Title: Mark Twain: A Biography. Complete
Author: Paine, Albert Bigelow
Language: English
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MARK TWAIN A BIOGRAPHY

THE PERSONAL AND LITERARY LIFE OF SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS

BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE



VOLUME I. Part 1: 1835-1866



TO CLARA CLEMENS GABRILOWITSCH WHO STEADILY UPHELD THE AUTHOR’S PURPOSE
TO WRITE HISTORY RATHER THAN EULOGY AS THE STORY OF HER FATHER’S LIFE



AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Dear William Dean Howells, Joseph Hopkins Twichell, Joseph T. Goodman,
and other old friends of Mark Twain:

I cannot let these volumes go to press without some grateful word to you
who have helped me during the six years and more that have gone to their
making.

First, I want to confess how I have envied you your association with
Mark Twain in those days when you and he “went gipsying, a long time
ago.” Next, I want to express my wonder at your willingness to give me
so unstintedly from your precious letters and memories, when it is in
the nature of man to hoard such treasures, for himself and for those who
follow him. And, lastly, I want to tell you that I do not envy you so
much, any more, for in these chapters, one after another, through your
grace, I have gone gipsying with you all. Neither do I wonder now, for
I have come to know that out of your love for him grew that greater
unselfishness (or divine selfishness, as he himself might have termed
it), and that nothing short of the fullest you could do for his memory
would have contented your hearts.

My gratitude is measureless; and it is world-wide, for there is no land
so distant that it does not contain some one who has eagerly contributed
to the story. Only, I seem so poorly able to put my thanks into words.

Albert Bigelow Paine.



PREFATORY NOTE

Certain happenings as recorded in this work will be found to differ
materially from the same incidents and episodes as set down in the
writings of Mr. Clemens himself. Mark Twain’s spirit was built of the
very fabric of truth, so far as moral intent was concerned, but in his
earlier autobiographical writings--and most of his earlier writings were
autobiographical--he made no real pretense to accuracy of time, place,
or circumstance--seeking, as he said, “only to tell a good story”--while
in later years an ever-vivid imagination and a capricious memory made
history difficult, even when, as in his so-called “Autobiography,” his
effort was in the direction of fact.

“When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or
not,” he once said, quaintly, “but I am getting old, and soon I shall
remember only the latter.”

The reader may be assured, where discrepancies occur, that the writer
of this memoir has obtained his data from direct and positive sources:
letters, diaries, account-books, or other immediate memoranda; also
from the concurring testimony of eye-witnesses, supported by a unity
of circumstance and conditions, and not from hearsay or vagrant printed
items.



MARK TWAIN--A BIOGRAPHY



I. ANCESTORS

On page 492 of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until
his very last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man
of wide repute “for his want of energy,” and in a marginal note he has
written:

“I guess this is where our line starts.”

It was like him to write that. It spoke in his whimsical fashion the
attitude of humility, the ready acknowledgment of shortcoming, which was
his chief characteristic and made him lovable--in his personality and in
his work.

Historically, we need not accept this identity of the Clemens ancestry.
The name itself has a kindly meaning, and was not an uncommon one in
Rome. There was an early pope by that name, and it appears now and
again in the annals of the Middle Ages. More lately there was a Gregory
Clemens, an English landowner who became a member of Parliament under
Cromwell and signed the death-warrant of Charles I. Afterward he was
tried as a regicide, his estates were confiscated, and his head was
exposed on a pole on the top of Westminster Hall.

Tradition says that the family of Gregory Clemens did not remain in
England, but emigrated to Virginia (or New Jersey), and from them, in
direct line, descended the Virginia Clemenses, including John Marshall
Clemens, the father of Mark Twain. Perhaps the line could be traced, and
its various steps identified, but, after all, an ancestor more or less
need not matter when it is the story of a descendant that is to be
written.

Of Mark Twain’s immediate forebears, however, there is something to be
said. His paternal grandfather, whose name also was Samuel, was a man of
culture and literary taste. In 1797 he married a Virginia girl, Pamela
Goggin; and of their five children John Marshall Clemens, born August
11, 1798, was the eldest--becoming male head of the family at the age of
seven, when his father was accidentally killed at a house-raising. The
family was not a poor one, but the boy grew up with a taste for work.
As a youth he became a clerk in an iron manufactory, at Lynchburg, and
doubtless studied at night. At all events, he acquired an education, but
injured his health in the mean time, and somewhat later, with his mother
and the younger children, removed to Adair County, Kentucky, where the
widow presently married a sweetheart of her girlhood, one Simon Hancock,
a good man. In due course, John Clemens was sent to Columbia, the
countyseat, to study law. When the living heirs became of age he
administered his father’s estate, receiving as his own share three
negro slaves; also a mahogany sideboard, which remains among the Clemens
effects to this day.

This was in 1821. John Clemens was now a young man of twenty-three,
never very robust, but with a good profession, plenty of resolution, and
a heart full of hope and dreams. Sober, industrious, and unswervingly
upright, it seemed certain that he must make his mark. That he was
likely to be somewhat too optimistic, even visionary, was not then
regarded as a misfortune.

It was two years later that he met Jane Lampton; whose mother was a
Casey--a Montgomery-Casey whose father was of the Lamptons (Lambtons)
of Durham, England, and who on her own account was reputed to be the
handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best dancer, in all
Kentucky. The Montgomeries and the Caseys of Kentucky had been Indian
fighters in the Daniel Boone period, and grandmother Casey, who had been
Jane Montgomery, had worn moccasins in her girlhood, and once saved
her life by jumping a fence and out-running a redskin pursuer. The
Montgomery and Casey annals were full of blood-curdling adventures, and
there is to-day a Casey County next to Adair, with a Montgomery County
somewhat farther east. As for the Lamptons, there is an earldom in
the English family, and there were claimants even then in the American
branch. All these things were worth while in Kentucky, but it was rare
Jane Lampton herself--gay, buoyant, celebrated for her beauty and her
grace; able to dance all night, and all day too, for that matter--that
won the heart of John Marshall Clemens, swept him off his feet almost at
the moment of their meeting. Many of the characteristics that made Mark
Twain famous were inherited from his mother. His sense of humor,
his prompt, quaintly spoken philosophy, these were distinctly her
contribution to his fame. Speaking of her in a later day, he once said:

“She had a sort of ability which is rare in man and hardly existent in
woman--the ability to say a humorous thing with the perfect air of not
knowing it to be humorous.”

She bequeathed him this, without doubt; also her delicate complexion;
her wonderful wealth of hair; her small, shapely hands and feet, and
the pleasant drawling speech which gave her wit, and his, a serene and
perfect setting.

It was a one-sided love affair, the brief courtship of Jane Lampton and
John Marshall Clemens. All her life, Jane Clemens honored her husband,
and while he lived served him loyally; but the choice of her heart had
been a young physician of Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her
prompt engagement with John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than
tenderness. She stipulated that the wedding take place at once, and
on May 6, 1823, they were married. She was then twenty; her husband
twenty-five. More than sixty years later, when John Clemens had long
been dead, she took a railway journey to a city where there was an Old
Settlers’ Convention, because among the names of those attending she had
noticed the name of the lover of her youth. She meant to humble herself
to him and ask forgiveness after all the years. She arrived too late;
the convention was over, and he was gone. Mark Twain once spoke of this,
and added:

“It is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the field of my
personal experience in a long lifetime.”



II. THE FORTUNES OF JOHN AND JANE CLEMENS

With all his ability and industry, and with the-best of intentions, John
Clemens would seem to have had an unerring faculty for making business
mistakes. It was his optimistic outlook, no doubt--his absolute
confidence in the prosperity that lay just ahead--which led him from
one unfortunate locality or enterprise to another, as long as he lived.
About a year after his marriage he settled with his young wife in
Gainsborough, Tennessee, a mountain town on the Cumberland River,
and here, in 1825, their first child, a boy, was born. They named him
Orion--after the constellation, perhaps--though they changed the accent
to the first syllable, calling it Orion. Gainsborough was a small place
with few enough law cases; but it could hardly have been as small, or
furnished as few cases; as the next one selected, which was Jamestown,
Fentress County, still farther toward the Eastward Mountains. Yet
Jamestown had the advantage of being brand new, and in the eye of
his fancy John Clemens doubtless saw it the future metropolis of east
Tennessee, with himself its foremost jurist and citizen. He took
an immediate and active interest in the development of the place,
established the county-seat there, built the first Court House, and was
promptly elected as circuit clerk of the court.

It was then that he decided to lay the foundation of a fortune for
himself and his children by acquiring Fentress County land. Grants could
be obtained in those days at the expense of less than a cent an acre,
and John Clemens believed that the years lay not far distant when
the land would increase in value ten thousand, twenty, perhaps even a
hundred thousandfold. There was no wrong estimate in that. Land covered
with the finest primeval timber, and filled with precious minerals,
could hardly fail to become worth millions, even though his entire
purchase of 75,000 acres probably did not cost him more than $500.
The great tract lay about twenty nines to the southward of Jamestown.
Standing in the door of the Court House he had built, looking out over
the “Knob” of the Cumberland Mountains toward his vast possessions, he
said:

“Whatever befalls me now, my heirs are secure. I may not live to see
these acres turn into silver and gold, but my children will.”

Such was the creation of that mirage of wealth, the “Tennessee land,”
 which all his days and for long afterward would lie just ahead--a golden
vision, its name the single watchword of the family fortunes--the dream
fading with years, only materializing at last as a theme in a story of
phantom riches, The Gilded Age.

Yet for once John Clemens saw clearly, and if his dream did not come
true he was in no wise to blame. The land is priceless now, and a
corporation of the Clemens heirs is to-day contesting the title of
a thin fragment of it--about one thousand acres--overlooked in some
survey.

Believing the future provided for, Clemens turned his attention to
present needs. He built himself a house, unusual in its style and
elegance. It had two windows in each room, and its walls were covered
with plastering, something which no one in Jamestown had ever seen
before. He was regarded as an aristocrat. He wore a swallow-tail coat
of fine blue jeans, instead of the coarse brown native-made cloth. The
blue-jeans coat was ornamented with brass buttons and cost one dollar
and twenty-five cents a yard, a high price for that locality and time.
His wife wore a calico dress for company, while the neighbor wives wore
homespun linsey-woolsey. The new house was referred to as the Crystal
Palace. When John and Jane Clemens attended balls--there were continuous
balls during the holidays--they were considered the most graceful
dancers.

Jamestown did not become the metropolis he had dreamed. It attained
almost immediately to a growth of twenty-five houses--mainly log
houses--and stopped there. The country, too, was sparsely settled; law
practice was slender and unprofitable, the circuit-riding from court to
court was very bad for one of his physique. John Clemens saw his reserve
of health and funds dwindling, and decided to embark in merchandise. He
built himself a store and put in a small country stock of goods. These
he exchanged for ginseng, chestnuts, lampblack, turpentine, rosin, and
other produce of the country, which he took to Louisville every spring
and fall in six-horse wagons. In the mean time he would seem to have
sold one or more of his slaves, doubtless to provide capital. There
was a second baby now--a little girl, Pamela,--born in September, 1827.
Three years later, May 1830, another little girl, Margaret, came. By
this time the store and home were in one building, the store occupying
one room, the household requiring two--clearly the family fortunes were
declining.

About a year after little Margaret was born, John Clemens gave up
Jamestown and moved his family and stock of goods to a point nine miles
distant, known as the Three Forks of Wolf. The Tennessee land was safe,
of course, and would be worth millions some day, but in the mean time
the struggle for daily substance was becoming hard.

He could not have remained at the Three Forks long, for in 1832 we find
him at still another place, on the right bank of Wolf River, where
a post-office called Pall Mall was established, with John Clemens as
postmaster, usually addressed as “Squire” or “Judge.” A store was run
in connection with the postoffice. At Pall Mall, in June, 1832, another
boy, Benjamin, was born.

The family at this time occupied a log house built by John Clemens
himself, the store being kept in another log house on the opposite bank
of the river. He no longer practised law. In The Gilded Age we have
Mark Twain’s picture of Squire Hawkins and Obedstown, written from
descriptions supplied in later years by his mother and his brother
Orion; and, while not exact in detail, it is not regarded as an
exaggerated presentation of east Tennessee conditions at that time. The
chapter is too long and too depressing to be set down here. The reader
may look it up for himself, if he chooses. If he does he will not wonder
that Jane Clemens’s handsome features had become somewhat sharper, and
her manner a shade graver, with the years and burdens of marriage, or
that John Clemens at thirty-six-out of health, out of tune with his
environment--was rapidly getting out of heart. After all the bright
promise of the beginning, things had somehow gone wrong, and hope seemed
dwindling away.

A tall man, he had become thin and unusually pale; he looked older
than his years. Every spring he was prostrated with what was called
“sunpain,” an acute form of headache, nerve-racking and destroying
to all persistent effort. Yet he did not retreat from his moral and
intellectual standards, or lose the respect of that shiftless community.
He was never intimidated by the rougher element, and his eyes were of a
kind that would disconcert nine men out of ten. Gray and deep-set under
bushy brows, they literally looked you through. Absolutely fearless, he
permitted none to trample on his rights. It is told of John Clemens, at
Jamestown, that once when he had lost a cow he handed the minister
on Sunday morning a notice of the loss to be read from the pulpit,
according to the custom of that community. For some reason, the minister
put the document aside and neglected it. At the close of the service
Clemens rose and, going to the pulpit, read his announcement himself to
the congregation. Those who knew Mark Twain best will not fail to recall
in him certain of his father’s legacies.

The arrival of a letter from “Colonel Sellers” inviting the Hawkins
family to come to Missouri is told in The Gilded Age. In reality the
letter was from John Quarles, who had married Jane Clemens’s sister,
Patsey Lampton, and settled in Florida, Monroe County, Missouri. It was
a momentous letter in The Gilded Age, and no less so in reality, for it
shifted the entire scene of the Clemens family fortunes, and it had to
do with the birthplace and the shaping of the career of one whose memory
is likely to last as long as American history.



III. A HUMBLE BIRTHPLACE

Florida, Missouri, was a small village in the early thirties--smaller
than it is now, perhaps, though in that day it had more promise, even if
less celebrity. The West was unassembled then, undigested, comparatively
unknown. Two States, Louisiana and Missouri, with less than half a
million white persons, were all that lay beyond the great river. St.
Louis, with its boasted ten thousand inhabitants and its river trade
with the South, was the single metropolis in all that vast uncharted
region. There was no telegraph; there were no railroads, no stage lines
of any consequence--scarcely any maps. For all that one could see or
guess, one place was as promising as another, especially a settlement
like Florida, located at the forks of a pretty stream, Salt River, which
those early settlers believed might one day become navigable and carry
the merchandise of that region down to the mighty Mississippi, thence to
the world outside.

In those days came John A. Quarles, of Kentucky, with his wife, who had
been Patsey Ann Lampton; also, later, Benjamin Lampton, her father, and
others of the Lampton race. It was natural that they should want Jane
Clemens and her husband to give up that disheartening east Tennessee
venture and join them in this new and promising land. It was natural,
too, for John Quarles--happy-hearted, generous, and optimistic--to write
the letter. There were only twenty-one houses in Florida, but Quarles
counted stables, out-buildings--everything with a roof on it--and set
down the number at fifty-four.

Florida, with its iridescent promise and negligible future, was just
the kind of a place that John Clemens with unerring instinct would be
certain to select, and the Quarles letter could have but one answer. Yet
there would be the longing for companionship, too, and Jane Clemens
must have hungered for her people. In The Gilded Age, the Sellers letter
ends:

“Come!--rush!--hurry!--don’t wait for anything!”

The Clemens family began immediately its preparation for getting away.
The store was sold, and the farm; the last two wagon-loads of produce
were sent to Louisville; and with the aid of the money realized, a few
hundred dollars, John Clemens and his family “flitted out into the great
mysterious blank that lay beyond the Knobs of Tennessee.” They had a
two-horse barouche, which would seem to have been preserved out of their
earlier fortunes. The barouche held the parents and the three younger
children, Pamela, Margaret, anal the little boy, Benjamin. There were
also two extra horses, which Orion, now ten, and Jennie, the house-girl,
a slave, rode. This was early in the spring of 1835.

They traveled by the way of their old home at Columbia, and paid a visit
to relatives. At Louisville they embarked on a steamer bound for St.
Louis; thence overland once more through wilderness and solitude into
what was then the Far West, the promised land.

They arrived one evening, and if Florida was not quite all in appearance
that John Clemens had dreamed, it was at least a haven--with John
Quarles, jovial, hospitable, and full of plans. The great Mississippi
was less than fifty miles away. Salt River, with a system of locks and
dams, would certainly become navigable to the Forks, with Florida as its
head of navigation. It was a Sellers fancy, though perhaps it should be
said here that John Quarles was not the chief original of that lovely
character in The Gilded Age. That was another relative--James Lampton,
a cousin--quite as lovable, and a builder of even more insubstantial
dreams.

John Quarles was already established in merchandise in Florida, and was
prospering in a small way. He had also acquired a good farm, which he
worked with thirty slaves, and was probably the rich man and leading
citizen of the community. He offered John Clemens a partnership in his
store, and agreed to aid him in the selection of some land. Furthermore,
he encouraged him to renew his practice of the law. Thus far, at least,
the Florida venture was not a mistake, for, whatever came, matters could
not be worse than they had been in Tennessee.

In a small frame building near the center of the village, John and Jane
Clemens established their household. It was a humble one-story affair,
with two main rooms and a lean-to kitchen, though comfortable enough for
its size, and comparatively new. It is still standing and occupied when
these lines are written, and it should be preserved and guarded as
a shrine for the American people; for it was here that the foremost
American-born author--the man most characteristically American in every
thought and word and action of his life--drew his first fluttering
breath, caught blinkingly the light of a world that in the years to come
would rise up and in its wide realm of letters hail him as a king.

It was on a bleak day, November 30, 1835, that he entered feebly the
domain he was to conquer. Long, afterward, one of those who knew him
best said:

“He always seemed to me like some great being from another planet--never
quite of this race or kind.”

He may have been, for a great comet was in the sky that year, and it
would return no more until the day when he should be borne back into the
far spaces of silence and undiscovered suns. But nobody thought of this,
then.

He was a seven-months child, and there was no fanfare of welcome at his
coming. Perhaps it was even suggested that, in a house so small and so
sufficiently filled, there was no real need of his coming at all. One
Polly Ann Buchanan, who is said to have put the first garment of any
sort on him, lived to boast of the fact,--[This honor has been claimed
also for Mrs. Millie Upton and a Mrs. Damrell. Probably all were present
and assisted.]--but she had no particular pride in that matter then.
It was only a puny baby with a wavering promise of life. Still, John
Clemens must have regarded with favor this first gift of fortune in
a new land, for he named the little boy Samuel, after his father, and
added the name of an old and dear Virginia friend, Langhorne. The family
fortunes would seem to have been improving at this time, and he may have
regarded the arrival of another son as a good omen.

With a family of eight, now, including Jennie, the slavegirl, more room
was badly needed, and he began building without delay. The result was
not a mansion, by any means, being still of the one-story pattern, but
it was more commodious than the tiny two-room affair. The rooms were
larger, and there was at least one ell, or extension, for kitchen and
dining-room uses. This house, completed in 1836, occupied by the Clemens
family during the remainder of the years spent in Florida, was often
in later days pointed out as Mark Twain’s birthplace. It missed that
distinction by a few months, though its honor was sufficient in having
sheltered his early childhood.--[This house is no longer standing. When
it was torn down several years ago, portions of it were carried off and
manufactured into souvenirs. Mark Twain himself disclaimed it as
his birthplace, and once wrote on a photograph of it: “No, it is too
stylish, it is not my birthplace.”]



IV. BEGINNING A LONG JOURNEY

It was not a robust childhood. The new baby managed to go through
the winter--a matter of comment among the family and neighbors. Added
strength came, but slowly; “Little Sam,” as they called him, was always
delicate during those early years.

It was a curious childhood, full of weird, fantastic impressions and
contradictory influences, stimulating alike to the imagination and that
embryo philosophy of life which begins almost with infancy. John Clemens
seldom devoted any time to the company of his children. He looked after
their comfort and mental development as well as he could, and gave
advice on occasion. He bought a book now and then--sometimes a
picture-book--and subscribed for Peter Parley’s Magazine, a marvel of
delight to the older children, but he did not join in their amusements,
and he rarely, or never, laughed. Mark Twain did not remember ever
having seen or heard his father laugh. The problem of supplying food was
a somber one to John Clemens; also, he was working on a perpetual-motion
machine at this period, which absorbed his spare time, and, to the
inventor at least, was not a mirthful occupation. Jane Clemens was busy,
too. Her sense of humor did not die, but with added cares and years her
temper as well as her features became sharper, and it was just as well
to be fairly out of range when she was busy with her employments.

Little Sam’s companions were his brothers and sisters, all older than
himself: Orion, ten years his senior, followed by Pamela and Margaret at
intervals of two and three years, then by Benjamin, a kindly little lad
whose gentle life was chiefly devoted to looking after the baby brother,
three years his junior. But in addition to these associations, there
were the still more potent influences Of that day and section, the
intimate, enveloping institution of slavery, the daily companionship of
the slaves. All the children of that time were fond of the negroes
and confided in them. They would, in fact, have been lost without such
protection and company.

It was Jennie, the house-girl, and Uncle Ned, a man of all
work--apparently acquired with the improved prospects--who were in real
charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment. Wonderful
entertainment it was. That was a time of visions and dreams, small.
gossip and superstitions. Old tales were repeated over and over, with
adornments and improvements suggested by immediate events. At evening
the Clemens children, big and little, gathered about the great open
fireplace while Jennie and Uncle Ned told tales and hair-lifting
legends. Even a baby of two or three years could follow the drift of
this primitive telling and would shiver and cling close with the horror
and delight of its curdling thrill. The tales always began with “Once
‘pon a time,” and one of them was the story of the “Golden Arm” which
the smallest listener would one day repeat more elaborately to wider
audiences in many lands. Briefly it ran as follows:

“Once ‘Pon a time there was a man, and he had a wife, and she had a’ arm
of pure gold; and she died, and they buried her in the graveyard; and
one night her husband went and dug her up and cut off her golden arm and
tuck it home; and one night a ghost all in white come to him; and she
was his wife; and she says:

“W-h-a-r-r’s my golden arm? W-h-a-r-r’s my golden arm? W-h-a-r-r’s my
g-o-l-den arm?”

As Uncle Ned repeated these blood-curdling questions he would look first
one and then another of his listeners in the eyes, with his bands drawn
up in front of his breast, his fingers turned out and crooked like
claws, while he bent with each question closer to the shrinking forms
before him. The tone was sepulchral, with awful pause as if waiting
each time for a reply. The culmination came with a pounce on one of the
group, a shake of the shoulders, and a shout of:

“YOU’VE got it!’ and she tore him all to pieces!”

And the children would shout “Lordy!” and look furtively over their
shoulders, fearing to see a woman in white against the black wall;
but, instead, only gloomy, shapeless shadows darted across it as the
flickering flames in the fireplace went out on one brand and flared up
on another. Then there was a story of a great ball of fire that used to
follow lonely travelers along dark roads through the woods.

“Once ‘pon a time there was a man, and he was riding along de road
and he come to a ha’nted house, and he heard de chains’a-rattlin’ and
a-rattlin’ and a-rattlin’, and a ball of fire come rollin’ up and
got under his stirrup, and it didn’t make no difference if his horse
galloped or went slow or stood still, de ball of fire staid under his
stirrup till he got plum to de front do’, and his wife come out and say:
‘My Gord, dat’s devil fire!’ and she had to work a witch spell to drive
it away.”

“How big was it, Uncle Ned?”

“Oh, ‘bout as big as your head, and I ‘spect it’s likely to come down
dis yere chimney ‘most any time.”

Certainly an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the
imagination of a delicate child. All the games and daily talk concerned
fanciful semi-African conditions and strange primal possibilities. The
children of that day believed in spells and charms and bad-luck signs,
all learned of their negro guardians.

But if the negroes were the chief companions and protectors of the
children, they were likewise one of their discomforts. The greatest real
dread children knew was the fear of meeting runaway slaves. A runaway
slave was regarded as worse than a wild beast, and treated worse when
caught. Once the children saw one brought into Florida by six men who
took him to an empty cabin, where they threw him on the floor and bound
him with ropes. His groans were loud and frequent. Such things made an
impression that would last a lifetime.

Slave punishment, too, was not unknown, even in the household. Jennie
especially was often saucy and obstreperous. Jane Clemens, with more
strength of character than of body, once undertook to punish her for
insolence, whereupon Jennie snatched the whip from her hand. John
Clemens was sent for in haste. He came at once, tied Jennie’s wrists
together with a bridle rein, and administered chastisement across the
shoulders with a cowhide. These were things all calculated to impress a
sensitive child.

In pleasant weather the children roamed over the country, hunting
berries and nuts, drinking sugar-water, tying knots in love-vine,
picking the petals from daisies to the formula “Love me-love me not,”
 always accompanied by one or more, sometimes by half a dozen, of their
small darky followers. Shoes were taken off the first of April. For
a time a pair of old woolen stockings were worn, but these soon
disappeared, leaving the feet bare for the summer. One of their dreads
was the possibility of sticking a rusty nail into the foot, as this was
liable to cause lockjaw, a malady regarded with awe and terror. They
knew what lockjaw was--Uncle John Quarles’s black man, Dan, was subject
to it. Sometimes when he opened his mouth to its utmost capacity he felt
the joints slip and was compelled to put down the cornbread, or jole and
greens, or the piece of ‘possum he was eating, while his mouth remained
a fixed abyss until the doctor came and restored it to a natural
position by an exertion of muscular power that would have well-nigh
lifted an ox.

Uncle John Quarles, his home, his farm, his slaves, all were sources
of never-ending delight. Perhaps the farm was just an ordinary Missouri
farm and the slaves just average negroes, but to those children these
things were never apparent. There was a halo about anything that
belonged to Uncle John Quarles, and that halo was the jovial, hilarious
kindness of that gentle-hearted, humane man. To visit at his house was
for a child to be in a heaven of mirth and pranks continually. When the
children came for eggs he would say:

“Your hens won’t lay, eh? Tell your maw to feed ‘em parched corn and
drive ‘em uphill,” and this was always a splendid stroke of humor to his
small hearers.

Also, he knew how to mimic with his empty hands the peculiar patting and
tossing of a pone of corn-bread before placing it in the oven. He would
make the most fearful threats to his own children, for disobedience, but
never executed any of them. When they were out fishing and returned late
he would say:

“You--if I have to hunt you again after dark, I will make you smell like
a burnt horn!”

Nothing could exceed the ferocity of this threat, and all the children,
with delightful terror and curiosity, wondered what would happen--if
it ever did happen--that would result in giving a child that peculiar
savor. Altogether it was a curious early childhood that Little Sam
had--at least it seems so to us now. Doubtless it was commonplace enough
for that time and locality.



V. THE WAY OF FORTUNE

Perhaps John Quarles’s jocular, happy-go-lucky nature and general
conduct did not altogether harmonize with John Clemens’s more taciturn
business methods. Notwithstanding the fact that he was a builder of
dreams, Clemens was neat and methodical, with his papers always in
order. He had a hearty dislike for anything resembling frivolity and
confusion, which very likely were the chief features of John Quarles’s
storekeeping. At all events, they dissolved partnership at the end of
two or three years, and Clemens opened business for himself across the
street. He also practised law whenever there were cases, and was elected
justice of the peace, acquiring the permanent title of “Judge.” He
needed some one to assist in the store, and took in Orion, who was
by this time twelve or thirteen years old; but, besides his youth,
Orion--all his days a visionary--was a studious, pensive lad with
no taste for commerce. Then a partnership was formed with a man who
developed neither capital nor business ability, and proved a disaster in
the end. The modest tide of success which had come with John Clemens’s
establishment at Florida had begun to wane. Another boy, Henry, born in
July, 1838, added one more responsibility to his burdens.

There still remained a promise of better things. There seemed at least a
good prospect that the scheme for making Salt River navigable was likely
to become operative. With even small boats (bateaux) running as high as
the lower branch of the South Fork, Florida would become an emporium of
trade, and merchants and property-owners of that village would reap
a harvest. An act of the Legislature was passed incorporating the
navigation company, with Judge Clemens as its president. Congress was
petitioned to aid this work of internal improvement. So confident
was the company of success that the hamlet was thrown into a fever
of excitement by the establishment of a boatyard and, the actual
construction of a bateau; but a Democratic Congress turned its back on
the proposed improvement. No boat bigger than a skiff ever ascended Salt
River, though there was a wild report, evidently a hoax, that a party
of picnickers had seen one night a ghostly steamer, loaded and manned,
puffing up the stream. An old Scotchman, Hugh Robinson, when he heard of
it, said:

“I don’t doubt a word they say. In Scotland, it often happens that when
people have been killed, or are troubled, they send their spirits
abroad and they are seen as much like themselves as a reflection in a
looking-glass. That was a ghost of some wrecked steamboat.”

But John Quarles, who was present, laughed:

“If ever anybody was in trouble, the men on that steamboat were,” he
said. “They were the Democratic candidates at the last election. They
killed Salt River improvements, and Salt River has killed them. Their
ghosts went up the river on a ghostly steamboat.”

It is possible that this comment, which was widely repeated and traveled
far, was the origin of the term “Going up Salt River,” as applied to
defeated political candidates.--[The dictionaries give this phrase as
probably traceable to a small, difficult stream in Kentucky; but it
seems more reasonable to believe that it originated in Quarles’s witty
comment.]

No other attempt was ever made to establish navigation on Salt River.
Rumors of railroads already running in the East put an end to any such
thought. Railroads could run anywhere and were probably cheaper and
easier to maintain than the difficult navigation requiring locks and
dams. Salt River lost its prestige as a possible water highway and
became mere scenery. Railroads have ruined greater rivers than the
Little Salt, and greater villages than Florida, though neither Florida
nor Salt River has been touched by a railroad to this day. Perhaps such
close detail of early history may be thought unnecessary in a work of
this kind, but all these things were definite influences in the career
of the little lad whom the world would one day know as Mark Twain.



VI. A NEW HOME

The death of little Margaret was the final misfortune that came to the
Clemens family in Florida. Doubtless it hastened their departure. There
was a superstition in those days that to refer to health as good luck,
rather than to ascribe it to the kindness of Providence, was to bring
about a judgment. Jane Clemens one day spoke to a neighbor of their good
luck in thus far having lost no member of their family. That same day,
when the sisters, Pamela and Margaret, returned from school, Margaret
laid her books on the table, looked in the glass at her flushed cheeks,
pulled out the trundle-bed, and lay down.

She was never in her right mind again. The doctor was sent for and
diagnosed the case “bilious fever.” One evening, about nine o’clock,
Orion was sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed by the patient, when
the door opened and Little Sam, then about four years old, walked in
from his bedroom, fast asleep. He came to the side of the trundle-bed
and pulled at the bedding near Margaret’s shoulder for some time before
he woke. Next day the little girl was “picking at the coverlet,” and it
was known that she could not live. About a week later she died. She
was nine years old, a beautiful child, plump in form, with rosy cheeks,
black hair, and bright eyes. This was in August, 1839. It was Little
Sam’s first sight of death--the first break in the Clemens family: it
left a sad household. The shoemaker who lived next door claimed to
have seen several weeks previous, in a vision, the coffin and the
funeral-procession pass the gate by the winding road, to the cemetery,
exactly as it happened.

Matters were now going badly enough with John Clemens. Yet he never was
without one great comforting thought--the future of the Tennessee land.
It underlaid every plan; it was an anodyne for every ill.

“When we sell the Tennessee land everything will be all right,” was the
refrain that brought solace in the darkest hours. A blessing for
him that this was so, for he had little else to brighten his days.
Negotiations looking to the sale of the land were usually in progress.
When the pressure became very hard and finances were at their lowest
ebb, it was offered at any price--at five cents an acre, sometimes. When
conditions improved, however little, the price suddenly advanced even
to its maximum of one thousand dollars an acre. Now and then a genuine
offer came along, but, though eagerly welcomed at the moment, it was
always refused after a little consideration.

“We will struggle along somehow, Jane,” he would say. “We will not throw
away the children’s fortune.”

There was one other who believed in the Tennessee land--Jane Clemens’s
favorite cousin, James Lampton, the courtliest, gentlest, most prodigal
optimist of all that guileless race. To James Lampton the land always
had “millions in it”--everything had. He made stupendous fortunes daily,
in new ways. The bare mention of the Tennessee land sent him off into
figures that ended with the purchase of estates in England adjoining
those of the Durham Lamptons, whom he always referred to as “our
kindred,” casually mentioning the whereabouts and health of the “present
earl.” Mark Twain merely put James Lampton on paper when he created
Colonel Sellers, and the story of the Hawkins family as told in The
Gilded Age reflects clearly the struggle of those days. The words
“Tennessee land,” with their golden promise, became his earliest
remembered syllables. He grew to detest them in time, for they came to
mean mockery.

One of the offers received was the trifling sum of two hundred and fifty
dollars, and such was the moment’s need that even this was considered.
Then, of course, it was scornfully refused. In some autobiographical
chapters which Orion Clemens left behind he said:

“If we had received that two hundred and fifty dollars, it would have
been more than we ever made, clear of expenses, out of the whole of the
Tennessee land, after forty years of worry to three generations.”

What a less speculative and more logical reasoner would have done in
the beginning, John Clemens did now; he selected a place which,
though little more than a village, was on a river already navigable--a
steamboat town with at least the beginnings of manufacturing and trade
already established--that is to say, Hannibal, Missouri--a point well
chosen, as shown by its prosperity to-day.

He did not delay matters. When he came to a decision, he acted quickly.
He disposed of a portion of his goods and shipped the remainder
overland; then, with his family and chattels loaded in a wagon, he was
ready to set out for the new home. Orion records that, for some reason,
his father did not invite him to get into the wagon, and how, being
always sensitive to slight, he had regarded this in the light of
deliberate desertion.

“The sense of abandonment caused my heart to ache. The wagon had gone a
few feet when I was discovered and invited to enter. How I wished they
had not missed me until they had arrived at Hannibal. Then the world
would have seen how I was treated and would have cried ‘Shame!’”

This incident, noted and remembered, long after became curiously
confused with another, in Mark Twain’s mind. In an autobiographical
chapter published in The North American Review he tells of the move to
Hannibal and relates that he himself was left behind by his absentminded
family. The incident of his own abandonment did not happen then, but
later, and somewhat differently. It would indeed be an absent-minded
family if the parents, and the sister and brothers ranging up to
fourteen years of age, should drive off leaving Little Sam, age four,
behind. --[As mentioned in the Prefatory Note, Mark Twain’s memory
played him many tricks in later life. Incidents were filtered through
his vivid imagination until many of them bore little relation to
the actual occurrence. Some of these lapses were only amusing, but
occasionally they worked an unintentional injustice. It is the author’s
purpose in every instance, so far as is possible, to keep the record
straight.]



VII. THE LITTLE TOWN OF HANNIBAL. Hannibal in 1839 was already a
corporate community and had an atmosphere of its own. It was a town
with a distinct Southern flavor, though rather more astir than the true
Southern community of that period; more Western in that it planned,
though without excitement, certain new enterprises and made a show, at
least, of manufacturing. It was somnolent (a slave town could not be
less than that), but it was not wholly asleep--that is to say, dead--and
it was tranquilly content. Mark Twain remembered it as “the white town
drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning,... the great Mississippi,
the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along;... the
dense forest away on the other side.”

The little city was proud of its scenery, and justly so: circled with
bluffs, with Holliday’s Hill on the north, Lover’s Leap on the south,
the shining river in the foreground, there was little to be desired in
the way of setting.

The river, of course, was the great highway. Rafts drifted by;
steamboats passed up and down and gave communication to the outside
world; St. Louis, the metropolis, was only one hundred miles away.
Hannibal was inclined to rank itself as of next importance, and took on
airs accordingly. It had society, too--all kinds--from the negroes and
the town drunkards (“General” Gaines and Jimmy Finn; later, Old Ben
Blankenship) up through several nondescript grades of mechanics and
tradesmen to the professional men of the community, who wore tall hats,
ruffled shirt-fronts, and swallow-tail coats, usually of some positive
color-blue, snuff-brown, and green. These and their families constituted
the true aristocracy of the Southern town. Most of them had pleasant
homes--brick or large frame mansions, with colonnaded entrances, after
the manner of all Southern architecture of that period, which had an
undoubted Greek root, because of certain drawing-books, it is said,
accessible to the builders of those days. Most of them, also, had
means--slaves and land which yielded an income in addition to their
professional earnings. They lived in such style as was considered
fitting to their rank, and had such comforts as were then obtainable.

It was to this grade of society that judge Clemens and his family
belonged, but his means no longer enabled him to provide either the
comforts or the ostentation of his class. He settled his family and
belongings in a portion of a house on Hill Street--the Pavey Hotel; his
merchandise he established modestly on Main Street, with Orion, in a
new suit of clothes, as clerk. Possibly the clothes gave Orion a renewed
ambition for mercantile life, but this waned. Business did not begin
actively, and he was presently dreaming and reading away the time. A
little later he became a printer’s apprentice, in the office of the
Hannibal Journal, at his father’s suggestion.

Orion Clemens perhaps deserves a special word here. He was to be
much associated with his more famous brother for many years, and his
personality as boy and man is worth at least a casual consideration. He
was fifteen now, and had developed characteristics which in a greater
or less degree were to go with him through life. Of a kindly, loving
disposition, like all of the Clemens children, quick of temper, but
always contrite, or forgiving, he was never without the fond regard
of those who knew him best. His weaknesses were manifold, but, on the
whole, of a negative kind. Honorable and truthful, he had no tendency
to bad habits or unworthy pursuits; indeed, he had no positive traits
of any sort. That was his chief misfortune. Full of whims and fancies,
unstable, indeterminate, he was swayed by every passing emotion and
influence. Daily he laid out a new course of study and achievement, only
to fling it aside because of some chance remark or printed paragraph or
bit of advice that ran contrary to his purpose. Such a life is bound to
be a succession of extremes--alternate periods of supreme exaltation and
despair. In his autobiographical chapters, already mentioned, Orion sets
down every impulse and emotion and failure with that faithful humility
which won him always the respect, if not always the approval, of men.

Printing was a step downward, for it was a trade, and Orion felt it
keenly. A gentleman’s son and a prospective heir of the Tennessee land,
he was entitled to a profession. To him it was punishment, and the
disgrace weighed upon him. Then he remembered that Benjamin Franklin had
been a printer and had eaten only an apple and a bunch of grapes for his
dinner. Orion decided to emulate Franklin, and for a time he took only
a biscuit and a glass of water at a meal, foreseeing the day when he
should electrify the world with his eloquence. He was surprised to find
how clear his mind was on this low diet and how rapidly he learned his
trade.

Of the other children Pamela, now twelve, and Benjamin, seven, were put
to school. They were pretty, attractive children, and Henry, the baby,
was a sturdy toddler, the pride of the household. Little Sam was the
least promising of the flock. He remained delicate, and developed little
beyond a tendency to pranks. He was a queer, fanciful, uncommunicative
child that detested indoors and would run away if not watched--always in
the direction of the river. He walked in his sleep, too, and often the
rest of the household got up in the middle of the night to find him
fretting with cold in some dark corner. The doctor was summoned for him
oftener than was good for the family purse--or for him, perhaps, if we
may credit the story of heavy dosings of those stern allopathic days.

Yet he would appear not to have been satisfied with his heritage of
ailments, and was ambitious for more. An epidemic of measles--the black,
deadly kind--was ravaging Hannibal, and he yearned for the complaint. He
yearned so much that when he heard of a playmate, one of the Bowen boys,
who had it, he ran away and, slipping into the house, crept into bed
with the infection. The success of this venture was complete. Some days
later, the Clemens family gathered tearfully around Little Sam’s bed to
see him die. According to his own after-confession, this gratified him,
and he was willing to die for the glory of that touching scene. However,
he disappointed them, and was presently up and about in search of fresh
laurels.--[In later life Mr. Clemens did not recollect the precise
period of this illness. With habitual indifference he assigned it to
various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required.
Without doubt the “measles” incident occurred when he was very
young.]--He must have been a wearing child, and we may believe that Jane
Clemens, with her varied cares and labors, did not always find him a
comfort.

“You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had,” she said to him
once, in her old age.

“I suppose you were afraid I wouldn’t live,” he suggested, in his
tranquil fashion.

She looked at him with that keen humor that had not dulled in eighty
years. “No; afraid you would,” she said. But that was only her joke, for
she was the most tenderhearted creature in the world, and, like mothers
in general, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of her
mother’s care.

It was mainly on his account that she spent her summers on John
Quarles’s farm near Florida, and it was during the first summer that
an incident already mentioned occurred. It was decided that the whole
family should go for a brief visit, and one Saturday morning in June
Mrs. Clemens, with the three elder children and the baby, accompanied
by Jennie, the slave-girl, set out in a light wagon for the day’s drive,
leaving Judge Clemens to bring Little Sam on horseback Sunday morning.
The hour was early when Judge Clemens got up to saddle his horse, and
Little Sam was still asleep. The horse being ready, Clemens, his mind
far away, mounted and rode off without once remembering the little boy,
and in the course of the afternoon arrived at his brother-in-law’s farm.
Then he was confronted by Jane Clemens, who demanded Little Sam.

“Why,” said the judge, aghast, “I never once thought of him after I left
him asleep.”

Wharton Lampton, a brother of Jane Clemens and Patsey Quarles, hastily
saddled a horse and set out, helter-skelter, for Hannibal. He arrived
in the early dusk. The child was safe enough, but he was crying with
loneliness and hunger. He had spent most of the day in the locked,
deserted house playing with a hole in the meal-sack where the meal
ran out, when properly encouraged, in a tiny stream. He was fed and
comforted, and next day was safe on the farm, which during that summer
and those that followed it, became so large a part of his boyhood and
lent a coloring to his later years.



VIII. THE FARM

We have already mentioned the delight of the Clemens children in Uncle
John Quarles’s farm. To Little Sam it was probably a life-saver. With
his small cousin, Tabitha,--[Tabitha Quarles, now Mrs. Greening,
of Palmyra, Missouri, has supplied most of the material for this
chapter.]--just his own age (they called her Puss), he wandered over
that magic domain, fording new marvels at every step, new delights
everywhere. A slave-girl, Mary, usually attended them, but she was only
six years older, and not older at all in reality, so she was just a
playmate, and not a guardian to be feared or evaded. Sometimes, indeed,
it was necessary for her to threaten to tell “Miss Patsey” or “Miss
Jane,” when her little charges insisted on going farther or staying
later than she thought wise from the viewpoint of her own personal
safety; but this was seldom, and on the whole a stay at the farm was
just one long idyllic dream of summer-time and freedom.

The farm-house stood in the middle of a large yard entered by a stile
made of sawed-off logs of graduated heights. In the corner of the yard
were hickory trees, and black walnut, and beyond the fence the hill fell
away past the barns, the corn-cribs, and the tobacco-house to a brook--a
divine place to wade, with deep, dark, forbidden pools. Down in the
pasture there were swings under the big trees, and Mary swung the
children and ran under them until their feet touched the branches, and
then took her turn and “balanced” herself so high that their one wish
was to be as old as Mary and swing in that splendid way. All the woods
were full of squirrels--gray squirrels and the red-fox species--and many
birds and flowers; all the meadows were gay with clover and butterflies,
and musical with singing grasshoppers and calling larks; there were
blackberries in the fence rows, apples and peaches in the orchard, and
watermelons in the corn. They were not always ripe, those watermelons,
and once, when Little Sam had eaten several pieces of a green one, he
was seized with cramps so severe that most of the household expected him
to die forthwith.

Jane Clemens was not heavily concerned.

“Sammy will pull through,” she said; “he wasn’t born to die that way.”

It is the slender constitution that bears the strain. “Sammy” did pull
through, and in a brief time was ready for fresh adventure.

There were plenty of these: there were the horses to ride to and from
the fields; the ox-wagons to ride in when they had dumped their heavy
loads; the circular horsepower to ride on when they threshed the wheat.
This last was a dangerous and forbidden pleasure, but the children would
dart between the teams and climb on, and the slave who was driving would
pretend not to see. Then in the evening when the black woman came along,
going after the cows, the children would race ahead and set the cows
running and jingling their bells--especially Little Sam, for he was a
wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies that sent him capering
and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a series of leaps and
shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as he lay rolling in the
grass.

His tendency to mischief grew with this wide liberty, improved health,
and the encouragement of John Quarles’s good-natured, fun-loving slaves.

The negro quarters beyond the orchard were especially attractive. In
one cabin lived a bed-ridden, white-headed old woman whom the children
visited daily and looked upon with awe; for she was said to be a
thousand years old and to have talked with Moses. The negroes believed
this; the children, too, of course, and that she had lost her health in
the desert, coming out of Egypt. The bald spot on her head was caused by
fright at seeing Pharaoh drowned. She also knew how to avert spells and
ward off witches, which added greatly to her prestige. Uncle Dan’l was a
favorite, too-kind-hearted and dependable, while his occasional lockjaw
gave him an unusual distinction. Long afterward he would become Nigger
Jim in the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tales, and so in his gentle
guilelessness win immortality and the love of many men.

Certainly this was a heavenly place for a little boy, the farm of Uncle
John Quarles, and the house was as wonderful as its surroundings. It
was a two-story double log building, with a spacious floor (roofed in)
connecting the two divisions. In the summer the table was set in the
middle of that shady, breezy pavilion, and sumptuous meals were served
in the lavish Southern style, brought to the table in vast dishes that
left only room for rows of plates around the edge. Fried chicken, roast
pig, turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits,
partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens--the list is too long to be
served here. If a little boy could not improve on that bill of fare and
in that atmosphere, his case was hopeless indeed. His mother kept him
there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them gather
around the wide, blazing fireplace. Sixty years later he wrote of that
scene:

    I can see the room yet with perfect clearness. I can see all its
    buildings, all its details: the family-room of the house, with the
    trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another a wheel
    whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the
    mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low-
    spirited, and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the
    dead; the vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs, from whose
    ends a sugary sap bubbled out, but did not go to waste, for we
    scraped it off and ate it;... the lazy cat spread out on the
    rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs,
    blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner and my uncle in the other
    smoking his corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor
    faintly mirroring the flame tongues, and freckled with black
    indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely
    death; half a dozen children romping in the background twilight;
    splint-bottom chairs here and there--some with rockers; a cradle
    --out of service, but waiting with confidence.

One is tempted to dwell on this period, to quote prodigally from these
vivid memories--the thousand minute impressions which the child’s
sensitive mind acquired in that long-ago time and would reveal
everywhere in his work in the years to come. For him it was education
of a more valuable and lasting sort than any he would ever acquire from
books.



IX. SCHOOL-DAYS

Nevertheless, on his return to Hannibal, it was decided that Little
Sam was now ready to go to school. He was about five years old, and
the months on the farm had left him wiry and lively, even if not very
robust. His mother declared that he gave her more trouble than all the
other children put together.

“He drives me crazy with his didoes, when he is in the house,” she used
to say; “and when he is out of it I am expecting every minute that some
one will bring him home half dead.”

He did, in fact, achieve the first of his “nine narrow escapes from
drowning” about this time, and was pulled out of the river one afternoon
and brought home in a limp and unpromising condition. When with mullein
tea and castor-oil she had restored him to activity, she said: “I guess
there wasn’t much danger. People born to be hanged are safe in water.”

She declared she was willing to pay somebody to take him off her hands
for a part of each day and try to teach him manners. Perhaps this is
a good place to say that Jane Clemens was the original of Tom Sawyer’s
“Aunt Polly,” and her portrait as presented in that book is considered
perfect. Kind-hearted, fearless, looking and acting ten years older
than her age, as women did in that time, always outspoken and sometimes
severe, she was regarded as a “character” by her friends, and beloved by
them as, a charitable, sympathetic woman whom it was good to know. Her
sense of pity was abnormal. She refused to kill even flies, and punished
the cat for catching mice. She, would drown the young kittens, when
necessary, but warmed the water for the purpose. On coming to Hannibal,
she joined the Presbyterian Church, and her religion was of that
clean-cut, strenuous kind which regards as necessary institutions hell
and Satan, though she had been known to express pity for the latter for
being obliged to surround himself with such poor society. Her children
she directed with considerable firmness, and all were tractable and
growing in grace except Little Sam. Even baby Henry at two was lisping
the prayers that Sam would let go by default unless carefully guarded.
His sister Pamela, who was eight years older and always loved him
dearly, usually supervised these spiritual exercises, and in her gentle
care earned immortality as the Cousin Mary of Tom Sawyer. He would say
his prayers willingly enough when encouraged by sister Pamela, but he
much preferred to sit up in bed and tell astonishing tales of the day’s
adventure--tales which made prayer seem a futile corrective and caused
his listeners to wonder why the lightning was restrained so long. They
did not know they were glimpsing the first outcroppings of a genius
that would one day amaze and entertain the nations. Neighbors hearing
of these things (also certain of his narrations) remonstrated with Mrs.
Clemens.

“You don’t believe anything that child says, I hope.”

“Oh yes, I know his average. I discount him ninety per cent. The rest is
pure gold.” At another time she said: “Sammy is a well of truth, but you
can’t bring it all up in one bucket.”

This, however, is digression; the incidents may have happened somewhat
later.

A certain Miss E. Horr was selected to receive the payment for taking
charge of Little Sam during several hours each day, directing him
mentally and morally in the mean time. Her school was then in a log
house on Main Street (later it was removed to Third Street), and was of
the primitive old-fashioned kind, with pupils of all ages, ranging in
advancement from the primer to the third reader, from the tables to
long division, with a little geography and grammar and a good deal of
spelling. Long division and the third reader completed the curriculum in
that school. Pupils who decided to take a post-graduate course went to
a Mr. Cross, who taught in a frame house on the hill facing what is now
the Public Square.

Miss Horr received twenty-five cents a week for each pupil, and opened
her school with prayer; after which came a chapter of the Bible, with
explanations, and the rules of conduct. Then the A B C class was
called, because their recital was a hand-to-hand struggle, requiring no
preparation.

The rules of conduct that first day interested Little Sam. He calculated
how much he would need to trim in, to sail close to the danger-line and
still avoid disaster. He made a miscalculation during the forenoon and
received warning; a second offense would mean punishment. He did not
mean to be caught the second time, but he had not learned Miss Horr
yet, and was presently startled by being commanded to go out and bring a
stick for his own correction.

This was certainly disturbing. It was sudden, and then he did not know
much about the selection of sticks. Jane Clemens had usually used
her hand. It required a second command to get him headed in the right
direction, and he was a trifle dazed when he got outside. He had the
forests of Missouri to select from, but choice was difficult. Everything
looked too big and competent. Even the smallest switch had a wiry,
discouraging look. Across the way was a cooper-shop with a good many
shavings outside.

One had blown across and lay just in front of him. It was an
inspiration. He picked it up and, solemnly entering the school-room,
meekly handed it to Miss Herr.

Perhaps Miss Horr’s sense of humor prompted forgiveness, but discipline
must be maintained.

“Samuel Langhorne Clemens,” she said (he had never heard it all strung
together in that ominous way), “I am ashamed of you! Jimmy Dunlap, go
and bring a switch for Sammy.” And Jimmy Dunlap went, and the switch was
of a sort to give the little boy an immediate and permanent distaste for
school. He informed his mother when he went home at noon that he did
not care for school; that he had no desire to be a great man; that he
preferred to be a pirate or an Indian and scalp or drown such people as
Miss Horr. Down in her heart his mother was sorry for him, but what she
said was that she was glad there was somebody at last who could take him
in hand.

He returned to school, but he never learned to like it. Each morning he
went with reluctance and remained with loathing--the loathing which
he always had for anything resembling bondage and tyranny or even the
smallest curtailment of liberty. A School was ruled with a rod in those
days, a busy and efficient rod, as the Scripture recommended. Of the
smaller boys Little Sam’s back was sore as often as the next, and he
dreamed mainly of a day when, grown big and fierce, he would descend
with his band and capture Miss Horr and probably drag her by the hair,
as he had seen Indians and pirates do in the pictures. When the days of
early summer came again; when from his desk he could see the sunshine
lighting the soft green of Holliday’s Hill, with the purple distance
beyond, and the glint of the river, it seemed to him that to be shut up
with a Webster’s spelling-book and a cross old maid was more than human
nature could bear. Among the records preserved from that far-off day
there remains a yellow slip, whereon in neat old-fashioned penmanship is
inscribed:

                  MISS PAMELA CLEMENS

    Has won the love of her teacher and schoolmates by her amiable
    deportment and faithful application to her various studies.
                                   E. Horr, Teacher.

If any such testimonial was ever awarded to Little Sam, diligent search
has failed to reveal it. If he won the love of his teacher and playmates
it was probably for other reasons.

Yet he must have learned, somehow, for he could read presently and was
soon regarded as a good speller for his years. His spelling came as a
natural gift, as did most of his attainments, then and later.

It has already been mentioned that Miss Horr opened her school with
prayer and Scriptural readings. Little Sam did not especially delight in
these things, but he respected them. Not to do so was dangerous. Flames
were being kept brisk for little boys who were heedless of sacred
matters; his home teaching convinced him of that. He also respected Miss
Horr as an example of orthodox faith, and when she read the text “Ask
and ye shall receive” and assured them that whoever prayed for a
thing earnestly, his prayer would be answered, he believed it. A small
schoolmate, the balker’s daughter, brought gingerbread to school every
morning, and Little Sam was just “honing” for some of it. He wanted a
piece of that baker’s gingerbread more than anything else in the world,
and he decided to pray for it.

The little girl sat in front of him, but always until that morning had
kept the gingerbread out of sight. Now, however, when he finished his
prayer and looked up, a small morsel of the precious food lay in front
of him. Perhaps the little girl could no longer stand that hungry look
in his eyes. Possibly she had heard his petition; at all events
his prayer bore fruit and his faith at that moment would have moved
Holliday’s Hill. He decided to pray for everything he wanted, but when
he tried the gingerbread supplication next morning it had no result.
Grieved, but still unshaken, he tried next morning again; still no
gingerbread; and when a third and fourth effort left him hungry he grew
despairing and silent, and wore the haggard face of doubt. His mother
said:

“What’s the matter, Sammy; are you sick?”

“No,” he said, “but I don’t believe in saying prayers any more, and I’m
never going to do it again.”

“Why, Sammy, what in the world has happened?” she asked, anxiously. Then
he broke down and cried on her lap and told her, for it was a serious
thing in that day openly to repudiate faith. Jane Clemens gathered him
to her heart and comforted him.

“I’ll make you a whole pan of gingerbread, better than that,” she said,
“and school will soon be out, too, and you can go back to Uncle John’s
farm.”

And so passed and ended Little Sam’s first school-days.



X. EARLY VICISSITUDE AND SORROW

Prosperity came laggingly enough to the Clemens household. The year 1840
brought hard times: the business venture paid little or no return;
law practice was not much more remunerative. Judge Clemens ran for the
office of justice of the peace and was elected, but fees were neither
large nor frequent. By the end of the year it became necessary to part
with Jennie, the slave-girl--a grief to all of them, for they were
fond of her in spite of her wilfulness, and she regarded them as “her
family.” She was tall, well formed, nearly black, and brought a good
price. A Methodist minister in Hannibal sold a negro child at the same
time to another minister who took it to his home farther South. As the
steamboat moved away from the landing the child’s mother stood at the
water’s edge, shrieking her anguish. We are prone to consider these
things harshly now, when slavery has been dead for nearly half a
century, but it was a sacred institution then, and to sell a child from
its mother was little more than to sell to-day a calf from its lowing
dam. One could be sorry, of course, in both instances, but necessity or
convenience are matters usually considered before sentiment. Mark Twain
once said of his mother:

“Kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not
conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted
usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard
it defended and sanctified in a thousand. As far as her experience
went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that
slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity,
and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly
thankful for.”

Yet Jane Clemens must have had qualms at times--vague, unassembled
doubts that troubled her spirit. After Jennie was gone a little black
chore-boy was hired from his owner, who had bought him on the east shore
of Maryland and brought him to that remote Western village, far from
family and friends.

He was a cheery spirit in spite of that, and gentle, but very noisy.
All day he went about singing, whistling, and whooping until his noise
became monotonous, maddening. One day Little Sam said:

“Ma--[that was the Southern term]--make Sandy stop singing all the time.
It’s awful.”

Tears suddenly came into his mother’s eyes.

“Poor thing! He is sold away from his home. When he sings it shows maybe
he is not remembering. When he’s still I am afraid he is thinking, and I
can’t bear it.”

Yet any one in that day who advanced the idea of freeing the slaves was
held in abhorrence. An abolitionist was something to despise, to stone
out of the community. The children held the name in horror, as belonging
to something less than human; something with claws, perhaps, and a tail.

The money received for the sale of Jennie made judge Clemens easier for
a time. Business appears to have improved, too, and he was tided through
another year during which he seems to have made payments on an expensive
piece of real estate on Hill and Main streets. This property, acquired
in November, 1839, meant the payment of some seven thousand dollars, and
was a credit purchase, beyond doubt. It was well rented, but the
tenants did not always pay; and presently a crisis came--a descent
of creditors--and John: Clemens at forty-four found himself without
business and without means. He offered everything--his cow, his
household furniture, even his forks and spoons--to his creditors, who
protested that he must not strip himself. They assured him that they
admired his integrity so much they would aid him to resume business; but
when he went to St. Louis to lay in a stock of goods he was coldly met,
and the venture came to nothing.

He now made a trip to Tennessee in the hope of collecting some old debts
and to raise money on the Tennessee land. He took along a negro man
named Charlie, whom he probably picked up for a small sum, hoping to
make something through his disposal in a better market. The trip was
another failure. The man who owed him a considerable sum of money was
solvent, but pleaded hard times:

    It seems so very hard upon him--[John Clemens wrote home]--to pay
    such a sum that I could not have the conscience to hold him to it.
   .. I still have Charlie. The highest price I had offered for him
    in New Orleans was $50, in Vicksburg $40. After performing the
    journey to Tennessee, I expect to sell him for whatever he will
    bring.

    I do not know what I can commence for a business in the spring. My
    brain is constantly on the rack with the study, and I can’t relieve
    myself of it. The future, taking its completion from the state of
    my health or mind, is alternately beaming in sunshine or over-
    shadowed with clouds; but mostly cloudy, as you may suppose. I want
    bodily exercise--some constant and active employment, in the first
    place; and, in the next place, I want to be paid for it, if
    possible.

This letter is dated January 7, 1842. He returned without any financial
success, and obtained employment for a time in a commission-house on the
levee. The proprietor found some fault one day, and Judge Clemens walked
out of the premises. On his way home he stopped in a general store, kept
by a man named Sehns, to make some purchases. When he asked that
these be placed on account, Selms hesitated. Judge Clemens laid down a
five-dollar gold piece, the last money he possessed in the world, took
the goods, and never entered the place again.

When Jane Clemens reproached him for having made the trip to Tennessee,
at a cost of two hundred dollars, so badly needed at this time, he only
replied gently that he had gone for what he believed to be the best.

“I am not able to dig in the streets,” he added, and Orion, who records
this, adds:

“I can see yet the hopeless expression of his face.”

During a former period of depression, such as this, death had come
into the Clemens home. It came again now. Little Benjamin, a sensitive,
amiable boy of ten, one day sickened, and died within a week, May 12,
1842. He was a favorite child and his death was a terrible blow. Little
Sam long remembered the picture of his parents’ grief; and Orion recalls
that they kissed each other, something hitherto unknown.

Judge Clemens went back to his law and judicial practice. Mrs. Clemens
decided to take a few boarders. Orion, by this time seventeen and a very
good journeyman printer, obtained a place in St. Louis to aid in the
family support.

The tide of fortune having touched low-water mark, the usual gentle
stage of improvement set in. Times grew better in Hannibal after those
first two or three years; legal fees became larger and more frequent.
Within another two years judge Clemens appears to have been in fairly
hopeful circumstances again--able at least to invest some money in
silkworm culture and lose it, also to buy a piano for Pamela, and to
build a modest house on the Hill Street property, which a rich St. Louis
cousin, James Clemens, had preserved for him. It was the house which is
known today as the “Mark Twain Home.”--[This house, in 1911, was
bought by Mr. and Mrs. George A. Mahan, and presented to Hannibal for
a memorial museum.]--Near it, toward the corner of Main Street, was his
office, and here he dispensed law and justice in a manner which, if it
did not bring him affluence, at least won for him the respect of the
entire community. One example will serve:

Next to his office was a stone-cutter’s shop. One day the proprietor,
Dave Atkinson, got into a muss with one “Fighting” MacDonald, and there
was a tremendous racket. Judge Clemens ran out and found the men down,
punishing each other on the pavement.

“I command the peace!” he shouted, as he came up to them.

No one paid the least attention.

“I command the peace!” he shouted again, still louder, but with no
result.

A stone-cutter’s mallet lay there, handy. Judge Clemens seized it and,
leaning over the combatants, gave the upper one, MacDonald, a smart blow
on the head.

“I command the peace!” he said, for the third time, and struck a
considerably smarter blow.

That settled it. The second blow was of the sort that made MacDonald
roll over, and peace ensued. Judge Clemens haled both men into his
court, fined them, and collected his fee. Such enterprise in the cause
of justice deserved prompt reward.



XI. DAYS OF EDUCATION

The Clemens family had made one or two moves since its arrival in
Hannibal, but the identity of these temporary residences and the period
of occupation of each can no longer be established. Mark Twain once
said:

“In 1843 my father caught me in a lie. It is not this fact that gives me
the date, but the house we lived in. We were there only a year.”

We may believe it was the active result of that lie that fixed his
memory of the place, for his father seldom punished him. When he did, it
was a thorough and satisfactory performance.

It was about the period of moving into the new house (1844) that the Tom
Sawyer days--that is to say, the boyhood of Samuel Clemens--may be said
to have begun. Up to that time he was just Little Sam, a child--wild,
and mischievous, often exasperating, but still a child--a delicate
little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed. Now,
at nine, he had acquired health, with a sturdy ability to look out for
himself, as boys will, in a community like that, especially where the
family is rather larger than the income and there is still a younger
child to claim a mother’s protecting care. So “Sam,” as they now called
him, “grew up” at nine, and was full of knowledge for his years. Not
that he was old in spirit or manner--he was never that, even to his
death--but he had learned a great number of things, mostly of a kind not
acquired at school.

They were not always of a pleasant kind; they were likely to be of a
kind startling to a boy, even terrifying. Once Little Sam--he was
still Little Sam, then--saw an old man shot down on the main street, at
noonday. He saw them carry him home, lay him on the bed, and spread on
his breast an open family Bible which looked as heavy as an anvil. He
though, if he could only drag that great burden away, the poor, old
dying man would not breathe so heavily. He saw a young emigrant
stabbed with a bowie-knife by a drunken comrade, and noted the spurt of
life-blood that followed; he saw two young men try to kill their uncle,
one holding him while the other snapped repeatedly an Allen revolver
which failed to go off. Then there was the drunken rowdy who proposed
to raid the “Welshman’s” house one dark threatening night--he saw that,
too. A widow and her one daughter lived there, and the ruffian woke the
whole village with his coarse challenges and obscenities. Sam Clemens
and a boon companion, John Briggs, went up there to look and listen. The
man was at the gate, and the warren were invisible in the shadow of the
dark porch. The boys heard the elder woman’s voice warning the man that
she had a loaded gun, and that she would kill him if he stayed where
he was. He replied with a ribald tirade, and she warned that she would
count ten-that if he remained a second longer she would fire. She began
slowly and counted up to five, with him laughing and jeering. At six he
grew silent, but he did not go. She counted on: seven--eight--nine--The
boys watching from the dark roadside felt their hearts stop. There was
a long pause, then the final count, followed a second later by a gush
of flame. The man dropped, his breast riddled. At the same instant the
thunderstorm that had been gathering broke loose. The boys fled wildly,
believing that Satan himself had arrived to claim the lost soul.

Many such instances happened in a town like that in those days. And
there were events incident to slavery. He saw a slave struck down
and killed with a piece of slag for a trifling offense. He saw an
abolitionist attacked by a mob, and they would have lynched him had not
a Methodist minister defended him on a plea that he must be crazy. He
did not remember, in later years, that he had ever seen a slave auction,
but he added:

“I am suspicious that it is because the thing was a commonplace
spectacle, and not an uncommon or impressive one. I do vividly remember
seeing a dozen black men and women chained together lying in a group on
the pavement, waiting shipment to a Southern slave-market. They had the
saddest faces I ever saw.”

It is not surprising that a boy would gather a store of human knowledge
amid such happenings as these. They were wild, disturbing things. They
got into his dreams and made him fearful when he woke in the middle of
the night. He did not then regard them as an education. In some vague
way he set them down as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him
a taste for a better life. He felt that it was his own conscience that
made these things torture him. That was his mother’s idea, and he had a
high respect for her moral opinions, also for her courage. Among other
things, he had seen her one day defy a vicious devil of a Corsican--a
common terror in the town-who was chasing his grown daughter with a
heavy rope in his hand, declaring he would wear it out on her. Cautious
citizens got out of her way, but Jane Clemens opened her door wide to
the refugee, and then, instead of rushing in and closing it, spread her
arms across it, barring the way. The man swore and threatened her with
the rope, but she did not flinch or show any sign of fear. She stood
there and shamed him and derided him and defied him until he gave up the
rope and slunk off, crestfallen and conquered. Any one who could do that
must have a perfect conscience, Sam thought. In the fearsome darkness
he would say his prayers, especially when a thunderstorm was coming, and
vow to begin a better life in the morning. He detested Sunday-school
as much as day-school, and once Orion, who was moral and religious,
had threatened to drag him there by the collar; but as the thunder got
louder Sam decided that he loved Sunday-school and would go the next
Sunday without being invited.

Fortunately there were pleasanter things than these. There were
picnics sometimes, and ferry-boat excursions. Once there was a great
Fourth-of-July celebration at which it was said a real Revolutionary
soldier was to be present. Some one had discovered him living alone
seven or eight miles in the country. But this feature proved a
disappointment; for when the day came and he was triumphantly brought in
he turned out to be a Hessian, and was allowed to walk home.

The hills and woods around Hannibal where, with his playmates, he roamed
almost at will were never disappointing. There was the cave with its
marvels; there was Bear Creek, where, after repeated accidents, he had
learned to swim. It had cost him heavily to learn to swim. He had seen
two playmates drown; also, time and again he had, himself, been dragged
ashore more dead than alive, once by a slave-girl, another time by a
slaveman--Neal Champ, of the Pavey Hotel. In the end he had conquered;
he could swim better than any boy in town of his age.

It was the river that meant more to him than all the rest. Its charm was
permanent. It was the path of adventure, the gateway to the world.
The river with its islands, its great slow-moving rafts, its marvelous
steamboats that were like fairyland, its stately current swinging to the
sea! He would sit by it for hours and dream. He would venture out on it
in a surreptitiously borrowed boat when he was barely strong enough
to lift an oar out of the water. He learned to know all its moods and
phases. He felt its kinship. In some occult way he may have known it
as his prototype--that resistless tide of life with its ever-changing
sweep, its shifting shores, its depths, its shadows, its gorgeous sunset
hues, its solemn and tranquil entrance to the sea.

His hunger for the life aboard the steamers became a passion. To be even
the humblest employee of one of those floating enchantments would be
enough; to be an officer would be to enter heaven; to be a pilot was to
be a god.

“You can hardly imagine what it meant,” he reflected once, “to a boy
in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and
down, and never to take a trip on them.”

He had reached the mature age of nine when he could endure this no
longer. One day, when the big packet came down and stopped at Hannibal,
he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck.
Presently the signal-bells rang, the steamboat backed away and swung
into midstream; he was really going at last. He crept from beneath the
boat and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery. Then
it began to rain--a terrific downpour. He crept back under the boat, but
his legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him. So he was taken
down into the cabin and at the next stop set ashore. It was the town
of Louisiana, and there were Lampton relatives there who took him home.
Jane Clemens declared that his father had got to take him in hand; which
he did, doubtless impressing the adventure on him in the usual way.
These were all educational things; then there was always the farm, where
entertainment was no longer a matter of girl-plays and swings, with a
colored nurse following about, but of manlier sports with his older boy
cousins, who had a gun and went hunting with the men for squirrels and
partridges by day, for coons and possums by night. Sometimes the little
boy had followed the hunters all night long and returned with them
through the sparkling and fragrant morning fresh, hungry, and triumphant
just in time for breakfast.

So it is no wonder that at nine he was no longer “Little Sam,” but Sam
Clemens, quite mature and self-dependent, with a wide knowledge of men
and things and a variety of accomplishments. He had even learned to
smoke--a little--out there on the farm, and had tried tobacco-chewing,
though that was a failure. He had been stung to this effort by a big
girl at a school which, with his cousin Puss, he sometimes briefly
attended.

“Do you use terbacker?” the big girl had asked, meaning did he chew it.

“No,” he said, abashed at the confession.

“Haw!” she cried to the other scholars; “here’s a boy that can’t chaw
terbacker.”

Degraded and ashamed, he tried to correct his fault, but it only made
him very ill; and he did not try again.

He had also acquired the use of certain strong, expressive words, and
used them, sometimes, when his mother was safely distant. He had an
impression that she would “skin him alive” if she heard him swear. His
education had doubtful spots in it, but it had provided wisdom.

He was not a particularly attractive lad. He was not tall for his years,
and his head was somewhat too large for his body. He had a “great ruck”
 of light, sandy hair which he plastered down to keep it from curling;
keen blue-gray eyes, and rather large features. Still, he had a fair,
delicate complexion, when it was not blackened by grime or tan; a
gentle, winning manner; a smile that, with his slow, measured way of
speaking, made him a favorite with his companions. He did not speak
much, and his mental attainments were not highly regarded; but, for some
reason, whenever he did speak every playmate in hearing stopped whatever
he was doing and listened. Perhaps it would be a plan for a new game or
lark; perhaps it was something droll; perhaps it was just a commonplace
remark that his peculiar drawl made amusing. Whatever it was, they
considered it worth while. His mother always referred to his slow
fashion of speaking as “Sammy’s long talk.” Her own speech was still
more deliberate, but she seemed not to notice it. Henry--a much
handsomer lad and regarded as far more promising--did not have it. He
was a lovable, obedient little fellow whom the mischievous Sam took
delight in teasing. For this and other reasons the latter’s punishments
were frequent enough, perhaps not always deserved. Sometimes he charged
his mother with partiality. He would say:

“Yes, no matter what it is, I am always the one to get punished”; and
his mother would answer:

“Well, Sam, if you didn’t deserve it for that, you did for something
else.”

Henry Clemens became the Sid of Tom Sawyer, though Henry was in every
way a finer character than Sid. His brother Sam always loved him, and
fought for him oftener than with him.

With the death of Benjamin Clemens, Henry and Sam were naturally drawn
much closer together, though Sam could seldom resist the temptation
of tormenting Henry. A schoolmate, George Butler (he was a nephew of
General Butler and afterward fought bravely in the Civil War), had a
little blue suit with a leather belt to match, and was the envy of all.
Mrs. Clemens finally made Sam and Henry suits of blue cotton velvet,
and the next Sunday, after various services were over, the two sauntered
about, shedding glory for a time, finally going for a stroll in the
woods. They walked along properly enough, at first, then just ahead Sam
spied the stump of a newly cut tree, and with a wild whooping impulse
took a running leap over it. There were splinters on the stump where the
tree had broken away, but he cleared them neatly. Henry wanted to match
the performance, but was afraid to try, so Sam dared him. He kept daring
him until Henry was goaded to the attempt. He cleared the stump, but the
highest splinters caught the slack of his little blue trousers, and
the cloth gave way. He escaped injury, but the precious trousers were
damaged almost beyond repair. Sam, with a boy’s heartlessness, was
fairly rolling on the ground with laughter at Henry’s appearance.

“Cotton-tail rabbit!” he shouted. “Cotton-tail rabbit!” while Henry,
weeping, set out for home by a circuitous and unfrequented road. Let
us hope, if there was punishment for this mishap, that it fell in the
proper locality.

These two brothers were of widely different temperament. Henry, even as
a little boy, was sturdy, industrious, and dependable. Sam was volatile
and elusive; his industry of an erratic kind. Once his father set him to
work with a hatchet to remove some plaster. He hacked at it for a
time well enough, then lay down on the floor of the room and threw his
hatchet at such areas of the plaster as were not in easy reach. Henry
would have worked steadily at a task like that until the last bit was
removed and the room swept clean.

The home incidents in ‘Tom Sawyer’, most of them, really happened. Sam
Clemens did clod Henry for getting him into trouble about the colored
thread with which he sewed his shirt when he came home from swimming;
he did inveigle a lot of boys into whitewashing, a fence for him; he did
give Pain-killer to Peter, the cat. There was a cholera scare that year,
and Pain-killer was regarded as a preventive. Sam had been ordered to
take it liberally, and perhaps thought Peter too should be safeguarded.
As for escaping punishment for his misdeeds in the manner described in
that book, this was a daily matter, and the methods adapted themselves
to the conditions. In the introduction to Tom Sawyer Mark Twain
confesses to the general truth of the history, and to the reality of its
characters. “Huck Finn was drawn from life,” he tells us. “Tom
Sawyer also, but not from an individual--he is a combination of the
characteristics of three boys whom I knew.”

The three boys were--himself, chiefly, and in a lesser degree John
Briggs and Will Bowen. John Briggs was also the original of Joe Harper
in that book. As for Huck Finn, his original was Tom Blankenship,
neither elaborated nor qualified.

There were several of the Blankenships: there was old Ben, the father,
who had succeeded “General” Gains as the town drunkard; young Ben, the
eldest son--a hard case with certain good traits; and Tom--that is to
say, Huck--who was just as he is described in Tom Sawyer: a ruin of
rags, a river-rat, an irresponsible bit of human drift, kind of heart
and possessing that priceless boon, absolute unaccountability of conduct
to any living soul. He could came and go as he chose; he never had to
work or go to school; he could do all things, good or bad, that the
other boys longed to do and were forbidden. He represented to them
the very embodiment of liberty, and his general knowledge of important
matters, such as fishing, hunting, trapping, and all manner of signs and
spells and hoodoos and incantations, made him immensely valuable as a
companion. The fact that his society was prohibited gave it a vastly
added charm.

The Blankenships picked up a precarious living fishing and hunting, and
lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later
moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new Clemens home on
Hill Street. It was really an old barn of a place--poor and ramshackle
even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still
standing. The siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which
must have been very plentiful in that long-ago time. Old drunken Ben
Blankenship never dreamed that pieces of his house would be carried off
as relics because of the literary fame of his son Tom--a fame founded
on irresponsibility and inconsequence. Orion Clemens, who was concerned
with missionary work about this time, undertook to improve the
Blankenships spiritually. Sam adopted them, outright, and took them to
his heart. He was likely to be there at any hour of the day, and he and
Tom had cat-call signals at night which would bring him out on the back
single-story roof, and down a little arbor and flight of steps, to the
group of boon companions which, besides Tom, included John Briggs, the
Bowen boys, Will Pitts, and one or two other congenial spirits. They
were not vicious boys; they were not really bad boys; they were only
mischievous, fun-loving boys-thoughtless, and rather disregardful of the
comforts and the rights of others.



XII. TOM SAWYER’S BAND

They ranged from Holliday’s Hill on the north to the Cave on the south,
and over the fields and through all the woods about. They navigated
the river from Turtle Island to Glasscock’s Island (now Pearl, or Tom
Sawyer’s Island), and far below; they penetrated the wilderness of the
Illinois shore. They could run like wild turkeys and swim like ducks;
they could handle a boat as if born in one. No orchard or melon patch
was entirely safe from them; no dog or slave patrol so vigilant that
they did not sooner or later elude it. They borrowed boats when their
owners were not present. Once when they found this too much trouble,
they decided to own a boat, and one Sunday gave a certain borrowed craft
a coat of red paint (formerly it had been green), and secluded it for
a season up Bear Creek. They borrowed the paint also, and the brush,
though they carefully returned these the same evening about nightfall,
so the painter could have them Monday morning. Tom Blankenship rigged up
a sail for the new craft, and Sam Clemens named it Cecilia, after which
they didn’t need to borrow boats any more, though the owner of it did;
and he sometimes used to observe as he saw it pass that, if it had been
any other color but red, he would have sworn it was his.

Some of their expeditions were innocent enough. They often cruised up
to Turtle Island, about two miles above Hannibal, and spent the day
feasting. You could have loaded a car with turtles and their eggs up
there, and there were quantities of mussels and plenty of fish. Fishing
and swimming were their chief pastimes, with general marauding for
adventure. Where the railroad-bridge now ends on the Missouri side was
their favorite swimming-hole--that and along Bear Creek, a secluded
limpid water with special interests of its own. Sometimes at evening
they swam across to Glasscock’s Island--the rendezvous of Tom Sawyer’s
“Black Avengers” and the hiding-place of Huck and Nigger Jim; then, when
they had frolicked on the sand-bar at the head of the island for an hour
or more, they would swim back in the dusk, a distance of half a mile,
breasting the strong, steady Mississippi current without exhaustion
or fear. They could swim all day, likely enough, those graceless
young scamps. Once--though this was considerably later, when he was
sixteen--Sam Clemens swam across to the Illinois side, and then turned
and swam back again without landing, a distance of at least two miles,
as he had to go. He was seized with a cramp on the return trip. His legs
became useless, and he was obliged to make the remaining distance with
his arms. It was a hardy life they led, and it is not recorded that they
ever did any serious damage, though they narrowly missed it sometimes.

One of their Sunday pastimes was to climb Holliday’s Hill and roll
down big stones, to frighten the people who were driving to church.
Holliday’s Hill above the road was steep; a stone once started would
go plunging and leaping down and bound across the road with the deadly
swiftness of a twelve-inch shell. The boys would get a stone poised,
then wait until they saw a team approaching, and, calculating the
distance, would give it a start. Dropping down behind the bushes, they
would watch the dramatic effect upon the church-goers as the great
missile shot across the road a few yards before them. This was Homeric
sport, but they carried it too far. Stones that had a habit of getting
loose so numerously on Sundays and so rarely on other days invited
suspicion, and the “Patterollers” (river patrol--a kind of police of
those days) were put on the watch. So the boys found other diversions
until the Patterollers did not watch any more; then they planned a grand
coup that would eclipse anything before attempted in the stone-rolling
line.

A rock about the size of an omnibus was lying up there, in a good
position to go down hill, once, started. They decided it would be a
glorious thing to see that great boulder go smashing down, a hundred
yards or so in front of some unsuspecting and peaceful-minded
church-goer. Quarrymen were getting out rock not far away, and left
their picks and shovels over Sundays. The boys borrowed these, and went
to work to undermine the big stone. It was a heavier job than they had
counted on, but they worked faithfully, Sunday after Sunday. If their
parents had wanted them to work like that, they would have thought they
were being killed.

Finally one Sunday, while they were digging, it suddenly got loose and
started down. They were not quite ready for it. Nobody was coming but
an old colored man in a cart, so it was going to be wasted. It was not
quite wasted, however. They had planned for a thrilling result; and
there was thrill enough while it lasted. In the first place, the stone
nearly caught Will Bowen when it started. John Briggs had just that
moment quit digging and handed Will the pick. Will was about to step
into the excavation when Sam Clemens, who was already there, leaped out
with a yell:

“Look out, boys, she’s coming!”

She came. The huge stone kept to the ground at first, then, gathering
a wild momentum, it went bounding into the air. About half-way down the
hill it struck a tree several inches through and cut it clean off. This
turned its course a little, and the negro in the cart, who heard the
noise, saw it come crashing in his direction and made a wild effort to
whip up his horse. It was also headed toward a cooper-shop across the
road. The boys watched it with growing interest. It made longer leaps
with every bound, and whenever it struck the fragments the dust would
fly. They were certain it would demolish the negro and destroy the
cooper-shop. The shop was empty, it being Sunday, but the rest of the
catastrophe would invite close investigation, with results. They wanted
to fly, but they could not move until they saw the rock land. It was
making mighty leaps now, and the terrified negro had managed to get
directly in its path. They stood holding their breath, their mouths
open. Then suddenly they could hardly believe their eyes; the boulder
struck a projection a distance above the road, and with a mighty bound
sailed clear over the negro and his mule and landed in the soft dirt
beyond-only a fragment striking the shop, damaging but not wrecking
it. Half buried in the ground, that boulder lay there for nearly forty
years; then it was blasted up for milling purposes. It was the last rock
the boys ever rolled down. They began to suspect that the sport was not
altogether safe.

Sometimes the boys needed money, which was not easy to get in those
days. On one occasion of this sort, Tom Blankenship had the skin of a
coon he had captured, which represented the only capital in the crowd.
At Selms’s store on Wild Cat corner the coonskin would bring ten cents,
but that was not enough. They arranged a plan which would make it pay
a good deal more than that. Selins’s window was open, it being
summer-time, and his pile of pelts was pretty handy. Huck--that is to
say, Tom--went in the front door and sold the skin for ten cents to
Selms, who tossed it back on the pile. Tom came back with the money and
after a reasonable period went around to the open window, crawled in,
got the coonskin, and sold it to Selms again. He did this several times
that afternoon; then John Pierce, Selins’s clerk, said:

“Look here, Selms, there is something wrong about this. That boy has
been selling us coonskins all the afternoon.”

Selms went to his pile of pelts. There were several sheepskins and some
cowhides, but only one coonskin--the one he had that moment bought.
Selms himself used to tell this story as a great joke.

Perhaps it is not adding to Mark Twain’s reputation to say that the boy
Sam Clemens--a pretty small boy, a good deal less than twelve at this
time--was the leader of this unhallowed band; yet any other record would
be less than historic. If the band had a leader, it was he. They were
always ready to listen to him--they would even stop fishing to do
that--and to follow his projects. They looked to him for ideas and
organization, whether the undertaking was to be real or make-believe.
When they played “Bandit” or “Pirate” or “Indian,” Sam Clemens was
always chief; when they became real raiders it is recorded that he was
no less distinguished. Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings
of leadership. When the Christian Sons of Temperance came along with a
regalia, and a red sash that carried with it rank and the privilege of
inventing pass-words, the gaud of these things got into his eyes, and
he gave up smoking (which he did rather gingerly) and swearing (which
he did only under heavy excitement), also liquor (though he had never
tasted it yet), and marched with the newly washed and pure in heart for
a full month--a month of splendid leadership and servitude. Then even
the red sash could not hold him in bondage. He looked up Tom Blankenship
and said:

“Say, Tom, I’m blamed tired of this! Let’s go somewhere and smoke!”
 Which must have been a good deal of a sacrifice, for the uniform was a
precious thing.

Limelight and the center of the stage was a passion of Sam Clemens’s
boyhood, a love of the spectacular that never wholly died. It seems
almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot old days he could not
have looked down the years to a time when, with the world at his feet,
venerable Oxford should clothe him in a scarlet gown.

He could not by any chance have dreamed of that stately honor. His
ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement. It is true
that now and then, on Friday at school, he read a composition, one of
which--a personal burlesque on certain older boys--came near resulting
in bodily damage. But any literary ambition he may have had in those
days was a fleeting thing. His permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a
pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active,
where his word--his nod, even--constituted sufficient law. The river
kept the pilot ambition always fresh, and the cave supplied a background
for those other things.

The cave was an enduring and substantial joy. It was a real cave, not
merely a hole, but a subterranean marvel of deep passages and vaulted
chambers that led away into bluffs and far down into the earth’s black
silences, even below the river, some said. For Sam Clemens the cave had
a fascination that never faded. Other localities and diversions might
pall, but any mention of the cave found him always eager and ready for
the three-mile walk or pull that brought them to its mystic door. With
its long corridors, its royal chambers hung with stalactites, its remote
hiding-places, its possibilities as the home of a gallant outlaw band,
it contained everything that a romantic boy could love or long for. In
Tom Sawyer Indian Joe dies in the cave. He did not die there in real
life, but was lost there once, and was living on bats when they found
him. He was a dissolute reprobate, and when, one night, he did die there
came up a thunder-storm so terrific that Sam Clemens at home and in bed
was certain that Satan had come in person for the half-breed’s wicked
soul. He covered his head and said his prayers industriously, in the
fear that the evil one might conclude to save another trip by taking him
along, too.

The treasure-digging adventure in the book had a foundation in fact.
There was a tradition concerning some French trappers who long before
had established a trading-post two miles above Hannibal, on what is
called the “bay.” It is said that, while one of these trappers was out
hunting, Indians made a raid on the post and massacred the others.
The hunter on returning found his comrades killed and scalped, but the
Indians had failed to find the treasure which was buried in a chest. He
left it there, swam across to Illinois, and made his way to St. Louis,
where he told of the massacre and the burial of the chest of gold. Then
he started to raise a party to go back for it, but was taken sick and
died. Later some men came up from St. Louis looking for the chest. They
did not find it, but they told the circumstances, and afterward a good
many people tried to find the gold.

Tom Blankenship one morning came to Sam Clemens and John Briggs and said
he was going to dig up the treasure. He said he had dreamed just where
it was, and said if they would go with him and dig he would divide
up. The boys had great faith in dreams, especially Tom’s dreams. Tom’s
unlimited freedom gave him a large importance in their eyes. The dreams
of a boy like that were pretty sure to mean something. They followed Tom
to the place with some shovels and a pick, and he showed them where to
dig. Then he sat down under the shade of a papaw-tree and gave orders.

They dug nearly all day. Now and then they stopped to rest, and maybe to
wonder a little why Tom didn’t dig some himself; but, of course, he had
done the dreaming, which entitled him to an equal share.

They did not find it that day, and when they went back next morning they
took two long iron rods; these they would push and drive into the ground
until they struck something hard. Then they would dig down to see
what it was, but it never turned out to be money. That night the boys
declared they would not dig any more. But Tom had another dream. He
dreamed the gold was exactly under the little papaw-tree. This sounded
so circumstantial that they went back and dug another day. It was hot
weather too, August, and that night they were nearly dead. Even Tom gave
it up, then. He said there was something about the way they dug, but he
never offered to do any digging himself.

This differs considerably from the digging incident in the book, but it
gives us an idea of the respect the boys had for the ragamuffin original
of Huckleberry Finn.--[Much of the detail in this chapter was furnished
to the writer by John Briggs shortly before his death in 1907.]--Tom
Blankenship’s brother, Ben, was also drawn upon for that creation, at
least so far as one important phase of Huck’s character is concerned. He
was considerably older, as well as more disreputable, than Tom. He was
inclined to torment the boys by tying knots in their clothes when they
went swimming, or by throwing mud at them when they wanted to come out,
and they had no deep love for him. But somewhere in Ben Blankenship
there was a fine generous strain of humanity that provided Mark Twain
with that immortal episode in the story of Huck Finn--in sheltering the
Nigger Jim.

This is the real story:

A slave ran off from Monroe County, Missouri, and got across the river
into Illinois. Ben used to fish and hunt over there in the swamps, and
one day found him. It was considered a most worthy act in those days to
return a runaway slave; in fact, it was a crime not to do it. Besides,
there was for this one a reward of fifty dollars, a fortune to ragged
outcast Ben Blankenship. That money and the honor he could acquire
must have been tempting to the waif, but it did not outweigh his human
sympathy. Instead of giving him up and claiming the reward, Ben kept the
runaway over there in the marshes all summer. The negro would fish and
Ben would carry him scraps of other food. Then, by and by, it leaked
out. Some wood-choppers went on a hunt for the fugitive, and chased him
to what was called “Bird Slough.” There trying to cross a drift he was
drowned.

In the book, the author makes Huck’s struggle a psychological one
between conscience and the law, on one side, and sympathy on the other.
With Ben Blankenship the struggle--if there was a struggle--was probably
between sympathy and cupidity. He would care very little for conscience
and still less for law. His sympathy with the runaway, however, would be
large and elemental, and it must have been very large to offset the lure
of that reward.

There was a gruesome sequel to this incident. Some days following the
drowning of the runaway, Sam Clemens, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys
went to the spot and were pushing the drift about, when suddenly the
negro rose before them, straight and terrible, about half his length out
of the water. He had gone down feet foremost, and the loosened drift had
released him. The boys did not stop to investigate. They thought he was
after them and flew in wild terror, never stopping until they reached
human habitation.

How many gruesome experiences there appear to have been in those early
days! In ‘The Innocents Abroad’ Mark Twain tells of the murdered man he
saw one night in his father’s office. The man’s name was McFarlane. He
had been stabbed that day in the old Hudson-McFarlane feud and carried
in there to die. Sam Clemens and John Briggs had run away from school
and had been sky larking all that day, and knew nothing of the affair.
Sam decided that his father’s office was safer for him than to face his
mother, who was probably sitting up, waiting. He tells us how he lay on
the lounge, and how a shape on the floor gradually resolved itself
into the outlines of a man; how a square of moonlight from the window
approached it and gradually revealed the dead face and the ghastly
stabbed breast.

“I went out of there,” he says. “I do not say that I went away in any
sort of a hurry, but I simply went; that is sufficient. I went out of
the window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the
sash, but it was handier to take it than to, leave it, and so I took it.
I was not scared, but I was considerably agitated.”

He was not yet twelve, for his father was no longer alive when the boy
reached that age. Certainly these were disturbing, haunting things. Then
there was the case of the drunken tramp in the calaboose to whom the
boys kind-heartedly enough carried food and tobacco. Sam Clemens spent
some of his precious money to buy the tramp a box of Lucifer matches--a
brand new invention then, scarce and high. The tramp started a fire with
the matches and burned down the calaboose, himself in it. For weeks the
boy was tortured, awake and in his dreams, by the thought that if he
had not carried the man the matches the tragedy could not have happened.
Remorse was always Samuel Clemens’s surest punishment. To his last days
on earth he never outgrew its pangs.

What a number of things crowded themselves into a few brief years! It
is not easy to curtail these boyhood adventures of Sam Clemens and his
scapegrace friends, but one might go on indefinitely with their mad
doings. They were an unpromising lot. Ministers and other sober-minded
citizens freely prophesied sudden and violent ends for them, and
considered them hardly worth praying for. They must have proven
a disappointing lot to those prophets. The Bowen boys became fine
river-pilots; Will Pitts was in due time a leading merchant and bank
director; John Briggs grew into a well-to-do and highly respected
farmer; even Huck Finn--that is to say, Tom Blankenship--is reputed to
have ranked as an honored citizen and justice of the peace in a Western
town. But in those days they were a riotous, fun-loving band with little
respect for order and even less for ordinance.



XIII. THE GENTLER SIDE

His associations were not all of that lawless breed. At his school (he
had sampled several places of learning, and was now at Mr. Cross’s on
the Square) were a number of less adventurous, even if not intrinsically
better playmates. There was George Robards, the Latin scholar, and John,
his brother, a handsome boy, who rode away at last with his father into
the sunset, to California, his golden curls flying in the wind. And
there was Jimmy McDaniel, a kind-hearted boy whose company was worth
while, because his father was a confectioner, and he used to bring candy
and cake to school. Also there was Buck Brown, a rival speller, and John
Meredith, the doctor’s son, and John Garth, who was one day to marry
little Helen Kercheval, and in the end would be remembered and honored
with a beautiful memorial building not far from the site of the old
school.

Furthermore, there were a good many girls. Tom Sawyer had an
impressionable heart, and Sam Clemens no less so. There was Bettie
Ormsley, and Artemisia Briggs, and Jennie Brady; also Mary Miller, who
was nearly twice his age and gave him his first broken heart.

“I believe I was as miserable as a grown man could be,” he said once,
remembering.

Tom Sawyer had heart sorrows too, and we may imagine that his emotions
at such times were the emotions of Sam Clemens, say at the age of ten.

But, as Tom Sawyer had one faithful sweetheart, so did he. They were one
and the same. Becky Thatcher in the book was Laura Hawkins in reality.
The acquaintance of these two had begun when the Hawkins family moved
into the Virginia house on the corner of Hill and Main streets.--[The
Hawkins family in real life bore no resemblance to the family of that
name in The Gilded Age. Judge Hawkins of The Gilded Age, as already
noted, was John Clemens. Mark Twain used the name Hawkins, also the
name of his boyhood sweetheart, Laura, merely for old times’ sake, and
because in portraying the childhood of Laura Hawkins he had a picture
of the real Laura in his mind.]--The Clemens family was then in the
new home across the way, and the children were soon acquainted. The boy
could be tender and kind, and was always gentle in his treatment of the
other sex. They visited back and forth, especially around the new house,
where there were nice pieces of boards and bricks for play-houses. So
they played “keeping house,” and if they did not always agree well,
since the beginning of the world sweethearts have not always agreed,
even in Arcady. Once when they were building a house--and there may have
been some difference of opinion as to its architecture--the boy happened
to let a brick fall on the little girl’s finger. If there had been any
disagreement it vanished instantly with that misfortune. He tried to
comfort her and soothe the pain; then he wept with her and suffered most
of the two, no doubt. So, you see, he was just a little boy, after
all, even though he was already chief of a red-handed band, the “Black
Avengers of the Spanish Main.”

He was always a tender-hearted lad. He would never abuse an animal,
unless, as in the Pain-killer incident, his tendency to pranking ran
away with him. He had indeed a genuine passion for cats; summers when
he went to the farm he never failed to take his cat in a basket. When
he ate, it sat in a chair beside him at the table. His sympathy included
inanimate things as well. He loved flowers--not as the embryo botanist
or gardener, but as a personal friend. He pitied the dead leaf and the
murmuring dried weed of November because their brief lives were ended,
and they would never know the summer again, or grow glad with another
spring. His heart went out to them; to the river and the sky, the sunlit
meadow and the drifted hill. That his observation of all nature was
minute and accurate is shown everywhere in his writing; but it was
never the observation of a young naturalist it was the subconscious
observation of sympathetic love.

We are wandering away from his school-days. They were brief enough and
came rapidly to an end. They will not hold us long. Undoubtedly
Tom Sawyer’s distaste for school and his excuses for staying at
home--usually some pretended illness--have ample foundation in the
boyhood of Sam Clemens. His mother punished him and pleaded with him,
alternately. He detested school as he detested nothing else on earth,
even going to church. “Church ain’t worth shucks,” said Tom Sawyer, but
it was better than school.

As already noted, the school of Mr. Cross stood in or near what is now
the Square in Hannibal. The Square was only a grove then, grown up with
plum, hazel, and vine--a rare place for children. At recess and the
noon hour the children climbed trees, gathered flowers, and swung in
grape-vine swings. There was a spelling-bee every Friday afternoon, for
Sam the only endurable event of the school exercises. He could hold
the floor at spelling longer than Buck Brown. This was spectacular and
showy; it invited compliments even from Mr. Cross, whose name must have
been handed down by angels, it fitted him so well. One day Sam Clemens
wrote on his slate:

       Cross by name and cross by nature
       Cross jumped over an Irish potato.

He showed this to John Briggs, who considered it a stroke of genius.
He urged the author to write it on the board at noon, but the poet’s
ambition did not go so far.

“Oh, pshaw!” said John. “I wouldn’t be afraid to do it.

“I dare you to do it,” said Sam.

John Briggs never took a dare, and at noon, when Mr. Cross was at home
at dinner, he wrote flamingly the descriptive couplet. When the teacher
returned and “books” were called he looked steadily at John Briggs. He
had recognized the penmanship.

“Did you do that?” he asked, ominously.

It was a time for truth.

“Yes, sir,” said John.

“Come here!” And John came, and paid for his exploitation of genius
heavily. Sam Clemens expected that the next call would be for “author,”
 but for some reason the investigation ended there. It was unusual for
him to escape. His back generally kept fairly warm from one “frailing”
 to the next.

His rewards were not all of a punitive nature. There were two medals
in the school, one for spelling, the other for amiability. They
were awarded once a week, and the holders wore them about the neck
conspicuously, and were envied accordingly. John Robards--he of the
golden curls--wore almost continuously the medal for amiability, while
Sam Clemens had a mortgage on the medal for spelling. Sometimes they
traded, to see how it would seem, but the master discouraged this
practice by taking the medals away from them for the remainder of the
week. Once Sam Clemens lost the medal by leaving the first “r” out of
February. He could have spelled it backward, if necessary; but Laura
Hawkins was the only one on the floor against him, and he was a gallant
boy.

The picture of that school as presented in the book written thirty
years later is faithful, we may believe, and the central figure is a
tender-hearted, romantic, devil-may-care lad, loathing application and
longing only for freedom. It was a boon which would come to him sooner
even than he had dreamed.



XIV. THE PASSING OF JOHN CLEMENS

Judge Clemens, who time and again had wrecked or crippled his fortune
by devices more or less unusual, now adopted the one unfailing method of
achieving disaster. He endorsed a large note, for a man of good repute,
and the payment of it swept him clean: home, property, everything
vanished again. The St. Louis cousin took over the home and agreed to
let the family occupy it on payment of a small interest; but after
an attempt at housekeeping with a few scanty furnishings and Pamela’s
piano--all that had been saved from the wreck--they moved across the
street into a portion of the Virginia house, then occupied by a Dr.
Grant. The Grants proposed that the Clemens family move over and board
them, a welcome arrangement enough at this time.

Judge Clemens had still a hope left. The clerkship of the Surrogate
Court was soon to be filled by election. It was an important
remunerative office, and he was regarded as the favorite candidate
for the position. His disaster had aroused general sympathy, and his
nomination and election were considered sure. He took no chances; he
made a canvass on horseback from house to house, often riding through
rain and the chill of fall, acquiring a cough which was hard to
overcome. He was elected by a heavy majority, and it was believed he
could hold the office as long as he chose. There seemed no further need
of worry. As soon as he was installed in office they would live in style
becoming their social position. About the end of February he rode to
Palmyra to be sworn in. Returning he was drenched by a storm of rain and
sleet, arriving at last half frozen. His system was in no condition to
resist such a shock. Pneumonia followed; physicians came with torments
of plasters and allopathic dosings that brought no relief. Orion
returned from St. Louis to assist in caring for him, and sat by his
bed, encouraging him and reading to him, but it was evident that he grew
daily weaker. Now and then he became cheerful and spoke of the Tennessee
land as the seed of a vast fortune that must surely flower at last. He
uttered no regrets, no complaints. Once only he said:

“I believe if I had stayed in Tennessee I might have been worth twenty
thousand dollars to-day.”

On the morning of the 24th of March, 1847, it was evident that he could
not live many hours. He was very weak. When he spoke, now and then, it
was of the land. He said it would soon make them all rich and happy.

“Cling to the land,” he whispered. “Cling to the land, and wait. Let
nothing beguile it away from you.”

A little later he beckoned to Pamela, now a lovely girl of nineteen,
and, putting his arm about her neck, kissed her for the first time in
years.

“Let me die,” he said.

He never spoke after that. A little more, and the sad, weary life
that had lasted less than forty-nine years was ended: A dreamer and a
moralist, an upright man honored by all, he had never been a financier.
He ended life with less than he had begun.



XV. A YOUNG BEN FRANKLIN

For a third time death had entered the Clemens home: not only had it
brought grief now, but it had banished the light of new fortune from the
very threshold. The disaster seemed complete.

The children were dazed. Judge Clemens had been a distant, reserved man,
but they had loved him, each in his own way, and they had honored his
uprightness and nobility of purpose. Mrs. Clemens confided to a neighbor
that, in spite of his manner, her husband had been always warm-hearted,
with a deep affection for his family. They remembered that he had never
returned from a journey without bringing each one some present, however
trifling. Orion, looking out of his window next morning, saw old Abram
Kurtz, and heard him laugh. He wondered how anybody could still laugh.

The boy Sam was fairly broken down. Remorse, which always dealt with
him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. Wildness, disobedience,
indifference to his father’s wishes, all were remembered; a hundred
things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in the
knowledge that they could never be undone. Seeing his grief, his mother
took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay.

“It is all right, Sammy,” she said. “What’s done is done, and it does
not matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now I want you
to promise me----”

He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung himself into her
arms.

“I will promise anything,” he sobbed, “if you won’t make me go to
school! Anything!”

His mother held him for a moment, thinking, then she said:

“No, Sammy; you need not go to school any more. Only promise me to be a
better boy. Promise not to break my heart.”

So he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright,
like his father. His mother was satisfied with that. The sense of
honor and justice was already strong within him. To him a promise was a
serious matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be
held sacred.

That night--it was after the funeral--his tendency to somnambulism
manifested itself. His mother and sister, who were sleeping together,
saw the door open and a form in white enter. Naturally nervous at such
a time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, they were
terrified and covered their heads. Presently a hand was laid on the
coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed. A thought
struck Mrs. Clemens:

“Sam!” she said.

He answered, but he was sound asleep and fell to the floor. He had risen
and thrown a sheet around him in his dreams. He walked in his sleep
several nights in succession after that. Then he slept more soundly.

Orion returned to St. Louis. He was a very good book and job printer
by this time and received a salary of ten dollars a week (high wages in
those frugal days), of which he sent three dollars weekly to the family.
Pamela, who had acquired a considerable knowledge of the piano and
guitar, went to the town of Paris, in Monroe County, about fifty miles
away, and taught a class of music pupils, contributing whatever remained
after paying for her board and clothing to the family fund. It was a
hard task for the girl, for she was timid and not over-strong; but she
was resolute and patient, and won success. Pamela Clemens was a noble
character and deserves a fuller history than can be afforded in this
work.

Mrs. Clemens and her son Samuel now had a sober talk, and, realizing
that the printing trade offered opportunity for acquiring further
education as well as a livelihood, they agreed that he should be
apprenticed to Joseph P. Ament, who had lately moved from Palmyra to
Hannibal and bought a weekly Democrat paper, the Missouri Courier. The
apprentice terms were not over-liberal. They were the usual thing for
that time: board and clothes--“more board than clothes, and not much of
either,” Mark Twain used to say.

“I was supposed to get two suits of clothes a year, like a nigger, but
I didn’t get them. I got one suit and took the rest out in Ament’s old
garments, which didn’t fit me in any noticeable way. I was only about
half as big as he was, and when I had on one of his shirts I felt as if
I had on a circus tent. I had to turn the trousers up to my ears to make
them short enough.”

There was another apprentice, a young fellow of about eighteen, named
Wales McCormick, a devilish fellow and a giant. Ament’s clothes were
too small for Wales, but he had to wear them, and Sam Clemens and Wales
McCormick together, fitted out with Ament’s clothes, must have been a
picturesque pair. There was also, for a time, a boy named Ralph; but he
appears to have presented no features of a striking sort, and the memory
of him has become dim.

The apprentices ate in the kitchen at first, served by the old
slave-cook and her handsome mulatto daughter; but those printer’s
“devils” made it so lively there that in due time they were promoted
to the family table, where they sat with Mr. and Mrs. Ament and the one
journeyman, Pet McMurry--a name that in itself was an inspiration. What
those young scamps did not already know Pet McMurry could teach them.
Sam Clemens had promised to be a good boy, and he was, by the standards
of boyhood. He was industrious, regular at his work, quick to learn,
kind, and truthful. Angels could hardly be more than that in a
printing-office; but when food was scarce even an angel--a young printer
angel--could hardly resist slipping down the cellar stairs at night for
raw potatoes, onions, and apples which they carried into the office,
where the boys slept on a pallet on the floor, and this forage they
cooked on the office stove. Wales especially had a way of cooking a
potato that his associate never forgot.

It is unfortunate that no photographic portrait has been preserved of
Sam Clemens at this period. But we may imagine him from a letter which,
long years after, Pet McMurry wrote to Mark Twain. He said:

    If your memory extends so far back, you will recall a little sandy-
    haired boy--[The color of Mark Twain’s hair in early life has been
    variously referred to as red, black, and brown. It was, in fact, as
    stated by McMurry, “sandy” in boyhood, deepening later to that rich,
    mahogany tone known as auburn.]--of nearly a quarter of a century
    ago, in the printing-office at Hannibal, over the Brittingham
    drugstore, mounted upon a little box at the case, pulling away at a
    huge cigar or a diminutive pipe, who used to love to sing so well
    the expression of the poor drunken man who was supposed to have
    fallen by the wayside: “If ever I get up again, I’ll stay up--if I
    kin.”... Do you recollect any of the serious conflicts that
    mirth-loving brain of yours used to get you into with that
    diminutive creature Wales McCormick--how you used to call upon me to
    hold your cigar or pipe, whilst you went entirely through him?

This is good testimony, without doubt. When he had been with Ament
little more than a year Sam had become office favorite and chief
standby. Whatever required intelligence and care and imagination was
given to Sam Clemens. He could set type as accurately and almost as
rapidly as Pet McMurry; he could wash up the forms a good deal better
than Pet; and he could run the job-press to the tune of “Annie Laurie”
 or “Along the Beach at Rockaway,” without missing a stroke or losing a
finger. Sometimes, at odd moments, he would “set up” one of the popular
songs or some favorite poem like “The Blackberry Girl,” and of these he
sent copies printed on cotton, even on scraps of silk, to favorite girl
friends; also to Puss Quarles, on his uncle’s farm, where he seldom went
now, because he was really grown up, associating with men and doing
a man’s work. He had charge of the circulation--which is to say, he
carried the papers. During the last year of the Mexican War, when a
telegraph-wire found its way across the Mississippi to Hannibal--a long
sagging span, that for some reason did not break of its own weight--he
was given charge of the extras with news from the front; and the burning
importance of his mission, the bringing of news hot from the field of
battle, spurred him to endeavors that won plaudits and success.

He became a sort of subeditor. When the forms of the paper were ready
to close and Ament was needed to supply more matter, it was Sam who was
delegated to find that rather uncertain and elusive person and labor
with him until the required copy was produced. Thus it was he saw
literature in the making.

It is not believed that Sam had any writing ambitions of his own. His
chief desire was to be an all-round journeyman printer like Pet McMurry;
to drift up and down the world in Pet’s untrammeled fashion; to see
all that Pet had seen and a number of things which Pet appeared to have
overlooked. He varied on occasion from this ambition. When the first
negro minstrel show visited Hannibal and had gone, he yearned for a
brief period to be a magnificent “middle man” or even the “end-man” of
that combination; when the circus came and went, he dreamed of the
day when, a capering frescoed clown, he would set crowded tiers of
spectators guffawing at his humor; when the traveling hypnotist arrived,
he volunteered as a subject, and amazed the audience by the marvel of
his performance.

In later life he claimed that he had not been hypnotized in any degree,
but had been pretending throughout--a statement always denied by his
mother and his brother Orion. This dispute was never settled, and never
could be. Sam Clemens’s tendency to somnambulism would seem to suggest
that he really might have taken on a hypnotic condition, while his
consummate skill as an actor, then and always, and his early fondness
of exhibition and a joke, would make it not unlikely that he was merely
“showing off” and having his fun. He could follow the dictates of
a vivid imagination and could be as outrageous as he chose without
incurring responsibility of any sort. But there was a penalty: he must
allow pins and needles to be thrust into his flesh and suffer these
tortures without showing discomfort to the spectators. It is difficult
to believe that any boy, however great his exhibitory passion, could
permit, in the full possession of his sensibilities, a needle to be
thrust deeply into his flesh without manifestations of a most unmesmeric
sort. The conclusion seems warranted that he began by pretending,
but that at times he was at least under semi-mesmeric control. At all
events, he enjoyed a week of dazzling triumph, though in the end he
concluded to stick to printing as a trade.

We have said that he was a rapid learner and a neat workman. At Ament’s
he generally had a daily task, either of composition or press-work,
after which he was free. When he had got the hang of his work he was
usually done by three in the afternoon; then away to the river or the
cave, as in the old days, sometimes with his boy friends, sometimes with
Laura Hawkins gathering wild columbine on that high cliff overlooking
the river, Lover’s Leap.

He was becoming quite a beau, attending parties on occasion, where
old-fashioned games--Forfeits, Ring-around-a-Rosy, Dusty Miller, and the
like--were regarded as rare amusements. He was a favorite with girls of
his own age. He was always good-natured, though he played jokes on them,
too, and was often a severe trial. He was with Laura Hawkins more than
the others, usually her escort. On Saturday afternoons in winter he
carried her skates to Bear Creek and helped her to put them on. After
which they skated “partners,” holding hands tightly, and were a likely
pair of children, no doubt. In The Gilded Age Laura Hawkins at twelve is
pictured “with her dainty hands propped into the ribbon-bordered pockets
of her apron... a vision to warm the coldest heart and bless and cheer
the saddest.” The author had the real Laura of his childhood in his mind
when he wrote that, though the story itself bears no resemblance to her
life.

They were never really sweethearts, those two. They were good friends
and comrades. Sometimes he brought her magazines--exchanges from the
printing--office--Godey’s and others. These were a treat, for such
things were scarce enough. He cared little for reading, himself, beyond
a few exciting tales, though the putting into type of a good deal of
miscellaneous matter had beyond doubt developed in him a taste for
general knowledge. It needed only to be awakened.



XVI. THE TURNING-POINT

There came into his life just at this period one of those seemingly
trifling incidents which, viewed in retrospect, assume pivotal
proportions. He was on his way from the office to his home one afternoon
when he saw flying along the pavement a square of paper, a leaf from a
book. At an earlier time he would not have bothered with it at all, but
any printed page had acquired a professional interest for him now. He
caught the flying scrap and examined it. It was a leaf from some history
of Joan of Arc. The “maid” was described in the cage at Rouen, in the
fortress, and the two ruffian English soldiers had stolen her clothes.
There was a brief description and a good deal of dialogue--her
reproaches and their ribald replies.

He had never heard of the subject before. He had never read any history.
When he wanted to know any fact he asked Henry, who read everything
obtainable. Now, however, there arose within him a deep compassion for
the gentle Maid of Orleans, a burning resentment toward her captors,
a powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history. It was an
interest that would grow steadily for more than half a lifetime
and culminate at last in that crowning work, the Recollections, the
loveliest story ever told of the martyred girl.

The incident meant even more than that: it meant the awakening of his
interest in all history--the world’s story in its many phases--a passion
which became the largest feature of his intellectual life and remained
with him until his very last day on earth. From the moment when that
fluttering leaf was blown into his hands his career as one of the
world’s mentally elect was assured. It gave him his cue--the first
word of a part in the human drama. It crystallized suddenly within him
sympathy with the oppressed, rebellion against tyranny and treachery,
scorn for the divine rights of kings. A few months before he died he
wrote a paper on “The Turning-point of My Life.” For some reason he did
not mention this incident. Yet if there was a turning-point in his life,
he reached it that bleak afternoon on the streets of Hannibal when a
stray leaf from another life was blown into his hands.

He read hungrily now everything he could find relating to the French
wars, and to Joan in particular. He acquired an appetite for history in
general, the record of any nation or period; he seemed likely to become
a student. Presently he began to feel the need of languages, French
and German. There was no opportunity to acquire French, that he could
discover, but there was a German shoemaker in Hannibal who agreed to
teach his native tongue. Sam Clemens got a friend--very likely it was
John Briggs--to form a class with him, and together they arranged for
lessons. The shoemaker had little or no English. They had no German. It
would seem, however, that their teacher had some sort of a “word-book,”
 and when they assembled in his little cubby-hole of a retreat he began
reading aloud from it this puzzling sentence:

“De hain eet flee whoop in de hayer.”

“Dere!” he said, triumphantly; “you know dose vord?”

The students looked at each other helplessly.

The teacher repeated the sentence, and again they were helpless when he
asked if they recognized it.

Then in despair he showed them the book. It was an English primer, and
the sentence was:

“The hen, it flies up in the air.”

They explained to him gently that it was German they wished to learn,
not English--not under the circumstances. Later, Sam made an attempt at
Latin, and got a book for that purpose, but gave it up, saying:

“No, that language is not for me. I’ll do well enough to learn English.”
 A boy who took it up with him became a Latin scholar.

His prejudice against oppression he put into practice. Boys who were
being imposed upon found in him a ready protector. Sometimes, watching a
game of marbles or tops, he would remark in his slow, impressive way:

“You mustn’t cheat that boy.” And the cheating stopped. When it didn’t,
there was a combat, with consequences.



XVII. THE HANNIBAL “JOURNAL”

Orion returned from St. Louis. He felt that he was needed in Hannibal
and, while wages there were lower, his expenses at home were slight;
there was more real return for the family fund. His sister Pamela was
teaching a class in Hannibal at this time. Orion was surprised when his
mother and sister greeted him with kisses and tears. Any outward display
of affection was new to him.

The family had moved back across the street by this time. With Sam
supporting himself, the earnings of Orion and Pamela provided at least
a semblance of comfort. But Orion was not satisfied. Then, as always,
he had a variety of vague ambitions. Oratory appealed to him, and he
delivered a temperance lecture with an accompaniment of music,
supplied chiefly by Pamela. He aspired to the study of law, a recurring
inclination throughout his career. He also thought of the ministry, an
ambition which Sam shared with him for a time. Every mischievous boy has
it, sooner or later, though not all for the same reasons.

“It was the most earnest ambition I ever had,” Mark Twain once remarked,
thoughtfully. “Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher, but
because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It
looked like a safe job.”

A periodical ambition of Orion’s was to own and conduct a paper in
Hannibal. He felt that in such a position he might become a power in
Western journalism. Once his father had considered buying the Hannibal
Journal to give Orion a chance, and possibly to further his own
political ambitions. Now Orion considered it for himself. The paper was
for sale under a mortgage, and he was enabled to borrow the $500 which
would secure ownership. Sam’s two years at Ament’s were now complete,
and Orion induced him to take employment on the Journal. Henry at eleven
was taken out of school to learn typesetting.

Orion was a gentle, accommodating soul, but he lacked force and
independence.

“I followed all the advice I received,” he says in his record. “If two
or more persons conflicted with each other, I adopted the views of the
last.”

He started full of enthusiasm. He worked like a slave to save help:
wrote his own editorials, and made his literary selections at night. The
others worked too. Orion gave them hard tasks and long hours. He had the
feeling that the paper meant fortune or failure to them all; that
all must labor without stint. In his usual self-accusing way he wrote
afterward:

I was tyrannical and unjust to Sam. He was as swift and as clean as
a good journeyman. I gave him tasks, and if he got through well I
begrudged him the time and made him work more. He set a clean proof, and
Henry a very dirty one. The correcting was left to be done in the form
the day before publication. Once we were kept late, and Sam complained
with tears of bitterness that he was held till midnight on Henry’s dirty
proofs.

Orion did not realize any injustice at the time. The game was too
desperate to be played tenderly. His first editorials were so brilliant
that it was not believed he could have written them. The paper
throughout was excellent, and seemed on the high road to success. But
the pace was too hard to maintain. Overwork brought weariness, and
Orion’s enthusiasm, never a very stable quantity, grew feeble. He became
still more exacting.

It is not to be supposed that Sam Clemens had given up all amusements to
become merely a toiling drudge or had conquered in any large degree his
natural taste for amusement. He had become more studious; but after the
long, hard days in the office it was not to be expected that a boy of
fifteen would employ the evening--at least not every evening--in reading
beneficial books. The river was always near at hand--for swimming in the
summer and skating in the winter--and once even at this late period it
came near claiming a heavy tribute. That was one winter’s night when
with another boy he had skated until nearly midnight. They were about
in the middle of the river when they heard a terrific and grinding noise
near the shore. They knew what it was. The ice was breaking up, and they
set out for home forthwith. It was moonlight, and they could tell the
ice from the water, which was a good thing, for there were wide cracks
toward the shore, and they had to wait for these to close. They were an
hour making the trip, and just before they reached the bank they came
to a broad space of water. The ice was lifting and falling and crunching
all around them. They waited as long as they dared and decided to leap
from cake to cake. Sam made the crossing without accident, but his
companion slipped in when a few feet from shore. He was a good swimmer
and landed safely, but the bath probably cost him his hearing. He was
taken very ill. One disease followed another, ending with scarlet fever
and deafness.

There was also entertainment in the office itself. A country boy named
Jim Wolfe had come to learn the trade--a green, good-natured, bashful
boy. In every trade tricks are played on the new apprentice, and Sam
felt that it was his turn to play them. With John Briggs to help him,
tortures for Jim Wolfe were invented and applied.

They taught him to paddle a canoe, and upset him. They took him sniping
at night and left him “holding the bag” in the old traditional fashion
while they slipped off home and went to bed.

But Jim Wolfe’s masterpiece of entertainment was one which he undertook
on his own account. Pamela was having a candy-pull down-stairs one
night--a grown-up candy-pull to which the boys were not expected. Jim
would not have gone, anyway, for he was bashful beyond belief, and
always dumb, and even pale with fear, in the presence of pretty Pamela
Clemens. Up in their room the boys could hear the merriment from below
and could look out in the moonlight on the snowy sloping roof that began
just beneath their window. Down at the eaves was the small arbor, green
in summer, but covered now with dead vines and snow. They could hear the
candymakers come out, now and then, doubtless setting out pans of candy
to cool. By and by the whole party seemed to come out into the little
arbor, to try the candy, perhaps the joking and laughter came plainly
to the boys up-stairs. About this time there appeared on the roof from
somewhere two disreputable cats, who set up a most disturbing duel
of charge and recrimination. Jim detested the noise, and perhaps was
gallant enough to think it would disturb the party. He had nothing to
throw at them, but he said:

“For two cents I’d get out there and knock their heads off.”

“You wouldn’t dare to do it,” Sam said, purringly.

This was wormwood to Jim. He was really a brave spirit.

“I would too,” he said, “and I will if you say that again.”

“Why, Jim, of course you wouldn’t dare to go out there. You might catch
cold.”

“You wait and see,” said Jim Wolfe.

He grabbed a pair of yarn stockings for his feet, raised the window, and
crept out on the snowy roof. There was a crust of ice on the snow, but
Jim jabbed his heels through it and stood up in the moonlight, his legs
bare, his single garment flapping gently in the light winter breeze.
Then he started slowly toward the cats, sinking his heels in the snow
each time for a footing, a piece of lath in his hand. The cats were on
the corner of the roof above the arbor, and Jim cautiously worked his
way in that direction. The roof was not very steep. He was doing well
enough until he came to a place where the snow had melted until it was
nearly solid ice. He was so intent on the cats that he did not notice
this, and when he struck his heel down to break the crust nothing
yielded. A second later Jim’s feet had shot out from under him, and he
vaulted like an avalanche down the icy roof out on the little vine-clad
arbor, and went crashing through among those candypullers, gathered
there with their pans of cooling taffy. There were wild shrieks and a
general flight. Neither Jim nor Sam ever knew how he got back to their
room, but Jim was overcome with the enormity of his offense, while Sam
was in an agony of laughter.

“You did it splendidly, Jim,” he drawled, when he could speak. “Nobody
could have done it better; and did you see how those cats got out of
there? I never had any idea when you started that you meant to do it
that way. And it was such a surprise to the folks down-stairs. How did
you ever think of it?”

It was a fearful ordeal for a boy like Jim Wolfe, but he stuck to his
place in spite of what he must have suffered. The boys made him one of
them soon after that. His initiation was thought to be complete.

An account of Jim Wolfe and the cats was the first original story
Mark Twain ever told. He told it next day, which was Sunday, to Jimmy
McDaniel, the baker’s son, as they sat looking out over the river,
eating gingerbread. His hearer laughed immoderately, and the
story-teller was proud and happy in his success.



XVIII. THE BEGINNING OF A LITERARY LIFE

Orion’s paper continued to go downhill. Following some random counsel,
he changed the name of it and advanced the price--two blunders. Then he
was compelled to reduce the subscription, also the advertising rates. He
was obliged to adopt a descending scale of charges and expenditures to
keep pace with his declining circulation--a fatal sign. A publisher must
lead his subscription list, not follow it.

“I was walking backward,” he said, “not seeing where I stepped.”

In desperation he broke away and made a trip to Tennessee to see if
something could not be realized on the land, leaving his brother Sam in
charge of the office. It was a journey without financial results; yet it
bore fruit, for it marked the beginning of Mark Twain’s literary career.

Sam, in his brother’s absence, concluded to edit the paper in a way that
would liven up the circulation. He had never done any writing--not for
print--but he had the courage of his inclinations. His local items were
of a kind known as “spicy”; his personals brought prompt demand for
satisfaction. The editor of a rival paper had been in love, and was
said to have gone to the river one night to drown himself. Sam gave
a picturesque account of this, with all the names connected with the
affair. Then he took a couple of big wooden block letters, turned them
upside down, and engraved illustrations for it, showing the victim
wading out into the river with a stick to test the depth of the water.
When this issue of the paper came out the demand for it was very
large. The press had to be kept running steadily to supply copies. The
satirized editor at first swore that he would thrash the whole journal
office, then he left town and did not come back any more. The embryo
Mark Twain also wrote a poem. It was addressed “To Mary in Hannibal,”
 but the title was too long to be set in one column, so he left out all
the letters in Hannibal, except the first and the last, and supplied
their place with a dash, with a startling result. Such were the early
flickerings of a smoldering genius. Orion returned, remonstrated, and
apologized. He reduced Sam to the ranks. In later years he saw his
mistake.

“I could have distanced all competitors even then,” he said, “if I had
recognized Sam’s ability and let him go ahead, merely keeping him from
offending worthy persons.”

Sam was subdued, but not done for. He never would be, now. He had
got his first taste of print, and he liked it. He promptly wrote two
anecdotes which he thought humorous and sent them to the Philadelphia
Saturday Evening Post. They were accepted--without payment, of course,
in those days; and when the papers containing them appeared he felt
suddenly lifted to a lofty plane of literature. This was in 1851.

“Seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that
line I have ever experienced since,” he said, nearly sixty years later.

Yet he did not feel inspired to write anything further for the Post.
Twice during the next two years he contributed to the Journal; once
something about Jim Wolfe, though it was not the story of the cats, and
another burlesque on a rival editor whom he pictured as hunting snipe
with a cannon, the explosion of which was said to have blown the snipe
out of the country. No contributions of this time have been preserved.
High prices have been offered for copies of the Hannibal journal
containing them, but without success. The Post sketches were unsigned
and have not been identified. It is likely they were trivial enough.
His earliest work showed no special individuality or merit, being mainly
crude and imitative, as the work of a boy--even a precocious boy--is
likely to be. He was not especially precocious--not in literature. His
literary career would halt and hesitate and trifle along for many years
yet, gathering impetus and equipment for the fuller, statelier swing
which would bring a greater joy to the world at large, even if not to
himself, than that first, far-off triumph.--[In Mark Twain’s sketch “My
First Literary Venture” he has set down with characteristic embroideries
some account of this early authorship.]

Those were hard financial days. Orion could pay nothing on his
mortgage--barely the interest. He had promised Sam three dollars and
a half a week, but he could do no more than supply him with board and
clothes--“poor, shabby clothes,” he says in his record.

“My mother and sister did the housekeeping. My mother was cook. She used
the provisions I supplied her. We therefore had a regular diet of bacon,
butter, bread, and coffee.”

Mrs. Clemens again took a few boarders; Pamela, who had given up
teaching for a time, organized another music class. Orion became
despondent. One night a cow got into the office, upset a typecase, and
ate up two composition rollers. Orion felt that fate was dealing with
a heavy hand. Another disaster quickly followed. Fire broke out in the
office, and the loss was considerable. An insurance company paid one
hundred and fifty dollars. With it Orion replaced such articles as were
absolutely needed for work, and removed his plant into the front room
of the Clemens dwelling. He raised the one-story part of the building to
give them an added room up-stairs; and there for another two years, by
hard work and pinching economies, the dying paper managed to drag along.
It was the fire that furnished Sam Clemens with his Jim Wolfe sketch.
In it he stated that Jim in his excitement had carried the office broom
half a mile and had then come back after the wash-pan.

In the meantime Pamela Clemens married. Her husband was a well-to-do
merchant, William A. Moffett, formerly of Hannibal, but then of St.
Louis, where he had provided her with the comforts of a substantial
home.

Orion tried the experiment of a serial story. He wrote to a number of
well-known authors in the East, but was unable to find one who would
supply a serial for the price he was willing to pay. Finally he obtained
a translation of a French novel for the sum offered, which was five
dollars. It did not save the sinking ship, however. He made the
experiment of a tri-weekly, without success. He noticed that even his
mother no longer read his editorials, but turned to the general news.
This was a final blow.

“I sat down in the dark,” he says, “the moon glinting in at the open
door. I sat with one leg over the chair and let my mind float.”

He had received an offer of five hundred dollars for his office--the
amount of the mortgage--and in his moonlight reverie he decided to
dispose of it on those terms. This was in 1853.

His brother Samuel was no longer with him. Several months before,
in June, Sam decided he would go out into the world. He was in his
eighteenth year now, a good workman, faithful and industrious, but he
had grown restless in unrewarded service. Beyond his mastery of the
trade he had little to show for six years of hard labor. Once when
he had asked Orion for a few dollars to buy a second-hand gun, Orion,
exasperated by desperate circumstances, fell into a passion and rated
him for thinking of such extravagance. Soon afterward Sam confided to
his mother that he was going away; that he believed Orion hated him;
that there was no longer a place for him at home. He said he would go to
St. Louis, where Pamela was. There would be work for him in St. Louis,
and he could send money home. His intention was to go farther than St.
Louis, but he dared not tell her. His mother put together sadly enough
the few belongings of what she regarded as her one wayward boy; then she
held up a little Testament:

“I want you to take hold of the other end of this, Sam,” she said, “and
make me a promise.”

If one might have a true picture of that scene: the shin, wiry woman of
forty-nine, her figure as straight as her deportment, gray-eyed, tender,
and resolute, facing the fair-cheeked, auburn-haired youth of seventeen,
his eyes as piercing and unwavering as her own. Mother and son, they
were of the same metal and the same mold.

“I want you to repeat after me, Sam, these words,” Jane Clemens said. “I
do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card or drink a drop of liquor
while I am gone.”

He repeated the oath after her, and she kissed him.

“Remember that, Sam, and write to us,” she said.

“And so,” Orion records, “he went wandering in search of that comfort
and that advancement and those rewards of industry which he had failed
to find where I was--gloomy, taciturn, and selfish. I not only missed
his labor; we all missed his bounding activity and merriment.”



XIX. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF FRANKLIN

He went to St. Louis by the night boat, visited his sister Pamela, and
found a job in the composing-room of the Evening News. He remained on
the paper only long enough to earn money with which to see the world.
The “world” was New York City, where the Crystal Palace Fair was then
going on. The railway had been completed by this time, but he had not
traveled on it. It had not many comforts; several days and nights were
required for the New York trip; yet it was a wonderful and beautiful
experience. He felt that even Pet McMurry could hardly have done
anything to surpass it. He arrived in New York with two or three dollars
in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill concealed in the lining of his coat.

New York was a great and amazing city. It almost frightened him. It
covered the entire lower end of Manhattan Island; visionary citizens
boasted that one day it would cover it all. The World’s Fair building,
the Crystal Palace, stood a good way out. It was where Bryant Park is
now, on Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue. Young Clemens classed it
as one of the wonders of the world and wrote lavishly of its marvels. A
portion of a letter to his sister Pamela has been preserved and is
given here not only for what it contains, but as the earliest existing
specimen of his composition. The fragment concludes what was doubtless
an exhaustive description.

    From the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight--the flags
    of the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering
    jewelry, gaudy tapestry, etc., with the busy crowd passing to and
    fro ‘tis a perfect fairy palace--beautiful beyond description.

    The machinery department is on the main floor, but I cannot
    enumerate any of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past 1
    o’clock). It would take more than a week to examine everything on
    exhibition; and I was only in a little over two hours to-night.
    I only glanced at about one-third of the articles; and, having a
    poor memory, I have enumerated scarcely any of even the principal
    objects. The visitors to the Palace average 6,000 daily--double the
    population of Hannibal. The price of admission being 50 cents, they
    take in about $3,000.

    The Latting Observatory (height about 280 feet) is near the Palace
    --from it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country
    around. The Croton Aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the
    greatest wonder yet. Immense sewers are laid across the bed of the
    Hudson River, and pass through the country to Westchester County,
    where a whole river is turned from its course and brought to New
    York. From the reservoir in the city to the Westchester County
    reservoir the distance is thirty-eight miles and, if necessary, they
    could easily supply every family in New York with one hundred
    barrels of water per day!

    I am very sorry to learn that Henry has been sick. He ought to go
    to the country and take exercise, for he is not half so healthy as
    Ma thinks he is. If he had my walking to do, he would be another
    boy entirely. Four times every day I walk a little over a mile; and
    working hard all day and walking four miles is exercise. I am used
    to it now, though, and it is no trouble. Where is it Orion’s going
    to? Tell Ma my promises are faithfully kept; and if I have my
    health I will take her to Ky. in the spring--I shall save money for
    this. Tell Jim (Wolfe) and all the rest of them to write, and give
    me all the news....

    (It has just struck 2 A.M., and I always get up at 6, and am at work
    at 7.) You ask where I spend my evenings. Where would you suppose,
    with a free printer’s library containing more than 4,000 volumes
    within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to?
    Write soon.

                  Truly your brother,     SAM

    P.S.-I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could not
    read by it. Write, and let me know how Henry is.

It is a good letter; it is direct and clear in its descriptive quality,
and it gives us a scale of things. Double the population of Hannibal
visited the Crystal Palace in one day! and the water to supply the city
came a distance of thirty-eight miles! Doubtless these were amazing
statistics.

Then there was the interest in family affairs--always strong--his
concern for Henry, whom he loved tenderly; his memory of the promise to
his mother; his understanding of her craving to visit her old home. He
did not write to her direct, for the reason that Orion’s plans were
then uncertain, and it was not unlikely that he had already found a
new location. From this letter, too, we learn that the boy who detested
school was reveling in a library of four thousand books--more than he
had ever seen together before. We have somehow the feeling that he had
all at once stepped from boyhood to manhood, and that the separation was
marked by a very definite line.

The work he had secured was in Cliff Street in the printing
establishment of John A. Gray & Green, who agreed to pay him four
dollars a week, and did pay that amount in wildcat money, which saved
them about twenty-five per cent. of the sum. He lodged at a mechanics’
boarding-house in Duane Street, and when he had paid his board and
washing he sometimes had as much as fifty cents to lay away.

He did not like the board. He had been accustomed to the Southern mode
of cooking, and wrote home complaining that New-Yorkers did not have
“hot-bread” or biscuits, but ate “light-bread,” which they allowed to
get stale, seeming to prefer it in that way. On the whole, there was
not much inducement to remain in New York after he had satisfied himself
with its wonders. He lingered, however, through the hot months of 1853,
and found it not easy to go. In October he wrote to Pamela, suggesting
plans for Orion; also for Henry and Jim Wolfe, whom he seems never to
have overlooked. Among other things he says:

    I have not written to any of the family for some time, from the
    fact, firstly, that I didn’t know where they were, and, secondly,
    because I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to
    leave New York every day for the last two weeks. I have taken a
    liking to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave
    I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause. I think I
    shall get off Tuesday, though.

    Edwin Forrest has been playing for the last sixteen days at the
    Broadway Theater, but I never went to see him till last night. The
    play was the “Gladiator.” I did not like parts of it much, but
    other portions were really splendid. In the latter part of the last
    act, where the “Gladiator” (Forrest) dies at his brother’s feet (in
    all the fierce pleasure of gratified revenge), the man’s whole soul
    seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is really startling
    to see him. I am sorry I did not see him play “Damon and Pythias”
     --the former character being the greatest. He appears in Philadelphia
    on Monday night.

    I have not received a letter from home lately, but got a “Journal”
     the other day, in which I see the office has been sold....

    If my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about
    me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years of age who is
    not able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a
    brother is not worth one’s thoughts; and if I don’t manage to take
    care of No. 1, be assured you will never know it. I am not afraid,
    however; I shall ask favors of no one and endeavor to be (and shall
    be) as “independent as a wood-sawyer’s clerk.”...

    Passage to Albany (160 miles) on the finest steamers that ply the
    Hudson is now 25 cents--cheap enough, but is generally cheaper than
    that in the summer.

“I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New
York” is distinctly a Mark Twain phrase. He might have said that fifty
years later.

He did go to Philadelphia presently and found work “subbing” on a daily
paper, ‘The Inquirer.’ He was a fairly swift compositor. He could set ten
thousand ems a day, and he received pay according to the amount of work
done. Days or evenings when there was no vacant place for him to fill
he visited historic sites, the art-galleries, and the libraries. He was
still acquiring education, you see. Sometimes at night when he returned
to his boardinghouse his room-mate, an Englishman named Sumner, grilled
a herring, and this was regarded as a feast. He tried his hand at
writing in Philadelphia, though this time without success. For some
reason he did not again attempt to get into the Post, but offered his
contributions to the Philadelphia ‘Ledger’--mainly poetry of an obituary
kind. Perhaps it was burlesque; he never confessed that, but it seems
unlikely that any other obituary poetry would have failed of print.

“My efforts were not received with approval,” was all he ever said of it
afterward.

There were two or three characters in the ‘Inquirer’ office whom he did
not forget. One of these was an old compositor who had “held a case”
 in that office for many years. His name was Frog, and sometimes when he
went away the “office devils” would hang a line over his case, with a
hook on it baited with a piece of red flannel. They never got tired of
this joke, and Frog was always able to get as mad over it as he had been
in the beginning. Another old fellow there furnished amusement. He owned
a house in the distant part of the city and had an abnormal fear of
fire. Now and then, when everything was quiet except the clicking of the
types, some one would step to the window and say with a concerned air:

“Doesn’t that smoke--[or that light, if it was evening]--seem to be in
the northwestern part of the city?” or “There go the fire-bells again!”
 and away the old man would tramp up to the roof to investigate. It was
not the most considerate sport, and it is to be feared that Sam Clemens
had his share in it.

He found that he liked Philadelphia. He could save a little money there,
for one thing, and now and then sent something to his mother--small
amounts, but welcome and gratifying, no doubt. In a letter to
Orion--whom he seems to have forgiven with absence--written October
26th, he incloses a gold dollar to buy her a handkerchief, and “to serve
as a specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in Philadelphia.”
 Further along he adds:

    Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people
    in it. There is only one thing that gets my “dander” up--and that
    is the hands are always encouraging me: telling me “it’s no use to
    get discouraged--no use to be downhearted, for there is more work
    here than you can do!” “Downhearted,” the devil! I have not had a
    particle of such a feeling since I left Hannibal, more than four
    months ago. I fancy they’ll have to wait some time till they see me
    downhearted or afraid of starving while I have strength to work and
    am in a city of 400,000 inhabitants. When I was in Hannibal, before
    I had scarcely stepped out of the town limits, nothing could have
    convinced me that I would starve as soon as I got a little way from
    home.

He mentions the grave of Franklin in Christ Churchyard with its
inscription “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin,” and one is sharply reminded
of the similarity between the early careers of Benjamin Franklin and
Samuel Clemens. Each learned the printer’s trade; each worked in his
brother’s printing-office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly
and went to New York, and from New York to Philadelphia, as a journeyman
printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human,
and of incredible popularity.

The foregoing letter ends with a long description of a trip made on
the Fairmount stage. It is a good, vivid description--impressions of a
fresh, sensitive mind, set down with little effort at fine writing;
a letter to convey literal rather than literary enjoyment. The Wire
Bridge, Fairmount Park and Reservoir, new buildings--all these passed in
review. A fine residence about completed impressed him:

    It was built entirely of great blocks of red granite. The pillars
    in front were all finished but one. These pillars were beautiful,
    ornamental fluted columns, considerably larger than a hogshead at
    the base, and about as high as Clapinger’s second-story front
    windows.... To see some of them finished and standing, and
    then the huge blocks lying about, looks so massy, and carries one,
    in imagination, to the ruined piles of ancient Babylon. I despise
    the infernal bogus brick columns plastered over with mortar. Marble
    is the cheapest building-stone about Philadelphia.

There is a flavor of the ‘Innocents’ about it; then a little further
along:

    I saw small steamboats, with their signs up--“For Wissahickon and
    Manayunk 25 cents.” Geo. Lippard, in his Legends of Washington and
    his Generals, has rendered the Wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and I
    shall make that trip, as well as one to Germantown, soon....

    There is one fine custom observed in Phila. A gentleman is always
    expected to hand up a lady’s money for her. Yesterday I sat in the
    front end of the bus, directly under the driver’s box--a lady sat
    opposite me. She handed me her money, which was right. But, Lord!
    a St. Louis lady would think herself ruined if she should be so
    familiar with a stranger. In St. Louis a man will sit in the front
    end of the stage, and see a lady stagger from the far end to pay her
    fare.

There are two more letters from Philadelphia: one of November, 28th,
to Orion, who by this time had bought a paper in Muscatine, Iowa,
and located the family there; and one to Pamela dated December 5th.
Evidently Orion had realized that his brother might be of value as a
contributor, for the latter says:

    I will try to write for the paper occasionally, but I fear my
    letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work
    dulls one’s ideas amazingly.... I believe I am the only person in
    the Inquirer office that does not drink. One young fellow makes $18
    for a few weeks, and gets on a grand “bender” and spends every cent
    of it.

    How do you like “free soil”?--I would like amazingly to see a good
    old-fashioned negro. My love to all.

                  Truly your brother,     SAM

In the letter to Pamela he is clearly homesick.

“I only want to return to avoid night work, which is injuring my eyes,”
 is the excuse, but in the next sentence he complains of the scarcity of
letters from home and those “not written as they should be.” “One only
has to leave home to learn how to write interesting letters to an absent
friend,” he says, and in conclusion, “I don’t like our present prospect
for cold weather at all.”

He had been gone half a year, and the first attack of home-longing, for
a boy of his age, was due. The novelty of things had worn off; it was
coming on winter; changes had taken place among his home people and
friends; the life he had known best and longest was going on and he had
no part in it. Leaning over his case, he sometimes hummed:

    “An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain.”

He weathered the attack and stuck it out for more than half a year
longer. In January, when the days were dark and he grew depressed, he
made a trip to Washington to see the sights of the capital. His stay
was comparatively brief, and he did not work there. He returned to
Philadelphia, working for a time on the Ledger and North American.
Finally he went back to New York. There are no letters of this period.
His second experience in New York appears not to have been recorded, and
in later years was only vaguely remembered. It was late in the summer of
1854 when he finally set out on his return to the West. His ‘Wanderjahr’
had lasted nearly fifteen months.

He went directly to St. Louis, sitting up three days and nights in a
smoking-car to make the journey. He was worn out when he arrived, but
stopped there only a few hours to see Pamela. It was his mother he was
anxious for. He took the Keokuk Packet that night, and, flinging himself
on his berth, slept the clock three times around, scarcely rousing or
turning over, only waking at last at Muscatine. For a long time that
missing day confused his calculations.

When he reached Orion’s house the family sat at breakfast. He came in
carrying a gun. They had not been expecting him, and there was a general
outcry, and a rush in his direction. He warded them off, holding the
butt of the gun in front of him.

“You wouldn’t let me buy a gun,” he said, “so I bought one myself, and I
am going to use it, now, in self-defense.”

“You, Sam! You, Sam!” cried Jane Clemens. “Behave yourself,” for she was
wary of a gun.

Then he had had his joke and gave himself into his mother’s arms.



XX. KEOKUK DAYS

Orion wished his brother to remain with him in the Muscatine office,
but the young man declared he must go to St. Louis and earn some money
before he would be able to afford that luxury: He returned to his place
on the St. Louis Evening News, where he remained until late winter or
early spring of the following year.

He lived at this time with a Pavey family, probably one of the Hannibal
Paveys, rooming with a youth named Frank E. Burrough, a journeyman
chair-maker with a taste for Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and Disraeli.
Burrough had really a fine literary appreciation for his years, and the
boys were comrades and close friends. Twenty-two years later Mark Twain
exchanged with Burrough some impressions of himself at that earlier
time. Clemens wrote:

    MY DEAR BURROUGH,--As you describe me I can picture myself as I was
    22 years ago. The portrait is correct. You think I have grown
    some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a
    callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern
    in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling
    the world and is entirely capable of doing it right.... That is
    what I was at 19-20.

Orion Clemens in the mean time had married and removed to Keokuk. He
had married during a visit to that city, in the casual, impulsive way so
characteristic of him, and the fact that he had acquired a wife in the
operation seemed at first to have escaped his inner consciousness. He
tells it himself; he says:

    At sunrise on the next morning after the wedding we left in a stage
    for Muscatine. We halted for dinner at Burlington. After
    despatching that meal we stood on the pavement when the stage drove
    up, ready for departure. I climbed in, gathered the buffalo robe
    around me, and leaned back unconscious that I had anything further
    to do. A gentleman standing on the pavement said to my wife, “Miss,
    do you go by this stage?” I said, “Oh, I forgot!” and sprang out
    and helped her in. A wife was a new kind of possession to which I
    had not yet become accustomed; I had forgotten her.

Orion’s wife had been Mary Stotts; her mother a friend of Jane Clemens’s
girlhood. She proved a faithful helpmate to Orion; but in those early
days of marriage she may have found life with him rather trying, and it
was her homesickness that brought them to Keokuk. Brother Sam came up
from St. Louis, by and by, to visit them, and Orion offered him five
dollars a week and board to remain. He accepted. The office at this
time, or soon after, was located on the third floor of 52 Main Street,
in the building at present occupied by the Paterson Shoe Company. Henry
Clemens, now seventeen, was also in Orion’s employ, and a lad by the
name of Dick Hingham. Henry and Sam slept in the office, and Dick came
in for social evenings. Also a young man named Edward Brownell, who
clerked in the book-store on the ground floor.

These were likely to be lively evenings. A music dealer and teacher,
Professor Isbell, occupied the floor just below, and did not care for
their diversions. He objected, but hardly in the right way. Had he gone
to Samuel Clemens gently, he undoubtedly would have found him willing
to make any concessions. Instead, he assailed him roughly, and the next
evening the boys set up a lot of empty wine-bottles, which they had
found in a barrel in a closet, and, with stones for balls, played
tenpins on the office floor. This was Dick and Sam; Henry declined to
join the game. Isbell rushed up-stairs and battered on the door, but
they paid no attention. Next morning he waited for the young men and
denounced them wildly. They merely ignored him, and that night
organized a military company, made up of themselves and a new German
apprentice-boy, and drilled up and down over the singing-class. Dick
Hingham led these military manoeuvers. He was a girlish sort of a
fellow, but he had a natural taste for soldiering. The others used to
laugh at him. They called him a disguised girl, and declared he would
run if a gun were really pointed in his direction. They were mistaken;
seven years later Dick died at Fort Donelson with a bullet in his
forehead: this, by the way.

Isbell now adopted new tactics. He came up very pleasantly and said:

“I like your military practice better than your tenpin exercise, but
on the whole it seems to disturb the young ladies. You see how it
is yourself. You couldn’t possibly teach music with a company of raw
recruits drilling overhead--now, could you? Won’t you please stop it? It
bothers my pupils.”

Sam Clemens regarded him with mild surprise.

“Does it?” he said, very deliberately. “Why didn’t you mention it
before? To be sure we don’t want to disturb the young ladies.”

They gave up the horse-play, and not only stopped the disturbance, but
joined one of the singing--classes. Samuel Clemens had a pretty good
voice in those days and could drum fairly well on a piano and guitar. He
did not become a brilliant musician, but he was easily the most popular
member of the singing-class.

They liked his frank nature, his jokes, and his humor; his slow, quaint
fashion of speech. The young ladies called him openly and fondly a
“fool”--a term of endearment, as they applied it meaning only that he
kept them in a more or less constant state of wonder and merriment; and
indeed it would have been hard for them to say whether he was really
light-minded and frivolous or the wisest of them all. He was twenty now
and at the age for love-making; yet he remained, as in Hannibal, a beau
rather than a suitor, good friend and comrade to all, wooer of none.
Ella Creel, a cousin on the Lampton side, a great belle; also Ella
Patterson (related through Orion’s wife and generally known as “Ick”),
and Belle Stotts were perhaps his favorite companions, but there were
many more. He was always ready to stop and be merry with them, full of
his pranks and pleasantries; though they noticed that he quite often
carried a book under his arm--a history or a volume of Dickens or the
tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

He read at odd moments; at night voluminously--until very late,
sometimes. Already in that early day it was his habit to smoke in bed,
and he had made him an Oriental pipe of the hubble-bubble variety,
because it would hold more and was more comfortable than the regular
short pipe of daytime use.

But it had its disadvantages. Sometimes it would go out, and that would
mean sitting up and reaching for a match and leaning over to light the
bowl which stood on the floor. Young Brownell from below was passing
upstairs to his room on the fourth floor one night when he heard Sam
Clemens call. The two were great chums by this time, and Brownell poked
his head in at the door.

“What will you have, Sam?” he asked.

“Come in, Ed; Henry’s asleep, and I am in trouble. I want somebody to
light my pipe.”

“Why don’t you get up and light it yourself?” Brownell asked.

“I would, only I knew you’d be along in a few minutes and would do it
for me.”

Brownell scratched the necessary match, stooped down, and applied it.

“What are you reading, Sam?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing much--a so-called funny book--one of these days I’ll write
a funnier book than that, myself.”

Brownell laughed.

“No, you won’t, Sam,” he said. “You are too lazy ever to write a book.”

A good many years later when the name “Mark Twain” had begun to stand
for American humor the owner of it gave his “Sandwich Island” lecture
in Keokuk. Speaking of the unreliability of the islanders, he said: “The
king is, I believe, one of the greatest liars on the face of the earth,
except one; and I am very sorry to locate that one right here in the
city of Keokuk, in the person of Ed Brownell.”

The Keokuk episode in Mark Twain’s life was neither very long nor
very actively important. It extended over a period of less than
two years--two vital years, no doubt, if all the bearings could be
known--but they were not years of startling occurrence.

Yet he made at least one beginning there: at a printers’ banquet he
delivered his first after-dinner speech; a hilarious speech--its
humor of a primitive kind. Whatever its shortcomings, it delighted
his audience, and raised him many points in the public regard. He had
entered a field of entertainment in which he would one day have no
rival. They impressed him into a debating society after that, and there
was generally a stir of attention when Sam Clemens was about to take the
floor.

Orion Clemens records how his brother undertook to teach the German
apprentice music.

“There was an old guitar in the office and Sam taught Fritz a song
beginning:

    “Grasshopper sitting on a sweet-potato vine,
    Turkey came along and yanked him from behind.”

The main point in the lesson was in giving to the word “yanked” the
proper expression and emphasis, accompanied by a sweep of the fingers
across the strings. With serious face and deep earnestness Fritz in his
broken English would attempt these lines, while his teacher would bend
over and hold his sides with laughter at each ridiculous effort. Without
intending it, Fritz had his revenge. One day his tormentor’s hand was
caught in the press when the German boy was turning the wheel. Sam
called to him to stop, but the boy’s mind was slow to grasp the
situation. The hand was badly wounded, though no bones were broken. In
due time it recovered, its power and dexterity, but the trace of the
scars remained.

Orion’s printing-office was not a prosperous one; he had not the gift of
prosperity in any form. When he found it difficult to pay his brother’s
wages, he took him into partnership, which meant that Sam got no wages
at all, barely a living, for the office could not keep its head above
water.

The junior partner was not disturbed, however. He cared little for money
in those days, beyond his actual needs, and these were modest enough.
His mother, now with Pamela, was amply provided for. Orion himself tells
how his business dwindled away. He printed a Keokuk directory, but it
did not pay largely. He was always too eager for the work; too low in
his bid for it. Samuel Clemens in this directory is set down as “an
antiquarian” a joke, of course, though the point of it is now lost.

Only two of his Keokuk letters have been preserved. The first indicates
the general disorder of the office and a growing dissatisfaction. It is
addressed to his mother and sister and bears date of June 10, 1856.

    I don’t like to work at too many things at once. They take Henry
    and Dick away from me, too. Before we commenced the Directory,
    --[Orion printed two editions of the directory. This was probably
    the second one.]--I could tell before breakfast just how much work
    could be done during the day, and manage accordingly--but now, they
    throw all my plans into disorder by taking my hands away from their
    work.... I am not getting along well with the job-work. I can’t
    work blindly--without system. I gave Dick a job yesterday, which I
    calculated he could set in two hours and I could work off on the
    press in three, and therefore just finish it by supper-time, but he
    was transferred to the Directory, and the job, promised this
    morning, remains untouched. Through all the great pressure of job-
    work lately, I never before failed in a promise of the kind...

The other letter is dated two months later, August 5th. It was written
to Henry, who was visiting in St. Louis or Hannibal at the time, and
introduces the first mention of the South American fever, which now
possessed the writer. Lynch and Herndon had completed their survey of
the upper Amazon, and Lieutenant Herndon’s account of the exploration
was being widely read. Poring over the book nights, young Clemens had
been seized with a desire to go to the headwaters of the South American
river, there to collect coca and make a fortune. All his life he was
subject to such impulses as that, and ways and means were not always
considered. It did not occur to him that it would be difficult to get
to the Amazon and still more difficult to ascend the river. It was his
nature to see results with a dazzling largeness that blinded him to
the detail of their achievement. In the “Turning-point” article already
mentioned he refers to this. He says:

    That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my temperament
    has not changed by even a shade. I have been punished many and many
    a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but
    these tortures have been of no value to me; I still do the thing
    commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward.
    Always violently. When I am reflecting on these occasions, even
    deaf persons can hear me think.

In the letter to Henry we see that his resolve was already made, his
plans matured; also that Orion had not as yet been taken into full
confidence.

    Ma knows my determination, but even she counsels me to keep it from
    Orion. She says I can treat him as I did her when I started to St.
    Louis and went to New York--I can start for New York and go to South
    America.

He adds that Orion had promised him fifty or one hundred dollars, but
that he does not depend upon it, and will make other arrangements.
He fears obstacles may be put in his way, and he will bring various
influences to bear.

    I shall take care that Ma and Orion are plentifully supplied with
    South American books: They have Herndon’s report now. Ward and the
    Dr. and myself will hold a grand consultation to-night at the
    office. We have agreed that no more shall be admitted into our
    company.

He had enlisted those two adventurers in his enterprise: a Doctor Martin
and the young man, Ward. They were very much in earnest, but the start
was not made as planned, most likely for want of means.

Young Clemens, however, did not give up the idea. He made up his mind to
work in the direction of his desire, following his trade and laying by
money for the venture. But Fate or Providence or Accident--whatever we
may choose to call the unaccountable--stepped in just then, and laid
before him the means of turning another sharp corner in his career.
One of those things happened which we refuse to accept in fiction as
possible; but fact has a smaller regard for the credibilities.

As in the case of the Joan of Arc episode (and this adds to its marvel),
it was the wind that brought the talismanic gift. It was a day in early
November--bleak, bitter, and gusty, with curling snow; most persons were
indoors. Samuel Clemens, going down Main Street, saw a flying bit of
paper pass him and lodge against the side of a building. Something about
it attracted him and he captured it. It was a fifty-dollar bill. He
had never seen one before, but he recognized it. He thought he must be
having a pleasant dream.

The temptation came to pocket his good-fortune and say nothing. His
need of money was urgent, but he had also an urgent and troublesome
conscience; in the end he advertised his find.

“I didn’t describe it very particularly, and I waited in daily fear that
the owner would turn up and take away my fortune. By and by I couldn’t
stand it any longer. My conscience had gotten all that was coming to it.
I felt that I must take that money out of danger.”

In the “Turning-point” article he says: “I advertised the find and left
for the Amazon the same day,” a statement which we may accept with a
literary discount.

As a matter of fact, he remained ample time and nobody ever came for
the money. It may have been swept out of a bank or caught up by the
wind from some counting-room table. It may have materialized out of the
unseen--who knows? At all events it carried him the first stage of a
journey, the end of which he little dreamed.



XXI. SCOTCHMAN NAMED MACFARLANE

He concluded to go to Cincinnati, which would be on the way either to
New York or New Orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points),
but first paid a brief visit to his mother in St. Louis, for he had a
far journey and along absence in view. Jane Clemens made him renew
his promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing. He had
expected to go from St. Louis to Cincinnati, but a new idea--a literary
idea--came to him, and he returned to Keokuk. The Saturday Post, a
Keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary
airs. He was in favor with the management, of which George Rees was
the head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of
his travels to the Post--for, a consideration. He may have had a still
larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have
been in his consciousness. Rees agreed to take letters from him at five
dollars each--good payment for that time and place. The young traveler,
jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made
another start, this time by way of Quincy, Chicago, and Indianapolis
according to his first letter in the Post.--[Supplied by Thomas Rees, of
the Springfield (Illinois) Register, son of George Rees named.]

This letter is dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and it is not a
promising literary production. It was written in the exaggerated dialect
then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes of the
undoubted Mark Twain type, they are few and far between. The genius that
a little more than ten years later would delight the world flickered
feebly enough at twenty-one. The letter is a burlesque account of the
trip to Cincinnati. A brief extract from it, as characteristic as any,
will serve.

    I went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close onto
    the Laclede House, and bought about a quire o’ yaller paper, cut up
    into tickets--one for each railroad in the United States, I thought,
    but I found out afterwards that the Alexandria and Boston Air-Line
    was left out--and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down to
    the boat, where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin’ it open and
    shakin’ out the contents, consisting of “guides” to Chicago, and
    “guides” to Cincinnati, and travelers’ guides, and all kinds of sich
    books, not excepting a “guide to heaven,” which last aint much use
    to a Teller in Chicago, I kin tell you. Finally, that fast packet
    quit ringing her bell, and started down the river--but she hadn’t
    gone morn a mile, till she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, whar
    she stuck till plum one o’clock, spite of the Captain’s swearin’
    --and they had to set the whole crew to cussin’ at last afore they
    got her off.

This is humor, we may concede, of that early American type which a
little later would have its flower in Nasby and Artemus Ward. Only
careful examination reveals in it a hint of the later Mark Twain. The
letters were signed “Snodgrass,” and there are but two of them. The
second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same
assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of
coal in Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a baby
left on his hands.

From the fewness of the letters we may assume that Snodgrass found them
hard work, and it is said he raised on the price. At all events, the
second concluded the series. They are mainly important in that they are
the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first
for which he received a cash return.

He secured work at his trade in Cincinnati at the printing-office of
Wrightson & Co., and remained there until April, 1857. That winter
in Cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable
association--one that beyond doubt forwarded Samuel Clemens’s general
interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain
views and philosophies which he never forgot.

He lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace
people, with one exception. This exception was a long, lank, unsmiling
Scotchman named Macfarlane, who was twice as old as Clemens and wholly
unlike him--without humor or any comprehension of it. Yet meeting on
the common plane of intellect, the two became friends. Clemens spent
his evenings in Macfarlane’s room until the clock struck ten; then
Macfarlane grilled a herring, just as the Englishman Sumner in
Philadelphia had done two years before, and the evening ended.

Macfarlane had books, serious books: histories, philosophies, and
scientific works; also a Bible and a dictionary. He had studied these
and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker. He never
talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired
his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a
mystery. He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the
same hour in the evening. His hands were hardened from some sort of
toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. He
would have liked to know, and he watched for some reference to slip out
that would betray Macfarlane’s trade; but this never happened.

What he did learn was that Macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of
abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher
besides. He had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word
in the English dictionary, and he made it good. The younger man tried
repeatedly to discover a word that Macfarlane could not define.

Perhaps Macfarlane was vain of his other mental attainments, for
he never tired of discoursing upon deep and grave matters, and his
companion never tired of listening. This Scotch philosopher did not
always reflect the conclusions of others; he had speculated deeply and
strikingly on his own account. That was a good while before Darwin
and Wallace gave out--their conclusions on the Descent of Man; yet
Macfarlane was already advancing a similar philosophy. He went even
further: Life, he said, had been developed in the course of ages from a
few microscopic seed-germs--from one, perhaps, planted by the Creator
in the dawn of time, and that from this beginning development on an
ascending scale had finally produced man. Macfarlane said that the
scheme had stopped there, and failed; that man had retrograded; that
man’s heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom: that man was the
only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness--almost the
only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness. He said that man’s
intellect was a depraving addition to him which, in the end, placed him
in a rank far below the other beasts, though it enabled him to keep them
in servitude and captivity, along with many members of his own race.

They were long, fermenting discourses that young Samuel Clemens listened
to that winter in Macfarlane’s room, and those who knew the real Mark
Twain and his philosophies will recognize that those evenings left their
impress upon him for life.



XXII. THE OLD CALL OF THE RIVER

When spring came, with budding life and quickening impulses; when the
trees in the parks began to show a hint of green, the Amazonian
idea developed afresh, and the would-be coca-hunter prepared for his
expedition. He had saved a little money--enough to take him to New
Orleans--and he decided to begin his long trip with a peaceful journey
down the Mississippi, for once, at least, to give himself up to that
indolent luxury of the majestic stream that had been so large a part of
his early dreams.

The Ohio River steamers were not the most sumptuous craft afloat, but
they were slow and hospitable. The winter had been bleak and hard.
“Spring fever” and a large love of indolence had combined in that drowsy
condition which makes one willing to take his time.

Mark Twain tells us in Life on the Mississippi that he “ran away,”
 vowing never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory.
This is a literary statement. The pilot ambition had never entirely
died; but it was coca and the Amazon that were uppermost in his head
when he engaged passage on the Paul Jones for New Orleans, and so
conferred immortality on that ancient little craft. He bade good-by to
Macfarlane, put his traps aboard, the bell rang, the whistle blew, the
gang-plank was hauled in, and he had set out on a voyage that was
to continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years--four
marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that
followed them.

In the Mississippi book the author conveys the impression of being then
a boy of perhaps seventeen. Writing from that standpoint he records
incidents that were more or less inventions or that happened to others.
He was, in reality, considerably more than twenty-one years old, for
it was in April, 1857, that he went aboard the Paul Jones; and he
was fairly familiar with steamboats and the general requirements of
piloting. He had been brought up in a town that turned out pilots; he
had heard the talk of their trade. One at least of the Bowen boys was
already on the river while Sam Clemens was still a boy in Hannibal, and
had often been home to air his grandeur and dilate on the marvel of his
work. That learning the river was no light task Sam Clemens very well
knew. Nevertheless, as the little boat made its drowsy way down the
river into lands that grew ever pleasanter with advancing spring, the
old “permanent ambition” of boyhood stirred again, and the call of the
far-away Amazon, with its coca and its variegated zoology, grew faint.

Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones, then a man of thirty-two, still
living (1910) and at the wheel,--[The writer of this memoir interviewed
Mr. Bixby personally, and has followed his phrasing throughout.]--was
looking out over the bow at the head of Island No. 35 when he heard a
slow, pleasant voice say:

“Good morning.”

Bixby was a clean-cut, direct, courteous man.

“Good morning, sir,” he said, briskly, without looking around.

As a rule Mr. Bixby did not care for visitors in the pilot-house. This
one presently came up and stood a little behind him.

“How would you like a young man to learn the river?” he said.

The pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender,
loose-limbed young fellow with a fair, girlish complexion and a great
tangle of auburn hair.

“I wouldn’t like it. Cub pilots are more trouble than they’re worth. A
great deal more trouble than profit.”

The applicant was not discouraged.

“I am a printer by trade,” he went on, in his easy, deliberate way. “It
doesn’t agree with me. I thought I’d go to South America.”

Bixby kept his eye on the river; but a note of interest crept into his
voice.

“What makes you pull your words that way?” (“pulling” being the river
term for drawling), he asked.

The young man had taken a seat on the visitors’ bench.

“You’ll have to ask my mother,” he said, more slowly than ever. “She
pulls hers, too.”

Pilot Bixby woke up and laughed; he had a keen sense of humor, and the
manner of the reply amused him. His guest made another advance.

“Do you know the Bowen boys?” he asked--“pilots in the St. Louis and New
Orleans trade?”

“I know them well--all three of them. William Bowen did his first
steering for me; a mighty good boy, too. Had a Testament in his pocket
when he came aboard; in a week’s time he had swapped it for a pack of
cards. I know Sam, too, and Bart.”

“Old schoolmates of mine in Hannibal. Sam and Will especially were my
chums.”

“Come over and stand by the side of me,” he said. “What is your name?”

The applicant told him, and the two stood looking at the sunlit water.

“Do you drink?”

“No.”

“Do you gamble?”

“No, Sir.”

“Do you swear?”

“Not for amusement; only under pressure.”

“Do you chew?”

“No, sir, never; but I must smoke.”

“Did you ever do any steering?” was Bixby’s next question.

“I have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, I guess.”

“Very well; take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat.
Keep her as she is--toward that lower cottonwood, snag.”

Bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief. He sat down on
the bench and kept a careful eye on the course. By and by he said:

“There is just one way that I would take a young man to learn the river:
that is, for money.”

“What do you charge?”

“Five hundred dollars, and I to be at no expense whatever.”

In those days pilots were allowed to carry a learner, or “cub,” board
free. Mr. Bixby meant that he was to be at no expense in port, or for
incidentals. His terms looked rather discouraging.

“I haven’t got five hundred dollars in money,” Sam said; “I’ve got a
lot of Tennessee land worth twenty-five cents an acre; I’ll give you two
thousand acres of that.”

Bixby dissented.

“No; I don’t want any unimproved real estate. I have too much already.”

Sam reflected upon the amount he could probably borrow from Pamela’s
husband without straining his credit.

“Well, then, I’ll give you one hundred dollars cash and the rest when I
earn it.”

Something about this young man had won Horace Bixby’s heart. His slow,
pleasant speech; his unhurried, quiet manner with the wheel, his evident
sincerity of purpose--these were externals, but beneath them the pilot
felt something of that quality of mind or heart which later made the
world love Mark Twain. The terms proposed were agreed upon. The deferred
payments were to begin when the pupil had learned the river and was
receiving pilot’s wages. During Mr. Bixby’s daylight watches his pupil
was often at the wheel, that trip, while the pilot sat directing him and
nursing his sore foot. Any literary ambitions Samuel Clemens may have
had grew dim; by the time they had reached New Orleans he had almost
forgotten he had been a printer, and when he learned that no ship would
be sailing to the Amazon for an indefinite period the feeling grew that
a directing hand had taken charge of his affairs.

From New Orleans his chief did not return to Cincinnati, but went to St.
Louis, taking with him his new cub, who thought it fine, indeed, to come
steaming up to that great city with its thronging water-front; its
levee fairly packed with trucks, drays, and piles of freight, the whole
flanked with a solid mile of steamboats lying side by side, bow a
little up-stream, their belching stacks reared high against the blue--a
towering front of trade. It was glorious to nose one’s way to a place
in that stately line, to become a unit, however small, of that imposing
fleet. At St. Louis Sam borrowed from Mr. Moffett the funds necessary to
make up his first payment, and so concluded his contract. Then, when he
suddenly found himself on a fine big boat, in a pilot-house so far
above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain--a “sumptuous
temple”--his happiness seemed complete.



XXIII. THE SUPREME SCIENCE

In his Mississippi book Mark Twain has given us a marvelous exposition
of the science of river-piloting, and of the colossal task of acquiring
and keeping a knowledge requisite for that work. He has not exaggerated
this part of the story of developments in any detail; he has set down a
simple confession.

Serenely enough he undertook the task of learning twelve hundred miles
of the great changing, shifting river as exactly and as surely by
daylight or darkness as one knows the way to his own features. As
already suggested, he had at least an inkling of what that undertaking
meant. His statement that he “supposed all that a pilot had to do was
to keep his boat in the river” is not to be accepted literally. Still he
could hardly have realized the full majesty of his task; nobody could do
that--not until afterward.

Horace Bixby was a “lightning” pilot with a method of instruction as
direct and forcible as it was effective. He was a small man, hot and
quick-firing, though kindly, too, and gentle when he had blown off.
After one rather pyrotechnic misunderstanding as to the manner of
imparting and acquiring information he said:

“My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell
you a thing put it down right away. There’s only one way to be a pilot,
and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just
like A B C.”

So Sam Clemens got the little book, and presently it “fairly bristled”
 with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, and reaches, but
it made his heart ache to think that he had only half of the river set
down; for, as the “watches” were four hours off and four hours on, there
were long gaps during which he had slept.

The little note-book still exists--thin and faded, with black
water-proof covers--its neat, tiny, penciled notes still, telling, the
story of that first trip. Most of them are cryptographic abbreviations,
not readily deciphered now. Here and there is an easier line:

                   MERIWEATHER’S BEND

    1/4 less 3--[Depth of water. One-quarter less than three
    fathoms.]----run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in
    willows about 200(ft.) lower down than last year.

One simple little note out of hundreds far more complicated. It would
take days for the average mind to remember even a single page of such
statistics. And those long four-hour gaps where he had been asleep,
they are still there, and somehow, after more than fifty years, the
old heart-ache is still in them. He got a new book, maybe, for the next
trip, and laid this one away.

There is but one way to account for the fact that the man whom the
world knew as Mark Twain--dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to
details--ever persisted in acquiring knowledge like that--in the vast,
the absolutely limitless quantity necessary to Mississippi piloting. It
lies in the fact that he loved the river in its every mood and aspect
and detail, and not only the river, but a steam boat; and still more,
perhaps, the freedom of the pilot’s life and its prestige. Wherever
he has written of the river--and in one way or another he was always
writing of it we feel the claim of the old captivity and that it still
holds him. In the Huckleberry Finn book, during those nights and days
with Huck and Nigger Jim on the raft--whether in stormlit blackness,
still noontide, or the lifting mists of morning--we can fairly “smell”
 the river, as Huck himself would say, and we know that it is because
the writer loved it with his heart of hearts and literally drank in its
environment and atmosphere during those halcyon pilot days.

So, in his love lay the secret of his marvelous learning, and it is
recorded (not by himself, but by his teacher) that he was an apt pupil.
Horace Bixby has more than once declared:

“Sam was always good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river.
He had a fine memory and never forgot anything I told him.”

Mark Twain himself records a different opinion of his memory, with the
size of its appalling task. It can only be presented in his own words.
In the pages quoted he had mastered somewhat of the problem, and had
begun to take on airs. His chief was a constant menace at such moments:

    One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler:

    “What is the shape of Walnut Bend?”

    He might as well have asked me my grandmother’s opinion of
    protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn’t know
    it had any particular shape. My gun-powdery chief went off with a
    bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was
    out of adjectives.... I waited. By and by he said:

    “My boy, you’ve got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It is
    all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything is
    blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn’t the same shape in the
    night that it has in the daytime.”

    “How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?”

    “How do you follow a hall at home in the dark? Because you know the
    shape of it. You can’t see it.”

    “Do you mean to say that I’ve got to know all the million trifling
    variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well
    as I know the shape of the front hall at home?”

    “On my honor, you’ve got to know them better than any man ever did
    know the shapes of the halls in his own house.”

    “I wish I was dead!”

    “Now, I don’t want to discourage you, but----”

    “Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.”

    “You see, this has got to be learned; there isn’t any getting around
    it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that, if you
    didn’t know the shape of a shore perfectly, you would claw away from
    every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it
    for a solid cape; and, you see, you would be getting scared to death
    every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from
    shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it.
    You can’t see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly
    where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are
    coming to it. Then there’s your pitch-dark night; the river is a
    very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a
    starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and
    mighty dim ones, too; and you’d run them for straight lines, only
    you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems
    to be a solid, straight wall (you know very well that in reality
    there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for
    you. Then there’s your gray mist. You take a night when there’s
    one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn’t any
    particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of
    the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of
    moonlight change the shape of the river in different ways.
    You see----”

    “Oh, don’t say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of
    the river according to all these five hundred thousand different
    ways? If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make
    me stoop-shouldered.”

    “No! you only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with
    such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape
    that’s in your head, and never mind the one that’s before your
    eyes.”

    “Very well, I’ll try it; but, after I have learned it, can I depend
    on it? Will it keep the same form, and not go fooling around?”

    Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W. came in to take the watch, and
    he said:

    “Bixby, you’ll have to look out for President’s island, and all that
    country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are
    caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why,
    you wouldn’t know the point about 40. You can go up inside the old
    sycamore snag now.”

    So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing
    shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed
    pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man
    had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know;
    and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a
    different way every twenty-four hours.

    I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the
    eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or
    hands on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp,
    wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of
    me and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and
    just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction we would draw
    up to it, and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and
    fold back into the bank!

    It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all
    the different ways that could be thought of--upside down, wrong end
    first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and “thort-ships,”--and then know
    what to do on gray nights when it hadn’t any shape at all. So I set
    about it. In the course of time I began to get the best of this
    knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more.
    Mr. Bixby was all fixed and ready to start it to the rear again. He
    opened on me after this fashion:

    “How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-The-
    Wall, trip before last?”

    I considered this an outrage. I said:

    “Every trip down and up the leadsmen are singing through that
    tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. How do
    you reckon I can remember such a mess as that?”

    “My boy, you’ve got to remember it. You’ve got to remember the
    exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the
    shoalest water, in every one of the five hundred shoal places
    between St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn’t get the shoal
    soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings
    and marks of another, either, for they’re not often twice alike.
    You must keep them separate.”

    When I came to myself again, I said:

    “When I get so that I can do that, I’ll be able to raise the dead,
    and then I won’t have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I want
    to retire from this business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush;
    I’m only fit for a roustabout. I haven’t got brains enough to be a
    pilot; and if I had I wouldn’t have strength enough to carry them
    around, unless I went on crutches.”

    “Now drop that! When I say I’ll learn a man the river I mean it.
    And you can depend on it, I’ll learn him or kill him.”

We have quoted at length from this chapter because it seems of very
positive importance here. It is one of the most luminous in the book so
far as the mastery of the science of piloting is concerned, and shows
better than could any other combination of words something of what is
required of the learner. It does not cover the whole problem, by any
means--Mark Twain himself could not present that; and even considering
his old-time love of the river and the pilot’s trade, it is still
incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he
did, against such obstacles.



XXIV. THE RIVER CURRICULUM

He acquired other kinds of knowledge. As the streets of Hannibal in
those early days, and the printing-offices of several cities, had taught
him human nature in various unvarnished aspects, so the river furnished
an added course to that vigorous education. Morally, its atmosphere
could not be said to be an improvement on the others. Navigation in the
West had begun with crafts of the flat-boat type--their navigators rude,
hardy men, heavy drinkers, reckless fighters, barbaric in their sports,
coarse in their wit, profane in everything. Steam-boatmen were the
natural successors of these pioneers--a shade less coarse, a thought
less profane, a veneer less barbaric. But these things were mainly
“above stairs.” You had but to scratch lightly a mate or a deck-hand to
find the old keel-boatman savagery. Captains were overlords, and
pilots kings in this estate; but they were not angels. In Life on the
Mississippi Clemens refers to his chief’s explosive vocabulary and tells
us how he envied the mate’s manner of giving an order. It was easier
to acquire those things than piloting, and, on the whole, quicker. One
could improve upon them, too, with imagination and wit and a natural
gift for terms. That Samuel Clemens maintained his promise as to drink
and cards during those apprentice days is something worth remembering;
and if he did not always restrict his profanity to moments of severe
pressure or sift the quality of his wit, we may also remember that he
was an extreme example of a human being, in that formative stage which
gathers all as grist, later to refine it for the uses and delights of
men.

He acquired a vast knowledge of human character. He says:

    In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly
    acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to
    be found in fiction, biography, or history. When I find a well-
    drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm
    personal interest in him, for the reason that I have, known him
    before--met him on the river.

Undoubtedly the river was a great school for the study of life’s broader
philosophies and humors: philosophies that avoid vague circumlocution
and aim at direct and sure results; humors of the rugged and vigorous
sort that in Europe are known as “American” and in America are known as
“Western.” Let us be thankful that Mark Twain’s school was no less than
it was--and no more.

The demands of the Missouri River trade took Horace Bixby away from the
Mississippi, somewhat later, and he consigned his pupil, according to
custom, to another pilot--it is not certain, now, to just which pilot,
but probably to Zeb Leavenworth or Beck Jolly, of the John J. Roe. The
Roe was a freight-boat, “as slow as an island and as comfortable as
a farm.” In fact, the Roe was owned and conducted by farmers, and Sam
Clemens thought if John Quarles’s farm could be set afloat it
would greatly resemble that craft in the matter of good-fellowship,
hospitality, and speed. It was said of her that up-stream she could even
beat an island, though down-stream she could never quite overtake the
current, but was a “love of a steamboat” nevertheless. The Roe was not
licensed to carry passengers, but she always had a dozen “family guests”
 aboard, and there was a big boiler-deck for dancing and moonlight
frolics, also a piano in the cabin. The young pilot sometimes played on
the piano and sang to his music songs relating to the “grasshopper on
the sweet-potato vine,” or to an old horse by the name of Methusalem:

       Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem,
              A long time ago.

There were forty-eight stanzas about this ancient horse, all pretty much
alike; but the assembled company was not likely to be critical, and his
efforts won him laurels. He had a heavenly time on the John J. Roe, and
then came what seemed inferno by contrast. Bixby returned, made a trip
or two, then left and transferred him again, this time to a man named
Brown. Brown had a berth on the fine new steamer Pennsylvania, one of
the handsomest boats on the river, and young Clemens had become a fine
steersman, so it is not unlikely that both men at first were gratified
by the arrangement.

But Brown was a fault-finding, tyrannical chief, ignorant, vulgar, and
malicious. In the Mississippi book the author gives his first interview
with Brown, also his last one. For good reasons these occasions were
burned into his memory, and they may be accepted as substantially
correct. Brown had an offensive manner. His first greeting was a surly
question.

“Are you Horace Bigsby’s cub?”

“Bixby” was usually pronounced “Bigsby” on the river, but Brown made it
especially obnoxious and followed it up with questions and comments and
orders still more odious. His subordinate soon learned to detest
him thoroughly. It was necessary, however, to maintain a respectable
deportment--custom, discipline, even the law, required that--but it must
have been a hard winter and spring the young steersman put in during
those early months of 1858, restraining himself from the gratification
of slaying Brown. Time would bring revenge--a tragic revenge and at a
fearful cost; but he could not guess that, and he put in his spare time
planning punishments of his own.

    I could imagine myself killing Brown; there was no law against that,
    and that was the thing I always used to do the moment I was abed.
    Instead of going over my river in my mind, as was my duty, I threw
    business aside for pleasure and killed Brown. I killed Brown every
    night for a month; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new
    and picturesque ones--ways that were sometimes surprising for
    freshness of design and ghastly for situation and environment.

Once when Brown had been more insulting than usual his subordinate went
to bed and killed him in “seventeen different ways--all of them new.”

He had made an effort at first to please Brown, but it was no use.
Brown was the sort of a man that refused to be pleased; no matter how
carefully his subordinate steered, he as always at him.

“Here,” he would shout, “where are you going now? Pull her down! Pull
her down! Don’t you hear me? Dod-derned mud-cat!”

His assistant lost all desire to be obliging to such a person and even
took occasion now and then to stir him up. One day they were steaming up
the river when Brown noticed that the boat seemed to be heading toward
some unusual point.

“Here, where are you heading for now?” he yelled. “What in nation are
you steerin’ at, anyway? Deyned numskull!”

“Why,” said Sam, in unruffled deliberation, “I didn’t see much else I
could steer for, and I was heading for that white heifer on the bank.”

“Get away from that wheel! and get outen this pilothouse!” yelled Brown.
“You ain’t fit to become no pilot!”

Which was what Sam wanted. Any temporary relief from the carping tyranny
of Brown was welcome.

He had been on the river nearly a year now, and, though universally
liked and accounted a fine steersman, he was receiving no wages. There
had been small need of money for a while, for he had no board to pay;
but clothes wear out at last, and there were certain incidentals. The
Pennsylvania made a round trip in about thirty-five days, with a day or
two of idle time at either end. The young pilot found that he could get
night employment, watching freight on the New Orleans levee, and thus
earn from two and a half to three dollars for each night’s watch.
Sometimes there would be two nights, and with a capital of five or six
dollars he accounted himself rich.

“It was a desolate experience,” he said, long afterward, “watching there
in the dark among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living
creature astir. But it was not a profitless one: I used to have
inspirations as I sat there alone those nights. I used to imagine all
sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things got into my books by
and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can trace the effect of
those nights through most of my books in one way and another.”

Many of the curious tales in the latter half of the Mississippi book
came out of those long night-watches. It was a good time to think of
such things.



XXV. LOVE-MAKING AND ADVENTURE

Of course, life with Brown was not all sorrow. At either end of the trip
there was respite and recreation. In St. Louis, at Pamela’s there was
likely to be company: Hannibal friends mostly, schoolmates--girls, of
course. At New Orleans he visited friendly boats, especially the John
J. Roe, where he was generously welcomed. One such visit on the Roe
he never forgot. A young girl was among the boat’s guests that
trip--another Laura, fifteen, winning, delightful. They met, and were
mutually attracted; in the life of each it was one of those bright spots
which are likely to come in youth: one of those sudden, brief periods of
romance, love--call it what you will the thing that leads to marriage,
if pursued.

“I was not four inches from that girl’s elbow during our waking hours
for the next three days.”

Then came a sudden interruption: Zeb Leavenworth came flying aft
shouting:

“The Pennsylvania is backing out.”

A flutter of emotion, a fleeting good-by, a flight across the decks, a
flying leap from romance back to reality, and it was all over. He wrote
her, but received no reply. He never saw her again, never heard from her
for forty-eight years, when both were married, widowed, and old. She had
not received his letter.

Even on the Pennsylvania life had its interests. A letter dated March 9,
1858, recounts a delightfully dangerous night-adventure in the steamer’s
yawl, hunting for soundings in the running ice.

    Then the fun commenced. We made fast a line 20 fathoms long, to the
    bow of the yawl, and put the men (both crews) to it like horses on
    the shore. Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow, with an oar, to keep
    her head out, and I took the tiller. We would start the men, and
    all would go well till the yawl would bring up on a heavy cake of
    ice, and then the men would drop like so many tenpins, while Brown
    assumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat. After an hour’s
    hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars.
    Sent back and warped up the other yawl, and then George (George
    Ealer, the other pilot) and myself took a double crew of fresh men
    and tried it again. This time we found the channel in less than
    half an hour, and landed on an island till the Pennsylvania came
    along and took us off. The next day was colder still. I was out in
    the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal steamboat
    came near running over us.... We sounded Hat Island, warped up
    around a bar, and sounded again--but in order to understand our
    situation you will have to read Dr. Kane. It would have been
    impossible to get back to the boat. But the Maria Denning was
    aground at the head of the island--they hailed us--we ran alongside,
    and they hoisted us in and thawed us out. We had then been out in
    the yawl from four o’clock in the morning till half past nine
    without being near a fire. There was a thick coating of ice over
    men, and yawl, ropes and everything else, and we looked like rock-
    candy statuary.

This was the sort of thing he loved in those days. We feel the writer’s
evident joy and pride in it. In the same letter he says: “I can’t
correspond with the paper, because when one is learning the river he is
not allowed to do or think about anything else.” Then he mentions his
brother Henry, and we get the beginning of that tragic episode for
which, though blameless, Samuel Clemens always held himself responsible.

    Henry was doing little or nothing here (St. Louis), and I sent him
    to our clerk to work his way for a trip, measuring wood-piles,
    counting coal-boxes, and doing other clerkly duties, which he
    performed satisfactorily. He may go down with us again.

Henry Clemens was about twenty at this time, a handsome, attractive boy
of whom his brother was lavishly fond and proud. He did go on the next
trip and continued to go regularly after that, as third clerk in line
of promotion. It was a bright spot in those hard days with Brown to have
Henry along. The boys spent a good deal of their leisure with the other
pilot, George Ealer, who “was as kindhearted as Brown wasn’t,” and
quoted Shakespeare and Goldsmith, and played the flute to his fascinated
and inspiring audience. These were things worth while. The young
steersman could not guess that the shadow of a long sorrow was even then
stretching across the path ahead.

Yet in due time he received a warning, a remarkable and impressive
warning, though of a kind seldom heeded. One night, when the
Pennsylvania lay in St. Louis, he slept at his sister’s house and had
this vivid dream:

He saw Henry, a corpse, lying in a metallic burial case in the
sitting-room, supported on two chairs. On his breast lay a bouquet of
flowers, white, with a single crimson bloom in the center.

When he awoke, it was morning, but the dream was so vivid that he
believed it real. Perhaps something of the old hypnotic condition was
upon him, for he rose and dressed, thinking he would go in and look
at his dead brother. Instead, he went out on the street in the early
morning and had walked to the middle of the block before it suddenly
flashed upon him that it was only a dream. He bounded back, rushed to
the sitting-room, and felt a great trembling revulsion of joy when he
found it really empty. He told Pamela the dream, then put it out of his
mind as quickly as he could. The Pennsylvania sailed from St. Louis as
usual, and made a safe trip to New Orleans.

A safe trip, but an eventful one; on it occurred that last interview
with Brown, already mentioned. It is recorded in the Mississippi book,
but cannot be omitted here. Somewhere down the river (it was in Eagle
Bend) Henry appeared on the hurricane deck to bring an order from the
captain for a landing to be made a little lower down. Brown was somewhat
deaf, but would never confess it. He may not have understood the order;
at all events he gave no sign of having heard it, and went straight
ahead. He disliked Henry as he disliked everybody of finer grain than
himself, and in any case was too arrogant to ask for a repetition. They
were passing the landing when Captain Klinefelter appeared on deck and
called to him to let the boat come around, adding:

“Didn’t Henry tell you to land here?”

“No, sir.”

Captain. Klinefelter turned to Sam:

“Didn’t you hear him?”

“Yes, sir.”

Brown said: “Shut your mouth! You never heard anything of the kind.”

By and by Henry came into the pilot-house, unaware of any trouble. Brown
set upon him in his ugliest manner.

“Here, why didn’t you tell me we had got to land at that plantation?” he
demanded.

Henry was always polite, always gentle.

“I did tell you, Mr. Brown.”

“It’s a lie.”

Sam Clemens could stand Brown’s abuse of himself, but not of Henry. He
said: “You lie yourself. He did tell you.”

Brown was dazed for a moment and then he shouted:

“I’ll attend to your case in half a minute!” and ordered Henry out of
the pilot-house.

The boy had started, when Brown suddenly seized him by the collar and
struck him in the face.--[In the Mississippi book the writer states
that Brown started to strike Henry with a large piece of coal; but, in a
letter written soon after the occurrence to Mrs. Orion Clemens, he
says: “Henry started out of the pilot-house-Brown jumped up and collared
him--turned him half-way around and struck him in the face!-and him
nearly six feet high-struck my little brother. I was wild from that
moment. I left the boat to steer herself, and avenged the insult--and
the captain said I was right.”]--Instantly Sam was upon Brown, with a
heavy stool, and stretched him on the floor. Then all the bitterness and
indignation that had been smoldering for months flamed up, and, leaping
upon Brown and holding him with his knees, he pounded him with his fists
until strength and fury gave out. Brown struggled free, then, and with
pilot instinct sprang to the wheel, for the vessel had been drifting
and might have got into trouble. Seeing there was no further danger, he
seized a spy-glass as a weapon.

“Get out of this here pilot-house,” he raged.

But his subordinate was not afraid of him now.

“You should leave out the ‘here,’” he drawled, critically. “It is
understood, and not considered good English form.”

“Don’t you give me none of your airs,” yelled Brown. “I ain’t going to
stand nothing more from you.”

“You should say, ‘Don’t give me any of your airs,’” Sam said, sweetly,
“and the last half of your sentence almost defies correction.”

A group of passengers and white-aproned servants, assembled on the deck
forward, applauded the victor.

Brown turned to the wheel, raging and growling. Clemens went below,
where he expected Captain Klinefelter to put him in irons, perhaps, for
it was thought to be felony to strike a pilot. The officer took him into
his private room and closed the door. At first he looked at the culprit
thoughtfully, then he made some inquiries:

    “Did you strike him first?” Captain Klinefelter asked.

    “Yes, sir.”

    “What with?”

    “A stool, sir.”

    “Hard?”

    “Middling, sir.”

    “Did it knock him down?”

    “He--he fell, sir.”

    “Did you follow it up? Did you do anything further?”

    “Yes, sir.”

    “What did you do?”

    “Pounded him, sir.”

    “Pounded him?”

    “Yes, sir.”

    “Did you pound him much--that is, severely?”

    “One might call it that, sir, maybe.”

    “I am deuced glad of it! Hark ye, never mention that I said that.
    You have been guilty of a great crime; and don’t ever be guilty of
    it again on this boat, but--lay for him ashore! Give him a good
    sound thrashing; do you hear? I’ll pay the expenses.”--[“Life on
    the Mississippi.”]

Captain Klinefelter told him to clear out, then, and the culprit heard
him enjoying himself as the door closed behind him. Brown, of course,
forbade him the pilothouse after that, and he spent the rest of the
trip “an emancipated slave” listening to George Ealer’s flute and
his readings from Goldsmith and Shakespeare; playing chess with him
sometimes, and learning a trick which he would use himself in the long
after-years--that of taking back the last move and running out the game
differently when he saw defeat.

Brown swore that he would leave the boat at New Orleans if Sam Clemens
remained on it, and Captain Klinefelter told Brown to go. Then when
another pilot could not be obtained to fill his place, the captain
offered to let Clemens himself run the daylight watches, thus showing
his confidence in the knowledge of the young steersman, who had been
only a little more than a year at the wheel. But Clemens himself had
less confidence and advised the captain to keep Brown back to St. Louis.
He would follow up the river by another boat and resume his place as
steersman when Brown was gone. Without knowing it, he may have saved his
life by that decision.

It is doubtful if he remembered his recent disturbing dream, though
some foreboding would seem to have hung over him the night before the
Pennsylvania sailed. Henry liked to join in the night-watches on the
levee when he had finished his duties, and the brothers often walked
the round chatting together. On this particular night the elder spoke of
disaster on the river. Finally he said:

“In case of accident, whatever you do, don’t lose your head--the
passengers will do that. Rush for the hurricane deck and to the
life-boat, and obey the mate’s orders. When the boat is launched, help
the women and children into it. Don’t get in yourself. The river is only
a mile wide. You can swim ashore easily enough.”

It was good manly advice, but it yielded a long harvest of sorrow.



XXVI. THE TRAGEDY OF THE “PENNSYLVANIA”

Captain Klinefelter obtained his steersman a pass on the A. T. Lacey,
which left two days behind the Pennsylvania. This was pleasant, for
Bart Bowen had become captain of that fine boat. The Lacey touched at
Greenville, Mississippi, and a voice from the landing shouted:

“The Pennsylvania is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island! One
hundred and fifty lives lost!”

Nothing further could be learned there, but that evening at Napoleon a
Memphis extra reported some of the particulars. Henry Clemens’s name was
mentioned as one of those, who had escaped injury. Still farther up the
river they got a later extra. Henry was again mentioned; this time as
being scalded beyond recovery. By the time they reached Memphis they
knew most of the details: At six o’clock that warm mid-June morning,
while loading wood from a large flat-boat sixty miles below Memphis,
four out of eight of the Pennsylvania’s boilers had suddenly exploded
with fearful results. All the forward end of the boat had been blown
out. Many persons had been killed outright; many more had been scalded
and crippled and would die. It was one of those hopeless, wholesale
steamboat slaughters which for more than a generation had made the
Mississippi a river of death and tears.

Samuel Clemens found his brother stretched upon a mattress on the floor
of an improvised hospital--a public hall--surrounded by more than thirty
others more or less desperately injured. He was told that Henry
had inhaled steam and that his body was badly scalded. His case was
considered hopeless.

Henry was one of those who had been blown into the river by the
explosion. He had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred
yards away, but presently, feeling no pain and believing himself unhurt,
he had turned back to assist in the rescue of the others. What he did
after that could not be clearly learned. The vessel had taken fire; the
rescued were being carried aboard the big wood-boat still attached to
the wreck. The fire soon raged so that the rescuers and all who could
be saved were driven into the wood-flat, which was then cut adrift and
landed. There the sufferers had to lie in the burning sun many hours
until help could come. Henry was among those who were insensible by that
time. Perhaps he had really been uninjured at first and had been scalded
in his work of rescue; it will never be known.

His brother, hearing these things, was thrown into the deepest agony and
remorse. He held himself to blame for everything; for Henry’s presence
on the boat; for his advice concerning safety of others; for his own
absence when he might have been there to help and protect the boy. He
wanted to telegraph at once to his mother and sister to come, but the
doctors persuaded him to wait--just why, he never knew. He sent word of
the disaster to Orion, who by this time had sold out in Keokuk and
was in East Tennessee studying law; then he set himself to the all but
hopeless task of trying to bring Henry back to life. Many Memphis ladies
were acting as nurses, and one, a Miss Wood, attracted by the boy’s
youth and striking features, joined in the desperate effort. Some
medical students had come to assist the doctors, and one of these
also took special interest in Henry’s case. Dr. Peyton, an old Memphis
practitioner, declared that with such care the boy might pull through.

But on the fourth night he was considered to be dying. Half delirious
with grief and the strain of watching, Samuel Clemens wrote to his
mother and to his sister-in-law in Tennessee. The letter to Orion
Clemens’s wife has been preserved.

    MEMPHIS, TENN., Friday, June 18, 1858.

    DEAR SISTER MOLLIE,--Long before this reaches you my poor Henry--my
    darling, my pride, my glory, my all will have finished his blameless
    career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter
    darkness. The horrors of three days have swept over me--they have
    blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time. Mollie,
    there are gray hairs in my head to-night. For forty-eight hours I
    labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised but
    uncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope went out and
    left me in the gloom of despair. Men take me by the hand and
    congratulate me, and call me “lucky” because I was not on the
    Pennsylvania when she blew up! May God forgive them, for they know
    not what they say.

    I was on the Pennsylvania five minutes before she left N. Orleans,
    and I must tell you the truth, Mollie--three hundred human beings
    perished by that fearful disaster. But may God bless Memphis, the
    noblest city on the face of the earth. She has done her duty by
    these poor afflicted creatures--especially Henry, for he has had
    five--aye, ten, fifteen, twenty times the care and attention that
    any one else has had. Dr. Peyton, the best physician in Memphis (he
    is exactly like the portraits of Webster), sat by him for 36 hours.
    There are 32 scalded men in that room, and you would know Dr.
    Peyton better than I can describe him if you could follow him around
    and hear each man murmur as he passes, “May the God of Heaven bless
    you, Doctor!” The ladies have done well, too. Our second mate, a
    handsome, noble-hearted young fellow, will die. Yesterday a
    beautiful girl of 15 stooped timidly down by his side and handed him
    a pretty bouquet. The poor suffering boy’s eyes kindled, his lips
    quivered out a gentle “God bless you, Miss,” and he burst into
    tears. He made them write her name on a card for him, that he might
    not forget it.

    Pray for me, Mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother.
    Your unfortunate brother,

    SAML. L. CLEMENS.

    P. S.--I got here two days after Henry.

But, alas, this was not all, nor the worst. It would seem that Samuel
Clemens’s cup of remorse must be always overfull. The final draft
that would embitter his years was added the sixth night after the
accident--the night that Henry died. He could never bring himself to
write it. He was never known to speak of it but twice.

Henry had rallied soon after the foregoing letter had been mailed, and
improved slowly that day and the next: Dr. Peyton came around about
eleven o’clock on the sixth night and made careful examination. He said:

“I believe he is out of danger and will get well. He is likely to be
restless during the night; the groans and fretting of the others will
disturb him. If he cannot rest without it, tell the physician in charge
to give him one-eighth of a grain of morphine.”

The boy did wake during the night, and was disturbed by the complaining
of the other sufferers. His brother told the young medical student in
charge what the doctor had said about the morphine. But morphine was a
new drug then; the student hesitated, saying:

“I have no way of measuring. I don’t know how much an eighth of a grain
would be.”

Henry grew rapidly worse--more and more restless. His brother was half
beside himself with the torture of it. He went to the medical student.

“If you have studied drugs,” he said, “you ought to be able to judge an
eighth of a grain of morphine.”

The young man’s courage was over-swayed. He yielded and ladled out in
the old-fashioned way, on the point of a knife-blade, what he believed
to be the right amount. Henry immediately sank into a heavy sleep. He
died before morning. His chance of life had been infinitesimal, and his
death was not necessarily due to the drug, but Samuel Clemens, unsparing
in his self-blame, all his days carried the burden of it.

He saw the boy taken to the dead room, then the long strain of grief,
the days and nights without sleep, the ghastly realization of the end
overcame him. A citizen of Memphis took him away in a kind of daze and
gave him a bed in his house, where he fell into a stupor of fatigue and
surrender. It was many hours before he woke; when he did, at last, he
dressed and went to where Henry lay. The coffin provided for the dead
were of unpainted wood, but the youth and striking face of Henry Clemens
had aroused a special interest. The ladies of Memphis had made up a
fund of sixty dollars and bought for him a metallic case. Samuel Clemens
entering, saw his brother lying exactly as he had seen him in his dream,
lacking only the bouquet of white flowers with its crimson center--a
detail made complete while he stood there, for at that moment an elderly
lady came in with a large white bouquet, and in the center of it was a
single red rose.

Orion arrived from Tennessee, and the brothers took their sorrowful
burden to St. Louis, subsequently to Hannibal, his old home. The death
of this lovely boy was a heavy sorrow to the community where he
was known, for he had been a favorite with all.--[For a fine
characterization of Henry Clemens the reader is referred to a letter
written by Orion Clemens to Miss Wood. See Appendix A, at the end of the
last volume.]

From Hannibal the family returned to Pamela’s home in St. Louis. There
one night Orion heard his brother moaning and grieving and walking the
floor of his room. By and by Sam came in to where Orion was. He could
endure it no longer, he said; he must, “tell somebody.”

Then he poured all the story of that last tragic night. It has been set
down here because it accounts for much in his after-life. It magnified
his natural compassion for the weakness and blunders of humanity, while
it increased the poor opinion implanted by the Scotchman Macfarlane
of the human being as a divine invention. Two of Mark Twain’s chief
characteristics were--consideration for the human species, and contempt
for it.

In many ways he never overcame the tragedy of Henry’s death. He never
really looked young again. Gray hairs had come, as he said, and they did
not disappear. His face took on the serious, pathetic look which from
that time it always had in repose. At twenty-three he looked thirty.
At thirty he looked nearer forty. After that the discrepancy in age and
looks became less notable. In vigor, complexion, and temperament he was
regarded in later life as young for his years, but never in looks.



XXVII. THE PILOT

The young pilot returned to the river as steersman for George Ealer,
whom he loved, and in September of that year obtained a full license
as Mississippi River pilot.--[In Life on the Mississippi he gives his
period of learning at from two to two and a half years; but documentary
evidence as well as Mr. Bixby’s testimony places the apprenticeship at
eighteen months]--Bixby had returned by this time, and they were again
together, first on the Crescent City, later on a fine new boat called
the New Falls City. Clemens was still a steersman when Bixby returned;
but as soon as his license was granted (September 9, 1858) his old chief
took him as full partner.

He was a pilot at last. In eighteen months he had packed away in
his head all the multitude of volatile statistics and acquired that
confidence and courage which made him one of the elect, a river
sovereign. He knew every snag and bank and dead tree and reef in all
those endless miles between St. Louis and New Orleans, every cut-off and
current, every depth of water--the whole story--by night and by day. He
could smell danger in the dark; he could read the surface of the water
as an open page. At twenty-three he had acquired a profession which
surpassed all others for absolute sovereignty and yielded an income
equal to that then earned by the Vice-President of the United States.
Boys generally finish college at about that age, but it is not
likely that any boy ever finished college with the mass of practical
information and training that was stored away in Samuel Clemens’s head,
or with his knowledge of human nature, his preparation for battle with
the world.

“Not only was he a pilot, but a good one.” These are Horace Bixby’s
words, and he added:

“It is the fashion to-day to disparage Sam’s piloting. Men who were born
since he was on the river and never saw him will tell you that Sam was
never much of a pilot. Most of them will tell you that he was never a
pilot at all. As a matter of fact, Sam was a fine pilot, and in a day
when piloting on the Mississippi required a great deal more brains and
skill and application than it does now. There were no signal-lights
along the shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels;
everything was blind, and on a dark, misty night in a river full of
snags and shifting sand--bars and changing shores, a pilot’s judgment
had to be founded on absolute certainty.”

He had plenty of money now. He could help his mother with a liberal
hand, and he did it. He helped Orion, too, with money and with advice.
From a letter written toward the end of the year, we gather the new
conditions. Orion would seem to have been lamenting over prospects,
and the young pilot, strong and exalted in his new estate, urges him to
renewed consistent effort:

    What is a government without energy?--[he says]--. And what is a
    man without energy? Nothing--nothing at all. What is the grandest
    thing in “Paradise Lost”--the Arch-Fiend’s terrible energy! What
    was the greatest feature in Napoleon’s character? His unconquerable
    energy! Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, and we give our
    greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, if I were a
    heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and worship
    it!

    I want a man to--I want you to--take up a line of action, and follow
    it out, in spite of the very devil.

Orion and his wife had returned to Keokuk by this time, waiting for
something in the way of a business opportunity.

His pilot brother, wrote him more than once letters of encouragement and
council. Here and there he refers to the tragedy of Henry’s death,
and the shadow it has cast upon his life; but he was young, he was
successful, his spirits were naturally exuberant. In the exhilaration
of youth and health and success he finds vent at times in that natural
human outlet, self-approval. He not only exhibits this weakness, but
confesses it with characteristic freedom.

    Putting all things together, I begin to think I am rather lucky than
    otherwise--a notion which I was slow to take up. The other night I
    was about to “round to” for a storm, but concluded that I could find
    a smoother bank somewhere. I landed five miles below. The storm
    came, passed away and did not injure us. Coming up, day before
    yesterday, I looked at the spot I first chose, and half the trees on
    the bank were torn to shreds. We couldn’t have lived 5 minutes in
    such a tornado. And I am also lucky in having a berth, while all
    the other young pilots are idle. This is the luckiest circumstance
    that ever befell me. Not on account of the wages--for that is a
    secondary consideration-but from the fact that the City of Memphis
    is the largest boat in the trade, and the hardest to pilot, and
    consequently I can get a reputation on her, which is a thing I never
    could accomplish on a transient boat. I can “bank” in the
    neighborhood of $100 a month on her, and that will satisfy me for
    the present (principally because the other youngsters are sucking
    their fingers). Bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge!--and
    what vast respect Prosperity commands! Why, six months ago, I could
    enter the “Rooms,” and receive only the customary fraternal greeting
    now they say, “Why, how are you, old fellow--when did you get in?”

    And the young pilots who use to tell me, patronizingly, that I could
    never learn the river cannot keep from showing a little of their
    chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. Permit me to “blow my
    horn,” for I derive a living pleasure from these things, and I must
    confess that when I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the
    d---d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred-dollar bill peeping out
    from amongst notes of smaller dimensions whose face I do not
    exhibit! You will despise this egotism, but I tell you there is a
    “stern joy” in it.

We are dwelling on this period of Mark Twain’s life, for it was a period
that perhaps more than any other influenced his future years. He
became completely saturated with the river its terms, its memories, its
influence remained a definite factor in his personality to the end of
his days. Moreover, it was his first period of great triumph. Where
before he had been a subaltern not always even a wage-earner--now all in
a moment he had been transformed into a high chief. The fullest ambition
of his childhood had been realized--more than realized, for in that
day he had never dreamed of a boat or of an income of such stately
proportions. Of great personal popularity, and regarded as a safe
pilot, he had been given one of the largest, most difficult of boats.
Single-handed and alone he had fought his way into the company of kings.

And we may pardon his vanity. He could hardly fail to feel his glory and
revel in it and wear it as a halo, perhaps, a little now and then in
the Association Rooms. To this day he is remembered as a figure there,
though we may believe, regardless of his own statement, that it was not
entirely because of his success. As the boys of Hannibal had gathered
around to listen when Sam Clemens began to speak, so we may be certain
that the pilots at St. Louis and New Orleans laid aside other things
when he had an observation to make or a tale to tell.

    He was much given to spinning yarns--[writes one associate of those
    days]--so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the
    time his own face was perfectly sober. If he laughed at all, it
    must have been inside. It would have killed his hearers to do that.
    Occasionally some of his droll yarns would get into the papers. He
    may have written them himself.

Another riverman of those days has recalled a story he heard Sam Clemens
tell:

    We were speaking of presence of mind in accidents--we were always
    talking of such things; then he said:

    “Boys, I had great presence of mind once. It was at a fire. An old
    man leaned out of a four-story building calling for help. Everybody
    in the crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything. The ladders
    weren’t long enough. Nobody had any presence of mind--nobody but
    me. I came to the rescue. I yelled for a rope. When it came I
    threw the old man the end of it. He caught it and I told him to tie
    it around his waist. He did so, and I pulled him down.”

This was one of the stories that got into print and traveled far.
Perhaps, as the old pilot suggests, he wrote some of them himself, for
Horace Bixby remembers that “Sam was always scribbling when not at the
wheel.”

But if he published any work in those river-days he did not acknowledge
it later--with one exception. The exception was not intended for
publication, either. It was a burlesque written for the amusement of his
immediate friends. He has told the story himself, more than once, but
it belongs here for the reason that some where out of the general
circumstance of it there originated a pseudonym, one day to become the
best-known in the hemispheres the name Mark Twain.

That terse, positive, peremptory, dynamic pen-name was first used by
an old pilot named Isaiah Sellers--a sort of “oldest inhabitant” of the
river, who made the other pilots weary with the scope and antiquity
of his reminiscent knowledge. He contributed paragraphs of general
information and Nestorian opinions to the New Orleans Picayune, and
signed them “Mark Twain.” They were quaintly egotistical in tone,
usually beginning: “My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New
Orleans,” and reciting incidents and comparisons dating as far back as
1811.

Captain Sellers naturally was regarded as fair game by the young pilots,
who amused themselves by imitating his manner and general attitude of
speech. But Clemens went further; he wrote at considerable length
a broadly burlesque imitation signed “Sergeant Fathom,” with an
introduction which referred to the said Fathom as “one of the oldest
cub pilots on the river.” The letter that followed related a perfectly
impossible trip, supposed to have been made in 1763 by the steamer “the
old first Jubilee” with a “Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew.” It is a
gem of its kind, and will bear reprint in full today.--[See Appendix B,
at the end of the last volume.]

The burlesque delighted Bart Bowen, who was Clemens’s pilot partner on
the Edward J. Gay at the time. He insisted on showing it to others
and finally upon printing it. Clemens was reluctant, but consented.
It appeared in the True Delta (May 8 or 9, 1859), and was widely and
boisterously enjoyed.

It broke Captain Sellers’s literary heart. He never contributed another
paragraph. Mark Twain always regretted the whole matter deeply, and
his own revival of the name was a sort of tribute to the old man he
had thoughtlessly wounded. If Captain Sellers has knowledge of material
matters now, he is probably satisfied; for these things brought to
him, and to the name he had chosen, what he could never himself have
achieved--immortality.



XXVIII. PILOTING AND PROPHECY

Those who knew Samuel Clemens best in those days say that he was a
slender, fine-looking man, well dressed--even dandified--given to patent
leathers, blue serge, white duck, and fancy striped shirts. Old for his
years, he heightened his appearance at times by wearing his beard in
the atrocious mutton-chop fashion, then popular, but becoming to no
one, least of all to him. The pilots regarded him as a great reader--a
student of history, travels, literature, and the sciences--a young man
whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know. When
not at the wheel, he was likely to be reading or telling yarns in the
Association Rooms.

He began the study of French one day when he passed a school of
languages, where three tongues, French, German, and Italian, were
taught, one in each of three rooms. The price was twenty-five dollars
for one language, or three for fifty dollars. The student was provided
with a set of cards for each room and supposed to walk from one
apartment to another, changing tongues at each threshold. With his
unusual enthusiasm and prodigality, the young pilot decided to take all
three languages, but after the first two or three round trips concluded
that for the present French would do. He did not return to the school,
but kept his cards and bought text-books. He must have studied pretty
faithfully when he was off watch and in port, for his river note-book
contains a French exercise, all neatly written, and it is from the
Dialogues of Voltaire.

This old note-book is interesting for other things. The notes are no
longer timid, hesitating memoranda, but vigorous records made with the
dash of assurance that comes from confidence and knowledge, and with the
authority of one in supreme command. Under the head of “2d high-water
trip--Jan., 1861--Alonzo Child,” we have the story of a rising river
with its overflowing banks, its blind passages and cut-offs--all the
circumstance and uncertainty of change.

    Good deal of water all over Coles Creek Chute, 12 or 15 ft. bank
    --could have gone up shore above General Taylor’s--too much drift....

    Night--didn’t run either 77 or 76 towheads--8 ft. bank on main shore
    Ozark Chute....

And so on page after page of cryptographic memoranda. It means little
enough to the lay reader, yet one gets an impression somehow of the
swirling, turbulent water and a lonely figure in that high glassed-in
place peering into the dark for blind land-marks and possible dangers,
picking his way up the dim, hungry river of which he must know
every foot as well as a man knows the hall of his own home. All the
qualifications must come into play, then memory, judgment, courage, and
the high art of steering. “Steering is a very high, art,” he says; “one
must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat’s stern if he wants to get
up the river fast.”

He had an example of the perfection of this art one misty night on the
Alonzo Child. Nearly fifty years later, sitting on his veranda in the
dark, he recalled it. He said:

“There was a pilot in those days by the name of Jack Leonard who was a
perfectly wonderful creature. I do not know that Jack knew anymore
about the river than most of us and perhaps could not read the water any
better, but he had a knack of steering away ahead of our ability, and I
think he must have had an eye that could see farther into the darkness.

“I had never seen Leonard steer, but I had heard a good deal about it. I
had heard it said that the crankiest old tub afloat--one that would kill
any other man to handle--would obey and be as docile as a child when
Jack Leonard took the wheel. I had a chance one night to verify that
for myself. We were going up the river, and it was one of the nastiest
nights I ever saw. Besides that, the boat was loaded in such a way that
she steered very hard, and I was half blind and crazy trying to locate
the safe channel, and was pulling my arms out to keep her in it. It was
one of those nights when everything looks the same whichever way you
look: just two long lines where the sky comes down to the trees and
where the trees meet the water with all the trees precisely the same
height--all planted on the same day, as one of the boys used to put
it--and not a thing to steer by except the knowledge in your head of the
real shape of the river. Some of the boats had what they call a ‘night
hawk’ on the jackstaff, a thing which you could see when it was in the
right position against the sky or the water, though it seldom was in the
right position and was generally pretty useless.

“I was in a bad way that night and wondering how I could ever get
through it, when the pilot-house door opened, and Jack Leonard walked
in. He was a passenger that trip, and I had forgotten he was aboard.
I was just about in the worst place and was pulling the boat first one
way, then another, running the wheel backward and forward, and climbing
it like a squirrel.

“‘Sam,’ he said, ‘let me take the wheel. Maybe I have been over this
place since you have.’

“I didn’t argue the question. Jack took the wheel, gave it a little turn
one way, then a little turn the other; that old boat settled down as
quietly as a lamb--went right along as if it had been broad daylight
in a river without snags, bars, bottom, or banks, or anything that one
could possibly hit. I never saw anything so beautiful. He stayed my
watch out for me, and I hope I was decently grateful. I have never
forgotten it.”

The old note-book contained the record of many such nights as that; but
there were other nights, too, when the stars were blazing out, or
when the moon on the water made the river a wide mysterious way of
speculative dreams. He was always speculating; the planets and the
remote suns were always a marvel to him. A love of astronomy--the
romance of it, its vast distances, and its possibilities--began with
those lonely river-watches and never waned to his last day. For a time
a great comet blazed in the heavens, a “wonderful sheaf of light”
 that glorified his lonely watch. Night after night he watched it as
it developed and then grew dim, and he read eagerly all the comet
literature that came to his hand, then or afterward. He speculated of
many things: of life, death, the reason of existence, of creation,
the ways of Providence and Destiny. It was a fruitful time for such
meditation; out of such vigils grew those larger philosophies that would
find expression later, when the years had conferred the magic gift of
phrase.

Life lay all ahead of him then, and during those still watches he
must have revolved many theories of how the future should be met and
mastered. In the old notebook there still remains a well-worn clipping,
the words of some unknown writer, which he had preserved and may have
consulted as a sort of creed. It is an interesting little document--a
prophetic one, the reader may concede:

    HOW TO TAKE LIFE.--Take it just as though it was--as it is--an
    earnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you were
    born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the
    world had awaited for your coming. Take it as though it was a grand
    opportunity to do and achieve, to carry forward great and good
    schemes; to help and cheer a suffering, weary, it may be
    heartbroken, brother. Now and then a man stands aside from the
    crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway
    becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort.
    The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates what
    others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. The
    miracle, or the power that elevates the few, is to be found in their
    industry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of a
    brave, determined spirit.

The old note-book contains no record of disasters. Horace Bixby, who
should know, has declared:

“Sam Clemens never had an accident either as a steersman or as a pilot,
except once when he got aground for a few hours in the bagasse (cane)
smoke, with no damage to anybody though of course there was some good
luck in that too, for the best pilots do not escape trouble, now and
then.”

Bixby and Clemens were together that winter on the Alonzo Child, and
a letter to Orion contains an account of great feasting which the two
enjoyed at a “French restaurant” in New Orleans--“dissipating on a
ten-dollar dinner--tell it not to Ma!”--where they had sheepshead fish,
oysters, birds, mushrooms, and what not, “after which the day was too
far gone to do anything.” So it appears that he was not always reading
Macaulay or studying French and astronomy, but sometimes went frivoling
with his old chief, now his chum, always his dear friend.

Another letter records a visit with Pamela to a picture-gallery in
St. Louis where was being exhibited Church’s “Heart of the Andes.” He
describes the picture in detail and with vast enthusiasm.

“I have seen it several times,” he concludes, “but it is always a new
picture--totally new--you seem to see nothing the second time that you
saw the first.”

Further along he tells of having taken his mother and the girls--his
cousin Ella Creel and another--for a trip down the river to New Orleans.

    Ma was delighted with her trip, but she was disgusted with the girls
    for allowing me to embrace and kiss them--and she was horrified at
    the ‘schottische’ as performed by Miss Castle and myself. She was
    perfectly willing for me to dance until 12 o’clock at the imminent
    peril of my going to sleep on the after-watch--but then she would
    top off with a very inconsistent sermon on dancing in general;
    ending with a terrific broadside aimed at that heresy of heresies,
    the ‘schottische’.

    I took Ma and the girls in a carriage round that portion of New
    Orleans where the finest gardens and residences are to be seen, and,
    although it was a blazing hot, dusty day, they seemed hugely
    delighted. To use an expression which is commonly ignored in polite
    society, they were “hell-bent” on stealing some of the luscious-
    looking oranges from branches which overhung the fence, but I
    restrained them.

In another letter of this period we get a hint of the future Mark Twain.
It was written to John T. Moore, a young clerk on the John J. Roe.

    What a fool old Adam was. Had everything his own way; had succeeded
    in gaining the love of the best-looking girl in the neighborhood,
    but yet, unsatisfied with his conquest, he had to eat a miserable
    little apple. Ah, John, if you had been in his place you would not
    have eaten a mouthful of the apple--that is, if it had required any
    exertion. I have noticed that you shun exertion. There comes in
    the difference between us. I court exertion. I love work. Why,
    sir, when I have a piece of work to perform, I go away to myself,
    sit down in the shade, and muse over the coming enjoyment.
    Sometimes I am so industrious that I muse too long.

There remains another letter of this period--a sufficiently curious
document. There was in those days a famous New Orleans clairvoyant known
as Madame Caprell. Some of the young pilot’s friends had visited her and
obtained what seemed to be satisfying results. From time to time they
had urged him to visit the fortune-teller, and one idle day he concluded
to make the experiment. As soon as he came away he wrote to Orion in
detail.

    She’s a very pleasant little lady--rather pretty--about 28--say
    5 feet 2 1/4--would weigh 116--has black eyes and hair--is polite
    and intelligent--used good language, and talks much faster than I
    do.

    She invited me into the little back parlor, closed the door; and we
    were alone. We sat down facing each other. Then she asked my age.
    Then she put her hands before her eyes a moment, and commenced
    talking as if she had a good deal to say and not much time to say it
    in. Something after this style:

    ‘Madame.’ Yours is a watery planet; you gain your livelihood on the
    water; but you should have been a lawyer--there is where your
    talents lie; you might have distinguished yourself as an orator, or
    as an editor--, you have written a great deal; you write well--but
    you are rather out of practice; no matter--you will be in practice
    some day; you have a superb constitution, and as excellent health as
    any man in the world; you have great powers of endurance; in your
    profession your strength holds out against the longest sieges
    without flagging; still, the upper part of your lungs, the top of
    them, is slightly affected--you must take care of yourself; you do
    not drink, but you use entirely too much tobacco; and you must stop
    it; mind, not moderate, but stop the use of it, totally; then I can
    almost promise you 86, when you will surely die; otherwise, look out
    for 28, 31, 34, 47, and 65; be careful--for you are not of a long-
    lived race, that is, on your father’s side; you are the only healthy
    member of your family, and the only one in it who has anything like
    the certainty of attaining to a great age--so, stop using tobacco,
    and be careful of yourself.... In some respects you take after your
    father, but you are much more like your mother, who belongs to the
    long-lived, energetic side of the house.... You never brought all
    your energies to bear upon any subject but what you accomplished it
    --for instance, you are self-made, self-educated.

    ‘S. L. C.’ Which proves nothing.

    ‘Madame.’ Don’t interrupt. When you sought your present
    occupation, you found a thousand obstacles in your way--obstacles
    unknown--not even suspected by any save you and me, since you keep
    such matter to yourself--but you fought your way, and hid the long
    struggle under a mask of cheerfulness, which saved your friends
    anxiety on your account. To do all this requires the qualities
    which I have named.

    ‘S. L. C.’ You flatter well, Madame.

    ‘Madame.’ Don’t interrupt. Up to within a short time you had
    always lived from hand to mouth--now you are in easy circumstances
    --for which you need give credit to no one but yourself. The
    turning-point in your life occurred in 1840-7-8.

    ‘S. L. C.’ Which was?

    ‘Madame.’ A death, perhaps, and this threw you upon the world and
    made you what you are; it was always intended that you should make
    yourself; therefore, it was well that this calamity occurred as
    early as it did. You will never die of water, although your career
    upon it in the future seems well sprinkled with misfortune. You
    will continue upon the water for some time yet; you will not retire
    finally until ten years from now.... What is your brother’s age?
    23--and a lawyer? and in pursuit of an office? Well, he stands a
    better chance than the other two, and he may get it; he is too
    visionary--is always flying off on a new hobby; this will never do
    --tell him I said so. He is a good lawyer--a very good lawyer--and
    a fine speaker--is very popular and much respected, and makes many
    friends; but although he retains their friendship, he loses their
    confidence by displaying his instability of character.... The land
    he has now will be very valuable after a while----
    ‘S. L. C.’ Say 250 years hence, or thereabouts, Madame----
    ‘Madame.’ No--less time--but never mind the land, that is a
    secondary consideration--let him drop that for the present, and
    devote himself to his business and politics with all his might, for
    he must hold offices under Government....

    After a while you will possess a good deal of property--retire at
    the end of ten years--after which your pursuits will be literary
    --try the law--you will certainly succeed. I am done now. If you
    have any questions to ask--ask them freely--and if it be in my
    power, I will answer without reserve--without reserve.

    I asked a few questions of minor importance-paid her and left-under
    the decided impression that going to the fortune-teller’s was just
    as good as going to the opera, and cost scarcely a trifle more
    --ergo, I will disguise myself and go again, one of these days, when
    other amusements fail. Now isn’t she the devil? That is to say,
    isn’t she a right smart little woman?

    When you want money, let Ma know, and she will send it. She and
    Pamela are always fussing about change, so I sent them a hundred and
    twenty quarters yesterday--fiddler’s change enough to last till I
    get back, I reckon.
                                SAM.

In the light of preceding and subsequent events, we must confess
that Madame Caprell was “indeed a right smart little woman.” She made
mistakes enough (the letter is not quoted in full), but when we remember
that she not only gave his profession at the moment, but at least
suggested his career for the future; that she approximated the year of
his father’s death as the time when he was thrown upon the world; that
she admonished him against his besetting habit, tobacco; that she read.
minutely not only his characteristics, but his brother Orion’s; that she
outlined the struggle in his conquest of the river; that she seemingly
had knowledge of Orion’s legal bent and his connection with the
Tennessee land, all seems remarkable enough, supposing, of course,
she had no material means of acquiring knowledge--one can never know
certainly about such things.



XXIX. THE END OF PILOTING

It is curious, however, that Madame Caprell, with clairvoyant vision,
should not have seen an important event then scarcely more than two
months distant: the breaking-out of the Civil War, with the closing of
the river and the end of Mark Twain’s career as a pilot. Perhaps these
things were so near as to be “this side” the range of second sight.

There had been plenty of war-talk, but few of the pilots believed that
war was really coming. Traveling that great commercial highway, the
river, with intercourse both of North and South, they did not believe
that any political differences would be allowed to interfere with
the nation’s trade, or would be settled otherwise than on the street
corners, in the halls of legislation, and at the polls. True, several
States, including Louisiana, had declared the Union a failure and
seceded; but the majority of opinions were not clear as to how far a
State had rights in such a matter, or as to what the real meaning of
secession might be. Comparatively few believed it meant war. Samuel
Clemens had no such belief. His Madame Caprell letter bears date of
February 6, 1861, yet contains no mention of war or of any special
excitement in New Orleans--no forebodings as to national conditions.

Such things came soon enough: President Lincoln was inaugurated on the
4th of March, and six weeks later Fort Sumter was fired upon. Men began
to speak out then and to take sides.

It was a momentous time in the Association Rooms. There were pilots
who would go with the Union; there were others who would go with the
Confederacy. Horace Bixby was one of the former, and in due time became
chief of the Union River Service. Another pilot named Montgomery (Samuel
Clemens had once steered for him) declared for the South, and later
commanded the Confederate Mississippi fleet. They were all good friends,
and their discussions, though warm, were not always acrimonious; but
they took sides.

A good many were not very clear as to their opinions. Living both North
and South as they did, they saw various phases of the question and
divided their sympathies. Some were of one conviction one day and of
another the next. Samuel Clemens was of the less radical element. He
knew there was a good deal to be said for either cause; furthermore, he
was not then bloodthirsty. A pilot-house with its elevated position and
transparency seemed a poor place to be in when fighting was going on.

“I’ll think about it,” he said. “I’m not very anxious to get up into a
glass perch and be shot at by either side. I’ll go home and reflect on
the matter.”

He did not realize it, but he had made his last trip as a pilot. It is
rather curious that his final brief note-book entry should begin with
his future nom de plume--a memorandum of soundings--“mark twain,” and
should end with the words “no lead.”

He went up the river as a passenger on a steamer named the Uncle Sam.
Zeb Leavenworth was one of the pilots, and Sam Clemens usually stood
watch with him. They heard war-talk all the way and saw preparations,
but they were not molested, though at Memphis they basely escaped the
blockade. At Cairo, Illinois, they saw soldiers drilling--troops later
commanded by Grant. The Uncle Sam came steaming up toward St. Louis,
those on board congratulating themselves on having come through
unscathed. They were not quite through, however. Abreast of Jefferson
Barracks they suddenly heard the boom of a cannon and saw a great whorl
of smoke drifting in their direction. They did not realize that it was
a signal--a thunderous halt--and kept straight on. Less than a minute
later there was another boom, and a shell exploded directly in front of
the pilot-house, breaking a lot of glass and destroying a good deal of
the upper decoration. Zeb Leavenworth fell back into a corner with a
yell.

“Good Lord Almighty! Sam;” he said, “what do they mean by that?”

Clemens stepped to the wheel and brought the boat around. “I guess they
want us to wait a minute, Zeb,” he said.

They were examined and passed. It was the last steamboat to make the
trip from New Orleans to St. Louis. Mark Twain’s pilot-days were over.
He would have grieved had he known this fact.

“I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since,” he
long afterward declared, “and I took a measureless pride in it.”

The dreamy, easy, romantic existence suited him exactly. A sovereign and
an autocrat, the pilot’s word was law; he wore his responsibilities as a
crown. As long as he lived Samuel Clemens would return to those old days
with fondness and affection, and with regret that they were no more.



XXX. THE SOLDIER

Clemens spent a few days in St. Louis (in retirement, for there was a
pressing war demand for Mississippi pilots), then went up to Hannibal to
visit old friends. They were glad enough to see him, and invited him to
join a company of gay military enthusiasts who were organizing to “help
Gov. ‘Claib’ Jackson repel the invader.” A good many companies were
forming in and about Hannibal, and sometimes purposes were conflicting
and badly mixed. Some of the volunteers did not know for a time which
invader they intended to drive from Missouri soil, and more than one
company in the beginning was made up of young fellows whose chief
ambition was to have a lark regardless as to which cause they might
eventually espouse. --[The military organizations of Hannibal and
Palmyra, in 1861, were as follows: The Marion Artillery; the Silver
Grays; Palmyra Guards; the W. E. Dennis company, and one or two others.
Most of them were small private affairs, usually composed of about
half-and-half Union and Confederate men, who knew almost nothing of
the questions or conditions, and disbanded in a brief time, to
attach themselves to the regular service according as they developed
convictions. The general idea of these companies was a little
camping-out expedition and a good time. One such company one morning
received unexpected reinforcements. They saw the approach of the
recruits, and, remarking how well drilled the new arrivals seemed to be,
mistook them for the enemy and fled.]

Samuel Clemens had by this time decided, like Lee, that he would go
with his State and lead battalions to victory. The “battalion” in this
instance consisted of a little squad of young fellows of his own age,
mostly pilots and schoolmates, including Sam Bowen, Ed Stevens, and Ab
Grimes, about a dozen, all told. They organized secretly, for the Union
militia was likely to come over from Illinois any time and look up any
suspicious armies that made an open demonstration. An army might lose
enthusiasm and prestige if it spent a night or two in the calaboose.

So they met in a secret place above Bear Creek Hill, just as Tom
Sawyer’s red-handed bandits had gathered so long before (a good many of
them were of the same lawless lot), and they planned how they would sell
their lives on the field of glory, just as Tom Sawyer’s band might have
done if it had thought about playing “War,” instead of “Indian” and
“Pirate” and “Bandit” with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon
patches. Then, on the evening before marching away, they stealthily
called on their sweethearts--those who had them did, and the others
pretended sweethearts for the occasion--and when it was dark and
mysterious they said good-by and suggested that maybe those girls would
never see them again. And as always happens in such a case, some of them
were in earnest, and two or three of the little group that slipped away
that night never did come back, and somewhere sleep in unmarked graves.

The “two Sams”--Sam Bowen and Sam Clemens--called on Patty Gore and
Julia Willis for their good-by visit, and, when they left, invited the
girls to “walk through the pickets” with them, which they did as far
as Bear Creek Hill. The girls didn’t notice any pickets, because the
pickets were away calling on girls, too, and probably wouldn’t be back
to begin picketing for some time. So the girls stood there and watched
the soldiers march up Bear Creek Hill and disappear among the trees.

The army had a good enough time that night, marching through the brush
and vines toward New London, though this sort of thing grew rather
monotonous by morning. When they took a look at themselves by daylight,
with their nondescript dress and accoutrements, there was some thing
about it all which appealed to one’s sense of humor rather than to
his patriotism. Colonel Ralls, of Ralls County, however, received them
cordially and made life happier for them with a good breakfast and some
encouraging words. He was authorized to administer the oath of office,
he said, and he proceeded to do it, and made them a speech besides; also
he sent out notice to some of the neighbors--to Col. Bill Splawn, Farmer
Nuck Matson, and others--that the community had an army on its hands
and perhaps ought to do something for it. This brought in a number of
contributions, provisions, paraphernalia, and certain superfluous horses
and mules, which converted the battalion into a cavalry, and made it
possible for it to move on to the front without further delay. Samuel
Clemens, mounted on a small yellow mule whose tail had been trimmed down
to a tassel at the end in a style that suggested his name, Paint Brush,
upholstered and supplemented with an extra pair of cowskin boots, a pair
of gray blankets, a home-made quilt, frying-pan, a carpet sack, a small
valise, an overcoat, an old-fashioned Kentucky rifle, twenty yards of
rope, and an umbrella, was a representative unit of the brigade. The
proper thing for an army loaded like that was to go into camp, and they
did it. They went over on Salt River, near Florida, and camped not
far from a farm-house with a big log stable; the latter they used as
headquarters. Somebody suggested that when they went into battle they
ought to have short hair, so that in a hand-to-hand conflict the enemy
could not get hold of it. Tom Lyon found a pair of sheep-shears in the
stable and acted as barber. They were not very sharp shears, but the
army stood the torture for glory in the field, and a group of little
darkies collected from the farm-house to enjoy the performance. The
army then elected its officers. William Ely was chosen captain, with
Asa Glasscock as first lieutenant. Samuel Clemens was then voted second
lieutenant, and there were sergeants and orderlies. There were only
three privates when the election was over, and these could not be
distinguished by their deportment. There was scarcely any discipline in
this army.

Then it set in to rain. It rained by day and it rained by night. Salt
River rose until it was bank full and overflowed the bottoms. Twice
there was a false night alarm of the enemy approaching, and the
battalion went slopping through the mud and brush into the dark, picking
out the best way to retreat, plodding miserably back to camp when the
alarm was over. Once they fired a volley at a row of mullen stalks,
waving on the brow of a hill, and once a picket shot at his own horse
that had got loose and had wandered toward him in the dusk.

The rank and file did not care for picket duty. Sam Bowen--ordered by
Lieutenant Clemens to go on guard one afternoon--denounced his superior
and had to be threatened with court-martial and death. Sam went finally,
but he sat in a hot open place and swore at the battalion and the war
in general, and finally went to sleep in the broiling sun. These things
began to tell on patriotism. Presently Lieutenant Clemens developed a
boil, and was obliged to make himself comfortable with some hay in a
horse-trough, where he lay most of the day, violently denouncing the
war and the fools that invented it. Then word came that “General” Tom
Harris, who was in command of the district, was stopping at a farmhouse
two miles away, living on the fat of the land.

That settled it. Most of them knew Tom Harris, and they regarded his
neglect of them as perfidy. They broke camp without further ceremony.

Lieutenant Clemens needed assistance to mount Paint Brush, and the
little mule refused to cross the river; so Ab Grimes took the coil of
rope, hitched one end of it to his own saddle and the other end to Paint
Brush’s neck. Grimes was mounted on a big horse, and when he started it
was necessary for Paint Brush to follow. Arriving at the farther bank,
Grimes looked around, and was horrified to see that the end of the rope
led down in the water with no horse and rider in view. He spurred up
the bank, and the hat of Lieutenant Clemens and the ears of Paint Brush
appeared.

“Ah,” said Clemens, as he mopped his face, “do you know that little
devil waded all the way across?”

A little beyond the river they met General Harris, who ordered them back
to camp. They admonished him to “go there himself.” They said they had
been in that camp and knew all about it. They were going now where there
was food--real food and plenty of it. Then he begged them, but it was no
use. By and by they stopped at a farm-house for supplies. A tall, bony
woman came to the door:

“You’re secesh, ain’t you?”

They acknowledged that they were defenders of the cause and that they
wanted to buy provisions. The request seemed to inflame her.

“Provisions!” she screamed. “Provisions for secesh, and my husband a
colonel in the Union Army. You get out of here!”

She reached for a hickory hoop-pole that stood by the door, and the army
moved on. When they arrived at Col. Bill Splawn’s that night Colonel
Splawn and his family had gone to bed, and it seemed unwise to disturb
them. The hungry army camped in the barnyard and crept into the hay-loft
to sleep. Presently somebody yelled “Fire!” One of the boys had been
smoking and started the hay. Lieutenant Clemens suddenly wakened, made
a quick rolling movement from the blaze, and rolled out of a big
hay-window into the barnyard below. The rest of the army, startled into
action, seized the burning hay and pitched it out of the same window.
The lieutenant had sprained his ankle when he struck the ground, and his
boil was far from well, but when the burning hay descended he forgot his
disabilities. Literally and figuratively this was the final straw. With
a voice and vigor suited to the urgencies of the case, he made a spring
from under the burning stuff, flung off the remnants, and with them his
last vestige of interest in the war. The others, now that the fire was,
out, seemed to think the incident boisterously amusing. Whereupon the
lieutenant rose up and told them, collectively and individually, what
he thought of them; also he spoke of the war and the Confederacy, and
of the human race at large. They helped him in, then, for his ankle was
swelling badly. Next morning, when Colonel Splawn had given them a good
breakfast, the army set out for New London.

But Lieutenant Clemens never got any farther than Nuck Matson’s
farm-house. His ankle was so painful by that time that Mrs. Matson had
him put to bed, where he stayed for several weeks, recovering from the
injury and stress of war. A little negro boy was kept on watch for Union
detachments--they were passing pretty frequently now--and when one came
in sight the lieutenant was secluded until the danger passed. When he
was able to travel, he had had enough of war and the Confederacy. He
decided to visit Orion in Keokuk. Orion was a Union abolitionist and
might lead him to mend his doctrines.

As for the rest of the army, it was no longer a unit in the field.
Its members had drifted this way and that, some to return to their
occupations, some to continue in the trade of war. Sam Bowen is said
to have been caught by the Federal troops and put to sawing wood in the
stockade at Hannibal. Ab (A. C.) Grimes became a noted Confederate spy
and is still among those who have lived to furnish the details here set
down. Properly officered and disciplined, that detachment would have
made as brave soldiers as any. Military effectiveness is a matter of
leaders and tactics.

Mark Twain’s own Private History of a ‘Campaign that Failed’ is, of
course, built on this episode. He gives us a delicious account, even
if it does not strikingly resemble the occurrence. The story might have
been still better if he had not introduced the shooting of the soldier
in the dark. The incident was invented, of course, to present the real
horror of war, but it seems incongruous in this burlesque campaign, and,
to some extent at least, it missed fire in its intention. --[In a book
recently published, Mark Twain’s “nephew” is quoted as authority for
the statement that Mark Twain was detailed for river duty, captured,
and paroled, captured again, and confined in a tobacco-warehouse in
St. Louis, etc. Mark Twain had but one nephew: Samuel E. Moffett, whose
Biographical Sketch (vol. xxii, Mark Twain’s Works) contains no such
statement; and nothing of the sort occurred.]



XXXI. OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY

When Madame Caprell prophesied that Orion Clemens would hold office
under government, she must have seen with true clairvoyant vision. The
inauguration of Abraham Lincoln brought Edward Bates into his Cabinet,
and Bates was Orion’s friend. Orion applied for something, and got it.
James W. Nye had been appointed Territorial governor of Nevada, and
Orion was made Territorial secretary. You could strain a point and refer
to the office as “secretary of state,” which was an imposing title.
Furthermore, the secretary would be acting governor in the governor’s
absence, and there would be various subsidiary honors. When Lieutenant
Clemens arrived in Keokuk, Orion was in the first flush of his triumph
and needed only money to carry him to the scene of new endeavor. The
late lieutenant C. S. A. had accumulated money out of his pilot salary,
and there was no comfortable place just then in the active Middle West
for an officer of either army who had voluntarily retired from the
service. He agreed that if Orion would overlook his recent brief
defection from the Union and appoint him now as his (Orion’s) secretary,
he would supply the funds for both overland passages, and they would
start with no unnecessary delay for a country so new that all human
beings, regardless of previous affiliations and convictions, were flung
into the common fusing-pot and recast in the general mold of pioneer.

The offer was a boon to Orion. He was always eager to forgive, and the
money was vitally necessary. In the briefest possible time he had packed
his belongings, which included a large unabridged dictionary, and the
brothers were on their way to St. Louis for final leave-taking before
setting out for the great mysterious land of promise--the Pacific West.
From St. Louis they took the boat for St. Jo, whence the Overland
stage started, and for six days “plodded” up the shallow, muddy, snaggy
Missouri, a new experience for the pilot of the Father of Waters.

    In fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to St. Jo by land,
    for she was walking most of the time, anyhow--climbing over reefs
    and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long.
    The captain said she was a “bully” boat, and all she wanted was some
    “shear” and a bigger wheel. I thought she wanted a pair of stilts,
    but I had the deep sagacity not to say so.’--[‘Roughing It’.]--

At St. Jo they paid one hundred and fifty dollars apiece for their stage
fare (with something extra for the dictionary), and on the twenty-sixth
of July, 1861, set out on that long, delightful trip behind sixteen
galloping horses--or mules--never stopping except for meals or to change
teams, heading steadily into the sunset, following it from horizon to
horizon over the billowy plains, across the snow-clad Rockies, covering
the seventeen hundred miles between St. Jo and Carson City (including
a two-day halt in Salt Lake City) in nineteen glorious days. What an
inspiration in such a trip! In ‘Roughing It’ he tells it all, and says:
“Even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the
life, the gladness, and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the
blood dance in my face on those fine Overland mornings.”

The nights, with the uneven mail-bags for a bed and the bounding
dictionary for company, were less exhilarating; but then youth does not
mind.

    All things being now ready, stowed the uneasy dictionary where it
    would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water-canteen and
    pistols where we could find them in the dark. Then we smoked a
    final pipe and swapped a final yarn; after which we put the pipes,
    tobacco, and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail-
    bags, and made the place as dark as the inside of a cow, as the
    conductor phrased it in his picturesque way. It was certainly as
    dark as any place could be--nothing was even dimly visible in it.
    And finally we rolled ourselves up like silkworms, each person in
    his own blanket, and sank peacefully to sleep.

Youth loves that sort of thing, despite its inconvenience. And sometimes
the clatter of the pony-rider swept by in the night, carrying letters at
five dollars apiece and making the Overland trip in eight days; just
a quick beat of hoofs in the distance, a dash, and a hail from the
darkness, the beat of hoofs again, then only the rumble of the stage and
the even, swinging gallop of the mules. Sometimes they got a glimpse
of the ponyrider by day--a flash, as it were, as he sped by. And every
morning brought new scenery, new phases of frontier life, including, at
last, what was to them the strangest phase of all, Mormonism.

They spent two wonderful days at Salt Lake City, that mysterious and
remote capital of the great American monarchy, who still flaunts her
lawless, orthodox creed the religion of David and Solomon--and thrives.
An obliging official made it his business to show them the city and
the life there, the result of which would be those amusing chapters in
‘Roughing It’ by and by. The Overland travelers set out refreshed from
Salt Lake City, and with a new supply of delicacies--ham, eggs, and
tobacco--things that make such a trip worth while. The author of
‘Roughing It’ assures us of this:

    Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after
    these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and
    scenery, a “down-grade,” a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a
    contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have
    struggled for.

But one must read all the story of that long-ago trip. It was a trip so
well worth taking, so well worth recording, so well worth reading and
rereading to-day. We can only read of it now. The Overland stage long
ago made its last trip, and will not start any more. Even if it did, the
life and conditions, the very scenery itself, would not be the same.



XXXII. THE PIONEER

It was a hot, dusty August 14th that the stage reached Carson City
and drew up before the Ormsby Hotel. It was known that the Territorial
secretary was due to arrive; and something in the nature of a reception,
with refreshments and frontier hospitality, had been planned. Governor
Nye, formerly police commissioner in New York City, had arrived a short
time before, and with his party of retainers (“heelers” we would call
them now), had made an imposing entrance. Perhaps something of the sort
was expected with the advent of the secretary of state. Instead, the
committee saw two way-worn individuals climb down from the stage,
unkempt, unshorn--clothed in the roughest of frontier costume, the same
they had put on at St. Jo--dusty, grimy, slouchy, and weather-beaten
with long days of sun and storm and alkali desert dust. It is not likely
there were two more unprepossessing officials on the Pacific coast
at that moment than the newly arrived Territorial secretary and his
brother: Somebody identified them, and the committee melted away; the
half-formed plan of a banquet faded out and was not heard of again. Soap
and water and fresh garments worked a transformation; but that first
impression had been fatal to festivities of welcome.

Carson City, the capital of Nevada, was a “wooden town,” with a
population of two thousand souls. Its main street consisted of a few
blocks of small frame stores, some of which are still standing. In
‘Roughing It’ the author writes:

    In the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was a “Plaza,” which
    is native to all towns beyond the Rocky Mountains, a large,
    unfenced, level vacancy with a Liberty Pole in it, and very useful
    as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass-meetings, and
    likewise for teamsters to camp in. Two other sides of the Plaza
    were faced by stores, offices, and stables. The rest of Carson City
    was pretty scattering.

One sees the place pretty clearly from this brief picture of his, but it
requires an extract from a letter written to his mother somewhat later
to populate it. The mineral excitement was at its height in those
days of the early sixties, and had brought together such a congress of
nations as only the greed for precious metal can assemble. The sidewalks
and streets of Carson, and the Plaza, thronged all day with a motley
aggregation--a museum of races, which it was an education merely to
gaze upon. Jane Clemens had required him to write everything just as it
was--“no better and no worse.”

    Well--[he says]--, “Gold Hill” sells at $5,000 per foot, cash down;
    “Wild Cat” isn’t worth ten cents. The country is fabulously rich in
    gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble,
    granite, chalk, plaster of Paris (gypsum), thieves, murderers,
    desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians,
    Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpens; coyotes (pronounced ki-yo-
    ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits. I overheard a
    gentleman say, the other day, that it was “the d---dest country
    under the sun,” and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe
    to. It never rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow
    here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The birds that fly over
    the land carry their provisions with them. Only the crow and the
    raven tarry with us. Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the
    purest, most unadulterated and uncompromising sand, in which
    infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, “sage-
    brush,” ventures to grow.... I said we are situated in a flat,
    sandy desert--true. And surrounded on all sides by such prodigious
    mountains that when you look disdainfully down (from them) upon the
    insignificant village of Carson, in that instant you are seized with
    a burning desire to stretch forth your hand, put the city in your
    pocket, and walk off with it.

    As to churches, I believe they have got a Catholic one here, but,
    like that one the New York fireman spoke of, I believe “they don’t
    run her now.”

Carson has been through several phases of change since this was
written--for better and for worse. It is a thriving place in these later
days, and new farming conditions have improved the country roundabout.
But it was a desert outpost then, a catch-all for the human drift which
every whirlwind of discovery sweeps along. Gold and silver hunting and
mine speculations were the industries--gambling, drinking, and murder
were the diversions--of the Nevada capital. Politics developed in due
course, though whether as a business or a diversion is not clear at this
time.

The Clemens brothers took lodging with a genial Irishwoman, Mrs.
Murphy, a New York retainer of Governor Nye, who boarded the
camp-followers.--[The Mrs. O’Flannigan of ‘Roughing It’.]--This
retinue had come in the hope of Territorial pickings and mine
adventure--soldiers of fortune they were, and a good-natured lot all
together. One of them, Bob Howland, a nephew of the governor, attracted
Samuel Clemens by his clean-cut manner and commanding eye.

“The man who has that eye doesn’t need to go armed,” he wrote later. “He
can move upon an armed desperado and quell him and take him a prisoner
without saying a single word.” It was the same Bob Howland who would be
known by and by as the most fearless man in the Territory; who, as city
marshal of Aurora, kept that lawless camp in subjection, and, when the
friends of a lot of condemned outlaws were threatening an attack with
general massacre, sent the famous message to Governor Nye: “All quiet
in Aurora. Five men will be hung in an hour.” And it was quiet, and
the programme was carried out. But this is a digression and somewhat
premature.

Orion Clemens, anxious for laurels, established himself in the meager
fashion which he thought the government would approve; and his brother,
finding neither duties nor salary attached to his secondary position,
devoted himself mainly to the study of human nature as exhibited under
frontier conditions. Sometimes, when the nights were cool, he would
build a fire in the office stove, and, with Bob Howland and a few other
choice members of the “Brigade” gathered around, would tell river yarns
in that inimitable fashion which would win him devoted audiences all his
days. His river life had increased his natural languor of habit, and his
slow speech heightened the lazy impression which he was never unwilling
to convey. His hearers generally regarded him as an easygoing, indolent
good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as one not
likely ever to set the world afire. They did not happen to think that
the same inclination which made them crowd about to listen and applaud
would one day win for him the attention of all mankind.

Within a brief time Sam Clemens (he was never known as otherwise than
“Sam” among those pioneers) was about the most conspicuous figure on
the Carson streets. His great bushy head of auburn hair, his piercing,
twinkling eyes, his loose, lounging walk, his careless disorder of
dress, drew the immediate attention even of strangers; made them turn to
look a second time and then inquire as to his identity.

He had quickly adapted himself to the frontier mode. Lately a river
sovereign and dandy, in fancy percales and patent leathers, he had
become the roughest of rough-clad pioneers, in rusty slouch hat, flannel
shirt, coarse trousers slopping half in and half out of the heavy
cowskin boots Always something of a barbarian in love with the loose
habit of unconvention, he went even further than others and became a
sort of paragon of disarray. The more energetic citizens of Carson did
not prophesy much for his future among them. Orion Clemens, with the
stir and bustle of the official new broom, earned their quick respect;
but his brother--well, they often saw him leaning for an hour or more
at a time against an awning support at the corner of King and Carson
streets, smoking a short clay pipe and staring drowsily at the human
kaleidoscope of the Plaza, scarcely changing his position, just
watching, studying, lost in contemplation--all of which was harmless
enough, of course, but how could any one ever get a return out of
employment like that?

Samuel Clemens did not catch the mining fever immediately; there was
too much to see at first to consider any special undertaking. The mere
coming to the frontier was for the present enough; he had no plans. His
chief purpose was to see the world beyond the Rockies, to derive from it
such amusement and profit as might fall in his way. The war would end,
by and by, and he would go back to the river, no doubt. He was already
not far from homesick for the “States” and his associations there. He
closed one letter:

    I heard a military band play “What Are the Wild Waves Saying” the
    other night, and it brought Ella Creel and Belle (Stotts) across the
    desert in an instant, for they sang the song in Orion’s yard the
    first time I ever heard it. It was like meeting an old friend. I
    tell you I could have swallowed that whole band, trombone and all,
    if such a compliment would have been any gratification to them.

His friends contracted the mining mania; Bob Howland and Raish Phillips
went down to Aurora and acquired “feet” in mini-claims and wrote him
enthusiastic letters. With Captain Nye, the governor’s brother, he
visited them and was presented with an interest which permitted him to
contribute an assessment every now and then toward the development of
the mine; but his enthusiasm still languished.

He was interested more in the native riches above ground than in those
concealed under it. He had heard that the timber around Lake Bigler
(Tahoe) promised vast wealth which could be had for the asking. The lake
itself and the adjacent mountains were said to be beautiful beyond the
dream of art. He decided to locate a timber claim on its shores.

He made the trip afoot with a young Ohio lad, John Kinney, and the
account of this trip as set down in ‘Roughing It’ is one of the best
things in the book. The lake proved all they had expected--more than
they expected; it was a veritable habitation of the gods, with
its delicious, winy atmosphere, its vast colonnades of pines, its
measureless depths of water, so clear that to drift on it was like
floating high aloft in mid-nothingness. They staked out a timber claim
and made a semblance of fencing it and of building a habitation,
to comply with the law; but their chief employment was a complete
abandonment to the quiet luxury of that dim solitude: wandering among
the trees, lounging along the shore, or drifting on that transparent,
insubstantial sea. They did not sleep in their house, he says:

“It never occurred to us, for one thing; and, besides, it was built to
hold the ground, and that was enough. We did not wish to strain it.”

They lived by their camp-fire on the borders of the lake, and one
day--it was just at nightfall--it got away from them, fired the forest,
and destroyed their fence and habitation. His picture in ‘Roughing
It’ of the superb night spectacle, the mighty mountain conflagration
reflected in the waters of the lake, is splendidly vivid. The reader may
wish to compare it with this extract from a letter written to Pamela at
the time.

    The level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the standard-
    bearers, as we called the tall, dead trees, wrapped in fire, and
    waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air. Then we
    could turn from the scene to the lake, and see every branch and leaf
    and cataract of flame upon its banks perfectly reflected, as in a
    gleaming, fiery mirror. The mighty roaring of the conflagration,
    together with our solitary and somewhat unsafe position (for there
    was no one within six miles of us), rendered the scene very
    impressive. Occasionally one of us would remove his pipe from his
    mouth and say, “Superb, magnificent!--beautifull--but--by the Lord
    God Almighty, if we attempt to sleep in this little patch to-night,
    we’ll never live till morning!”

This is good writing too, but it lacks the fancy and the choice of
phrasing which would develop later. The fire ended their first excursion
to Tahoe, but they made others and located other claims--claims in
which the “folks at home,” Mr. Moffett, James Lampton, and others, were
included. It was the same James Lampton who would one day serve as a
model for Colonel Sellers. Evidently Samuel Clemens had a good opinion
of his business capacity in that earlier day, for he writes:

    This is just the country for cousin Jim to live in. I don’t believe
    it would take him six months to make $100,000 here if he had $3,000
    to commence with. I suppose he can’t leave his family, though.

Further along in the same letter his own overflowing Seller’s optimism
develops.

    Orion and I have confidence enough in this country to think that if
    the war lets us alone we can make Mr. Moffett rich without its ever
    costing him a cent or a particle of trouble.

This letter bears date of October 25th, and from it we gather that a
certain interest in mining claims had by this time developed.

    We have got about 1,650 feet of mining ground, and, if it proves
    good, Mr. Moffett’s name will go in, and if not I can get “feet” for
    him in the spring.

    You see, Pamela, the trouble does not consist in getting mining
    ground--for there is plenty enough--but the money to work it with
    after you get it.

He refers to Pamela’s two little children, his niece Annie and Baby
Sam,--[Samuel E. Moffett, in later life a well-known journalist
and editor.]--and promises to enter claims for them--timber claims
probably--for he was by no means sanguine as yet concerning the mines.
That was a long time ago. Tahoe land is sold by the lot, now, to summer
residents. Those claims would have been riches to-day, but they were all
abandoned presently, forgotten in the delirium which goes only with the
pursuit of precious ores.



XXXIII. THE PROSPECTOR

It was not until early winter that Samuel Clemens got the real mining
infection. Everybody had it by that time; the miracle is that he had not
fallen an earlier victim. The wildest stories of sudden fortune were in
the air, some of them undoubtedly true. Men had gone to bed paupers, on
the verge of starvation, and awakened to find themselves millionaires.
Others had sold for a song claims that had been suddenly found to be
fairly stuffed with precious ores. Cart-loads of bricks--silver and
gold--daily drove through the streets.

In the midst of these things reports came from the newly opened Humboldt
region--flamed up with a radiance that was fairly blinding. The papers
declared that Humboldt County “was the richest mineral region on God’s
footstool.” The mountains were said to be literally bursting with gold
and silver. A correspondent of the daily Territorial Enterprise
fairly wallowed in rhetoric, yet found words inadequate to paint the
measureless wealth of the Humboldt mines. No wonder those not already
mad speedily became so. No wonder Samuel Clemens, with his natural
tendency to speculative optimism, yielded to the epidemic and became as
“frenzied as the craziest.” The air to him suddenly began to shimmer;
all his thoughts were of “leads” and “ledges” and “veins”; all his
clouds had silver linings; all his dreams were of gold. He joined
an expedition at once; he reproached himself bitterly for not having
started earlier.

    Hurry was the word! We wasted no time. Our party consisted of four
    persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and
    myself. We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. We put
    1,800 pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove
    out of Carson on a chilly December afternoon.

In a letter to his mother he states that besides provisions and mining
tools, their load consisted of certain luxuries viz., ten pounds of
killikinick, Watts’s Hymns, fourteen decks of cards, Dombey and Son, a
cribbage-board, one small keg of lager-beer, and the “Carmina Sacra.”

The two young lawyers were A. W.(Gus) Oliver (Oliphant in ‘Roughing
It’), and W. H. Clagget. Sam Clemens had known Billy Clagget as a
law student in Keokuk, and they were brought together now by this
association. Both Clagget and Oliver were promising young men, and would
be heard from in time. The blacksmith’s name was Tillou (Ballou), a
sturdy, honest soul with a useful knowledge of mining and the repair
of tools. There were also two dogs in the party--a small curly-tailed
mongrel, Curney, the property of Mr. Tillou, and a young hound. The
combination seemed a strong one.

It proved a weak one in the matter of horses. Oliver and Clemens had
furnished the team, and their selection had not been of the best. It was
two hundred miles to Humboldt, mostly across sand. The horses could not
drag their load and the miners too, so the miners got out. Then they
found it necessary to push.

    Not because we were fond of it, Ma--oh, no! but on Bunker’s account.
    Bunker was the “near” horse on the larboard side, named after the
    attorney-general of this Territory. My horse--and I am sorry you do
    not know him personally, Ma, for I feel toward him, sometimes, as if
    he were a blood relation of our family--he is so lazy, you know--my
    horse--I was going to say, was the “off” horse on the starboard
    side. But it was on Bunker’s account, principally, that we pushed
    behind the wagon. In fact, Ma, that horse had something on his mind
    all the way to Humboldt.--[S. L. C. to his mother. Published in
    the Keokuk (Iowa) Gate city.]--

So they had to push, and most of that two hundred miles through snow and
sand storm they continued to push and swear and groan, sustained only by
the thought that they must arrive at last, when their troubles would all
be at an end, for they would be millionaires in a brief time and never
know want or fatigue any more.

There were compensations: the camp-fire at night was cheerful, the food
satisfying. They bundled close under the blankets and, when it was too
cold to sleep, looked up at the stars, while the future entertainer
of kings would spin yarn after yarn that made his hearers forget their
discomforts. Judge Oliver, the last one of the party alive, in a recent
letter to the writer of this history, says:

    He was the life of the camp; but sometimes there would come a
    reaction and he could hardly speak for a day or two. One day a pack
    of wolves chased us, and the hound Sam speaks of never stopped to
    look back till he reached the next station, many miles ahead.

Judge Oliver adds that an Indian war had just ended, and that they
occasionally passed the charred ruin of a shack, and new graves: This
was disturbing enough. Then they came to that desolation of desolations,
the Alkali Desert, where the sand is of unknown depth, where the road is
strewn thickly with the carcasses of dead beasts of burden, the charred
remains of wagons, chains, bolts, and screws, which thirsty emigrants,
grown desperate, have thrown away in the grand hope of being able, when
less encumbered, to reach water.

They traveled all day and night, pushing through that fierce, waterless
waste to reach camp on the other side. It was three o’clock in the
morning when they got across and dropped down utterly exhausted. Judge
Oliver in his letter tells what happened then:

    The sun was high in the heavens when we were aroused from our sleep
    by a yelling band of Piute warriors. We were upon our feet in an
    instant. The pictures of burning cabins and the lonely graves we
    had passed were in our minds. Our scalps were still our own, and
    not dangling from the belts of our visitors. Sam pulled himself
    together, put his hand on his head as if to make sure he had not
    been scalped, and then with his inimitable drawl said: “Boys, they
    have left us our scalps. Let’s give them all the flour and sugar
    they ask for.” And we did give them a good supply, for we were
    grateful.

They were eleven weary days pushing their wagon and team the two hundred
miles to Unionville, Humboldt County, arriving at last in a driving
snow-storm. Unionville consisted of eleven poor cabins built in the
bottom of a canon, five on one side and six facing them on the other.
They were poor, three-sided, one-room huts, the fourth side formed by
the hill; the roof, a spread of white cotton. Stones used to roll down
on them sometimes, and Mark Twain tells of live stock--specifically of
a mule and cow--that interrupted the patient, long-suffering Oliver, who
was trying to write poetry, and only complained when at last “an entire
cow came rolling down the hill, crashed through on the table, and made a
shapeless wreck of everything.”--[‘The Innocents Abroad.’]

Judge Oliver still does not complain; but he denies the cow. He says
there were no cows in Humboldt in those days, so perhaps it was only a
literary cow, though in any case it will long survive. Judge Oliver’s
name will go down with it to posterity.

In the letter which Samuel Clemens wrote home he tells of what they
found in Unionville.

    “National” there was selling at $50 per foot and assayed $2,496 per
    ton at the mint in San Francisco. And the “Alda Nueva,” “Peru,”
     “Delirio,” “Congress,” “Independent,” and others were immensely rich
    leads. And moreover, having winning ways with us, we could get
    “feet” enough to make us all rich one of these days.

“I confess with shame,” says the author of ‘Roughing It’, “that I
expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground.” And he
adds that he slipped away from the cabin to find a claim on his own
account, and tells how he came staggering back under a load of golden
specimens; also how his specimens proved to be only worthless mica; and
how he learned that in mining nothing that glitters is gold. His account
in ‘Roughing It’ of the Humboldt mining experience is sufficiently
good history to make detail here unnecessary. Tillou instructed them
in prospecting, and in time they located a fairly promising claim.
They went to work on it with pick and shovel, then with drill and
blasting-powder. Then they gave it up.

“One week of this satisfied me. I resigned.”

They tried to tunnel, but soon resigned again. It was pleasanter to
prospect and locate and trade claims and acquire feet in every new
ledge than it was to dig-and about as profitable. The golden reports of
Humboldt had been based on assays of selected rich specimens, and
were mainly delirium and insanity. The Clemens-Clagget-Oliver-Tillou
combination never touched their claims again with pick and shovel,
though their faith, or at least their hope, in them did not immediately
die. Billy Clagget put out his shingle as notary public, and Gus Oliver
put out his as probate judge. Sam Clemens and Tillou, with a fat-witted,
arrogant Prussian named Pfersdoff (Ollendorf) set out for Carson City.
It is not certain what became of the wagon and team, or of the two dogs.

The Carson travelers were water-bound at a tavern on the Carson River
(the scene of the “Arkansas” sketch), with a fighting, drinking lot.
Pfersdoff got them nearly drowned getting away, and finally succeeded
in getting them absolutely lost in the snow. The author of ‘Roughing
It’ tells us how they gave themselves up to die, and how each swore
off whatever he had in the way of an evil habit, how they cast their
tempters-tobacco, cards, and whisky-into the snow. He further tells us
how next morning, when they woke to find themselves alive, within a few
rods of a hostelry, they surreptitiously dug up those things again and,
deep in shame and luxury, resumed their fallen ways: It was the 29th of
January when they reached Carson City. They had been gone not quite two
months, one of which had been spent in travel. It was a brief period,
but it contained an episode, and it seemed like years.



XXXIV. TERRITORIAL CHARACTERISTICS

Meantime, the Territorial secretary had found difficulties in launching
the ship of state. There was no legislative hall in Carson City; and
if Abram Curry, one of the original owners of the celebrated Gould and
Curry mine--“Curry--old Curry--old Abe Curry,” as he called himself--had
not tendered the use of a hall rent free, the first legislature would
have been obliged to “sit in the desert.” Furthermore, Orion had met
with certain acute troubles of his own. The government at Washington had
not appreciated his economies in the matter of cheap office rental, and
it had stipulated the price which he was to pay for public printing
and various other services-prices fixed according to Eastern standards.
These prices did not obtain in Nevada, and when Orion, confident that
because of his other economies the comptroller would stretch a point
and allow the increased frontier tariff, he was met with the usual
thick-headed official lack of imagination, with the result that the
excess paid was deducted from his slender salary. With a man of less
conscience this condition would easily have been offset by another
wherein other rates, less arbitrary, would have been adjusted to
negotiate the official deficit. With Orion Clemens such a remedy was not
even considered; yielding, unstable, blown by every wind of influence
though he was, Orion’s integrity was a rock.

Governor Nye was among those who presently made this discovery. Old
politician that he was--former police commissioner of New York City--Nye
took care of his own problems in the customary manner. To him, politics
was simply a game--to be played to win. He was a popular, jovial man,
well liked and thought of, but he did not lie awake, as Orion did,
planning economies for the government, or how to make up excess charges
out of his salary. To him Nevada was simply a doorway to the United
States Senate, and in the mean time his brigade required official
recognition and perquisites. The governor found Orion Clemens an
impediment to this policy. Orion could not be brought to a proper
political understanding of “special bills and accounts,” and relations
between the secretary of state and the governor were becoming strained.

It was about this time that the man who had been potentate of the
pilot-house of a Mississippi River steamer returned from Humboldt. He
was fond of the governor, but he had still higher regard for the family
integrity. When he had heard Orion’s troubled story, he called on
Governor Nye and delivered himself in his own fashion. In his former
employments he had acquired a vocabulary and moral backbone sufficient
to his needs. We may regret that no stenographic report was made of the
interview. It would be priceless now. But it is lost; we only know that
Orion’s rectitude was not again assailed, and that curiously enough
Governor Nye apparently conceived a strong admiration and respect for
his brother.

Samuel Clemens, miner, remained but a brief time in Carson City--only
long enough to arrange for a new and more persistent venture. He did not
confess his Humboldt failure to his people; in fact, he had not as yet
confessed it to himself; his avowed purpose was to return to Humboldt
after a brief investigation of the Esmeralda mines. He had been paying
heavy assessments on his holdings there; and, with a knowledge of mining
gained at Unionville, he felt that his personal attention at Aurora
might be important. As a matter of fact, he was by this time fairly daft
on the subject of mines and mining, with the rest of the community for
company.

His earlier praises of the wonders and climate of Tahoe had inspired his
sister Pamela, always frail, with a desire to visit that health-giving
land. Perhaps he felt that he recommended the country somewhat too
highly.

“By George, Pamela,” he said, “I begin to fear that I have invoked a
spirit of some kind or other, which I will find more than difficult to
allay.” He proceeds to recommend California as a residence for any or
all of them, but he is clearly doubtful concerning Nevada.

    Some people are malicious enough to think that if the devil were set
    at liberty and told to confine himself to Nevada Territory, he would
    come here and look sadly around awhile, and then get homesick and go
    back to hell again.... Why, I have had my whiskers and mustaches
    so full of alkali dust that you’d have thought I worked in a starch
    factory and boarded in a flour barrel.

But then he can no longer restrain his youth and optimism. How could
he, with a fortune so plainly in view? It was already in his grasp in
imagination; he was on the way home with it.

    I expect to return to St. Louis in July--per steamer. I don’t say
    that I will return then, or that I shall be able to do it--but I
    expect to--you bet. I came down here from Humboldt, in order to
    look after our Esmeralda interests. Yesterday, Bob Howland arrived
    here, and I have had a talk with him. He owns with me in the
    “Horatio and Derby” ledge. He says our tunnel is in 52 feet, and a
    small stream of water has been struck, which bids fair to become a
    “big thing” by the time the ledge is reached--sufficient to supply a
    mill. Now, if you knew anything of the value of water here, you
    would perceive at a glance that if the water should amount to 50 or
    100 inches, we wouldn’t care whether school kept or not. If the
    ledge should prove to be worthless, we’d sell the water for money
    enough to give us quite a lift. But, you see, the ledge will not
    prove to be worthless. We have located, near by, a fine site for a
    mill, and when we strike the ledge, you know, we’ll have a mill-
    site, water-power, and payrock, all handy. Then we sha’n’t care
    whether we have capital or not. Mill folks will build us a mill,
    and wait for their pay. If nothing goes wrong, we’ll strike the
    ledge in June--and if we do, I’ll be home in July, you know.

He pauses at this point for a paragraph of self-analysis--characteristic
and crystal-clear.

    So, just keep your clothes on, Pamela, until I come. Don’t you know
    that undemonstrated human calculations won’t do to bet on? Don’t
    you know that I have only talked, as yet, but proved nothing? Don’t
    you know that I have expended money in this country but have made
    none myself? Don’t you know that I have never held in my hands a
    gold or silver bar that belonged to me? Don’t you know that it’s
    all talk and no cider so far? Don’t you know that people who always
    feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them--who
    have the organ of Hope preposterously developed--who are endowed
    with an unconcealable sanguine temperament--who never feel concerned
    about the price of corn--and who cannot, by any possibility,
    discover any but the bright side of a picture--are very apt to go to
    extremes and exaggerate with 40-horse microscopic power?

                     But-but
              In the bright lexicon of youth,
              There is no such word as Fail--
                  and I’ll prove it!

Whereupon, he lets himself go again, full-tilt:

    By George, if I just had a thousand dollars I’d be all right! Now
    there’s the “Horatio,” for instance. There are five or six
    shareholders in it, and I know I could buy half of their interests
    at, say $20 per foot, now that flour is worth $50 per barrel and
    they are pressed for money, but I am hard up myself, and can’t buy
    --and in June they’ll strike the ledge, and then “good-by canary.”
     I can’t get it for love or money. Twenty dollars a foot! Think of
    it! For ground that is proven to be rich. Twenty dollars, Madam-
    and we wouldn’t part with a foot of our 75 for five times the sum.
    So it will be in Humboldt next summer. The boys will get pushed and
    sell ground for a song that is worth a fortune. But I am at the
    helm now. I have convinced Orion that he hasn’t business talent
    enough to carry on a peanut-stand, and he has solemnly promised me
    that he will meddle no more with mining or other matters not
    connected with the secretary’s office. So, you see, if mines are to
    be bought or sold, or tunnels run or shafts sunk, parties have to
    come to me--and me only. I’m the “firm,” you know.

There are pages of this, all glowing with golden expectations and
plans. Ah, well! we have all written such letters home at one time and
another-of gold-mines of one form or another.

He closes at last with a bit of pleasantry for his mother.

    Ma says: “It looks like a man can’t hold public office and be
    honest.” Why, certainly not, Madam. A man can’t hold public office
    and be honest. Lord bless you, it is a common practice with Orion
    to go about town stealing little things that happen to be lying
    around loose. And I don’t remember having heard him speak the truth
    since we have been in Nevada. He even tries to prevail upon me to
    do these things, Ma, but I wasn’t brought up in that way, you know.
    You showed the public what you could do in that line when you raised
    me, Madam. But then you ought to have raised me first, so that
    Orion could have had the benefit of my example. Do you know that he
    stole all the stamps out of an 8-stamp quartz-mill one night, and
    brought them home under his overcoat and hid them in the back room?



XXXV. THE MINER

He had about exhausted his own funds by this time, and it was necessary
that Orion should become the financier. The brothers owned their
Esmeralda claims in partnership, and it was agreed that Orion, out of
his modest depleted pay, should furnish the means, while the other would
go actively into the field and develop their riches. Neither had the
slightest doubt but that they would be millionaires presently, and both
were willing to struggle and starve for the few intervening weeks.

It was February when the printer-pilot-miner arrived in Aurora, that
rough, turbulent camp of the Esmeralda district lying about one hundred
miles south of Carson City, on the edge of California, in the Sierra
slopes. Everything was frozen and covered with snow; but there was no
lack of excitement and prospecting and grabbing for “feet” in this ledge
and that, buried deep under the ice and drift. The new arrival camped
with Horatio Phillips (Raish), in a tiny cabin with a domestic roof
(the ruin of it still stands), and they cooked and bunked together
and combined their resources in a common fund. Bob Howland joined them
presently, and later an experienced miner, Calvin H. Higbie (Cal),
one day to be immortalized in the story of ‘Roughing It’ and in the
dedication of that book. Around the cabin stove they would gather, and
paw over their specimens, or test them with blow-pipe and “horn” spoon,
after which they would plan tunnels and figure estimates of prospective
wealth. Never mind if the food was poor and scanty, and the chill wind
came in everywhere, and the roof leaked like a filter; they were living
in a land where all the mountains were banked with nuggets, where all
the rivers ran gold. Bob Howland declared later that they used to go out
at night and gather up empty champagne-bottles and fruit-tins and pile
them in the rear of their cabin to convey to others the appearance of
affluence and high living. When they lacked for other employment and
were likely to be discouraged, the ex-pilot would “ride the bunk” and
smoke and, without money and without price, distribute riches more
valuable than any they would ever dig out of those Esmeralda Hills. At
other times he talked little or not at all, but sat in one corner and
wrote, wholly oblivious of his surroundings. They thought he was writing
letters, though letters were not many and only to Orion during this
period. It was the old literary impulse stirring again, the desire to
set things down for their own sake, the natural hunger for print. One
or two of his earlier letters home had found their way into a Keokuk
paper--the ‘Gate City’. Copies containing them had gone back to Orion,
who had shown them to a representative of the Territorial Enterprise,
a young man named Barstow, who thought them amusing. The Enterprise
reprinted at least one of these letters, or portions of it, and with
this encouragement the author of it sent an occasional contribution
direct to that paper over the pen-name “Josh.” He did not care to sign
his own name. He was a miner who was soon to be a magnate; he had no
desire to be known as a camp scribbler.

He received no pay for these offerings, and expected none. They were
sketches of a broadly burlesque sort, the robust horse-play kind of
humor that belongs to the frontier. They were not especially promising
efforts. One of them was about an old rackabones of a horse, a sort of
preliminary study for “Oahu,” of the Sandwich Islands, or “Baalbec” and
“Jericho,” of Syria. If any one had told him, or had told any reader of
this sketch, that the author of it was knocking at the door of the house
of fame such a person’s judgment or sincerity would have been open to
doubt. Nevertheless, it was true, though the knock was timid and halting
and the summons to cross the threshold long delayed.

A winter mining-camp is the most bleak and comfortless of places. The
saloon and gambling-house furnished the only real warmth and cheer. Our
Aurora miners would have been less than human, or more, if they had not
found diversion now and then in the happy harbors of sin. Once there was
a great ball given at a newly opened pavilion, and Sam Clemens is
said to have distinguished himself by his unrestrained and spontaneous
enjoyment of the tripping harmony. Cal Higbie, who was present, writes:

    In changing partners, whenever he saw a hand raised he would grasp
    it with great pleasure and sail off into another set, oblivious to
    his surroundings. Sometimes he would act as though there was no use
    in trying to go right or to dance like other people, and with his
    eyes closed he would do a hoe-down or a double-shuffle all alone,
    talking to himself and saying that he never dreamed there was so
    much pleasure to be obtained at a ball. It was all as natural as a
    child’s play. By the second set, all the ladies were falling over
    themselves to get him for a partner, and most of the crowd, too full
    of mirth to dance, were standing or sitting around, dying with
    laughter.

What a child he always was--always, to the very end? With the first
break of winter the excitement that had been fermenting and stewing
around camp stoves overflowed into the streets, washed up the gullies,
and assailed the hills. There came then a period of madness, beside
which the Humboldt excitement had been mere intoxication. Higbie says:

    It was amazing how wild the people became all over the Pacific
    coast. In San Francisco and other large cities barbers, hack-
    drivers, servant-girls, merchants, and nearly every class of people
    would club together and send agents representing all the way from
    $5,000 to $500,000 or more to buy mines. They would buy anything.
    in the shape of quartz, whether it contained any mineral value or
    not.

The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion are humanly
documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their movement; they
show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed
excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom humorous,
except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are likely to be
violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the flourish of youth
has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the
gambling mania of which mining is the ultimate form. An extract from a
letter of April is a fair exhibit:

    Work not yet begun on the “Horatio and Derby”--haven’t seen it yet.
    It is still in the snow. Shall begin on it within 3 or 4 weeks
    --strike the ledge in July: Guess it is good--worth from $30 to $50
    a foot in California....

    Man named Gebhart shot here yesterday while trying to defend a claim
    on Last Chance Hill. Expect he will die.

    These mills here are not worth a d--n--except Clayton’s--and it is
    not in full working trim yet.

    Send me $40 or $50--by mail-immediately. I go to work to-morrow
    with pick and shovel. Something’s got to come, by G--, before I let
    go here.

By the end of April work had become active in the mines, though the snow
in places was still deep and the ground stony with frost. On the 28th he
writes:

    I have been at work all day blasting and digging, and d--ning one of
    our new claims--“Dashaway”--which I don’t think a great deal of, but
    which I am willing to try. We are down, now, 10 or 12 a feet. We
    are following down under the ledge, but not taking it out. If we
    get up a windlass to-morrow we shall take out the ledge, and see
    whether it is worth anything or not.

It must have been hard work picking away at the flinty ledges in the
cold; and the “Dashaway” would seem to have proven a disappointment,
for there is no promising mention of it again. Instead, we hear of
the “Flyaway;” and “Annipolitan” and the “Live Yankee” and of a dozen
others, each of which holds out the beacon of hope for a little while
and then passes from notice forever. In May it is the “Monitor” that
is sure to bring affluence, though realization is no longer regarded as
immediate.

    To use a French expression, I have “got my d---d satisfy” at last.
    Two years’ time will make us capitalists, in spite of anything.

    Therefore we need fret and fume and worry and doubt no more, but
    just lie still and put up with privation for six months. Perhaps 3
    months will “let us out.” Then, if government refuses to pay the
    rent on your new office we can do it ourselves. We have got to wait
    six weeks, anyhow, for a dividend--maybe longer--but that it will
    come there is no shadow of a doubt. I have got the thing sifted
    down to a dead moral certainty. I own one-eighth of the new
    “Monitor Ledge, Clemens Company,” and money can’t buy a foot of it;
    because I know it to contain our fortune. The ledge is six feet
    wide, and one needs no glass to see gold and silver in it....

    When you and I came out here we did not expect ‘63 or ‘64 to find us
    rich men--and if that proposition had been made we would have
    accepted it gladly. Now, it is made. I am willing, now, that
    “Neary’s tunnel” or anybody else’s tunnel shall succeed. Some of
    them may beat us a few months, but we shall be on hand in the
    fullness of time, as sure as fate. I would hate to swap chances
    with any member of the tribe....

It is the same man who twenty-five years later would fasten his faith
and capital to a type-setting machine and refuse to exchange stock in
it, share for share, with the Mergenthaler linotype. He adds:

    But I have struck my tent in Esmeralda, and I care for no mines but
    those which I can superintend myself. I am a citizen here now, and
    I am satisfied, although Ratio and I are “strapped” and we haven’t
    three days’ rations in the house.... I shall work the “Monitor” and
    the other claims with my own hands. I prospected 3/4 of a pound of
    “Monitor” yesterday, and Raish reduced it with the blow-pipe, and
    got about 10 or 12 cents in gold and silver, besides the other half
    of it which we spilt on the floor and didn’t get....

    I tried to break a handsome chunk from a huge piece of my darling
    “Monitor” which we brought from the croppings yesterday, but it all
    splintered up, and I send you the scraps. I call that “choice”--any
    d---d fool would.

    Don’t ask if it has been assayed, for it hasn’t. It don’t need it.
    It is simply able to speak for itself. It is six feet wide on top,
    and traversed through with veins whose color proclaims their worth.

    What the devil does a man want with any more feet when he owns in
    the invincible bomb-proof “Monitor”?

There is much more of this, and other such letters, most of them ending
with demands for money. The living, the tools, the blasting-powder, and
the help eat it up faster than Orion’s salary can grow.

“Send me $50 or $100, all you can spare; put away $150 subject to my
call--we shall need it soon for the tunnel.” The letters are full of
such admonition, and Orion, more insane, if anything, than his brother,
is scraping his dollars and pennies together to keep the mines going.
He is constantly warned to buy no claims on his own account and promises
faithfully, but cannot resist now and then when luring baits are laid
before him, though such ventures invariably result in violent and
profane protests from Aurora.

“The pick and shovel are the only claims I have any confidence in now,”
 the miner concludes, after one fierce outburst. “My back is sore, and my
hands are blistered with handling them to-day.”

But even the pick and shovel did not inspire confidence a little later.
He writes that the work goes slowly, very slowly, but that they still
hope to strike it some day. “But--if we strike it rich--I’ve lost my
guess, that’s all.” Then he adds: “Couldn’t go on the hill to-day. It
snowed. It always snows here, I expect”; and the final heart-sick line,
“Don’t you suppose they have pretty much quit writing at home?”

This is midsummer, and snow still interferes with the work. One feels
the dreary uselessness of the quest.

Yet resolution did not wholly die, or even enthusiasm. These things were
as recurrent as new prospects, which were plentiful enough. In a still
subsequent letter he declares that he will never look upon his mother’s
face again, or his sister’s, or get married, or revisit the “Banner
State,” until he is a rich man, though there is less assurance than
desperation in the words.

In ‘Roughing It’ the author tells us that, when flour had reached one
dollar a pound and he could no longer get the dollar, he abandoned
mining and went to milling “as a common laborer in a quartz-mill at
ten dollars a week.” This statement requires modification. It was not
entirely for the money that he undertook the laborious task of washing
“riffles” and “screening tailings.” The money was welcome enough, no
doubt, but the greater purpose was to learn refining, so that when
his mines developed he could establish his own mill and personally
superintend the work. It is like him to wish us to believe that he
was obliged to give up being a mining magnate to become a laborer in
a quartz-mill, for there is a grim humor in the confession. That
he abandoned the milling experiment at the end of a week is a true
statement. He got a violent cold in the damp place, and came near
getting salivated, he says in a letter, “working in the quicksilver
and chemicals. I hardly think I shall try the experiment again. It is a
confining business, and I will not be confined for love or money.”

As recreation after this trying experience, Higbie took him on a tour,
prospecting for the traditional “Cement Mine,” a lost claim where, in a
deposit of cement rock, gold nuggets were said to be as thick as raisins
in a fruitcake. They did not find the mine, but they visited Mono
Lake--that ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, which in
‘Roughing It’ he has so vividly pictured. It was good to get away from
the stress of things; and they repeated the experiment. They made a
walking trip to Yosemite, carrying their packs, camping and fishing in
that far, tremendous isolation, which in those days few human beings had
ever visited at all. Such trips furnished a delicious respite from the
fevered struggle around tunnel and shaft. Amid mountain-peaks and giant
forests and by tumbling falls the quest for gold hardly seemed worth
while. More than once that summer he went alone into the wilderness to
find his balance and to get away entirely from humankind.



XXXVI. LAST MINING DAYS

It was late in July when he wrote:

    If I do not forget it, I will send you, per next mail, a pinch of
    decom. (decomposed rock) which I pinched with thumb and finger from
    Wide West ledge a while ago. Raish and I have secured 200 out of a
    company with 400 ft. in it, which perhaps (the ledge, I mean) is a
    spur from the W. W.--our shaft is about 100 ft. from the W. W.
    shaft. In order to get in, we agreed to sink 30 ft. We have sublet
    to another man for 50 ft., and we pay for powder and sharpening
    tools.

This was the “Blind Lead” claim of Roughing It, but the episode as
set down in that book is somewhat dramatized. It is quite true that
he visited and nursed Captain Nye while Higbie was off following the
“Cement” ‘ignus fatuus’ and that the “Wide West” holdings were forfeited
through neglect. But if the loss was regarded as a heavy one, the
letters fail to show it. It is a matter of dispute to-day whether or not
the claim was ever of any value. A well-known California author--[Ella
Sterling Cummins, author of The Story of the Files, etc]--declares:

    No one need to fear that he ran any chance of being a millionaire
    through the “Wide West” mine, for the writer, as a child, played
    over that historic spot and saw only a shut-down mill and desolate
    hole in the ground to mark the spot where over-hopeful men had sunk
    thousands and thousands, that they never recovered.

The “Blind Lead” episode, as related, is presumably a tale of what might
have happened--a possibility rather than an actuality. It is vividly
true in atmosphere, however, and forms a strong and natural climax for
closing the mining episode, while the literary privilege warrants any
liberties he may have taken for art’s sake.

In reality the close of his mining career was not sudden and
spectacular; it was a lingering close, a reluctant and gradual
surrender. The “Josh” letters to the Enterprise had awakened at least a
measure of interest, and Orion had not failed to identify their author
when any promising occasion offered; as a result certain tentative
overtures had been made for similar material. Orion eagerly communicated
such chances, for the money situation was becoming a desperate one. A
letter from the Aurora miner written near the end of July presents the
situation very fully. An extract or two will be sufficient:

    My debts are greater than I thought for--I bought $25 worth of
    clothing and sent $25 to Higbie, in the cement diggings. I owe
    about $45 or $50, and have got about $45 in my pocket. But how in
    the h--l I am going to live on something over $100 until October or
    November is singular. The fact is, I must have something to do, and
    that shortly, too.... Now write to the Sacramento Union folks, or
    to Marsh, and tell them I’ll write as many letters a week as they
    want for $10 a week. My board must be paid. Tell them I have
    corresponded with the N. Orleans Crescent and other papers--and the
    Enterprise.

    If they want letters from here--who’ll run from morning till night
    collecting material cheaper? I’ll write a short letter twice a
    week, for the present for the ‘Age’, for $5 per week. Now it has
    been a long time since I couldn’t make my own living, and it shall
    be a long time before I loaf another year.

Nothing came of these possibilities, but about this time Barstow, of the
Enterprise, conferred with Joseph T. Goodman, editor and owner of the
paper, as to the advisability of adding the author of the “Josh” letters
to their local staff. Joe Goodman, who had as keen a literary perception
as any man that ever pitched a journalistic tent on the Pacific coast
(and there could be no higher praise than that), looked over the letters
and agreed with Barstow that the man who wrote them had “something in
him.” Two of the sketches in particular he thought promising. One of
them was a burlesque report of an egotistical lecturer who was referred
to as “Professor Personal Pronoun.” It closed by stating that it was
“impossible to print his lecture in full, as the type-cases had run out
of capital I’s.” But it was the other sketch which settled Goodman’s
decision. It was also a burlesque report, this time of a Fourth-of-July
oration. It opened, “I was sired by the Great American Eagle and foaled
by a continental dam.” This was followed by a string of stock patriotic
phrases absurdly arranged. But it was the opening itself that won
Goodman’s heart.

“That is the sort of thing we want,” he said. “Write to him, Barstow,
and ask him if he wants to come up here.”

Barstow wrote, offering twenty-five dollars a week, a tempting sum. This
was at the end of July, 1862.

In ‘Roughing It’ we are led to believe that the author regarded this as
a gift from heaven and accepted it straightaway. As a matter of fact,
he fasted and prayed a good while over the “call.” To Orion he wrote
Barstow has offered me the post as local reporter for the Enterprise at
$25 a week, and I have written him that I will let him know next mail,
if possible.

There was no desperate eagerness, you see, to break into literature,
even under those urgent conditions. It meant the surrender of all hope
in the mines, the confession of another failure. On August 7th he wrote
again to Orion. He had written to Barstow, he said, asking when they
thought he might be needed. He was playing for time to consider.

Now, I shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk
of 60 or 70 miles through a totally uninhabited country, and it is
barely possible that mail facilities may prove infernally “slow.” But do
you write Barstow that I have left here for a week or so, and in case he
should want me, he must write me here, or let me know through you.

So he had gone into the wilderness to fight out his battle alone. But
eight days later, when he had returned, there was still no decision. In
a letter to Pamela of this date he refers playfully to the discomforts
of his cabin and mentions a hope that he will spend the winter in
San Francisco; but there is no reference in it to any newspaper
prospects--nor to the mines, for that matter. Phillips, Howland, and
Higbie would seem to have given up by this time, and he was camping with
Dan Twing and a dog, a combination amusingly described. It is a pleasant
enough letter, but the note of discouragement creeps in:

    I did think for a while of going home this fall--but when I found
    that that was, and had been, the cherished intention and the darling
    aspiration every year of these old care-worn Californians for twelve
    weary years, I felt a little uncomfortable, so I stole a march on
    Disappointment and said I would not go home this fall. This country
    suits me, and it shall suit me whether or no.

He was dying hard, desperately hard; how could he know, to paraphrase
the old form of Christian comfort, that his end as a miner would mean,
in another sphere, “a brighter resurrection” than even his rainbow
imagination could paint?



XXXVII. THE NEW ESTATE

It was the afternoon of a hot, dusty August day when a worn,
travel-stained pilgrim drifted laggingly into the office of the Virginia
City Enterprise, then in its new building on C Street, and, loosening a
heavy roll of blankets from his shoulders, dropped wearily into a chair.
He wore a rusty slouch hat, no coat, a faded blue flannel shirt, a
Navy revolver; his trousers were hanging on his boot tops. A tangle of
reddish-brown hair fell on his shoulders, and a mass of tawny beard,
dingy with alkali dust, dropped half-way to his waist.

Aurora lay one hundred and thirty miles from Virginia. He had walked
that distance, carrying his heavy load. Editor Goodman was absent at the
moment, but the other proprietor, Denis E. McCarthy, signified that the
caller might state his errand. The wanderer regarded him with a far-away
look and said, absently and with deliberation:

“My starboard leg seems to be unshipped. I’d like about one hundred
yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces.” Then he added: “I want
to see Mr. Barstow, or Mr. Goodman. My name is Clemens, and I’ve come to
write for the paper.”

It was the master of the world’s widest estate come to claim his
kingdom:

William Wright, who had won a wide celebrity on the Coast as Dan de
Quille, was in the editorial chair and took charge of the new arrival.
He was going on a trip to the States soon; it was mainly on this account
that the new man had been engaged. The “Josh” letters were very good,
in Dan’s opinion; he gave their author a cordial welcome, and took him
around to his boarding-place. It was the beginning of an association
that continued during Samuel Clemens’s stay in Virginia City and of a
friendship that lasted many years.

The Territorial Enterprise was one of the most remarkable frontier
papers ever published. Its editor-in-chief, Joseph Goodman, was a man
with rare appreciation, wide human understanding, and a comprehensive
newspaper policy. Being a young man, he had no policy, in fact, beyond
the general purpose that his paper should be a forum for absolutely
free speech, provided any serious statement it contained was based upon
knowledge. His instructions to the new reporter were about as follows:

“Never say we learn so and so, or it is rumored, or we understand so and
so; but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts; then speak out
and say it is so and so. In the one case you are likely to be shot, and
in the other you are pretty certain to be; but you will preserve the
public confidence.”

Goodman was not new to the West. He had come to California as a boy and
had been a miner, explorer, printer, and contributor by turns. Early
in ‘61, when the Comstock Lode--[Named for its discoverer, Henry T.
P. Comstock, a half-crazy miner, who realized very little from his
stupendous find.]--was new and Virginia in the first flush of its
monster boom, he and Denis McCarthy had scraped together a few dollars
and bought the paper. It had been a hand-to-hand struggle for a
while, but in a brief two years, from a starving sheet in a shanty
the Enterprise, with new building, new presses, and a corps of swift
compositors brought up from San Francisco, had become altogether
metropolitan, as well as the most widely considered paper on the Coast.
It had been borne upward by the Comstock tide, though its fearless,
picturesque utterance would have given it distinction anywhere. Goodman
himself was a fine, forceful writer, and Dan de Quille and R. M. Daggett
(afterward United States minister to Hawaii) were representative
of Enterprise men.--[The Comstock of that day became famous for its
journalism. Associated with the Virginia papers then or soon afterward
were such men as Tom Fitch (the silver-tongued orator), Alf Doten, W.
J. Forbes, C. C. Goodwin, H. R. Mighels, Clement T. Rice, Arthur McEwen,
and Sam Davis--a great array indeed for a new Territory.]--Samuel
Clemens fitted precisely into this group. He added the fresh, rugged
vigor of thought and expression that was the very essence of the
Comstock, which was like every other frontier mining-camp, only on a
more lavish, more overwhelming scale.

There was no uncertainty about the Comstock; the silver and gold were
there. Flanking the foot of Mount Davidson, the towns of Gold Hill
and Virginia and the long street between were fairly underburrowed and
underpinned by the gigantic mining construction of that opulent lode
whose treasures were actually glutting the mineral markets of the world.
The streets overhead seethed and swarmed with miners, mine owners, and
adventurers--riotous, rollicking children of fortune, always ready to
drink and make merry, as eager in their pursuit of pleasure as of gold.
Comstockers would always laugh at a joke; the rougher the better. The
town of Virginia itself was just a huge joke to most of them. Everybody
had, money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a good time. The
Enterprise, “Comstock to the backbone,” did what it could to help things
along.

It was a sort of free ring, with every one for himself. Goodman let the
boys write and print in accordance with their own ideas and upon any
subject. Often they wrote of each other--squibs and burlesques, which
gratified the Comstock far more than mere news.--[The indifference
to ‘news’ was noble--none the less so because it was so blissfully
unconscious. Editors Mark or Dan would dismiss a murder with a couple
of inches and sit down and fill up a column with a fancy sketch: “Arthur
McEwen”]--It was the proper class-room for Mark Twain, an encouraging
audience and free utterance: fortune could have devised nothing better
for him than that.

He was peculiarly fitted for the position. Unspoiled humanity appealed
to him, and the Comstock presented human nature in its earliest
landscape forms. Furthermore, the Comstock was essentially
optimistic--so was he; any hole in the ground to him held a possible,
even a probable, fortune.

His pilot memory became a valuable asset in news-gathering. Remembering
marks, banks, sounding, and other river detail belonged apparently in
the same category of attainments as remembering items and localities of
news. He could travel all day without a note-book and at night reproduce
the day’s budget or at least the picturesqueness of it, without
error. He was presently accounted a good reporter, except where
statistics--measurements and figures--were concerned. These he gave
“a lick and a promise,” according to De Quille, who wrote afterward of
their associations. De Quille says further:

    Mark and I agreed well in our work, which we divided when there was
    a rush of events; but we often cruised in company, he taking the
    items of news he could handle best, and I such as I felt competent
    to work up. However, we wrote at the same table and frequently
    helped each other with such suggestions as occurred to us during the
    brief consultations we held in regard to the handling of any matters
    of importance. Never was there an angry word between us in all the
    time we worked together.

De Quille tells how Clemens clipped items with a knife when there were
no scissors handy, and slashed through on the top of his desk, which
in time took on the semblance “of a huge polar star, spiritedly dashing
forth a thousand rays.”

The author of ‘Roughing It’ has given us a better picture of the
Virginia City of those days and his work there than any one else will
ever write. He has made us feel the general spirit of affluence that
prevailed; how the problem was not to get money, but to spend it; how
“feet” in any one of a hundred mines could be had for the asking; how
such shares were offered like apples or cigars or bonbons, as a natural
matter of courtesy when one happened to have his supply in view; how any
one connected with a newspaper would have stocks thrust upon him, and
how in a brief time he had acquired a trunk ful of such riches and
usually had something to sell when any of the claims made a stir on the
market. He has told us of the desperadoes and their trifling regard for
human life, and preserved other elemental characters of these prodigal
days. The funeral of Buck Fanshaw that amazing masterpiece--is a
complete epitome of the social frontier.

It would not be the part of wisdom to attempt another inclusive
presentation of Comstock conditions. We may only hope to add a few
details of history, justified now by time and circumstances, to
supplement the picture with certain data of personality preserved from
the drift of years.



XXXVIII. ONE OF THE “STAFF”

The new reporter found acquaintance easy. The office force was like one
family among which there was no line of caste. Proprietors, editors, and
printers were social equals; there was little ceremony among them--none
at all outside of the office.--[“The paper went to press at two in the
morning, then all the staff and all the compositors gathered themselves
together in the composing-room and drank beer and sang the popular
war-songs of the day until dawn.”--S. L. C., in 1908.]--Samuel Clemens
immediately became “Sam,” or “Josh,” to his associates, just as De
Quille was “Dan” and Goodman “Joe.” He found that he disliked the name
of Josh, and, as he did not sign it again, it was presently dropped.
The office, and Virginia City generally, quickly grew fond of him,
delighting in his originality and measured speech. Enterprise readers
began to identify his work, then unsigned, and to enjoy its fresh
phrasing, even when it was only the usual local item or mining notice.
True to its name and reputation, the paper had added a new attraction.

It was only a brief time after his arrival in Virginia City that Clemens
began the series of hoaxes which would carry his reputation, not always
in an enviable fashion, across the Sierras and down the Pacific coast.
With one exception these are lost to-day, for so far as known there
is not a single file of the Enterprise in existence. Only a few stray
copies and clippings are preserved, but we know the story of some of
these literary pranks and of their results. They were usually intended
as a special punishment of some particular individual or paper or
locality; but victims were gathered by the wholesale in their seductive
web. Mark Twain himself, in his book of Sketches, has set down something
concerning the first of these, “The Petrified Man,” and of another, “My
Bloody Massacre,” but in neither case has he told it all. “The Petrified
Man” hoax was directed at an official named Sewall, a coroner and
justice of the peace at Humboldt, who had been pompously indifferent in
the matter of supplying news. The story, told with great circumstance
and apparent care as to detail, related the finding of a petrified
prehistoric man, partially imbedded in a rock, in a cave in the desert
more than one hundred miles from Humboldt, and how Sewall had made the
perilous five-day journey in the alkali waste to hold an inquest over
a man that had been dead three hundred years; also how, “with that
delicacy so characteristic of him,” Sewall had forbidden the miners
from blasting him from his position. The account further stated that
the hands of the deceased were arranged in a peculiar fashion; and the
description of the arrangement was so skilfully woven in with other
matters that at first, or even second, reading one might not see that
the position indicated was the ancient one which begins with the
thumb at the nose and in many ages has been used impolitely to express
ridicule and the word “sold.” But the description was a shade too
ingenious. The author expected that the exchanges would see the jolt
and perhaps assist in the fun he would have with Sewall. He did not
contemplate a joke on the papers themselves. As a matter of fact, no one
saw the “sell” and most of the papers printed his story of the petrified
man as a genuine discovery. This was a surprise, and a momentary
disappointment; then he realized that he had builded better than he
knew. He gathered up a bundle of the exchanges and sent them to Sewall;
also he sent marked copies to scientific men in various parts of the
United States. The papers had taken it seriously; perhaps the scientists
would. Some of them did, and Sewall’s days became unhappy because of
letters received asking further information. As literature, the effort
did not rank high, and as a trick on an obscure official it was hardly
worth while; but, as a joke on the Coast exchanges and press generally,
it was greatly regarded and its author, though as yet unnamed, acquired
prestige.

Inquiries began to be made as to who was the smart chap in Virginia that
did these things. The papers became wary and read Enterprise items twice
before clipping them. Clemens turned his attention to other matters to
lull suspicion. The great “Dutch Nick Massacre” did not follow until a
year later.

Reference has already been made to the Comstock’s delight in humor of
a positive sort. The practical joke was legal tender in Virginia. One
might protest and swear, but he must take it. An example of Comstock
humor, regarded as the finest assay, is an incident still told of Leslie
Blackburn and Pat Holland, two gay men about town. They were coming
down C Street one morning when they saw some fine watermelons on a
fruit-stand at the International Hotel corner. Watermelons were rare
and costly in that day and locality, and these were worth three dollars
apiece. Blackburn said:

“Pat, let’s get one of those watermelons. You engage that fellow in
conversation while I stand at the corner, where I can step around out
of sight easily. When you have got him interested, point to something on
the back shelf and pitch me a melon.”

This appealed to Holland, and he carried out his part of the plan
perfectly; but when he pitched the watermelon Blackburn simply put his
hands in his pockets, and stepped around the corner, leaving the melon
a fearful disaster on the pavement. It was almost impossible for Pat to
explain to the fruit-man why he pitched away a three-dollar melon like
that even after paying for it, and it was still more trying, also
more expensive, to explain to the boys facing the various bars along C
Street.

Sam Clemens, himself a practical joker in his youth, found a healthy
delight in this knock-down humor of the Comstock. It appealed to his
vigorous, elemental nature. He seldom indulged physically in such
things; but his printed squibs and hoaxes and his keen love of the
ridiculous placed him in the joker class, while his prompt temper, droll
manner, and rare gift of invective made him an enticing victim.

Among the Enterprise compositors was one by the name of Stephen E.
Gillis (Steve, of course--one of the “fighting Gillises”), a small,
fearless young fellow, handsome, quick of wit, with eyes like
needle-points.

“Steve weighed only ninety-five pounds,” Mark Twain once wrote of him,
“but it was well known throughout the Territory that with his fists he
could whip anybody that walked on two legs, let his weight and science
be what they might.”

Clemens was fond of Steve Gillis from the first. The two became closely
associated in time, and were always bosom friends; but Steve was a
merciless joker, and never as long as they were together could he
“resist the temptation of making Sam swear,” claiming that his profanity
was grander than any music.

A word hereabout Mark Twain’s profanity. Born with a matchless gift of
phrase, the printing-office, the river, and the mines had developed it
in a rare perfection. To hear him denounce a thing was to give one the
fierce, searching delight of galvanic waves. Every characterization
seemed the most perfect fit possible until he applied the next. And
somehow his profanity was seldom an offense. It was not mere idle
swearing; it seemed always genuine and serious. His selection of epithet
was always dignified and stately, from whatever source--and it might
be from the Bible or the gutter. Some one has defined dirt as misplaced
matter. It is perhaps the greatest definition ever uttered. It is
absolutely universal in its application, and it recurs now, remembering
Mark Twain’s profanity. For it was rarely misplaced; hence it did not
often offend. It seemed, in fact, the safety-valve of his high-pressure
intellectual engine. When he had blown off he was always calm, gentle;
forgiving, and even tender. Once following an outburst he said,
placidly:

“In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate
circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.”

It seems proper to add that it is not the purpose of this work to
magnify or modify or excuse that extreme example of humankind which
forms its chief subject; but to set him down as he was inadequately, of
course, but with good conscience and clear intent.

Led by Steve Gillis, the Enterprise force used to devise tricks to set
him going. One of these was to hide articles from his desk. He detested
the work necessary to the care of a lamp, and wrote by the light of a
candle. To hide “Sam’s candle” was a sure way to get prompt and vigorous
return. He would look for it a little; then he would begin a
slow, circular walk--a habit acquired in the limitations of the
pilot-house--and his denunciation of the thieves was like a great
orchestration of wrong. By and by the office boy, supposedly innocent,
would find another for him, and all would be forgotten. He made a
placard, labeled with fearful threats and anathemas, warning any one
against touching his candle; but one night both the placard and the
candle were gone.

Now, among his Virginia acquaintances was a young minister, a Mr.
Rising, “the fragile, gentle new fledgling” of the Buck Fanshaw episode.
Clemens greatly admired Mr. Rising’s evident sincerity, and the young
minister had quickly recognized the new reporter’s superiority of mind.
Now and then he came to the office to call on him. Unfortunately, he
happened to step in just at that moment when, infuriated by the
latest theft of his property, Samuel Clemens was engaged in his rotary
denunciation of the criminals, oblivious of every other circumstance.
Mr. Rising stood spellbound by this, to him, new phase of genius, and
at last his friend became dimly aware of him. He did not halt in his
scathing treadmill and continued in the slow monotone of speech:

“I know, Mr. Rising, I know it’s wicked to talk like this; I know it
is wrong. I know I shall certainly go to hell for it. But if you had a
candle, Mr. Rising, and those thieves should carry it off every night,
I know that you would say, just as I say, Mr. Rising, G-d d--n their
impenitent souls, may they roast in hell for a million years.”

The little clergyman caught his breath.

“Maybe I should, Mr. Clemens,” he replied, “but I should try to say,
‘Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.’”

“Oh, well! if you put it on the ground that they are just fools, that
alters the case, as I am one of that class myself. Come in and we’ll try
to forgive them and forget about it.”

Mark Twain had a good many experiences with young ministers. He
was always fond of them, and they often sought him out. Once, long
afterward, at a hotel, he wanted a boy to polish his shoes, and had rung
a number of times without getting any response. Presently, he thought he
heard somebody approaching in the hall outside. He flung open the door,
and a small, youngish-looking person, who seemed to have been hesitating
at the door, made a movement as though to depart hastily. Clemens
grabbed him by the collar.

“Look here,” he said, “I’ve been waiting and ringing here for half an
hour. Now I want you to take those shoes, and polish them, quick. Do you
hear?”

The slim, youthful person trembled a good deal, and said: “I would,
Mr. Clemens, I would indeed, sir, if I could. But I’m a minister of the
Gospel, and I’m not prepared for such work.”



XXXIX. PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY

There was a side to Samuel Clemens that in those days few of his
associates saw. This was the poetic, the philosophic, the contemplative
side. Joseph Goodman recognized this phase of his character, and, while
he perhaps did not regard it as a future literary asset, he delighted
in it, and in their hours of quiet association together encouraged its
exhibition. It is rather curious that with all his literary penetration
Goodman did not dream of a future celebrity for Clemens. He afterward
said:

“If I had been asked to prophesy which of the two men, Dan de Quille or
Sam, would become distinguished, I should have said De Quille. Dan
was talented, industrious, and, for that time and place, brilliant.
Of course, I recognized the unusualness of Sam’s gifts, but he was
eccentric and seemed to lack industry; it is not likely that I should
have prophesied fame for him then.”

Goodman, like MacFarlane in Cincinnati, half a dozen years before,
though by a different method, discovered and developed the deeper vein.
Often the two, dining together in a French restaurant, discussed
life, subtler philosophies, recalled various phases of human history,
remembered and recited the poems that gave them especial enjoyment. “The
Burial of Moses,” with its noble phrasing and majestic imagery, appealed
strongly to Clemens, and he recited it with great power. The first
stanza in particular always stirred him, and it stirred his hearer as
well. With eyes half closed and chin lifted, a lighted cigar between his
fingers, he would lose himself in the music of the stately lines.

       By Nebo’s lonely mountain,
       On this side Jordan’s wave,
       In a vale in the land of Moab,
       There lies a lonely grave.

       And no man knows that sepulchre,
       And no man saw it e’er,
       For the angels of God, upturned the sod,
       And laid the dead man there.

Another stanza that he cared for almost as much was the one beginning:

       And had he not high honor
       --The hill-side for a pall,
       To lie in state while angels wait
       With stars for tapers tall,
       And the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes,
       Over his bier to wave,
       And God’s own hand in that lonely land,
       To lay him in the grave?

Without doubt he was moved to emulate the simple grandeur of that poem,
for he often repeated it in those days, and somewhat later we find it
copied into his notebook in full. It would seem to have become to him a
sort of literary touchstone; and in some measure it may be regarded as
accountable for the fact that in the fullness of time “he made use of
the purest English of any modern writer.” These are Goodman’s words,
though William Dean Howells has said them, also, in substance, and
Brander Matthews, and many others who know about such things. Goodman
adds, “The simplicity and beauty of his style are almost without a
parallel, except in the common version of the Bible,” which is also
true. One is reminded of what Macaulay said of Milton:

“There would seem at first sight to be no more in his words than in
other words. But they are words of enchantment. No sooner are they
pronounced than the past is present and the distance near. New forms of
beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial-places of the
memory give up their dead.”

One drifts ahead, remembering these things. The triumph of words, the
mastery of phrases, lay all before him at the time of which we are
writing now. He was twenty-seven. At that age Rudyard Kipling had
reached his meridian. Samuel Clemens was still in the classroom.
Everything came as a lesson-phrase, form, aspect, and combination;
nothing escaped unvalued. The poetic phase of things particularly
impressed him. Once at a dinner with Goodman, when the lamp-light from
the chandelier struck down through the claret on the tablecloth in a
great red stain, he pointed to it dramatically “Look, Joe,” he said,
“the angry tint of wine.”

It was at one of these private sessions, late in ‘62, that Clemens
proposed to report the coming meeting of the Carson legislature. He
knew nothing of such work and had small knowledge of parliamentary
proceedings. Formerly it had been done by a man named Gillespie,
but Gillespie was now clerk of the house. Goodman hesitated; then,
remembering that whether Clemens got the reports right or not, he would
at least make them readable, agreed to let him undertake the work.



XL. “MARK TWAIN”

The early Nevada legislature was an interesting assembly. All State
legislatures are that, and this was a mining frontier. No attempt can be
made to describe it. It was chiefly distinguished for a large ignorance
of procedure, a wide latitude of speech, a noble appreciation of humor,
and plenty of brains. How fortunate Mask Twain was in his schooling,
to be kept away from institutional training, to be placed in one after
another of those universities of life where the sole curriculum is the
study of the native inclinations and activities of mankind! Sometimes,
in after-years, he used to regret the lack of systematic training. Well
for him--and for us--that he escaped that blight.

For the study of human nature the Nevada assembly was a veritable
lecture-room. In it his understanding, his wit, his phrasing, his
self-assuredness grew like Jack’s bean-stalk, which in time was ready to
break through into a land above the sky. He made some curious blunders
in his reports, in the beginning; but he was so frank in his ignorance
and in his confession of it that the very unsophistication of his early
letters became their chief charm. Gillespie coached him on parliamentary
matters, and in time the reports became technically as well as
artistically good. Clemens in return christened Gillespie “Young,
Jefferson’s Manual,” a title which he bore, rather proudly indeed, for
many years.

Another “entitlement” growing out of those early reports, and possibly
less satisfactory to its owner, was the one accorded to Clement T. Rice,
of the Virginia City Union. Rice knew the legislative work perfectly and
concluded to poke fun at the Enterprise letters.

But this was a mistake. Clemens in his next letter declared that Rice’s
reports might be parliamentary enough, but that they covered with
glittering technicalities the most festering mass of misstatement, and
even crime. He avowed that they were wholly untrustworthy; dubbed the
author of them “The Unreliable,” and in future letters never referred
to him by any other term. Carson and the Comstock and the papers of the
Coast delighted in this burlesque journalistic warfare, and Rice was
“The Unreliable” for life.

Rice and Clemens, it should be said, though rivals, were the best of
friends, and there was never any real animosity between them.

Clemens quickly became a favorite with the members; his sharp letters,
with their amusing turn of phrase and their sincerity, won general
friendship. Jack Simmons, speaker of the house, and Billy Clagget, the
Humboldt delegation, were his special cronies and kept him on the inside
of the political machine. Clagget had remained in Unionville after the
mining venture, warned his Keokuk sweetheart, and settled down into
politics and law. In due time he would become a leading light and go
to Congress. He was already a notable figure of forceful eloquence and
tousled, unkempt hair. Simmons, Clagget, and Clemens were easily the
three conspicuous figures of the session.

It must have been gratifying to the former prospector and miner to come
back to Carson City a person of consequence, where less than a year
before he had been regarded as no more than an amusing indolent fellow,
a figure to smile at, but unimportant. There is a photograph extant of
Clemens and his friends Clagget and Simmons in a group, and we gather
from it that he now arrayed himself in a long broadcloth cloak, a
starched shirt, and polished boots. Once more he had become the glass of
fashion that he had been on the river. He made his residence with Orion,
whose wife and little daughter Jennie had by this time come out from the
States. “Sister Mollie,” as wife of the acting governor, was presently
social leader of the little capital; her brilliant brother-in-law its
chief ornament. His merriment and songs and good nature made him a
favorite guest. His lines had fallen in pleasant places; he could afford
to smile at the hard Esmeralda days.

He was not altogether satisfied. His letters, copied and quoted all
along the Coast, were unsigned. They were easily identified with
one another, but not with a personality. He realized that to build a
reputation it was necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name.

He gave the matter a good deal of thought. He did not consider the use
of his own name; the ‘nom de plume’ was the fashion of the time. He
wanted something brief, crisp, definite, unforgettable. He tried over
a good many combinations in his mind, but none seemed convincing. Just
then--this was early in 1863--news came to him that the old pilot he had
wounded by his satire, Isaiah Sellers, was dead. At once the pen-name of
Captain Sellers recurred to him. That was it; that was the sort of name
he wanted. It was not trivial; it had all the qualities--Sellers would
never need it again. Clemens decided he would give it a new meaning and
new association in this far-away land. He went up to Virginia City.

“Joe,” he said, to Goodman, “I want to sign my articles. I want to be
identified to a wider audience.”

“All right, Sam. What name do you want to use ‘Josh’?”

“No, I want to sign them ‘Mark Twain.’ It is an old river term, a
leads-man’s call, signifying two fathoms--twelve feet. It has a richness
about it; it was always a pleasant sound for a pilot to hear on a dark
night; it meant safe water.”

He did not then mention that Captain Isaiah Sellers had used and dropped
the name. He was ashamed of his part in that episode, and the offense
was still too recent for confession. Goodman considered a moment:

“Very well, Sam,” he said, “that sounds like a good name.”

It was indeed a good name. In all the nomenclature of the world no more
forceful combination of words could have been selected to express
the man for whom they stood. The name Mark Twain is as infinite,
as fundamental as that of John Smith, without the latter’s wasting
distribution of strength. If all the prestige in the name of John Smith
were combined in a single individual, its dynamic energy might give it
the carrying power of Mark Twain. Let this be as it may, it has proven
the greatest ‘nom de plume’ ever chosen--a name exactly in accord with
the man, his work, and his career.

It is not surprising that Goodman did not recognize this at the moment.
We should not guess the force that lies in a twelve-inch shell if we
had never seen one before or heard of its seismic destruction. We should
have to wait and see it fired, and take account of the result.

It was first signed to a Carson letter bearing date of February 2, 1863,
and from that time was attached to all Samuel Clemens’s work. The work
was neither better nor worse than before, but it had suddenly acquired
identification and special interest. Members of the legislature and
friends in Virginia and Carson immediately began to address him as
“Mark.” The papers of the Coast took it up, and within a period to be
measured by weeks he was no longer “Sam” or “Clemens” or “that bright
chap on the Enterprise,” but “Mark”--“Mark Twain.” No ‘nom de plume’
was ever so quickly and generally accepted as that. De Quille, returning
from the East after an absence of several months, found his room and
deskmate with the distinction of a new name and fame.

It is curious that in the letters to the home folks preserved from that
period there is no mention of his new title and its success. In fact,
the writer rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined
to tell of the mining shares he has accumulated, their present and
prospective values. However, many of the letters are undoubtedly
missing. Such as have been preserved are rather airy epistles full of
his abounding joy of life and good nature. Also they bear evidence of
the renewal of his old river habit of sending money home--twenty dollars
in each letter, with intervals of a week or so between.



XLI. THE CREAM OF COMSTOCK HUMOR

With the adjournment of the legislature, Samuel Clemens returned to
Virginia City distinctly a notability--Mark Twain. He was regarded as
leading man on the Enterprise--which in itself was high distinction
on the Comstock--while his improved dress and increased prosperity
commanded additional respect. When visitors of note came
along--well-known actors, lecturers, politicians--he was introduced as
one of the Comstock features which it was proper to see, along with the
Ophir and Gould and Curry mines, and the new hundred-stamp quartz-mill.

He was rather grieved and hurt, therefore, when, after several
collections had been taken up in the Enterprise office to present
various members of the staff with meerschaum pipes, none had come to
him. He mentioned this apparent slight to Steve Gillis:

“Nobody ever gives me a meerschaum pipe,” he said, plaintively. “Don’t I
deserve one yet?”

Unhappy day! To that remorseless creature, Steve Gillis, this was a
golden opportunity for deviltry of a kind that delighted his soul. This
is the story, precisely as Gillis himself told it to the writer of these
annals more than a generation later:

“There was a German kept a cigar store in Virginia City and always had
a fine assortment of meerschaum pipes. These pipes usually cost anywhere
from forty to seventy-five dollars.

“One day Denis McCarthy and I were walking by the old German’s place,
and stopped to look in at the display in the window. Among other things
there was one large imitation meerschaum with a high bowl and a long
stem, marked a dollar and a half.

“I decided that that would be just the pipe for Sam. We went in and
bought it, also a very much longer stem. I think the stem alone cost
three dollars. Then we had a little German-silver plate engraved with
Mark’s name on it and by whom presented, and made preparations for the
presentation. Charlie Pope--[afterward proprietor of Pope’s Theater, St.
Louis]--was playing at the Opera House at the time, and we engaged him
to make the presentation speech.

“Then we let in Dan de Quille, Mark’s closest friend, to act the part of
Judas--to tell Mark privately that he, was going to be presented with a
fine pipe, so that he could have a speech prepared in reply to Pope’s.
It was awful low-down in Dan. We arranged to have the affair come off in
the saloon beneath the Opera House after the play was over.

“Everything went off handsomely; but it was a pretty remorseful
occasion, and some of us had a hang-dog look; for Sam took it in such
sincerity, and had prepared one of the most beautiful speeches I ever
heard him make. Pope’s presentation, too, was beautifully done. He told
Sam how his friends all loved him, and that this pipe, purchased at so
great an expense, was but a small token of their affection. But Sam’s
reply, which was supposed to be impromptu, actually brought the tears to
the eyes of some of us, and he was interrupted every other minute with
applause. I never felt so sorry for anybody.

“Still, we were bent on seeing the thing through. After Sam’s speech was
finished, he ordered expensive wines--champagne and sparkling Moselle.
Then we went out to do the town, and kept things going until morning to
drown our sorrow.

“Well, next day, of course, he started in to color the pipe. It wouldn’t
color any more than a piece of chalk, which was about all it was. Sam
would smoke and smoke, and complain that it didn’t seem to taste right,
and that it wouldn’t color. Finally Denis said to him one day:

“‘Oh, Sam, don’t you know that’s just a damned old egg-shell, and that
the boys bought it for a dollar and a half and presented you with it for
a joke?’

“Then Sam was furious, and we laid the whole thing on Dan de Quille. He
had a thunder-cloud on his face when he started up for the Local Room,
where Dan was. He went in and closed the door behind him, and locked
it, and put the key in his pocket--an awful sign. Dan was there alone,
writing at his table.

“Sam said, ‘Dan, did you know, when you invited me to make that speech,
that those fellows were going to give me a bogus pipe?’

“There was no way for Dan to escape, and he confessed. Sam walked up and
down the floor, as if trying to decide which way to slay Dan. Finally he
said:

“‘Oh, Dan, to think that you, my dearest friend, who knew how little
money I had, and how hard I would work to prepare a speech that would
show my gratitude to my friends, should be the traitor, the Judas, to
betray me with a kiss! Dan, I never want to look on your face again. You
knew I would spend every dollar I had on those pirates when I couldn’t
afford to spend anything; and yet you let me do it; you aided and
abetted their diabolical plan, and you even got me to get up that damned
speech to make the thing still more ridiculous.’

“Of course Dan felt terribly, and tried to defend himself by saying that
they were really going to present him with a fine pipe--a genuine one,
this time. But Sam at first refused to be comforted; and when, a few
days later, I went in with the pipe and said, ‘Sam, here’s the pipe the
boys meant to give you all the time,’ and tried to apologize, he looked
around a little coldly, and said:

“‘Is that another of those bogus old pipes?’

“He accepted it, though, and general peace was restored. One day, soon
after, he said to me:

“‘Steve, do you know that I think that that bogus pipe smokes about as
well as the good one?’”

Many years later (this was in his home at Hartford, and Joe Goodman was
present) Mark Twain one day came upon the old imitation pipe.

“Joe,” he said, “that was a cruel, cruel trick the boys played on me;
but, for the feeling I had during the moment when they presented me with
that pipe and when Charlie Pope was making his speech and I was making
my reply to it--for the memory of that feeling, now, that pipe is more
precious to me than any pipe in the world!”

Eighteen hundred and sixty-three was flood-tide on the Comstock. Every
mine was working full blast. Every mill was roaring and crunching,
turning out streams of silver and gold. A little while ago an old
resident wrote:

    When I close my eyes I hear again the respirations of hoisting-
    engines and the roar of stamps; I can see the “camels” after
    midnight packing in salt; I can see again the jam of teams on C
    Street and hear the anathemas of the drivers--all the mighty work
    that went on in order to lure the treasures from the deep chambers
    of the great lode and to bring enlightenment to the desert.

Those were lively times. In the midst of one of his letters home Mark
Twain interrupts himself to say: “I have just heard five pistol-shots
down the street--as such things are in my line, I will go and see about
it,” and in a postscript added a few hours later:

    5 A.M. The pistol-shot did its work well. One man, a Jackson
    County Missourian, shot two of my friends (police officers) through
    the heart--both died within three minutes. The murderer’s name is
    John Campbell.

“Mark and I had our hands full,” says De Quille, “and no grass grew
under our feet.” In answer to some stray criticism of their policy, they
printed a sort of editorial manifesto:

    Our duty is to keep the universe thoroughly posted concerning
    murders and street fights, and balls, and theaters, and pack-trains,
    and churches, and lectures, and school-houses, and city military
    affairs, and highway robberies, and Bible societies, and hay-wagons,
    and the thousand other things which it is in the province of local
    reporters to keep track of and magnify into undue importance for the
    instruction of the readers of a great daily newspaper.

It is easy to recognize Mark Twain’s hand in that compendium of labor,
which, in spite of its amusing apposition, was literally true, and so
intended, probably with no special thought of humor in its construction.
It may be said, as well here as anywhere, that it was not Mark Twain’s
habit to strive for humor. He saw facts at curious angles and phrased
them accordingly. In Virginia City he mingled with the turmoil of the
Comstock and set down what he saw and thought, in his native speech. The
Comstock, ready to laugh, found delight in his expression and discovered
a vast humor in his most earnest statements.

On the other hand, there were times when the humor was intended and
missed its purpose. We have already recalled the instance of the
“Petrified Man” hoax, which was taken seriously; but the “Empire City
Massacre” burlesque found an acceptance that even its author considered
serious for a time. It is remembered to-day in Virginia City as the
chief incident of Mark Twain’s Comstock career.

This literary bomb really had two objects, one of which was to punish
the San Francisco Bulletin for its persistent attacks on Washoe
interests; the other, though this was merely incidental, to direct an
unpleasant attention to a certain Carson saloon, the Magnolia, which was
supposed to dispense whisky of the “forty rod” brand--that is, a liquor
warranted to kill at that range. It was the Bulletin that was to be made
especially ridiculous. This paper had been particularly disagreeable
concerning the “dividend-cooking” system of certain of the Comstock
mines, at the same time calling invidious attention to safer investments
in California stocks. Samuel Clemens, with “half a trunkful” of Comstock
shares, had cultivated a distaste for California things in general: In a
letter of that time he says:

“How I hate everything that looks or tastes or smells like California!”
 With his customary fickleness of soul, he was glorifying California
less than a year later, but for the moment he could see no good in
that Nazareth. To his great satisfaction, one of the leading California
corporations, the Spring Valley Water Company, “cooked” a dividend of
its own about this time, resulting in disaster to a number of guileless
investors who were on the wrong side of the subsequent crash. This
afforded an inviting opportunity for reprisal. With Goodman’s consent
he planned for the California papers, and the Bulletin in particular, a
punishment which he determined to make sufficiently severe. He believed
the papers of that State had forgotten his earlier offenses, and the
result would show he was not mistaken.

There was a point on the Carson River, four miles from Carson City,
known as “Dutch Nick’s,” and also as Empire City, the two being
identical. There was no forest there of any sort nothing but sage-brush.
In the one cabin there lived a bachelor with no household. Everybody in
Virginia and Carson, of course, knew these things.

Mark Twain now prepared a most lurid and graphic account of how one
Phillip Hopkins, living “just at the edge of the great pine forest which
lies between Empire City and ‘Dutch Nick’s’,” had suddenly gone insane
and murderously assaulted his entire family consisting of his wife and
their nine children, ranging in ages from one to nineteen years. The
wife had been slain outright, also seven of the children; the other
two might recover. The murder had been committed in the most brutal and
ghastly fashion, after which Hopkins had scalped his wife, leaped on a
horse, cut his own throat from ear to ear, and ridden four miles into
Carson City, dropping dead at last in front of the Magnolia saloon,
the red-haired scalp of his wife still clutched in his gory hand. The
article further stated that the cause of Mr. Hopkins’s insanity was
pecuniary loss, he having withdrawn his savings from safe Comstock
investments and, through the advice of a relative, one of the editors
of the San Francisco Bulletin, invested them in the Spring Valley Water
Company. This absurd tale with startling head-lines appeared in the
Enterprise, in its issue of October 28, 1863.

It was not expected that any one in Virginia City or Carson City would
for a moment take any stock in the wild invention, yet so graphic was
it that nine out of ten on first reading never stopped to consider the
entire impossibility of the locality and circumstance. Even when
these things were pointed out many readers at first refused to confess
themselves sold. As for the Bulletin and other California papers, they
were taken-in completely, and were furious. Many of them wrote and
demanded the immediate discharge of its author, announcing that they
would never copy another line from the Enterprise, or exchange with it,
or have further relations with a paper that had Mark Twain on its staff.
Citizens were mad, too, and cut off their subscriptions. The joker was
in despair.

“Oh, Joe,” he said, “I have ruined your business, and the only
reparation I can make is to resign. You can never recover from this blow
while I am on the paper.”

“Nonsense,” replied Goodman. “We can furnish the people with news, but
we can’t supply them with sense. Only time can do that. The flurry will
pass. You just go ahead. We’ll win out in the long run.”

But the offender was in torture; he could not sleep. “Dan, Dan,” he
said, “I am being burned alive on both sides of the mountains.”

“Mark,” said Dan. “It will all blow over. This item of yours will be
remembered and talked about when the rest of your Enterprise work is
forgotten.”

Both Goodman and De Quille were right. In a month papers and people had
forgotten their humiliation and laughed. “The Dutch Nick Massacre” gave
to its perpetrator and to the Enterprise an added vogue. --[For full
text of the “Dutch Nick” hoax see Appendix C, at the end of last volume:
also, for an anecdote concerning a reporting excursion made by Alf.
Doten and Mark Twain.]--



XLII REPORTORIAL DAYS.

Reference has already been made to the fashion among Virginia City
papers of permitting reporters to use the editorial columns for ridicule
of one another. This custom was especially in vogue during the period
when Dan de Quille and Mark Twain and The Unreliable were the shining
journalistic lights of the Comstock. Scarcely a week went by that some
apparently venomous squib or fling or long burlesque assault did not
appear either in the Union or the Enterprise, with one of those jokers
as its author and another as its target. In one of his “home” letters of
that year Mark Twain says:

    I have just finished writing up my report for the morning paper and
    giving The Unreliable a column of advice about how to conduct
    himself in church.

The advice was such as to call for a reprisal, but it apparently made no
difference in personal relations, for a few weeks later he is with
The Unreliable in San Francisco, seeing life in the metropolis, fairly
swimming in its delights, unable to resist reporting them to his mother.

    We fag ourselves completely out every day and go to sleep without
    rocking every night. When I go down Montgomery Street shaking hands
    with Tom, Dick, and Harry, it is just like being on Main Street in
    Hannibal and meeting the old familiar faces. I do hate to go back
    to Washoe. We take trips across the bay to Oakland, and down to San
    Leandro and Alameda, and we go out to the Willows and Hayes Park and
    Fort Point, and up to Benicia; and yesterday we were invited out on
    a yachting excursion, and had a sail in the fastest yacht on the
    Pacific coast. Rice says: “Oh no--we are not having any fun, Mark
    --oh no--I reckon it’s somebody else--it’s probably the gentleman in
    the wagon” (popular slang phrase), and when I invite Rice to the
    Lick House to dinner the proprietor sends us champagne and claret,
    and then we do put on the most disgusting airs. The Unreliable says
    our caliber is too light--we can’t stand it to be noticed.

Three days later he adds that he is going sorrowfully “to the snows and
the deserts of Washoe,” but that he has “lived like a lord to make up
for two years of privation.”

Twenty dollars is inclosed in each of these letters, probably as a
bribe to Jane Clemens to be lenient with his prodigalities, which in
his youthful love of display he could not bring himself to conceal. But
apparently the salve was futile, for in another letter, a month later,
he complains that his mother is “slinging insinuations” at him again,
such as “where did you get that money” and “the company I kept in San
Francisco.” He explains:

    Why, I sold Wild Cat mining ground that was given me, and my credit
    was always good at the bank for $2,000 or $3,000, and I never gamble
    in any shape or manner, and never drink anything stronger than
    claret and lager beer, which conduct is regarded as miraculously
    temperate in this place. As for company, I went in the very best
    company to be found in San Francisco. I always move in the best
    society in Virginia and have a reputation to preserve.

He closes by assuring her that he will be more careful in future and
that she need never fear but that he will keep her expenses paid. Then
he cannot refrain from adding one more item of his lavish life:

“Put in my washing, and it costs me one hundred dollars a month to
live.”

De Quille had not missed the opportunity of his comrade’s absence
to payoff some old scores. At the end of the editorial column of the
Enterprise on the day following his departure he denounced the absent
one and his “protege,” The Unreliable, after the intemperate fashion of
the day.

    It is to be regretted that such scrubs are ever permitted to visit
    the bay, as the inevitable effect will be to destroy that exalted
    opinion of the manners and morality of our people which was inspired
    by the conduct of our senior editor--[which is to say, Dan
    himself]--.

The diatribe closed with a really graceful poem, and the whole was no
doubt highly regarded by the Enterprise readers.

What revenge Mark Twain took on his return has not been recorded, but
it was probably prompt and adequate; or he may have left it to The
Unreliable. It was clearly a mistake, however, to leave his own local
work in the hands of that properly named person a little later. Clemens
was laid up with a cold, and Rice assured him on his sacred honor that
he would attend faithfully to the Enterprise locals, along with his own
Union items. He did this, but he had been nursing old injuries too long.
What was Mark Twain’s amazement on looking over the Enterprise next
morning to find under the heading “Apologetic” a statement over his own
nom de plume, purporting to be an apology for all the sins of ridicule
to the various injured ones.

    To Mayor Arick, Hon. Wm. Stewart, Marshal Perry, Hon. J. B. Winters,
    Mr. Olin, and Samuel Wetherill, besides a host of others whom we
    have ridiculed from behind the shelter of our reportorial position,
    we say to these gentlemen we acknowledge our faults, and, in all
    weakness and humility upon our bended marrow bones, we ask their
    forgiveness, promising that in future we will give them no cause for
    anything but the best of feeling toward us. To “Young Wilson” and
    The Unreliable (as we have wickedly termed them), we feel that no
    apology we can make begins to atone for the many insults we have
    given them. Toward these gentlemen we have been as mean as a man
    could be--and we have always prided ourselves on this base quality.
    We feel that we are the least of all humanity, as it were. We will
    now go in sack-cloth and ashes for the next forty days.

This in his own paper over his own signature was a body blow; but it had
the effect of curing his cold. He was back in the office forthwith, and
in the next morning’s issue denounced his betrayer.

    We are to blame for giving The Unreliable an opportunity to
    misrepresent us, and therefore refrain from repining to any great
    extent at the result. We simply claim the right to deny the truth
    of every statement made by him in yesterday’s paper, to annul all
    apologies he coined as coming from us, and to hold him up to public
    commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more
    cultivation, no more Christian principle than animates and adorns
    the sportive jackass-rabbit of the Sierras. We have done.

These were the things that enlivened Comstock journalism. Once in a
boxing bout Mark Twain got a blow on the nose which caused it to swell
to an unusual size and shape. He went out of town for a few days, during
which De Quille published an extravagant account of his misfortune,
describing the nose and dwelling on the absurdity of Mark Twain’s ever
supposing himself to be a boxer.

De Quille scored heavily with this item but his own doom was written.
Soon afterward he was out riding and was thrown from his horse and
bruised considerably.

This was Mark’s opportunity. He gave an account of Dan’s disaster; then,
commenting, he said:

    The idea of a plebeian like Dan supposing he could ever ride a
    horse! He! why, even the cats and the chickens laughed when they
    saw him go by. Of course, he would be thrown off. Of course, any
    well-bred horse wouldn’t let a common, underbred person like Dan
    stay on his back! When they gathered him up he was just a bag of
    scraps, but they put him together, and you’ll find him at his old
    place in the Enterprise office next week, still laboring under the
    delusion that he’s a newspaper man.

The author of ‘Roughing It’ tells of a literary periodical called
the Occidental, started in Virginia City by a Mr. F. This was the
silver-tongued Tom Fitch, of the Union, an able speaker and writer,
vastly popular on the Coast. Fitch came to Clemens one day and said he
was thinking of starting such a periodical and asked him what he thought
of the venture. Clemens said:

“You would succeed if any one could, but start a flower-garden on the
desert of Sahara; set up hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining
sulphur; start a literary paper in Virginia City; h--l!”

Which was a correct estimate of the situation, and the paper perished
with the third issue. It was of no consequence except that it contained
what was probably the first attempt at that modern literary abortion,
the composite novel. Also, it died too soon to publish Mark Twain’s
first verses of any pretension, though still of modest merit--“The Aged
Pilot Man”--which were thereby saved for ‘Roughing It.’

Visiting Virginia now, it seems curious that any of these things could
have happened there. The Comstock has become little more than a memory;
Virginia and Gold Hill are so quiet, so voiceless, as to constitute
scarcely an echo of the past. The International Hotel, that once so
splendid edifice, through whose portals the tide of opulent life then
ebbed and flowed, is all but deserted now. One may wander at will
through its dingy corridors and among its faded fripperies, seeking in
vain for attendance or hospitality, the lavish welcome of a vanished
day. Those things were not lacking once, and the stream of wealth tossed
up and down the stair and billowed up C Street, an ebullient tide
of metals and men from which millionaires would be struck out, and
individuals known in national affairs. William M. Stewart who would one
day become a United States Senator, was there, an unnoticed unit;
and John Mackay and James G. Fair, one a senator by and by, and both
millionaires, but poor enough then--Fair with a pick on his shoulder and
Mackay, too, at first, though he presently became a mine superintendent.
Once in those days Mark Twain banteringly offered to trade businesses
with Mackay.

“No,” Mackay said, “I can’t trade. My business is not worth as much as
yours. I have never swindled anybody, and I don’t intend to begin now.”

Neither of those men could dream that within ten years their names
would be international property; that in due course Nevada would propose
statues to their memory.

Such things came out of the Comstock; such things spring out of every
turbulent frontier.



XLIII. ARTEMUS WARD

Madame Caprell’s warning concerning Mark Twain’s health at twenty-eight
would seem to have been justified. High-strung and neurotic, the strain
of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on him. As in
later life, he was subject to bronchial colds, and more than once that
year he found it necessary to drop all work and rest for a time at
Steamboat Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling
springs and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable
hotel. He contributed from there sketches somewhat more literary in
form than any of his previous work. “Curing a Cold” is a more or less
exaggerated account of his ills.

    [Included in Sketches New and Old. “Information for the Million,”
     and “Advice to Good Little Girls,” included in the “Jumping Frog”
     Collection, 1867, but omitted from the Sketches, are also believed
    to belong to this period.]

A portion of a playful letter to his mother, written from the springs,
still exists.

    You have given my vanity a deadly thrust. Behold, I am prone to
    boast of having the widest reputation as a local editor of any man
    on the Pacific coast, and you gravely come forward and tell me “if I
    work hard and attend closely to my business, I may aspire to a place
    on a big San Francisco daily some day.” There’s a comment on human
    vanity for you! Why, blast it, I was under the impression that I
    could get such a situation as that any time I asked for it. But I
    don’t want it. No paper in the United States can afford to pay me
    what my place on the Enterprise is worth. If I were not naturally a
    lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond, I could make it pay me
    $20,000 a year. But I don’t suppose I shall ever be any account. I
    lead an easy life, though, and I don’t care a cent whether school
    keeps or not. Everybody knows me, and I fare like a prince wherever
    I go, be it on this side of the mountain or the other. And I am
    proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory.

    You think that picture looks old? Well, I can’t help it--in reality
    I’m not as old as I was when I was eighteen.

Which was a true statement, so far as his general attitude was
concerned. At eighteen, in New York and Philadelphia, his letters had
been grave, reflective, advisory. Now they were mostly banter and froth,
lightly indifferent to the serious side of things, though perhaps
only pretendedly so, for the picture did look old. From the shock and
circumstance of his brother’s death he--had never recovered. He was
barely twenty-eight. From the picture he might have been a man of forty.

It was that year that Artemus Ward (Charles F. Browne) came to Virginia
City. There was a fine opera-house in Virginia, and any attraction that
billed San Francisco did not fail to play to the Comstock. Ward intended
staying only a few days to deliver his lectures, but the whirl of the
Comstock caught him like a maelstrom, and he remained three weeks.

He made the Enterprise office his headquarters, and fairly reveled in
the company he found there. He and Mark Twain became boon companions.
Each recognized in the other a kindred spirit. With Goodman, De Quille,
and McCarthy, also E. E. Hingston--Ward’s agent, a companionable
fellow--they usually dined at Chaumond’s, Virginia’s high-toned French
restaurant.

Those were three memorable weeks in Mark Twain’s life. Artemus Ward
was in the height of his fame, and he encouraged his new-found
brother-humorist and prophesied great things of him. Clemens, on his
side, measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps
with good reason concluded that Ward’s estimate was correct, that he too
could win fame and honor, once he got a start. If he had lacked ambition
before Ward’s visit, the latter’s unqualified approval inspired him with
that priceless article of equipment. He put his soul into entertaining
the visitor during those three weeks; and it was apparent to their
associates that he was at least Ward’s equal in mental stature and
originality. Goodman and the others began to realize that for Mark Twain
the rewards of the future were to be measured only by his resolution and
ability to hold out. On Christmas Eve Artemus lectured in Silver City
and afterward came to the Enterprise office to give the boys a farewell
dinner. The Enterprise always published a Christmas carol, and Goodman
sat at his desk writing it. He was just finishing as Ward came in:

“Slave, slave,” said Artemus. “Come out and let me banish care from
you.”

They got the boys and all went over to Chaumond’s, where Ward commanded
Goodman to order the dinner. When the cocktails came on, Artemus lifted
his glass and said:

“I give you Upper Canada.”

The company rose, drank the toast in serious silence; then Goodman said:

“Of course, Artemus, it’s all right, but why did you give us Upper
Canada?”

“Because I don’t want it myself,” said Ward, gravely.

Then began a rising tide of humor that could hardly be matched in the
world to-day. Mark Twain had awakened to a fuller power; Artemus Ward
was in his prime. They were giants of a race that became extinct when
Mark Twain died. The youth, the wine, the whirl of lights and life,
the tumult of the shouting street-it was as if an electric stream of
inspiration poured into those two human dynamos and sent them into a
dazzling, scintillating whirl. All gone--as evanescent, as forgotten,
as the lightnings of that vanished time; out of that vast feasting and
entertainment only a trifling morsel remains. Ward now and then asked
Goodman why he did not join in the banter. Goodman said:

“I’m preparing a joke, Artemus, but I’m keeping it for the present.”

It was near daybreak when Ward at last called for the bill. It was two
hundred and thirty-seven dollars.

“What”’ exclaimed Artemus.

“That’s my joke.” said Goodman.

“But I was only exclaiming because it was not twice as much,” returned
Ward.

He paid it amid laughter, and they went out into the early morning air.
It was fresh and fine outside, not yet light enough to see clearly.
Artemus threw his face up to the sky and said:

“I feel glorious. I feel like walking on the roofs.”

Virginia was built on the steep hillside, and the eaves of some of the
houses almost touched the ground behind them.

“There is your chance, Artemus,” Goodman said, pointing to a row of
these houses all about of a height.

Artemus grabbed Mark Twain, and they stepped out upon the long string
of roofs and walked their full length, arm in arm. Presently the others
noticed a lonely policeman cocking his revolver and getting ready to aim
in their direction. Goodman called to him:

“Wait a minute. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to shoot those burglars,” he said.

“Don’t for your life. Those are not burglars. That’s Mark Twain and
Artemus Ward.”

The roof-walkers returned, and the party went down the street to a
corner across from the International Hotel. A saloon was there with a
barrel lying in front, used, perhaps for a sort of sign. Artemus climbed
astride the barrel, and somebody brought a beer-glass and put it in his
hand. Virginia City looks out over the Eastward Desert. Morning was
just breaking upon the distant range-the scene as beautiful as when the
sunrise beams across the plain of Memnon. The city was not yet awake.
The only living creatures in sight were the group of belated diners,
with Artemus Ward, as King Gambrinus, pouring a libation to the sunrise.

That was the beginning of a week of glory. The farewell dinner became
a series. At the close of one convivial session Artemus went to a
concert-hall, the “Melodeon,” blacked his face, and delivered a speech.
He got away from Virginia about the close of the year.

A day or two later he wrote from Austin, Nevada, to his new-found
comrade as “My dearest Love,” recalling the happiness of his stay:

“I shall always remember Virginia as a bright spot in my existence, as
all others must or rather cannot be, as it were.”

Then reflectively he adds:

“Some of the finest intellects in the world have been blunted by
liquor.”

Rare Artemus Ward and rare Mark Twain! If there lies somewhere a place
of meeting and remembrance, they have not failed to recall there those
closing days of ‘63.



XLIV. GOVERNOR OF THE “THIRD HOUSE”

With Artemus Ward’s encouragement, Clemens began to think of extending
his audience eastward. The New York Sunday Mercury published literary
matter. Ward had urged him to try this market, and promised to write
a special letter to the editors, introducing Mark Twain and his work.
Clemens prepared a sketch of the Comstock variety, scarcely refined
in character and full of personal allusion, a humor not suited to the
present-day reader. Its general subject was children; it contained
some absurd remedies, supposedly sent to his old pilot friend Zeb
Leavenworth, and was written as much for a joke on that good-natured
soul as for profit or reputation.

“I wrote it especially for Beck Jolly’s use,” the author declares, in a
letter to his mother, “so he could pester Zeb with it.”

We cannot know to-day whether Zeb was pestered or not. A faded clipping
is all that remains of the incident. As literature the article, properly
enough, is lost to the world at large. It is only worth remembering as
his metropolitan beginning. Yet he must have thought rather highly of
it (his estimation of his own work was always unsafe), for in the letter
above quoted he adds:

    I cannot write regularly for the Mercury, of course, I sha’n’t have
    time. But sometimes I throw off a pearl (there is no self-conceit
    about that, I beg you to observe) which ought for the eternal
    welfare of my race to have a more extensive circulation than is
    afforded by a local daily paper.

    And if Fitzhugh Ludlow (author of the ‘Hasheesh Eater’) comes your
    way, treat him well. He published a high encomium upon Mark Twain
    (the same being eminently just and truthful, I beseech you to
    believe) in a San Francisco paper. Artemus Ward said that when my
    gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority I
    ought to appreciate them myself, leave sage-brush obscurity, and
    journey to New York with him, as he wanted me to do. But I
    preferred not to burst upon the New York public too suddenly and
    brilliantly, so I concluded to remain here.

He was in Carson City when this was written, preparing for the opening
of the next legislature. He was beyond question now the most conspicuous
figure of the capital; also the most wholesomely respected, for his
influence had become very large. It was said that he could control more
votes than any legislative member, and with his friends, Simmons and
Clagget, could pass or defeat any bill offered. The Enterprise was a
powerful organ--to be courted and dreaded--and Mark Twain had become
its chief tribune. That he was fearless, merciless, and incorruptible,
without doubt had a salutary influence on that legislative session. He
reveled in his power; but it is not recorded that he ever abused it. He
got a bill passed, largely increasing Orion’s official fees, but this
was a crying need and was so recognized. He made no secret promises,
none at all that he did not intend to fulfill. “Sam’s word was as fixed
as fate,” Orion records, and it may be added that he was morally as
fearless.

The two Houses of the last territorial legislature of Nevada assembled
January 12, 1864.--[Nevada became a State October 31, 1864.]--A few days
later a “Third House” was organized--an institution quite in keeping
with the happy atmosphere of that day and locality, for it was a
burlesque organization, and Mark Twain was selected as its “Governor.”

The new House prepared to make a public occasion of this first session,
and its Governor was required to furnish a message. Then it was decided
to make it a church benefit. The letters exchanged concerning this
proposition still exist; they explain themselves:

                     CARSON CITY, January 23, 1864.

    GOV. MARK TWAIN, Understanding from certain members of the Third
    House of the territorial Legislature that that body will have
    effected a permanent organization within a day or two, and be ready
    for the reception of your Third Annual Message,--[ There had been
    no former message. This was regarded as a great joke.]--we desire
    to ask your permission, and that of the Third House, to turn the
    affair to the benefit of the Church by charging toll-roads,
    franchises, and other persons a dollar apiece for the privilege of
    listening to your communication.
                     S. PIXLEY,
                     G. A. SEARS,
                            Trustees.

                     CARSON CITY, January 23, 1864.

    GENTLEMEN,--Certainly. If the public can find anything in a grave
    state paper worth paying a dollar for, I am willing they should pay
    that amount, or any other; and although I am not a very dusty
    Christian myself, I take an absorbing interest in religious affairs,
    and would willingly inflict my annual message upon the Church itself
    if it might derive benefit thereby. You can charge what you please;
    I promise the public no amusement, but I do promise a reasonable
    amount of instruction. I am responsible to the Third House only,
    and I hope to be permitted to make it exceedingly warm for that
    body, without caring whether the sympathies of the public and the
    Church be enlisted in their favor, and against myself, or not.
                     Respectfully,
                     MARK TWAIN.

Mark Twain’s reply is closely related to his later style in phrase and
thought. It might have been written by him at almost any subsequent
period. Perhaps his association with Artemus Ward had awakened a
new perception of the humorous idea--a humor of repression, of
understatement. He forgot this often enough, then and afterward, and
gave his riotous fancy free rein; but on the whole the simpler, less
florid form seemingly began to attract him more and more.

His address as Governor of the Third House has not been preserved, but
those who attended always afterward referred to it as the “greatest
effort of his life.” Perhaps for that audience and that time this
verdict was justified.

It was his first great public opportunity. On the stage about him sat
the membership of the Third House; the building itself was packed, the
aisles full. He knew he could let himself go in burlesque and satire,
and he did. He was unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the
officials in general, the legislative members, and of individual
citizens. From the beginning to the end of his address the audience was
in a storm of laughter and applause. With the exception of the
dinner speech made to the printers in Keokuk, it was his first public
utterance--the beginning of a lifelong series of triumphs.

Only one thing marred his success. Little Carrie Pixley, daughter of one
of the “trustees,” had promised to be present and sit in a box next the
stage. It was like him to be fond of the child, and he had promised to
send a carriage for her. Often during his address he glanced toward the
box; but it remained empty. When the affair was ended, he drove home
with her father to inquire the reason. They found the little girl, in
all her finery, weeping on the bed. Then he remembered he had forgotten
to send the carriage; and that was like him, too.

For his Third House address Judge A. W. (Sandy) Baldwin and Theodore
Winters presented him with a gold watch inscribed to “Governor Mark
Twain.” He was more in demand now than ever; no social occasion was
regarded as complete without him. His doings were related daily and his
sayings repeated on the streets. Most of these things have passed away
now, but a few are still recalled with smiles. Once, when conundrums
were being asked at a party, he was urged to make one.

“Well,” he sand, “why am I like the Pacific Ocean?”

Several guesses were made, but none satisfied him. Finally all gave it
up.

“Tell us, Mark, why are you like the Pacific Ocean?”

“I don’t know,” he drawled. “I was just asking for information.”

At another time, when a young man insisted on singing a song of eternal
length, the chorus of which was, “I’m going home, I’m going home, I’m
going home tomorrow,” Mark Twain put his head in the window and said,
pleadingly:

“For God’s sake go to-night.”

But he was also fond of quieter society. Sometimes, after the turmoil
of a legislative morning, he would drop in to Miss Keziah Clapp’s school
and listen to the exercises, or would call on Colonel Curry--“old Curry,
old Abe Curry”--and if the colonel happened to be away, he would talk
with Mrs. Curry, a motherly soul (still alive at ninety-three, in
1910), and tell her of his Hannibal boyhood or his river and his mining
adventures, and keep her laughing until the tears ran.

He was a great pedestrian in those days. Sometimes he walked from
Virginia to Carson, stopping at Colonel Curry’s as he came in for rest
and refreshment.

“Mrs. Curry,” he said once, “I have seen tireder men than I am,
and lazier men, but they were dead men.” He liked the home feeling
there--the peace and motherly interest. Deep down, he was lonely and
homesick; he was always so away from his own kindred.

Clemens returned now to Virginia City, and, like all other men who ever
met her, became briefly fascinated by the charms of Adah Isaacs Menken,
who was playing Mazeppa at the Virginia Opera House. All men--kings,
poets, priests, prize-fighters--fell under Menken’s spell. Dan de Quille
and Mark Twain entered into a daily contest as to who could lavish the
most fervid praise on her in the Enterprise. The latter carried her
his literary work to criticize. He confesses this in one of his home
letters, perhaps with a sort of pride.

I took it over to show to Miss Menken the actress, Orpheus C. Ken’s
wife. She is a literary cuss herself.

She has a beautiful white hand, but her handwriting is infamous; she
writes fast and her chirography is of the door-plate order--her letters
are immense. I gave her a conundrum, thus:

“My dear madam, why ought your hand to retain its present grace and
beauty always? Because you fool away devilish little of it on your
manuscript.”

But Menken was gone presently, and when he saw her again, somewhat
later, in San Francisco, his “madness” would have seemed to have been
allayed.



XLV. A COMSTOCK DUEL. The success--such as it was--of his occasional
contributions to the New York Sunday Mercury stirred Mark Twain’s
ambition for a wider field of labor. Circumstance, always ready to meet
his wishes, offered assistance, though in an unexpected form.

Goodman, temporarily absent, had left Clemens in editorial charge. As in
that earlier day, when Orion had visited Tennessee and returned to find
his paper in a hot personal warfare with certain injured citizens, so
the Enterprise, under the same management, had stirred up trouble. It
was just at the time of the “Flour Sack Sanitary Fund,” the story of
which is related at length in ‘Roughing It’. In the general hilarity of
this occasion, certain Enterprise paragraphs of criticism or ridicule
had incurred the displeasure of various individuals whose cause
naturally enough had been espoused by a rival paper, the Chronicle. Very
soon the original grievance, whatever it was, was lost sight of in the
fireworks and vitriol-throwing of personal recrimination between Mark
Twain and the Chronicle editor, then a Mr. Laird.

A point had been reached at length when only a call for bloodshed--a
challenge--could satisfy either the staff or the readers of the two
papers. Men were killed every week for milder things than the editors
had spoken each of the other. Joe Goodman himself, not so long before,
had fought a duel with a Union editor--Tom Fitch--and shot him in the
leg, so making of him a friend, and a lame man, for life. In Joe’s
absence the prestige of the paper must be maintained.

Mark Twain himself has told in burlesque the story of his duel, keeping
somewhat nearer to the fact than was his custom in such writing, as may
be seen by comparing it with the account of his abettor and second--of
course, Steve Gillis. The account is from Mr. Gillis’s own hand:

    When Joe went away, he left Sam in editorial charge of the paper.
    That was a dangerous thing to do. Nobody could ever tell what Sam
    was going to write. Something he said stirred up Mr. Laird, of the
    Chronicle, who wrote a reply of a very severe kind. He said some
    things that we told Mark could only be wiped out with blood. Those
    were the days when almost every man in Virginia City had fought with
    pistols either impromptu or premeditated duels. I had been in
    several, but then mine didn’t count. Most of them were of the
    impromptu kind. Mark hadn’t had any yet, and we thought it about
    time that his baptism took place.

    He was not eager for it; he was averse to violence, but we finally
    prevailed upon him to send Laird a challenge, and when Laird did not
    send a reply at once we insisted on Mark sending him another
    challenge, by which time he had made himself believe that he really
    wanted to fight, as much as we wanted him to do. Laird concluded to
    fight, at last. I helped Mark get up some of the letters, and a man
    who would not fight after such letters did not belong in Virginia
    City--in those days.

    Laird’s acceptance of Mark’s challenge came along about midnight, I
    think, after the papers had gone to press. The meeting was to take
    place next morning at sunrise.

    Of course I was selected as Mark’s second, and at daybreak I had him
    up and out for some lessons in pistol practice before meeting Laird.
    I didn’t have to wake him. He had not been asleep. We had been
    talking since midnight over the duel that was coming. I had been
    telling him of the different duels in which I had taken part, either
    as principal or second, and how many men I had helped to kill and
    bury, and how it was a good plan to make a will, even if one had not
    much to leave. It always looked well, I told him, and seemed to be
    a proper thing to do before going into a duel. So Mark made a will
    with a sort of gloomy satisfaction, and as soon as it was light
    enough to see, we went out to a little ravine near the meeting-
    place, and I set up a board for him to shoot at. He would step out,
    raise that big pistol, and when I would count three he would shut
    his eyes and pull the trigger. Of course he didn’t hit anything; he
    did not come anywhere near hitting anything. Just then we heard
    somebody shooting over in the next ravine. Sam said:

    “What’s that, Steve?”

    “Why,” I said, “that’s Laud. His seconds are practising him over
    there.”

    It didn’t make my principal any more cheerful to hear that pistol go
    off every few seconds over there. Just then I saw a little mud-hen
    light on some sage-brush about thirty yards away.

    “Mark,” I said, “let me have that pistol. I’ll show you how to
    shoot.”

    He handed it to me, and I let go at the bird and shot its head off,
    clean. About that time Laird and his second came over the ridge to
    meet us. I saw them coming and handed Mark back the pistol. We
    were looking at the bird when they came up.

    “Who did that?” asked Laird’s second.

    “Sam,” I said.

    “How far off was it?”

    “Oh, about thirty yards.”

    “Can he do it again?”

    “Of course,” I said; “every time. He could do it twice that far.”

    Laud’s second turned to his principal.

    “Laird,” he said, “you don’t want to fight that man. It’s just like
    suicide. You’d better settle this thing, now.”

    So there was a settlement. Laird took back all he had said; Mark
    said he really had nothing against Laird--the discussion had been
    purely journalistic and did not need to be settled in blood. He
    said that both he and Laird were probably the victims of their
    friends. I remember one of the things Laird said when his second
    told him he had better not fight.

    “Fight! H--l, no! I am not going to be murdered by that d--d
    desperado.”

    Sam had sent another challenge to a man named Cutler, who had been
    somehow mixed up with the muss and had written Sam an insulting
    letter; but Cutler was out of town at the time, and before he got
    back we had received word from Jerry Driscoll, foreman of the Grand
    jury, that the law just passed, making a duel a penitentiary offense
    for both principal and second, was to be strictly enforced, and
    unless we got out of town in a limited number of hours we would be
    the first examples to test the new law.

We concluded to go, and when the stage left next morning for San
Francisco we were on the outside seat. Joe Goodman had returned by this
time and agreed to accompany us as far as Henness Pass. We were all in
good spirits and glad we were alive, so Joe did not stop when he got
to Henness Pass, but kept on. Now and then he would say, “Well, I had
better be going back pretty soon,” but he didn’t go, and in the end he
did not go back at all, but went with us clear to San Francisco, and we
had a royal good time all the way. I never knew any series of duels to
close so happily.

So ended Mark Twain’s career on the Comstock. He had come to it a weary
pilgrim, discouraged and unknown; he was leaving it with a new name and
fame--elate, triumphant, even if a fugitive.



XLVI. GETTING SETTLED IN SAN FRANCISCO

This was near the end of May, 1864. The intention of both Gillis and
Clemens was to return to the States; but once in San Francisco both
presently accepted places, Clemens as reporter and Gillis as compositor,
on the ‘Morning Call’.

From ‘Roughing It’ the reader gathers that Mark Twain now entered into
a life of butterfly idleness on the strength of prospective riches to be
derived from the “half a trunkful of mining stocks,” and that presently,
when the mining bubble exploded, he was a pauper. But a good many
liberties have been taken with the history of this period. Undoubtedly
he expected opulent returns from his mining stocks, and was
disappointed, particularly in an investment in Hale and Norcross shares,
held too long for the large profit which could have been made by selling
at the proper time.

The fact is, he spent not more than a few days--a fortnight at most--in
“butterfly idleness,” at the Lick House before he was hard at work on
the ‘Call’, living modestly with Steve Gillis in the quietest place they
could find, never quiet enough, but as far as possible from dogs and
cats and chickens and pianos, which seemed determined to make the
mornings hideous, when a weary night reporter and compositor wanted
to rest. They went out socially, on occasion, arrayed in considerable
elegance; but their recreations were more likely to consist of private
midnight orgies, after the paper had gone to press--mild dissipations
in whatever they could find to eat at that hour, with a few glasses of
beer, and perhaps a game of billiards or pool in some all-night resort.
A printer by the name of Ward--“Little Ward,”--[L. P. Ward; well known
as an athlete in San Francisco. He lost his mind and fatally shot
himself in 1903.]--they called him--often went with them for these
refreshments. Ward and Gillis were both bantam game-cocks, and sometimes
would stir up trouble for the very joy of combat. Clemens never cared
for that sort of thing and discouraged it, but Ward and Gillis were for
war. “They never assisted each other. If one had offered to assist the
other against some overgrown person, it would have been an affront, and
a battle would have followed between that pair of little friends.”--[S.
L. C., 1906.]--Steve Gillis in particular, was fond of incidental
encounters, a characteristic which would prove an important factor
somewhat later in shaping Mark Twain’s career. Of course, the more
strenuous nights were not frequent. Their home-going was usually tame
enough and they were glad enough to get there.

Clemens, however, was never quite ready for sleep. Then, as ever,
he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose himself in
English or French history until sleep conquered. His room-mate did not
approve of this habit; it interfered with his own rest, and with his
fiendish tendency to mischief he found reprisal in his own fashion.
Knowing his companion’s highly organized nervous system he devised means
of torture which would induce him to put out the light. Once he tied a
nail to a string; an arrangement which he kept on the floor behind the
bed. Pretending to be asleep, he would hold the end of the string, and
lift it gently up and down, making a slight ticking sound on the floor,
maddening to a nervous man. Clemens would listen a moment and say:

“What in the nation is that noise”

Gillis’s pretended sleep and the ticking would continue.

Clemens would sit up in bed, fling aside his book, and swear violently.

“Steve, what is that d--d noise?” he would say.

Steve would pretend to rouse sleepily.

“What’s the matter, Sam? What noise? Oh, I guess that is one of those
death-ticks; they don’t like the light. Maybe it will stop in a minute.”

It usually did stop about that time, and the reading would be apt to
continue. But no sooner was there stillness than it began again--tick,
tick, tick. With a wild explosion of blasphemy, the book would go across
the floor and the light would disappear. Sometimes, when he couldn’t
sleep, he would dress and walk out in the street for an hour, while the
cruel Steve slept like the criminal that he was.

At last, one night, he overdid the thing and was caught. His tortured
room-mate at first reviled him, then threatened to kill him, finally put
him to shame. It was curious, but they always loved each other, those
two; there was never anything resembling an estrangement, and to
his last days Mark Twain never could speak of Steve Gillis without
tenderness.

They moved a great many times in San Francisco. Their most satisfactory
residence was on a bluff on California Street. Their windows looked down
on a lot of Chinese houses--“tin-can houses,” they were called--small
wooden shanties covered with beaten-out cans. Steve and Mark would look
down on these houses, waiting until all the Chinamen were inside; then
one of them would grab an empty beer-bottle, throw it down on those tin
can roofs, and dodge behind the blinds. The Chinamen would swarm out
and look up at the row of houses on the edge of the bluff, shake their
fists, and pour out Chinese vituperation. By and by, when they had
retired and everything was quiet again, their tormentors would throw
another bottle. This was their Sunday amusement.

At a place on Minna Street they lived with a private family. At first
Clemens was delighted.

“Just look at it, Steve,” he said. “What a nice, quiet place. Not a
thing to disturb us.”

But next morning a dog began to howl. Gillis woke this time, to find
his room-mate standing in the door that opened out into a back garden,
holding a big revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement.

“Came here, Steve,” he said. “Come here and kill him. I’m so chilled
through I can’t get a bead on him.”

“Sam,” said Steve, “don’t shoot him. Just swear at him. You can easily
kill him at that range with your profanity.”

Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain then let go such a scorching,
singeing blast that the brute’s owner sold him next day for a Mexican
hairless dog.

We gather that they moved, on an average, about once a month. A home
letter of September 25, 1864, says:

    We have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodging
    five times. We are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have
    no fault to find with the rooms or the people. We are the only
    lodgers-in a well-to-do private family.... But I need change
    and must move again.

This was the Minna Street place--the place of the dog. In the same
letter he mentions having made a new arrangement with the Call, by which
he is to receive twenty-five dollars a week, with no more night-work; he
says further that he has closed with the Californian for weekly articles
at twelve dollars each.



XLVII. BOHEMIAN DAYS

Mark Twain’s position on the ‘Call’ was uncongenial from the start.
San Francisco was a larger city than Virginia; the work there was
necessarily more impersonal, more a routine of news-gathering and
drudgery. He once set down his own memories of it:

    At nine in the morning I had to be at the police court for an hour
    and make a brief history of the squabbles of the night before. They
    were usually between Irishmen and Irishmen, and Chinamen and
    Chinamen, with now and then a squabble between the two races, for a
    change.

    During the rest of the day we raked the town from end to end,
    gathering such material as we might, wherewith to fill our required
    columns; and if there were no fires to report, we started some. At
    night we visited the six theaters, one after the other, seven nights
    in the week. We remained in each of those places five minutes, got
    the merest passing glimpse of play and opera, and with that for a
    text we “wrote up” those plays and operas, as the phrase goes,
    torturing our souls every night in the effort to find something to
    say about those performances which we had not said a couple of
    hundred times before.

    It was fearful drudgery-soulless drudgery--and almost destitute of
    interest. It was an awful slavery for a lazy man.

On the Enterprise he had been free, with a liberty that amounted to
license. He could write what he wished, and was personally responsible
to the readers. On the Call he was simply a part of a news-machine;
restricted by a policy, the whole a part of a still greater
machine--politics. Once he saw some butchers set their dogs on an
unoffending Chinaman, a policeman looking on with amused interest. He
wrote an indignant article criticizing the city government and raking
the police. In Virginia City this would have been a welcome delight; in
San Francisco it did not appear.

At another time he found a policeman asleep on his beat. Going to a
near-by vegetable stall he borrowed a large cabbage-leaf, came back and
stood over the sleeper, gently fanning him. It would be wasted effort
to make an item of this incident; but he could publish it in his own
fashion. He stood there fanning the sleeping official until a large
crowd collected. When he thought it was large enough he went away. Next
day the joke was all over the city.

Only one of the several severe articles he wrote criticizing officials
and institutions seems to have appeared--an attack on an undertaker
whose establishment formed a branch of the coroner’s office. The
management of this place one day refused information to a Call reporter,
and the next morning its proprietor was terrified by a scathing
denunciation of his firm. It began, “Those body-snatchers” and continued
through half a column of such scorching strictures as only Mark Twain
could devise. The Call’s policy of suppression evidently did not include
criticisms of deputy coroners.

Such liberty, however, was too rare for Mark Twain, and he lost
interest. He confessed afterward that he became indifferent and lazy,
and that George E. Barnes, one of the publishers of the Call, at last
allowed him an assistant. He selected from the counting-room a big,
hulking youth by the name of McGlooral, with the acquired prefix of
“Smiggy.” Clemens had taken a fancy to Smiggy McGlooral--on account of
his name and size perhaps--and Smiggy, devoted to his patron, worked
like a slave gathering news nights--daytimes, too, if necessary--all
of which was demoralizing to a man who had small appetite for his
place anyway. It was only a question of time when Smiggy alone would be
sufficient for the job.

There were other and pleasanter things in San Francisco. The personal
and literary associations were worth while. At his right hand in the
Call office sat Frank Soule--a gentle spirit--a graceful versifier who
believed himself a poet. Mark Twain deferred to Frank Soule in those
days. He thought his verses exquisite in their workmanship; a word of
praise from Soule gave him happiness. In a luxurious office up-stairs
was another congenial spirit--a gifted, handsome fellow of twenty-four,
who was secretary of the Mint, and who presently became editor of a new
literary weekly, the Californian, which Charles Henry Webb had founded.
This young man’s name was Francis Bret Harte, originally from Albany,
later a miner and school-teacher on the Stanislaus, still later a
compositor, finally a contributor, on the Golden Era. His fame scarcely
reached beyond San Francisco as yet; but among the little coterie of
writing folk that clustered about the Era office his rank was high. Mark
Twain fraternized with Bret Harte and the Era group generally. He felt
that he had reached the land--or at least the borderland--of Bohemia,
that Ultima Thule of every young literary dream.

San Francisco did, in fact, have a very definite literary atmosphere and
a literature of its own. Its coterie of writers had drifted from here
and there, but they had merged themselves into a California body-poetic,
quite as individual as that of Cambridge, even if less famous, less
fortunate in emoluments than the Boston group. Joseph E. Lawrence,
familiarly known as “Joe” Lawrence, was editor of the Golden Era,--[The
Golden Era, California’s first literary publication, was founded by
Rollin M. Daggett and J. McDonough Foard in 1852.]--and his kindness and
hospitality were accounted sufficient rewards even when his pecuniary
acknowledgments were modest enough. He had a handsome office, and the
literati, local and visiting, used to gather there. Names that would
be well known later were included in that little band. Joaquin Miller
recalls from an old diary, kept by him then, having seen Adah Isaacs
Menken, Prentice Mulford, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitzhugh
Ludlow, Mark Twain, Orpheus C. Kerr, Artemus Ward, Gilbert Densmore,
W. S. Kendall, and Mrs. Hitchcock assembled there at one time. The Era
office would seem to have been a sort of Mount Olympus, or Parnassus,
perhaps; for these were mainly poets, who had scarcely yet attained to
the dignity of gods. Miller was hardly more than a youth then, and this
grand assemblage impressed him, as did the imposing appointments of the
place.

    The Era rooms were elegant--[he says]--the most grandly carpeted
    and most gorgeously furnished that I have ever seen. Even now in my
    memory they seem to have been simply palatial. I have seen the
    world well since then--all of its splendors worth seeing--yet those
    carpeted parlors, with Joe Lawrence and his brilliant satellites,
    outshine all things else, as I turn to look back.

More than any other city west of the Alleghanies, San Francisco has
always been a literary center; and certainly that was a remarkable group
to be out there under the sunset, dropped down there behind the Sierras,
which the transcontinental railway would not climb yet, for several
years. They were a happy-hearted, aspiring lot, and they got as much as
five dollars sometimes for an Era article, and were as proud of it as
if it had been a great deal more. They felt that they were creating
literature, as they were, in fact; a new school of American letters
mustered there.

Mark Twain and Bret Harte were distinctive features of this group. They
were already recognized by their associates as belonging in a class by
themselves, though as yet neither had done any of the work for which he
would be remembered later. They were a good deal together, and it was
when Harte was made editor of the Californian that Mark Twain was put
on the weekly staff at the then unexampled twelve-dollar rate. The
Californian made larger pretensions than the Era, and perhaps had a
heavier financial backing. With Mark Twain on the staff and Bret Harte
in the chair, himself a frequent contributor, it easily ranked as first
of San Francisco periodicals. A number of the sketches collected by Webb
later, in Mark Twain’s first little volume, the Celebrated Jumping Frog,
Etc., appeared in the Era or Californian in 1864 and 1865. They were
smart, bright, direct, not always refined, but probably the best humor
of the day. Some of them are still preserved in this volume of sketches.
They are interesting in what they promise, rather than in what they
present, though some of them are still delightful enough. “The Killing
of Julius Caesar Localized” is an excellent forerunner of his burlesque
report of a gladiatorial combat in The Innocents Abroad. The Answers
to Correspondents, with his vigorous admonition of the statistical
moralist, could hardly have been better done at any later period. The
Jumping Frog itself was not originally of this harvest. It has a history
of its own, as we shall see a little further along.

The reportorial arrangement was of brief duration. Even the great
San Francisco earthquake of that day did not awaken in Mark Twain
any permanent enthusiasm for the drudgery of the ‘Call’. He had
lost interest, and when Mark Twain lost interest in a subject or an
undertaking that subject or that undertaking were better dead, so far as
he was concerned. His conclusion of service with the Call was certain,
and he wondered daily why it was delayed so long. The connection had
become equally unsatisfactory to proprietor and employee. They had a
heart-to-heart talk presently, with the result that Mark Twain was free.
He used to claim, in after-years, with his usual tendency to confess
the worst of himself, that he was discharged, and the incident has been
variously told. George Barnes himself has declared that Clemens resigned
with great willingness. It is very likely that the paragraph at the
end of Chapter LVIII in ‘Roughing It’ presents the situation with fair
accuracy, though, as always, the author makes it as unpleasant for
himself as possible:

“At last one of the proprietors took me aside, with a charity I still
remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign
my berth, and so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal.”

As an extreme contrast with the supposititious “butterfly idleness” of
his beginning in San Francisco, and for no other discoverable reason,
he doubtless thought it necessary, in the next chapter of that book,
to depict himself as having reached the depths of hard luck, debt, and
poverty.

“I became an adept at slinking,” he says. “I slunk from back street
to back street.... I slunk to my bed. I had pawned everything but the
clothes I had on.”

This is pure fiction. That he occasionally found himself short of funds
is likely enough--a literary life invites that sort of thing--but that
he ever clung to a single “silver ten-cent piece,” as he tells us, and
became the familiar of mendicancy, was a condition supplied altogether
by his later imagination to satisfy what he must have regarded as an
artistic need. Almost immediately following his separation from
the ‘Call’ he arranged with Goodman to write a daily letter for the
Enterprise, reporting San Francisco matters after his own notion with a
free hand. His payment for this work was thirty dollars a week, and he
had an additional return from his literary sketches. The arrangement was
an improvement both as to labor and income.

Real affluence appeared on the horizon just then, in the form of
a liberal offer for the Tennessee land. But alas! it was from a
wine-grower who wished to turn the tract into great vineyards, and Orion
had a prohibition seizure at the moment, so the trade was not made.
Orion further argued that the prospective purchaser would necessarily be
obliged to import horticultural labor from Europe, and that those people
might be homesick, badly treated, and consequently unhappy in those far
eastern Tennessee mountains. Such was Orion’s way.



XLVIII. THE REFUGE OF THE HILLS

Those who remember Mark Twain’s Enterprise letters (they are no longer
obtainable)--[Many of these are indeed now obtainable by a simple Web
search. D.W.]--declare them to have been the greatest series of daily
philippics ever written. However this may be, it is certain that they
made a stir. Goodman permitted him to say absolutely what he pleased
upon any subject. San Francisco was fairly weltering in corruption,
official and private. He assailed whatever came first to hand with all
the fierceness of a flaming indignation long restrained.

Quite naturally he attacked the police, and with such ferocity and
penetration that as soon as copies of the Enterprise came from Virginia
the City Hall began to boil and smoke and threaten trouble. Martin G.
Burke, then chief of police, entered libel suit against the Enterprise,
prodigiously advertising that paper, copies of which were snatched as
soon as the stage brought them.

Mark Twain really let himself go then. He wrote a letter that on the
outside was marked, “Be sure and let Joe see this before it goes in.”
 He even doubted himself whether Goodman would dare to print it, after
reading. It was a letter describing the city’s corrupt morals under the
existing police government. It began, “The air is full of lechery,
and rumors of lechery,” and continued in a strain which made even the
Enterprise printers aghast.

“You can never afford to publish that,” the foreman said to, Goodman.

“Let it all go in, every word,” Goodman answered. “If Mark can stand it,
I can!”

It seemed unfortunate (at the time) that Steve Gillis should select this
particular moment to stir up trouble that would involve both himself
and Clemens with the very officials which the latter had undertaken to
punish. Passing a saloon one night alone, Gillis heard an altercation
going on inside, and very naturally stepped in to enjoy it. Including
the barkeeper, there were three against two. Steve ranged himself on the
weaker side, and selected the barkeeper, a big bruiser, who, when the
fight was over, was ready for the hospital. It turned out that he was
one of Chief Burke’s minions, and Gillis was presently indicted on a
charge of assault with intent to kill. He knew some of the officials
in a friendly way, and was advised to give a straw bond and go into
temporary retirement. Clemens, of course, went his bail, and Steve set
out for Virginia City, until the storm blew over.

This was Burke’s opportunity. When the case was called and Gillis did
not appear, Burke promptly instituted an action against his bondsman,
with an execution against his loose property. The watch that had been
given him as Governor of the Third House came near being thus sacrificed
in the cause of friendship, and was only saved by skilful manipulation.

Now, it was down in the chain of circumstances that Steve Gillis’s
brother, James N. Gillis, a gentle-hearted hermit, a pocket-miner of the
halcyon Tuolumne district--the Truthful James of Bret Harte--happened to
be in San Francisco at this time, and invited Clemens to return with
him to the far seclusion of his cabin on Jackass Hill. In that peaceful
retreat were always rest and refreshment for the wayfarer, and more
than one weary writer besides Bret Harte had found shelter there.
James Gillis himself had fine literary instincts, but he remained a
pocket-miner because he loved that quiet pursuit of gold, the Arcadian
life, the companionship of his books, the occasional Bohemian pilgrim
who found refuge in his retreat. It is said that the sick were made
well, and the well made better, in Jim Gillis’s cabin on the hilltop,
where the air was nectar and the stillness like enchantment. One
could mine there if he wished to do so; Jim would always furnish him a
promising claim, and teach him the art of following the little fan-like
drift of gold specks to the nested deposit of nuggets somewhere up
the hillside. He regularly shared his cabin with one Dick Stoker (Dick
Baker, of ‘Roughing It’), another genial soul who long ago had retired
from the world to this forgotten land, also with Dick’s cat, Tom Quartz;
but there was always room for guests.

In ‘Roughing It’, and in a later story, “The Californian’s Tale,” Mark
Twain has made us acquainted with the verdant solitude of the Tuolumne
hills, that dreamy, delicious paradise where once a vast population had
gathered when placer-mining had been in its bloom, a dozen years before.
The human swarm had scattered when the washings failed to pay, leaving
only a quiet emptiness and the few pocket-miners along the Stanislaus
and among the hills. Vast areas of that section present a strange
appearance to-day. Long stretches there are, crowded and jammed and
drifted with ghostly white stones that stand up like fossils of a
prehistoric life--the earth deposit which once covered them entirely
washed away, every particle of it removed by the greedy hordes, leaving
only this vast bleaching drift, literally the “picked bones of the
land.” At one place stands Columbia, regarded once as a rival to
Sacramento, a possible State capital--a few tumbling shanties now--and a
ruined church.

It was the 4th of December, 1864, when Mark Twain arrived at Jim
Gillis’s cabin. He found it a humble habitation made of logs and slabs,
partly sheltered by a great live-oak tree, surrounded by a stretch of
grass. It had not much in the way of pretentious furniture, but there
was a large fireplace, and a library which included the standard
authors. A younger Gillis boy, William, was there at this time, so that
the family numbered five in all, including Tom Quartz, the cat. On rainy
days they would gather about the big, open fire and Jim Gillis, with his
back to the warmth, would relate diverting yarns, creations of his
own, turned out hot from the anvil, forged as he went along. He had a
startling imagination, and he had fostered it in that secluded place.
His stories usually consisted of wonderful adventures of his companion,
Dick Stoker, portrayed with humor and that serene and vagrant fancy
which builds as it goes, careless as to whither it is proceeding and
whether the story shall end well or ill, soon or late, if ever. He
always pretended that these extravagant tales of Stoker were strictly
true; and Stoker--“forty-six and gray as a rat”--earnest, thoughtful,
and tranquilly serene, would smoke and look into the fire and listen to
those astonishing things of himself, smiling a little now and then but
saying never a word. What did it matter to him? He had no world outside
of the cabin and the hills, no affairs; he would live and die there;
his affairs all had ended long ago. A number of the stories used in Mark
Twain’s books were first told by Jim Gillis, standing with his hands
crossed behind him, back to the fire, in the cabin on jackass Hill. The
story of Dick Baker’s cat was one of these; the jaybird and Acorn story
of ‘A Tramp Abroad’ was another; also the story of the “Burning Shame,”
 and there are others. Mark Twain had little to add to these stories;
in fact, he never could get them to sound as well, he said, as when Jim
Gillis had told them.

James Gillis’s imagination sometimes led him into difficulties. Once a
feeble old squaw came along selling some fruit that looked like green
plums. Stoker, who knew the fruit well enough, carelessly ventured the
remark that it might be all right, but he had never heard of anybody
eating it, which set Gillis off into eloquent praises of its delights,
all of which he knew to be purely imaginary; whereupon Stoker told him
if he liked the fruit so well, to buy some of it. There was no escape
after that; Jim had to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the
hair-lifting aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed
them, adding sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and
then, boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. He gave the
others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided
him and rode him down. But Jim never weakened. He ate that fearful brew,
and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the
luscious health-giving joys of the “Californian plums.”

Jackass Hill was not altogether a solitude; here and there were
neighbors. Another pocket-miner; named Carrington, had a cabin not
far away, and a mile or two distant lived an old couple with a pair of
pretty daughters, so plump and trim and innocent, that they were called
the “Chapparal Quails.” Young men from far and near paid court to them,
and on Sunday afternoons so many horses would be tied to their front
fence as to suggest an afternoon service there. Young “Billy” Gillis
knew them, and one Sunday morning took his brother’s friend, Sam
Clemens, over for a call. They went early, with forethought, and
promptly took the girls for a walk. They took a long walk, and went
wandering over the hills, toward Sandy Bar and the Stanislaus--through
that reposeful land which Bret Harte would one day light with idyllic
romance--and toward evening found themselves a long way from home. They
must return by the nearest way to arrive before dark. One of the young
ladies suggested a short cut through the Chemisal, and they started. But
they were lost, presently, and it was late, very late, when at last they
reached the ranch. The mother of the “Quails” was sitting up for them,
and she had something to say. She let go a perfect storm of general
denunciation, then narrowed the attack to Samuel Clemens as the oldest
of the party. He remained mildly serene.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he ventured at last; “it was Billy Gillis’s
fault.”

“No such thing. You know better. Mr. Gillis has been here often. It was
you.”

“But do you realize, ma’am, how tired and hungry we are? Haven’t you got
a bite for us to eat?”

“No, sir, not a bite--for such as you.”

The offender’s eyes, wandering about the room, spied something in a
corner.

“Isn’t that a guitar over there?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, it is; what of it?”

The culprit walked over, and taking it up, tuned the strings a little
and struck the chords. Then he began to sing. He began very softly and
sang “Fly Away, Pretty Moth,” then “Araby’s Daughter.” He could sing
very well in those days, following with the simpler chords. Perhaps the
mother “Quail” had known those songs herself back in the States, for her
manner grew kindlier, almost with the first notes. When he had finished
she was the first to ask him to go on.

“I suppose you are just like all young folks,” she said. “I was young
myself once. While you sing I’ll get some supper.”

She left the door to the kitchen open so that she could hear, and cooked
whatever she could find for the belated party.



XLIX. THE JUMPING FROG

It was the rainy season, the winter of 1864 and 1865, but there were
many pleasant days, when they could go pocket-hunting, and Samuel
Clemens soon added a knowledge of this fascinating science to his other
acquirements. Sometimes he worked with Dick Stoker, sometimes with one
of the Gillis boys. He did not make his fortune at pocket-mining; he
only laid its corner-stone. In the old note-book he kept of that sojourn
we find that, with Jim Gillis, he made a trip over into Calaveras County
soon after Christmas and remained there until after New Year’s, probably
prospecting; and he records that on New Year’s night, at Vallecito, he
saw a magnificent lunar rainbow in a very light, drizzling rain. A lunax
rainbow is one of the things people seldom see. He thought it an omen of
good-fortune.

They returned to the cabin on the hill; but later in the month, on the
they crossed over into Calaveras again, and began pocket-hunting not far
from Angel’s Camp. The note-book records that the bill of fare at the
Camp hotel consisted wholly of beans and something which bore the name
of coffee; also that the rains were frequent and heavy.

    January 27. Same old diet--same old weather--went out to the
    pocket-claim--had to rush back.

They had what they believed to be a good claim. Jim Gillis declared the
indications promising, and if they could only have good weather to work
it, they were sure of rich returns. For himself, he would have been
willing to work, rain or shine. Clemens, however, had different views
on the subject. His part was carrying water for washing out the pans of
dirt, and carrying pails of water through the cold rain and mud was not
very fascinating work. Dick Stoker came over before long to help. Things
went a little better then; but most of their days were spent in the
bar-room of the dilapidated tavern at Angel’s Camp, enjoying the
company of a former Illinois River pilot, Ben Coon,--[This name has been
variously given as “Ros Coon,” “Coon Drayton,” etc. It is given here as
set down in Mark Twain’s notes, made on the spot. Coon was not (as
has been stated) the proprietor of the hotel (which was kept by a
Frenchman), but a frequenter of it.]--a solemn, fat-witted person,
who dozed by the stove, or old slow, endless stories, without point or
application. Listeners were a boon to him, for few came and not many
would stay. To Mark Twain and Jim Gillis, however, Ben Coon was a
delight. It was soothing and comfortable to listen to his endless
narratives, told in that solemn way, with no suspicion of humor. Even
when his yarns had point, he did not recognize it. One dreary afternoon,
in his slow, monotonous fashion, he told them about a frog--a frog that
had belonged to a man named Coleman, who trained it to jump, but
that failed to win a wager because the owner of a rival frog had
surreptitiously loaded the trained jumper with shot. The story had
circulated among the camps, and a well-known journalist, named Samuel
Seabough, had already made a squib of it, but neither Clemens nor Gillis
had ever happened to hear it before. They thought the tale in itself
amusing, and the “spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through
such a queer yarn without ever smiling was exquisitely absurd.” When
Coon had talked himself out, his hearers played billiards on the frowsy
table, and now and then one would remark to the other:

“I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other
frog,” and perhaps the other would answer:

“I ain’t got no frog, but if I had a frog I’d bet you.”

Out on the claim, between pails of water, Clemens, as he watched Jim
Gillis or Dick Stoker “washing,” would be apt to say, “I don’t see
no p’ints about that pan o’ dirt that’s any better’n any other pan o’
dirt,” and so they kept it up.

Then the rain would come again and interfere with their work. One
afternoon, when Clemens and Gillis were following certain tiny-sprayed
specks of gold that were leading them to pocket--somewhere up the long
slope, the chill downpour set in. Gillis, as usual, was washing, and
Clemens carrying water. The “color” was getting better with every pan,
and Jim Gillis believed that now, after their long waiting, they were to
be rewarded. Possessed with the miner’s passion, he would have gone
on washing and climbing toward the precious pocket, regardless of
everything. Clemens, however, shivering and disgusted, swore that each
pail of water was his last. His teeth were chattering and he was wet
through. Finally he said, in his deliberate way:

“Jim, I won’t carry any more water. This work is too disagreeable.”

Gillis had just taken out a panful of dirt.

“Bring one more pail, Sam,” he pleaded.

“Oh, hell, Jim, I won’t do it; I’m freezing!”

“Just one more pail, Sam,” he pleaded.

“No, sir, not a drop, not if I knew there were a million dollars in that
pan.”

Gillis tore a page out of his note-book, and hastily posted a thirty-day
claim notice by the pan of dirt, and they set out for Angel’s Camp. It
kept on raining and storming, and they did not go back. A few days
later a letter from Steve Gillis made Clemens decide to return to San
Francisco. With Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker he left Angel’s and walked
across the mountains to Jackass Hill in the snow-storm--“the first I
ever saw in California,” he says in his notes.

In the mean time the rain had washed away the top of the pan of earth
they had left standing on the hillside, and exposed a handful of
nuggets-pure gold. Two strangers, Austrians, had come along and,
observing it, had sat down to wait until the thirty-day claim notice
posted by Jim Gillis should expire. They did not mind the rain--not
with all that gold in sight--and the minute the thirty days were up they
followed the lead a few pans farther and took out--some say ten, some
say twenty, thousand dollars. In either case it was a good pocket.
Mark Twain missed it by one pail of water. Still, it is just as well,
perhaps, when one remembers that vaster nugget of Angel’s Camp--the
Jumping Frog. Jim Gillis always declared, “If Sam had got that pocket he
would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of his days, like me.”

In Mark Twain’s old note-book occurs a memorandum of the frog story--a
mere casual entry of its main features:

    Coleman with his jumping frog--bet stranger $50--stranger had no
    frog, and C. got him one:--in the mean time stranger filled C.’s
    frog full of shot and he couldn’t jump. The stranger’s frog won.

It seemed unimportant enough, no doubt, at the time; but it was the
nucleus around which was built a surpassing fame. The hills along the
Stanislaus have turned out some wonderful nuggets in their time, but no
other of such size as that.



L. BACK TO THE TUMULT

FROM the note-book:

    February 25. Arrived in Stockton 5 p.m. Home again home again at
    the Occidental Hotel, San Francisco--find letters from Artemus Ward
    asking me to write a sketch for his new book of Nevada Territory
    Travels which is soon to come out. Too late--ought to have got the
    letters three months ago. They are dated early in November.

He was sorry not to oblige Ward, sorry also not to have representation
in his book. He wrote explaining the circumstance, and telling the story
of his absence. Steve Gillis, meantime, had returned to San Francisco,
and settled his difficulties there. The friends again took up residence
together.

Mark Twain resumed his daily letters to the Enterprise, without further
annoyance from official sources. Perhaps there was a temporary truce
in that direction, though he continued to attack various abuses--civic,
private, and artistic--becoming a sort of general censor, establishing
for himself the title of the “Moralist of the Main.” The letters were
reprinted in San Francisco and widely read. Now and then some one
had the temerity to answer them, but most of his victims maintained a
discreet silence. In one of these letters he told of the Mexican oyster,
a rather tough, unsatisfactory article of diet, which could not stand
criticism, and presently disappeared from the market. It was a mistake,
however, for him to attack an Alta journalist by the name of Evans.
Evans was a poet, and once composed an elegy with a refrain which ended:

       Gone, gone, gone
       --Gone to his endeavor;
       Gone, gone, gone,
       Forever and forever.

In the Enterprise letter following its publication Mark Twain referred
to this poem. He parodied the refrain and added, “If there is any
criticism to make on it I should say there is a little too much ‘gone’
and not enough ‘forever.’”

It was a more or less pointless witticism, but it had a humorous
quotable flavor, and it made Evans mad. In a squib in the Alta he
retaliated:

    Mark Twain has killed the Mexican oyster. We only regret that the
    act was not inspired by a worthier motive. Mark Twain’s sole reason
    for attacking the Mexican oyster was because the restaurant that
    sold them refused him credit.

A deadly thrust like that could not be parried in print. To deny or
recriminate would be to appear ridiculous. One could only sweat and
breathe vengeance.

“Joe,” he said to Goodman, who had come over for a visit, “my one object
in life now is to make enough money to stand trial and then go and
murder Evans.”

He wrote verses himself sometimes, and lightened his Enterprise letters
with jingles. One of these concerned Tom Maguire, the autocrat manager
of San Francisco theaters. It details Maguire’s assault on one of his
actors.

       Tom Maguire,
       Roused to ire,
       Lighted on McDougal;
       Tore his coat,
       Clutched his throat,
       And split him in the bugle.

       For shame! oh, fie!
       Maguire, why
       Will you thus skyugle?
       Why curse and swear,
       And rip and tear
       The innocent McDougal?

       Of bones bereft,
       Almost, you’ve left
       Vestvali, gentle Jew gal;
       And now you’ve smashed
       And almost hashed
       The form of poor McDougall

Goodman remembers that Clemens and Gillis were together again on
California Street at this time, and of hearing them sing, “The Doleful
Ballad of the Rejected Lover,” another of Mark Twain’s compositions. It
was a wild, blasphemous outburst, and the furious fervor with which Mark
and Steve delivered it, standing side by side and waving their fists,
did not render it less objectionable. Such memories as these are set
down here, for they exhibit a phase of that robust personality, built
of the same primeval material from which the world was created--built
of every variety of material, in fact, ever incorporated in a human
being--equally capable of writing unprintable coarseness and that rarest
and most tender of all characterizations, the ‘Recollections of JOAN of
ARC’.



LI. THE CORNER-STONE

Along with his Enterprise work, Clemens continued to write occasionally
for the Californian, but for some reason he did not offer the story of
the jumping frog. For one thing, he did not regard it highly as literary
material. He knew that he had enjoyed it himself, but the humor and
fashion of its telling seemed to him of too simple and mild a variety in
that day of boisterous incident and exaggerated form. By and by Artemus
Ward turned up in San Francisco, and one night Mark Twain told him his
experiences with Jim Gillis, and in Angel’s Camp; also of Ben Coon and
his tale of the Calaveras frog. Ward was delighted.

“Write it,” he said. “There is still time to get it into my volume of
sketches. Send it to Carleton, my publisher in New York.”--[This is in
accordance with Mr. Clemens’s recollection of the matter. The author can
find no positive evidence that Ward was on the Pacific coast again in
1865. It seems likely, therefore, that the telling of the frog story and
his approval of it were accomplished by exchange of letters.]--Clemens
promised to do this, but delayed fulfilment somewhat, and by the time
the sketch reached Carleton, Ward’s book was about ready for the press.
It did not seem worth while to Carleton to make any change of plans
that would include the frog story. The publisher handed it over to Henry
Clapp, editor of the Saturday Press, a perishing sheet, saying: “Here,
Clapp, here’s something you can use in your paper.” Clapp took it
thankfully enough, we may believe.

“Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”--[This was the original
title.]--appeared in the Saturday Press of November 18, 1865, and was
immediately copied and quoted far and near. It brought the name of Mark
Twain across the mountains, bore it up and down the Atlantic coast, and
out over the prairies of the Middle West. Away from the Pacific slope
only a reader here and there had known the name before. Now every one
who took a newspaper was treated to the tale of the wonderful Calaveras
frog, and received a mental impress of the author’s signature. The name
Mark Twain became hardly an institution, as yet, but it made a strong
bid for national acceptance.

As for its owner, he had no suspicion of these momentous happenings
for a considerable time. The telegraph did not carry such news in those
days, and it took a good while for the echo of his victory to travel to
the Coast. When at last a lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem
to have brought disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author.
Even Artemus Ward’s opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain’s
regard for it as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant,
as he believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter
written January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself:

    I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was
    back there piloting up and down the river again. Verily, all is
    vanity and little worth--save piloting.

    To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused
    for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out
    a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on! “Jim Smiley and
    His Jumping Frog”--a squib which would never have been written but
    to please Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to
    appear in his book.

    But no matter. His book was a wretchedly poor one, generally
    speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear
    between its covers.

This paragraph is from the New York correspondence of the San Francisco
Alta:

    “Mark Twain’s story in the Saturday Press of November 18th, called
    ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,’ has set all New York in a roar,
    and he may be said to have made his mark. I have been asked fifty
    times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and
    near. It is voted the best thing of the day. Cannot the
    ‘Californian’ afford to keep Mark all to itself? It should not let
    him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the
    California press.”

    The New York publishing house of Carleton & Co. gave the sketch to
    the Saturday Press when they found it was too late for the book.

It is difficult to judge the jumping Frog story to-day. It has the
intrinsic fundamental value of one of AEsop’s Fables.--[The resemblance
of the frog story to the early Greek tales must have been noted by Prof.
Henry Sidgwick, who synopsized it in Greek form and phrase for his book,
Greek Prose Composition. Through this originated the impression that the
story was of Athenian root. Mark Twain himself was deceived, until
in 1899, when he met Professor Sidgwick, who explained that the Greek
version was the translation and Mark Twain’s the original; that he had
thought it unnecessary to give credit for a story so well known. See The
Jumping Frog, Harper & Bros., 1903, p. 64.]--It contains a basic idea
which is essentially ludicrous, and the quaint simplicity of its telling
is convincing and full of charm. It appeared in print at a time when
American humor was chaotic, the public taste unformed. We had a vast
appreciation for what was comic, with no great number of opportunities
for showing it. We were so ready to laugh that when a real opportunity
came along we improved it and kept on laughing and repeating the cause
of our merriment, directing the attention of our friends to it. Whether
the story of “Jim Smiley’s Frog,” offered for the first time today,
would capture the public, and become the initial block of a towering
fame, is another matter. That the author himself underrated it
is certain. That the public, receiving it at what we now term the
psychological moment, may have overrated it is by no means impossible.
In any case, it does not matter now. The stone rejected by the builder
was made the corner-stone of his literary edifice. As such it is
immortal.

In the letter already quoted, Clemens speaks of both Bret Harte and
himself as having quit the ‘Californian’ in future expecting to write
for Eastern papers. He adds:

    Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers
    in this part of the country, the place properly belongs to Bret
    Harte, I think, though he denies it, along with the rest. He wants
    me to club a lot of old sketches together with a lot of his, and
    publish a book. I wouldn’t do it, only he agrees to take all the
    trouble. But I want to know whether we are going to make anything
    out of it, first. However, he has written to a New York publisher,
    and if we are offered a bargain that will pay for a month’s labor we
    will go to work and prepare the volume for the press.

Nothing came of the proposed volume, or of other joint literary schemes
these two had then in mind. Neither of them would seem to have been
optimistic as to their future place in American literature; certainly
in their most exalted moments they could hardly have dreamed that within
half a dozen years they would be the head and front of a new school of
letters--the two most talked-of men in America.



LII. A COMMISSION TO THE SANDWICH ISLANDS

Whatever his first emotions concerning the success of “Jim Smiley’s
Frog” may have been, the sudden astonishing leap of that batrachian into
American literature gave the author an added prestige at home as well as
in distant parts. Those about him were inclined to regard him, in
some degree at least, as a national literary figure and to pay tribute
accordingly. Special honors began to be shown to him. A fine new
steamer, the Ajax, built for the Sandwich Island trade, carried on its
initial trip a select party of guests of which he was invited to make
one. He did not go, and reproached himself sorrowfully afterward.

If the Ajax were back I would go quick, and throw up my correspondence.
She had fifty-two invited guests aboard--the cream of the
town--gentlemen and ladies, and a splendid brass band. I could not
accept because there would be no one to write my correspondence while I
was gone.

In fact, the daily letter had grown monotonous. He was restless, and the
Ajax excursion, which he had been obliged to forego, made him still more
dissatisfied. An idea occurred to him: the sugar industry of the islands
was a matter of great commercial interest to California, while the life
and scenery there, picturesquely treated, would appeal to the general
reader. He was on excellent terms with James Anthony and Paul Morrill,
of the Sacramento Union; he proposed to them that they send him as
their special correspondent to report to their readers, in a series of
letters, life, trade, agriculture, and general aspect of the islands. To
his vast delight, they gave him the commission. He wrote home joyously
now:

I am to remain there a month and ransack the islands, the cataracts and
volcanoes completely, and write twenty or thirty letters, for which they
pay as much money as I would get if I stayed at home.

He adds that on his return he expects to start straight across the
continent by way of the Columbia River, the Pend Oreille Lakes, through
Montana and down the Missouri River. “Only two hundred miles of land
travel from San Francisco to New Orleans.”

So it is: man proposes, while fate, undisturbed, spins serenely on.

He sailed by the Ajax on her next trip, March 7 (1866), beginning his
first sea voyage--a brand-new experience, during which he acquired the
names of the sails and parts of the ship, with considerable knowledge
of navigation, and of the islands he was to visit--whatever information
passengers and sailors could furnish. It was a happy, stormy voyage
altogether. In ‘Roughing It’ he has given us some account of it.

It was the 18th of March when he arrived at Honolulu, and his first
impression of that tranquil harbor remained with him always. In fact,
his whole visit there became one of those memory-pictures, full of
golden sunlight and peace, to be found somewhere in every human past.

The letters of introduction he had brought, and the reputation which
had preceded him, guaranteed him welcome and hospitality. Officials and
private citizens were alike ready to show him their pleasant land, and
he fairly reveled in its delicious air, its summer warmth, its soft
repose.

    Oh, islands there are on the face of the deep
    Where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep,

he quotes in his note-book, and adds:

    Went with Mr. Damon to his cool, vine-shaded home; no careworn or
    eager, anxious faces in this land of happy contentment. God, what a
    contrast with California and the Washoe!

And in another place:

    They live in the S. I.--no rush, no worry--merchant goes down to his
    store like a gentleman at nine--goes home at four and thinks no more
    of business till next day. D--n San F. style of wearing out life.

He fitted in with the languorous island existence, but he had come for
business, and he lost not much time. He found there a number of friends
from Washoe, including the Rev. Mr. Rising, whose health had failed from
overwork. By their direction, and under official guidance, he set out
on Oahu, one of the several curious horses he has immortalized in print,
and, accompanied by a pleasant party of ladies and gentlemen, encircled
the island of that name, crossed it and recrossed it, visited its
various battle-fields, returning to Honolulu, lame, sore, sunburnt, but
triumphant. His letters home, better even than his Union correspondence,
reveal his personal interest and enthusiasms.

    I have got a lot of human bones which I took from one of these
    battle-fields. I guess I will bring you some of them. I went with
    the American Minister and took dinner this evening with the King’s
    Grand Chamberlain, who is related to the royal family, and though
    darker than a mulatto he has an excellent English education, and in
    manners is an accomplished gentleman. He is to call for me in the
    morning; we will visit the King in the palace, After dinner they
    called in the “singing girls,” and we had some beautiful music, sung
    in the native tongue.

It was his first association with royalty, and it was human that he
should air it a little. In the same letter he states: “I will sail in a
day or two on a tour of the other islands, to be gone two months.”

‘In Roughing It’ he has given us a picture of his visits to the islands,
their plantations, their volcanoes, their natural and historic wonders.
He was an insatiable sight-seer then, and a persevering one. The very
name of a new point of interest filled him with an eager enthusiasm to
be off. No discomfort or risk or distance discouraged him. With a single
daring companion--a man who said he could find the way--he crossed the
burning floor of the mighty crater of Kilauea (then in almost constant
eruption), racing across the burning lava floor, jumping wide and
bottomless crevices, when a misstep would have meant death.

By and by Marlette shouted “Stop!” I never stopped quicker in my life.
I asked what the matter was. He said we were out of the path. He said
we must not try to go on until we found it again, for we were surrounded
with beds of rotten lava, through which we could easily break and plunge
down 1,000 feet. I thought Boo would answer for me, and was about to
say so, when Marlette partly proved his statement, crushing through and
disappearing to his arm-pits.

They made their way across at last, and stood the rest of the night
gazing down upon a spectacle of a crater in quivering action, a
veritable lake of fire. They had risked their lives for that scene, but
it seemed worth while.

His open-air life on the river, and the mining camps, had prepared
Samuel Clemens for adventurous hardships. He was thirty years old, with
his full account of mental and physical capital. His growth had been
slow, but he was entering now upon his golden age; he was fitted for
conquest of whatever sort, and he was beginning to realize his power.



LIII. ANSON BURLINGAME AND THE “HORNET” DISASTER

It was near the end of June when he returned to Honolulu from a tour of
all the islands, fairly worn out and prostrated with saddle boils. He
expected only to rest and be quiet for a season, but all unknown to him
startling and historic things were taking place in which he was to have
a part--events that would mark another forward stride in his career.

The Ajax had just come in, bringing his Excellency Anson Burlingame,
then returning to his post as minister to China; also General Van
Valkenburg, minister to Japan; Colonel Rumsey and Minister Burlingame’s
son, Edward,--[Edward L. Burlingame, now for many years editor of
Scribner’s Magazine.]--then a lively boy of eighteen. Young Burlingame
had read “The Jumping Frog,” and was enthusiastic about Mark Twain and
his work. Learning that he was in Honolulu, laid up at his hotel, the
party sent word that they would call on him next morning.

Clemens felt that he must not accept this honor, sick or well. He
crawled out of bed, dressed and shaved himself as quickly as possible,
and drove to the American minister’s, where the party was staying. They
had a hilariously good time. When he returned to his hotel he sent them,
by request, whatever he had on hand of his work. General Van Valkenburg
had said to him:

“California is proud of Mark Twain, and some day the American people
will be, too, no doubt.”

There has seldom been a more accurate prophecy.

But a still greater event was imminent. On that very day (June 21, 1866)
there came word of the arrival at Sanpahoe, on the island of Hawaii, of
an open boat containing fifteen starving wretches, who on short, ten-day
rations had been buffeting a stormy sea for forty-three days! A vessel,
the Hornet, from New York, had taken fire and burned “on the line,” and
since early in May, on that meager sustenance, they had been battling
with hundreds of leagues of adverse billows, seeking for land.

A few days following the first report, eleven of the rescued men were
brought to Honolulu and placed in the hospital. Mark Twain recognized
the great news importance of the event. It would be a splendid beat if
he could interview the castaways and be the first to get their story to
his paper. There was no cable in those days; a vessel for San Francisco
would sail next morning. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and he
must not miss it. Bedridden as he was, the undertaking seemed beyond his
strength.

But just at this time the Burlingame party descended on him, and almost
before he knew it he was on the way to the hospital on a cot, escorted
by the heads of the joint legations of China and Japan. Once there,
Anson Burlingame, with his splendid human sympathy and handsome, courtly
presence, drew from those enfeebled castaways all the story of their
long privation and struggle, that had stretched across forty-three
distempered days and four thousand miles of sea. All that Mark Twain had
to do was to listen and make the notes.

He put in the night-writing against time. Next morning, just as the
vessel for the States was drifting away from her dock, a strong hand
flung his bulky envelope of manuscript aboard, and if the vessel arrived
his great beat was sure. It did arrive, and the three-column story on
the front page of the Sacramento Union, in its issue of July 19th, gave
the public the first detailed history of the terrible Hornet disaster
and the rescue of those starving men. Such a story occupied a wider
place in the public interest than it would in these crowded days. The
telegraph carried it everywhere, and it was featured as a sensation.

Mark Twain always adored the name and memory of Anson Burlingame. In his
letter home he tells of Burlingame’s magnanimity in “throwing away an
invitation to dine with princes and foreign dignitaries” to help him.
“You know I appreciate that kind of thing,” he says; which was a true
statement, and in future years he never missed an opportunity of paying
an instalment on his debt of gratitude. It was proper that he should
do so, for the obligation was a far greater one than that contracted
in obtaining the tale of the Hornet disaster. It was the debt which one
owes to a man who, from the deep measure of his understanding, gives
encouragement and exactly needed and convincing advice. Anson Burlingame
said to Samuel Clemens:

“You have great ability; I believe you have genius. What you need now is
the refinement of association. Seek companionship among men of superior
intellect and character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate
with inferiors; always climb.”

Clemens never forgot that advice. He did not always observe it, but he
rarely failed to realize its gospel. Burlingame urged him to travel.

“Come to Pekin next winter,” he said, “and visit me. Make my house
your home. I will give you letters and introduce you. You will have
facilities for acquiring information about China.”

It is not surprising then that Mark Twain never felt his debt to Anson
Burlingame entirely paid. Burlingame came more than once to the hotel,
for Clemens was really ill now, and they discussed plans for his future
betterment.

He promised, of course, to visit China, and when he was alone put in a
good deal of time planning a trip around the world which would include
the great capitals. When not otherwise employed he read; though there
was only one book in the hotel, a “blue and gold” edition of Dr.
Holmes’s Songs in Many Keys, and this he soon knew almost by heart, from
title-page to finis.

He was soon up and about. No one could remain ill long in those happy
islands. Young Burlingame came, and suggested walks. Once, when Clemens
hesitated, the young man said:

“But there is a Scriptural command for you to go.”

“If you can quote one I’ll obey it,” said Clemens.

“Very well. The Bible says, ‘If any man require thee to walk a mile, go
with him, Twain.’”

The command was regarded as sufficient. Clemens quoted the witticism
later (in his first lecture), and it was often repeated in after-years,
ascribed to Warner, Ward, and a dozen others. Its origin was as here set
down.

Under date of July 4 (1866), Mark Twain’s Sandwich Island note-book
says:

    Went to a ball 8.30 P.M.--danced till 12.30; stopped at General Van
    Valkenburg’s room and talked with him and Mr. Burlingame and Ed
    Burlingame until 3 A.M.

From which we may conclude that he had altogether recovered. A few days
later the legation party had sailed for China and Japan, and on the 19th
Clemens himself set out by a slow sailing-vessel to San Francisco.
They were becalmed and were twenty-five days making the voyage. Captain
Mitchell and others of the wrecked Hornet were aboard, and he put in a
good deal of time copying their diaries and preparing a magazine article
which, he believed, would prove his real entrance to the literary world.

The vessel lay almost perfectly still, day after day, and became a
regular playground at sea. Sundays they had services and Mark Twain led
the choir.

“I hope they will have a better opinion of our music in heaven than I
have down here,” he says in his notes. “If they don’t, a thunderbolt
will knock this vessel endways.” It is perhaps worthy of mention that on
the night of the 27th of July he records having seen another “splendidly
colored, lunar rainbow.” That he regarded this as an indication of
future good-fortune is not surprising, considering the events of the
previous year.

It was August 13th when he reached San Francisco, and the note-book
entry of that day says:

    Home again. No--not home again--in prison again, end all the wild
    sense of freedom gone. The city seems so cramped and so dreary with
    toil and care and business anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at
    sea again!

There were compensations, however. He went over to Sacramento, and
was abundantly welcomed. It was agreed that, in addition to the twenty
dollars allowed for each letter, a special bill should be made for the
Hornet report.

“How much do you think it ought to be, Mark?” James Anthony asked.

“Oh, I’m a modest man; I don’t want the whole Union office. Call it $100
a column.”

There was a general laugh. The bill was made out at that figure, and he
took it to the business office for payment.

“The cashier didn’t faint,” he wrote, many years later, “but he came
rather near it. He sent for the proprietors, and they only laughed in
their jolly fashion, and said it was a robbery, but ‘no matter, pay it.
It’s all right.’ The best men that ever owned a newspaper.”--[“My
Debut as a Literary Person.”--Collected works.]--Though inferior to the
descriptive writing which a year later would give him a world-wide fame,
the Sandwich Island letters added greatly to his prestige on the
Pacific coast. They were convincing, informing; tersely--even
eloquently--descriptive, with a vein of humor adapted to their audience.
Yet to read them now, in the fine nonpareil type in which they were set,
is such a wearying task that one can only marvel at their popularity.
They were not brilliant literature, by our standards to-day. Their humor
is usually of a muscular kind, varied with grotesque exaggerations; the
literary quality is pretty attenuated. Here and there are attempts at
verse. He had a fashion in those days of combining two or more
poems with distracting, sometimes amusing, effect. Examples of these
dislocations occur in the Union letters; a single stanza will present
the general idea:

    The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,

    The turf with their bayonets turning,
    And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold,
    And our lanterns dimly burning.

Only a trifling portion of the letters found their way into his Sandwich
Island chapters of ‘Roughing It’, five years later. They do, however,
reveal a sort of transition stage between the riotous florescence of the
Comstock and the mellowness of his later style. He was learning to
see things with better eyes, from a better point of view. It is not
difficult to believe that this literary change of heart was in no small
measure due to the influence of Anson Burlingame.



VOLUME I, Part 2: 1866-1875



LIV. THE LECTURER

It was not easy to take up the daily struggle again, but it was
necessary.--[Clemens once declared he had been so blue at this period
that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked
courage to pull the trigger.]--Out of the ruck of possibilities (his
brain always thronged with plans) he constructed three or four resolves.
The chief of these was the trip around the world; but that lay months
ahead, and in the mean time ways and means must be provided. Another
intention was to finish the Hornet article, and forward it to Harper’s
Magazine--a purpose carried immediately into effect. To his delight
the article found acceptance, and he looked forward to the day of its
publication as the beginning of a real career. He intended to follow
it up with a series on the islands, which in due time might result in
a book and an income. He had gone so far as to experiment with a
dedication for the book--an inscription to his mother, modified later
for use in ‘The Innocents Abroad’. A third plan of action was to take
advantage of the popularity of the Hawaiian letters, and deliver a
lecture on the same subject. But this was a fearsome prospect--he
trembled when he thought of it. As Governor of the Third House he had
been extravagantly received and applauded, but in that case the position
of public entertainer had been thrust upon him. To come forward now,
offering himself in the same capacity, was a different matter. He
believed he could entertain, but he lacked the courage to declare
himself; besides, it meant a risk of his slender capital. He confided
his situation to Col. John McComb, of the Alta California, and was
startled by McComb’s vigorous endorsement.

“Do it, by all means!” urged McComb. “It will be a grand success--I know
it! Take the largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket.”

Frightened but resolute, he went to the leading theater manager the same
Tom Maguire of his verses--and was offered the new opera-house at half
rates. The next day this advertisement appeared:

                MAGUIRE’S ACADEMY OF MUSIC
               PINE STREET, NEAR MONTGOMERY

                  THE SANDWICH ISLANDS

                      MARK TWAIN

        (HONOLULU CORRESPONDENT OF THE SACRAMENTO UNION)
                    WILL DELIVER A
              LECTURE ON THE SANDWICH ISLANDS

                AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC
               ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCT. 2d
                       (1866)

  In which passing mention will be made of Harris, Bishop Staley, the
American missionaries, etc., and the absurd customs and characteristics
of the natives duly discussed and described. The great volcano of
Kilauea will also receive proper attention.

                  A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA
            is in town, but has not been engaged
                       ALSO
               A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS
           will be on exhibition in the next block
                  MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS

 were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned
A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION may be expected; in fact, the public are
privileged to expect whatever they please.

           Dress Circle, $1.00  Family Circle, 50c
    Doors open at 7 o’clock  The Trouble to begin at 8 o’clock

The story of that first lecture, as told in Roughing It, is a faithful
one, and need only be summarized here.

Expecting to find the house empty, he found it packed from the
footlights to the walls. Sidling out from the wings--wobbly-kneed and
dry of tongue--he was greeted by a murmur, a roar, a very crash of
applause that frightened away his remaining vestiges of courage. Then,
came reaction--these were his friends, and he began to talk to them.
Fear melted away, and as tide after tide of applause rose and billowed
and came breaking at his feet, he knew something of the exaltation of
Monte Cristo when he declared “The world is mine!”

It was a vast satisfaction to have succeeded. It was particularly
gratifying at this time, for he dreaded going back into newspaper
harness. Also; it softened later the disappointment resulting from
another venture; for when the December Harper appeared, with his
article, the printer and proof-reader had somehow converted Mark Twain
into “Mark Swain,” and his literary dream perished.

As to the literary value of his lecture, it was much higher than had,
been any portion of his letters, if we may judge from its few remaining
fragments. One of these--a part of the description of the great volcano
Haleakala, on the island of Maui--is a fair example of his eloquence.

It is somewhat more florid than his later description of the same scene
in Roughing It, which it otherwise resembles; and we may imagine that
its poetry, with the added charm of its delivery, held breathless his
hearers, many of whom believed that no purer eloquence had ever been
uttered or written.

It is worth remembering, too, that in this lecture, delivered so long
ago, he advocated the idea of American ownership of these islands,
dwelling at considerable length on his reasons for this ideal. --[For
fragmentary extracts from this first lecture of Mark Twain and news
comment, see Appendix D, end of last volume.]--There was a gross return
from his venture of more than $1,200, but with his usual business
insight, which was never foresight, he had made an arrangement by which,
after paying bills and dividing with his manager, he had only about
one-third of, this sum left. Still, even this was prosperity and
triumph. He had acquired a new and lucrative profession at a bound. The
papers lauded him as the “most piquant and humorous writer and lecturer
on the Coast since the days of the lamented John Phoenix.” He felt that
he was on the highroad at last.

Denis McCarthy, late of the Enterprise, was in San Francisco, and was
willing to become his manager. Denis was capable and honest, and Clemens
was fond of him. They planned a tour of the near-by towns, beginning
with Sacramento, extending it later even to the mining camps, such as
Red Dog and Grass Valley; also across into Nevada, with engagements at
Carson City, Virginia, and Gold Hill. It was an exultant and hilarious
excursion--that first lecture tour made by Denis McCarthy and Mark
Twain. Success traveled with them everywhere, whether the lecturer
looked across the footlights of some pretentious “opera-house” or
between the two tallow candles of some camp “academy.” Whatever the
building, it was packed, and the returns were maximum.

Those who remember him as a lecturer in that long-ago time say that his
delivery was more quaint, his drawl more exaggerated, even than in
later life; that his appearance and movements on the stage were natural,
rather than graceful; that his manuscript, which he carried under his
arm, looked like a ruffled hen. It was, in fact, originally written on
sheets of manila paper, in large characters, so that it could be read
easily by dim light, and it was doubtless often disordered.

There was plenty of amusing experience on this tour. At one place, when
the lecture was over, an old man came to him and said:

“Be them your natural tones of eloquence?”

At Grass Valley there was a rival show, consisting of a lady tight-rope
walker and her husband. It was a small place, and the tight-rope
attraction seemed likely to fail. The lady’s husband had formerly been
a compositor on the Enterprise, so that he felt there was a bond of
brotherhood between him and Mark Twain.

“Look here,” he said. “Let’s combine our shows. I’ll let my wife do the
tight-rope act outside and draw a crowd, and you go inside and lecture.”

The arrangement was not made.

Following custom, the lecturer at first thought it necessary to be
introduced, and at each place McCarthy had to skirmish around and find
the proper person. At Red Dog, on the Stanislaus, the man selected
failed to appear, and Denis had to provide another on short notice. He
went down into the audience and captured an old fellow, who ducked and
dodged but could not escape. Denis led him to the stage, a good deal
frightened.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “this is the celebrated Mark Twain from
the celebrated city of San Francisco, with his celebrated lecture about
the celebrated Sandwich Islands.”

That was as far as he could go; but it was far enough. Mark Twain never
had a better introduction. The audience was in a shouting humor from the
start.

Clemens himself used to tell of an introduction at another camp, where
his sponsor said:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I know only two things about this man: the first
is that he’s never been in jail, and the second is I don’t know why.”

But this is probably apocryphal; there is too much “Mark Twain” in it.

When he reached Virginia, Goodman said to him:

“Sam, you do not need anybody to introduce you. There’s a piano on the
stage in the theater. Have it brought out in sight, and when the curtain
rises you be seated at the piano, playing and singing that song of
yours, ‘I Had an Old Horse Whose Name Was Methusalem,’ and don’t seem
to notice that the curtain is up at first; then be surprised when you
suddenly find out that it is up, and begin talking, without any further
preliminaries.”

This proved good advice, and the lecture, thus opened, started off with
general hilarity and applause.



LV. HIGHWAY ROBBERY

His Nevada, lectures were bound to be immensely successful. The people
regarded him as their property over there, and at Carson and Virginia
the houses overflowed. At Virginia especially his friends urged and
begged him to repeat the entertainment, but he resolutely declined.

“I have only one lecture yet,” he said. “I cannot bring myself to give
it twice in the same town.”

But that irresponsible imp, Steve Gillis, who was again in Virginia,
conceived a plan which would make it not only necessary for him to
lecture again, but would supply him with a subject. Steve’s plan was
very simple: it was to relieve the lecturer of his funds by a friendly
highway robbery, and let an account of the adventure furnish the new
lecture.

In ‘Roughing It’ Mark Twain has given a version of this mock robbery
which is correct enough as far as it goes; but important details are
lacking. Only a few years ago (it was April, 1907), in his cabin
on jackass Hill, with Joseph Goodman and the writer of this history
present, Steve Gillis made his “death-bed” confession as is here set
down:

“Mark’s lecture was given in Piper’s Opera House, October 30, 1866. The
Virginia City people had heard many famous lectures before, but they
were mere sideshows compared with Mark’s. It could have been run to
crowded houses for a week. We begged him to give the common people a
chance; but he refused to repeat himself. He was going down to Carson,
and was coming back to talk in Gold Hill about a week later, and his
agent, Denis McCarthy, and I laid a plan to have him robbed on the
Divide between Gold Hill and Virginia, after the Gold Hill lecture was
over and he and Denis would be coming home with the money. The Divide
was a good lonely place, and was famous for its hold-ups. We got City
Marshal George Birdsall into it with us, and took in Leslie Blackburn,
Pat Holland, Jimmy Eddington, and one or two more of Sam’s old friends.
We all loved him, and would have fought for him in a moment. That’s the
kind of friends Mark had in Nevada. If he had any enemies I never heard
of them.

“We didn’t take in Dan de Quille, or Joe here, because Sam was Joe’s
guest, and we were afraid he would tell him. We didn’t take in Dan
because we wanted him to write it up as a genuine robbery and make a big
sensation. That would pack the opera-house at two dollars a seat to hear
Mark tell the story.

“Well, everything went off pretty well. About the time Mark was
finishing his lecture in Gold Hill the robbers all went up on the Divide
to wait, but Mark’s audience gave him a kind of reception after his
lecture, and we nearly froze to death up there before he came along.
By and by I went back to see what was the matter. Sam and Denis were
coming, and carrying a carpet-sack about half full of silver between
them. I shadowed them and blew a policeman’s whistle as a signal to the
boys when the lecturers were within about a hundred yards of the place.
I heard Sam say to Denis:

“‘I’m glad they’ve got a policeman on the Divide. They never had one in
my day.’

“Just about that time the boys, all with black masks on and silver
dollars at the sides of their tongues to disguise their voices, stepped
out and stuck six-shooters at Sam and Denis and told them to put up
their hands. The robbers called each other ‘Beauregard’ and ‘Stonewall
Jackson.’ Of course Denis’s hands went up, and Mark’s, too, though Mark
wasn’t a bit scared or excited. He talked to the robbers in his regular
fashion. He said:

“‘Don’t flourish those pistols so promiscuously. They might go off by
accident.’

“They told him to hand over his watch and money; but when he started to
take his hands down they made him put them up again. Then he asked how
they expected him to give them his valuables with his hands up in the
sky. He said his treasures didn’t lie in heaven. He told them not to
take his watch, which was the one Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters had
given him as Governor of the Third House, but we took it all the same.

“Whenever he started to put his hands down we made him put them up
again. Once he said:

“‘Don’t you fellows be so rough. I was tenderly reared.’

“Then we told him and Denis to keep their hands up for fifteen minutes
after we were gone--this was to give us time to get back to Virginia and
be settled when they came along. As we were going away Mark called:

“‘Say, you forgot something.’

“‘What is it?’

“Why, the carpet-bag.’

“He was cool all the time. Senator Bill Stewart, in his Autobiography,
tells a great story of how scared Mark was, and how he ran; but Stewart
was three thousand miles from Virginia by that time, and later got mad
at Mark because he made a joke about him in ‘Roughing It’.

“Denis wanted to take his hands down pretty soon after we were gone, but
Mark said:

“‘No, Denis, I’m used to obeying orders when they are given in that
convincing way; we’ll just keep our hands up another fifteen minutes or
so for good measure.’

“We were waiting in a big saloon on C Street when Mark and Denis
came along. We knew they would come in, and we expected Mark would be
excited; but he was as unruffled as a mountain lake. He told us they
had been robbed, and asked me if I had any money. I gave him a hundred
dollars of his own money, and he ordered refreshments for everybody.
Then we adjourned to the Enterprise office, where he offered a reward,
and Dan de Quille wrote up the story and telegraphed it to the other
newspapers. Then somebody suggested that Mark would have to give another
lecture now, and that the robbery would make a great subject. He entered
right into the thing, and next day we engaged Piper’s Opera House, and
people were offering five dollars apiece for front seats. It would have
been the biggest thing that ever came to Virginia if it had come off.
But we made a mistake, then, by taking Sandy Baldwin into the joke. We
took in Joe here, too, and gave him the watch and money to keep, which
made it hard for Joe afterward. But it was Sandy Baldwin that ruined us.
He had Mark out to dinner the night before the show was to come off,
and after he got well warmed up with champagne he thought it would be a
smart thing to let Mark into what was really going on.

“Mark didn’t see it our way. He was mad clear through.”

At this point Joseph Goodman took up the story. He said:

“Those devils put Sam’s money, watch, keys, pencils, and all his things
into my hands. I felt particularly mean at being made accessory to the
crime, especially as Sam was my guest, and I had grave doubts as to how
he would take it when he found out the robbery was not genuine.

“I felt terribly guilty when he said:

“‘Joe, those d--n thieves took my keys, and I can’t get into my trunk.
Do you suppose you could get me a key that would fit my trunk?’

“I said I thought I could during the day, and after Sam had gone I took
his own key, put it in the fire and burnt it to make it look black. Then
I took a file and scratched it here and there, to make it look as if I
had been fitting it to the lock, feeling guilty all the time, like a man
who is trying to hide a murder. Sam did not ask for his key that day,
and that evening he was invited to judge Baldwin’s to dinner. I thought
he looked pretty silent and solemn when he came home; but he only said:

“‘Joe, let’s play cards; I don’t feel sleepy.’

“Steve here, and two or three of the other boys who had been active in
the robbery, were present, and they did not like Sam’s manner, so they
excused themselves and left him alone with me. We played a good while;
then he said:

“‘Joe, these cards are greasy. I have got some new ones in my trunk. Did
you get that key to-day?’

“I fished out that burnt, scratched-up key with fear and trembling.
But he didn’t seem to notice it at all, and presently returned with the
cards. Then we played, and played, and played--till one o’clock--two
o’clock--Sam hardly saying a word, and I wondering what was going to
happen. By and by he laid down his cards and looked at me, and said:

“‘Joe, Sandy Baldwin told me all about that robbery to-night. Now, Joe,
I have found out that the law doesn’t recognize a joke, and I am going
to send every one of those fellows to the penitentiary.’

“He said it with such solemn gravity, and such vindictiveness, that I
believed he was in dead earnest.

“I know that I put in two hours of the hardest work I ever did, trying
to talk him out of that resolution. I used all the arguments about the
boys being his oldest friends; how they all loved him, and how the joke
had been entirely for his own good; I pleaded with him, begged him to
reconsider; I went and got his money and his watch and laid them on
the table; but for a time it seemed hopeless. And I could imagine
those fellows going behind the bars, and the sensation it would make in
California; and just as I was about to give it up he said:

“‘Well, Joe, I’ll let it pass--this time; I’ll forgive them again; I’ve
had to do it so many times; but if I should see Denis McCarthy and Steve
Gillis mounting the scaffold to-morrow, and I could save them by turning
over my hand, I wouldn’t do it!’

“He canceled the lecture engagement, however, next morning, and the
day after left on the Pioneer Stage, by the way of Donner Lake, for
California. The boys came rather sheepishly to see him off; but he
would make no show of relenting. When they introduced themselves as
Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, etc., he merely said:

“‘Yes, and you’ll all be behind the bars some day. There’s been a good
deal of robbery around here lately, and it’s pretty clear now who did
it.’ They handed him a package containing the masks which the robbers
had worn. He received it in gloomy silence; but as the stage drove
away he put his head out of the window, and after some pretty vigorous
admonition resumed his old smile, and called out: ‘Good-by, friends;
good-by, thieves; I bear you no malice.’ So the heaviest joke was on his
tormentors after all.”

This is the story of the famous Mark Twain robbery direct from
headquarters. It has been garbled in so many ways that it seems worth
setting down in full. Denis McCarthy, who joined him presently in San
Francisco, received a little more punishment there.

“What kind of a trip did you boys have?” a friend asked of them.

Clemens, just recovering from a cold which the exposure on the Divide
had given him, smiled grimly:

“Oh, pretty good, only Denis here mistook it for a spree.”

He lectured again in San Francisco, this time telling the story of his
Overland trip in 1861, and he did the daring thing of repeating three
times the worn-out story of Horace Greeley’s ride with Hank Monk, as
given later in ‘Roughing It’. People were deadly tired of that story out
there, and when he told it the first time, with great seriousness, they
thought he must be failing mentally. They did not laugh--they only felt
sorry. He waited a little, as if expecting a laugh, and presently led
around to it and told it again. The audience was astonished still more,
and pitied him thoroughly. He seemed to be waiting pathetically in the
dead silence for their applause, then went on with his lecture; but
presently, with labored effort, struggled around to the old story again,
and told it for the third time. The audience suddenly saw the joke then,
and became vociferous and hysterical in their applause; but it was a
narrow escape. He would have been hysterical himself if the relief had
not came when it did. --[A side-light on the Horace Greeley story and on
Mr. Greeley’s eccentricities is furnished by Mr. Goodman:

When I was going East in 1869 I happened to see Hank Monk just before I
started. “Mr. Goodman,” he said, “you tell Horace Greeley that I want to
come East, and ask him to send me a pass.” “All right, Hank,” I said, “I
will.” It happened that when I got to New York City one of the first men
I met was Greeley. “Mr. Greeley,” said, “I have a message for you from
Hank Monk.” Greeley bristled and glared at me. “That--rascal?” he said,
“He has done me more injury than any other man in America.”]



LVI. BACK TO THE STATES

In the mean time Clemens had completed his plan for sailing, and had
arranged with General McComb, of the Alta California, for letters during
his proposed trip around the world. However, he meant to visit his
people first, and his old home. He could go back with means now, and
with the prestige of success.

“I sail to-morrow per Opposition--telegraphed you to-day,” he wrote on
December 14th, and a day later his note-book entry says:

    Sailed from San Francisco in Opposition (line) steamer America,
    Capt. Wakeman, at noon, 15th Dec., 1866. Pleasant sunny day, hills
    brightly clad with green grass and shrubbery.

So he was really going home at last! He had been gone five and a half
years--eventful, adventurous years that had made him over completely,
at least so far as ambitions and equipment were concerned. He had came
away, in his early manhood, a printer and a pilot, unknown outside of
his class. He was returning a man of thirty-one, with a fund of
hard experience, three added professions--mining, journalism, and
lecturing--also with a new name, already famous on the sunset slopes of
its adoption, and beginning to be heard over the hills and far away.
In some degree, at least, he resembled the prince of a fairy tale
who, starting out humble and unnoticed, wins his way through a hundred
adventures and returns with gifts and honors.

The homeward voyage was a notable one. It began with a tempest a little
way out of San Francisco--a storm terrible but brief, that brought
the passengers from their berths to the deck, and for a time set them
praying. Then there was Captain Ned Wakeman, a big, burly, fearless
sailor, who had visited the edges of all continents and archipelagos;
who had been born at sea, and never had a day’s schooling in his life,
but knew the Bible by heart; who was full of human nature and profanity,
and believed he was the only man on the globe who knew the secret of
the Bible miracles. He became a distinct personality in Mark Twain’s
work--the memory of him was an unfailing delight. Captain “Ned Blakely,”
 in ‘Roughing It’, who with his own hands hanged Bill Noakes, after
reading him promiscuous chapters from the Bible, was Captain Wakeman.
Captain “Stormfield,” who had the marvelous visit to heaven, was
likewise Captain Wakeman; and he appears in the “Idle Excursion” and
elsewhere.

Another event of the voyage was crossing the Nicaragua Isthmus--the trip
across the lake and down the San Juan River--a brand-new experience,
between shores of splendid tropic tangle, gleaming with vivid life. The
luxuriance got into his note-book.

Dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars,
towers, pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless
confusion of vine-work--no shape known to architecture unimitated--and
all so webbed together that short distances within are only gained by
glimpses. Monkeys here and there; birds warbling; gorgeous plumaged
birds on the wing; Paradise itself, the imperial realm of beauty-nothing
to wish for to make it perfect.

But it was beyond the isthmus that the voyage loomed into proportions
somber and terrible. The vessel they took there, the San Francisco,
sailed from Greytown January 1, 1867, the beginning of a memorable
year in Mark Twain’s life. Next day two cases of Asiatic cholera were
reported in the steerage. There had been a rumor of it in Nicaragua, but
no one expected it on the ship.

The nature of the disease was not hinted at until evening, when one of
the men died. Soon after midnight, the other followed. A minister making
the voyage home, Rev. J. G. Fackler, read the burial service. The gaiety
of the passengers, who had become well acquainted during the Pacific
voyage, was subdued. When the word “cholera” went among them, faces grew
grave and frightened. On the morning of January 4th Reverend Fackler’s
services were again required. The dead man was put overboard within half
an hour after he had ceased to breathe.

Gloom settled upon the ship. All steam was made to put into Key West.
Then some of the machinery gave way and the ship lay rolling, helplessly
becalmed in the fierce heat of the Gulf, while repairs were being made.
The work was done at a disadvantage, and the parts did not hold. Time
and again they were obliged to lie to, in the deadly tropic heat,
listening to the hopeless hammering, wondering who would be the next to
be sewed up hastily in a blanket and slipped over the ship’s side. On
the 5th seven new cases of illness were reported. One of the crew, a man
called “Shape,” was said to be dying. A few hours later he was dead. By
this time the Reverend Fackler himself had been taken.

“So they are burying poor ‘Shape’ without benefit of clergy,” says the
note-book.

General consternation now began to prevail. Then it was learned that
the ship’s doctor had run out of medicines. The passengers became
demoralized. They believed their vessel was to become a charnel ship.
Strict sanitary orders were issued, and a hospital was improvised.

    Verily the ship is becoming a floating hospital herself--not an hour
    passes but brings its fresh sensation, its new disaster, its
    melancholy tidings. When I think of poor “Shape” and the preacher,
    both so well when I saw them yesterday evening, I realize that I
    myself may be dead to-morrow.

    Since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on the
    ship--a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers.

By noon it was evident that the minister could not survive. He died at
two o’clock next morning; the fifth victim in less than five days. The
machinery continued to break and the vessel to drag. The ship’s doctor
confessed to Clemens that he was helpless. There were eight patients in
the hospital.

But on January 6th they managed to make Key West, and for some reason
were not quarantined. Twenty-one passengers immediately deserted the
ship and were heard of no more.

“I am glad they are gone. D--n them,” says the notebook. Apparently
he had never considered leaving, and a number of others remained. The
doctor restocked his medicine-locker, and the next day they put to sea
again. Certainly they were a daring lot of voyagers. On the 8th another
of the patients died. Then the cooler weather seemed to check the
contagion, and it was not until the night of the 11th, when the New York
harbor lights were in view, that the final death occurred. There were
no new cases by this time, and the other patients were convalescent. A
certificate was made out that the last man had died of “dropsy.” There
would seem to have been no serious difficulty in docking the vessel and
landing the passengers. The matter would probably be handled differently
to-day.



LVII. OLD FRIENDS AND NEW PLANS

It had been more than thirteen years since his first arrival in New
York. Then he had been a youth, green, untraveled, eager to get away
from home. Now a veteran, he was as eager to return.

He stopped only long enough in New York to see Charles Henry Webb, late
of California, who had put together a number of the Mark Twain sketches,
including “The Jumping Frog,” for book publication. Clemens himself
decided to take the book to Carleton, thinking that, having missed the
fame of the “Frog” once, he might welcome a chance to stand sponsor for
it now. But Carleton was wary; the “Frog” had won favor, and even fame,
in its fugitive, vagrant way, but a book was another matter. Books were
undertaken very seriously and with plenty of consideration in those
days. Twenty-one years later, in Switzerland, Carleton said to Mark
Twain:

“My chief claim to immortality is the distinction of having declined
your first book.”

Clemens was ready enough to give up the book when Carleton declined
it, but Webb said he would publish it himself, and he set about it
forthwith. The author waited no longer now, but started for St. Louis,
and was soon with his mother and sister, whom he had not seen since that
eventful first year of the war. They thought he looked old, which was
true enough, but they found him unchanged in his manner: buoyant, full
of banter and gravely quaint remarks--he was always the same. Jane
Clemens had grown older, too. She was nearly sixty-four, but as keen
and vigorous as ever-proud (even if somewhat critical) of this handsome,
brilliant man of new name and fame who had been her mischievous,
wayward boy. She petted him, joked with him, scolded him, and inquired
searchingly into his morals and habits. In turn he petted, comforted,
and teased her. She decided that he was the same Sam, and always would
be--a true prophecy.

He went up to Hannibal to see old friends. Many were married; some had
moved away; some were dead--the old story. He delivered his lecture
there, and was the center of interest and admiration--his welcome might
have satisfied even Tom Sawyer. From Hannibal he journeyed to Keokuk,
where he lectured again to a crowd of old friends and new, then returned
to St. Louis for a more extended visit.

It was while he was in St. Louis that he first saw the announcement of
the Quaker City Holy Land Excursion, and was promptly fascinated by what
was then a brand-new idea in ocean travel--a splendid picnic--a choice
and refined party that would sail away for a long summer’s journeying
to the most romantic of all lands and seas, the shores of the
Mediterranean. No such argosy had ever set out before in pursuit of the
golden fleece of happiness.

His projected trip around the world lost its charm in the light of this
idyllic dream. Henry Ward Beecher was advertised as one of the party;
General Sherman as another; also ministers, high-class journalists--the
best minds of the nation. Anson Burlingame had told him to associate
with persons of refinement and intellect. He lost no time in writing to
the Alta, proposing that they send him in this select company.

Noah Brooks, who was then on the Alta, states--[In an article published
in the Century Magazine.]--that the management was staggered by the
proposition, but that Col. John McComb insisted that the investment in
Mark Twain would be sound. A letter was accordingly sent, stating that
a check for his passage would be forwarded in due season, and that
meantime he could contribute letters from New York City. The rate
for all letters was to be twenty dollars each. The arrangement was a
godsend, in the fullest sense of the word, to Mark Twain.

It was now April, and he was eager to get back to New York to arrange
his passage. The Quaker City would not sail for two months yet (two
eventful months), but the advertisement said that passages must be
secured by the 5th, and he was there on that day. Almost the first man
he met was the chief of the New York Alta bureau with a check for twelve
hundred and fifty dollars (the amount of his ticket) and a telegram
saying, “Ship Mark Twain in the Holy Land Excursion and pay his
passage.”

    --[The following letter, which bears no date, was probably handed to
    him later in the New York Alta office as a sort of credential:

    ALTA CALIFORNIA OFFICE, 42 JOHN STREET, NEW YORK.

    Sam’l Clemens, Esq., New York.

    DEAR SIR,--I have the honor to inform you that Fred’k. MacCrellish
    & Co., Proprietors of Alta California, San Francisco, Cal., desire
    to engage your services as Special Correspondent on the pleasure
    excursion now about to proceed from this City to the Holy Land. In
    obedience to their instructions I have secured a passage for you on
    the vessel about to convey the excursion party referred to, and made
    such arrangements as I hope will secure your comfort and
    convenience. Your only instructions are that you will continue to
    write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in
    the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers
    of the Alta California. I have the honor to remain, with high
    respect and esteem,

    Your ob’dt. Servant,

    JOHN J. MURPHY.]

The Alta, it appears, had already applied for his berth; but, not having
been vouched for by Mr. Beecher or some other eminent divine, Clemens
was fearful he might not be accepted. Quite casually he was enlightened
on this point. While waiting for attention in the shipping-office, with
the Alta agent, he heard a newspaper man inquire what notables were
going. A clerk, with evident pride, rattled off the names:

“Lieutenant-General Sherman, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mask Twain; also
probably General Banks.”

So he was billed as an attraction. It was his first surreptitious taste
of fame on the Atlantic coast, and not without its delight. The story
often told of his being introduced by Ned House, of the Tribune, as a
minister, though often repeated by Mark Twain himself, was in the nature
of a joke, and mainly apocryphal. Clemens was a good deal in House’s
company at the time, for he had made an arrangement to contribute
occasional letters to the Tribune, and House no doubt introduced him
jokingly as one of the Quaker City ministers.



LVIII. A NEW BOOK AND A LECTURE

Webb, meantime, had pushed the Frog book along. The proofs had been read
and the volume was about ready for issue. Clemens wrote to his mother
April 15th:

    My book will probably be in the bookseller’s hands in about two
    weeks. After that I shall lecture. Since I have been gone, the
    boys have gotten up a “call” on me signed by two hundred
    Californians.

The lecture plan was the idea of Frank Fuller, who as acting Governor of
Utah had known Mark Twain on the Comstock, and prophesied favorably of
his future career. Clemens had hunted up Fuller on landing in New York
in January, and Fuller had encouraged the lecture then; but Clemens was
doubtful.

“I have no reputation with the general public here,” he said. “We
couldn’t get a baker’s dozen to hear me.”

But Fuller was a sanguine person, with an energy and enthusiasm that
were infectious. He insisted that the idea was sound. It would solidify
Mark Twain’s reputation on the Atlantic coast, he declared, insisting
that the largest house in New York, Cooper Union, should be taken.
Clemens had partially consented, and Fuller had arranged with all the
Pacific slope people who had come East, headed by ex-Governor James
W. Nye (by this time Senator at Washington), to sign a call for the
“Inimitable Mark Twain” to appear before a New York audience. Fuller
made Nye agree to be there and introduce the lecturer, and he was
burningly busy and happy in the prospect.

But Mark Twain was not happy. He looked at that spacious hall and
imagined the little crowd of faithful Californian stragglers that might
gather in to hear him, and the ridicule of the papers next day. He
begged Fuller to take a smaller hall, the smallest he could get. But
only the biggest hall in New York would satisfy Fuller. He would have
taken a larger one if he could have found it. The lecture was
announced for May 6th. Its subject was “Kanakadom, or the Sandwich
Islands”--tickets fifty cents. Fuller timed it to follow a few days
after Webb’s book should appear, so that one event might help the other.

Mark Twain’s first book, ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveyas
County, and Other Sketches’, was scheduled for May 1st, and did,
in fact, appear on that date; but to the author it was no longer an
important event. Jim Smiley’s frog as standard-bearer of his
literary procession was not an interesting object, so far as he was
concerned--not with that vast, empty hall in the background and the
insane undertaking of trying to fill it. The San Francisco venture had
been as nothing compared with this. Fuller was working night and day
with abounding joy, while the subject of his labor felt as if he were
on the brink of a fearful precipice, preparing to try a pair of wings
without first learning to fly. At one instant he was cold with fright,
the next glowing with an infection of Fuller’s faith. He devised a
hundred schemes for the sale of seats. Once he came rushing to Fuller,
saying:

“Send a lot of tickets down to the Chickering Piano Company. I have
promised to put on my programme, ‘The piano used at this entertainment
is manufactured by Chickering.”’

“But you don’t want a piano, Mark,” said Fuller, “do you?”

“No, of course not; but they will distribute the tickets for the sake of
the advertisement, whether we have the piano or not.”

Fuller got out a lot of handbills and hung bunches of them in the
stages, omnibuses, and horse-cars. Clemens at first haunted these
vehicles to see if anybody noticed the bills. The little dangling
bunches seemed untouched. Finally two men came in; one of them pulled
off a bill and glanced at it. His friend asked:

“Who’s Mark Twain?”

“God knows; I don’t!”

The lecturer could not ride any more. He was desperate.

“Fuller,” he groaned, “there isn’t a sign--a ripple of interest.”

Fuller assured him that everything was working all right “working
underneath,” Fuller said--but the lecturer was hopeless. He reported his
impressions to the folks at home:

    Everything looks shady, at least, if not dark; I have a good agent;
    but now, after we have hired the Cooper Institute, and gone to an
    expense in one way or another of $500, it comes out that I have got
    to play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, Ristori, and also the
    double troop of Japanese jugglers, the latter opening at the great
    Academy of Music--and with all this against me I have taken the
    largest house in New York and cannot back water.

He might have added that there were other rival entertainments: “The
Flying Scud” was at Wallack’s, the “Black Crook” was at Niblo’s,
John Brougham at the Olympic; and there were at least a dozen lesser
attractions. New York was not the inexhaustible city in those days;
these things could gather in the public to the last man. When the day
drew near, and only a few tickets had been sold, Clemens was desperate.

“Fuller,” he said, “there’ll be nobody in the Cooper Union that night
but you and me. I am on the verge of suicide. I would commit suicide if
I had the pluck and the outfit. You must paper the house, Fuller. You
must send out a flood of complementaries.”

“Very well,” said Fuller; “what we want this time is reputation
anyway--money is secondary. I’ll put you before the choicest, most
intelligent audience that ever was gathered in New York City. I will
bring in the school-instructors--the finest body of men and women in the
world.”

Fuller immediately sent out a deluge of complimentary tickets, inviting
the school-teachers of New York and Brooklyn, and all the adjacent
country, to come free and hear Mark Twain’s great lecture on Kanakadom.
This was within forty-eight hours of the time he was to appear.

Senator Nye was to have joined Clemens and Fuller at the Westminster,
where Clemens was stopping, and they waited for him there with a
carriage, fuming and swearing, until it was evident that he was not
coming. At last Clemens said:

“Fuller, you’ve got to introduce me.”

“No,” suggested Fuller; “I’ve got a better scheme than that. You get
up and begin by bemeaning Nye for not being there. That will be better
anyway.”

Clemens said:

“Well, Fuller, I can do that. I feel that way. I’ll try to think up
something fresh and happy to say about that horse-thief.”

They drove to Cooper Union with trepidation. Suppose, after all, the
school-teachers had declined to come? They went half an hour before the
lecture was to begin. Forty years later Mark Twain said:

“I couldn’t keep away. I wanted to see that vast Mammoth cave and
die. But when we got near the building I saw that all the streets were
blocked with people, and that traffic had stopped. I couldn’t believe
that these people were trying to get into Cooper Institute; but
they were, and when I got to the stage at last the house was jammed
full-packed; there wasn’t room enough left for a child.

“I was happy and I was excited beyond expression. I poured the Sandwich
Islands out on those people, and they laughed and shouted to my entire
content. For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in paradise.”

And Fuller to-day, alive and young, when so many others of that ancient
time and event have vanished, has added:

“When Mark appeared the Californians gave a regular yell of welcome.
When that was over he walked to the edge of the platform, looked
carefully down in the pit, round the edges as if he were hunting for
something. Then he said: ‘There was to have been a piano here, and a
senator to introduce me. I don’t seem to discover them anywhere. The
piano was a good one, but we will have to get along with such music as
I can make with your help. As for the senator--Then Mark let himself go
and did as he promised about Senator Nye. He said things that made men
from the Pacific coast, who had known Nye, scream with delight. After
that came his lecture. The first sentence captured the audience. From
that moment to the end it was either in a roar of laughter or half
breathless by his beautiful descriptive passages. People were positively
ill for days, laughing at that lecture.”

So it was a success: everybody was glad to have been there; the papers
were kind, congratulations numerous. --[Kind but not extravagant; those
were burning political times, and the doings of mere literary people
did not excite the press to the extent of headlines. A jam around Cooper
Union to-day, followed by such an artistic triumph, would be a news
event. On the other hand, Schuyler Colfax, then Speaker of the House,
was reported to the extent of a column, nonpareil. His lecture was of
no literary importance, and no echo of it now remains. But those were
political, not artistic, days.

Of Mark Twain’s lecture the Times notice said:

“Nearly every one present came prepared for considerable provocation
for enjoyable laughter, and from the appearance of their mirthful
faces leaving the hall at the conclusion of the lecture but few were
disappointed, and it is not too much to say that seldom has so large
an audience been so uniformly pleased as the one that listened to Mark
Twain’s quaint remarks last evening. The large hall of the Union was
filled to its utmost capacity by fully two thousand persons, which fact
spoke well for the reputation of the lecturer and his future success.
Mark Twain’s style is a quaint one both in manner and method, and
through his discourse he managed to keep on the right side of the
audience, and frequently convulsed it with hearty laughter.... During
a description of the topography of the Sandwich Islands the lecturer
surprised his hearers by a graphic and eloquent description of the
eruption of the great volcano, which occurred in 1840, and his language
was loudly applauded.

“Judging from the success achieved by the lecturer last evening, he
should repeat his experiment at an early date.”]

                   COOPER INSTITUTE
    By Invitation of s large number of prominent Californians and
                  Citizens of New York,

                      MARK TWAIN

                    WILL DELIVER A
                  SERIO-HUMEROUS LECTURE
                      CONERNING

                      KANAKDOM
                         OR
                  THE SANDWICH ISLANDS,

                   COOPER INSTITUTE,
               On Monday Evening, May 6,1867.

                  TICKETS FIFTY GENTS.
 For Sale at Chickering and Sons, 852 Broadway, and at the Principal
                       Hotel

    Doors open at 7 o’clock.  The Wisdom will begin to flow at 8.

Mark Twain always felt grateful to the school-teachers for that night.
Many years later, when they wanted him to read to them in Steinway Hall,
he gladly gave his services without charge.

Nor was the lecture a complete financial failure. In spite of the
flood of complementaries, there was a cash return of some three hundred
dollars from the sale of tickets--a substantial aid in defraying the
expenses which Fuller assumed and insisted on making good on his own
account. That was Fuller’s regal way; his return lay in the joy of the
game, and in the winning of the larger stake for a friend.

“Mark,” he said, “it is all right. The fortune didn’t come, but it will.
The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out you are
going to be the most talked-of man in the country. Your letters for the
Alta and the Tribune will get the widest reception of any letters of
travel ever written.”



LIX. THE FIRST BOOK

With the shadow of the Cooper Institute so happily dispelled, The
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and his following of
Other Sketches, became a matter of more interest. The book was a neat
blue-and-gold volume printed by John A. Gray & Green, the old firm for
which the boy, Sam Clemens, had set type thirteen years before. The
title-page bore Webb’s name as publisher, with the American News Company
as selling agents. It further stated that the book was edited by “John
Paul,” that is to say by Webb himself. The dedication was in keeping
with the general irresponsible character of the venture. It was as
follows:

                         TO
                      JOHN SMITH
            WHOM I HAVE KNOWN IN DIVERS AND SUNDRY
             PLACES ABOUT THE WORLD, AND WHOSE
               MANY AND MANIFOLD VIRTUES DID
                ALWAYS COMMAND MY ESTEEM,
                  I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

It is said that the man to whom a volume is dedicated always buys a
copy. If this prove true in the present instance, a princely affluence
is about to burst upon                                   THE AUTHOR.

The “advertisement” stated that the author had “scaled the heights of
popularity at a single jump, and won for himself the sobriquet of the
‘Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope’; furthermore, that he was known to
fame as the ‘Moralist of the Main,’” and that as such he would be likely
to go down to posterity, adding that it was in his secondary character,
as humorist, rather than in his primal one of moralist, that the volume
aimed to present him.--[The advertisement complete, with extracts from
the book, may be found under Appendix E, at the end of last volume.]

Every little while, during the forty years or more that have elapsed
since then, some one has come forward announcing Mark Twain to be as
much a philosopher as a humorist, as if this were a new discovery. But
it was a discovery chiefly to the person making the announcement. Every
one who ever knew Mark Twain at any period of his life made the same
discovery. Every one who ever took the trouble to familiarize himself
with his work made it. Those who did not make it have known his work
only by hearsay and quotation, or they have read it very casually, or
have been very dull. It would be much more of a discovery to find a book
in which he has not been serious--a philosopher, a moralist, and a
poet. Even in the Jumping Frog sketches, selected particularly for their
inconsequence, the under-vein of reflection and purpose is not lacking.
The answer to Moral Statistician--[In “Answers to Correspondents,”
 included now in Sketches New and Old. An extract from it, and from “A
Strange Dream,” will be found in Appendix E.]--is fairly alive with
human wisdom and righteous wrath. The “Strange Dream,” though ending
in a joke, is aglow with poetry. Webb’s “advertisement” was playfully
written, but it was earnestly intended, and he writes Mark Twain down a
moralist--not as a discovery, but as a matter of course. The discoveries
came along later, when the author’s fame as a humorist had dazzled the
nations.

It is as well to say it here as anywhere, perhaps, that one reason why
Mark Twain found it difficult to be accepted seriously was the fact that
his personality was in itself so essentially humorous. His physiognomy,
his manner of speech, this movement, his mental attitude toward
events--all these were distinctly diverting. When we add to this that
his medium of expression was nearly always full of the quaint phrasing
and those surprising appositions which we recognize as amusing, it is
not so astonishing that his deeper, wiser, more serious purpose should
be overlooked. On the whole these unabated discoverers serve a purpose,
if only to make the rest of their species look somewhat deeper than the
comic phrase.

The little blue-and-gold volume which presented the Frog story and
twenty-six other sketches in covers is chiefly important to-day as being
Mark Twain’s first book. The selections in it were made for a public
that had been too busy with a great war to learn discrimination, and
most of them have properly found oblivion. Fewer than a dozen of them
were included in his collected Sketches issued eight years later, and
some even of those might have been spared; also some that were added,
for that matter; but detailed literary criticism is not the province of
this work. The reader may investigate and judge for himself.

Clemens was pleased with the appearance of his book. To Bret Harte he
wrote:

The book is out and it is handsome. It is full of damnable errors of
grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch,
because I was away and did not read proofs; but be a friend and say
nothing about these things. When my hurry is over, I will send you a
copy to pisen the children with.

That he had no exaggerated opinion of the book’s contents or prospects
we may gather from his letter home:

As for the Frog book, I don’t believe it will ever pay anything worth a
cent. I published it simply to advertise myself, and not with the hope
of making anything out of it.

He had grown more lenient in his opinion of the merits of the Frog story
itself since it had made friends in high places, especially since James
Russell Lowell had pronounced it “the finest piece of humorous writing
yet produced in America”; but compared with his lecture triumph, and his
prospective journey to foreign seas, his book venture, at best, claimed
no more than a casual regard. A Sandwich Island book (he had collected
his Union letters with the idea of a volume) he gave up altogether after
one unsuccessful offer of it to Dick & Fitzgerald.

Frank Fuller’s statement, that the fame had arrived, had in it some
measure of truth. Lecture propositions came from various directions.
Thomas Nast, then in the early day of his great popularity, proposed a
joint tour, in which Clemens would lecture, while he, Nast, illustrated
the remarks with lightning caricatures. But the time was too short; the
Quaker City would sail on the 8th of June, and in the mean time the Alta
correspondent was far behind with his New York letters. On May 29th he
wrote:

I am 18 Alta letters behind, and I must catch up or bust. I have refused
all invitations to lecture. Don’t know how my book is coming on.

He worked like a slave for a week or so, almost night and day, to
clean up matters before his departure. Then came days of idleness and
reaction-days of waiting, during which his natural restlessness and the
old-time regret for things done and undone, beset him.

    My passage is paid, and if the ship sails I sail on her; but I make
    no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing--have
    made no preparations whatever--shall not pack my trunk till the
    morning we sail.

    All I do know or feel is that I am wild with impatience to move
    --move--move! Curse the endless delays! They always kill me--they
    make me neglect every duty, and then I have a conscience that tears
    me like a wild beast. I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month.
    I do more mean things the moment I get a chance to fold my hands and
    sit down than ever I get forgiveness for.

    Yes, we are to meet at Mr. Beach’s next Thursday night, and I
    suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in
    swallow-tails, white kids and everything ‘en regle’.

    I am resigned to Rev. Mr. Hutchinson’s or anybody else’s
    supervision. I don’t mind it. I am fixed. I have got a splendid,
    immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless roommate who is as
    good and true and right-minded a man as ever lived--a man whose
    blameless conduct and example will always be an eloquent sermon to
    all who shall come within their influence. But send on the
    professional preachers--there are none I like better to converse
    with; if they’re not narrowminded and bigoted they make good
    companions.

The “splendid immoral room-mate” was Dan Slote--“Dan,” of The Innocents,
a lovable character--all as set down. Samuel Clemens wrote one more
letter to his mother and sister--a conscience-stricken, pessimistic
letter of good-by written the night before sailing. Referring to the
Alta letters he says:

    I think they are the stupidest letters ever written from New York.
    Corresponding has been a perfect drag ever since I got to the
    States. If it continues abroad, I don’t know what the Tribune and
    Alta folk will think.

He remembers Orion, who had been officially eliminated when Nevada had
received statehood.

    I often wonder if his law business is going satisfactorily. I wish
    I had gone to Washington in the winter instead of going West. I
    could have gouged an office out of Bill Stewart for him, and that
    would have atoned for the loss of my home visit. But I am so
    worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish
    anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is
    stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and
    an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and
    restless moving from place to place. If I could only say I had done
    one thing for any of you that entitled me to your good opinions (I
    say nothing of your love, for I am sure of that, no matter how
    unworthy of it I may make myself--from Orion down, you have always
    given me that; all the days of my life, when God Almighty knows I
    have seldom deserved it), I believe I could go home and stay there
    --and I know I would care little for the world’s praise or blame.
    There is no satisfaction in the world’s praise anyhow, and it has no
    worth to me save in the way of business. I tried to gather up its
    compliments to send you, but the work was distasteful and I dropped
    it.

    You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that
    is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt. I can get away
    from that at sea, and be tranquil and satisfied; and so, with my
    parting love and benediction for Orion and all of you, I say good-by
    and God bless you all-and welcome the wind that wafts a weary soul
    to the sunny lands of the Mediterranean!

                     Yrs. forever,
                                SAM



LX. THE INNOCENTS AT SEA

       HOLY LAND PLEASURE EXCURSION

       Steamer: Quaker City.

       Captain C. C. Duncan.

       Left New York at 2 P.m., June 8, 1867.

       Rough weather--anchored within the harbor to lay all night.

That first note recorded an event momentous in Mark Twain’s career--an
event of supreme importance; if we concede that any link in a
chain regardless of size is of more importance than any other link.
Undoubtedly it remains the most conspicuous event, as the world views it
now, in retrospect.

The note further heads a new chapter of history in sea-voyaging. No such
thing as the sailing of an ocean steamship with a pleasure-party on a
long transatlantic cruise had ever occurred before. A similar project
had been undertaken the previous year, but owing to a cholera scare
in the East it had been abandoned. Now the dream had become a fact--a
stupendous fact when we consider it. Such an important beginning as that
now would in all likelihood furnish the chief news story of the day.

But they had different ideas of news in those days. There were no
headlines announcing the departure of the Quaker City--only the barest
mention of the ship’s sailing, though a prominent position was given
to an account of a senatorial excursion-party which set out that same
morning over the Union Pacific Railway, then under construction. Every
name in that political party was set dawn, and not one of them except
General Hancock will ever be heard of again. The New York Times,
however, had some one on its editorial staff who thought it worth while
to comment a little on the history-making Quaker City excursion. The
writer was pleasantly complimentary to officers and passengers. He
referred to Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, who was taking with him type and
press, whereby he would “skilfully utilize the brains of the company for
their mutual edification.” Mr. Beecher and General Sherman would find
talent enough aboard to make the hours go pleasantly (evidently the
writer had not interested himself sufficiently to know that these
gentlemen were not along), and the paragraph closed by prophesying other
such excursions, and wishing the travelers “good speed, a happy voyage,
and a safe return.”

That was handsome, especially for those days; only now, some fine day,
when an airship shall start with a band of happy argonauts to land
beyond the sunrise for the first time in history, we shall feature it
and emblazon it with pictures in the Sunday papers, and weeklies, and in
the magazines.--[The Quaker City idea was so unheard-of that in some
of the foreign ports visited, the officials could not believe that the
vessel was simply a pleasure-craft, and were suspicious of some dark,
ulterior purpose.]

That Henry Ward Beecher and General Sherman had concluded not to go
was a heavy disappointment at first; but it proved only a temporary
disaster. The inevitable amalgamation of all ship companies took place.
The sixty-seven travelers fell into congenial groups, or they mingled
and devised amusements, and gossiped and became a big family, as happy
and as free from contention as families of that size are likely to be.

The Quaker City was a good enough ship and sizable for her time. She
was registered eighteen hundred tons--about one-tenth the size of
Mediterranean excursion-steamers today--and when conditions were
favorable she could make ten knots an hour under steam--or, at least,
she could do it with the help of her auxiliary sails. Altogether she was
a cozy, satisfactory ship, and they were a fortunate company who had her
all to themselves and went out on her on that long-ago ocean gipsying.
She has grown since then, even to the proportions of the Mayflower. It
was necessary for her to grow to hold all of those who in later times
claimed to have sailed in her on that voyage with Mark Twain.--[The
Quaker City passenger list will be found under Appendix F, at the end of
last volume.]

They were not all ministers and deacons aboard the Quaker City. Clemens
found other congenial spirits be sides his room-mate Dan Slote--among
them the ship’s surgeon, Dr. A. Reeve Jackson (the guide-destroying
“Doctor” of The Innocents); Jack Van Nostrand, of New Jersey (“Jack”);
Julius Moulton, of St. Louis (“Moult”), and other care-free fellows,
the smoking-room crowd which is likely to make comradeship its
chief watchword. There were companionable people in the cabin crowd
also--fine, intelligent men and women, especially one of the latter,
a middle-aged, intellectual, motherly soul--Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks, of
Cleveland, Ohio. Mrs. Fairbanks--herself a newspaper correspondent for
her husband’s paper, the Cleveland Herald had a large influence on
the character and general tone of those Quaker City letters which
established Mark Twain’s larger fame. She was an able writer herself;
her judgment was thoughtful, refined, unbiased--altogether of a superior
sort. She understood Samuel Clemens, counseled him, encouraged him to
read his letters aloud to her, became in reality “Mother Fairbanks,” as
they termed her, to him and to others of that ship who needed her kindly
offices.

In one of his home letters, later, he said of her:

    She was the most refined, intelligent, cultivated lady in the ship,
    and altogether the kindest and best. She sewed my buttons on, kept
    my clothing in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I
    behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit
    promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits. I am
    under lasting obligations to her. She looks young because she is so
    good, but she has a grown son and daughter at home.

In one of the early letters which Mrs. Fairbanks wrote to her paper she
is scarcely less complimentary to him, even if in a different way.

    We have D.D.’s and M.D.’s--we have men of wisdom and men of wit.
    There is one table from which is sure to come a peal of laughter,
    and all eyes are turned toward Mark Twain, whose face is, perfectly
    mirth-provoking. Sitting lazily at the table, scarcely genteel in
    his appearance, there is something, I know not what, that interests
    and attracts. I saw to-day at dinner venerable divines and sage-
    looking men convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint,
    odd manners.

It requires only a few days on shipboard for acquaintances to form, and
presently a little afternoon group was gathering to hear Mark Twain read
his letters. Mrs. Fairbanks was there, of course, also Mr. and Mrs. S.
L. Severance, likewise of Cleveland, and Moses S. Beach, of the Sun,
with his daughter Emma, a girl of seventeen. Dan Slote was likely to be
there, too, and Jack, and the Doctor, and Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira,
New York, a boy of eighteen, who had conceived a deep admiration for the
brilliant writer. They were fortunate ones who first gathered to hear
those daring, wonderful letters.

But the benefit was a mutual one. He furnished a priceless
entertainment, and he derived something equally priceless in return--the
test of immediate audience and the boon of criticism. Mrs. Fairbanks
especially was frankly sincere. Mr. Severance wrote afterward:

    One afternoon I saw him tearing up a bunch of the soft, white paper-
    copy paper, I guess the newspapers call it-on which he had written
    something, and throwing the fragments into the Mediterranean. I
    inquired of him why he cast away the fruits of his labors in that
    manner.

“Well,” he drawled, “Mrs. Fairbanks thinks it oughtn’t to be printed,
and, like as not, she is right.”

And Emma Beach (Mrs. Abbott Thayer) remembers hearing him say:

“Well, Mrs. Fairbanks has just destroyed another four hours’ work for
me.”

Sometimes he played chess with Emma Beach, who thought him a great
hero because, once when a crowd of men were tormenting a young lad, a
passenger, Mark Twain took the boy’s part and made them desist.

“I am sure I was right, too,” she declares; “heroism came natural to
him.”

Mr. Severance recalls another incident which, as he says, was trivial
enough, but not easy to forget:

We were having a little celebration over the birthday anniversary of
Mrs. Duncan, wife of our captain. Mark Twain got up and made a little
speech, in which he said Mrs. Duncan was really older than Methuselah
because she knew a lot of things that Methuselah never heard of. Then
he mentioned a number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by
saying, “What did Methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?”

Except Following the Equator, The Innocents Abroad comes nearer to being
history than any other of Mark Twain’s travel-books. The notes for it
were made on the spot, and there was plenty of fact, plenty of fresh,
new experience, plenty of incident to set down. His idea of descriptive
travel in those days was to tell the story as it happened; also,
perhaps, he had not then acquired the courage of his inventions. We
may believe that the adventures with Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are
elaborated here and there; but even those happened substantially as
recorded. There is little to add, then, to the story of that halcyon
trip, and not much to elucidate.

The old note-books give a light here and there that is interesting. It
is curious to be looking through them now, trying to realize that
these penciled memoranda were the fresh, first impressions that would
presently grow into the world’s most delightful book of travel; that
they were set down in the very midst of that care-free little company
that frolicked through Italy, climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills.
They are all dead now; but to us they are as alive and young to-day as
when they followed the footprints of the Son of Man through Palestine,
and stood at last before the Sphinx, impressed and awed by its “five
thousand slow-revolving years.”

Some of the items consist of no more than a few terse, suggestive
words--serious, humorous, sometimes profane. Others are statistical,
descriptive, elaborated. Also there are drawings--“not copied,” he marks
them, with a pride not always justified by the result. The earlier
notes are mainly comments on the “pilgrims,” the freak pilgrims: “the
Frenchy-looking woman who owns a dog and keeps up an interminable
biography of him to the passengers”; the “long-legged, simple,
wide-mouthed, horse-laughing young fellow who once made a sea voyage to
Fortress Monroe, and quotes eternally from his experiences”; also, there
is reference to another young man, “good, accommodating, pleasant but
fearfully green.” This young person would become the “Interrogation
Point,” in due time, and have his picture on page 71 (old edition),
while opposite him, on page 70, would appear the “oracle,” identified as
one Doctor Andrews, who (the note-book says) had the habit of “smelling
in guide-books for knowledge and then trying to play it for old
information that has been festering in his brain.” Sometimes there are
abstract notes such as:

How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing that no one had
ever said it before.

Of the “character” notes, the most important and elaborated is
that which presents the “Poet Lariat.” This is the entry, somewhat
epitomized:

                  BLOODGOOD H. CUTTER

    He is fifty years old, and small of his age. He dresses in
    homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with
    a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them on all
    possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his
    portrait at the head. These he will give to any man who comes
    along, whether he has anything against him or not....

    Dan said:

    “It must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of day
    and put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like Byron and
    Shakespeare and those fellows.”

    “Oh yes, it is--it is--Why, many’s the time I’ve had to get up in
    the night when it comes on me:

       Whether we’re on the sea or the land
       We’ve all got to go at the word of command--

    “Hey! how’s that?”

A curious character was Cutter--a Long Island farmer with the obsession
of rhyme. In his old age, in an interview, he said:

“Mark was generally writing and he was glum. He would write what we were
doing, and I would write poetry, and Mark would say:

“‘For Heaven’s sake, Cutter, keep your poems to yourself.’

“Yes, Mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing.”

Poor old Poet Lariat--dead now with so many others of that happy crew.
We may believe that Mark learned to be “glum” when he saw the Lariat
approaching with his sheaf of rhymes. We may believe, too, that he was
“generally writing.” He contributed fifty-three letters to the Alta
during that five months and six to the Tribune. They would average about
two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four thousand words, or
something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in all. To turn out
an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing
besides, one must be generally writing during any odd intervals; those
who are wont to regard Mark Twain as lazy may consider these statistics.
That he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which
he was fitted and intended it may be set down here upon authority (and
despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last
year he was the most industrious of men.



LXI. THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

It was Dan, Jack, and the Doctor who with Mark Twain wandered down
through Italy and left moral footprints that remain to this day.
The Italian guides are wary about showing pieces of the True Cross,
fragments of the Crown of Thorns, and the bones of saints since then.
They show them, it is true, but with a smile; the name of Mark Twain
is a touch-stone to test their statements. Not a guide in Italy but has
heard the tale of that iconoclastic crew, and of the book which turned
their marvels into myths, their relics into bywords.

It was Doctor Jackson, Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens
who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and
looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight. It is all
set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given
in the book; only he does not tell us that Captain Duncan and the
quartermaster, Pratt, connived at the escapade, or how the latter
watched the shore in anxious suspense until he heard the whistle which
was their signal to be taken aboard. It would have meant six months’
imprisonment if they had been captured, for there was no discretion in
the Greek law.

It was T. D. Crocker, A. N. Sanford, Col. Peter Kinney, and William
Gibson who were delegated to draft the address to the Emperor of Russia
at Yalta, with Samuel L. Clemens as chairman of that committee. The
chairman wrote the address, the opening sentence of which he grew so
weary of hearing:

    We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply
    for recreation, and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial
    state.

The address is all set down in the notes, and there also exists the
first rough draft, with the emendations in his own hand. He deplores the
time it required:

    That job is over. Writing addresses to emperors is not my strong
    suit. However, if it is not as good as it might be it doesn’t
    signify--the other committeemen ought to have helped me write it;
    they had nothing to do, and I had my hands full. But for bothering
    with this I would have caught up entirely with my New York Tribune
    correspondence and nearly up with the San Francisco.

They wanted him also to read the address to the Emperor, but he pointed
out that the American consul was the proper person for that office. He
tells how the address was presented:

August 26th. The Imperial carriages were in waiting at eleven, and at
twelve we were at the palace....

The Consul for Odessa read the address and the Czar said frequently,
“Good--very good; indeed”--and at the close, “I am very, very grateful.”

It was not improper for him to set down all this, and much more, in his
own note-book--not then for publication. It was in fact a very proper
record--for today.

One incident of the imperial audience Mark Twain omitted from his book,
perhaps because the humor of it had not yet become sufficiently evident.
“The humorous perception of a thing is a pretty slow growth sometimes,”
 he once remarked. It was about seventeen years before he could laugh
enjoyably at a slight mistake he made at the Emperor’s reception. He set
down a memorandum of it, then, for fear it might be lost:

    There were a number of great dignitaries of the Empire there, and
    although, as a general thing, they were dressed in citizen’s
    clothing, I observed that the most of them wore a very small piece
    of ribbon in the lapels of their coats. That little touch of color
    struck my fancy, and it seemed to me a good idea to add it to my own
    attractions; not imagining that it had any special significance. So
    I stepped aside, hunted up a bit of red ribbon, and ornamented my
    lapel with it. Presently, Count Festetics, the Grand Master of
    ceremonies, and the only man there who was gorgeously arrayed, in
    full official costume, began to show me a great many attentions. He
    was particularly polite, and pleasant, and anxious to be of service
    to me. Presently, he asked me what order of nobility I belonged to?
    I said, “I didn’t belong to any.” Then he asked me what order of
    knighthood I belonged to? I said, “None.” Then he asked me what
    the red ribbon in my buttonhole stood for? I saw, at once, what an
    ass I had been making of myself, and was accordingly confused and
    embarrassed. I said the first thing that came into my mind, and
    that was that the ribbon was merely the symbol of a club of
    journalists to which I belonged, and I was not pursued with any more
    of Count Festetic’s attentions.

    Later, I got on very familiar terms with an old gentleman, whom I
    took to be the head gardener, and walked him all about the gardens,
    slipping my arm into his without invitation, yet without demur on
    his part, and by and by was confused again when I found that he was
    not a gardener at all, but the Lord High Admiral of Russia! I
    almost made up my mind that I would never call on an Emperor again.

Like all Mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were
insatiable collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of outlandish
things. Dan Slote had the stateroom hung and piled with such gleanings.
At Constantinople his room-mate writes:

    I thought Dan had got the state-room pretty full of rubbish at last,
    but awhile ago his dragoman arrived with a brand-new ghastly
    tombstone of the Oriental pattern, with his name handsomely carved
    and gilted on it in Turkish characters. That fellow will buy a
    Circassian slave next.

It was Church, Denny, Jack, Davis, Dan, Moult, and Mark Twain who
made the “long trip” through Syria from Beirut to Jerusalem with their
elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags “Jericho,” “Baalbec,” and
the rest. It was better camping than that Humboldt journey of six years
before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was
a hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine
in that torrid summer heat. Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now.
Tourists hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not
go back before November. One brief quotation from Mark Twain’s book
gives us an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to undergo:

    We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of
    hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-
    trees to give me a chance to rest. It was the hottest day we had
    seen yet--the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that
    stream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a deluge
    on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof. I imagined I
    could distinguish between the floods of rays. I thought I could
    tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders,
    and when the next one came. It was terrible.

He had been ill with cholera at Damascus, a light attack; but any attack
of that dread disease is serious enough. He tells of this in the book,
but he does not mention, either in the book or in his notes, the attack
which Dan Slote had some days later. It remained for William F. Church,
of the party, to relate that incident, for it was the kind of thing that
Mark Twain was not likely to record, or even to remember. Doctor Church
was a deacon with orthodox views and did not approve of Mark Twain; he
thought him sinful, irreverent, profane.

“He was the worst man I ever knew,” Church said; then he added, “And the
best.”

What happened was this: At the end of a terrible day of heat, when the
party had camped on the edge of a squalid Syrian village, Dan was taken
suddenly ill. It was cholera, beyond doubt. Dan could not go on--he
might never go on. The chances were that way. It was a serious matter
all around. To wait with Dan meant to upset their travel schedule--it
might mean to miss the ship. Consultation was held and a resolution
passed (the pilgrims were always passing resolutions) to provide for
Dan as well as possible, and leave him behind. Clemens, who had remained
with Dan, suddenly appeared and said:

“Gentlemen, I understand that you are going to leave Dan Slote here
alone. I’ll be d---d if I do!”

And he didn’t. He stayed there and brought Dan into Jerusalem, a few
days late, but convalescent.

Perhaps most of them were not always reverent during that Holy Land
trip. It was a trying journey, and after fierce days of desert hills
the reaction might not always spare even the holiest memories. Jack was
particularly sinful. When they learned the price for a boat on Galilee,
and the deacons who had traveled nearly half around the world to sail on
that sacred water were confounded by the charge, Jack said:

“Well, Denny, do you wonder now that Christ walked?”

It was the irreverent Jack who one morning (they had camped the night
before by the ruins of Jericho) refused to get up to see the sun rise
across the Jordan. Deacon Church went to his tent.

“Jack, my boy, get up. Here is the place where the Israelites crossed
over into the Promised Land, and beyond are the mountains of Moab, where
Moses lies buried.”

“Moses who!” said Jack.

“Oh, Jack, my boy, Moses, the great lawgiver--who led the Israelites out
of Egypt-forty years through the wilderness--to the Promised Land.”

“Forty years!” said Jack. “How far was it?”

“It was three hundred miles, Jack; a great wilderness, and he brought
them through in safety.”

Jack regarded him with scorn. “Huh, Moses--three hundred miles forty
years--why, Ben Holiday would have brought them through in thirty-six
hours!”--[Ben Holiday, owner of the Overland stages, and a man of great
executive ability. This incident, a true one, is more elaborately told
in Roughing It, but it seems pertinent here.]

Jack probably learned more about the Bible during that trip-its history
and its heroes-than during all his former years. Nor was Jack the only
one of that group thus benefited. The sacred landmarks of Palestine
inspire a burning interest in the Scriptures, and Mark Twain probably
did not now regret those early Sunday-school lessons; certainly he did
not fail to review them exhaustively on that journey. His note-books
fairly overflow with Bible references; the Syrian chapters in The
Innocents Abroad are permeated with the poetry and legendary beauty of
the Bible story. The little Bible he carried on that trip, bought in
Constantinople, was well worn by the time they reached the ship again at
Jaffa. He must have read it with a large and persistent interest; also
with a double benefit. For, besides the knowledge acquired, he was
harvesting a profit--probably unsuspected at the time---viz., the
influence of the most direct and beautiful English--the English of the
King James version--which could not fail to affect his own literary
method at that impressionable age. We have already noted his earlier
admiration for that noble and simple poem, “The Burial of Moses,” which
in the Palestine note-book is copied in full. All the tendency of his
expression lay that way, and the intense consideration of stately Bible
phrase and imagery could hardly fail to influence his mental processes.
The very distinct difference of style, as shown in The Innocents Abroad
and in his earlier writings, we may believe was in no small measure due
to his study of the King James version during those weeks in Palestine.

He bought another Bible at Jerusalem; but it was not for himself. It
was a little souvenir volume bound in olive and balsam wood, and on the
fly-leaf is inscribed:

    Mrs. Jane Clemens from her son. Jerusalem, Sept. 24, 1867.

There is one more circumstance of that long cruise-recorded neither in
the book nor the notes--an incident brief, but of more importance in the
life of Samuel Clemens than any heretofore set down. It occurred in the
beautiful Bay of Smyrna, on the fifth or sixth of September, while the
vessel lay there for the Ephesus trip.

Reference has been made to young Charles Langdon, of Elmira (the
“Charley” once mentioned in the Innocents), as an admirer of Mark Twain.
There was a good deal of difference in their ages, and they were seldom
of the same party; but sometimes the boy invited the journalist to his
cabin and, boy-like, exhibited his treasures. He had two sisters at
home; and of Olivia, the youngest, he had brought a dainty miniature
done on ivory in delicate tints--a sweet-pictured countenance, fine and
spiritual. On that fateful day in the day of Smyrna, Samuel Clemens,
visiting in young Langdon’s cabin, was shown this portrait. He looked
at it with long admiration, and spoke of it reverently, for the delicate
face seemed to him to be something more than a mere human likeness. Each
time he came, after that, he asked to see the picture, and once even
begged to be allowed to take it away with him. The boy would not agree
to this, and the elder man looked long and steadily at the miniature,
resolving in his mind that some day he would meet the owner of that
lovely face--a purpose for once in accord with that which the fates had
arranged for him, in the day when all things were arranged, the day of
the first beginning.



LXII. THE RETURN OF THE PILGRIMS

The last note-book entry bears date of October 11th:

    At sea, somewhere in the neighborhood of Malta. Very stormy.

    Terrible death to be talked to death. The storm has blown two small
    land birds and a hawk to sea and they came on board. Sea full of
    flying-fish.

That is all. There is no record of the week’s travel in Spain, which
a little group of four made under the picturesque Gibraltar guide,
Benunes, still living and quite as picturesque at last accounts. This
side-trip is covered in a single brief paragraph in the Innocents,
and the only account we have of it is in a home letter, from Cadiz, of
October 24th:

    We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras (4 hours), thus
    dodging the quarantine--took dinner, and then rode horseback all
    night in a swinging trot, and at daylight took a caleche (a-wheeled
    vehicle), and rode 5 hours--then took cars and traveled till twelve
    at night. That landed us at Seville, and we were over the hard part
    of our trip and somewhat tired. Since then we have taken things
    comparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another and
    attracting a good deal of attention--for I guess strangers do not
    wander through Andalusia and the other southern provinces of Spain
    often. The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote and
    Sancho Panza were possible characters.

    But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was
    under Moorish domination. No, I will not say that--but then when
    one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the
    Alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to
    overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created
    them.

We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but
it will never be written now. A night or two before the vessel reached
New York there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion,
at Mrs. Severance’s request, Mark Twain wrote some verses. They were not
especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but
one prophetic stanza is worth remembering. In the opening lines the
passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows:

       Lo! other ships of that parted fleet
       Shall suffer this fate or that:
       One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,
       Or ground on treacherous flat.
       Some shall be famed in many lands
       As good ships, fast and fair,
       And some shall strangely disappear,
       Men know not when or where.

The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark
Twain found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute. The
fifty-three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York
Tribune had carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and
Territories. Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry,
they came as a revelation to a public weary of the driveling,
tiresome travel-letters of that period. They preached a new gospel in
travel-literature: the gospel of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a
gospel of sincerity in according praises to whatever seemed genuine,
and ridicule to the things considered sham. It was the gospel that Mark
Twain would continue to preach during his whole career. It became his
chief literary message to the world-a world waiting for that message.

Moreover, the letters were literature. He had received, from whatever
source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception
and expression. It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander
chord, the throbbing cadence of human story.

Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America;
old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages
to arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins
beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the
fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked
the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were
vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes.

This is pure poetry. He had never touched so high a strain before,
but he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing
mastery and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy
Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional
crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain,
the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph or
two of that word-picture:

    After years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was
    so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not
    of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as
    never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient.
    If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking
    toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing--nothing
    but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything
    of the present, and far into the past.... It was thinking of the
    wars of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and
    destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose
    progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy
    and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five
    thousand slow-revolving years....

    The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its
    magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its
    story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this
    eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of
    all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when
    we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.

Then that closing word of Egypt. He elaborated it for the book, and did
not improve it. Let us preserve here its original form.

    We are glad to have seen Egypt. We are glad to have seen that old
    land which taught Greece her letters--and through Greece, Rome--and
    through Rome, the world--that venerable cradle of culture and
    refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of
    Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages--those
    Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad
    shortcomings we still excuse--not because they were savages, but
    because they were the chosen savages of God.

The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame. They presented
the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever
written--one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long
as human nature remains unchanged. From beginning to end the tale is
rarely, reverently told. Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in
the voluminous literature of that solemn land:

    Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of
    a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.
    Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn
    sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing
    exists--over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs
    motionless and dead--about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and
    scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises
    refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.
    Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of
    Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds
    only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the
    accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua’s miracle left
    it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in
    their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to
    remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour’s
    presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks
    by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, goodwill to men,
    is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature
    that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the
    stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and
    is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer
    there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the
    wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel is
    gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on
    that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the
    Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode
    at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships,
    was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its
    borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin;
    Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have
    vanished from the earth, and the “desert places” round about them
    where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour’s voice and ate
    the miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
    inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.

    Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise?
    Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?

It would be easy to quote pages here--a pictorial sequence from
Gibraltar to Athens, from Athens to Egypt, a radiant panoramic march.
In time he would write technically better. He would avoid solecism, he
would become a greater master of vocabulary and phrase, but in all the
years ahead he would never match the lambent bloom and spontaneity of
those fresh, first impressions of Mediterranean lands and seas. No need
to mention the humor, the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule
of old masters and of sacred relics, so called. These we have kept
familiar with much repetition. Only, the humor had grown more subtle,
more restrained; the burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the
ridicule so frank and good-natured, that even the old masters themselves
might have enjoyed it, while the most devoted churchman, unless blinded
by bigotry, would find in it satisfaction, rather than sacrilege.

The final letter was written for the New York Herald after the arrival,
and was altogether unlike those that preceded it. Gaily satirical and
personal--inclusively so--it might better have been left unwritten,
for it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of goodly
people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years. However, it is all
past now, and those who were old then, and perhaps queer and pious and
stingy, do not mind any more, and those who were young and frivolous
have all grown old too, and most of them have set out on the still
farther voyage. Somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and
lightly, tenderly recall their old-time journeying.



LXIII. IN WASHINGTON--A PUBLISHING PROPOSITION

Clemens remained but one day in New York. Senator Stewart had written,
about the time of the departure of the Quaker City, offering him the
position of private secretary--a position which was to give him leisure
for literary work, with a supporting salary as well. Stewart no doubt
thought it would be considerably to his advantage to have the brilliant
writer and lecturer attached to his political establishment, and Clemens
likewise saw possibilities in the arrangement. From Naples, in August,
he had written accepting Stewart’s offer; he lost no time now in
discussing the matter in person.--[In a letter home, August 9th, he
referred to the arrangement: “I wrote to Bill Stewart to-day accepting
his private secretaryship in Washington, next winter.”]

There seems to have been little difficulty in concluding the
arrangement. When Clemens had been in Washington a week we find him
writing:

    DEAR FOLKS, Tired and sleepy--been in Congress all day and making
    newspaper acquaintances. Stewart is to look up a clerkship in the
    Patent Office for Orion. Things necessarily move slowly where there
    is so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be attended
    to. I guess it will be all right. I intend it shall be all right.

    I have 18 invitations to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts
    of the Union--have declined them all. I am for business now.

    Belong on the Tribune Staff, and shall write occasionally. Am
    offered the same berth to-day on the Herald by letter. Shall write
    Mr. Bennett and accept, as soon as I hear from Tribune that it will
    not interfere. Am pretty well known now--intend to be better known.
    Am hobnobbing with these old Generals and Senators and other humbugs
    for no good purpose. Don’t have any more trouble making friends
    than I did in California. All serene. Good-by. Shall continue on
    the Alta.
                     Yours affectionately,
                                   SAM.

    P.S.--I room with Bill Stewart and board at Willard’s Hotel.

But the secretary arrangement was a brief matter. It is impossible
to conceive of Mark Twain as anybody’s secretary, especially as the
secretary of Senator Stewart. --[In Senator Stewart’s memoirs he refers
unpleasantly to Mark Twain, and after relating several incidents that
bear only strained relations to the truth, states that when the writer
returned from the Holy Land he (Stewart) offered him a secretaryship as
a sort of charity. He adds that Mark Twain’s behavior on his premises
was such that a threat of a thrashing was necessary. The reason for such
statements becomes apparent, however, when he adds that in ‘Roughing It’
the author accuses him of cheating, prints a picture of him with a hatch
over his eye, and claims to have given him a sound thrashing, none
of which statements, save only the one concerning the picture (an
apparently unforgivable offense to his dignity), is true, as the reader
may easily ascertain for himself.]

Within a few weeks he was writing humorous accounts of “My Late
Senatorial Secretaryship,” “Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,”
 etc., all good-natured burlesque, but inspired, we may believe, by the
change: These articles appeared in the New York Tribune, the New York
Citizen, and the Galaxy Magazine.

There appears to have been no ill-feeling at this time between Clemens
and Stewart. If so, it is not discoverable in any of the former’s
personal or newspaper correspondence. In fact, in his article relating
to his “late senatorial secretaryship” he puts the joke, so far as it
is a joke, on Senator James W. Nye, probably as an additional punishment
for Nye’s failure to appear on the night of his lecture. He established
headquarters with a brilliant newspaper correspondent named Riley. “One
of the best men in Washington--or elsewhere,” he tells us in a brief
sketch of that person.--[See Riley, newspaper correspondent. Sketches
New and Old.]--He had known Riley in San Francisco; the two were
congenial, and settled down to their several undertakings.

Clemens was chiefly concerned over two things: he wished to make money
and he wished to secure a government appointment for Orion. He had used
up the most of his lecture accumulations, and was moderately in debt.
His work was in demand at good rates, for those days, and with working
opportunity he could presently dispose of his financial problem. The
Tribune was anxious for letters; the Enterprise and Alta were waiting
for them; the Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the magazines--all had
solicited contributions; the lecture bureaus pursued him. Personally his
outlook was bright.

The appointment for Orion was a different matter. The powers were not
especially interested in a brother; there were too many brothers and
assorted relatives on the official waiting-list already. Clemens was
offered appointments for himself--a consulship, a post-mastership; even
that of San Francisco. From the Cabinet down, the Washington political
contingent had read his travel-letters, and was ready to recognize
officially the author of them in his own person and personality.

Also, socially: Mark Twain found himself all at once in the midst of
receptions, dinners, and speech-making; all very exciting for a time
at least, but not profitable, not conducive to work. At a dinner of the
Washington Correspondents Club his response to the toast, “Women,” was
pronounced by Schuyler Colfax to be “the best after dinner speech
ever made.” Certainly it was a refreshing departure from the prosy or
clumsy-witted efforts common to that period. He was coming altogether
into his own.--[This is the first of Mark Twain’s after-dinner speeches
to be preserved. The reader will find it complete, as reported next day,
in Appendix G, at the end of last volume.]

He was not immediately interested in the matter of book publication.
The Jumping Frog book was popular, and in England had been issued
by Routledge; but the royalty returns were modest enough and slow in
arrival. His desire was for prompter results. His interest in book
publication had never been an eager one, and related mainly to the
advertising it would furnish, which he did not now need; or to the money
return, in which he had no great faith. Yet at this very moment a letter
for him was lying in the Tribune office in New York which would bring
the book idea into first prominence and spell the beginning of his
fortune.

Among those who had read and found delight in the Tribune letters was
Elisha Bliss, Jr., of the American Publishing Company, of Hartford.
Bliss was a shrewd and energetic man, with a keen appreciation for humor
and the American fondness for that literary quality. He had recently
undertaken the management of a Hartford concern, and had somewhat
alarmed its conservative directorate by publishing books that furnished
entertainment to the reader as well as moral instruction. Only his
success in paying dividends justified this heresy and averted his
downfall. Two days after the arrival of the Quaker City Bliss wrote the
letter above mentioned. It ran as follows:

                  OFFICE OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING CO.
                  HARTFORD, CONN., November 21, 1867.

SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, ESQ., Tribune Office, New York.

DEAR SIR,--We take the liberty to address you this, in place of a letter
which we had recently written and were about to forward to you, not
knowing your arrival home was expected so soon. We are desirous of
obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your
letters from the past, etc., with such interesting additions as may be
proper. We are the publishers of A. D. Richardson’s works, and flatter
ourselves that we can give an author a favorable term and do as full
justice to his productions as any other house in the country. We are
perhaps the oldest subscription house in the country, and have never
failed to give a book an immense circulation. We sold about 100,000
copies of Richardson’s F. D. and E. [‘Field, Dungeon and Escape’), and
are now printing 41,000 of ‘Beyond the Mississippi’, and large orders
ahead. If you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to
do so, we should be pleased to see you, and will do so. Will you do us
the favor of reply at once, at your earliest convenience.

                         Very truly etc.,

                            E. BLISS, JR.,
                            Secretary.

After ten days’ delay this letter was forwarded to the Tribune bureau in
Washington, where Clemens received it. He replied promptly.

                     WASHINGTON, December 2, 1867.

E. BLISS, JR., ESQ., Secretary American Publishing Co.

DEAR SIR,--I only received your favor of November 21st last night, at
the rooms of the Tribune Bureau here. It was forwarded from the Tribune
office, New York where it had lain eight or ten days. This will be a
sufficient apology for the seeming discourtesy of my silence.

I wrote fifty-two letters for the San Francisco Alta California during
the Quaker City excursion, about half of which number have been printed
thus far. The Alta has few exchanges in the East, and I suppose
scarcely any of these letters have been copied on this side of the Rocky
Mountains. I could weed them of their chief faults of construction
and inelegancies of expression, and make a volume that would be more
acceptable in many respects than any I could now write. When those
letters were written my impressions were fresh, but now they have lost
that freshness; they were warm then, they are cold now. I could strike
out certain letters, and write new ones wherewith to supply their
places. If you think such a book would suit your purpose, please drop
me a line, specifying the size and general style of the volume--when the
matter ought to be ready; whether it should have pictures in it or not;
and particularly what your terms with me would be, and what amount of
money I might possibly make out of it. The latter clause has a degree of
importance for me which is almost beyond my own comprehension. But you
understand that, of course.

I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of
interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author
could be demonstrated to be plain before me. But I know Richardson,
and learned from him some months ago something of an idea of the
subscription plan of publishing. If that is your plan invariably it
looks safe.

I am on the New York Tribune staff here as an “occasional,” among other
things, and a note from you addressed to              Very truly, etc.,
                         SAM. L. CLEMENS,
                         New York Tribune Bureau, Washington
will find me, without fail.

The exchange of those two letters marked the beginning of one of the
most notable publishing connections in American literary history.

Consummation, however, was somewhat delayed. Bliss was ill when the
reply came, and could not write again in detail until nearly a month
later. In this letter he recited the profits made by Richardson and
others through subscription publication, and named the royalties paid.
Richardson had received four per cent. of the sale price, a small enough
rate for these later days; but the cost of manufacture was larger then,
and the sale and delivery of books through agents has ever been an
expensive process. Even Horace Greeley had received but a fraction
more on his Great American Conflict. Bliss especially suggested
and emphasized a “humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously
inclined.” He added that they had two arrangements for paying authors:
outright purchase, and royalty. He invited a meeting in New York to
arrange terms.



LXIV. OLIVIA LANGDON

Clemens did in fact go to New York that same evening, to spend Christmas
with Dan Slote, and missed Bliss’s second letter. It was no matter. Fate
had his affairs properly in hand, and had prepared an event of still
larger moment than the publication even of Innocents Abroad. There was a
pleasant reunion at Dan Slote’s. He wrote home about it:

    Charley Langdon, Jack Van Nostrand, Dan and I (all Quaker City
    night-hawks) had a blow-out at Dan’s house and a lively talk over
    old times. I just laughed till my sides ached at some of our
    reminiscences. It was the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through
    Palestine, but those are the best boys in the world.

This, however, was not the event; it was only preliminary to it. We are
coming to that now. At the old St. Nicholas Hotel, which stood on the
west of Broadway between Spring and Broome streets, there were stopping
at this time Jervis Langdon, a wealty coal-dealer and mine-owner of
Elmira, his son Charles and his daughter Olivia, whose pictured face
Samuel Clemens had first seen in the Bay of Smyrna one September day.
Young Langdon had been especially anxious to bring his distinguished
Quaker City friend and his own people together, and two days before
Christmas Samuel Clemens was invited to dine at the hotel. He went very
willingly. The lovely face of that miniature had been often a part of
his waking dreams. For the first time now he looked upon its reality.
Long afterward he said:

“It is forty years ago. From that day to this she has never been out of
my mind.”

Charles Dickens was in New York then, and gave a reading that night in
Steinway Hall. The Langdons went, and Samuel Clemens accompanied them.
He remembered afterward that Dickens wore a black velvet coat with a
fiery red flower in his buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene
from Copperfield--the death of James Steerforth. But he remembered still
more clearly the face and dress of that slender girlish figure at his
side.

Olivia Langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the
miniature he had seen, fragile to look upon, though no longer with the
shattered health of her girlhood. At sixteen, through a fall upon the
ice, she had become a complete invalid, confined to her bed for two
years, unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position
except upon her back. Great physicians and surgeons, one after another,
had done their best for her but she had failed steadily until every
hope had died. Then, when nothing else was left to try, a certain Doctor
Newton, of spectacular celebrity, who cured by “laying on of hands,” was
brought to Elmira to see her. Doctor Newton came into the darkened room
and said:

“Open the windows--we must have light!”

They protested that she could not bear the light, but the windows
were opened. Doctor Newton came to the bedside of the helpless girl,
delivered a short, fervent prayer, put his arm under her shoulders, and
bade her sit up. She had not moved for two years, and the family were
alarmed, but she obeyed, and he assisted her into a chair. Sensation
came back to her limbs. With his assistance she even made a feeble
attempt to walk. He left then, saying that she would gradually improve,
and in time be well, though probably never very strong. On the same day
he healed a boy, crippled and drawn with fever.

It turned out as he had said. Olivia Langdon improved steadily, and
now at twenty-two, though not robust--she was never that--she was
comparatively well. Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol,
and Samuel Clemens joined in their worship from the moment of that first
meeting.

Olivia Langdon, on her part, was at first dazed and fascinated, rather
than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike any one she had
ever known. Her life had been circumscribed, her experiences of a simple
sort. She had never seen anything resembling him before. Indeed, nobody
had. Somewhat carelessly, even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather
than observantly, attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than
cultured, of speech--a blazing human solitaire, unfashioned, unset,
tossed by the drift of fortune at her feet. He disturbed rather than
gratified her. She sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms
which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward
life--to her always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even
might have unorthodox views on matters of religion. When he had gone she
somehow had the feeling that a great fiery meteor of unknown portent had
swept across her sky.

To her brother, who was eager for her approval of his celebrity, Miss
Langdon conceded admiration. As for her father, he did not qualify his
opinion. With hearty sense of humor, and a keen perception of verity
and capability in men, Jervis Langdon accepted Samuel Clemens from the
start, and remained his stanch admirer and friend. Clemens left that
night with an invitation to visit Elmira by and by, and with the full
intention of going--soon. Fate, however, had another plan. He did not
see Elmira for the better part of a year.

He saw Miss Langdon again within the week. On New-Year’s Day he set
forth to pay calls, after the fashion of the time--more lavish then than
now. Miss Langdon was receiving with Miss Alice Hooker, a niece of Henry
Ward Beecher, at the home of a Mrs. Berry; he decided to go there first.
With young Langdon he arrived at eleven o’clock in the morning, and
they did not leave until midnight. If his first impression upon Olivia
Langdon had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to
her as a streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon. One thing
is certain: she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of his
future years. He visited Henry Ward Beecher on that trip and dined with
him by invitation. Harriet Beecher Stowe was present, and others of that
eminent family. Likewise his old Quaker City comrades, Moses S. and Emma
Beach. It was a brilliant gathering, a conclave of intellectual gods--a
triumph to be there for one who had been a printer-boy on the banks of
the Mississippi, and only a little while before a miner with pick and
shovel. It was gratifying to be so honored; it would be pleasant to
write home; but the occasion lacked something too--everything, in
fact--for when he ran his eye around the board the face of the minature
was not there.

Still there were compensations; inadequate, of course, but pleasant
enough to remember. It was Sunday evening and the party adjourned to
Plymouth Church. After services Mr. Beecher invited him to return home
with him for a quiet talk. Evidently they had a good time, for in the
letter telling of these things Samuel Clemens said: “Henry Ward Beecher
is a brick.”



LXV. A CONTRACT WITH ELISHA BLISS, JR.

He returned to Washington without seeing Miss Langdon again, though he
would seem to have had permission to write--friendly letters. A
little later (it was on the evening of January 9th) he lectured in
Washington--on very brief notice indeed. The arrangement for his
appearance had been made by a friend during his absence--“a friend,”
 Clemens declared afterward, “not entirely sober at the time.” To his
mother he wrote:

I scared up a doorkeeper and was ready at the proper time, and by pure
good luck a tolerably good house assembled and I was saved. I hardly
knew what I was going to talk about, but it went off in splendid style.

The title of the lecture delivered was “The Frozen Truth”--“more truth
in the title than in the lecture,” according to his own statement. What
it dealt with is not remembered now. It had to do with the Quaker City
trip, perhaps, and it seems to have brought a financial return which was
welcome enough. Subsequently he delivered it elsewhere; though just how
far the tour extended cannot be learned from the letters, and he had but
little memory of it in later years.

There was some further correspondence with Bliss, then about the 21st
of January (1868) Clemens made a trip to Hartford to settle the matter.
Bliss had been particularly anxious to meet him, personally and was a
trifle disappointed with his appearance. Mark Twain’s traveling costume
was neither new nor neat, and he was smoking steadily a pipe of power.
His general make-up was hardly impressive.

Bliss’s disturbance was momentary. Once he began to talk the rest did
not matter. He was the author of those letters, and Bliss decided that
personally he was even greater than they. The publisher, confined to his
home with illness, offered him the hospitality of his household. Also,
he made him two propositions: he would pay him ten thousand dollars cash
for his copyright, or he would pay five per cent. royalty, which was
a fourth more than Richardson had received. He advised the latter
arrangement.

Clemens had already taken advice and had discussed the project a good
deal with Richardson. The ten thousand dollars was a heavy temptation,
but he withstood it and closed on the royalty basis--“the best business
judgment I ever displayed,” he was wont to declare. A letter written
to his mother and sister near the end of this Hartford stay is worth
quoting pretty fully here, for the information and “character” it
contains. It bears date of January 24th.

    This is a good week for me. I stopped in the Herald office, as I
    came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, and young James
    Gordon Bennett asked me to write twice a week, impersonally, for the
    Herald, and said if I would I might have full swing, and about
    anybody and everything I wanted to. I said I must have the very
    fullest possible swing, and he said, “All right.” I said, “It’s a
    contract--” and that settled that matter.

    I’ll make it a point to write one letter a week anyhow. But the
    best thing that has happened is here. This great American
    Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till
    I thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk. I
    met Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and with his usual whole-souled
    way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he
    gets a chance, he said: “Now, here, you are one of the talented men
    of the age--nobody is going to deny that--but in matters of business
    I don’t suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.
    I’ll tell you what to do and how to do it.” And he did.

    And I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid
    contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with
    illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publisher’s hands
    by the middle of July.--[The contract was not a formal one. There
    was an exchange of letters agreeing to the terms, but no joint
    document was drawn until October 16 (1868).]--My percentage is to
    be a fourth more than they have ever paid any author except Greeley.
    Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this.

    These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books
    you can imagine. I shall write to the Enterprise and Alta every
    week, as usual, I guess, and to the Herald twice a week,
    occasionally to the Tribune and the magazines (I have a stupid
    article in the Galaxy, just issued), but I am not going to write to
    this and that and the other paper any more.

    I have had a tiptop time here for a few days (guest of Mr. Jno.
    Hooker’s family--Beecher’s relatives--in a general way of Mr. Bliss
    also, who is head of the publishing firm). Puritans are mighty
    straight-laced, and they won’t let me smoke in the parlor, but the
    Almighty don’t make any better people.

    I have to make a speech at the annual Herald dinner on the 6th of
    May.

So the book, which would establish his claim to a peerage in the
literary land, was arranged for, and it remained only to prepare the
manuscript, a task which he regarded as not difficult. He had only to
collate the Alta and Tribune letters, edit them, and write such new
matter as would be required for completeness.

Returning to Washington, he plunged into work with his usual terrific
energy, preparing the copy--in the mean time writing newspaper
correspondence and sketches that would bring immediate return. In
addition to his regular contributions, he entered into a syndicate
arrangement with John Swinton (brother of William Swinton, the
historian) to supply letters to a list of newspapers.

“I have written seven long newspaper letters and a short magazine
article in less than two days,” he wrote home, and by the end of January
he had also prepared several chapters of his book.

The San Francisco post-mastership was suggested to him again, but he put
the temptation behind him. He refers to this more than once in his home
letters, and it is clear that he wavered.

    Judge Field said if I wanted the place he could pledge me the
    President’s appointment, and Senator Corners said he would guarantee
    me the Senate’s confirmation. It was a great temptation, but it
    would render it impossible to fill my book contract, and I had to
    drop the idea....

    And besides I did not want the office.

He made this final decision when he heard that the chief editor of the
Alta wanted the place, and he now threw his influence in that quarter.
“I would not take ten thousand dollars out of a friend’s pocket,” he
said.

But then suddenly came the news from Goodman that the Alta publishers
had copyrighted his Quaker City letters and proposed getting them out in
a book, to reimburse themselves still further on their investment. This
was sharper than a serpent’s tooth. Clemens got confirmation of the
report by telegraph. By the same medium he protested, but to no purpose.
Then he wrote a letter and sat down to wait. He reported his troubles to
Orion:

    I have made a superb contract for a book, and have prepared the
    first ten chapters of the sixty or eighty, but I will bet it never
    sees the light. Don’t you let the folks at home hear that. That
    thieving Alta copyrighted the letters, and now shows no disposition
    to let me use them. I have done all I can by telegraph, and now
    await the final result by mail. I only charged them for 50 letters
    what (even in) greenbacks would amount to less than two thousand
    dollars, intending to write a good deal for high-priced Eastern
    papers, and now they want to publish my letters in book form
    themselves to get back that pitiful sum.

Orion was by this time back from Nevada, setting type in St. Louis. He
was full of schemes, as usual, and his brother counsels him freely. Then
he says:

    We chase phantoms half the days of our lives. It is well if we
    learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.

    I am in for it. I must go on chasing them, until I marry, then I am
    done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature
    wherewith to please the general public.

    I shall write to please myself then.

He closes by saying that he rather expects to go with Anson Burlingame
on the Chinese embassy. Clearly he was pretty hopeless as to his book
prospects.

His first meeting with General Grant occurred just at this time. In one
of his home letters he mentions, rather airily, that he will drop in
someday on the General for an interview; and at last, through Mrs.
Grant, an appointment was made for a Sunday evening when the General
would be at home. He was elated with the prospect of an interview; but
when he looked into the imperturbable, square, smileless face of the
soldier he found himself, for the first time in his life, without
anything particular to say. Grant nodded slightly and waited. His caller
wished something would happen. It did. His inspiration returned.

“General,” he said, “I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are you?”

That broke the ice. There were no further difficulties.--[Mark Twain has
variously related this incident. It is given here in accordance with the
letters of the period.]



LXVI. BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO

Reply came from the Alta, but it was not promising. It spoke rather
vaguely of prior arrangements and future possibilities. Clemens gathered
that under certain conditions he might share in the profits of the
venture. There was but one thing to do; he knew those people--some of
them--Colonel McComb and a Mr. McCrellish intimately. He must confer
with them in person.

He was weary of Washington, anyway. The whole pitiful machinery of
politics disgusted him. In his notebook he wrote:

    Whiskey is taken into the committee rooms in demijohns and carried
    out in demagogues.

And in a letter:

    This is a place to get a poor opinion of everybody in. There are
    some pitiful intellects in this Congress! There isn’t one man in
    Washington in civil office who has the brains of Anson Burlingame,
    and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great talents to
    the world this government would have discarded him when his time was
    up.--[Anson Burlingame had by this time become China’s special
    ambassador to the nations.]

Furthermore, he was down on the climate of Washington. He decided to go
to San Francisco and see “those Alta thieves face to face.” Then, if a
book resulted, he could prepare it there among friends. Also, he could
lecture.

He had been anxious to visit his people before sailing, but matters were
too urgent to permit delay. He obtained from Bliss an advance of royalty
and took passage, by way of Aspinwall, on the sidewheel steamer Henry
Chauncey, a fine vessel for those days. The name of Mark Twain was
already known on the isthmus, and when it was learned he had arrived on
the Chauncey a delegation welcomed him on the wharf, and provided him
with refreshments and entertainment. Mr. Tracy Robinson, a poet, long a
resident of that southern land, was one of the group. Beyond the isthmus
Clemens fell in again with his old captain, Ned Wakeman, who during the
trip told him the amazing dream that in due time would become Captain
Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven. He made the first draft of this story soon
after his arrival in San Francisco, as a sort of travesty of Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps’s Gates Ajar, then very popular. Clemens, then and later,
had a high opinion of Capt. Ned Wakeman’s dream, but his story of it
would pass through several stages before finally reaching the light of
publication.--[Mr. John P. Vollmer, now of Lewiston, Idaho, a companion
of that voyage, writes of a card game which took place beyond the
isthmus. The notorious crippled gambler, “Smithy,” figured in it, and it
would seem to have furnished the inspiration for the exciting story in
Chapter XXXVI of the Mississippi book.]

In San Francisco matters turned out as he had hoped. Colonel McComb was
his stanch friend; McCrellish and Woodward, the proprietors, presently
conceded that they had already received good value for the money paid.
The author agreed to make proper acknowledgments to the Alta in his
preface, and the matter was settled with friendliness all around.

The way was now clear, the book assured. First, however, he must
provide himself with funds. He delivered a lecture, with the Quaker City
excursion as his subject. On the 5th of May he wrote to Bliss:

I lectured here on the trip the other night; over $1,600 in gold in the
house; every seat taken and paid for before night.

He reports that he is steadily at work, and expects to start East with
the completed manuscript about the middle of June.

But this was a miscalculation. Clemens found that the letters needed
more preparation than he had thought. His literary vision and equipment
had vastly altered since the beginning of that correspondence. Some of
the chapters he rewrote; others he eliminated entirely. It required two
months of fairly steady work to put the big manuscript together.

Some of the new chapters he gave to Bret Harte for the Overland Monthly,
then recently established. Harte himself was becoming a celebrity about
this time. His “Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,”
 published in early numbers of the Overland, were making a great stir
in the East, arousing there a good deal more enthusiasm than in the
magazine office or the city of their publication. That these two
friends, each supreme in his own field, should have entered into their
heritage so nearly at the same moment, is one of the many seemingly
curious coincidences of literary history.

Clemens now concluded to cover his lecture circuit of two years before.
He was assured that it would be throwing away a precious opportunity not
to give his new lecture to his old friends. The result justified that
opinion. At Virginia, at Carson, and elsewhere he was received like
a returned conqueror. He might have been accorded a Roman triumph had
there been time and paraphernalia. Even the robbers had reformed, and
entire safety was guaranteed him on the Divide between Virginia and Gold
Hill. At Carson he called on Mrs. Curry, as in the old days, and among
other things told her how snow from the Lebanon Mountains is brought to
Damascus on the backs of camels.

“Sam,” she said, “that’s just one of your yarns, and if you tell it in
your lecture to-night I’ll get right up and say so.”

But he did tell it, for it was a fact; and though Mrs. Curry did not
rise to deny it she shook her finger at him in a way he knew.

He returned to San Francisco and gave one more lecture, the last he
would ever give in California. His preparatory advertising for that
occasion was wholly unique, characteristic of him to the last degree. It
assumed the form of a handbill of protest, supposed to have been issued
by the foremost citizens of San Francisco, urging him to return to the
States without inflicting himself further upon them. As signatures he
made free with the names of prominent individuals, followed by those of
organizations, institutions, “Various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on
Foot and Horseback, and fifteen hundred in the Steerage.”

Following this (on the same bill) was his reply, “To the fifteen hundred
and others,” in which he insisted on another hearing:

    I will torment the people if I want to.... It only costs the people
    $1 apiece, and if they can’t stand it what do they stay here for?...
    My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have
    submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have
    pronounced it good. Now, therefore, why should I withhold it?

He promised positively to sail on the 6th of July if they would let
him talk just this once. Continuing, the handbill presented a second
protest, signed by the various clubs and business firms; also others
bearing variously the signatures of the newspapers, and the clergy,
ending with the brief word:

    You had better go.  Yours,  CHIEF OF POLICE.

All of which drollery concluded with his announcement of place and date
of his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end. Nothing short of
a seismic cataclysm--an earthquake, in fact--could deter a San Francisco
audience after that. Mark Twain’s farewell address, given at the
Mercantile Library July 2 (1868), doubtless remains today the leading
literary event in San Francisco’s history.--[Copy of the lecture
announcement, complete, will be found in Appendix H, at the end of last
volume.]

He sailed July 6th by the Pacific mail steamer Montana to Acapulco,
caught the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall, reached New York on the 28th,
and a day or two later had delivered his manuscript at Hartford.

But a further difficulty had arisen. Bliss was having troubles himself,
this time, with his directors. Many reports of Mark Twain’s new book had
been traveling the rounds of the press, some of which declared it was
to be irreverent, even blasphemous, in tone. The title selected, The
New Pilgrim’s Progress, was in itself a sacrilege. Hartford was a
conservative place; the American Publishing Company directors were of
orthodox persuasion. They urged Bliss to relieve the company of this
impending disaster of heresy. When the author arrived one or more of
them labored with him in person, without avail. As for Bliss, he was
stanch; he believed in the book thoroughly, from every standpoint.
He declared if the company refused to print it he would resign the
management and publish the book himself. This was an alarming suggestion
to the stockholders. Bliss had returned dividends--a boon altogether
too rare in the company’s former history. The objectors retired and were
heard of no more. The manuscript was placed in the hands of Fay and Cox,
illustrators, with an order for about two hundred and fifty pictures.

Fay and Cox turned it over to True Williams, one of the well-known
illustrators of that day. Williams was a man of great talent--of fine
imagination and sweetness of spirit--but it was necessary to lock him in
a room when industry was required, with nothing more exciting than
cold water as a beverage. Clemens himself aided in the illustrating by
obtaining of Moses S. Beach photographs from the large collection he had
brought home.



LXVII. A VISIT TO ELMIRA

Meantime he had skilfully obtained a renewal of the invitation to spend
a week in the Langdon home.

He meant to go by a fast train, but, with his natural gift for
misunderstanding time-tables, of course took a slow one, telegraphing
his approach from different stations along the road. Young Langdon
concluded to go down the line as far as Waverly to meet him. When
the New York train reached there the young man found his guest in the
smoking-car, travel-stained and distressingly clad. Mark Twain was
always scrupulously neat and correct of dress in later years, but in
that earlier day neatness and style had not become habitual and did not
give him comfort. Langdon greeted him warmly but with doubt. Finally he
summoned courage to say, hesitatingly--“You’ve got some other clothes,
haven’t you?”

The arriving guest was not in the least disturbed.

“Oh yes,” he said with enthusiasm, “I’ve got a fine brand-new outfit in
this bag, all but a hat. It will be late when we get in, and I won’t see
any one to-night. You won’t know me in the morning. We’ll go out early
and get a hat.”

This was a large relief to the younger man, and the rest of the journey
was happy enough. True to promise, the guest appeared at daylight
correctly, even elegantly clad, and an early trip to the shops secured
the hat. A gay and happy week followed--a week during which Samuel
Clemens realized more fully than ever that in his heart there was room
for only one woman in all the world: Olivia Langdon--“Livy,” as they
all called her--and as the day of departure drew near it may be that the
gentle girl had made some discoveries, too.

No word had passed between them. Samuel Clemens had the old-fashioned
Southern respect for courtship conventions, and for what, in that day at
least, was regarded as honor. On the morning of the final day he said to
young Langdon:

“Charley, my week is up, and I must go home.”

The young man expressed a regret which was genuine enough, though not
wholly unqualified. His older sister, Mrs. Crane, leaving just then for
a trip to the White Mountains, had said:

“Charley, I am sure Mr. Clemens is after our Livy. You mustn’t let him
carry her off before our return.”

The idea was a disturbing one. The young man did not urge his guest to
prolong his-visit. He said:

“We’ll have to stand it, I guess, but you mustn’t leave before
to-night.”

“I ought to go by the first train,” Clemens said, gloomily. “I am in
love.”

“In what!”

“In love-with your sister, and I ought to get away from here.”

The young man was now very genuinely alarmed. To him Mark Twain was a
highly gifted, fearless, robust man--a man’s man--and as such altogether
admirable--lovable. But Olivia--Livy--she was to him little short of a
saint. No man was good enough for her, certainly not this adventurous
soldier of letters from the West. Delightful he was beyond doubt,
adorable as a companion, but not a companion for Livy.

“Look here, Clemens,” he said, when he could get his voice. “There’s a
train in half an hour. I’ll help you catch it. Don’t wait till to-night.
Go now.”

Clemens shook his head.

“No, Charley,” he said, in his gentle drawl, “I want to enjoy your
hospitality a little longer. I promise to be circumspect, and I’ll go
to-night.”

That night, after dinner, when it was time to take the New York train,
a light two-seated wagon was at the gate. The coachman was in front, and
young Langdon and his guest took the back seat. For some reason the
seat had not been locked in its place, and when, after the good-bys, the
coachman touched the horse it made a quick spring forward, and the back
seat, with both passengers, described a half-circle and came down with
force on the cobbled street. Neither passenger was seriously hurt;
Clemens not at all--only dazed a little for a moment. Then came an
inspiration; here was a chance to prolong his visit. Evidently it was
not intended that he should take that train. When the Langdon household
gathered around with restoratives he did not recover too quickly. He
allowed them to support or carry him into the house and place him in an
arm-chair and apply remedies. The young daughter of the house especially
showed anxiety and attention. This was pure happiness. He was perjuring
himself, of course, but they say Jove laughs at such things.

He recovered in a day or two, but the wide hospitality of the handsome
Langdon home was not only offered now; it was enforced. He was still
there two weeks later, after which he made a trip to Cleveland to
confide in Mrs. Fairbanks how he intended to win Livy Langdon for his
wife.



LXVIII. THE REV. “JOE” TWICHELL.


He returned to Hartford to look after the progress of his book. Some of
it was being put into type, and with his mechanical knowledge of such
things he was naturally interested in the process.

He made his headquarters with the Blisses, then living at 821 Asylum
Avenue, and read proof in a little upper room, where the lamp was likely
to be burning most of the time, where the atmosphere was nearly always
blue with smoke, and the window-sill full of cigar butts. Mrs. Bliss
took him into the quiet social life of the neighborhood--to small church
receptions, society gatherings and the like--all of which he seemed to
enjoy. Most of the dwellers in that neighborhood were members of the
Asylum Hill Congregational Church, then recently completed; all but the
spire. It was a cultured circle, well-off in the world’s goods, its male
members, for the most part, concerned in various commercial ventures.

The church stood almost across the way from the Bliss home, and Mark
Twain, with his picturesque phrasing, referred to it as the “stub-tailed
church,” on account of its abbreviated spire; also, later, with a
knowledge of its prosperous membership, as the “Church of the Holy
Speculators.” He was at an evening reception in the home of one of its
members when he noticed a photograph of the unfinished building framed
and hanging on the wall.

“Why, yes,” he commented, in his slow fashion, “this is the ‘Church of
the Holy Speculators.’”

“Sh,” cautioned Mrs. Bliss. “Its pastor is just behind you. He knows
your work and wants to meet you.” Turning, she said: “Mr. Twichell, this
is Mr. Clemens. Most people know him as Mark Twain.”

And so, in this casual fashion, he met the man who was presently to
become his closest personal friend and counselor, and would remain so
for more than forty years.

Joseph Hopkins Twichell was a man about his own age, athletic and
handsome, a student and a devout Christian, yet a man familiar with
the world, fond of sports, with an exuberant sense of humor and a wide
understanding of the frailties of humankind. He had been “port waist
oar” at Yale, and had left college to serve with General “Dan” Sickles
as a chaplain who had followed his duties not only in the camp, but on
the field.

Mention has already been made of Mark Twain’s natural leaning toward
ministers of the gospel, and the explanation of it is easier to realize
than to convey. He was hopelessly unorthodox--rankly rebellious as to
creeds. Anything resembling cant or the curtailment of mental liberty
roused only his resentment and irony. Yet something in his heart always
warmed toward any laborer in the vineyard, and if we could put the
explanation into a single sentence, perhaps we might say it was because
he could meet them on that wide, common ground sympathy with mankind.
Mark Twain’s creed, then and always, may be put into three words,
“liberty, justice, humanity.” It may be put into one word, “humanity.”

Ministers always loved Mark Twain. They did not always approve of him,
but they adored him: The Rev. Mr. Rising, of the Comstock, was an early
example of his ministerial friendships, and we have seen that Henry Ward
Beecher cultivated his company. In a San Francisco letter of two years
before, Mark Twain wrote his mother, thinking it would please her:

I am as thick as thieves with the Reverend Stebbins. I am laying for
the Reverend Scudder and the Reverend Doctor Stone. I am running on
preachers now altogether, and I find them gay.

So it may be that his first impulse toward Joseph Twichell was due to
the fact that he was a young member of that army whose mission is to
comfort and uplift mankind. But it was only a little time till the
impulse had grown into a friendship that went beyond any profession or
doctrine, a friendship that ripened into a permanent admiration and love
for “Joe” Twichell himself, as one of the noblest specimens of his race.

He was invited to the Twichell home, where he met the young wife and got
a glimpse of the happiness of that sweet and peaceful household. He
had a neglected, lonely look, and he loved to gather with them at their
fireside. He expressed his envy of their happiness, and Mrs. Twichell
asked him why, since his affairs were growing prosperous, he did not
establish a household of his own. Long afterward Mr. Twichell wrote:

    Mark made no answer for a little, but, with his eyes bent on the
    floor, appeared to be deeply pondering. Then he looked up, and said
    slowly, in a voice tremulous with earnestness (with what sympathy he
    was heard may be imagined): “I am taking thought of it. I am in
    love beyond all telling with the dearest and best girl in the whole
    world. I don’t suppose she will marry me. I can’t think it
    possible. She ought not to. But if she doesn’t I shall be sure
    that the best thing I ever did was to fall in love with her, and
    proud to have it known that I tried to win her!”

It was only a brief time until the Twichell fireside was home to him.
He came and went, and presently it was “Mark” and “Joe,” as by and by it
would be “Livy” and “Harmony,” and in a few years “Uncle Joe” and “Uncle
Mark,” “Aunt Livy” and “Aunt Harmony,” and so would remain until the
end.



LXIX. A LECTURE TOUR

James Redpath, proprietor of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, was the leading
lecture agent of those days, and controlled all, or nearly all, of the
platform celebrities. Mark Twain’s success at the Cooper Union the
year before had interested Redpath. He had offered engagements then and
later, but Clemens had not been free for the regular circuit. Now there
was no longer a reason for postponement of a contract. Redpath was eager
for the new celebrity, and Clemens closed with him for the season of
1868-9. With his new lecture, “The Vandal Abroad,” he was presently
earning a hundred dollars and more a night, and making most of the
nights count.

This was affluence indeed. He had become suddenly a person of
substance-an associate of men of consequence, with a commensurate
income. He could help his mother lavishly now, and he did.

His new lecture was immensely popular. It was a resume of the ‘Quaker
City’ letters--a foretaste of the book which would presently follow.
Wherever he went, he was hailed with eager greetings. He caught such
drifting exclamations as, “There he is! There goes Mark Twain!” People
came out on the street to see him pass. That marvelous miracle which we
variously call “notoriety,” “popularity,” “fame,” had come to him. In
his notebook he wrote, “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the
only, earthly certainty oblivion.”

The newspapers were filled with enthusiasm both as to his matter and
method. His delivery was described as a “long, monotonous drawl, with
the fun invariably coming in at the end of a sentence--after a pause.”
 His appearance at this time is thus set down:

    Mark Twain is a man of medium height, about five feet ten, sparsely
    built, with dark reddish-brown hair and mustache. His features are
    fair, his eyes keen and twinkling. He dresses in scrupulous evening
    attire. In lecturing he hangs about the desk, leaning on it or
    flirting around the corners of it, then marching and countermarching
    in the rear of it. He seldom casts a glance at his manuscript.

No doubt this fairly presents Mark Twain, the lecturer of that day. It
was a new figure on the platform, a man with a new method. As to his
manuscript, the item might have said that he never consulted it at
all. He learned his lecture; what he consulted was merely a series of
hieroglyphics, a set of crude pictures drawn by himself, suggestive of
the subject-matter underneath new head. Certain columns represented the
Parthenon; the Sphinx meant Egypt, and so on. His manuscript lay there
in case of accident, but the accident did not happen.

A number of his engagements were in the central part of New York, at
points not far distant from Elmira. He had a standing invitation to
visit the Langdon home, and he made it convenient to avail himself of
that happiness.

His was not an unruffled courtship. When at last he reached the point
of proposing for the daughter of the house, neither the daughter nor the
household offered any noticeable encouragement to his suit. Many absurd
anecdotes have been told of his first interview with Mr. Langdon on the
subject, but they are altogether without foundation. It was a proper
and dignified discussion of a very serious matter. Mr. Langdon expressed
deep regard for him and friendship but he was not inclined to add him
to the family; the young lady herself, in a general way, accorded with
these views. The applicant for favor left sadly enough, but he could not
remain discouraged or sad. He lectured at Cleveland with vast success,
and the news of it traveled quickly to Elmira. He was referred to by
Cleveland papers as a “lion” and “the coming man of the age.” Two days
later, in Pittsburgh (November 19th), he “played” against Fanny Kemble,
the favorite actress of that time, with the result that Miss Kemble
had an audience of two hundred against nearly ten times the number who
gathered to hear Mark Twain. The news of this went to Elmira, too.
It was in the papers there next morning; surely this was a conquering
hero--a gay Lochinvar from out of the West--and the daughter of the
house must be guarded closely, that he did not bear her away. It was on
the second morning following the Pittsburgh triumph, when the Langdon
family were gathered at breakfast, that a bushy auburn head poked
fearfully in at the door, and a low, humble voice said:

“The calf has returned; may the prodigal have some breakfast?”

No one could be reserved or reprovingly distant, or any of those
unfriendly things with a person like that; certainly not Jervis Langdon,
who delighted in the humor and the tricks and turns and oddities of this
eccentric visitor. Giving his daughter to him was another matter, but
even that thought was less disturbing than it had been at the start. In
truth, the Langdon household had somehow grown to feel that he belonged
to them. The elder sister’s husband, Theodore Crane, endorsed him
fully. He had long before read some of the Mark Twain sketches that had
traveled eastward in advance of their author, and had recognized, even
in the crudest of them, a classic charm. As for Olivia Langdon’s mother
and sister, their happiness lay in hers. Where her heart went theirs
went also, and it would appear that her heart, in spite of herself,
had found its rightful keeper. Only young Langdon was irreconciled,
and eventually set out for a voyage around the world to escape the
situation.

There was only a provisional engagement at first. Jervis Langdon
suggested, and Samuel Clemens agreed with him, that it was proper
to know something of his past, as well as of his present, before the
official parental sanction should be given. When Mr. Langdon inquired
as to the names of persons of standing to whom he might write for
credentials, Clemens pretty confidently gave him the name of the
Reverend Stebbins and others of San Francisco, adding that he might
write also to Joe Goodman if he wanted to, but that he had lied for
Goodman a hundred times and Goodman would lie for him if necessary,
so his testimony would be of no value. The letters to the clergy were
written, and Mr. Langdon also wrote one on his own account.

It was a long mail-trip to the Coast and back in those days. It might be
two months before replies would come from those ministers. The lecturer
set out again on his travels, and was radiantly and happily busy. He
went as far west as Illinois, had crowded houses in Chicago, visited
friends and kindred in Hannibal, St. Louis, and Keokuk, carrying the
great news, and lecturing in old familiar haunts.



LXX. INNOCENTS AT HOME--AND “THE INNOCENTS ABROAD”

He was in Jacksonville, Illinois, at the end of January (1869), and in
a letter to Bliss states that he will be in Elmira two days later, and
asks that proofs of the book be sent there. He arrived at the Langdon
home, anxious to hear the reports that would make him, as the novels
might say, “the happiest or the most miserable of men.” Jervis Langdon
had a rather solemn look when they were alone together. Clemens asked:

“You’ve heard from those gentlemen out there?”

“Yes, and from another gentleman I wrote concerning you.”

“They don’t appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your manner.”

“Well, yes, some of them were.”

“I suppose I may ask what particular form their emotion took?”

“Oh yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant, able man,
a man with a future, and that you would make about the worst husband on
record.”

The applicant for favor had a forlorn look.

“There’s nothing very evasive about that,” he said:

There was a period of reflective silence. It was probably no more than a
few seconds, but it seemed longer.

“Haven’t you any other friend that you could suggest?” Langdon said.

“Apparently none whose testimony would be valuable.”

Jervis Langdon held out his hand. “You have at least one,” he said. “I
believe in you. I know you better than they do.”

And so came the crown of happiness. The engagement of Samuel Langhorne
Clemens and Olivia Lewis Langdon was ratified next day, February 4,
1869.

But if the friends of Mark Twain viewed the idea of the marriage with
scant favor, the friends of Miss Langdon regarded it with genuine
alarm. Elmira was a conservative place--a place of pedigree and family
tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, pilot, miner, wandering
journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the daughter of one of the
oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not to be lightly permitted.
The fact that he had achieved a national fame did not count
against other considerations. The social protest amounted almost to
insurrection, but it was not availing. The Langdon family had their
doubts too, though of a different sort. Their doubts lay in the fear
that one, reared as their daughter had been, might be unable to hold a
place as the wife of this intellectual giant, whom they felt that the
world was preparing to honor. That this delicate, sheltered girl could
have the strength of mind and body for her position seemed hard to
believe. Their faith overbore such questionings, and the future years
proved how fully it was justified.

To his mother Samuel Clemens wrote:

    She is only a little body, but she hasn’t her peer in Christendom.
    I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion
    imperatively demands a two-hundred-dollar diamond one, and told her
    it was typical of her future life-namely, that she would have to
    flourish on substance, rather than luxuries (but you see I know the
    girl--she don’t care anything about luxuries).... She spends no
    money but her astral year’s allowance, and spends nearly every cent
    of that on other people. She will be a good, sensible little wife,
    without any airs about her. I don’t make intercession for her
    beforehand, and ask you to love her, for there isn’t any use in
    that--you couldn’t help it if you were to try. I warn you that
    whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is
    her willing slave forevermore.

To Mrs. Crane, absent in March, her father wrote:

    DEAR SUE,--I received your letter yesterday with a great deal of
    pleasure, but the letter has gone in pursuit of one S. L. Clemens,
    who has been giving us a great deal of trouble lately. We cannot
    have a joy in our family without a feeling, on the part of the
    little incorrigible in our family, that this wanderer must share it,
    so, as soon as read, into her pocket and off upstairs goes your
    letter, and in the next two minutes into the mail, so it is
    impossible for me now to refer to it, or by reading it over gain an
    inspiration in writing you...

Clemens closed his lecture tour in March, acid went immediately to
Elmira. He had lectured between fifty and sixty times, with a return of
something more than $8,000, not a bad aggregate for a first season on
the circuit. He had planned to make a spring tour to California, but
the attraction at Elmira was of a sort that discouraged distant travel.
Furthermore, he disliked the platform, then and always. It was always a
temptation to him because of its quick and abundant return, but it was
none the less distasteful. In a letter of that spring he wrote:

    I most cordially hate the lecture field. And after all, I shudder
    to think I may never get out of it. In all conversation with Gough,
    and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips,
    and the other old stagers, I could not observe that they ever
    expected or hoped to get out of the business. I don’t want to get
    wedded to it as they are.

He declined further engagements on the excuse that he must attend to
getting out his book. The revised proofs were coming now, and he and
gentle Livy Langdon read them together. He realized presently that with
her sensitive nature she had also a keen literary perception. What he
lacked in delicacy--and his lack was likely to be large enough in that
direction--she detected, and together they pruned it away. She became
his editor during those happy courtship days--a position which she held
to her death. The world owed a large debt of gratitude to Mark Twain’s
wife, who from the very beginning--and always, so far as in her strength
she was able--inspired him to give only his worthiest to the world,
whether in written or spoken word, in counsel or in deed. Those early
days of their close companionship, spiritual and mental, were full of
revelation to Samuel Clemens, a revelation that continued from day to
day, and from year to year, even to the very end.

The letter to Bliss and the proofs were full of suggested changes
that would refine and beautify the text. In one of them he settles the
question of title, which he says is to be:

                  THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
                         or
                THE NEW PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

and we may be sure that it was Olivia Langdon’s voice that gave the
deciding vote for the newly adopted chief title, which would take any
suggestion of irreverence out of the remaining words.

The book was to have been issued in the spring, but during his
wanderings proofs had been delayed, and there was now considerable
anxiety about it, as the agencies had become impatient for the canvass.
At the end of April Clemens wrote: “Your printers are doing well. I will
hurry the proofs”; but it was not until the early part of June that
the last chapters were revised and returned. Then the big book, at
last completed, went to press on an edition of twenty thousand, a large
number for any new book, even to-day.

In later years, through some confusion of circumstance, Mark Twain was
led to believe that the publication of The Innocents Abroad was long and
unnecessarily delayed. But this was manifestly a mistake. The book went
to press in June. It was a big book and a large edition. The first
copy was delivered July 20 (1869), and four hundred and seventeen
bound volumes were shipped that month. Even with the quicker mechanical
processes of to-day a month or more is allowed for a large book between
the final return of proofs and the date of publication. So it is only
another instance of his remembering, as he once quaintly put it, “the
thing that didn’t happen.”--[In an article in the North American Review
(September 21, 1906) Mr. Clemens stated that he found it necessary
to telegraph notice that he would bring suit if the book was not
immediately issued. In none of the letters covering this period is there
any suggestion of delay on the part of the publishers, and the date
of the final return of proofs, together with the date of publication,
preclude the possibility of such a circumstance. At some period of his
life he doubtless sent, or contemplated sending, such a message, and
this fact, through some curious psychology, became confused in his mind
with the first edition of The Innocents Abroad.]



LXXI. THE GREAT BOOK OF TRAVEL.


‘The Innocents Abroad’ was a success from the start. The machinery for
its sale and delivery was in full swing by August 1, and five thousand
one hundred and seventy copies were disposed of that month--a number
that had increased to more than thirty-one thousand by the first of the
year. It was a book of travel; its lowest price was three and a half
dollars. No such record had been made by a book of that description;
none has equaled it since.--[One must recall that this was the record
only up to 1910. D.W.]

If Mark Twain was not already famous, he was unquestionably famous now.
As the author of The New Pilgrim’s Progress he was swept into the domain
of letters as one riding at the head of a cavalcade--doors and windows
wide with welcome and jubilant with applause. Newspapers chorused their
enthusiasm; the public voiced universal approval; only a few of the more
cultured critics seemed hesitant and doubtful.

They applauded--most of them--but with reservation. Doctor Holland
regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was
not altogether pleasant in his dictum. Doctor Holmes, in a letter to the
author, speaks of the “frequently quaint and amusing conceits,” but
does not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature. It was
naturally difficult for the East to concede a serious value to one
who approached his subject with such militant aboriginality, and
occasionally wrote “those kind.” William Dean Howells reviewed the book
in the Atlantic, which was of itself a distinction, whether the review
was favorable or otherwise. It was favorable on the whole, favorable
to the humor of the book, its “delicious impudence,” the charm of its
good-natured irony. The review closed:

    It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists
    California has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely
    different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of
    the best.

This is praise, but not of an intemperate sort, nor very inclusive. The
descriptive, the poetic, the more pretentious phases of the book did not
receive attention. Mr. Howells was perhaps the first critic of eminence
to recognize in Mark Twain not only the humorist, but the supreme
genius-the “Lincoln of our literature.” This was later. The public--the
silent public--with what Howells calls “the inspired knowledge of the
simple-hearted multitude,” reached a similar verdict forthwith. And on
sufficient evidence: let the average unprejudiced person of to-day take
up the old volume and read a few chapters anywhere and decide whether it
is the work of a mere humorist, or also of a philosopher, a poet, and
a seer. The writer well remembers a little group of “the simple-hearted
multitude” who during the winter of ‘69 and ‘70 gathered each evening to
hear the Innocents read aloud, and their unanimous verdict that it was
the “best book of modern times.”

It was the most daring book of its day. Passages of it were calculated
to take the breath of the orthodox reader; only, somehow, it made him
smile, too. It was all so good-natured, so openly sincere. Without doubt
it preached heresy--the heresy of viewing revered landmarks and relics
joyously, rather than lugubriously; reverentially, when they inspired
reverence; satirically, when they invited ridicule, and with kindliness
always.

The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain’s greatest book of travel. The
critical and the pure in speech may object to this verdict. Brander
Matthews regards it second to A Tramp Abroad, the natural viewpoint
of the literary technician. The ‘Tramp’ contains better usage without
doubt, but it lacks the “color” which gives the Innocents its perennial
charm. In the Innocents there is a glow, a fragrance, a romance of
touch, a subtle something which is idyllic, something which is not quite
of reality, in the tale of that little company that so long ago sailed
away to the harbors of their illusions beyond the sea, and, wandered
together through old palaces and galleries, and among the tombs of the
saints, and down through ancient lands. There is an atmosphere about it
all, a dream-like quality that lies somewhere in the telling, maybe, or
in the tale; at all events it is there, and the world has felt it ever
since. Perhaps it could be defined in a single word, perhaps that
word would be “youth.” That the artist, poor True Williams, felt its
inspiration is certain. We may believe that Williams was not a great
draftsman, but no artist ever caught more perfectly the light and spirit
of the author’s text. Crude some of the pictures are, no doubt, but they
convey the very essence of the story; they belong to it, they are a part
of it, and they ought never to perish. ‘A Tramp Abroad’ is a rare
book, but it cannot rank with its great predecessor in human charm. The
public, which in the long run makes mistakes, has rendered that verdict.
The Innocents by far outsells the Tramp, and, for that matter, any other
book of travel.



LXXII.THE PURCHASE OF A PAPER.


It is curious to reflect that Mark Twain still did not regard himself
as a literary man. He had no literary plans for the future; he scarcely
looked forward to the publication of another book. He considered himself
a journalist; his ambition lay in the direction of retirement in some
prosperous newspaper enterprise, with the comforts and companionship
of a home. During his travels he had already been casting about for a
congenial and substantial association in newspaperdom, and had at one
time considered the purchase of an interest in the Cleveland Herald. But
Buffalo was nearer Elmira, and when an opportunity offered, by which he
could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo Express for $25,000, the
purchase was decided upon. His lack of funds prompted a new plan for a
lecture tour to the Pacific coast, this time with D. R. Locke (Nasby),
then immensely popular, in his lecture “Cussed Be Canaan.”

Clemens had met Nasby on the circuit, and was very fond of him. The
two had visited Boston together, and while there had called on Doctor
Holmes; this by the way. Nasby was fond of Clemens too, but doubtful
about the trip-doubtful about his lecture:

    Your proposition takes my breath away. If I had my new lecture
    completed I wouldn’t hesitate a moment, but really isn’t “Cussed Be
    Canaan” too old? You know that lemon, our African brother, juicy as
    he was in his day, has been squeezed dry. Why howl about his wrongs
    after said wrongs have been redressed? Why screech about the
    “damnable spirit of Cahst” when the victim thereof sits at the first
    table, and his oppressor mildly takes, in hash, what he leaves? You
    see, friend Twain, the Fifteenth Amendment busted “Cussed Be
    Canaan.” I howled feelingly on the subject while it was a living
    issue, for I felt all that I said and a great deal more; but now
    that we have won our fight why dance frantically on the dead corpse
    of our enemy? The Reliable Contraband is contraband no more, but a
    citizen of the United States, and I speak of him no more.

    Give me a week to think of your proposition. If I can jerk a
    lecture in time I will go with you. The Lord knows I would like to.
    --[Nasby’s lecture, “Cussed Be Canaan,” opened, “We are all
    descended from grandfathers!” He had a powerful voice, and always
    just on the stroke of eight he rose and vigorously delivered this
    sentence. Once, after lecturing an entire season--two hundred and
    twenty-five nights--he went home to rest. That evening he sat,
    musingly drowsing by the fire, when the clock struck eight. Without
    a moment’s thought Nasby sprang to his feet and thundered out, “We
    are all descended from grandfathers!”]

Nasby did not go, and Clemens’s enthusiasm cooled at the prospect
of setting out alone on that long tour. Furthermore, Jervis Langdon
promptly insisted on advancing the money required to complete the
purchase of the Express, and the trade was closed.--[Mr. Langdon is just
as good for $25,000 for me, and has already advanced half of it in cash.
I wrote and asked whether I had better send him my note, or a due bill,
or how he would prefer to have the indebtedness made of record, and he
answered every other topic in the letter pleasantly, but never replied
to that at all. Still, I shall give my note into a hands of his business
agent here, and pay him the interest as it falls due.--S. L. C. to his
mother.]

The Buffalo Express was at this time in the hands of three men--Col.
George F. Selkirk, J. L. Lamed, and Thomas A. Kennett. Colonel Selkirk
was business manager, Lamed was political editor. With the purchase
of Kennett’s share Clemens became a sort of general and contributing
editor, with a more or less “roving commission”--his hours and duties
not very clearly defined. It was believed by his associates, and by
Clemens himself, that his known connection with the paper would give
it prestige and circulation, as Nasby’s connection had popularized the
Toledo Blade. The new editor entered upon his duties August 14 (1869).
The members of the Buffalo press gave him a dinner that evening, and
after the manner of newspaper men the world over, were handsomely
cordial to the “new enemy in their midst.”

There is an anecdote which relates that next morning, when Mark Twain
arrived in the Express office (it was then at 14 Swan Street), there
happened to be no one present who knew him. A young man rose very
bruskly and asked if there was any one he would like to see. It is
reported that he replied, with gentle deliberation:

“Well, yes, I should like to see some young man offer the new editor a
chair.”

It is so like Mark Twain that we are inclined to accept it, though it
seems of doubtful circumstance. In any case it deserves to be true. His
“Salutatory” (August 18th) is sufficiently genuine:

    Being a stranger, it would be immodest for me to suddenly and
    violently assume the associate editorship of the Buffalo Express
    without a single word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending
    patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to constant
    attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word shall be as brief
    as possible. I only want to assure parties having a friendly
    interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to
    hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not
    going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to
    make trouble.... I shall not make use of slang and vulgarity upon
    any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use
    profanity except when discussing house rent and taxes. Indeed, upon
    a second thought, I shall not use it even then, for it is
    unchristian, inelegant, and degrading; though, to speak truly, I do
    not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a
    cent without it. I shall not often meddle with politics, because we
    have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to
    serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect. I shall not
    write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.

    Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom is law
    and must be obeyed.

John Harrison Mills, who was connected with the Express in those days,
has written:

    I cannot remember that there was any delay in getting down to his
    work. I think within five minutes the new editor had assumed the
    easy look of one entirely at home, pencil in hand and a clutch of
    paper before him, with an air of preoccupation, as of one intent on
    a task delayed. It was impossible to be conscious of the man
    sitting there, and not feel his identity with all that he had
    enjoyed, and the reminiscence of it he that seemed to radiate; for
    the personality was so absolutely in accord with all the record of
    himself and his work. I cannot say he seemed to be that vague thing
    they call a type in race or blood, though the word, if used in his
    case for temperament, would decidedly mean what they used to call
    the “sanguine.”

    I thought that, pictorially, the noble costume of the Albanian would
    have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the
    horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric’s warriors; or stood at the prow
    of one of the swift craft of the Vikings. His eyes, which have been
    variously described, were, it seemed to me, of an indescribable
    depth of the bluish moss-agate, with a capacity of pupil dilation
    that in certain lights had the effect of a deep black....

Mr. Mills adds that in dress he was now “well groomed,” and that
consequently they were obliged to revise their notions as to the
careless negligee which gossip had reported.--[From unpublished
Reminiscences kindly lent to the author by Mr. Mills]



LXXIII. THE FIRST MEETING WITH HOWELLS

Clemens’ first period of editorial work was a brief one, though he made
frequent contributions to the paper: sketches, squibs, travel-notes, and
experiences, usually humorous in character. His wedding-day had been set
for early in the year, and it was necessary to accumulate a bank account
for that occasion. Before October he was out on the lecture circuit,
billed now for the first time for New England, nervous and apprehensive
in consequence, though with good hope. To Pamela he wrote (November
9th):

To-morrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston
audience--4,000 critics--and on the success of this matter depends my
future success in New England. But I am not distressed. Nasby is in the
same boat. Tonight decides the fate of his brand-new lecture. He
has just left my room--been reading his lecture to me--was greatly
depressed. I have convinced him that he has little to fear.

Whatever alarm Mark Twain may have felt was not warranted. His success
with the New England public was immediate and complete. He made his
headquarters in Boston, at Redpath’s office, where there was pretty sure
to be a congenial company, of which he was presently the center.

It was during one of these Boston sojourns that he first met William
Dean Howells, his future friend and literary counselor. Howells was
assistant editor of the Atlantic at this time; James T. Fields, its
editor. Clemens had been gratified by the Atlantic review, and had
called to express his thanks for it. He sat talking to Fields, when
Howells entered the editorial rooms, and on being presented to the
author of the review, delivered his appreciation in the form of a story,
sufficiently appropriate, but not qualified for the larger types.--[He
said: “When I read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was
so glad her baby had come white.”]

His manner, his humor, his quaint colloquial forms all delighted
Howells--more, in fact, than the opulent sealskin overcoat which he
affected at this period--a garment astonishing rather than esthetic, as
Mark Twain’s clothes in those days of his first regeneration were likely
to be startling enough, we may believe; in the conservative atmosphere
of the Atlantic rooms. And Howells--gentle, genial, sincere--filled
with the early happiness of his calling, won the heart of Mark Twain
and never lost it, and, what is still more notable, won his absolute and
unvarying confidence in all literary affairs. It was always Mark Twain’s
habit to rely on somebody, and in matters pertaining to literature and
to literary people in general he laid his burden on William Dean Howells
from that day. Only a few weeks after that first visit we find him
telegraphing to Howells, asking him to look after a Californian poet,
then ill and friendless in Brooklyn. Clemens states that he does
not know the poet, but will contribute fifty dollars if Howells
will petition the steamboat company for a pass; and no doubt Howells
complied, and spent a good deal more than fifty dollars’ worth of time
to get the poet relieved and started; it would be like him.



LXXIV. THE WEDDING-DAY

The wedding was planned, at first, either for Christmas or New-Year’s
Day; but as the lecture engagements continued into January it was
decided to wait until these were filled. February 2d, a date near the
anniversary of the engagement, was agreed upon, also a quiet wedding
with no “tour.” The young people would go immediately to Buffalo, and
take up a modest residence, in a boardinghouse as comfortable, even as
luxurious, as the husband’s financial situation justified. At least that
was Samuel Clemens’s understanding of the matter. He felt that he was
heavily in debt--that his first duty was to relieve himself of that
obligation.

There were other plans in Elmira, but in the daily and happy letters he
received there was no inkling of any new purpose.

He wrote to J. D. F. Slee, of Buffalo, who was associated in business
with Mr. Langdon, and asked him to find a suitable boarding-place, one
that would be sufficiently refined for the woman who was to be his
wife, and sufficiently reasonable to insure prosperity. In due time Slee
replied that, while boarding was a “miserable business anyhow,” he
had been particularly fortunate in securing a place on one of the most
pleasant streets--“the family a small one and choice spirits, with
no predilection for taking boarders, and consenting to the present
arrangement only because of the anticipated pleasure of your company.”
 The price, Slee added, would be reasonable. As a matter of fact a house
on Delaware Avenue--still the fine residence street of Buffalo--had been
bought and furnished throughout as a present to the bride and groom. It
stands to-day practically unchanged--brick and mansard without, Eastlake
within, a type then much in vogue--spacious and handsome for that
period. It was completely appointed. Diagrams of the rooms had been
sent to Elmira and Miss Langdon herself had selected the furnishings.
Everything was put in readiness, including linen, cutlery, and utensils.
Even the servants had been engaged and the pantry and cellar had been
stocked.

It must have been hard for Olivia Langdon to keep this wonderful
surprise out of those daily letters. A surprise like that is always
watching a chance to slip out unawares, especially when one is eagerly
impatient to reveal it.

However, the traveler remained completely in the dark. He may have
wondered vaguely at the lack of enthusiasm in the boarding idea, and
could he have been certain that the sales of the book would continue,
or that his newspaper venture would yield an abundant harvest, he might
have planned his domestic beginning on a more elaborate scale. If only
the Tennessee land would yield the long-expected fortune now! But these
were all incalculable things. All that he could be sure of was the
coming of his great happiness, in whatever environment, and of the
dragging weeks between.

At last the night of the final lecture came, and he was off for Elmira
with the smallest possible delay. Once there, the intervening days
did not matter. He could join in the busy preparations; he could write
exuberantly to his friends. To Laura Hawkins, long since Laura Frazer
he sent a playful line; to Jim Gillis, still digging and washing on
the slopes of the old Tuolumne hills, he wrote a letter which eminently
belongs here:

                     Elmira, N. Y., January 26, 1870.

    DEAR Jim,--I remember that old night just as well! And somewhere
    among my relics I have your remembrance stored away. It makes my
    heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. Still it
    shouldn’t, for right in the depths of their poverty and their
    pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune.
    You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal
    sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel’s Camp--I mean that day we sat
    around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and
    how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from
    the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and
    dear old Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my
    note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen
    dollars for it--I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up.
    I published that story, and it became widely known in America,
    India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me
    thousands and thousands of dollars since. Four or five months ago I
    bought into the Express (I have ordered it sent to you as long as
    you live, and if the bookkeeper sends you any bills you let me hear
    of it). I went heavily in debt--never could have dared to do that,
    Jim, if we hadn’t heard the jumping Frog story that day.

    And wouldn’t I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn’t I
    love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of
    Rinalds in the “Burning Shame!” Where is Dick and what is he doing?
    Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances.

    A week from to-day I shall be married-to a girl even better and
    lovelier than the peerless “Chapparal Quails.” You can’t come so
    far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come anyhow, and I
    invite Dick too. And if you two boys were to land here on that
    pleasant occasion we would make you right royally welcome.
                     Truly your friend,
                                SAML. L. CLEMENS.

    P.S.---California plums are good. Jim, particularly when they are
    stewed.

It had been only five years before--that day in Angel’s Camp--but how
long ago and how far away it seemed to him now! So much had happened
since then, so much of which that was the beginning--so little compared
with the marvel of the years ahead, whose threshold he was now about to
cross, and not alone.

A day or two before the wedding he was asked to lecture on the night of
February 2d. He replied that he was sorry to disappoint the applicant,
but that he could not lecture on the night of February 2d, for the
reason that he was going to marry a young lady on that evening, and that
he would rather marry that young lady than deliver all the lectures in
the world.

And so came the wedding-day. It began pleasantly; the postman brought a
royalty check that morning of $4,000, the accumulation of three months’
sales, and the Rev. Joseph Twichell and Harmony, his wife, came
from Hartford--Twichell to join with the Rev. Thomas K. Beecher in
solemnizing the marriage. Pamela Moffett, a widow now, with her daughter
Annie, grown to a young lady, had come all the way from St. Louis, and
Mrs. Fairbanks from Cleveland.

Yet the guests were not numerous, not more than a hundred at most, so
it was a quiet wedding there in the Langdon parlors, those dim, stately
rooms that in the future would hold so much of his history--so much of
the story of life and death that made its beginning there.

The wedding-service was about seven o’clock, for Mr. Beecher had a
meeting at the church soon after that hour. Afterward followed the
wedding-supper and dancing, and the bride’s father danced with the
bride. To the interested crowd awaiting him at the church Mr. Beecher
reported that the bride was very beautiful, and had on the longest
white gloves he had ever seen; he declared they reached to her
shoulders.--[Perhaps for a younger generation it should be said that
Thomas K. Beecher was a brother of Henry Ward Beecher. He lived and
died in Elmira, the almost worshiped pastor of the Park Congregational
Church. He was a noble, unorthodox teacher. Samuel Clemens at the time
of his marriage already strongly admired him, and had espoused his
cause in an article signed “S’cat!” in the Elmira Advertiser, when he
(Beecher) had been assailed by the more orthodox Elmira clergy. For the
“S’cat” article see Appendix I, at the end of last volume.]

It was the next afternoon when they set out for Buffalo, accompanied by
the bride’s parents, the groom’s relatives, the Beechers, and perhaps
one or two others of that happy company. It was nine o’clock at night
when they arrived, and found Mr. Slee waiting at the station with
sleighs to convey the party to the “boarding-house” he had selected.
They drove and drove, and the sleigh containing the bride and groom got
behind and apparently was bound nowhere in particular, which disturbed
the groom a good deal, for he thought it proper that they should arrive
first, to receive their guests. He commented on Slee’s poor judgment
in selecting a house that was so hard to find, and when at length they
turned into fashionable Delaware Avenue, and stopped before one of
the most attractive places in the neighborhood, he was beset with fear
concerning the richness of the locality.

They were on the steps when the doors opened, and a perfect fairyland
of lights and decoration was revealed within. The friends who had gone
ahead came out with greetings, to lead in the bride and groom. Servants
hurried forward to take bags and wraps. They were ushered inside; they
were led through beautiful rooms, all newly appointed and garnished. The
bridegroom was dazed, unable to understand the meaning of things, the
apparent ownership and completeness of possession.

At last the young wife put her hand upon his arm:

“Don’t you understand, Youth,” she said; that was always her name for
him. “Don’t you understand? It is ours, all ours--everything--a gift
from father!”

But even then he could not grasp it; not at first, not until Mr. Langdon
brought a little box and, opening it, handed them the deeds.

Nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that Samuel Clemens
made then; but either then or a little later he said:

“Mr. Langdon, whenever you are in Buffalo, if it’s twice a year, come
right here. Bring your bag and stay overnight if you want to. It sha’n’t
cost you a cent!”

They went in to supper then, and by and by the guests were gone and the
young wedded pair were alone.

Patrick McAleer, the young coachman, who would grow old in their employ,
and Ellen, the cook, came in for their morning orders, and were full of
Irish delight at the inexperience and novelty of it all. Then they were
gone, and only the lovers in their new house and their new happiness
remained.

And so it was they entered the enchanted land.



LXXV. AS TO DESTINY

If any reader has followed these chapters thus far, he may have
wondered, even if vaguely, at the seeming fatality of events. Mark Twain
had but to review his own life for justification of his doctrine of
inevitability--an unbroken and immutable sequence of cause and effect
from the beginning. Once he said:

“When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian
sea the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first
atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life, until, if
the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of
that first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing here in my
dressing-gown at this instant talking to you.”

It seemed the clearest presentment ever offered in the matter of
predestined circumstance--predestined from the instant when that primal
atom felt the vital thrill. Mark Twain’s early life, however imperfectly
recorded, exemplifies this postulate. If through the years still ahead
of us the course of destiny seems less clearly defined, it is only
because thronging events make the threads less easy to trace. The web
becomes richer, the pattern more intricate and confusing, but the line
of fate neither breaks nor falters, to the end.



LXXVI. ON THE BUFFALO “EXPRESS”

With the beginning of life in Buffalo, Mark Twain had become already a
world character--a man of large consequence and events. He had no proper
realization of this, no real sense of the size of his conquest; he
still regarded himself merely as a lecturer and journalist, temporarily
popular, but with no warrant to a permanent seat in the world’s literary
congress. He thought his success something of an accident. The fact
that he was prepared to settle down as an editorial contributor to a
newspaper in what was then only a big village is the best evidence of a
modest estimate of his talents.

He “worked like a horse,” is the verdict of those who were closely
associated with him on the Express. His hours were not regular, but
they were long. Often he was at his desk at eight in the morning, and
remained there until ten or eleven at night.

His working costume was suited to comfort rather than show. With coat,
vest, collar, and tie usually removed (sometimes even his shoes), he
lounged in his chair, in any attitude that afforded the larger ease,
pulling over the exchanges; scribbling paragraphs, editorials, humorous
skits, and what not, as the notion came upon him. J. L. Lamed, his
co-worker (he sat on the opposite side of the same table), remembers
that Mark Twain enjoyed his work as he went along--the humor of it--and
that he frequently laughed as some whimsicality or new absurdity came
into his mind.

“I doubt,” writes Lamed, “if he ever enjoyed anything more than the
jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of board of a military map of
the siege of Paris, which was printed in the Express from his original
plate, with accompanying explanations and comments. His half-day of
whittling and laughter that went with it are something that I find
pleasant to remember. Indeed, my whole experience of association with
him is a happy memory, which I am fortunate in having.... What one saw
of him was always the actual Mark Twain, acting out of his own nature
simply, frankly, without pretense, and almost without reserve. It was
that simplicity and naturalness in the man which carried his greatest
charm.”

Lamed, like many others, likens Mark Twain to Lincoln in various of his
characteristics. The two worked harmoniously together: Lamed attending
to the political direction of the journal, Clemens to the literary, and
what might be termed the sentimental side. There was no friction in the
division of labor, never anything but good feeling between them. Clemens
had a poor opinion of his own comprehension of politics, and perhaps
as little regard for Lamed’s conception of humor. Once when the latter
attempted something in the way of pleasantry his associate said:

“Better leave the humor on this paper to me, Lamed”; and once when Lamed
was away attending the Republican State Convention at Saratoga, and some
editorial comment seemed necessary, Clemens thought it best to sign the
utterance, and to make humor of his shortcomings.

    I do not know much about politics, and am not sitting up nights to
    learn....

    I am satisfied that these nominations are all right and sound, and
    that they are the only ones that can bring peace to our distracted
    country (the only political phrase I am perfectly familiar with and
    competent to hurl at the public with fearless confidence--the other
    editor is full of them), but being merely satisfied is not enough.
    I always like to know before I shout. But I go for Mr. Curtis with
    all my strength! Being certain of him, I hereby shout all I know
    how. But the others may be a split ticket, or a scratched ticket,
    or whatever you call it.

    I will let it alone for the present. It will keep. The other young
    man will be back to-morrow, and he will shout for it, split or no
    split, rest assured of that. He will prance into this political
    ring with his tomahawk and his war-whoop, and then you will hear a
    crash and see the scalps fly. He has none of my diffidence. He
    knows all about these nominees, and if he don’t he will let on to in
    such a natural way as to deceive the most critical. He knows
    everything--he knows more than Webster’s Unabridged and the American
    Encyclopedia--but whether he knows anything about a subject or not
    he is perfectly willing to discuss it. When he gets back he will
    tell you all about these candidates as serenely as if he had been
    acquainted with them a hundred years, though, speaking
    confidentially, I doubt if he ever heard of any of them till to-day.
    I am right well satisfied it is a good, sound, sensible ticket, and
    a ticket to win; but wait till he comes.

    In the mean time I go for George William Curtis and take the
    chances.
                                MARK TWAIN.

He had become what Mr. Howells calls entirely “desouthernized” by this
time. From having been of slaveholding stock, and a Confederate soldier,
he had become a most positive Republican, a rampant abolitionist--had
there been anything left to abolish. His sympathy had been always with
the oppressed, and he had now become their defender. His work on the
paper revealed this more and more. He wrote fewer sketches and more
editorials, and the editorials were likely to be either savage assaults
upon some human abuse, or fierce espousals of the weak. They were
fearless, scathing, terrific. Of some farmers of Cohocton, who had taken
the law into their own hands to punish a couple whom they believed to be
a detriment to the community, he wrote:

“The men who did that deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking,
cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition. They are the very
bastards of the devil.”

He appended a full list of their names, and added:

“If the farmers of Cohocton are of this complexion, what on earth must a
Cohocton rough be like?”

But all this happened a long time ago, and we need not detail those
various old interests and labors here. It is enough to say that Mark
Twain on the Express was what he had been from the beginning, and would
be to the end--the zealous champion of justice and liberty; violent
and sometimes wrong in his viewpoint, but never less than fearless and
sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct
for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the under dog.

Among the best of his editorial contributions is a tribute to Anson
Burlingame, who died February 23, 1870, at St. Petersburg, on his trip
around the world as special ambassador for the Chinese Empire. In this
editorial Clemens endeavored to pay something of his debt to the noble
statesman. He reviewed Burlingame’s astonishing career--the career
which had closed at forty-seven, and read like a fairy-tale-and he dwelt
lovingly on his hero’s nobility of character. At the close he said:

“He was a good man, and a very, very great man. America, lost a son, and
all the world a servant, when he died.”

Among those early contributions to the Express is a series called
“Around the World,” an attempt at collaboration with Prof. D. R. Ford,
who did the actual traveling, while Mark Twain, writing in the first
person, gave the letters his literary stamp. At least some of the
contributions were written in this way, such as “Adventures in Hayti,”
 “The Pacific,” and “Japan.” These letters exist to-day only in the old
files of the Express, and indeed this is the case with most of Clemens’s
work for that paper. It was mainly ephemeral or timely work, and
its larger value has disappeared. Here and there is a sentence worth
remembering. Of two practical jokers who sent in a marriage notice of
persons not even contemplating matrimony, he said: “This deceit has been
practised maliciously by a couple of men whose small souls will escape
through their pores some day if they do not varnish their hides.”

Some of the sketches have been preserved. “Journalism in Tennessee,”
 one of the best of his wilder burlesques, is as enjoyable to-day as
when written. “A Curious Dream” made a lasting impression on his Buffalo
readers, and you are pretty certain to hear of it when you mention Mark
Twain in that city to-day. It vividly called attention to the neglect
of the old North Street graveyard. The gruesome vision of the ancestors
deserting with their coffins on their backs was even more humiliating
than amusing, and inspired a movement for reform. It has been
effective elsewhere since then, and may still be read with profit--or
satisfaction--for in a note at the end the reader is assured that if the
cemeteries of his town are kept in good order the dream is not leveled
at his town at all, but “particularly and venomously at the next town.”



LXXVII. THE “GALAXY”

Mark Twain’s work on the Express represented only a portion of his
literary activities during his Buffalo residence. The Galaxy, an
ambitious New York magazine of that day--[published by Sheldon & Co.
at 498 and 500 Broadway]--proposed to him that he conduct for them a
humorous department. They would pay $2,400 a year for the work, and
allow him a free hand. There was some discussion as to book rights,
but the arrangement was concluded, and his first instalment, under the
general title of “Memoranda,” appeared in the May number, 1870. In
his Introductory he outlined what the reader might expect, such as
“exhaustive statistical tables,” “Patent Office reports,” and “complete
instructions about farming, even from the grafting of the seed to the
harrowing of the matured crops.” He declared that he would throw a
pathos into the subject of agriculture that would surprise and delight
the world. He added that the “Memoranda” was not necessarily a humorous
department.

    I would not conduct an exclusively and professedly humorous
    department for any one. I would always prefer to have the privilege
    of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to
    me, without the reader’s feeling obliged to consider himself
    outraged.... Puns cannot be allowed a place in this department....
    No circumstance, however dismal, will ever be considered a
    sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest
    evidence of intellectual poverty, the pun.

The Galaxy was really a fine magazine, with the best contributors
obtainable; among them Justin McCarthy, S. M. B. Piatt, Richard Grant
White, and many others well known in that day, with names that still
flicker here and there in its literary twilight. The new department
appealed to Clemens, and very soon he was writing most of his sketches
for it. They were better literature, as a rule, than those published in
his own paper.

The first number of the “Memoranda” was fairly representative of those
that followed it. “The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract,” a
manuscript which he had undertaken three years before and mislaid,
was its initial contribution. Besides the “Beef Contract,” there was
a tribute to George Wakeman, a well-known journalist of those days;
a stricture on the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage, who had delivered from the
pulpit an argument against workingmen occupying pews in fashionable
churches; a presentment of the Chinese situation in San Francisco,
depicting the cruel treatment of the Celestial immigrant; a burlesque
of the Sunday-school “good little boy” story,--[“The Story of the Good
Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper” and the “Beef Contract” are included
in Sketches New and Old; also the Chinese sketch, under the title,
“Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy.”]--and several shorter skits--and
anecdotes, ten pages in all; a rather generous contract.

Mark Twain’s comment on Talmage was prompted by an article in which
Talmage had assumed the premise that if workingmen attended the churches
it would drive the better class of worshipers away. Among other things
he said:

    I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in
    church, and a workingman should enter the door at the other end,
    would smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame for the
    sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer
    for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. The fact is,
    if you had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing of the
    common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of
    Christendom sick at their stomach. If you are going to kill the
    church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to do with this work
    of evangelization.

Commenting on this Mark Twain said--well, he said a good deal more than
we have room for here, but a portion of his closing paragraphs is
worth preserving. He compares the Reverend Mr. Talmage with the early
disciples of Christ--Paul and Peter and the others; or, rather, he
contrasts him with them.

    They healed the very beggars, and held intercourse with people of a
    villainous odor every day. If the subject of these remarks had been
    chosen among the original Twelve Apostles he would not have
    associated with the rest, because he could not have stood the fishy
    smell of some of his comrades who came from around the Sea of
    Galilee. He would have resigned his commission with some such
    remark as he makes in the extract quoted above: “Master, if thou art
    going to kill the church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to
    do with this work of evangelization.” He is a disciple, and makes
    that remark to the Master; the only difference is that he makes it
    in the nineteenth instead of the first century.

Talmage was immensely popular at this time, and Mark Twain’s open attack
on him must have shocked a good many Galaxy readers, as perhaps his
article on the Chinese cruelties offended the citizens of San Francisco.
It did not matter. He was not likely to worry over the friends he would
lose because of any stand taken for human justice. Lamed said of him:
“He was very far from being one who tried in any way to make himself
popular.” Certainly he never made any such attempt at the expense of his
convictions.

The first Galaxy instalment was a sort of platform of principles for
the campaign that was to follow. Not that each month’s contribution
contained personal criticism, or a defense of the Chinese (of whom he
was always the champion as long as he lived), but a good many of them
did. In the October number he began a series of letters under the
general title of “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again,” supposed to have
been written by a Chinese immigrant in San Francisco, detailing his
experience there. In a note the author says: “No experience is set down
in the following letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed
to give variety to the history of the Chinaman’s sojourn in America.
Plain fact is amply sufficient.” The letters show how the supposed
Chinese writer of them had set out for America, believing it to be
a land whose government was based on the principle that all men are
created equal, and treated accordingly; how, upon arriving in San
Francisco, he was kicked and bruised and beaten, and set upon by dogs,
flung into jail, tried and condemned without witnesses, his own race not
being allowed to testify against Americans--Irish-Americans--in the San
Francisco court. They are scathing, powerful letters, and one cannot
read them, even in this day of improved conditions, without feeling the
hot waves of resentment and indignation which Mark Twain must have felt
when he penned them.

Reverend Mr. Talmage was not the only divine to receive attention in the
“Memoranda.” The Reverend Mr. Sabine, of New York, who had declined to
hold a church burial service for the old actor, George Holland, came
in for the most caustic as well as the most artistic stricture of
the entire series. It deserves preservation to-day, not only for its
literary value, but because no finer defense of the drama, no more
searching sermon on self-righteousness, has ever been put into concrete
form.--[“The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of Gorge Holland by the Rev.
Mr. Sabine”; Galaxy for February, 1871. The reader will find it complete
under Appendix J, at the end of last volume.]

The “Little Church Around the Corner” on Twenty-ninth Street received
that happy title from this incident.

“There is a little church around the corner that will, perhaps, permit
the service,” Mr. Sabine had said to Holland’s friends.

The little church did permit the service, and there was conferred upon
it the new name, which it still bears. It has sheltered a long line
of actor folk and their friends since then, earning thereby reverence,
gratitude, and immortal memory.--[Church of the Transfiguration.
Memorial services were held there for Joseph Jefferson; and a memorial
window, by John La Farge, has been placed there in memory of Edwin
Booth.]

Of the Galaxy contributions a number are preserved in Sketches New
and Old. “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper” is one of the best of
these--an excellent example of Mark Twain’s more extravagant style of
humor. It is perennially delightful; in France it has been dramatized,
and is still played.

A successful Galaxy feature, also preserved in the Sketches, was
the “Burlesque Map of Paris,” reprinted from the Express. The
Franco-Prussian War was in progress, and this travesty was particularly
timely. It creates only a smile of amusement to-day, but it was all
fresh and delightful then. Schuyler Colfax, by this time Vice-President,
wrote to him: “I have had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so
have all my family. You are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to
be punished severely.”

The “Official Commendations,” which accompany the map, are its chief
charm. They are from Grant, Bismarck, Brigham Young, and others, the
best one coming from one J. Smith, who says:

    My wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though everything
    was done for her relief that could be done, all was in vain. But,
    sir, since her first glance at your map they have entirely left her.
    She has nothing but convulsions now.

It is said that the “Map of Paris” found its way to Berlin, where the
American students in the beer-halls used to pretend to quarrel over it
until they attracted the attention of the German soldiers that might be
present. Then they would wander away and leave it on the table and watch
results. The soldiers would pounce upon it and lose their tempers over
it; then finally abuse it and revile its author, to the satisfaction of
everybody.

The larger number of “Memoranda” sketches have properly found oblivion
to-day. They were all, or nearly all, collected by a Canadian pirate, C.
A. Backas, in a volume bearing the title of Memoranda,--[Also by a
harpy named John Camden Hotten (of London), of whom we shall hear again.
Hotten had already pirated The Innocents, and had it on the market
before Routledge could bring out the authorized edition. Routledge later
published the “Memoranda” under the title of Sketches, including the
contents of the Jumping Frog book.]--a book long ago suppressed. Only
about twenty of the Galaxy contributions found place in Sketches New
and Old, five years later, and some of these might have been spared
as literature. “To Raise Poultry,” “John Chinaman in New York,” and
“History Repeats Itself” are valuable only as examples of his work at
that period. The reader may consult them for himself.



LXXVIII. THE PRIMROSE PATH

But we are losing sight of more important things. From the very
beginning Mark Twain’s home meant always more to him than his work.
The life at 472 Delaware Avenue had begun with as fair a promise as any
matrimonial journey ever undertaken: There seemed nothing lacking: a
beautiful home, sufficient income, bright prospects--these things, with
health and love; constitute married happiness. Mrs. Clemens wrote to her
sister, Mrs. Crane, at the end of February: “Sue, we are two as happy
people as you ever saw. Our days seem to be made up of only bright
sunlight, with no shadow in them.” In the same letter the husband added:
“Livy pines and pines every day for you, and I pine and pine every day
for you, and when we both of us are pining at once you would think it
was a whole pine forest let loose.”

To Redpath, who was urging lecture engagements for the coming season, he
wrote:

    DEAR RED,--I am not going to lecture any more forever. I have got
    things ciphered down to a fraction now. I know just about what it
    will cost to live, and I can make the money without lecturing.
    Therefore, old man, count me out.

And still later, in May:

    I guess I am out of the field permanently. Have got a lovely wife,
    a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a
    coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-in-spiring, nothing
    less; and I am making more money than necessary, by considerable,
    and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform? The
    subscriber will have to be excused for the present season at least.

So they were very happy during those early months, acquiring pleasantly
the education which any matrimonial experience is sure to furnish,
accustoming themselves to the uses of housekeeping, to life in
partnership, with all the discoveries and mental and spiritual
adaptations that belong to the close association of marriage. They were
far, very far, apart on many subjects. He was unpolished, untrained,
impulsive, sometimes violent. Twichell remembers that in the earlier
days of their acquaintance he wore a slouch hat pulled down in front,
and smoked a cigar that sometimes tilted up and touched the brim of it.
The atmosphere and customs of frontier life, the Westernisms of
that day, still clung to him. Mrs. Clemens, on the other hand, was
conservative, dainty, cultured, spiritual. He adored her as little less
than a saint, and she became, indeed, his saving grace. She had all
the personal refinement which he lacked, and she undertook the work of
polishing and purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy
his personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and
she set about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude
in each achievement.

She did not entirely approve of certain lines of his reading; or,
rather, she did not understand them in those days. That he should be
fond of history and the sciences was natural enough, but when the Life
of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, appeared, and he sat up nights to
absorb it, and woke early and lighted the lamp to follow the career
of the great showman, she was at a loss to comprehend this particular
literary passion, and indeed was rather jealous of it. She did not
realize then his vast interest in the study of human nature, or that
such a book contained what Mr. Howells calls “the root of the human
matter,” the inner revelation of the human being at first hand.

Concerning his religious observances her task in the beginning was easy
enough. Clemens had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines
of his own. His natural kindness of heart, and especially his love for
his wife, inclined him toward the teachings and customs of her Christian
faith--unorthodox but sincere, as Christianity in the Langdon family
was likely to be. It took very little persuasion on his wife’s part
to establish family prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the
morning reading of a Bible chapter. Joe Goodman, who made a trip East,
and visited them during the early days of their married life, was
dumfounded to see Mark Twain ask a blessing and join in family worship.
Just how long these forms continued cannot be known to-day; the time
of their abandonment has perished from the recollection of any one now
living.

It would seem to have been the Bible-reading that wrought the change.
The prayer and the blessing were to him sincere and gracious; but as the
readings continued he realized that he had never before considered the
Bible from a doctrinal point of view, as a guide to spiritual salvation.
To his logical reasoning mind, a large portion of it seemed absurd:
a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology. From such material
humanity had built its mightiest edifice of hope, the doctrines of its
faith. After a little while he could stand it no longer.

“Livy,” he said one day, “you may keep this up if you want to, but I
must ask you to excuse me from it. It is making me a hypocrite. I don’t
believe in this Bible. It contradicts my reason. I can’t sit here and
listen to it, letting you believe that I regard it, as you do, in the
light of gospel, the word of God.”

He was moved to write an article on the human idea of God, ancient and
modern. It contained these paragraphs:

    The difference in importance, between the God of the Bible and the
    God of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely
    and inadequately figured to the mind.... If you make figures
    to represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch
    between them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of
    distance which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be
    eleven miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star.
    --[His figures were far too small. A map drawn on the scale of
    400,000 miles to the inch would need to be 1,100 miles long to take
    in both the earth and the nearest fixed star. On such a map the
    earth would be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter--the size of a
    small grain of sand.]--So one cannot put the modern heavens on a
    map, nor the modern God; but the Bible God and the Bible heavens can
    be set down on a slate and yet not be discommoded....

    The difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by
    science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn
    and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies. Its God was
    strictly proportioned to its dimensions. His sole solicitude was
    about a handful of truculent nomads. He worried and fretted over
    them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way. One day he coaxed
    and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed
    them beyond their deserts. He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he
    grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no
    purpose; his efforts were all vain, he could not govern them. When
    the fury was on him he was blind to all reason--he not only
    slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and
    dumb cattle....

    To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive,
    fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true God
    is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose
    beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his
    colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his
    purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being
    equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; these things,
    taken together, suggest that if he shall ordain us to live
    hereafter, he will still be steadfast, just, and fair toward us. We
    shall not need to require anything more.

It seems mild enough, obvious, even orthodox, now--so far have we
traveled in forty years. But such a declaration then would have shocked
a great number of sincerely devout persons. His wife prevailed upon him
not to print it. She respected his honesty--even his reasoning, but
his doubts were a long grief to her, nevertheless. In time she saw more
clearly with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived
more with the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and
the proportions of created things.

They did not mingle much or long with the social life of Buffalo. They
received and returned calls, attended an occasional reception; but
neither of them found such things especially attractive in those days,
so they remained more and more in their own environment. There is an
anecdote which seems to belong here.

One Sunday morning Clemens noticed smoke pouring from the upper window
of the house across the street. The owner and his wife, comparatively
newcomers, were seated upon the veranda, evidently not aware of
impending danger. The Clemens household thus far had delayed calling on
them, but Clemens himself now stepped briskly across the street. Bowing
with leisurely politeness, he said:

“My name is Clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and I beg
your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your house is on
fire.”

Almost the only intimate friends they had in Buffalo were in the family
of David Gray, the poet-editor of the Courier. Gray was a gentle,
lovable man. “The gentlest spirit and the loveliest that ever went
clothed in clay, since Sir Galahad laid him to rest,” Mark Twain once
said of him. Both Gray and Clemens were friends of John Hay, and their
families soon became intimate. Perhaps, in time, the Clemens household
would have found other as good friends in the Buffalo circles; but heavy
clouds that had lain unseen just beyond the horizon during those
earlier months of marriage rose suddenly into view, and the social life,
whatever it might have become, was no longer a consideration.



LXXIX. THE OLD HUMAN STORY

Jervis Langdon was never able to accept his son-in-law’s invitation to
the new home. His health began to fail that spring, and at the end of
March, with his physician and Mrs. Langdon, he made a trip to the South.
In a letter written at Richmond he said, “I have thrown off all care,”
 and named a list of the four great interests in which he was involved.
Under “number 5,” he included “everything,” adding, “so you see how good
I am to follow the counsel of my children.” He closed: “Samuel, I love
your wife and she loves me. I think it is only fair that you should know
it, but you need not flare up. I loved her before you did, and she loved
me before she did you, and has not ceased since. I see no way but for
you to make the most of it.” He was already a very ill man, and this
cheerful letter was among the last he ever wrote.

He was absent six weeks and seemed to improve, but suffered an attack
early in May; in June his condition became critical. Clemens and his
wife were summoned to Elmira, and joined in the nursing, day and night.
Clemens surprised every one by his ability as a nurse. His delicacy and
thoughtfulness were unfailing; his original ways of doing things always
amused and interested the patient. In later years Mark Twain once said:

    “How much of the nursing did I do? My main watch was from midnight
    to four in the morning, nearly four hours. My other watch was a
    midday watch, and I think it was nearly three hours. The two
    sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four
    hours between them, and each of them tried generously and
    persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch. I
    went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by
    midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure. I went
    on watch sleepy and remained miserable, sleepy, and wretched,
    straight along through the four hours. I can still see myself
    sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering
    night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf fan over the drawn, white
    face of the patient. I can still recall my noddings, my fleeting
    unconsciousness, when the fan would come to a standstill in my hand,
    and I woke up with a start and a hideous shock. During all that
    dreary time I began to watch for the dawn long before it came. When
    the first faint gray showed through the window-blinds I felt as no
    doubt a castaway feels when the dim threads of the looked-for ship
    appear against the sky. I was well and strong, but I was a man,
    afflicted with a man’s infirmity--lack of endurance.”

He always dealt with himself in this unsparing way; but those who were
about him then have left a different story.

It was all without avail. Mr. Langdon rallied, and early in July there
was hope for his recovery. He failed again, and on the afternoon of the
6th of August he died. To Mrs. Clemens, delicate and greatly worn with
the anxiety and strain of watching, the blow was a crushing one. It
was the beginning of a series of disasters which would mark the entire
remaining period of their Buffalo residence.

There had been a partial plan for spending the summer in England, and a
more definite one for joining the Twichells in the Adirondacks. Both of
these projects were now abandoned. Mrs. Clemens concluded that she would
be better at home than anywhere else, and invited an old school friend,
a Miss Emma Nye, to visit her.

But the shadow of death had not been lifted from the Clemens household.
Miss Nye presently fell ill with typhoid fever. There followed another
long period of anxiety and nursing, ending with the death of the visitor
in the new home, September 29th. The young wife was now in very delicate
health; genuinely ill, in fact. The happy home had become a place of
sorrow-of troubled nights and days. Another friend came to cheer
them, and on this friend’s departure Mrs. Clemens drove to the railway
station. It was a hurried trip over rough streets to catch the train.
She was prostrated on her return, and a little later, November 7, 1870,
her first child, Langdon, was prematurely born. A dangerous illness
followed, and complete recovery was long delayed. But on the 12th the
crisis seemed passed, and the new father wrote a playful letter to the
Twichells, as coming from the late arrival:

    DEAR UNCLE AND AUNT,--I came into the world on the 7th inst., and
    consequently am about five days old now. I have had wretched health
    ever since I made my appearance... I am not corpulent, nor am
    I robust in any way. At birth I only weighed four and one-half
    pounds with my clothes on--and the clothes were the chief feature of
    the weight, too, I am obliged to confess, but I am doing finely, all
    things considered.... My little mother is very bright and
    cheery, and I guess she is pretty happy, but I don’t know what
    about. She laughs a great deal, notwithstanding she is sick abed.

    P. S.--Father says I had better write because you will be more
    interested in me, just now, than in the rest of the family.

A week later Clemens, as himself, wrote:

    Livy is up and the prince keeps her busy and anxious these latter
    days and nights, but I am a bachelor up-stairs and don’t have to
    jump up and get the soothing sirup, though I would as soon do it as
    not, I assure you. (Livy will be certain to read this letter.)

    Tell Harmony that I do hold the baby, and do it pretty handily too,
    though with occasional apprehensions that his loose head will fall
    off. I don’t have to quiet him; he hardly ever utters a cry. He is
    always thinking about something. He is a patient, good little baby.

Further along he refers to one of his reforms:

    Smoke? I always smoke from three till five on Sunday afternoons,
    and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week, day and night. But
    when Livy is well I smoke only those two hours on Sunday. I’m boss
    of the habit now, and shall never let it boss me any more.
    Originally I quit solely on Livy’s account (not that I believed
    there was the faintest reason in the matter, but just as I would
    deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit
    wearing socks if she thought them immoral), and I stick to it yet on
    Livy’s account, and shall always continue to do so without a pang.
    But somehow it seems a pity that you quit, for Mrs. T. didn’t mind
    it, if I remember rightly. Ah, it is turning one’s back upon a
    kindly Providence to spurn away from us the good creature he sent to
    make the breath of life a luxury as well as a necessity, enjoyable
    as well as useful. To go quit smoking, when there ain’t any
    sufficient excuse for it!--why, my old boy, when they used to tell
    me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew
    the devotee they were wasting their puerile words upon; they little
    knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no
    smoking in it! But I won’t persuade you, Twichell--I won’t until I
    see you again--but then we’ll smoke for a week together, and then
    shut off again.



LXXX. LITERARY PROJECTS

The success of the Innocents naturally made a thrifty publisher like
Bliss anxious for a second experiment. He had begun early in the year to
talk about another book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or
two, more or less hazy and unpursued. Clemens at one time developed a
plan for a Noah’s Ark book, which was to detail the cruise of the Ark
in diaries kept by various members of it-Shem, Ham, and the others.
He really wrote some of it at the time, and it was an idea he never
entirely lost track of. All along among his manuscripts appear fragments
from those ancient voyagers. One of the earlier entries will show the
style and purpose of the undertaking. It is from Shem’s record:

    Friday: Papa’s birthday. He is 600 years old. We celebrated it in
    a big, black tent. Principal men of the tribe present. Afterward
    they were shown over the ark, which was looking desolate and empty
    and dreary on account of a misunderstanding with the workmen about
    wages. Methuselah was as free with his criticisms as usual, and as
    voluble and familiar, which I and my brothers do not like; for we
    are past our one hundredth year and married. He still calls me
    Shemmy, just as he did when I was a child of sixty. I am still but
    a youth, it is true, but youth has its feelings, and I do not like
    this....

    Saturday: Keeping the Sabbath.

    Sunday: Papa has yielded the advance and everybody is hard at work.
    The shipyard is so crowded that the men hinder each other; everybody
    hurrying or being hurried; the rush and confusion and shouting and
    wrangling are astonishing to our family, who have always been used
    to a quiet, country life.

It was from this germ that in a later day grew the diaries of Adam and
Eve, though nothing very satisfactory ever came of this preliminary
attempt. The author had faith in it, however. To Bliss he wrote:

    I mean to take plenty of time and pains with the Noah’s Ark book;
    maybe it will be several years before it is all written, but it will
    be a perfect lightning striker when it is done.

    You can have the first say (that is plain enough) on that or any
    other book I may prepare for the press, as long as you deal in a
    fair, open, and honorable way with me. I do not think you will ever
    find me doing otherwise with you. I can get a book ready for you
    any time you want it; but you can’t want one before this time next
    year, so I have plenty of time.

Bliss was only temporarily appeased. He realized that to get a book
ready by the time he wanted it-a book of sufficient size and importance
to maintain the pace set by the Innocents meant rather more immediate
action than his author seemed to contemplate. Futhermore, he knew
that other publishers were besieging the author of the Innocents; a
disquieting thought. In early July, when Mr. Langdon’s condition had
temporarily improved, Bliss had come to Elmira and proposed a book which
should relate the author’s travels and experiences in the Far West. It
was an inviting subject, and Clemens, by this time more attracted by the
idea of authorship and its rewards, readily enough agreed to undertake
the volume. He had been offered half profits, and suggested that the
new contract be arranged upon these terms. Bliss, figuring on a sale
of 100,000 copies, proposed seven and one-half per cent. royalty as an
equivalent, and the contract was so arranged. In after-years, when the
cost of manufacture and paper had become greatly reduced, Clemens, with
but a confused notion of business details, believed he had been misled
by Bliss in this contract, and was bitter and resentful accordingly.
The figures remain, however, to show that Bliss dealt fairly. Seven and
one-half per cent. of a subscription book did represent half profits up
to 100,000 copies when the contract was drawn; but it required ten years
to sell that quantity, and in that time conditions had changed. Bliss
could hardly foresee that these things would be so, and as he was dead
when the book touched the 100,000 mark he could not explain or readjust
matters, whatever might have been his inclination.

Clemens was pleased enough with the contract when it was made. To Orion
he wrote July 15 (1870):

    Per contract I must have another six-hundred-page book ready for my
    publisher January 1st, and I only began it to-day. The subject of
    it is a secret, because I may possibly change it. But as it stands
    I propose to do up Nevada and California, beginning with the trip
    across the country in the stage. Have you a memorandum of the route
    we took, or the names of any of the stations we stopped at? Do you
    remember any of the scenes, names, incidents, or adventures of the
    coach trip?--for I remember next to nothing about the matter. Jot
    down a foolscap page of items for me. I wish I could have two days’
    talk with you.

    I suppose I am to get the biggest copyright this time ever paid on a
    subscription book in this country.

The work so promptly begun made little progress. Hard days of illness
and sorrow followed, and it was not until September that it was really
under way. His natural enthusiasm over any new undertaking possessed
him. On the 4th he wrote Bliss:

During the past week I have written the first four chapters of the book,
and I tell you ‘The Innocents Abroad’ will have to get up early to beat
it. It will be a book that will jump straight into continental celebrity
the first month it is issued.

He prophesied a sale of 90,000 copies during the first twelve months and
declared, “I see the capabilities of the subject.”

But further disasters, even then impending, made continued effort
impossible; the prospect of the new book for a time became gloomy, the
idea of it less inspiring. Other plans presented themselves, and at one
time he thought of letting the Galaxy publishers get out a volume of
his sketches. In October he wrote Bliss that he was “driveling along
tolerably fair on the book, getting off from twelve to twenty pages
of manuscript a day.” Bliss naturally discouraged the Galaxy idea, and
realizing that the new book might be long delayed, agreed to get out a
volume of miscellany sufficiently large and important for subscription
sales. He was doubtful of the wisdom of this plan, and when Clemens
suddenly proposed a brand-new scheme his publisher very readily agreed
to hold back the publication of Sketches indefinitely.

The new book was to be adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa,
then newly opened and of wide public interest. Clemens did not propose
to visit the mines himself, but to let another man do the traveling,
make the notes, and write or tell him the story, after which Clemens
would enlarge and elaborate it in his own fashion. His adaptation of the
letters of Professor Ford, a year earlier, had convinced him that his
plan would work out successfully on a larger scale; he fixed upon
his old friend, J. H. Riley, of Washington--[“Riley-Newspaper
Correspondent.” See Sketches.]--(earlier of San Francisco), as the
proper person to do the traveling. At the end of November he wrote
Bliss:

    I have put my greedy hands upon the best man in America for my
    purpose, and shall start him to the diamond field in South Africa
    within a fortnight at my expense... that the book will have a
    perfectly beautiful sale.

He suggested that Bliss advance Riley’s expense money, the amount to be
deducted from the first royalty returns; also he proposed an increased
royalty, probably in view of the startling splendor of the new idea.
Bliss was duly impressed, and the agreement was finally made on a basis
of eight and one-half per cent., with an advance of royalty sufficient
to see Riley to South Africa and return.

Clemens had not yet heard from Riley definitely when he wrote his
glowing letter to Bliss. He took it for granted that Riley, always an
adventurous sort, would go. When Riley wrote him that he felt morally
bound to the Alta, of which he was then Washington correspondent, also
in certain other directions till the end of the session, Clemens wrote
him at great length, detailing his scheme in full and urging him to
write instantly to the Alta and others, asking a release on the ground
of being offered a rare opportunity to improve his fortunes.

You know right well that I would not have you depart a hair from any
obligation for any money. The boundless confidence that I have in you
is born of a conviction of your integrity in small as well as in great
things. I know plenty of men whose integrity I would trust to here, but
not off yonder in Africa.

His proposal, in brief, to Riley was that the latter should make the
trip to Africa without expense to himself, collect memoranda, and such
diamond mines as might be found lying about handy. Upon his return he
was to take up temporary residence in the Clemens household until
the book was finished, after which large benefits were to accrue to
everybody concerned. In the end Riley obtained a release from his
obligations and was off for the diamond mines and fortune.

Poor fellow! He was faithful in his mission, and it is said that
he really located a mining claim that would have made him and his
independent for all time to come; but returning home with his precious
memoranda and the news of good fortune, he accidentally wounded himself
with a fork while eating; blood-poisoning set in (they called it cancer
then), and he was only able to get home to die. His memoranda were
never used, his mining claim was never identified. Certainly, death was
closely associated with Mark Twain’s fortunes during those earlier days
of his married life.

On the whole the Buffalo residence was mainly a gloomy one; its ventures
were attended by ill-fortune. For some reason Mark Twain’s connection
with the Express, while it had given the paper a wide reputation, had
not largely increased its subscription. Perhaps his work on it was too
varied and erratic. Nasby, who had popularized the Toledo Blade, kept
steadily to one line. His farmer public knew always just what to expect
when their weekly edition arrived.

Clemens and his wife dreamed of a new habitation, and new faces and
surroundings. They agreed to offer their home and his interests in the
Express for sale. They began to talk of Hartford, where Twichell lived,
and where Orion Clemens and his wife had recently located.

Mark Twain’s new fortunes had wrought changes in the affairs of his
relatives. Already, before his marriage, he had prospected towns here
and there with a view to finding an Eastern residence for his mother and
sister, and he had kept Orion’s welfare always in mind. When Pamela and
her daughter came to his wedding he told them of a little city by the
name of Fredonia (New York), not far from Buffalo, where he thought they
might find a pleasant home.

“I went in there by night and out by night,” he said, “so I saw none of
it, but I had an intelligent, attractive audience. Prospect Fredonia
and let me know what it is like. Try to select a place where a good many
funerals pass. Ma likes funerals. If you can pick a good funeral corner
she will be happy.”

It was in her later life that Jane Clemens had developed this particular
passion. She would consult the morning paper for any notice of obsequies
and attend those that were easy of access. Watching the processions
go by gave her a peculiar joy. Mrs. Moffett and her daughter did go to
Fredonia immediately following the wedding. They found it residentially
attractive, and rented a house before returning to St. Louis, a
promptness that somewhat alarmed the old lady, who did not altogether
fancy the idea of being suddenly set down in a strange house, in a
strange land, even though it would be within hailing distance of Sam and
his new wife. Perhaps the Fredonia funerals were sufficiently numerous
and attractive, for she soon became attached to the place, and entered
into the spirit of the life there, joining its temperance crusades, and
the like, with zest and enjoyment.

Onion remained in St. Louis, but when Bliss established a paper called
The Publisher, and wanted an editor, he was chosen for the place,
originally offered to his brother; the latter, writing to Onion, said:

If you take the place with an air of perfect confidence in yourself,
never once letting anything show in your bearing but a quiet, modest,
entire, and perfect confidence in your ability to do pretty much
anything in the world, Bliss will think you are the very man he needs;
but don’t show any shadow of timidity or unsoldierly diffidence, for
that sort of thing is fatal to advancement.

I warn you thus because you are naturally given to knocking your pot
over in this way, when a little judicious conduct would make it boil.



LXXXI. SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS

Meantime The Innocents Abroad had continued to prosper. Its author
ranked mainly as a humorist, but of such colossal proportions that his
contemporaries had seemed to dwindle; the mighty note of the “Frog of
Calaveras” had dwarfed a score of smaller peepers. At the end of a year
from its date of publication the book had sold up to 67,000 and was
continuing at the rate of several thousand monthly.

“You are running it in staving, tiptop, first-class style,” Clemens
wrote to Bliss. “On the average ten people a day come and hunt me up
to tell me I am a benefactor! I guess that is a part of the program we
didn’t expect, in the first place.”

Apparently the book appealed to readers of every grade. One hundred and
fifteen copies were in constant circulation at the Mercantile Library,
in New York, while in the most remote cabins of America it was read and
quoted. Jack Van Nostrand, making a long horseback tour of Colorado,
wrote:

I stopped a week ago in a ranch but a hundred miles from nowhere. The
occupant had just two books: the Bible and The Innocents Abroad--the
former in good repair.

Across the ocean the book had found no less favor, and was being
translated into many and strange tongues. By what seems now some
veritable magic its author’s fame had become literally universal.
The consul at Hongkong, discussing English literature with a Chinese
acquaintance, a mandarin, mentioned The Pilgrim’s Progress.

“Yes, indeed, I have read it!” the mandarin said, eagerly. “We are
enjoying it in China, and shall have it soon in our own language. It is
by Mark Twain.”

In England the book had an amazing vogue from the beginning, and English
readers were endeavoring to outdo the Americans in appreciation. Indeed,
as a rule, English readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an
understanding of Mark Twain’s literary value with greater promptness
than did the same class of readers at home. There were exceptions,
of course. There were English critics who did not take Mark Twain
seriously, there were American critics who did. Among the latter was a
certain William Ward, an editor of a paper down in Macon, Georgia--The
Beacon. Ward did not hold a place with the great magazine arbiters of
literary rank. He was only an obscure country editor, but he wrote like
a prophet. His article--too long to quote in full--concerned American
humorists in general, from Washington Irving, through John Phoenix,
Philander Doesticks, Sut Lovingwood, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and
Petroleum V. Nasby, down to Mark Twain. With the exception of the first
and last named he says of them:

    They have all had, or will have, their day. Some of them are
    resting beneath the sod, and others still live whose work will
    scarcely survive them. Since Irving no humorist in prose has held
    the foundation of a permanent fame except it be Mark Twain, and
    this, as in the case of Irving, is because he is a pure writer.
    Aside from any subtle mirth that lurks through his composition, the
    grace and finish of his more didactic and descriptive sentences
    indicate more than mediocrity.

The writer then refers to Mark Twain’s description of the Sphinx,
comparing it with Bulwer’s, which he thinks may have influenced it. He
was mistaken in this, for Clemens had not read Bulwer--never could read
him at any length.

Of the English opinions, that of The Saturday Review was perhaps
most doubtful. It came along late in 1870, and would hardly be worth
recalling if it were not for a resulting, or collateral, interest.
Clemens saw notice of this review before he saw the review itself.
A paragraph in the Boston Advertiser spoke of The Saturday Review as
treating the absurdities of the Innocents from a serious standpoint. The
paragraph closed:

    We can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute
    to his power; and indeed it is so amusing in itself that he can
    hardly do better than reproduce the article in full in his next
    monthly “Memoranda.”

The old temptation to hoax his readers prompted Mark Twain to
“reproduce” in the Galaxy, not the Review article, which he had not yet
seen, but an imaginary Review article, an article in which the imaginary
reviewer would be utterly devoid of any sense of humor and treat the
most absurd incidents of The New Pilgrim’s Progress as if set down by
the author in solemn and serious earnest. The pretended review began:

    Lord Macaulay died too soon. We never felt this so deeply as when
    we finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work.
    Macaulay died too soon; for none but he could mete out complete and
    comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impudence, the
    presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance
    of this author.

The review goes on to cite cases of the author’s gross deception. It
says:

    Let the cultivated English student of human nature picture to
    himself this Mark Twain as a person capable of doing the following
    described things; and not only doing them, but, with incredible
    innocence, printing them tranquilly and calmly in a book. For
    instance:

    He states that he entered a hair-dresser’s in Paris to get a shave,
    and the first “rake” the barber gave him with his razor it loosened
    his “hide,” and lifted him out of the chair.

    This is unquestionably extravagant. In Florence he was so annoyed
    by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a
    frantic spirit of revenge. There is, of course, no truth in this.
    He gives at full length the theatrical program, seventeen or
    eighteen hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the
    ruins of the Colosseum, among the dirt-and mold and rubbish. It is
    a sufficient comment upon this subject to remark that even a cast-
    iron program would not have lasted so long under the circumstances.

There were two and one-half pages of this really delightful burlesque
which the author had written with huge-enjoyment, partly as a joke on
the Review, partly to trick American editors, who he believed would
accept it as a fresh and startling proof of the traditional English lack
of humor.

But, as in the early sage-brush hoaxes, he rather overdid the thing.
Readers and editors readily enough accepted it as genuine, so far as
having come from The Saturday Review; but most of them, regarded it as a
delicious bit of humor which Mark Twain himself had taken seriously,
and was therefore the one sold. This was certainly startling, and by
no means gratifying. In the next issue he undertook that saddest of all
performances with tongue or pen: he explained his joke, and insisted on
the truth of the explanation. Then he said:

    If any man doubts my word now I will kill him. No, I will not kill
    him; I will win his money. I will bet him twenty to one, and let
    any New York publisher hold the stakes, that the statements I have
    above made as to the authorship of the article in question are
    entirely true.

But the Cincinnati Enquirer persisted in continuing the joke--in
“rubbing it in,” as we say now. The Enquirer declared that Mark Twain
had been intensely mortified at having been so badly taken in; that his
explanation in the Galaxy was “ingenious, but unfortunately not true.”
 The Enquirer maintained that The Saturday Review of October 8, 1870, did
contain the article exactly as printed in the “Memoranda,” and advised
Mark Twain to admit that he was sold, and say no more about it.

This was enraging. Mark Twain had his own ideas as to how far a joke
might be carried without violence, and this was a good way beyond the
limits. He denounced the Enquirer’s statement as a “pitiful, deliberate
falsehood,” in his anger falling into the old-time phrasing of newspaper
editorial abuse. He offered to bet them a thousand dollars in cash
that they could not prove their assertions, and asked pointedly, in
conclusion: “Will they swallow that falsehood ignominiously, or will
they send an agent to the Galaxy office? I think the Cincinnati Enquirer
must be edited by children.” He promised that if they did not accept his
financial proposition he would expose them in the next issue.

The incident closed there. He was prevented, by illness in his
household, from contributing to the next issue, and the second issue
following was his final “Memoranda” installment. So the matter perished
and was forgotten. It was his last editorial hoax. Perhaps he concluded
that hoaxes in any form were dangerous playthings; they were too likely
to go off at the wrong end.

It was with the April number (1871) that he concluded his relations with
the Galaxy. In a brief valedictory he gave his reasons:

    I have now written for the Galaxy a year. For the last eight
    months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and
    comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! During
    these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and
    malignantly threatened two others. All this I have experienced, yet
    all the time have been under contract to furnish “humorous” matter,
    once a month, for this magazine. I am speaking the exact truth in
    the above details. Please to put yourself in my place and
    contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. I think that
    some of the “humor” I have written during this period could have
    been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity
    of the occasion.

    The “Memoranda” will cease permanently with this issue of the
    magazine. To be a pirate on a low salary, and with no share in the
    profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable
    occupation, but I have other views now. To be a monthly humorist in
    a cheerless time is drearier.

Without doubt he felt a glad relief in being rid of this recurrent,
imperative demand. He wrote to Orion that he had told the Galaxy people
he would not write another article, long or short, for less than $500,
and preferred not to do it at all.

The Galaxy department and the work on the Express were Mark
Twain’s farewell to journalism; for the “Memoranda” was essentially
journalistic, almost as much so, and as liberally, as his old-time
Enterprise position. Apparently he wrote with absolute freedom,
unhampered by editorial policy or restriction. The result was not always
pleasant, and it was not always refined. We may be certain that it was
because of Mrs. Clemens’s heavy burdens that year, and her consequent
inability to exert a beneficent censorship, that more than one--more
than a dozen--of the “Memoranda” contributions were permitted to see the
light of print.

As a whole, the literary result of Mark Twain’s Buffalo period does
not reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad. It was a
retrogression--in some measure a return to his earlier form. It had been
done under pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said. Also there
was another reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of
labor had afforded that lofty inspiration which glorified every step
of the Quaker City journey. Buffalo was a progressive city--a beautiful
city, as American cities go--but it was hardly an inspiring city for
literature, and a dull, dingy newspaper office was far, very far, from
the pleasant decks of the Quaker City, the camp-fires of Syria, the blue
sky and sea of the Mediterranean.



LXXXII. THE WRITING OF “ROUGHING IT”

The third book published by Mark Twa
in was not the Western book he was
preparing for Bliss. It was a small volume, issued by Sheldon & Co.,
entitled Mark Twain’s Autobiography (Burlesque) and First Romance. The
Romance was the “Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance” which had appeared
in the Express at the beginning of 1870. The burlesque autobiography
had not previously appeared. The two made a thin little book, which, in
addition to its literary features, had running through it a series of
full-page, irrelevant pictures---cartoons of the Erie Railroad Ring,
presented as illustrations of a slightly modified version of “The House
That Jack Built.” The “House” was the Erie headquarters, the purpose
being to illustrate the swindling methods of the Ring. The faces of Jay
Gould, James Fisk, Jr., John T. Hoffman, and others of the combination,
are chiefly conspicuous. The publication was not important, from any
standpoint. Literary burlesque is rarely important, and it was far from
Mark Twain’s best form of expression. A year or two later he realized
the mistake of this book, bought in the plates and destroyed them.

Meantime the new Western book was at a standstill. To Orion, in March,
he wrote:

    I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out. We
    shall go to Elmira ten days hence (if Livy can travel on a mattress
    then), and stay there until I finish the California book, say three
    months. But I can’t begin work right away when I get there; must
    have a week’s rest, for I have been through thirty days’ terrific
    siege.

He promised to forward some of the manuscript soon.

    Hold on four or five days and I will see if I can get a few chapters
    fixed to send to Bliss....

    I have offered this house and the Express for sale, and when we go
    to Elmira we leave here for good. I shall not select a new home
    till the book is finished, but we have little doubt that Hartford
    will be the place.

He disposed of his interest in the Express in April, at a sacrifice of
$10,000 on the purchase price. Mrs. Clemens and the baby were able to
travel, and without further delay he took them to Elmira, to Quarry
Farm.

Quarry Farm, the home of Mrs. Clemens’s sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane, is
a beautiful hilltop, with a wide green slope, overlooking the hazy city
and the Chemung River, beyond which are the distant hills. It was bought
quite incidentally by Mr. and Mrs. Langdon, who, driving by one evening,
stopped to water the horses and decided that it would make a happy
summer retreat, where the families could combine their housekeeping
arrangements during vacation days. When the place had first been
purchased, they had debated on a name for it. They had tried several,
among them “Go-as-you-please Hall,” “Crane’s Nest,” and had finally
agreed upon “Rest and Be Thankful.” But this was only its official name.
There was an abandoned quarry up the hill, a little way from the house,
and the title suggested by Thomas K. Beecher came more naturally to the
tongue. The place became Quarry Farm, and so remains.

Clemens and his wife had fully made up their minds to live in Hartford.
They had both conceived an affection for the place, Clemens mainly
because of Twichell, while both of them yearned for the congenial
literary and social atmosphere, and the welcome which they felt awaited
them. Hartford was precisely what Buffalo in that day was not--a home
for the literary man. It held a distinguished group of writers, most of
whom the Clemenses already knew. Furthermore, with Bliss as publisher of
the Mark Twain books, it held their chief business interests.

Their plans for going were not very definite as to time. Clemens found
that his work went better at the farm, and that Mrs. Clemens and the
delicate baby daily improved. They decided to remain at Quarry Farm for
the summer, their first summer in that beautiful place which would mean
so much to them in the years to come.

It was really Joe Goodman, as much as anything, that stirred a fresh
enthusiasm in the new book. Goodman arrived just when the author’s
spirits were at low ebb.

“Joe,” he said, “I guess I’m done for. I don’t appear to be able to get
along at all with my work, and what I do write does not seem valuable.
I’m afraid I’ll never be able to reach the standard of ‘The Innocents
Abroad’ again. Here is what I have written, Joe. Read it, and see if
that is your opinion.”

Goodman took the manuscript and seated himself in a chair, while Clemens
went over to a table and pretended to work. Goodman read page after
page, critically, and was presently absorbed in it. Clemens watched him
furtively, till he could stand it no longer. Then he threw down his pen,
exclaiming:

“I knew it! I knew it! I am writing nothing but rot. You have sat there
all this time reading without a smile, and pitying the ass I am making
of myself. But I am not wholly to blame. I am not strong enough to fight
against fate. I have been trying to write a funny book, with dead people
and sickness everywhere. Mr. Langdon died first, then a young lady in
our house, and now Mrs. Clemens and the baby have been at the point of
death all winter! Oh, Joe, I wish to God I could die myself!”

“Mark,” said Joe, “I was reading critically, not for amusement, and so
far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you
have ever written. I have found it perfectly absorbing. You are doing a
great book!”

Clemens knew that Goodman never spoke except from conviction, and the
verdict was to him like a message of life handed down by an archangel.
He was a changed man instantly. He was all enthusiasm, full of his
subject, eager to go on. He proposed to pay Goodman a salary to stay
there and keep him company and furnish him with inspiration--the Pacific
coast atmosphere and vernacular, which he feared had slipped away from
him. Goodman declined the salary, but extended his visit as long as his
plans would permit, and the two had a happy time together, recalling old
Comstock days. Every morning, for a month or more, they used to tramp
over the farm. They fell into the habit of visiting the old quarry and
pawing over the fragments in search of fossil specimens. Both of them
had a poetic interest in geology, its infinite remotenesses and its
testimonies. Without scientific knowledge, they took a deep pleasure in
accumulating a collection, which they arranged on boards torn from an
old fence, until they had enough specimens to fill a small museum.
They imagined they could distinguish certain geological relations and
families, and would talk about trilobites, the Old Red Sandstone
period, and the azoic age, or follow random speculation to far-lying
conclusions, developing vague humors of phrase and fancy, having
altogether a joyful good time.

Another interest that developed during Goodman’s stay was in one Ruloff,
who was under death sentence for a particularly atrocious murder. The
papers were full of Ruloff’s prodigious learning. It was said that he
had in preparation a work showing the unity of all languages. Goodman
and Clemens agreed that Ruloff’s death would be a great loss to mankind,
even though he was clearly a villain and deserved his sentence. They
decided that justice would be served just as well if some stupid person
were hung in his place, and following out this fancy Clemens one morning
put aside his regular work and wrote an article to the Tribune,
offering to supply a substitute for Ruloff. He signed it simply “Samuel
Langhorne,” and it was published as a serious communication, without
comment, so far as the Tribune was concerned. Other papers, however,
took it up and it was widely copied and commented upon. Apparently
no one ever identified, Mark Twain with the authorship of the letter,
which, by the way, does not appear to have prolonged Ruloff’s earthly
usefulness.--[The reader will find the Ruloff letter in full under
Appendix K, at the end of last volume.]

Life at the farm may have furnished agricultural inspiration, for
Clemens wrote something about Horace Greeley’s farming, also a skit
concerning Henry Ward Beecher’s efforts in that direction. Of Mr.
Beecher’s farming he said:

“His strawberries would be a comfortable success if robins would eat
turnips.”

The article amused Beecher, and perhaps Greeley was amused too, for he
wrote:

    MARK,--You are mistaken as to my criticisms on your farming. I
    never publicly made any, while you have undertaken to tell the exact
    cost per pint of my potatoes and cabbages, truly enough the
    inspiration of genius. If you will really betake yourself to
    farming, or even to telling what you know about it, rather than what
    you don’t know about mine, I will not only refrain from disparaging
    criticism, but will give you my blessing.

                     Yours,  HORACE GREELEY.

The letter is in Mr. Greeley’s characteristic scrawl, and no doubt
furnished inspiration for the turnip story in ‘Roughing It’, also the
model for the pretended facsimile of Greeley’s writing.

Altogether that was a busy, enterprising summer at Quarry Farm. By
the middle of May, Clemens wrote to Bliss that he had twelve hundred
manuscript pages of the new book already written, and that he was
turning out the remainder at the rate of from thirty to sixty-five
per day. He was in high spirits by this time. The family health had
improved, and prospects were bright.

I have enough manuscript on hand now to make (allowing for engravings)
about four hundred pages of the book, consequently am two-thirds done. I
intended to run up to Hartford about the middle of the week and take
it along, but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work now (a
thing I have not experienced for months) that I can’t bear to lose a
single moment of the inspiration. So I will stay here and peg away as
long as it lasts. My present idea is to write as much more as I have
already written, and then collect from the mass the very best chapters
and discard the rest. When I get it done I want to see the man who will
begin to read it and not finish it. Nothing grieves me now; nothing
troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets my attention. I don’t think
of anything but the book, and don’t have an hour’s unhappiness about
anything, and don’t care two cents whether school keeps or not. The book
will be done soon now. It will be a starchy book; the dedication will be
worth the price of the volume. Thus:

                   TO THE LATE CAIN
                  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

    not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little
    respect; not on account of sympathy for him, for his bloody deed
    places him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking, but
    out of a mere humane commiseration for him, in that it was his
    misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent
    insanity plea.

Probably Mrs. Clemens diverted this picturesque dedication in favor of
the Higbie inscription, or perhaps the author never really intended the
literary tribute to Cain. The impulse that inspired it, however, was
characteristic.

In a postscript to this letter he adds:

    My stock is looking up. I am getting the bulliest offers for books
    and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one
    periodical offers me $6,000 cash for twelve articles of any length,
    and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise.

He set in to make hay while the sun was shining. In addition to the
California book, which was now fast nearing completion, he discussed a
scheme with Goodman for a six-hundred-page work which they were to do
jointly; he planned and wrote one or two scenes from a Western play, to
be built from episodes in the new book (one of them was the “Arkansas”
 incident, related in Chapter XXXI); he perfected one of his several
inventions--an automatically adjusting vest-strap; he wrote a number
of sketches, made an occasional business trip to New York and Hartford;
prospected the latter place for a new home. The shadow which had hung
over the sojourn in Buffalo seemed to have lifted.

He had promised Bliss some contributions for his new paper, and in June
he sent three sketches. In an accompanying letter he says:

    Here are three articles which you may have if you will pay $125 for
    the lot. If you don’t want them I’ll sell them to the Galaxy, but
    not for a cent less than three times the money.... If you take them
    pay one-tenth of the $125 in weekly instalments to Orion till he has
    received it all.

He reconsidered his resolution not to lecture again, and closed with
Redpath for the coming season. He found himself in a lecture-writing
fever. He wrote three of them in succession: one on Artemus Ward,
another on “Reminiscences of Some Pleasant Characters I Have Met,” and
a third one based on chapters from the new book. Of the “Reminiscence”
 lecture he wrote Redpath:

“It covers my whole acquaintance; kings, lunatics, idiots, and all.”
 Immediately afterward he wrote that he had prepared still another
lecture, “title to be announced later.”

“During July I’ll decide which one I like best,” he said. He instructed
Redpath not to make engagements for him to lecture in churches. “I never
made a success of a lecture in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh
in a church.”

Redpath was having difficulties in arranging a circuit to suit him.
Clemens had prejudices against certain towns and localities, prejudices
that were likely to change overnight. In August he wrote:

    DEAR RED,--I am different from other women; my mind changes oftener.
    People who have no mind can easily be stead fast and firm, but when
    a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea
    of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.
    See? Therefore, if you will notice, one week I am likely to give
    rigid instructions to confine me to New England; the next week send
    me to Arizona; the next week withdraw my name; the next week give
    you full, untrammeled swing; and the week following modify it. You
    must try to keep the run of my mind, Redpath that is your business,
    being the agent, and it always was too many for me.... Now about
    the West this week, I am willing that you shall retain all the
    Western engagements. But what I shall want next week is still with
    God.
                         Yours,  MARK.

He was in Hartford when this letter was written, arranging for residence
there and the removal of his belongings. He finally leased the fine
Hooker house on Ford Street, in that pleasant seclusion known as Nook
Farm--the literary part of Hartford, which included the residence
of Charles Dudley Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. He arranged for
possession of the premises October 1st. So the new home was settled
upon; then learning that Nasby was to be in Boston, he ran over to that
city for a few days of recreation after his season’s labors.

Preparations for removal to Hartford were not delayed. The Buffalo
property was disposed of, the furnishings were packed and shipped away.
The house which as bride and groom they had entered so happily was left
empty and deserted, never to be entered by them again. In the year and
a half of their occupancy it had seen well-nigh all the human round, all
that goes to make up the happiness and the sorrow of life.



LXXXIII. LECTURING DAYS

Life in Hartford, in the autumn of 1871, began in the letter, rather
than in the spirit. The newcomers were received with a wide, neighborly
welcome, but the disorder of establishment and the almost immediate
departure of the head of the household on a protracted lecturing tour
were disquieting things; the atmosphere of the Clemens home during those
early Hartford days gave only a faint promise of its future loveliness.

As in a far later period, Mark Twain had resorted to lecturing to pay
off debt. He still owed a portion of his share in the Express; also
he had been obliged to obtain an advance from the lecture bureau. He
dreaded, as always, the tedium of travel, the clatter of hotel life,
the monotony of entertainment, while, more than most men, he loved the
tender luxury of home. It was only that he could not afford to lose the
profit offered on the platform.

His season opened at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, October 16th, and his
schedule carried him hither and thither, to and fro, over distances that
lie between Boston and Chicago. There were opportunities to run into
Hartford now and then, when he was not too far away, and in November he
lectured there on Artemus Ward.

He changed his entertainment at least twice that season. He began with
the “Reminiscences,” the lecture which he said would treat of all those
whom he had met, “idiots, lunatics, and kings,” but he did not like it,
or it did not go well. He wrote Redpath of the Artemus Ward address:

“It suits me, and I’ll never deliver the nasty, nauseous ‘Reminiscences’
any more.”

But the Ward lecture was good for little more than a month, for on
December 8th he wrote again:

    Notify all hands that from this time I shall talk nothing but
    selections from my forthcoming book, ‘Roughing It’. Tried it twice
    last night; suits me tiptop.

And somewhat later:

    Had a splendid time with a splendid audience in Indianapolis last
    night; a perfectly jammed house, just as I have all the time out
    here.... I don’t care now to have any appointments canceled. I’ll
    even “fetch” those Dutch Pennsylvanians with this lecture.

    Have paid up $4,000 indebtedness. You are the last on my list.
    Shall begin to pay you in a few days, and then I shall be a free man
    again.

Undoubtedly he reveled in the triumphs of a platform tour, though at no
time did he regard it as a pleasure excursion. During those early weeks
the proofs of his new book, chasing him from place to place, did not add
to his comfort. Still, with large, substantial rewards in hand and in
prospect, one could endure much.

In the neighborhood of Boston there were other compensations. He could
spend a good part of his days at the Lyceum headquarters, in School
Street, where there was always congenial fellowship--Nasby, Josh
Billings, and the rest of the peripatetic group that about the end of
the year collected there. Their lectures were never tried immediately
in Boston, but in the outlying towns; tried and perfected--or discarded.
When the provincial audiences were finally satisfied, then the final.
test in the Boston Music Hall was made, and if this proved successful
the rest of the season was safe. Redpath’s lecturers put up at Young’s
Hotel, and spent their days at the bureau, smoking and spinning yarns,
or talking shop. Early in the evening they scattered to the outlying
towns, Lowell, Lexington, Concord, New Bedford. There is no such a
condition to-day: lecturers are few, lecture bureaus obscure; there are
no great reputations made on the platform.

Neither is there any such distinct group of humorists as the one just
mentioned. Humor has become universal since then. Few writers of this
age would confess to taking their work so seriously as to be at all
times unsmiling in it; only about as many, in fact, as in that day would
confess to taking their work so lightly that they could regard life’s
sterner phases and philosophies with a smile.

Josh Billings was one of the gentlest and loveliest of our pioneers of
laughter. The present generation is not overfamiliar even with his name,
but both the name and sayings of that quaint soul were on everybody’s
lips at the time of which we are writing. His true name was Henry W.
Shaw, and he was a genuine, smiling philosopher, who might have built
up a more permanent and serious reputation had he not been induced to
disfigure his maxims with ridiculous spelling in order to popularize
them and make them bring a living price. It did not matter much with
Nasby’s work. An assumed illiteracy belonged with the side of life which
he presented; but it is pathetic now to consider some of the really
masterly sayings of Josh Billings presented in that uncouth form which
was regarded as a part of humor a generation ago. Even the aphorisms
that were essentially humorous lose value in that degraded spelling.

“When a man starts down hill everything is greased for the occasion,”
 could hardly be improved upon by distorted orthography, and here are a
few more gems which have survived that deadly blight.

“Some folks mistake vivacity for wit; whereas the difference between
vivacity and wit is the same as the difference between the lightning-bug
and the lightning.”

“Don’t take the bull by the horns-take him by the tail; then you can let
go when you want to.”

“The difficulty is not that we know so much, but that we know so much
that isn’t so.”

Josh Billings, Nasby, and Mark Twain were close friends. They had
themselves photographed in a group, and there was always some pleasantry
going on among them. Josh Billings once wrote on “Lekturing,” and
under the head of “Rule Seven,” which treated of unwisdom of inviting a
lecturer to a private house, he said:

    Think of asking Mark Twain home with yu, for instance. Yure good
    wife has put her house in apple-pie order for the ockashun;
    everything is just in the right place. Yu don’t smoke in yure
    house, never. Yu don’t put yure feet on the center-table, yu don’t
    skatter the nuzepapers all over the room, in utter confushion: order
    and ekonemy governs yure premises. But if yu expeckt Mark Twain to
    be happy, or even kumfortable yu hav got to buy a box of cigars
    worth at least seventeen dollars and yu hav got to move all the
    tender things out ov yure parlor. Yu hav got to skatter all the
    latest papers around the room careless, you hav got to hav a pitcher
    ov icewater handy, for Mark is a dry humorist. Yu hav got to ketch
    and tie all yure yung ones, hed and foot, for Mark luvs babys only
    in theory; yu hav got to send yure favorite kat over to the nabors
    and hide yure poodle. These are things that hav to be done, or Mark
    will pak hiz valise with hiz extry shirt collar and hiz lektur on
    the Sandwich Islands, and travel around yure streets, smoking and
    reading the sighns over the store doorways untill lektur time
    begins.

As we-are not likely to touch upon Mark Twain’s lecturing, save only
lightly, hereafter, it may be as well to say something of his method at
this period. At all places visited by lecturers there was a committee,
and it was the place of the chairman to introduce the lecturer, a
privilege which he valued, because it gave him a momentary association
with distinction and fame. Clemens was a great disappointment to these
officials. He had learned long ago that he could introduce himself more
effectively than any one else. His usual formula was to present himself
as the chairman of the committee, introducing the lecturer of the
evening; then, with what was in effect a complete change of personality,
to begin his lecture. It was always startling and amusing, always a
success; but the papers finally printed this formula, which took the
freshness out of it, so that he had to invent others. Sometimes he got
up with the frank statement that he was introducing himself because he
had never met any one who could pay a proper tribute to his talents;
but the newspapers printed that too, and he often rose and began with no
introduction at all.

Whatever his method of beginning, Mark Twain’s procedure probably was
the purest exemplification of the platform entertainer’s art which
this country has ever seen. It was the art that makes you forget the
artisanship, the art that made each hearer forget that he was not being
personally entertained by a new and marvelous friend, who had traveled
a long way for his particular benefit. One listener has written that
he sat “simmering with laughter” through what he supposed was the
continuation of the introduction, waiting for the traditional lecture to
begin, when presently the lecturer, with a bow, disappeared, and it was
over. The listener looked at his watch; he had been there more than an
hour. He thought it could be no more than ten minutes, at most. Many
have tried to set down something of the effect his art produced on them,
but one may not clearly convey the story of a vanished presence and a
silent voice.

There were other pleasant associations in Boston. Howells was there, and
Aldrich; also Bret Harte, who had finished his triumphal progress across
the continent to join the Atlantic group. Clemens appears not to have
met Aldrich before, though their acquaintance had begun a year earlier,
when Aldrich, as editor of Every Saturday, had commented on a poem
entitled, “The Three Aces,” which had appeared in the Buffalo Express.
Aldrich had assumed the poem to be the work of Mark Twain, and had
characterized it as “a feeble imitation of Bret Harte’s ‘Heathen
Chinee.’” Clemens, in a letter, had mildly protested as to the charge of
authorship, and Aldrich had promptly printed the letter with apologetic
explanation. A playful exchange of personal letters followed, and the
beginning of a lifelong friendship.

One of the letters has a special interest here. Clemens had followed his
protest with an apology for it, asking that no further notice be taken
of the matter. Aldrich replied that it was too late to prevent “doing
him justice,” as his explanation was already on the press, but that if
Clemens insisted he would withdraw it in the next issue. Clemens then
wrote that he did not want it withdrawn, and explained that he hated to
be accused of plagiarizing Bret Harte, to whom he was deeply indebted
for literary schooling in the California days. Continuing he said:

    Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot
    through Harte’s brain? It was this. When they were trying to
    decide upon a vignette cover for the Overland a grizzly bear (of the
    arms of the State of California) was chosen. Nahl Bros. carved him
    and the page was printed with him in it.

    As a bear he was a success. He was a good bear, but then, it was
    objected, he was an objectless bear--a bear that meant nothing,
    signified nothing, simply stood there, snarling over his shoulder at
    nothing, and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured
    intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that none were
    satisfied; they hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as
    much to have him there when there was no point to him. But
    presently Harte took a pencil and drew two simple lines under his
    feet, and behold he was a magnificent success!--the ancient symbol
    of California savagery, snarling at the approaching type of high and
    progressive civilization, the first Overland locomotive! I just
    think that was nothing less than an inspiration.--[The “bear” was
    that which has always appeared on the Overland cover; the “two
    lines” formed a railway track under his feet. Clemens’s original
    letter contained crude sketches illustrating these things.]

Among the Boston group was another Californian, Ralph Keeler, an
eccentric, gifted, and altogether charming fellow, whom Clemens had
known on the Pacific slope. Keeler had been adopted by the Boston
writers, and was grateful and happy accordingly. He was poor of
purse, but inexhaustibly rich in the happier gifts of fortune. He was
unfailingly buoyant, light-hearted, and hopeful. On an infinitesimal
capital he had made a tour of many lands, and had written of it for the
Atlantic. In that charmed circle he was as overflowingly happy as if he
had been admitted to the company of the gods. Keeler was affectionately
regarded by all who knew him, and he offered a sort of worship in
return. He often accompanied Mark Twain on his lecture engagements to
the various outlying towns, and Clemens brought him back to his hotel
for breakfast, where they had good, enjoyable talks together. Once
Keeler came eagerly to the hotel and made his way up to Clemens’s room.

“Come with me,” he said. “Quick!”

“What is it? What’s happened?”

“Don’t wait to talk. Come with me.”

They tramped briskly through the streets till they reached the public
library, entered, Keeler leading the way, not stopping till he faced a
row of shelves filled with books. He pointed at one of them, his face
radiant with joy.

“Look,” he said. “Do you see it?”

Clemens looked carefully now and identified one of the books as a
still-born novel which Keeler had published.

“This is a library,” said Keeler, eagerly, “and they’ve got it!”

His whole being was aglow with the wonder of it. He had been
investigating; the library records showed that in the two years the
book had been there it had been taken out and read three times! It never
occurred to Clemens even to smile. Knowing Mark Twain, one would guess
that his eyes were likely to be filled with tears.

In his book about Mark Twain, Howells tells of a luncheon which Keeler
gave to his more famous associates--Aldrich, Fields, Harte, Clemens, and
Howells himself--a merry informal occasion. Says Howells:

    Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and
    aimless and joyful talk--play, beginning and ending nowhere, of
    eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-
    lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional
    concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it
    gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of
    good-fellowship, Bret Harte’s leering dramatization of Clemens’s
    mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. “Why,
    fellows,” he spluttered, “this is the dream of Mark’s life,” and I
    remember the glance from under Clemens’s feathery eyebrows which
    betrayed his enjoyment of the fun.

Very likely Keeler gave that luncheon in celebration of his book’s
triumph; it would be like him.

Keeler’s end was a mystery. The New York Tribune commissioned him to go
to Cuba to report the facts of some Spanish outrages. He sailed from New
York in the steamer, and was last seen alive the night before the vessel
reached Havana. He had made no secret of his mission, but had discussed
it in his frank, innocent way. There were some Spanish military men on
the ship.

Clemens, commenting on the matter, once said:

“It may be that he was not flung into the sea, still the belief was
general that that was what had happened.”

In his book Howells refers to the doubt with which Mark Twain was then
received by the polite culture of Boston; which, on the other
hand, accepted Bret Harte as one of its own, forgiving even social
shortcomings.

The reason is not difficult to understand. Harte had made his appeal
with legitimate fiction of the kind which, however fresh in flavor and
environment, was of a sort to be measured and classified. Harte spoke a
language they could understand; his humor, his pathos, his point of view
were all recognizable. It was an art already standardized by a master.
It is no reflection on the genius of Bret Harte to liken his splendid
achievements to those of Charles Dickens. Much of Harte’s work is in no
way inferior to that of his great English prototype. Dickens never wrote
a better short story than “The Outcasts of Poker Flats.” He never wrote
as good a short story as “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Boston critics
promptly realized these things and gave Harte his correct rating. That
they failed to do this with Mark Twain, lay chiefly in the fact that he
spoke to them in new and startling tongues. His gospels were likely to
be heresies; his literary eccentricities were all unclassified. Of the
ultrafastidious set Howells tells us that Charles Eliot Norton and Prof.
Francis J. Child were about the only ones who accorded him unqualified
approval. The others smiled and enjoyed him, but with that condescension
which the courtier is likely to accord to motley and the cap and bells.
Only the great, simple-hearted, unbiased multitude, the public, which
had no standards but the direct appeal from one human heart to another,
could recognize immediately his mightier heritage, could exalt and place
him on the throne.



LXXXIV. “ROUGHING IT”.

Telegram to Redpath:

    How in the name of God does a man find his way from here to Amherst,
    and when must he start? Give me full particulars, and send a man
    with me. If I had another engagement I would rot before I would
    fill it.                S. L. CLEMENS.

This was at the end of February, and he believed that he was standing on
the platform for the last time. He loathed the drudgery of the work, and
he considered there was no further need. He was no longer in debt, and
his income he accounted ample. His new book, ‘Roughing It’,--[It was
Bliss who had given the new book the title of Roughing It. Innocents at
Home had been its provision title, certainly a misleading one, though it
has been retained in England for the second volume; for what reason it
would be difficult to explain.]--had had a large advance sale, and its
earnings promised to rival those of the ‘Innocents’. He resolved in the
future to confine himself to the trade and profits of authorship.

The new book had advantages in its favor. Issued early in the year,
it was offered at the best canvassing season; particularly so, as
the author’s lectures had prepared the public for its reception.
Furthermore, it dealt with the most picturesque phases of American life,
scenes and episodes vastly interesting at that time, and peculiarly
adapted to Mark Twain’s literary expression. In a different way
‘Roughing It’ is quite as remarkable as ‘The Innocents Abroad.’ If it
has less charm, it has greater interest, and it is by no means without
charm. There is something delicious, for instance, in this bit of pure
enjoyment of the first day’s overland travel:

    It was now just dawn, and as we stretched our cramped legs full
    length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across
    the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where
    there was an expectant look in the Eastern horizon, our perfect
    enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The
    stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the
    curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle
    swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses’ hoofs,
    the cracking of the driver’s whip, and his “Hi-yi! g’lang!” were
    music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give
    us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us
    with interest and envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the
    pipe of peace, and compared all this luxury with the years of
    tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was
    only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had
    found it.

Also, there is that lofty presentation of South Pass, and a picture of
the alkali desert, so parching, so withering in its choking realism,
that it makes the throat ache and the tongue dry to read it. Just a bit
of the desert in passing:

    The sun beats down with a dead, blistering, relentless malignity;
    the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but
    scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed
    before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air
    stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the
    brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any
    direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its
    monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound, not a sigh,
    not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of
    bird; not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that
    dead air.

As for the humor of the book, it has been chiefly famous for that.
“Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral” has become a classic, and the purchase of
the “Mexican Plug.” But it is to no purpose to review the book here in
detail. We have already reviewed the life and environment out of which
it grew.

Without doubt the story would have contained more of the poetic and
contemplative, in which he was always at his best, if the subject
itself, as in the Innocents, had lent itself oftener to this form of
writing. It was the lack of that halo perhaps which caused the new book
never quite to rank with its great forerunner in public favor. There
could hardly be any other reason. It presented a fresher theme; it
abounded in humor; technically, it was better written; seemingly it
had all the elements of popularity and of permanence. It did, in fact,
possess these qualities, but its sales, except during the earlier months
of its canvass, never quite equaled those of The Innocents Abroad.

‘Roughing It’ was accepted by the public for just what it was and is,
a great picture of the Overland Pioneer days--a marvelous picture of
frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself, even with its
hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a vast primal joke;
when all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers in order
to survive the stress of its warfares.

A word here about this Western humor: It is a distinct product. It grew
out of a distinct condition--the battle with the frontier. The fight was
so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that
they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear. “Western
humor” was the result. It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world,
but there is tragedy behind it.

‘Roughing It’ presented the picture of those early conditions with the
startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it
was. It was not accurate history, even of the author’s own adventures.
It was true in its aspects, rather than in its details. The greater
artist disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase
or a condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished
time. This was what Mark Twain did in ‘Roughing It’. He told the story
of overland travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations,
in what is essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing
fiction, founded on fact.

The sales of ‘Roughing It’ during the first three months aggregated
nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate
accordingly. To Orion (who had already closed his career with Bliss, by
exercise of those hereditary eccentricities through which he so often
came to grief) he gave $1,000 out of the first royalty check, in
acknowledgment of the memorandum book and other data which Orion had
supplied. Clemens believed the new book would sell one hundred thousand
copies within the year; but the sale diminished presently, and at the
end of the first year it was considerably behind the Innocents for the
same period. As already stated, it required ten years for Roughing It
to reach the one-hundred-thousand mark, which the Innocents reached in
three.



LXXXV. A BIRTH, A DEATH, AND A VOYAGE

The year 1872 was an eventful one in Mark Twain’s life. At Elmira,
on March 19th, his second child, a little girl, whom they named Susan
Olivia, was born. On June 2d, in the new home in Hartford, to which they
had recently moved, his first child, a little boy, Langdon, died. He had
never been strong, his wavering life had often been uncertain, always
more of the spirit than the body, and in Elmira he contracted a heavy
cold, or perhaps it was diphtheria from the beginning. In later years,
whenever Clemens spoke of the little fellow, he never failed to accuse
himself of having been the cause of the child’s death. It was Mrs.
Clemens’s custom to drive out each morning with Langdon, and once when
she was unable to go Clemens himself went instead.

“I should not have been permitted to do it,” he said, remembering. “I
was not qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should
have gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would
lose myself dreaming. After a while the coachman looked around and
noticed that the carriage-robes had dropped away from the little fellow,
and that he was exposed to the chilly air. He called my attention to it,
but it was too late. Tonsilitis or something of the sort set in, and
he did not get any better, so we took him to Hartford. There it was
pronounced diphtheria, and of course he died.”

So, with or without reason, he added the blame of another tragedy to the
heavy burden of remorse which he would go on piling up while he lived.

The blow was a terrible one to Mrs. Clemens; even the comfort of the
little new baby on her arm could not ease the ache in her breast. It
seemed to her that death was pursuing her. In one of her letters she
says:

“I feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves,” and she
expresses the wish that she may drop out of life herself before her
sister and her husband--a wish which the years would grant.

They did not return to Elmira, for it was thought that the air of the
shore would be better for the little girl; so they spent the summer at
Saybrook, Connecticut, at Fenwick Hall, leaving Orion and his wife in
charge of the house at Hartford.

Beyond a few sketches, Clemens did very little literary work that
summer, but he planned a trip to Europe, and he invented what is still
known and sold as the “Mark Twain Scrap-Book.”

He wrote to Orion of his proposed trip to England, and dilated upon his
scrap-book with considerable enthusiasm. The idea had grown out of
the inconvenience of finding a paste-jar, and the general mussiness of
scrap-book keeping. His new plan was a self-pasting scrap-book with
the gum laid on in narrow strips, requiring only to be dampened with a
sponge or other moist substance to be ready for the clipping. He states
that he intends to put the invention into the hands of Slote, Woodman
& Co., of whom Dan Slote, his old Quaker City room-mate, was the senior
partner, and have it manufactured for the trade.

About this time began Mark Twain’s long and active interest in
copyright. Previously he had not much considered the subject; he
had taken it for granted there was no step that he could take, while
international piracy was a recognized institution. On both sides of
the water books were appropriated, often without profit, sometimes even
without credit, to the author. To tell the truth, Clemens had at first
regarded it rather in the nature of a compliment that his books should
be thought worth pirating in England, but as time passed he realized
that he was paying heavily for this recognition. Furthermore, he decided
that he was forfeiting a right; rather that he was being deprived of it:
something which it was in his nature to resent.

When ‘Roughing It’ had been ready for issue he agreed with Bliss that
they should try the experiment of copyrighting it in England, and
see how far the law would protect them against the voracious little
publisher, who thus far had not only snapped up everything bearing Mark
Twain’s signature, but had included in a volume of Mark Twain sketches
certain examples of very weak humor with which Mark Twain had been
previously unfamiliar.

Whatever the English pirate’s opinion of the copyright protection of
‘Roughing It’ may have been, he did not attempt to violate it. This
was gratifying. Clemens came to regard England as a friendly power. He
decided to visit it and spy out the land. He would make the acquaintance
of its people and institutions and write a book, which would do these
things justice.

He gave out no word of his real purpose. He merely said that he was
going over to see his English publishers, and perhaps to arrange for a
few lectures. He provided himself with some stylographic note-books,
by which he could produce two copies of his daily memoranda--one for
himself and one to mail to Mrs. Clemens--and sailed on the Scotia August
21, 1872.

Arriving in Liverpool he took train for London, and presently the
wonderful charm of that old, finished country broke upon him. His “first
hour in England was an hour of delight,” he records; “of rapture and
ecstasy. These are the best words I can find, but they are not adequate;
they are not strong enough to convey the feeling which this first
vision of rural England brought me.” Then he noticed that the gentleman
opposite in his compartment paid no attention to the scenery, but was
absorbed in a green-covered volume. He was so absorbed in it that,
by and by, Clemens’s curiosity was aroused. He shifted his position
a little and his eye caught the title. It was the first volume of the
English edition of The Innocents Abroad. This was gratifying for a
moment; then he remembered that the man had never laughed, never even
smiled during the hour of his steady reading. Clemens recalled what he
had heard of the English lack of humor. He wondered if this was a fair
example of it, and if the man could be really taking seriously every
word he was reading. Clemens could not look at the scenery any more for
watching his fellow-passenger, waiting with a fascinated interest for
the paragraph that would break up that iron-clad solemnity. It did not
come. During all the rest of the trip to London the atmosphere of the
compartment remained heavy with gloom.

He drove to the Langham Hotel, always popular with Americans,
established himself, and went to look up his publishers. He found the
Routledges about to sit down to luncheon in a private room, up-stairs,
in their publishing house. He joined them, and not a soul stirred from
that table again until evening. The Routledges had never heard Mark
Twain talk before, never heard any one talk who in the least resembled
him. Various refreshments were served during the afternoon, came
and went, while this marvelous creature talked on and they listened,
reveling, and wondering if America had any more of that sort at home.
By and by dinner was served; then after a long time, when there was no
further excuse for keeping him there, they took him to the Savage Club,
where there were yet other refreshments and a gathering of the clans
to welcome this new arrival as a being from some remote and unfamiliar
star.

Tom Hood, the younger, was there, and Harry Lee, and Stanley the
explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry
Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those
names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are
only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.’--[Clemens
had first known Stanley as a newspaper man. “I first met him when he
reported a lecture of mine in St. Louis,” he said once in a conversation
where the name of Stanley was mentioned.]



LXXXVI. ENGLAND

From that night Mark Twain’s stay in England could not properly be
called a gloomy one.

Routledge, Hood, Lee, and, in fact, all literary London, set themselves
the task of giving him a good time. Whatever place of interest they
could think of he was taken there; whatever there was to see he saw it.
Dinners, receptions, and assemblies were not complete without him. The
White Friars’ Club and others gave banquets in his honor. He was the
sensation of the day. When he rose to speak on these occasions he was
greeted with wild cheers. Whatever he said they eagerly applauded--too
eagerly sometimes, in the fear that they might be regarded as insensible
to American humor. Other speakers delighted in chaffing him in order to
provoke his retorts. When a speaker humorously referred to his American
habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he followed this
custom because a cotton umbrella was the only kind of an umbrella
that an Englishman wouldn’t steal, was all over England next day, and
regarded as one of the finest examples of wit since the days of Swift.

The suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great ones of
London rather overwhelmed and frightened him made him timid. Joaquin
Miller writes:

    He was shy as a girl, although time was already coyly flirting white
    flowers at his temples, and could hardly be coaxed to meet the
    learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand.

Many came to call on him at his hotel, among them Charles Reade and
Canon Kingsley. Kingsley came twice without finding him; then wrote,
asking for an appointment. Reade invited his assistance on a novel.
Indeed, it was in England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he
had come into his rightful heritage. Whatever may have been the doubts
concerning him in America, there was no question in England. Howells
says:

    In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord mayors,
    lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he
    was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the
    favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.

After that first visit of Mark Twain’s, when Americans in England,
referring to their great statesmen, authors, and the like, naturally
mentioned the names of Seward, Webster, Lowell, or Holmes, the English
comment was likely to be: “Never mind those. We can turn out academic
Sewards by the dozen, and cultured humorists like Lowell and Holmes by
the score. Tell us of Lincoln, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain. We cannot
match these; they interest us.” And it was true. History could not match
them, for they were unique.

Clemens would have been more than human if in time he had not realized
the fuller meaning of this triumph, and exulted in it a little to the
folks at home. There never lived a more modest, less pretentious, less
aggressive man than Mark Twain, but there never lived a man who took a
more childlike delight in genuine appreciation; and, being childlike,
it was only human that he should wish those nearest to him to share his
happiness. After one memorable affair he wrote:

    I have been received in a sort of tremendous way to-night by the
    brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of
    London; mine being (between you and me) a name which was received
    with a thundering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long
    list of guests was called.

I might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support and
assistance of my excellent friend, Sir John Bennett.

This letter does not tell all of the incident or the real reason why he
might have perished on the spot. During the long roll-call of guests
he had lost interest a little, and was conversing in whispers with his
“excellent friend,” Sir John Bennett, stopping to applaud now and then
when the applause of the others indicated that some distinguished name
had been pronounced. All at once the applause broke out with great
vehemence. This must be some very distinguished person indeed. He joined
in it with great enthusiasm. When it was over he whispered to Sir John:

“Whose name was that we were just applauding?”

“Mark Twain’s.”

Whereupon the support was needed.

Poor little pirate Hotten did not have a happy time during this visit.
He had reveled in the prospect at first, for he anticipated a large
increase to be derived from his purloined property; but suddenly, one
morning, he was aghast to find in the Spectator a signed letter from
Mark Twain, in which he was repudiated, referred to as “John Camden
Hottentot,” an unsavory person generally. Hotten also sent a letter to
the Spectator, in which he attempted to justify himself, but it was
a feeble performance. Clemens prepared two other communications, each
worse than the other and both more destructive than the first one. But
these were only to relieve his mind. He did not print them. In one of
them he pursued the fancy of John Camden Hottentot, whom he offers as a
specimen to the Zoological Gardens.

It is not a bird. It is not a man. It is not a fish. It does not seem to
be in all respects a reptile. It has the body and features of a man, but
scarcely any of the instincts that belong to such a structure.... I am
sure that this singular little creature is the missing link between the
man and the hyena.

Hotten had preyed upon explorer Stanley and libeled him in a so-called.
biography to a degree that had really aroused some feeling against
Stanley in England. Only for the moment--the Queen invited Stanley
to luncheon, and newspaper criticism ceased. Hotten was in general
disrepute, therefore, so it was not worth while throwing a second brick
at him.

In fact, now that Clemens had expended his venom, on paper, Hotten
seemed to him rather an amusing figure than otherwise. An incident grew
out of it all, however, that was not amusing. E. P. Hingston, whom the
reader may remember as having been with Artemus Ward in Virginia City,
and one of that happy group that wined and dined the year away, had
been engaged by Hotten to write the introductory to his edition of
The Innocents Abroad. It was a well-written, highly complimentary
appreciation. Hingston did not dream that he was committing an offense,
nor did Clemens himself regard it as such in the beginning.

But Mark Twain’s views had undergone a radical change, and with
characteristic dismissal of previous conditions he had forgotten that
he had ever had any other views than those he now held. Hingston was
in London, and one evening, at a gathering, approached Clemens with
outstretched hand. But Clemens failed to see Hingston’s hand or to
recognize him. In after-years his conscience hurt him terribly for this.
He remembered it only with remorse and shame. Once, in his old age, he
spoke of it with deep sorrow.



LXXXVII. THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN

The book on England, which he had prepared for so carefully, was
never written. Hundreds of the stylographic pages were filled, and the
duplicates sent home for the entertainment of Olivia Clemens, but the
notes were not completed, and the actual writing was never begun. There
was too much sociability in London for one thing, and then he found that
he could not write entertainingly of England without introducing too
many personalities, and running the risk of offending those who had
taken him into their hearts and homes. In a word, he would have to write
too seriously or not at all.

He began his memoranda industriously enough, and the volume might have
been as charming and as valuable as any he has left behind. The reader
will hardly fail to find a few of the entries interesting. They are
offered here as examples of his daily observation during those early
weeks of his stay, and to show somewhat of his purpose:

                    AN EXPATRIATE

    There was once an American thief who fled his country and took
    refuge in England. He dressed himself after the fashion of the
    Londoners, and taught his tongue the peculiarities of the London
    pronunciation and did his best in all ways to pass himself for a
    native. But he did two fatal things: he stopped at the Langham
    Hotel, and the first trip he took was to visit Stratford-on-Avon and
    the grave of Shakespeare. These things betrayed his nationality.

                  STANLEY AND THE QUEEN

    See the power a monarch wields! When I arrived here, two weeks ago,
    the papers and geographers were in a fair way to eat poor Stanley up
    without salt or sauce. The Queen says, “Come four hundred miles up
    into Scotland and sit at my luncheon-table fifteen minutes”; which,
    being translated, means, “Gentlemen, I believe in this man and take
    him under my protection”; and not another yelp is heard.

                  AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM

    What a place it is!

    Mention some very rare curiosity of a peculiar nature--a something
    which you have read about somewhere but never seen--they show you a
    dozen! They show you all the possible varieties of that thing!
    They show you curiously wrought jeweled necklaces of beaten gold,
    worn by the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Greeks,
    Britons--every people of the forgotten ages, indeed. They show you
    the ornaments of all the tribes and peoples that live or ever did
    live. Then they show you a cast taken from Cromwell’s face in
    death; then the venerable vase that once contained the ashes of
    Xerxes.

    I am wonderfully thankful for the British Museum. Nobody comes
    bothering around me--nobody elbows me--all the room and all the
    light I want, under this huge dome--no disturbing noises--and people
    standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever
    was printed under the sun--and if I choose to go wandering about the
    long corridors and galleries of the great building the secrets of
    all the earth and all the ages axe laid open to me. I am not
    capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum--it seems
    as if I do not know any but little words and weak ones.

                WESTMINSTER ABBEY BY NIGHT

    It was past eleven o’clock and I was just going to bed. But this
    friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was
    not a doubt in my mind that his “expedition” had merit in it. I put
    on my coat and boots again, and we drove away.

    “Where is it? Where are we going?”

    “Don’t worry. You’ll see.”

    He was not inclined to talk. So I thought this must be a weighty
    matter. My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully
    under the surface. I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers as
    we thundered down the long street. I am always lost in London, day
    or night. It was very chilly, almost bleak. People leaned against
    the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter. The crowds grew
    thinner and thinner, and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away.
    The sky was overcast and threatening. We drove on, and still on,
    till I wondered if we were ever going to stop. At last we passed by
    a spacious bridge and a vast building, and presently entered a
    gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court
    surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice. Then we
    alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited. In a little while
    footsteps were heard, a man emerged from the darkness, and we
    dropped into his wake without saying anything. He led us under an
    archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a
    tall iron gate, which he locked behind us. We followed him down
    this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than
    by anything we could very distinctly see. At the end of it we came
    to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a
    bull’s-eye lantern. Then he unlocked the gate; and I wished he had
    oiled it first, it grated so dismally. The gate swung open and we
    stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared
    cavern, carved out of the solid darkness. The conductor and my
    friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise. For the
    moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the stillness
    seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom. I looked my inquiry!

    “It is the tomb of the great dead of England-Westminster Abbey.”...

    We were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting,
    standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness
    --reached out their hands toward us--some appealing, some beckoning,
    some warning us away. Effigies they were--statues over the graves;
    but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows. Now a
    little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the
    bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by
    the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that
    sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of
    yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn
    of history, more than twelve hundred years ago....

    Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon
    that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was nothing
    about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of
    interest. He is a man in authority, being superintendent, and his
    daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the
    great pile. Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would
    say:

    “Observe the height of the Abbey--one hundred and three feet to the
    base of the roof; I measured it myself the other day. Notice the
    base of this column--old, very old--hundreds and hundreds of years
    --and how well they knew how to build in those old days! Notice it
    --every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature
    laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day
    some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and
    flake. Architects cannot teach nature anything. Let me remove this
    matting--it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit
    of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these
    scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before
    time and sacrilegious idlers marred it. Now there, in the border,
    was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by
    the ornaments that have been pulled out--here is an A and there is
    an O, and yonder another A--all beautiful Old English capitals;
    there is no telling what the inscription was--no record left now.
    Now move along in this direction, if you please. Yonder is where
    old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the
    Abbey; Sebert died in 616,--[Clemens probably misunderstood the
    name. It was Ethelbert who died in 616. The name Sebert does not
    appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]--and that’s
    as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it! Twelve
    hundred and fifty years! Now yonder is the last one--Charles
    Dickens--there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab--and
    to this day the people come and put flowers on it.... There is
    Garrick’s monument; and Addison’s, and Thackeray’s bust--and
    Macaulay lies there. And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan
    and Dr. Johnson--and here is old Parr....

    “That stone there covers Campbell the poet. Here are names you know
    pretty well--Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who
    wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson--there are three
    tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got ‘O, Rare Ben
    Jonson’ cut on them. You were standing on one of them just now he
    is buried standing up. There used to be a tradition here that
    explains it. The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried
    in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present
    of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said ‘yes,’ and
    asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey.
    Well, the King wouldn’t go back on his word, and so there he is,
    sure enough-stood up on end.”

The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that
the book itself was never written. Just when he gave up the project is
not recorded. He was urged to lecture in London, but declined. To Mrs.
Clemens, in September, he wrote:

Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the least idea
of doing it; certainly not at present. Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to
America, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though I have sent him
word once before that I can’t be hired to talk here; because I have no
time to spare. There is too much sociability; I do not get along fast
enough with work.

In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that Mrs.
Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless she would prefer
to have him come home for the winter and all of them return to London
in the spring. So it is likely that the book was not then abandoned. He
felt that his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only
just begun, but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him.
To his mother and sister, in November, he wrote:

I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven’t done much but attend
dinners and make speeches. I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate
to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel
entirely at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make
after-dinner speeches here. I have made hundreds of friends; and last
night, in the crush at the opening of the new Guild Hall Library and
Museum, I was surprised to meet a familiar face every other step.

All his impressions of England had been happy ones. He could deliver
a gentle satire now and then at certain British institutions--certain
London localities and features--as in his speech at the Savage
Club,--[September 28, 1872. This is probably the most characteristic
speech made by Mark Twain during his first London visit; the reader will
find it in full in Appendix L, at the end of last volume.]--but taking
the snug island as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair,
rural aspects, he had found in it only delight. To Mrs. Crane he wrote:

    If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me,
    and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful
    that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land. There is nothing
    like it elsewhere on the globe. You should have a season ticket and
    travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship
    nature.

    And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now
    as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the
    British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the
    customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every
    official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the
    speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their
    lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder. I
    would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you
    over.

He sailed November 12th, on the Batavia, loaded with Christmas presents
for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical steam-engine for
his namesake, Sam Moffett. Half-way across the Atlantic the Batavia ran
into a hurricane and was badly damaged by heavy seas, and driven far out
of her course. It was a lucky event on the whole, for she fell in with a
water-logged lumber bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors
clinging to her rigging. In the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was
launched and the perishing men were rescued. Clemens prepared a graphic
report of the matter for the Royal Humane Society, asking that medals
be conferred upon the brave rescuers, a document that was signed by his
fellow-passengers and obtained for the men complete recognition and wide
celebrity. Closing, the writer said:

    As might have been anticipated, if I have been of any service toward
    rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing around the
    deck in a furious storm, without an umbrella, keeping an eye on
    things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling whenever a
    cheer seemed to be the important thing, I am glad and I am
    satisfied. I ask no reward. I would do it again under the same
    circumstances. But what I do plead for, earnestly and sincerely, is
    that the Royal Humane Society will remember our captain and our
    life-boat crew, and in so remembering them increase the high honor
    and esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized
    world.

The Batavia reached New York November 26, 1872. Mark Twain had been
absent three months, during which he had been brought to at least a
partial realization of what his work meant to him and to mankind.

An election had taken place during his absence--an election which
gratified him deeply, for it had resulted in the second presidency
of General Grant and in the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom he admired
perhaps, but not as presidential material. To Thomas Nast, who had aided
very effectually in Mr. Greeley’s overwhelming defeat, Clemens wrote:

Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for
Grant--I mean, rather, for civilization and progress. Those pictures
were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold
his head up and be honestly proud of his share in this year’s vast
events that man is unquestionably yourself. We all do sincerely honor
you, and are proud of you.

Horace Greeley’s peculiar abilities and eccentricities won celebrity for
him, rather than voters. Mark Twain once said of him:

“He was a great man, an honest man, and served his, country well and
was an honor to it. Also, he was a good-natured man, but abrupt with
strangers if they annoyed him when he was busy. He was profane, but that
is nothing; the best of us is that. I did not know him well, but only
just casually, and by accident. I never met him but once. I called on
him in the Tribune office, but I was not intending to. I was looking
for Whitelaw Reid, and got into the wrong den. He was alone at his desk,
writing, and we conversed--not long, but just a little. I asked him if
he was well, and he said, ‘What the hell do you want?’ Well, I couldn’t
remember what I wanted, so I said I would call again. But I didn’t.”

Clemens did not always tell the incident just in this way. Sometimes it
was John Hay he was looking for instead of Reid, and the conversation
with Greeley varied; but perhaps there was a germ of history under it
somewhere, and at any rate it could have happened well enough, and not
have been out of character with either of the men.



LXXXVIII. “THE GILDED AGE”

Mark Twain did not go on the lecture circuit that winter. Redpath had
besought him as usual, and even in midsummer had written:

“Will you? Won’t you? We have seven thousand to eight thousand dollars
in engagements recorded for you,” and he named a list of towns ranging
geographically from Boston to St. Paul.

But Clemens had no intention then of ever lecturing any more, and again
in November, from London, he announced (to Redpath):

“When I yell again for less than $500 I’ll be pretty hungry, but I
haven’t any intention of yelling at any price.”

Redpath pursued him, and in January proposed $400 for a single night in
Philadelphia, but without result. He did lecture two nights in Steinway
Hall for the Mercantile Library Association, on the basis of half
profits, netting $1,300 for the two nights as his share; and he lectured
one night in Hartford, at a profit Of $1,500, for charity. Father
Hawley, of Hartford, had announced that his missionary work was
suffering for lack of funds. Some of his people were actually without
food, he said, their children crying with hunger. No one ever responded
to an appeal like that quicker than Samuel Clemens. He offered to
deliver a lecture free, and to bear an equal proportion of whatever
expenses were incurred by the committee of eight who agreed to join in
forwarding the project. He gave the Sandwich Island lecture, and at the
close of it a large card was handed him with the figures of the receipts
printed upon it. It was held up to view, and the house broke into a
storm of cheers.

He did very little writing during the early weeks following his return.
Early in the year (January 3 and 6, 1873) he contributed two Sandwich
Island letters to the Tribune, in which, in his own peculiar fashion, he
urged annexation.

“We must annex those people,” he declared, and proceeded to specify
the blessings we could give them, such as “leather-headed juries, the
insanity law, and the Tweed Ring.”

    We can confer Woodhull and Clafin on them, and George Francis Train.
    We can give them lecturers! I will go myself.

    We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner
    on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy
    civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need!

    “Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?”

His success in England became an incentive to certain American
institutions to recognize his gifts at home. Early in the year he was
dined as the guest of the Lotos Club of New York, and a week or two
later elected to its membership. This was but a beginning. Some new
membership or honor was offered every little while, and so many banquets
that he finally invented a set form for declining them. He was not yet
recognized as the foremost American man of letters, but undoubtedly he
had become the most popular; and Edwin Whipple, writing at this time, or
but little later, said:

“Mark Twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise of his
real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors in the past
fifty years.” So he was beginning to be “discovered” in high places.

It was during this winter that the Clemens household enjoyed its first
real home life in Hartford, its first real home life anywhere since
those earliest days of marriage. The Hooker mansion was a comfortable
place. The little family had comparatively good health. Their old
friends were stanch and lavishly warm-hearted, and they had added many
new ones. Their fireside was a delightful nucleus around which gathered
those they cared for most, the Twichells, the Warner families, the
Trumbulls--all certain of a welcome there. George Warner, only a little
while ago, remembering, said:

“The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there was
never any preoccupation in the evenings, and where visitors were always
welcome. Clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after dinner
were an unending flow of stories.”

Friends living near by usually came and went at will, often without the
ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking. They were more like one
great family in that neighborhood, with a community of interests, a
unity of ideals. The Warner families and the Clemenses were particularly
intimate, and out of their association grew Mark Twain’s next important
literary undertaking, his collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in
‘The Gilded Age’.

A number of more or less absurd stories have been printed about the
origin of this book. It was a very simple matter, a perfectly natural
development.

At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present, criticisms
of recent novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of
dinner-table talk. The husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly
the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment. The wives
naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to
furnish the American people with better ones. This was regarded in the
nature of a challenge, and as such was accepted--mutually accepted: that
is to say, in partnership. On the spur of the moment Clemens and Warner
agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it
immediately. This is the whole story of the book’s origin; so far, at
least, as the collaboration is concerned. Clemens, in fact, had the
beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an
extended work of fiction alone. He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore,
the proposition of joint authorship. His purpose was to write a tale
around that lovable character of his youth, his mother’s cousin, James
Lampton--to let that gentle visionary stand as the central figure
against a proper background. The idea appealed to Warner, and there was
no delay in the beginning. Clemens immediately set to work and completed
399 pages of the manuscript, the first eleven chapters of the book,
before the early flush of enthusiasm waned.

Warner came over then, and Clemens read it aloud to him. Warner had
some plans for the story, and took it up at this point, and continued
it through the next twelve chapters; and so they worked alternately, “in
the superstition,” as Mark Twain long afterward declared, “that we were
writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter of fact, we were
writing two incoherent ones.”--[The reader may be interested in the
division of labor. Clemens wrote chapters I to XI; also chapters XXIV,
XXV, XXVII, XXVIII, XXX, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XLII,
XLIII, XLV, LI, LII, LIII, LVII, LIX, LX, LXI, LXII, and portions of
chapters XXXV, XLIX, LVI. Warner wrote chapters XII to XXIII; also
chapters XXVI, XXIX, XXXI, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLIV, XLVI, XLVII,
XLVIII, L, LIV, LV, LVIII, LXIII, and portions of chapters XXXV, XLIX,
and LVI. The work was therefore very evenly divided.

There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was
finally completed. This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the
variegated, marvelous cryptographic chapter headings: Trumbull was the
most learned man that ever lived in Hartford. He was familiar with all
literary and scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear
in twenty-seven languages. It was thought to be a choice idea to
get Trumbull to supply a lingual medley of quotations to precede the
chapters in the new book, the purpose being to excite interest and
possibly to amuse the reader--a purpose which to some extent appears to
have miscarried.]

The book was begun in February and finished in April, so the work did
not lag. The result, if not highly artistic, made astonishingly good
reading. Warner had the touch of romance, Clemens, the gift of creating,
or at least of portraying, human realities. Most of his characters
reflected intimate personalities of his early life. Besides the
apotheosis of James Lampton into the immortal Sellers, Orion became
Washington Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain’s own
personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his
creations. As for the Tennessee land, so long a will-o’the-wisp and a
bugbear, it became tangible property at last. Only a year or two before
Clemens had written to Orion:

    Oh, here! I don’t want to be consulted at all about Tennessee. I
    don’t want it even mentioned to me. When I make a suggestion it is
    for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to
    ask my advice, opinion, or consent about that hated property.

But it came in good play now. It is the important theme of the story.

Mark Twain was well qualified to construct his share of the tale. He
knew his characters, their lives, and their atmospheres perfectly.
Senator Dilworthy (otherwise Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, then notorious
for attempted vote-buying) was familiar enough. That winter in
Washington had acquainted Clemens with the life there, its political
intrigues, and the disrepute of Congress. Warner was equally well
qualified for his share of the undertaking, and the chief criticism that
one may offer is the one stated by Clemens himself--that the divisions
of the tale remain divisions rather than unity.

As for the story itself--the romance and tragedy of it--the character of
Laura in the hands of either author is one not easy to forget. Whether
this means that the work is well done, or only strikingly done, the
reader himself must judge. Morally, the character is not justified.
Laura was a victim of circumstance from the beginning. There could be no
poetic justice in her doom. To drag her out of a steamer wreck, only to
make her the victim of a scoundrel, later an adventuress, and finally a
murderess, all may be good art, but of a very bad kind. Laura is a sort
of American Becky Sharp; but there is retributive justice in Becky’s
fate, whereas Laura’s doom is warranted only by the author’s whim. As
for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day might have done, a
present-day audience would not have pelted her from the stage, destroyed
her future, taken away her life.

The authors regarded their work highly when it was finished, but that
is nothing. Any author regards his work highly at the moment of its
completion. In later years neither of them thought very well of their
production; but that also is nothing. The author seldom cares very
deeply for his offspring once it is turned over to the public charge.
The fact that the story is still popular, still delights thousands of
readers, when a myriad of novels that have been written since it was
completed have lived their little day and died so utterly that even
their names have passed out of memory, is the best verdict as to its
worth.



LXXXIX. PLANNING A NEW HOME

Clemens and his wife bought a lot for the new home that winter, a fine,
sightly piece of land on Farmington Avenue--table-land, sloping down to
a pretty stream that wound through the willows and among the trees. They
were as delighted as children with their new purchase and the prospect
of building. To her sister Mrs. Clemens wrote:

    Mr. Clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession; he goes daily
    into the lot, has had several falls trying to lay off the land by
    sliding around on his feet....

    For three days the ice has covered the trees, and they have been
    glorious. We could do nothing but watch the beauty outside; if you
    looked at the trees as the sun struck them, with your back toward
    the sun, they were covered with jewels. If you looked toward the
    sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land. Then the
    nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving
    us the same prismatic effect.

This was the storm of which Mark Twain wrote his matchless description,
given first in his speech on New England weather, and later preserved in
‘Following the Equator’, in more extended form. In that book he likens
an ice-storm to his impressions derived from reading descriptions of
the Taj Mahal, that wonderful tomb of a fair East Indian queen. It is a
marvelous bit of word-painting--his description of that majestic vision:
“When every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops,
and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia’s
diamond plume.” It will pay any one to look up that description and read
it all, though it has been said, by the fortunate one or two who heard
him first give it utterance as an impromptu outburst, that in the
subsequent process of writing the bloom of its original magnificence was
lost.

The plans for the new house were drawn forthwith by that gentle
architect Edward Potter, whose art to-day may be considered open to
criticism, but not because of any lack of originality. Hartford houses
of that period were mainly of the goods-box form of architecture,
perfectly square, typifying the commercial pursuits of many of their
owners. Potter agreed to get away from this idea, and a radical and
even frenzied departure was the result. Certainly his plans presented
beautiful pictures, and all who saw them were filled with wonder and
delight. Architecture has lavished itself in many florescent forms since
then, but we may imagine that Potter’s “English violet” order of design,
as he himself designated it, startled, dazzled, and captivated in a day,
when most houses were mere habitations, built with a view to economy and
the largest possible amount of room.

Workmen were put on the ground without delay, to prepare for the
builders, and work was rapidly pushed along. Then in May the whole
matter was left in the hands of the architect and the carpenters (with
Lawyer Charles E. Perkins to stand between Potter and the violent
builder, who roared at Potter and frightened him when he wanted
changes), while the Clemens household, with Clara Spaulding, a girlhood
friend of Mrs. Clemens, sailed away to England for a half-year holiday.



XC. A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY

They sailed on the Batavia, and with them went a young man named
Thompson, a theological student whom Clemens had consented to take as an
amanuensis. There is a pathetic incident connected with this young man,
and it may as well be set down here. Clemens found, a few weeks after
his arrival in England, that so great was the tax upon his time that
he could make no use of Thompson’s services. He gave Thompson fifty
dollars, and upon the possibility of the young man’s desiring to return
to America, advanced him another fifty dollars, saying that he could
return it some day, and never thought of it again. But the young man
remembered it, and one day, thirty-six years later, after a life of
hardship and struggle, such as the life of a country minister is apt
to be, he wrote and inclosed a money-order, a payment on his debt. That
letter and its inclosure brought only sorrow to Mark Twain. He felt that
it laid upon him the accumulated burden of the weary thirty-six years’
struggle with ill-fortune. He returned the money, of course, and in a
biographical note commented:

    How pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it! Thompson’s
    heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and
    which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound
    obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days. I had
    forgotten Thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly
    as lightning. I can see him now. It was on the deck of the
    Batavia, in the dock. The ship was casting off, with that hubbub
    and confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and
    shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure
    preparations in those days--an impressive contrast with the solemn
    silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships of
    the present day. Mrs. Clemens, Clara Spaulding, little Susy, and
    the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion. We all
    had on our storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and
    designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance
    with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being distinctly
    and odiously out of the question.

    Very well. On that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable
    and properly upholstered groups, appeared Thompson, young, grave,
    long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper
    end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down, without
    break or wrinkle, to his ankles. He came straight to us, and shook
    hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew him. A
    nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder astonishment.

    However, Thompson didn’t know that anything was happening. He had
    no prejudices about clothes. I can still see him as he looked when
    we passed Sandy Hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us.
    Erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug
    on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind, level
    with his neck. There were scoffers observing, but he didn’t know
    it; he wasn’t disturbed.

    In my mind, I see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me
    down in shorthand. The Shah of Persia had come to England and Dr.
    Hosmer, of the Herald, had sent me to Ostend, to view his Majesty’s
    progress across the Channel and write an account of it. I can’t
    recall Thompson after that, and I wish his memory had been as poor
    as mine.

They had been a month in London, when the final incident referred to
took place--the arrival of the Shah of Persia--and were comfortably
quartered at the Langham Hotel. To Twichell Clemens wrote:

    We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor,
    our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a
    noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland
    Place and the crook that joins it onto Regent Street).

    Nine p.m. full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west.

    I am not going to write anything; rather tell it when I get back.
    I love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I’ve got
    anyway. And I mean to keep that fresh all the time.

Mrs. Clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared: “It is perfectly
discouraging to try to write you. There is so much to write about that
it makes me feel as if it was no use to begin.”

It was a period of continuous honor and entertainment. If Mark Twain had
been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than royalty now. His
rooms at the Langham were like a court. Miss Spaulding (now Mrs. John
B. Stanchfield) remembers that Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John
Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke (then at the height of his
fame) were among those that called to pay their respects. In a recent
letter she says:

    I remember a delightful luncheon that Charles Kingsley gave for Mr.
    Clemens; also an evening when Lord Dunraven brought Mr. Home, the
    medium, Lord Dunraven telling many of the remarkable things he had
    seen Mr. Home do. I remember I wanted so much to see him float out
    of a seven or eight story window, and enter another, which Lord
    Dunraven said he had seen him do many times. But Mr. Home had been
    very ill, and said his power had left him. My great regret was that
    we did not see Carlyle, who was too sad and ill for visits.

Among others they met Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland,
and found him so shy that it was almost impossible to get him to say a
word on any subject.

“The shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met,” Clemens
once wrote. “Dr. MacDonald and several other lively talkers were
present, and the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but
Carroll sat still all the while, except now and then when he answered a
question.”

At a dinner given by George Smalley they met Herbert Spencer, and at a
luncheon-party at Lord Houghton’s, Sir Arthur Helps, then a world-wide
celebrity.

    Lord Elcho, a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the
    table. He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming. It
    was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the
    Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling,
    and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it
    startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. In the
    middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests on
    her right and on her left, in a matter-of-fact way, “Excuse me, I
    have an engagement,” and without further ceremony, she went off to
    meet it. This would have been doubtful etiquette in America. Lord
    Houghton told a number of delightful stories. He told them in
    French, and I lost nothing of them but the nubs.

Little Susy and her father thrived on London life, but after a time
it wore on Mrs. Clemens. She delighted in the English cordiality and
culture, but the demands were heavy, the social forms sometimes trying.
Life in London was interesting, and in its way charming, but she did not
enter into it with quite her husband’s enthusiasm and heartiness. In
the end they canceled all London engagements and quietly set out for
Scotland. On the way they rested a few days in York, a venerable place
such as Mark Twain always loved to describe. In a letter to Mrs. Langdon
he wrote:

    For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with
    its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew
    no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper
    stories far overhanging the street, and thus marking their date,
    say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated
    gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque
    ruin of St. Mary’s Abbey, suggesting their date, say five hundred
    years ago, in the heart of Crusading times and the glory of English
    chivalry and romance; the vast Cathedral of York, with its worn
    carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of still remoter
    days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that
    stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish
    dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of
    King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with Saxon
    oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred
    years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins
    and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of
    stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by
    the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed
    and, caressed them every lagging day since the Roman Emperor’s
    soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son of Mary
    walked the streets of Nazareth a youth, with no more name or fame
    than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street this
    moment.

They reached Edinburgh at the end of July and secluded themselves in
Veitch’s family hotel in George Street, intending to see no one. But
this plan was not a success; the social stress of London had been
too much for Mrs. Clemens, and she collapsed immediately after their
arrival. Clemens was unacquainted in Edinburgh, but remembered that Dr.
John Brown, who had written Rab and His Friend, lived there. He learned
his address, and that he was still a practising physician. He walked
around to 23 Rutland Street, and made himself known. Dr. Brown came
forthwith, and Mrs. Clemens speedily recovered under his able and
inspiring treatment.

The association did not end there. For nearly a month Dr. Brown was
their daily companion, either at the hotel, or in his own home, or on
protracted drives when he made his round of visits, taking these new
friends along. Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Edinburgh, everybody
in Scotland, for that matter, and his story of Rab had won him a
following throughout Christendom. He was an unpretentious sovereign.
Clemens once wrote of him:

    His was a sweet and winning face, as beautiful a face as I have ever
    known. Reposeful, gentle, benignant; the face of a saint at peace
    with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine of love
    that filled his heart.

He was the friend of all dogs, and of all people. It has been told of
him that once, when driving, he thrust his head suddenly out of the
carriage window, then resumed his place with a disappointed look.

“Who was it?” asked his companion. “Some one you know?”

“No,” he said. “A dog I don’t know.”

He became the boon companion and playmate of little Susy, then not quite
a year and a half old. He called her Megalopis, a Greek term, suggested
by her eyes; those deep, burning eyes that seemed always so full of
life’s sadder philosophies, and impending tragedy. In a collection of
Dr. Brown’s letters he refers to this period. In one place he says:

    Had the author of The Innocents Abroad not come to Edinburgh at that
    time we in all human probability might never have met, and what a
    deprivation that would have been to me during the last quarter of a
    century!

And in another place:

    I am attending the wife of Mark Twain. His real name is Clemens.
    She is a quite lovely little woman, modest and clever, and she has a
    girlie eighteen months old, her ludicrous miniature--and such eyes!

Those playmates, the good doctor and Megalopis, romped together through
the hotel rooms with that complete abandon which few grown persons can
assume in their play with children, and not all children can assume in
their play with grown-ups. They played “bear,” and the “bear” (which was
a very little one, so little that when it stood up behind the sofa
you could just get a glimpse of yellow hair) would lie in wait for her
victim, and spring out and surprise him and throw him into frenzies of
fear.

Almost every day they made his professional rounds with him. He always
carried a basket of grapes for his patients. His guests brought along
books to read while they waited. When he stopped for a call he would
say:

“Entertain yourselves while I go in and reduce the population.”

There was much sight-seeing to do in Edinburgh, and they could not quite
escape social affairs. There were teas and luncheons and dinners with
the Dunfermlines and the Abercrombies, and the MacDonalds, and with
others of those brave clans that no longer slew one another among the
grim northern crags and glens, but were as sociable and entertaining
lords and ladies as ever the southland could produce. They were very
gentle folk indeed, and Mrs. Clemens, in future years, found her heart
going back oftener to Edinburgh than to any other haven of those first
wanderings. August 24th she wrote to her sister:

    We leave Edinburgh to-morrow with sincere regret; we have had such a
    delightful stay here--we do so regret leaving Dr. Brown and his
    sister, thinking that we shall probably never see them again [as
    indeed they never did].

They spent a day or two at Glasgow and sailed for Ireland, where they
put in a fortnight, and early in September were back in England again,
at Chester, that queer old city where; from a tower on the wall, Charles
I. read the story of his doom. Reginald Cholmondeley had invited them to
visit his country seat, beautiful Condover Hall, near Shrewsbury, and in
that lovely retreat they spent some happy, restful days. Then they were
in the whirl of London once more, but escaped for a fortnight to Paris,
sight-seeing and making purchases for the new home.

Mrs. Clemens was quite ready to return to America, by this time.

    I am blue and cross and homesick [she wrote]. I suppose what makes
    me feel the latter is because we are contemplating to stay in London
    another month. There has not one sheet of Mr. Clemens’s proof come
    yet, and if he goes home before the book is published here he will
    lose his copyright. And then his friends feel that it will be
    better for him to lecture in London before his book is published,
    not only that it will give him a larger but a more enviable
    reputation. I would not hesitate one moment if it were simply for
    the money that his copyright will bring him, but if his reputation
    will be better for his staying and lecturing, of course he ought to
    stay.... The truth is, I can’t bear the thought of postponing going
    home.

It is rather gratifying to find Olivia Clemens human, like that, now
and then. Otherwise, on general testimony, one might well be tempted to
regard her as altogether of another race and kind.



XCI. A LONDON LECTURE

Clemens concluded to hasten the homeward journey, but to lecture a few
nights in London before starting. He would then accompany his little
family home, and return at once to continue the lecture series and
protect his copyright. This plan was carried out. In a communication to
the Standard, October 7th, he said:

    SIR,--In view of the prevailing frenzy concerning the Sandwich
    Islands, and the inflamed desire of the public to acquire
    information concerning them, I have thought it well to tarry yet
    another week in England and deliver a lecture upon this absorbing
    subject. And lest it should be thought unbecoming in me, a
    stranger, to come to the public rescue at such a time, instead of
    leaving to abler hands a matter of so much moment, I desire to
    explain that I do it with the best motives and the most honorable
    intentions. I do it because I am convinced that no one can allay
    this unwholesome excitement as effectually as I can, and to allay
    it, and allay it as quickly as possible, is surely one thing that is
    absolutely necessary at this juncture. I feel and know that I am
    equal to this task, for I can allay any kind of an excitement by
    lecturing upon it. I have saved many communities in this way. I
    have always been able to paralyze the public interest in any topic
    that I chose to take hold of and elucidate with all my strength.

    Hoping that this explanation will show that if I am seeming to
    intrude I am at least doing it from a high impulse, I am, sir, your
    obedient servant,
                         MARK TWAIN.

A day later the following announcement appeared:

                  QUEEN’S CONCERT ROOMS,
                   HANOVER SQUARE.

            MR. GEORGE DOLBY begs to announce that

                    MR. MARK TWAIN

                    WILL DELIVER A
                      LECTURE
                       OF A
                  HUMOROUS CHARACTER,

                     AS ABOVE, ON
           MONDAY EVENING NEXT, OCTOBER 13th, 1873,
            AND REPEAT IT IN THE SAME PLACE, ON
               TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 14th,
               WEDNESDAY “      “  15th,
               THURSDAY “      “  16th,
               FRIDAY  “      “  17th,

                   At Eight o’Clock,
                       AND
             SATURDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 18th,
                   At Three o’Clock.

                      SUBJECT:
         “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands.”

    As Mr. TWAIN has spent several months in these Islands, and is well
    acquainted with his subject, the Lecture may be expected to furnish
    matter of interest.

           STALLS, 5s.     UNRESERVED SEATS, 3s.

The prospect of a lecture from Mark Twain interested the London public.
Those who had not seen him were willing to pay even for that privilege.
The papers were encouraging; Punch sounded a characteristic note:

              WELCOME TO A LECTURER

  “‘Tis time we Twain did show ourselves.” ‘Twas said
    By Caesar, when one Mark had lost his head:
    By Mark, whose head’s quite bright, ‘tis said again:
    Therefore, “go with me, friends, to bless this Twain.”

                                --Punch.

Dolby had managed the Dickens lectures, and he proved his sound business
judgment and experience by taking the largest available hall in London
for Mark Twain.

On the evening of October 13th, in the spacious Queen’s Concert Rooms,
Hanover Square, Mark Twain delivered his first public address in
England. The subject was “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,”
 the old lecture with which he had made his first great successes. He was
not introduced. He appeared on the platform in evening dress, assuming
the character of a manager announcing a disappointment.

Mr. Clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present. He paused
and loud murmurs arose from the audience. He lifted his hand and they
subsided. Then he added, “I am happy to say that Mark Twain is present,
and will now give his lecture.” Whereupon the audience roared its
approval.

It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that his triumph that week
was a regal one. For five successive nights and a Saturday matinee the
culture and fashion of London thronged to hear him discourse of their
“fellow savages.” It was a lecture event wholly without precedent. The
lectures of Artemus Ward,--[“Artemus the delicious,” as Charles Reade
called him, came to London in June, 1866, and gave his “piece” in
Egyptian Hall. The refined, delicate, intellectual countenance, the
sweet, gave, mouth, from which one might have expected philosophical
lectures retained their seriousness while listeners were convulsed with
laughter. There was something magical about it. Every sentence was a
surprise. He played on his audience as Liszt did on a piano most easily
when most effectively. Who can ever forget his attempt to stop his
Italian pianist--“a count in his own country, but not much account in
this”--who went on playing loudly while he was trying to tell us an
“affecting incident” that occurred near a small clump of trees shown
on his panorama of the Far West. The music stormed on-we could see only
lips and arms pathetically moving till the piano suddenly ceased, and
we heard-it was all we heard “and, she fainted in Reginald’s arms.”
 His tricks have been at tempted in many theaters, but Artemus Ward was
inimitable. And all the time the man was dying. (Moneure D. Conway,
Autobiography.)]--who had quickly become a favorite in London, had
prepared the public for American platform humor, while the daily doings
of this new American product, as reported by the press, had aroused
interest, or curiosity, to a high pitch. On no occasion in his own
country had he won such a complete triumph. The papers for a week
devoted columns of space to appreciation and editorial comment. The
Daily News of October 17th published a column-and-a-half editorial on
American humor, with Mark Twain’s public appearance as the general text.
The Times referred to the continued popularity of the lectures:

    They can’t be said to have more than whetted the public appetite, if
    we are to take the fact which has been imparted to us, that the
    holding capacity of the Hanover Square Rooms has been inadequate to
    the demand made upon it every night by Twain’s lecturing, as a
    criterion. The last lecture of this too brief course was delivered
    yesterday before an audience which crammed to discomfort every part
    of the principal apartment of the Hanover Square Rooms....

At the close of yesterday’s lecture Mark Twain was so loudly applauded
that he returned to the stage, and, as soon as the audience gave him a
chance of being heard, he said, with much apparent emotion:

    “Ladies and Gentlemen,--I won’t keep you one single moment in this
    suffocating atmosphere. I simply wish to say that this is the last
    lecture I shall have the honor to deliver in London until I return
    from America, four weeks from now. I only wish to say (here Mr.
    Clemens faltered as if too much affected to proceed) I am very
    grateful. I do not wish to appear pathetic, but it is something
    magnificent for a stranger to come to the metropolis of the world
    and be received so handsomely as I have been. I simply thank you.”

The Saturday Review devoted a page, and Once a Week, under the head
of “Cracking jokes,” gave three pages, to praise of the literary and
lecture methods of the new American humorist. With the promise of speedy
return, he left London, gave the lecture once in Liverpool, and with his
party (October 21st) set sail for home.

In mid-Atlantic he remembered Dr. Brown, and wrote him:

    We have plowed a long way over the sea, and there’s twenty-two
    hundred miles of restless water between us now, besides the railway
    stretch. And yet you are so present with us, so close to us, that a
    span and a whisper would bridge the distance.

So it would seem that of all the many memories of that eventful
half-year, that of Dr. Brown was the most present, the most tender.



XCII. FURTHER LONDON LECTURE TRIUMPHS

Orion Clemens records that he met “Sam and Livy” on their arrival from
England, November 2d, and that the president of the Mercantile Library
Association sent up his card “four times,” in the hope of getting a
chance to propose a lecture engagement--an incident which impressed
Orion deeply in its evidence of his brother’s towering importance. Orion
himself was by this time engaged in various projects. He was inventing
a flying-machine, for one thing, writing a Jules Verne story, reading
proof on a New York daily, and contemplating the lecture field. This
great blaze of international appreciation which had come to the little
boy who used to set type for him in Hannibal, and wash up the forms and
cry over the dirty proof, made him gasp.

They went to see Booth in Hamlet [he says], and Booth sent for Sam to
come behind the scenes, and when Sam proposed to add a part to Hamlet,
the part of a bystander who makes humorous modern comment on the
situations in the play, Booth laughed immoderately.

Proposing a sacrilege like that to Booth! To what heights had this
printer-pilot, miner-brother not attained!--[This idea of introducing a
new character in Hamlet was really attempted later by Mark Twain, with
the connivance of Joe Goodman [of all men], sad to relate. So far as is
known it is the one stain on Goodman’s literary record.]

Clemens returned immediately to England--the following Saturday, in
fact--and was back in London lecturing again after barely a month’s
absence. He gave the “Roughing It” address, this time under the title of
“Roughing It on the Silver Frontier,” and if his audiences were any less
enthusiastic, or his houses less crowded than before, the newspapers of
that day have left no record of it. It was the height of the season now,
and being free to do so, he threw himself into the whirl of it, and for
two months, beyond doubt, was the most talked-of figure in London. The
Athenaeum Club made him a visiting member (an honor considered next to
knighthood); Punch quoted him; societies banqueted him; his apartments,
as before; were besieged by callers. Afternoons one was likely to find
him in “Poets’ Corner” of the Langham smoking-room, with a group
of London and American authors--Reade, Collins, Miller, and the
others--frankly rioting in his bold fancies. Charles Warren Stoddard was
in London at the time, and acted as his secretary. Stoddard was a gentle
poet, a delightful fellow, and Clemens was very fond of him. His only
complaint of Stoddard was that he did not laugh enough at his humorous
yarns. Clemens once said:

“Dolby and I used to come in after the lecture, or perhaps after being
out to some dinner, and we liked to sit down and talk it over and tell
yarns, and we expected Stoddard to laugh at them, but Stoddard would
lie there on the couch and snore. Otherwise, as a secretary, he was
perfect.”

The great Tichborne trial was in progress then, and the spectacle of an
illiterate impostor trying to establish his claim as the rightful heir
to a great estate was highly diverting to Mark Twain.--[In a letter
of this period he speaks of having attended one of the Claimant’s
“Evenings.”]--He wanted to preserve the evidence as future literary
material, and Stoddard day after day patiently collected the news
reports and neatly pasted them into scrap-books, where they still rest,
a complete record of that now forgotten farce. The Tichborne trial
recalled to Mark Twain the claimant in the Lampton family, who from
time to time wrote him long letters, urging him to join in the effort
to establish his rights to the earldom of Durham. This American claimant
was a distant cousin, who had “somehow gotten hold of, or had fabricated
a full set of documents.”

Colonel Henry Watterson, just quoted (also a Lampton connection), adds:

    During the Tichborne trial Mark and I were in London, and one day he
    said to me: “I have investigated this Durham business down at the
    Herald’s office. There is nothing to it. The Lamptons passed out
    of the earldom of Durham a hundred years ago. There were never any
    estates; the title lapsed; the present earldom is a new creation,
    not in the same family at all. But I’ll tell you what: if you’ll
    put up $500, I’ll put up $500 more; we’ll bring our chap over here
    and set him in as claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy’s fat boy
    won’t be a marker to him.”

It was a characteristic Mark Twain project, one of the sort he never
earned out in reality, but loved to follow in fancy, and with the pen
sometimes. The “Rightful Earl of Durham” continued to send letters for
a long time after that (some of them still exist), but he did not
establish his claim. No one but Mark Twain ever really got anything out
of it. Like the Tennessee land, it furnished material by and by for
a book. Colonel Watterson goes on to say that Clemens was only joking
about having looked up the matter in the peerage; that he hadn’t really
looked it up at all, and that the earldom lies still in the Lampton
family.

Another of Clemens’s friends in London at this time was Prentice
Mulford, of California. In later years Mulford acquired a wide
reputation for his optimistic and practical psychologies. Through them
he lifted himself out of the slough of despond, and he sought to extend
a helping hand to others. His “White Cross Library” had a wide reading
and a wide influence; perhaps has to this day. But in 1873 Mulford had
not found the tangibility of thought, the secret of strength; he was
only finding it, maybe, in his frank acknowledgment of shortcoming:

    Now, Mark, I am down-very much down at present; you are up-where you
    deserve to be. I can’t ask this on the score of any past favors,
    for there have been none. I have not always spoken of you in terms
    of extravagant praise; have sometimes criticized you, which was due,
    I suppose, in part to an envious spirit. I am simply human. Some
    people in the same profession say they entertain no jealousy of
    those more successful. I can’t. They are divine; I am not.

It was only that he wished Clemens to speak a word for him to Routledge,
to get him a hearing for his work. He adds:

    I shall be up myself some day, although my line is far apart from
    yours. Whether you can do anything that I ask of you or not, I
    shall be happy then, as I would be now, to do you any just and right
    service.... Perhaps I have mistaken my vocation. Certainly, if I
    was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I’d make it rattle livelier
    than ever I did before. I have occasionally thought of London
    Bridge, but the Thames is now so d---d cold and dirty, and besides I
    can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the mere
    instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming ashore and
    ruining my best clothes; wherefore I should be worse off than ever.

Of course Mark Twain granted the favor Mulford asked, and a great
deal more, no doubt, for that was his way. Mulford came up, as he had
prophesied, but the sea in due time claimed him, though not in the way
he had contemplated. Years after he was one day found drifting off the
shores of Long Island in an open boat, dead.

Clemens made a number of notable dinner speeches during this second
London lecture period. His response to the toast of the “Ladies,”
 delivered at the annual dinner of the Scottish Corporation of London,
was the sensational event of the evening.

He was obliged to decline an invitation to the Lord Mayor’s dinner,
whereupon his Lordship wrote to urge him to be present at least at the
finale, when the welcome would be “none the less hearty,” and bespoke
his attendance for any future dinners.

Clemens lectured steadily at the Hanover Square Rooms during the two
months of his stay in London, and it was only toward the end of this
astonishing engagement that the audience began to show any sign of
diminishing. Early in January he wrote to Twichell:

I am not going to the provinces because I cannot get halls that are
large enough. I always felt cramped in the Hanover Square Rooms, but I
find that everybody here speaks with awe and respect of that prodigious
hall and wonders that I could fill it so long.

I am hoping to be back in twenty days, but I have so much to go home to
and enjoy with a jubilant joy that it hardly seems possible that it can
come to pass in so uncertain a world as this.

In the same letter he speaks of attending an exhibition of Landseer’s
paintings at the Royal Academy:

    Ah, they are wonderfully beautiful! There are such rich moonlights
    and dusks in the “Challenge” and the “Combat,” and in that long
    flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or
    sunrise, for no man can ever tell t’other from which in a picture,
    except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the
    water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face
    of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn
    suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in
    the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way that he
    makes animals’ flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were
    darkened ever so little, and a motionless living animal placed
    beside the painted one, no man could tell which was which.

I interrupted myself here, to drop a line to Shirley Brooks and suggest
a cartoon for Punch. It was this: in one of the Academy saloons (in
a suite where these pictures are) a fine bust of Landseer stands on a
pedestal in the center of the room. I suggested that some of Landseer’s
best known animals be represented as having come down out of their
frames in the moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in
mourning attitudes.

He sailed January 13 (1874.), on the Paythia, and two weeks later was at
home, where all was going well. The Gilded Age had been issued a day or
two before Christmas, and was already in its third edition. By the end
of January 26,000 copies had been sold, a sale that had increased to
40,000 a month later. The new house was progressing, though it was by no
means finished. Mrs. Clemens was in good health. Little Susy was full of
such American activities as to earn the name of “The Modoc.” The promise
of the year was bright.



XCIII. THE REAL COLONEL SELLERS-GOLDEN DAYS

There are bound to be vexations, flies in the ointment, as we say. It
was Warner who conferred the name of Eschol Sellers on the chief figure
of the collaborated novel. Warner had known it as the name of an obscure
person, or perhaps he had only heard of it. At all events, it seemed a
good one for the character and had been adopted. But behold, the book
had been issued but a little while when there rose “out of the vasty
deeps” a genuine Eschol Sellers, who was a very respectable person. He
was a stout, prosperous-looking man, gray and about fifty-five years
old. He came into the American Publishing Company offices and asked
permission to look at the book. Mr. Bliss was out at the moment, but
presently arrived. The visitor rose and introduced himself.

“My name is Eschol Sellers,” he said. “You have used it in one of your
publications. It has brought upon me a lot of ridicule. My people wish
me to sue you for $10,000 damages.”

He had documents to prove his identity, and there was only one thing
to be done; he must be satisfied. Bliss agreed to recall as many of
the offending volumes as possible and change the name on the plates.
He contacted the authors, and the name Beriah was substituted for the
offending Eschol. It turned out that the real Sellers family was a large
one, and that the given name Eschol was not uncommon in its several
branches. This particular Eschol Sellers, curiously enough, was an
inventor and a promoter, though of a much more substantial sort than his
fiction namesake. He was also a painter of considerable merit, a writer
and an antiquarian. He was said to have been a grandson of the famous
painter, Rembrandt Peale.

Clemens vowed that he would not lecture in America that winter. The
irrepressible Redpath besieged him as usual, and at the end of January
Clemens telegraphed him, as he thought, finally. Following it with a
letter of explanation, he added:

“I said to her, ‘There isn’t money enough in America to hire me to leave
you for one day.’”

But Redpath was a persistent devil. He used arguments and held out
inducements which even Mrs. Clemens thought should not be resisted, and
Clemens yielded from time to time, and gave a lecture here and there
during February. Finally, on the 3d of March (1879.) he telegraphed his
tormentor:

“Why don’t you congratulate me? I never expect to stand on a lecture
platform again after Thursday night.”

Howells tells delightfully of a visit which he and Aldrich paid to
Hartford just at this period. Aldrich went to visit Clemens and Howells
to visit Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens coming as far as Springfield to
welcome them.

    In the good-fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such
    days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round. There was
    constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively
    hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or
    nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
    doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
    satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another
    sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which
    enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance.

Howells tells how Clemens dilated on the advantages of subscription sale
over the usual methods of publication, and urged the two Boston authors
to prepare something which canvassers could handle.

“Why, any other means of bringing out a book is privately printing it,”
 he declared, and added that his subscription books in Bliss’s hands sold
right along, “just like the Bible.”

On the way back to Boston Howells and Aldrich planned a subscription
book which would sell straight along, like the Bible. It was to be
called “Twelve Memorable Murders.” They had dreamed two or three
fortunes by the time they had reached Boston, but the project ended
there.

“We never killed a single soul,” Howells said once to the writer of this
memoir.

Clemens was always urging Howells to visit him after that. He offered
all sorts of inducements.

    You will find us the most reasonable people in the world. We had
    thought of precipitating upon you, George Warner and his wife one
    day, Twichell and his jewel of a wife another day, and Charles
    Perkins and wife another. Only those--simply members of our family
    they are. But I’ll close the door against them all, which will
    “fix” all of the lot except Twichell, who will no more hesitate to
    climb in the back window than nothing.

    And you shall go to bed when you please, get up when you please,
    talk when you please, read when you please.

A little later he was urging Howells or Aldrich, or both of them; to
come to Hartford to live.

    Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe’s (just where we
    drive in to go to our new house), will sell for $16,000 or $17,000.
    You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can’t you?
    Come! Will one of you boys buy that house? Now, say yes.

Certainly those were golden, blessed days, and perhaps, as Howells
says, the sun does not shine on their like any more--not in Hartford,
at least, for the old group that made them no longer assembles there.
Hartford about this time became a sort of shrine for all literary
visitors, and for other notables as well, whether of America or from
overseas. It was the half-way place between Boston and New York,
and pilgrims going in either direction rested there. It is said that
travelers arriving in America, were apt to remember two things they
wished to see: Niagara Falls and Mark Twain. But the Falls had no such
recent advertising advantage as that spectacular success in London.
Visitors were apt to begin in Hartford.

Howells went with considerable frequency after that, or rather with
regularity, twice a year, or oftener, and his coming was always hailed
with great rejoicing. They visited and ate around at one place and
another among that pleasant circle of friends. But they were happiest
afterward together, Clemens smoking continually, “soothing his tense
nerves with a mild hot Scotch,” says Howells, “while we both talked, and
talked, and tasked of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and
the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would
come away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those
locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end
of summer.” Sometimes Clemens told the story of his early life, “the
inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never
tire of even when it began to be told over again.”



XCIV. BEGINNING “TOM SAWYER”

The Clemens household went to Quarry Farm in April, leaving the new
house once more in the hands of the architect and builders. It was
costing a vast sum of money, and there was a financial stress upon land.
Mrs. Clemens, always prudent, became a little uneasy at times, though
without warrant in those days, for her business statement showed that
her holdings were only a little less than a quarter of a million in
her own right, while her husband’s books and lectures had been highly
remunerative, and would be more so. They were justified in living in
ample, even luxurious comfort, and how free from financial worries they
could have lived for the rest of their days!

Clemens, realizing his happiness, wrote Dr. Brown:

Indeed I am thankful for the wifey and the child, and if there is one
individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and
uniformly and, unceasingly happy than I am I defy the world to produce
him and prove him. In my opinion he don’t exist. I was a mighty rough,
coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me, four years ago,
and I may still be to the rest of the world, but not to her. She has
made a very creditable job of me.

Truly fortune not only smiled, but laughed. Every mail brought
great bundles of letters that sang his praises. Robert Watt, who had
translated his books into Danish, wrote of their wide popularity
among his people. Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon), who as early as 1872 had
translated The Jumping Frog into French, and published it, with extended
comment on the author and his work, in the ‘Revue des deux mondes’, was
said to be preparing a review of ‘The Gilded Age’. All the world seemed
ready to do him honor.

Of course, one must always pay the price, usually a vexatious one.
Bores stopped him on the street to repeat ancient and witless stories.
Invented anecdotes, some of them exasperating ones, went the rounds of
the press. Impostors in distant localities personated him, or claimed
to be near relatives, and obtained favors, sometimes money, in his name.
Trivial letters, seeking benefactions of every kind, took the savor from
his daily mail. Letters from literary aspirants were so numerous that he
prepared a “form” letter of reply:

DEAR SIR OR MADAM,--Experience has not taught me very much, still it has
taught me that it is not wise to criticize a piece of literature, except
to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then if you praise it that
enemy admires--you for your honest manliness, and if you dispraise it he
admires you for your sound judgment.

                     Yours truly,  S. L. C.

Even Orion, now in Keokuk on a chicken farm, pursued him with
manuscripts and proposals of schemes. Clemens had bought this farm for
Orion, who had counted on large and quick returns, but was planning new
enterprises before the first eggs were hatched. Orion Clemens was as
delightful a character as was ever created in fiction, but he must have
been a trial now and then to Mark Twain. We may gather something of this
from a letter written by the latter to his mother and sister at this
period:

    I can’t “encourage” Orion. Nobody can do that conscientiously, for
    the reason that before one’s letter has time to reach him he is off
    on some new wild-goose chase. Would you encourage in literature a
    man who the older he grows the worse he writes?

    I cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change
    his religion so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent
    under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him.

    I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter
    around his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and
    impossible projects at the rate of 365 a year which is his customary
    average. He says he did well in Hannibal! Now there is a man who
    ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments, and
    activities of a hen farm.

    If you ask me to pity Orion I can do that. I can do it every day
    and all day long. But one can’t “encourage” quicksilver; because
    the instant you put your finger on it, it isn’t there. No, I am
    saying too much. He does stick to his literary and legal
    aspirations, and he naturally would elect the very two things which
    he is wholly and preposterously unfitted for. If I ever become
    able, I mean to put Orion on a regular pension without revealing the
    fact that it is a pension.

    He did presently allow the pension, a liberal one, which continued
    until neither Orion Clemens nor his wife had further earthly need of
    it.

Mark Twain for some time had contemplated one of the books that will
longest preserve his memory, ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’. The
success of ‘Roughing It’ naturally made him cast about for other
autobiographical material, and he remembered those days along the
river-front in Hannibal--his skylarking with Tom Blankenship, the Bowen
boys, John Briggs, and the rest. He had recognized these things as
material--inviting material it was--and now in the cool luxury of Quarry
Farm he set himself to spin the fabric of youth.

He found summer-time always his best period for literary effort, and
on a hillside just by the old quarry, Mrs. Crane had built for him
that spring a study--a little room of windows, somewhat suggestive of a
pilot-house--overlooking the long sweep of grass and the dreamlike city
below. Vines were planted that in the course of time would cover and
embower it; there was a tiny fireplace for chilly days. To Twichell, of
his new retreat, Clemens wrote:

It is the loveliest study you ever saw. It is octagonal, with a peaked
roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in
complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of
valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is
a cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four
chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the
lightning flashes behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats upon the
roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it.

He worked steadily there that summer. He would go up mornings, after
breakfast, remaining until nearly dinner-time, say until five o’clock
or after, for it was not his habit to eat luncheon. Other members of
the family did not venture near the place, and if he was urgently wanted
they blew a horn. Each evening he brought down his day’s performance to
read to the assembled family. He felt the need of audience and approval.
Usually he earned the latter, but not always. Once, when for a day he
put aside other matters to record a young undertaker’s love-affair, and
brought down the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with the joy of
it, he met with a surprise. The tale was a ghastly burlesque, its
humor of the most disheartening, unsavory sort. No one spoke during the
reading, nobody laughed: The air was thick with disapproval. His voice
lagged and faltered toward the end. When he finished there was heavy
silence. Mrs. Clemens was the only one who could speak:

“Youth, let’s walk a little,” she said.

The “Undertaker’s Love Story” is still among the manuscripts of
that period, but it is unlikely that it will ever see the light of
print.--[This tale bears no relation to “The Undertaker’s Story” in
Sketches New and Old.]

The Tom Sawyer tale progressed steadily and satisfactorily. Clemens
wrote Dr. Brown:

    I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average,
    for some time now, on a book (a story), and consequently have been
    so wrapped up in it, and dead to everything else, that I have fallen
    mighty short in letter-writing....

    On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with
    brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the
    same thin linen we make shirts of.

He incloses some photographs in this letter.

    The group [he says] represents the vine-clad carriageway in front of
    the farm-house. On the left is Megalopis sitting in the lap of her
    German nurse-maid. I am sitting behind them. Mrs. Crane is in the
    center. Mr. Crane next to her. Then Mrs. Clemens and the new baby.
    Her Irish nurse stands at her back. Then comes the table waitress,
    a young negro girl, born free. Next to her is Auntie Cord (a
    fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine). She is
    the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self-
    satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby’s
    American nurse-maid. In the middle distance my mother-in-law’s
    coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help out
    the picture. No, that is not true. He was waiting there a minute
    or two before the photographer came. In the extreme background,
    under the archway, you glimpse my study.

The “new baby,” “Bay,” as they came to call her, was another little
daughter, born in June, a happy, healthy addition to the household. In a
letter written to Twichell we get a sweet summer picture of this period,
particularly of little sunny-haired, two-year-old Susy.

    There is nothing selfish about the Modoc. She is fascinated with
    the new baby. The Modoc rips and tears around outdoors most of the
    time, and consequently is as hard as a pineknot and as brown as an
    Indian. She is bosom friend to all the chickens, ducks, turkeys,
    and guinea-hens on the place. Yesterday, as she marched along the
    winding path that leads up the hill through the red-clover beds to
    the summer-house, there was a long procession of these fowls
    stringing contentedly after her, led by a stately rooster, who can
    look over the Modoc’s head. The devotion of these vassals has been
    purchased with daily largess of Indian meal, and so the Modoc,
    attended by her body-guard, moves in state wherever she goes.

There were days, mainly Sundays, when he did not work at all; peaceful
days of lying fallow, dreaming in shady places, drowsily watching little
Susy, or reading with Mrs. Clemens. Howells’s “Foregone Conclusion” was
running in the Atlantic that year, and they delighted in it. Clemens
wrote the author:

    I should think that this must be the daintiest, truest, most
    admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story. The creatures
    of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do.
    If your genuine stories can die I wonder by what right old Walter
    Scott’s artificialities shall continue to live.

At other times he found comfort in the society of Theodore Crane. These
two were always fond of each other, and often read together the books
in which they were mutually interested. They had portable-hammock
arrangements, which they placed side by side on the lawn, and read and
discussed through summer afternoons. The ‘Mutineers of the Bounty’ was
one of the books they liked best, and there was a story of an Iceland
farmer, a human document, that had an unfading interest. Also there
were certain articles in old numbers of the Atlantic that they read and
reread. ‘Pepys’ Diary’, ‘Two Years Before the Mast’, and a book on the
Andes were reliable favorites. Mark Twain read not so many books, but
read a few books often. Those named were among the literature he asked
for each year of his return to Quarry Farm. Without them, the farm and
the summer would not be the same.

Then there was ‘Lecky’s History of European Morals’; there were periods
when they read Lecky avidly and discussed it in original and unorthodox
ways. Mark Twain found an echo of his own philosophies in Lecky. He
made frequent marginal notes along the pages of the world’s moral
history--notes not always quotable in the family circle. Mainly,
however, they were short, crisp interjections of assent or disapproval.
In one place Lecky refers to those who have undertaken to prove that all
our morality is a product of experience, holding that a desire to obtain
happiness and to avoid pain is the only possible motive to action; the
reason, and the only reason, why we should perform virtuous actions
being “that on the whole such a course will bring us the greatest amount
of happiness.” Clemens has indorsed these philosophies by writing on the
margin, “Sound and true.” It was the philosophy which he himself would
always hold (though, apparently, never live by), and in the end
would embody a volume of his own.--[What Is Man? Privately printed in
1906.]--In another place Lecky, himself speaking, says:

    Fortunately we are all dependent for many of our pleasures on
    others. Co-operation and organization are essential to our
    happiness, and these are impossible without some restraint being
    placed upon our appetites. Laws are made to secure this restraint,
    and being sustained by rewards, and punishments they make it the
    interest of the individual to regard that of the community.

“Correct!” comments Clemens. “He has proceeded from unreasoned
selfishness to reasoned selfishness. All our acts, reasoned and
unreasoned, are selfish.” It was a conclusion he logically never
departed from; not the happiest one, it would seem, at first glance, but
one easier to deny than to disprove.

On the back of an old envelope Mark Twain set down his literary
declaration of this period.

“I like history, biography, travels, curious facts and strange
happenings, and science. And I detest novels, poetry, and theology.”

But of course the novels of Howells would be excepted; Lecky was not
theology, but the history of it; his taste for poetry would develop
later, though it would never become a fixed quantity, as was his
devotion to history and science. His interest in these amounted to a
passion.



XCV. AN “ATLANTIC” STORY AND A PLAY

The reference to “Auntie Cord” in the letter to Dr. Brown brings us to
Mark Twain’s first contribution to the Atlantic Monthly. Howells in his
Recollections of his Atlantic editorship, after referring to certain
Western contributors, says:

    Later came Mark Twain, originally of Missouri, but then
    provisionally of Hartford, and now ultimately of the solar system,
    not to say the universe. He came first with “A True Story,” one of
    those noble pieces of humanity with which the South has atoned
    chiefly, if not solely, through him for all its despite to the
    negro.

Clemens had long aspired to appear in the Atlantic, but such was his own
rating of his literature that he hardly hoped to qualify for its pages.
Twichell remembers his “mingled astonishment and triumph” when he was
invited to send something to the magazine.

He was obliged to “send something” once or twice before the acceptance
of “A True Story,” the narrative of Auntie Cord, and even this
acceptance brought with it the return of a fable which had accompanied
it, with the explanation that a fable like that would disqualify the
magazine for every denominational reader, though Howells hastened to
express his own joy in it, having been particularly touched by the
author’s reference to Sisyphus and Atlas as ancestors of the tumble-bug.
The “True Story,” he said, with its “realest king of black talk,” won
him, and a few days later he wrote again: “This little story delights me
more and more. I wish you had about forty of ‘em.”

And so, modestly enough, as became him, for the story was of the
simplest, most unpretentious sort, Mark Twain entered into the school of
the elect.

In his letter to Howells, accompanying the MS., the author said:

    I inclose also “A True Story,” which has no humor in it. You can
    pay as lightly as you choose for that if you want it, for it is
    rather out of my line. I have not altered the old colored woman’s
    story, except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle,
    as she did--and traveled both ways.

Howells in his Recollections tells of the business anxiety in the
Atlantic office in the effort to estimate the story’s pecuniary value.
Clemens and Harte had raised literary rates enormously; the latter was
reputed to have received as much as five cents a word from affluent
newspapers! But the Atlantic was poor, and when sixty dollars was
finally decided upon for the three pages (about two and a half cents a
word) the rate was regarded as handsome--without precedent in Atlantic
history. Howells adds that as much as forty times this amount was
sometimes offered to Mark Twain in later years. Even in ‘74 he had
received a much higher rate than that offered by the Atlantic,--but no
acceptance, then, or later, ever made him happier, or seemed more richly
rewarded.

“A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” was precisely what
it claimed to be.--[Atlantic Monthly for November, 1874; also included
in Sketches New and Old.]--Auntie Cord, the Auntie Rachel of that tale,
cook at Quarry Farm, was a Virginia negress who had been twice sold as
a slave, and was proud of the fact; particularly proud that she had
brought $1,000 on the block. All her children had been sold away from
her, but it was a long time ago, and now at sixty she was fat and
seemingly without care. She had told her story to Mrs. Crane, who had
more than once tried to persuade her to tell it to Clemens; but Auntie
Cord was reluctant. One evening, however, when the family sat on the
front veranda in the moonlight, looking down on the picture city, as
was their habit, Auntie Cord came around to say good night, and Clemens
engaged her in conversation. He led up to her story, and almost before
she knew it she was seated at his feet telling the strange tale in
almost the exact words in which it was set down by him next morning.
It gave Mark Twain a chance to exercise two of his chief
gifts--transcription and portrayal. He was always greater at these
things than at invention. Auntie Cord’s story is a little masterpiece.

He wished to do more with Auntie Cord and her associates of the farm,
for they were extraordinarily interesting. Two other negroes on the
place, John Lewis and his wife (we shall hear notably of Lewis later),
were not always on terms of amity with Auntie Cord. They disagreed
on religion, and there were frequent battles in the kitchen. These
depressed the mistress of the house, but they gave only joy to Mark
Twain. His Southern raising had given him an understanding of their
humors, their native emotions which made these riots a spiritual
gratification. He would slip around among the shrubbery and listen to
the noise and strife of battle, and hug himself with delight. Sometimes
they resorted to missiles--stones, tinware--even dressed poultry which
Auntie Cord was preparing for the oven. Lewis was very black, Auntie
Cord was a bright mulatto, Lewis’s’ wife several shades lighter.
Wherever the discussion began it promptly shaded off toward the
color-line and insult. Auntie Cord was a Methodist; Lewis was a
Dunkard. Auntie Cord was ignorant and dogmatic; Lewis could read and was
intelligent. Theology invariably led to personality, and eventually to
epithets, crockery, geology, and victuals. How the greatest joker of the
age did enjoy that summer warfare!

The fun was not all one-sided. An incident of that summer probably
furnished more enjoyment for the colored members of the household
than it did for Mark Twain. Lewis had some fowls, and among them was a
particularly pestiferous guinea-hen that used to get up at three in the
morning and go around making the kind of a noise that a guinea-hen must
like and is willing to get up early to hear. Mark Twain did not care for
it. He stood it as long as he could one morning, then crept softly from
the house to stop it.

It was a clear, bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up
stealthily with a stout stick. The bird was pouring out its heart,
tearing the moonlight to tatters. Stealing up close, Clemens made
a vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped
forward a little, and he missed. The stroke and his explosion frightened
the fowl, and it started to run. Clemens, with his mind now on the
single purpose of revenge, started after it. Around the trees, along the
paths, up and down the lawn, through gates and across the garden, out
over the fields, they raced, “pursuer and pursued.” The guinea nor
longer sang, and Clemens was presently too exhausted to swear. Hour
after hour the silent, deadly hunt continued, both stopping to rest at
intervals; then up again and away. It was like something in a dream.
It was nearly breakfast-time when he dragged himself into the house at
last, and the guinea was resting and panting under a currant-bush.
Later in the day Clemens gave orders to Lewis to “kill and eat that
guinea-hen,” which Lewis did. Clemens himself had then never eaten a
guinea, but some years later, in Paris, when the delicious breast of one
of those fowls was served him, he remembered and said:

“And to think, after chasing that creature all night, John Lewis got to
eat him instead of me.”

The interest in Tom and Huck, or the inspiration for their adventures,
gave out at last, or was superseded by a more immediate demand. As early
as May, Goodman, in San Francisco, had seen a play announced there,
presenting the character of Colonel Sellers, dramatized by Gilbert
S. Densmore and played by John T. Raymond. Goodman immediately wrote
Clemens; also a letter came from Warner, in Hartford, who had noticed in
San Francisco papers announcements of the play. Of course Clemens would
take action immediately; he telegraphed, enjoining the performance.
Then began a correspondence with the dramatist and actor. This in time
resulted in an amicable arrangement, by which the dramatist agreed
to dispose of his version to Clemens. Clemens did not wait for it to
arrive, but began immediately a version of his own. Just how much or
how little of Densmore’s work found its way into the completed play,
as presented by Raymond later, cannot be known now. Howells conveys
the impression that Clemens had no hand in its authorship beyond the
character of Sellers as taken from the book. But in a letter still
extant, which Clemens wrote to Howells at the time, he says:

    I worked a month on my play, and launched it in New York last
    Wednesday. I believe it will go. The newspapers have been
    complimentary. It is simply a setting for one character, Colonel
    Sellers. As a play I guess it will not bear critical assault in
    force.

The Warners are as charming as ever. They go shortly to the devil for a
year--that is, to Egypt.

Raymond, in a letter which he wrote to the Sun, November 3, 1874,
declared that “not one line” of Densmore’s dramatization was used,
“except that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age.” During the
newspaper discussion of the matter, Clemens himself prepared a letter
for the Hartford Post. This letter was suppressed, but it still exists.
In it he says:

    I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. I
    had expected to use little of his [Densmore’s] language and but
    little of his plot. I do not think there are now twenty sentences
    of Mr. Densmore’s in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I
    wrote and told him that I should pay him about as much more as I had
    already paid him in case the play proved a success. I shall keep my
    word.

This letter, written while the matter was fresh in his mind, is
undoubtedly in accordance with the facts. That Densmore was fully
satisfied may be gathered from an acknowledgment, in which he says:
“Your letter reached me on the ad, with check. In this place permit me
to thank you for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in
this matter.”

Warner, meantime, realizing that the play was constructed almost
entirely of the Mark Twain chapters of the book, agreed that his
collaborator should undertake the work and financial responsibilities
of the dramatic venture and reap such rewards as might result. Various
stories have been told of this matter, most of them untrue. There was no
bitterness between the friends, no semblance of an estrangement of
any sort. Warner very generously and promptly admitted that he was not
concerned with the play, its authorship, or its profits, whatever the
latter might amount to. Moreover, Warner was going to Egypt very soon,
and his labors and responsibilities were doubly sufficient as they
stood.

Clemens’s estimate of the play as a dramatic composition was correct
enough, but the public liked it, and it was a financial success from the
start. He employed a representative to travel with Raymond, to assist in
the management and in the division of spoil. The agent had instructions
to mail a card every day, stating the amount of his share in the
profits. Howells once arrived in Hartford just when this postal tide of
fortune was at its flood:

One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred
dollars were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in
the air, before he sat down at the table, or rose from it to brandish,
and then, flinging his napkin in the chair, walked up and down to exult
in.

Once, in later years, referring to the matter, Howells said “He was
never a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he
wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream.” Which
was a true word. Mark Twain with money was like a child with a heap of
bright pebbles, ready to pile up more and still more, then presently to
throw them all away and begin gathering anew.



XCVI. THE NEW HOME

The Clemenses returned to Hartford to find their new house “ready,”
 though still full of workmen, decorators, plumbers, and such other
minions of labor as make life miserable to those with ambitions for new
or improved habitations. The carpenters were still on the lower floor,
but the family moved in and camped about in rooms up-stairs that were
more or less free from the invader. They had stopped in New York ten
days to buy carpets and furnishings, and these began to arrive, with no
particular place to put them; but the owners were excited and happy
with it all, for it was the pleasant season of the year, and all the new
features of the house were fascinating, while the daily progress of the
decorators furnished a fresh surprise when they roamed through the rooms
at evening. Mrs. Clemens wrote home:

    We are perfectly delighted with everything here and do so want you
    all to see it.

Her husband, as he was likely to do, picked up the letter and finished
it:

    Livy appoints me to finish this; but how can a headless man perform
    an intelligent function? I have been bully-ragged all day by the
    builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who
    is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the
    carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and
    has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the
    ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a
    book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified.
    Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and I a man
    who loathes details with all his heart! But I haven’t lost my
    temper, and I’ve made Livy lie down most of the time; could anybody
    make her lie down all the time?

Warner wrote from Egypt expressing sympathy for their unfurnished state
of affairs, but added, “I would rather fit out three houses and fill
them with furniture than to fit out one ‘dahabiyeh’.” Warner was at that
moment undertaking his charmingly remembered trip up the Nile.

The new home was not entirely done for a long time. One never knows when
a big house like that--or a little house, for that matters done. But
they were settled at last, with all their beautiful things in place; and
perhaps there have been richer homes, possibly more artistic ones, but
there has never been a more charming home, within or without, than that
one.

So many frequenters have tried to express the charm of that household.
None of them has quite succeeded, for it lay not so much in its
arrangement of rooms or their decorations or their outlook, though
these were all beautiful enough, but rather in the personality, the
atmosphere; and these are elusive things to convey in words. We can only
see and feel and recognize; we cannot translate them. Even Howells, with
his subtle touch, can present only an aspect here and there; an essence,
as it were, from a happy garden, rather than the fullness of its bloom.

As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house
was unlike any other house ever built. People asked him why he built the
kitchen toward the street, and he said:

“So the servants can see the circus go by without running out into the
front yard.”

But this was probably an after-thought. The kitchen end of the house
extended toward Farmington Avenue, but it was by no means unbeautiful.
It was a pleasing detail of the general scheme. The main entrance faced
at right angles with the street and opened to a spacious hall. In turn,
the hall opened to a parlor, where there was a grand piano, and to
the dining-room and library, and the library opened to a little
conservatory, semicircular in form, of a design invented by Harriet
Beecher Stowe. Says Howells:

    The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed
    up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of the
    fountain companied by Callas and other waterloving lilies. There,
    while we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled
    the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the
    delicate accents of its varied blossoms.

In the library was an old carved mantel which Clemens and his wife had
bought in Scotland, salvage from a dismantled castle, and across the
top of the fireplace a plate of brass with the motto, “The ornament of a
house is the friends that frequent it,” surely never more appropriately
inscribed.

There was the mahogany room, a large bedroom on the ground floor, and
upstairs were other spacious bedrooms and many baths, while everywhere
were Oriental rugs and draperies, and statuary and paintings. There
was a fireplace under a window, after the English pattern, so that in
winter-time one could at the same moment watch the blaze and the falling
snow. The library windows looked out over the valley with the little
stream in it, and through and across the tree-tops. At the top of the
house was what became Clemens’s favorite retreat, the billiard-room, and
here and there were unexpected little balconies, which one could step
out upon for the view.

Below was a wide, covered veranda, the “ombra,” as they called it,
secluded from the public eye--a favorite family gathering-place on
pleasant days.

But a house might easily have all these things without being more than
usually attractive, and a house with a great deal less might have
been as full of charm; only it seemed just the proper setting for that
particular household, and undoubtedly it acquired the personality of its
occupants.

Howells assures us that there never was another home like it, and we may
accept his statement. It was unique. It was the home of one of the most
unusual and unaccountable personalities in the world, yet was perfectly
and serenely ordered. Mark Twain was not responsible for this blissful
condition. He was its beacon-light; it was around Mrs. Clemens that its
affairs steadily revolved.

If in the four years and more of marriage Clemens had made advancement
in culture and capabilities, Olivia Clemens also had become something
more than the half-timid, inexperienced girl he had first known. In a
way her education had been no less notable than his. She had worked and
studied, and her half-year of travel and entertainment abroad had given
her opportunity for acquiring knowledge and confidence. Her vision
of life had vastly enlarged; her intellect had flowered; her grasp of
practicalities had become firm and sure.

In spite of her delicate physical structure, her continued uncertainty
of health, she capably undertook the management of their large new
house, and supervised its economies. Any one of her undertakings was
sufficient for one woman, but she compassed them all. No children had
more careful direction than hers. No husband had more devoted attendance
and companionship. No household was ever directed with a sweeter and
gentler grace, or with greater perfection of detail. When the great ones
of the world came to visit America’s most picturesque literary figure
she gave welcome to them all, and filled her place at his side with such
sweet and capable dignity that those who came to pay their duties to
him often returned to pay even greater devotion to his companion. Says
Howells:

    She was, in a way, the loveliest person I have ever seen--the
    gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united
    wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted
    her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it.

And once, in an interview with the writer of these chapters, Howells
declared: “She was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman of singular
intellectual power. I never knew any one quite like her.” Then he added:
“Words cannot express Mrs. Clemens--her fineness, her delicate, her
wonderful tact with a man who was in some respects, and wished to be,
the most outrageous creature that ever breathed.”

Howells meant a good many things by that, no doubt: Clemens’s violent
methods, for one thing, his sudden, savage impulses, which sometimes
worked injustice and hardship for others, though he was first to
discover the wrong and to repair it only too fully. Then, too, Howells
may have meant his boyish teasing tendency to disturb Mrs. Clemens’s
exquisite sense of decorum.

Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in
a pair of white cowskin slippers with the hair out, and do a crippled
colored uncle, to the joy of all beholders. I must not say all, for I
remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of
“Oh, Youth!”

He was continually doing such things as the “crippled colored uncle,”;
partly for the very joy of the performance, but partly, too, to disturb
her serenity, to incur her reproof, to shiver her a little--“shock”
 would be too strong a word. And he liked to fancy her in a spirit and
attitude of belligerence, to present that fancy to those who knew the
measure of her gentle nature. Writing to Mrs. Howells of a picture of
herself in a group, he said:

    You look exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said: “Indeed, I
    do not wonder that you can frame no reply; for you know only too
    well that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation, or argument
    --none!”

Clemens would pretend to a visitor that she had been violently indignant
over some offense of his; perhaps he would say:

“Well I contradicted her just now, and the crockery will begin to fly
pretty soon.”

She could never quite get used to this pleasantry, and a faint glow
would steal over her face. He liked to produce that glow. Yet always his
manner toward her was tenderness itself. He regarded her as some dainty
bit of porcelain, and it was said that he was always following her about
with a chair. Their union has been regarded as ideal. That is Twichell’s
opinion and Howells’s. The latter sums up:

    Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be,
    but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the
    most perfect.



XCVII. THE WALK TO BOSTON

The new home became more beautiful to them as things found their places,
as the year deepened; and the wonder of autumn foliage lit up their
landscape. Sitting on one of the little upper balconies Mrs. Clemens
wrote:

    The atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even more
    soft and beautiful than usual. Mr. Twichell came for Mr. Clemens to
    go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time, heavily laden
    with autumn leaves.

And as usual Clemens, finding the letter unfinished, took up the story.

    Twichell came up here with me to luncheon after services, and I went
    back home with him and took Susy along in her little carriage. We
    have just got home again, middle of afternoon, and Livy has gone to
    rest and left the west balcony to me. There is a shining and most
    marvelous miracle of cloud-effects mirrored in the brook; a picture
    which began with perfection, and has momently surpassed it ever
    since, until at last it is almost unendurably beautiful....

    There is a cloud-picture in the stream now whose hues are as
    manifold as those in an opal and as delicate as the tintings of a
    sea-shell. But now a muskrat is swimming through it and
    obliterating it with the turmoil of wavelets he casts abroad from
    his shoulders.

    The customary Sunday assemblage of strangers is gathered together in
    the grounds discussing the house.

Twichell and Clemens took a good many walks these days; long walks, for
Twichell was an athlete and Clemens had not then outgrown the Nevada
habit of pedestrian wandering. Talcott’s Tower, a wooden structure about
five miles from Hartford, was one of their favorite objective points;
and often they walked out and back, talking so continuously, and so
absorbed in the themes of their discussions, that time and distance
slipped away almost unnoticed. How many things they talked of in those
long walks! They discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and
all the range of human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases
of literature and history and politics. Unorthodox discussions they
were, illuminating, marvelously enchanting, and vanished now forever.
Sometimes they took the train as far as Bloomfield, a little station
on the way, and walked the rest of the distance, or they took the train
from Bloomfield home. It seems a strange association, perhaps, the
fellowship of that violent dissenter with that fervent soul dedicated to
church and creed, but the root of their friendship lay in the frankness
with which each man delivered his dogmas and respected those of his
companion.

It was during one of their walks to the tower that they planned a far
more extraordinary undertaking--nothing less, in fact, than a walk from
Hartford to Boston. This was early in November. They did not delay the
matter, for the weather was getting too uncertain.

Clemens wrote Redpath:

DEAR REDPATH,--Rev. J. H. Twichell and I expect to start at 8 o’clock
Thursday morning to walk to Boston in twenty four hours--or more. We
shall telegraph Young’s Hotel for rooms Saturday night, in order to
allow for a low average of pedestrianism.

It was half past eight on Thursday morning, November 12, 1874, that they
left Twichell’s house in a carriage, drove to the East Hartford bridge,
and there took to the road, Twichell carrying a little bag and Clemens a
basket of lunch.

The papers had got hold of it by this time, and were watching the
result. They did well enough that first day, following the old Boston
stage road, arriving at Westford about seven o’clock in the evening,
twenty-eight miles from the starting-point. There was no real hotel at
Westford, only a sort of tavern, but it afforded the luxury of rest.
“Also,” says Twichell, in a memoranda of the trip, “a sublimely profane
hostler whom you couldn’t jostle with any sort of mild remark without
bringing down upon yourself a perfect avalanche of oaths.”

This was a joy to Clemens, who sat behind the stove, rubbing his lame
knees and fairly reveling in Twichell’s discomfiture in his efforts to
divert the hostler’s blasphemy. There was also a mellow inebriate
there who recommended kerosene for Clemens’s lameness, and offered as
testimony the fact that he himself had frequently used it for stiffness
in his joints after lying out all night in cold weather, drunk:
altogether it was a notable evening.

Westford was about as far as they continued the journey afoot. Clemens
was exceedingly lame next morning, and had had a rather bad night; but
he swore and limped along six miles farther, to North Ashford, then
gave it up. They drove from North Ashford to the railway, where Clemens
telegraphed Redpath and Howells of their approach. To Redpath:

    We have made thirty-five miles in less than five days. This
    demonstrates that the thing can be done. Shall now finish by rail.
    Did you have any bets on us?

To Howells:

    Arrive by rail at seven o’clock, the first of a series of grand
    annual pedestrian tours from Hartford to Boston to be performed by
    us. The next will take place next year.

Redpath read his despatch to a lecture audience, with effect. Howells
made immediate preparation for receiving two way-worn, hungry men. He
telegraphed to Young’s Hotel: “You and Twichell come right up to 37
Concord Avenue, Cambridge, near observatory. Party waiting for you.”

They got to Howells’s about nine o’clock, and the refreshments were
waiting. Miss Longfellow was there, Rose Hawthorne, John Fiske, Larkin
G. Mead, the sculptor, and others of their kind. Howells tells in his
book how Clemens, with Twichell, “suddenly stormed in,” and immediately
began to eat and drink:

    I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with
    his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped
    oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party,
    exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the
    most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of
    their progress.

Clemens gave a dinner, next night, to Howells, Aldrich, Osgood, and the
rest. The papers were full of jokes concerning the Boston expedition;
some even had illustrations, and it was all amusing enough at the time.

Next morning, sitting in the writing-room of Young’s Hotel, he wrote a
curious letter to Mrs. Clemens, though intended as much for Howells and
Aldrich as for her. It was dated sixty-one years ahead, and was a sort
of Looking Backwards, though that notable book had not yet been written.
It presupposed a monarchy in which the name of Boston has been changed
to “Limerick,” and Hartford to “Dublin.” In it, Twichell has become the
“Archbishop of Dublin,” Howells “Duke of Cambridge,” Aldrich “Marquis
of Ponkapog,” Clemens the “Earl of Hartford.” It was too whimsical
and delightful a fancy to be forgotten.--[This remarkable and amusing
document will be found under Appendix M, at the end of last volume.]

A long time afterward, thirty-four year, he came across this letter. He
said:

“It seems curious now that I should have been dreaming dreams of a
future monarchy and never suspect that the monarchy was already present
and the Republic a thing of the past.”

What he meant, was the political succession that had fostered those
commercial trusts which, in turn, had established party dominion.

To Howells, on his return, Clemens wrote his acknowledgments, and added:

    Mrs. Clemens gets upon the verge of swearing, and goes tearing
    around in an unseemly fury when I enlarge upon the delightful time
    we had in Boston, and she not there to have her share. I have tried
    hard to reproduce Mrs. Howells to her, and have probably not made a
    shining success of it.



XCVIII. “OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI”

Howells had been urging Clemens to do something more for the Atlantic,
specifically something for the January number. Clemens cudgeled his
brains, but finally declared he must give it up:

    Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me day by day with urgings to
    go to work and do that something, but it’s no use. I find I can’t.
    We are in such a state of worry and endless confusion that my head
    won’t go.

Two hours later he sent another hasty line:

    I take back the remark that I can’t write for the January number,
    for Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods, and I got to
    telling him about old Mississippi days of steam-boating glory and
    grandeur as I saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house. He
    said, “What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!” I hadn’t
    thought of that before. Would you like a series of papers to run
    through three months or six or nine--or about four months, say?

Howells welcomed this offer as an echo of his own thought. He had come
from a piloting family himself, and knew the interest that Mark Twain
could put into such a series.

Acting promptly under the new inspiration, Clemens forthwith sent the
first chapter of that monumental, that absolutely unique, series of
papers on Mississippi River life, which to-day constitutes one of his
chief claims to immortality.

His first number was in the nature of an experiment. Perhaps, after all,
the idea would not suit the Atlantic readers.

“Cut it, scarify it, reject it, handle it with entire freedom,” he
wrote, and awaited the result.

The “result” was that Howells expressed his delight:

    The piece about the Mississippi is capital. It almost made the
    water in our ice-pitcher muddy as I read it. I don’t think I shall
    meddle much with it, even in the way of suggestion. The sketch of
    the low-lived little town was so good that I could have wished there
    was more of it. I want the sketches, if you can make them, every
    month.

Mark Twain was now really interested in this new literary venture. He
was fairly saturated with memories. He was writing on the theme that lay
nearest to his heart. Within ten days he reported that he had finished
three of the papers, and had begun the fourth.

And yet I have spoken of nothing but piloting as a science so far, and I
doubt if I ever get beyond that portion of my subject. And I don’t care
to. Any Muggins can write about old days on the Mississippi of five
hundred different kinds, but I am the only man alive that can scribble
about the piloting of that day, and no man has ever tried to scribble
about it yet. Its newness pleases me all the time, and it is about the
only new subject I know of.

He became so enthusiastic presently that he wanted to take Howells with
him on a trip down the Mississippi, with their wives for company, to go
over the old ground again and obtain added material enough for a book.
Howells was willing enough--agreed to go, in fact--but found it hard to
get away. He began to temporize and finally backed out. Clemens tried to
inveigle Osgood into the trip, but without success; also John Hay, but
Hay had a new baby at his house just then--“three days old, and with
a voice beyond price,” he said, offering it as an excuse for
non-acceptance. So the plan for revisiting the river and the conclusion
of the book were held in abeyance for nearly seven years.

Those early piloting chapters, as they appeared in the Atlantic,
constituted Mark Twain’s best literary exhibit up to that time. In some
respects they are his best literature of any time. As pictures of an
intensely interesting phase of life, they are so convincing, so real,
and at the same time of such extraordinary charm and interest, that if
the English language should survive a thousand years, or ten times as
long, they would be as fresh and vivid at the end of that period as
the day they were penned. In them the atmosphere of, the river and its
environment--its pictures, its thousand aspects of life--are reproduced
with what is no less than literary necromancy. Not only does he make you
smell the river you can fairly hear it breathe. On the appearance of the
first number John Hay wrote:

“It is perfect; no more nor less. I don’t see how you do it,” and added,
“you know what my opinion is of time not spent with you.”

Howells wrote:

    You are doing the science of piloting splendidly. Every word
    interesting, and don’t you drop the series till you’ve got every bit
    of anecdote and reminiscence into it.

He let Clemens write the articles to suit himself. Once he said:

    If I might put in my jaw at this point I should say, stick to actual
    fact and character in the thing and give things in detail. All that
    belongs to the old river life is novel, and is now mostly
    historical. Don’t write at any supposed Atlantic audience, but yarn
    it off as if into my sympathetic ear.

Clemens replied that he had no dread of the Atlantic audience; he
declared it was the only audience that did not require a humorist to
“paint himself striped and stand on his head to amuse it.”

The “Old Times” papers ran through seven numbers of the Atlantic. They
were reprinted everywhere by the newspapers, who in that day had little
respect for magazine copyrights, and were promptly pirated in book form
in Canada. They added vastly to Mark Twain’s literary capital, though
Howells informs us that the Atlantic circulation did not thrive
proportionately, for the reason that the newspapers gave the articles
to their readers from advanced sheets of the magazine, even before
the latter could be placed on sale. It so happened that in the January
Atlantic, which contained the first of the Mississippi papers, there
appeared Robert Dale Owen’s article on “Spiritualism,” which brought
such humility both to author and publisher because of the exposure of
the medium Katie King, which came along while the magazine was in press.
Clemens has written this marginal note on the opening page of the copy
at Quarry Farm:

While this number of the Atlantic was being printed the Katie King
manifestations were discovered to be the cheapest, wretchedest shams and
frauds, and were exposed in the newspapers. The awful humiliation of it
unseated Robert Dale Owen’s reason, and he died in the madhouse.



XCIX. A TYPEWRITER, AND A JOKE ON ALDRICH

It was during the trip to Boston with Twichell that Mark Twain saw for
the first time what was then--a brand-new invention, a typewriter; or
it may have been during a subsequent visit, a week or two later. At all
events, he had the machine and was practising on it December 9, 1874,
for he wrote two letters on it that day, one to Howells and the other to
Orion Clemens. In the latter he says:

    I am trying to get the hang of this new-fangled writing-machine, but
    am not making a shining success of it. However, this is the first
    attempt I ever have made, and yet I perceive that I shall soon
    easily acquire a fine facility in its use. I saw the thing in
    Boston the other day and was greatly taken with it.

He goes on to explain the new wonder, and on the whole his first attempt
is a very creditable performance. With his usual enthusiasm over an
innovation, he believes it is going to be a great help to him, and
proclaims its advantages.

This is the letter to Howells, with the errors preserved:

    You needn’t answer this; I am only practicing to get three; anothe
    slip-up there; only practici?ng ti get the hang of the thing. I
    notice I miss fire & get in a good many unnecessary letters &
    punctuation marks. I am simply using you for a target to bang at.
    Blame my cats, but this thing requires genius in order to work it
    just right.

In an article written long after he tells how he was with Nasby when he
first saw the machine in Boston through a window, and how they went in
to see it perform. In the same article he states that he was the first
person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature, and that
he thinks the story of Tom Sawyer was the first type-copied
manuscript.--[Tom Sawyer was not then complete, and had been laid aside.
The first type-copied manuscript was probably early chapters of the
Mississippi story, two discarded typewritten pages of which still
exist.]

The new enthusiasm ran its course and died. Three months later, when
the Remington makers wrote him for a recommendation of the machine, he
replied that he had entirely stopped using it. The typewriter was not
perfect in those days, and the keys did not always respond readily. He
declared it was ruining his morals--that it made him “want to swear.”
 He offered it to Howells because, he said, Howells had no morals
anyway. Howells hesitated, so Clemens traded the machine to Bliss for a
side-saddle. But perhaps Bliss also became afraid of its influence, for
in due time he brought it back. Howells, again tempted, hesitated,
and this time was lost. What eventually became of the machine is not
history.

One of those, happy Atlantic dinners which Howells tells of came about
the end of that year. It was at the Parker House, and Emerson was there;
and Aldrich, and the rest of that group.

“Don’t you dare to refuse the invitation,” said Howells, and naturally
Clemens didn’t, and wrote back:

    I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all night at the
    Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and take
    breakfast with me in the morning. I will have a good room for you
    and a fire. Can’t you tell her it always makes you sick to go home
    late at night or something like that? That sort of thing arouses
    Mrs. Clemens’s sympathies easily.

Two memories of that old dinner remain to-day. Aldrich and Howells
were not satisfied with the kind of neckties that Mark Twain wore (the
old-fashioned black “string” tie, a Western survival), so they made him
a present of two cravats when he set out on his return for Hartford.
Next day he wrote:

    You and Aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful
    --Mrs. Clemens. For months--I may even say years--she has shown an
    unaccountable animosity toward my necktie, even getting up in the
    night to take it with the tongs and blackguard it, sometimes also
    getting so far as to threaten it.

    When I said you and Aldrich had given me two new neckties, and that
    they were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of
    happiness until she found I was going to frame them; then all the
    venom in her nature gathered itself together; insomuch that I, being
    near to a door, went without, perceiving danger.

It is recorded that eventually he wore the neckties, and returned no
more to the earlier mode.

Another memory of that dinner is linked to a demand that Aldrich made of
Clemens that night, for his photograph. Clemens, returning to Hartford,
put up fifty-two different specimens in as many envelopes, with the idea
of sending one a week for a year. Then he concluded that this was too
slow a process, and for a week sent one every morning to “His Grace of
Ponkapog.”

Aldrich stood it for a few days, then protested. “The police,” he said,
“are in the habit of swooping down upon a publication of that sort.”

On New-Year’s no less than twenty pictures came at once--photographs
and prints of Mark Twain, his house, his family, his various belongings.
Aldrich sent a warning then that the perpetrator of this outrage
was known to the police as Mark Twain, alias “The Jumping Frog,” a
well-known California desperado, who would be speedily arrested and
brought to Ponkapog to face his victim. This letter was signed “T.
Bayleigh, Chief of Police,” and on the outside of the envelope there was
a statement that it would be useless for that person to send any more
mail-matter, as the post-office had been blown up. The jolly farce
closed there. It was the sort of thing that both men enjoyed.

Aldrich was writing a story at this time which contained some Western
mining incident and environment. He sent the manuscript to Clemens for
“expert” consideration and advice. Clemens wrote him at great length and
in careful detail. He was fond of Aldrich, regarding him as one of the
most brilliant of men. Once, to Robert Louis Stevenson, he said:

    “Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and
    humorous sayings. None has equaled him, certainly none has
    surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed
    these children of his fancy. Aldrich is always brilliant; he can’t
    help it; he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is
    not speaking you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and
    glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash. Yes,
    he is always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be
    brilliant in hell-you will see.”

Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, said, “I hope not.”

“Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like
a transfigured Adonis backed against a pink sunset.”--[North American
Review, September, 1906.]



C. RAYMOND, MENTAL TELEGRAPHY, ETC.

The Sellers play was given in Hartford, in January (1875), to as many
people as could crowd into the Opera House. Raymond had reached the
perfection of his art by that time, and the townsmen of Mark Twain saw
the play and the actor at their best. Kate Field played the part of
Laura Hawkins, and there was a Hartford girl in the company; also
a Hartford young man, who would one day be about as well known to
playgoers as any playwright or actor that America has produced. His
name was William Gillette, and it was largely due to Mark Twain that
the author of Secret Service and of the dramatic “Sherlock Holmes” got
a fair public start. Clemens and his wife loaned Gillette the three
thousand dollars which tided him through his period of dramatic
education. Their faith in his ability was justified.

Hartford would naturally be enthusiastic on a first “Sellers-Raymond”
 night. At the end of the fourth act there was an urgent demand for the
author of the play, who was supposed to be present. He was not there in
person, but had sent a letter, which Raymond read:

MY DEAR RAYMOND,--I am aware that you are going to be welcomed to our
town by great audiences on both nights of your stay there, and I beg
to add my hearty welcome also, through this note. I cannot come to
the theater on either evening, Raymond, because there is something so
touching about your acting that I can’t stand it.

(I do not mention a couple of colds in my head, because I hardly mind
them as much as I would the erysipelas, but between you and me I would
prefer it if they were rights and lefts.)

And then there is another thing. I have always taken a pride in earning
my living in outside places and spending it in Hartford; I have said
that no good citizen would live on his own people, but go forth and make
it sultry for other communities and fetch home the result; and now at
this late day I find myself in the crushed and bleeding position of
fattening myself upon the spoils of my brethren! Can I support such
grief as this? (This is literary emotion, you understand. Take the money
at the door just the same.)

Once more I welcome you to Hartford, Raymond, but as for me let me stay
at home and blush.

                         Yours truly,  MARK.

The play was equally successful wherever it went. It made what in that
day was regarded as a fortune. One hundred thousand dollars is hardly
too large an estimate of the amount divided between author and actor.
Raymond was a great actor in that part, as he interpreted it, though he
did not interpret it fully, or always in its best way. The finer side,
the subtle, tender side of Colonel Sellers, he was likely to overlook.
Yet, with a natural human self-estimate, Raymond believed he had created
a much greater part than Mark Twain had written. Doubtless from the
point of view of a number of people this was so, though the idea,
was naturally obnoxious to Clemens. In course of time their personal
relations ceased.

Clemens that winter gave another benefit for Father Hawley. In reply to
an invitation to appear in behalf of the poor, he wrote that he had quit
the lecture field, and would not return to the platform unless driven
there by lack of bread. But he added:

By the spirit of that remark I am debarred from delivering this proposed
lecture, and so I fall back upon the letter of it, and emerge upon the
platform for this last and final time because I am confronted by a lack
of bread-among Father Hawley’s flock.

He made an introductory speech at an old-fashioned spelling-bee,
given at the Asylum Hill Church; a breezy, charming talk of which the
following is a sample:

    I don’t see any use in spelling a word right--and never did. I mean
    I don’t see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of
    spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook
    all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I
    have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me;
    there is such a breezy, unfettered originality about his
    orthography. He always spells “kow” with a large “K.” Now that is
    just as good as to spell it with a small one. It is better. It
    gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope. It suggests
    to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.

    He took part in the contest, and in spite of his early reputation,
    was spelled down on the word “chaldron,” which he spelled
    “cauldron,” as he had been taught, while the dictionary used as
    authority gave that form as second choice.

Another time that winter, Clemens read before the Monday Evening Club
a paper on “Universal Suffrage,” which is still remembered by the
surviving members of that time. A paragraph or two will convey its
purport:

    Our marvelous latter-day statesmanship has invented universal
    suffrage. That is the finest feather in our cap. All that we
    require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons
    instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance
    to the reported image of God. He need not know anything whatever;
    he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even be
    known to be a consummate scoundrel. No matter. While he can steer
    clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote of a
    president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince. We
    brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after
    all, for we restrict when we come to the women.

The Monday Evening Club was an organization which included the best
minds of Hartford. Dr. Horace Bushnell, Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, and J.
Hammond Trumbull founded it back in the sixties, and it included such
men as Rev. Dr. Parker, Rev. Dr. Burton, Charles H. Clark, of the
Courant, Warner, and Twichell, with others of their kind. Clemens had
been elected after his first sojourn in England (February, 1873),
and had then read a paper on the “License of the Press.” The club met
alternate Mondays, from October to May. There was one paper for each
evening, and, after the usual fashion of such clubs, the reading was
followed by discussion. Members of that time agree that Mark Twain’s
association with the club had a tendency to give it a life, or at least
an exhilaration, which it had not previously known. His papers were
serious in their purpose he always preferred to be serious--but they
evidenced the magic gift which made whatever he touched turn to literary
jewelry.

Psychic theories and phenomena always attracted Mark Twain. In
thought-transference, especially, he had a frank interest--an interest
awakened and kept alive by certain phenomena--psychic manifestations we
call them now. In his association with Mrs. Clemens it not
infrequently happened that one spoke the other’s thought, or perhaps a
long-procrastinated letter to a friend would bring an answer as quickly
as mailed; but these are things familiar to us all. A more startling
example of thought-communication developed at the time of which we are
writing, an example which raised to a fever-point whatever interest he
may have had in the subject before. (He was always having these vehement
interests--rages we may call them, for it would be inadequate to speak
of them as fads, inasmuch as they tended in the direction of human
enlightenment, or progress, or reform.)

Clemens one morning was lying in bed when, as he says, “suddenly a
red-hot new idea came whistling down into my camp.” The idea was
that the time was ripe for a book that would tell the story of the
Comstock-of the Nevada silver mines. It seemed to him that the person
best qualified for the work was his old friend William Wright--Dan
de Quille. He had not heard from Dan, or of him, for a long time, but
decided to write and urge him to take up the idea. He prepared the
letter, going fully into the details of his plan, as was natural for
him to do, then laid it aside until he could see Bliss and secure his
approval of the scheme from a publishing standpoint. Just a week later,
it was the 9th of March, a letter came--a thick letter bearing a Nevada
postmark, and addressed in a handwriting which he presently recognized
as De Quille’s. To a visitor who was present he said:

“Now I will do a miracle. I will tell you everything this letter
contains--date, signature, and all without breaking the seal.”

He stated what he believed was in the letter. Then he opened it and
showed that he had correctly given its contents, which were the same in
all essential details as those of his own letter, not yet mailed.

In an article on “Mental Telegraphy” (he invented the name) he relates
this instance, with others, and in ‘Following the Equator’ and elsewhere
he records other such happenings. It was one of the “mysteries” in
which he never lost interest, though his concern in it in time became a
passive one.

The result of the De Quille manifestation, however, he has not recorded.
Clemens immediately wrote, urging Dan to come to Hartford for an
extended visit. De Quille came, and put in a happy spring in his
old comrade’s luxurious home, writing ‘The Big Bonanza’, which Bliss
successfully published a year later.

Mark Twain was continually inviting old friends to share his success
with him. Any comrade of former days found welcome in his home as often
as he would come, and for as long as he would stay. Clemens dropped his
own affairs to advise in their undertakings; and if their undertakings
were literary he found them a publisher. He did this for Joaquin Miller
and for Bret Harte, and he was always urging Goodman to make his house a
home.

The Beecher-Tilton trial was the sensation of the spring of 1875, and
Clemens, in common with many others, was greatly worked up over it.
The printed testimony had left him decidedly in doubt as to Beecher’s
innocence, though his blame would seem to have been less for the
possible offense than because of the great leader’s attitude in the
matter. To Twichell he said:

“His quibbling was fatal. Innocent or guilty, he should have made an
unqualified statement in the beginning.”

Together they attended one of the sessions, on a day when Beecher
himself was on the witness-stand. The tension was very great; the
excitement was painful. Twichell thought that Beecher appeared well
under the stress of examination and was deeply sorry for him; Clemens
was far from convinced.

The feeling was especially strong in Hartford, where Henry Ward
Beecher’s relatives were prominent, and animosities grew out of it. They
are all forgotten now; most of those who cherished bitterness are dead.
Any feeling that Clemens had in the matter lasted but a little while.
Howells tells us that when he met him some months after the trial ended,
and was tempted to mention it, Clemens discouraged any discussion of the
event. Says Howells:

    He would only say the man had suffered enough; as if the man had
    expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew his
    penalty. I found that very curious, very delicate. His continued
    blame could not come to the sufferer’s knowledge, but he felt it his
    duty to forbear it.

It was one hundred years, that 19th of April, since the battles of
Lexington and Concord, and there was to be a great celebration. The
Howellses had visited Hartford in March, and the Clemenses were invited
to Cambridge for the celebration. Only Clemens could go, which in the
event proved a good thing perhaps; for when Clemens and Howells set
out for Concord they did not go over to Boston to take the train, but
decided to wait for it at Cambridge. Apparently it did not occur to them
that the train would be jammed the moment the doors were opened at the
Boston station; but when it came along they saw how hopeless was their
chance. They had special invitations and passage from Boston, but these
were only mockeries now. It yeas cold and chilly, and they forlornly set
out in search of some sort of a conveyance. They tramped around in
the mud and raw wind, but vehicles were either filled or engaged, and
drivers and occupants were inclined to jeer at them. Clemens was taken
with an acute attack of indigestion, which made him rather dismal
and savage. Their effort finally ended with his trying to run down a
tally-ho which was empty inside and had a party of Harvard students
riding atop. The students, who did not recognize their would-be fare,
enjoyed the race. They encouraged their pursuer, and perhaps their
driver, with merriment and cheers. Clemens was handicapped by having to
run in the slippery mud, and soon “dropped by the wayside.”

“I am glad,” says Howells, “I cannot recall what he said when he came
back to me.”

They hung about a little longer, then dragged themselves home, slipped
into the house, and built up a fine, cheerful fire on the hearth. They
proposed to practise a deception on Mrs. Howells by pretending they had
been to Concord and returned. But it was no use. Their statements were
flimsy, and guilt was plainly written on their faces. Howells recalls
this incident delightfully, and expresses the belief that the humor of
the situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than the actual
visit to Concord would have been.

Twichell did not have any such trouble in attending the celebration.
He had adventures (he was always having adventures), but they were of a
more successful kind. Clemens heard the tale of them when he returned to
Hartford. He wrote it to Howells:

    Joe Twichell preached morning and evening here last Sunday; took
    midnight train for Boston; got an early breakfast and started by
    rail at 7.30 A.M. for Concord; swelled around there until 1 P.M.,
    seeing everything; then traveled on top of a train to Lexington; saw
    everything there; traveled on top of a train to Boston (with
    hundreds in company), deluged with dust, smoke, and cinders; yelled
    and hurrahed all the way like a school-boy; lay flat down, to dodge
    numerous bridges, and sailed into the depot howling with excitement
    and as black as a chimneysweep; got to Young’s Hotel at 7 P.M.; sat
    down in the reading-room and immediately fell asleep; was promptly
    awakened by a porter, who supposed he was drunk; wandered around an
    hour and a half; then took 9 P.M. train, sat down in a smoking-car,
    and remembered nothing more until awakened by conductor as the train
    came into Hartford at 1.30 A.M. Thinks he had simply a glorious
    time, and wouldn’t have missed the Centennial for the world. He
    would have run out to see us a moment at Cambridge but he was too
    dirty. I wouldn’t have wanted him there; his appalling energy would
    have been an insufferable reproach to mild adventurers like you and
    me.



CI. CONCLUDING “TOM SAWYER”--MARK TWAIN’s “EDITORS”

Meantime the “inspiration tank,” as Clemens sometimes called it, had
filled up again. He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the
story of Tom and Huck, and was working on it steadily. The family
remained in Hartford, and early in July, under full head of steam, he
brought the story to a close. On the 5th he wrote Howells:

    I have finished the story and didn’t take the chap beyond boyhood.
    I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but
    autobiographically, like Gil Blas. I perhaps made a mistake in not
    writing it in the first person. If I went on now, and took him into
    manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in
    literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him.
    It is not a boy’s book at all. It will only be read by adults. It
    is only written for adults.

He would like to see the story in the Atlantic, he said, but doubted the
wisdom of serialization.

“By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him through life (in the
first person), but not Tam Sawyer, he would not make a good character
for it.” From which we get the first glimpse of Huck’s later adventures.

Of course he wanted Howells to look at the story. It was a tremendous
favor to ask, he said, and added, “But I know of no other person whose
judgment I could venture to take, fully and entirely. Don’t hesitate to
say no, for I know how your time is taxed, and I would have honest need
to blush if you said yes.”

“Send on your MS.,” wrote Howells. “You’ve no idea what I may ask you to
do for me some day.”

But Clemens, conscience-stricken, “blushed and weakened,” as he said.
When Howells insisted, he wrote:

    But I will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows:
    dramatize it, if you perceive that you can, and take, for your
    remuneration, half of the first $6,000 which I receive for its
    representation on the stage. You could alter the plot entirely if
    you chose. I could help in the work most cheerfully after you had
    arranged the plot. I have my eye upon two young girls who can play
    Tom and Huck.

Howells in his reply urged. Clemens to do the playwriting himself. He
could never find time, he said, and he doubted whether he could
enter into the spirit of another man’s story. Clemens did begin a
dramatization then or a little later, but it was not completed. Mrs.
Clemens, to whom he had read the story as it proceeded, was as anxious
as her husband for Howells’s opinion, for it was the first extended
piece of fiction Mark Twain had undertaken alone. He carried the
manuscript over to Boston himself, and whatever their doubts may have
been, Howells’s subsequent letter set them at rest. He wrote that he had
sat up till one in the morning to get to the end of it, simply because
it was impossible to leave off.

It is altogether the best boy story I ever read. It will be an immense
success, but I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy’s story;
grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do, and if you should put it
forth as a story of boys’ character from the grown-up point of view you
give the wrong key to it.

Viewed in the light of later events, there has never been any better
literary opinion than that--none that has been more fully justified.

Clemens was delighted. He wrote concerning a point here and there, one
inquiry referring to the use of a certain strong word. Howells’s reply
left no doubt:

    I’d have that swearing out in an instant. I suppose I didn’t notice
    it because the location was so familiar to my Western sense, and so
    exactly the thing Huck would say, but it won’t do for children.

It was in the last chapter, where Huck relates to Tom the sorrows of
reform and tells how they comb him “all to thunder.” In the original,
“They comb me all to hell,” says Huck; which statement, one must agree,
is more effective, more the thing Huck would be likely to say.

Clemens’s acknowledgment of the correction was characteristic:

    Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute she
    lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her
    tongue, “Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?” Then I had
    to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to
    her. Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape
    with my scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go
    a little one-sided?

The Clemens family did not, go to Elmira that year. The children’s
health seemed to require the sea-shore, and in August they went to
Bateman’s Point, Rhode Island, where Clemens most of the time played
tenpins in an alley that had gone to ruin. The balls would not stay on
the track; the pins stood at inebriate angles. It reminded him of the
old billiard-tables of Western mining-camps, and furnished the same
uncertainty of play. It was his delight, after he had become accustomed
to the eccentricities of the alley, to invite in a stranger and watch
his suffering and his frantic effort to score.



CII. “SKETCHES NEW AND OLD”

The long-delayed book of Sketches, contracted for five years before, was
issued that autumn. “The Jumping Frog,” which he had bought from Webb,
was included in the volume, also the French translation which Madame
Blanc (Th. Bentzon) had made for the Revue des deux mondes, with Mark
Twain’s retranslation back into English, a most astonishing performance
in its literal rendition of the French idiom. One example will suffice
here. It is where the stranger says to Smiley, “I don’t see no p’ints
about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.”

Says the French, retranslated:

“Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than
each frog” (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait mieux qu’aucune
grenouille). (If that isn’t grammar gone to seed then I count myself no
judge.--M. T.)

“Possible that you not it saw not,” said Smiley; “possible that you you
comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing;
possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be
but an amateur. Of all manner (de toute maniere) I bet forty dollars
that she batter in jumping, no matter which frog of the county of
Calaveras.”

He included a number of sketches originally published with the Frog,
also a selection from the “Memoranda” and Buffalo Express contributions,
and he put in the story of Auntie Cord, with some matter which had never
hitherto appeared. True Williams illustrated the book, but either it
furnished him no inspiration or he was allowed too much of another sort,
for the pictures do not compare with his earlier work.

Among the new matter in the book were-“Some Fables for Good Old Boys
and Girls,” in which certain wood creatures are supposed to make a
scientific excursion into a place at some time occupied by men. It is
the most pretentious feature of the book, and in its way about as good
as any. Like Gulliver’s Travels, its object was satire, but its result
is also interest.

Clemens was very anxious that Howells should be first to review this
volume. He had a superstition that Howells’s verdicts were echoed by
the lesser reviewers, and that a book was made or damned accordingly;
a belief hardly warranted, for the review has seldom been written that
meant to any book the difference between success and failure. Howells’s
review of Sketches may be offered as a case in point. It was highly
commendatory, much more so than the notice of the ‘Innocents’ had been,
or even that of ‘Roughing It’, also more extensive than the latter. Yet
after the initial sale of some twenty thousand copies, mainly on the
strength of the author’s reputation, the book made a comparatively poor
showing, and soon lagged far behind its predecessors.

We cannot judge, of course, the taste of that day, but it appears now
an unattractive, incoherent volume. The pictures were absurdly bad, the
sketches were of unequal merit. Many of them are amusing, some of them
delightful, but most of them seem ephemeral. If we except “The Jumping
Frog,” and possibly “A True Story” (and the latter was altogether out of
place in the collection), there is no reason to suppose that any of its
contents will escape oblivion. The greater number of the sketches, as
Mark Twain himself presently realized and declared, would better have
been allowed to die.

Howells did, however, take occasion to point out in his review, or at
least to suggest, the more serious side of Mark Twain. He particularly
called attention to “A True Story,” which the reviewers, at the time of
its publication in the Atlantic, had treated lightly, fearing a lurking
joke in it; or it may be they had not read it, for reviewers are busy
people. Howells spoke of it as the choicest piece of work in the volume,
and of its “perfect fidelity to the tragic fact.” He urged the reader
to turn to it again, and to read it as a “simple dramatic report of
reality,” such as had been equaled by no other American writer.

It was in this volume of sketches that Mark Twain first spoke in print
concerning copyright, showing the absurd injustice of discriminating
against literary ownership by statute of limitation. He did this in the
form of an open petition to Congress, asking that all property, real and
personal, should be put on the copyright basis, its period of ownership
limited to a “beneficent term of forty-two years.” Generally this was
regarded as a joke, as in a sense it was; but like most of Mark Twain’s
jokes it was founded on reason and justice.

The approval with which it was received by his literary associates
led him to still further flights. He began a determined crusade for
international copyright laws. It was a transcendental beginning, but it
contained the germ of what, in the course of time, he would be largely
instrumental in bringing to a ripe and magnificent conclusion. In this
first effort he framed a petition to enact laws by which the United
States would declare itself to be for right and justice, regardless of
other nations, and become a good example to the world by refusing to
pirate the books of any foreign author. He wrote to Howells, urging him
to get Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and others to sign this
petition.

I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages, and send him personally
to every author of distinction in the country and corral the rest of
the signatures. Then I’ll have the whole thing lithographed (about one
thousand copies), and move upon the President and Congress in person,
but in the subordinate capacity of the party who is merely the agent of
better and wiser men, or men whom the country cannot venture to laugh
at. I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and
if he should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should
blush, but still I would frame it). And then if Europe chooses to go
on stealing from us we would say, with noble enthusiasm, “American
lawmakers do steal, but not from foreign authors--not from foreign
authors,”.... If we only had some God in the country’s laws, instead
of being in such a sweat to get Him into the Constitution, it would be
better all around.

The petition never reached Congress. Holmes agreed to sign it with a
smile, and the comment that governments were not in the habit of setting
themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue. Longfellow
also pledged himself, as did a few others; but if there was any
general concurrence in the effort there is no memory of it now. Clemens
abandoned the original idea, but remained one of the most persistent and
influential advocates of copyright betterment, and lived to see most of
his dream fulfilled.--[For the petition concerning copyright term in
the United States, see Sketches New and Old. For the petition concerning
international copyright and related matters, see Appendix N, at the end
of last volume.]



CIII. “ATLANTIC” DAYS

It was about this period that Mark Twain began to exhibit openly his
more serious side; that is to say his advocacy of public reforms.
His paper on “Universal Suffrage” had sounded a first note, and his
copyright petitions were of the same spirit. In later years he used to
say that he had always felt it was his mission to teach, to carry the
banner of moral reconstruction, and here at forty we find him furnishing
evidences of this inclination. In the Atlantic for October, 1875, there
was published an unsigned three-page article entitled, “The Curious
Republic of Gondour.” In this article was developed the idea that the
voting privilege should be estimated not by the individuals, but by
their intellectual qualifications. The republic of Gondour was a Utopia,
where this plan had been established:

    It was an odd idea and ingenious. You must understand the
    constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested
    right, and could not be taken away. But the constitution did not
    say that certain individuals might not be given two votes or ten.
    So an amendatory clause was inserted in a quiet way, a clause which
    authorized the enlargement of the suffrage in certain cases to be
    specified by statute....

    The victory was complete. The new law was framed and passed. Under
    it every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote, so
    universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good
    common-school education and no money he had two votes, a high-school
    education gave him four; if he had property, likewise, to the value
    of three thousand sacos he wielded one more vote; for every fifty
    thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was entitled to
    another vote; a University education entitled a man to nine votes,
    even though he owned no property.

The author goes on to show the beneficent results of this enaction;
how the country was benefited and glorified by this stimulus toward
enlightenment and industry. No one ever suspected that Mark Twain was
the author of this fable. It contained almost no trace of his usual
literary manner. Nevertheless he wrote it, and only withheld his name,
as he did in a few other instances, in the fear that the world might
refuse to take him seriously over his own signature or nom de plume.

Howells urged him to follow up the “Gondour” paper; to send some more
reports from that model land. But Clemens was engaged in other things by
that time, and was not pledged altogether to national reforms.

He was writing a skit about a bit of doggerel which was then making
nights and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who in an evil
moment had fallen upon it in some stray newspaper corner. A certain car
line had recently adopted the “punch system,” and posted in its cars,
for the information of passengers and conductor, this placard:

A Blue Trip Slip for an 8 Cents Fare, A Buff Trip Slip for a 6 Cents
Fare, A Pink Trip Slip for a 3 Cents Fare, For Coupon And Transfer,
Punch The Tickets.

Noah Brooks and Isaac Bromley were riding down-town one evening on the
Fourth Avenue line, when Bromley said:

“Brooks, it’s poetry. By George, it’s poetry!”

Brooks followed the direction of Bromley’s finger and read the card of
instructions. They began perfecting the poetic character of the notice,
giving it still more of a rhythmic twist and jingle; arrived at the
Tribune office, W. C. Wyckoff, scientific editor, and Moses P. Handy
lent intellectual and poetic assistance, with this result:

       Conductor, when you receive a fare,

       Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
       A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
       A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
       A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare.
       Punch in the presence of the passenjare!

    CHORUS
       Punch, brothers! Punch with care!
       Punch in the presence of the passenjare!

It was printed, and street-car poetry became popular. Different papers
had a turn at it, and each usually preceded its own effort with all
other examples, as far as perpetrated. Clemens discovered the lines, and
on one of their walks recited them to Twichell. “A Literary Nightmare”
 was written a few days later. In it the author tells how the jingle
took instant and entire possession of him and went waltzing through his
brain; how, when he had finished his breakfast, he couldn’t tell whether
he had eaten anything or not; and how, when he went to finish the novel
he was writing, and took up his pen, he could only get it to say:

Punch in the presence of the passenjare.

He found relief at last in telling it to his reverend friend, that is,
Twichell, upon whom he unloaded it with sad results.

It was an amusing and timely skit, and is worth reading to-day. Its
publication in the Atlantic had the effect of waking up horse-car poetry
all over the world. Howells, going to dine at Ernest Longfellow’s the
day following its appearance, heard his host and Tom Appleton urging
each other to “Punch with care.” The Longfellow ladies had it by heart.
Boston was devastated by it. At home, Howells’s children recited it
to him in chorus. The streets were full of it; in Harvard it became an
epidemic.

It was transformed into other tongues. Even Swinburne, the musical, is
said to have done a French version for the ‘Revue des deux mondes’. *
A St. Louis magazine, The Western, found relief in a Latin anthem with
this chorus:

Pungite, fratres, pungite, Pungite cum amore, Pungite pro vectore,
Diligentissime pungite.

              * LE CHANT DU CONDUCTEUR

           Ayant ete paye, le conducteur
           Percera en pleine vue du voyageur,
           Quand il regoit trois sous un coupon vert,
           Un coupon jaune pour six sous c’est l’affaire,
           Et pour huit sous c’est un coupon couleur
           De rose, en pleine vue du voyageur.

       CHOEUR
           Donc, percez soigneusement, mes freres
           Tout en pleine vue des voyageurs, etc.



CIV. MARK TWAIN AND HIS WIFE

Clemens and his wife traveled to Boston for one of those happy
fore-gatherings with the Howellses, which continued, at one end of
the journey or another, for so many years. There was a luncheon with
Longfellow at Craigie House, and, on the return to Hartford, Clemens
reported to Howells how Mrs. Clemens had thrived on the happiness of the
visit. Also he confesses his punishment for the usual crimes:

    I “caught it” for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her
    coffee, when it was a “good deal better than we get at home.” I
    “caught it” for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing
    her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS.
    when the printers are done with it. I “caught it” once more for
    personating that drunken Colonel James. I “caught it” for
    mentioning that Mr. Longfellow’s picture was slightly damaged; and
    when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I
    had privately suggested to you that we hadn’t any frames, and that
    if you wouldn’t mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the
    madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she
    said:

    “How could you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his
    sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er--”

    “Oh, Howells won’t mind it! You don’t know Howells. Howells is a
    man who--”

    She was gone. But George was the first person she stumbled on in
    the hall, so she took it out of George. I am glad of that, because
    it saved the babies.

Clemens used to admit, at a later day, that his education did not
advance by leaps and bounds, but gradually, very gradually; and it used
to give him a pathetic relief in those after-years, when that sweet
presence had gone out of his life, to tell the way of it, to confess
over-fully, perhaps, what a responsibility he had been to her.

He used to tell how, for a long time, he concealed his profanity from
her; how one morning, when he thought the door was shut between
their bedroom and the bathroom, he was in there dressing and shaving,
accompanying these trying things with language intended only for the
strictest privacy; how presently, when he discovered a button off the
shirt he intended to put on, he hurled it through the window into the
yard with appropriate remarks, followed it with another shirt that
was in the same condition, and added certain collars and neckties and
bath-room requisites, decorating the shrubbery outside, where the people
were going by to church; how in this extreme moment he heard a slight
cough and turned to find that the door was open! There was only one door
to the bath-room, and he knew he had to pass her. He felt pale and sick,
and sat down for a few moments to consider. He decided to assume that
she was asleep, and to walk out and through the room, head up, as if
he had nothing on his conscience. He attempted it, but without success.
Half-way across the room he heard a voice suddenly repeat his last
terrific remark. He turned to see her sitting up in bed, regarding him
with a look as withering as she could find in her gentle soul. The humor
of it struck him.

“Livy,” he said, “did it sound like that?”

“Of course it did,” she said, “only worse. I wanted you to hear just how
it sounded.”

“Livy,” he said, “it would pain me to think that when I swear it sounds
like that. You got the words right, Livy, but you don’t know the tune.”

Yet he never willingly gave her pain, and he adored her and gloried in
her dominion, his life long. Howells speaks of his beautiful and tender
loyalty to her as the “most moving quality of his most faithful soul.”

It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives,
and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all
the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character.

She guarded his work sacredly; and reviewing the manuscripts which
he was induced to discard, and certain edited manuscripts, one gets a
partial idea of what the reading world owes to Olivia Clemens. Of the
discarded manuscripts (he seems seldom to have destroyed them) there
are a multitude, and among them all scarcely one that is not a proof
of her sanity and high regard for his literary honor. They are
amusing--some of them; they are interesting--some of them; they are
strong and virile--some of them; but they are unworthy--most of them,
though a number remain unfinished because theme or interest failed.

Mark Twain was likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up
hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as
with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding
release. As often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea
of what he proposed to do. He would start with a few characters and
situations, trusting in Providence to supply material as needed. So he
was likely to run ashore any time. As for those other attempts--stories
“unavailable” for one reason or another--he was just as apt to
begin those as the better sort, for somehow he could never tell the
difference. That is one of the hall-marks of genius--the thing which
sharply differentiates genius from talent. Genius is likely to rate a
literary disaster as its best work. Talent rarely makes that mistake.

Among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of
authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended to
become a book, “The Second Advent,” a story which opens with a
very doubtful miraculous conception in Arkansas, and leads only to
grotesquery and literary disorder. There is another, “The Autobiography
of a Damn Fool,” a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible;
yet he began it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see
the manuscript, thought it especially good. “Livy wouldn’t have it,”
 he said, “so I gave it up.” There is another, “The Mysterious Chamber,”
 strong and fine in conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the
story of a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door
in an old castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down
into subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this
isolation for twenty years. The question of sustenance was the weak
point in the story. Clemens could invent no way of providing it, except
by means of a waste or conduit from the kitchen into which scraps of
meat, bread, and other items of garbage were thrown. This he thought
sufficient, but Mrs. Clemens did not highly regard such a literary
device. Clemens could think of no good way to improve upon it, so this
effort too was consigned to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept
in his study. To Howells and others, when they came along, he would read
the discarded yarns, and they were delightful enough for such a purpose,
as delightful as the sketches which every artist has, turned face to the
wall.

“Captain Stormfield” lay under the ban for many a year, though never
entirely abandoned. This manuscript was even recommended for publication
by Howells, who has since admitted that it would not have done then; and
indeed, in its original, primitive nakedness it would hardly have done
even in this day of wider toleration.

It should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and
the manuscripts are full of evidence) that Mrs. Clemens was ever
super-sensitive, or narrow, or unliterary in her restraints. She
became his public, as it were, and no man ever had a more open-minded,
clear-headed public than that. For Mark Twain’s reputation it would
have been better had she exercised her editorial prerogative even more
actively--if, in her love for him and her jealousy of his reputation,
she had been even more severe. She did all that lay in her strength,
from the beginning to the end, and if we dwell upon this phase of
their life together it is because it is so large a part of Mark Twain’s
literary story. On her birthday in the year we are now closing (1875) he
wrote her a letter which conveys an acknowledgment of his debt.

LIVY DARLING,--Six years have gone by since I made my first great
success in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since
Providence made preparation for that happy success by sending you
into the world. Every day we live together adds to the security of my
confidence that we can never any more wish to be separated than we can
imagine a regret that we were ever joined. You are dearer to me to-day,
my child, than you were upon the last anniversary of this birthday; you
were dearer then than you were a year before; you have grown more and
more dear from the first of those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that
this precious progression will continue on to the end.

Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and
their gray hairs, without fear and without depression, trusting and
believing that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make
them blessed.

So, with abounding affection for you and our babies I hail this day that
brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades!



VOLUME II, Part 1: 1875-1886



CV. MARK TWAIN AT FORTY

In conversation with John Hay, Hay said to Clemens:

“A man reaches the zenith at forty, the top of the hill. From that time
forward he begins to descend. If you have any great undertaking ahead,
begin it now. You will never be so capable again.”

Of course this was only a theory of Hay’s, a rule where rules do not
apply, where in the end the problem resolves itself into a question of
individualities. John Hay did as great work after forty as ever before,
so did Mark Twain, and both of them gained in intellectual strength and
public honor to the very end.

Yet it must have seemed to many who knew him, and to himself, like
enough, that Mark Twain at forty had reached the pinnacle of his fame
and achievement. His name was on every lip; in whatever environment
observation and argument were likely to be pointed with some saying or
anecdote attributed, rightly or otherwise, to Mark Twain. “As Mark Twain
says,” or, “You know that story of Mark Twain’s,” were universal and
daily commonplaces. It was dazzling, towering fame, not of the best or
most enduring kind as yet, but holding somewhere within it the structure
of immortality.

He was in a constant state of siege, besought by all varieties and
conditions of humanity for favors such as only human need and abnormal
ingenuity can invent. His ever-increasing mail presented a marvelous
exhibition of the human species on undress parade. True, there were
hundreds of appreciative tributes from readers who spoke only out of a
heart’s gratitude; but there were nearly as great a number who came
with a compliment, and added a petition, or a demand, or a suggestion,
usually unwarranted, often impertinent. Politicians, public speakers,
aspiring writers, actors, elocutionists, singers, inventors (most
of them he had never seen or heard of) cheerfully asked him for a
recommendation as to their abilities and projects.

Young men wrote requesting verses or sentiments to be inscribed in young
ladies’ autograph albums; young girls wrote asking him to write the
story of his life, to be used as a school composition; men starting
obscure papers coolly invited him to lend them his name as editor,
assuring him that he would be put to no trouble, and that it would help
advertise his books; a fruitful humorist wrote that he had invented
some five thousand puns, and invited Mark Twain to father this terrific
progeny in book form for a share of the returns. But the list is
endless. He said once:

“The symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for
every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always
seeking the opportunity to grind it.”

Even P. T. Barnum had an ax, the large ax of advertising, and he was
perpetually trying to grind it on Mark Twain’s reputation; in other
words, trying to get him to write something that would help to
popularize “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

There were a good many curious letters-letters from humorists, would-be
and genuine. A bright man in Duluth sent him an old Allen “pepper-box”
 revolver with the statement that it had been found among a pile of bones
under a tree, from the limb of which was suspended a lasso and a buffalo
skull; this as evidence that the weapon was the genuine Allen which
Bemis had lost on that memorable Overland buffalo-hunt. Mark Twain
enjoyed that, and kept the old pepper-box as long as he lived. There
were letters from people with fads; letters from cranks of every
description; curious letters even from friends. Reginald Cholmondeley,
that lovely eccentric of Condover Hall, where Mr. and Mrs. Clemens had
spent some halcyon days in 1873, wrote him invitations to be at his
castle on a certain day, naming the hour, and adding that he had asked
friends to meet him. Cholmondeley had a fancy for birds, and spared
nothing to improve his collection. Once he wrote Clemens asking him
to collect for him two hundred and five American specimens, naming the
varieties and the amount which he was to pay for each. Clemens was to
catch these birds and bring them over to England, arriving at Condover
on a certain day, when there would be friends to meet him, of course.

Then there was a report which came now and then from another English
castle--the minutes of a certain “Mark Twain Club,” all neatly and
elaborately written out, with the speech of each member and the
discussions which had followed--the work, he found out later, of another
eccentric; for there was no Mark Twain Club, the reports being just
the mental diversion of a rich young man, with nothing else to do.--[In
Following the Equator Clemens combined these two pleasant characters in
one story, with elaborations.]

Letters came queerly addressed. There is one envelope still in
existence which bears Clemens’s name in elaborate design and a very
good silhouette likeness, the work of some talented artist. “Mark Twain,
United States,” was a common address; “Mark Twain, The World,” was also
used; “Mark Twain, Somewhere,” mailed in a foreign country, reached him
promptly, and “Mark Twain, Anywhere,” found its way to Hartford in due
season. Then there was a letter (though this was later; he was abroad
at the time), mailed by Brander Matthews and Francis Wilson, addressed,
“Mark Twain, God Knows Where.” It found him after traveling half around
the world on its errand, and in his answer he said, “He did.” Then some
one sent a letter addressed, “The Devil Knows Where.” Which also reached
him, and he answered, “He did, too.”

Surely this was the farthest horizon of fame.

Countless Mark Twain anecdotes are told of this period, of every period,
and will be told and personally vouched for so long as the last soul of
his generation remains alive. For seventy years longer, perhaps, there
will be those who will relate “personal recollections” of Mark Twain.
Many of them will be interesting; some of them will be true; most of
them will become history at last. It is too soon to make history of
much of this drift now. It is only safe to admit a few authenticated
examples.

It happens that one of the oftenest-told anecdotes has been the least
elaborated. It is the one about his call on Mrs. Stowe. Twichell’s
journal entry, set down at the time, verifies it:

Mrs. Stowe was leaving for Florida one morning, and Clemens ran
over early to say good-by. On his return Mrs. Clemens regarded him
disapprovingly:

“Why, Youth,” she said, “you haven’t on any collar and tie.”

He said nothing, but went up to his room, did up these items in a neat
package, and sent it over by a servant, with a line:

“Herewith receive a call from the rest of me.”

Mrs. Stowe returned a witty note, in which she said that he had
discovered a new principle, the principle of making calls by
instalments, and asked whether, in extreme cases, a man might not send
his hat, coat, and boots and be otherwise excused.

Col. Henry Watterson tells the story of an after-theater supper at
the Brevoort House, where Murat Halstead, Mark Twain, and himself were
present. A reporter sent in a card for Colonel Watterson, who was about
to deny himself when Clemens said:

“Give it to me; I’ll fix it.” And left the table. He came back in a
moment and beckoned to Watterson.

“He is young and as innocent as a lamb,” he said. “I represented myself
as your secretary. I said that you were not here, but if Mr. Halstead
would do as well I would fetch him out. I’ll introduce you as Halstead,
and we’ll have some fun.”

Now, while Watterson and Halstead were always good friends, they were
political enemies. It was a political season and the reporter wanted
that kind of an interview. Watterson gave it to him, repudiating every
principle that Halstead stood for, reversing him in every expressed
opinion. Halstead was for hard money and given to flying the “bloody
shirt” of sectional prejudice; Watterson lowered the bloody shirt and
declared for greenbacks in Halstead’s name. Then he and Clemens returned
to the table and told frankly what they had done. Of course, nobody
believed it. The report passed the World night-editor, and appeared,
next morning. Halstead woke up, then, and wrote a note to the World,
denying the interview throughout. The World printed his note with the
added line:

“When Mr. Halstead saw our reporter he had dined.”

It required John Hay (then on the Tribune) to place the joke where it
belonged.

There is a Lotos Club anecdote of Mark Twain that carries the internal
evidence of truth. Saturday evening at the Lotos always brought a
gathering of the “wits,” and on certain evenings--“Hens and chickens”
 nights--each man had to tell a story, make a speech, or sing a song. On
one evening a young man, an invited guest, was called upon and recited a
very long poem.

One by one those who sat within easy reach of the various exits
melted away, until no one remained but Mark Twain. Perhaps he saw the
earnestness of the young man, and sympathized with it. He may have
remembered a time when he would have been grateful for one such
attentive auditor. At all events, he sat perfectly still, never taking
his eyes from the reader, never showing the least inclination toward
discomfort or impatience, but listening, as with rapt attention, to
the very last line. Douglas Taylor, one of the faithful Saturday-night
members, said to him later:

“Mark, how did you manage to sit through that dreary, interminable
poem?”

“Well,” he said, “that young man thought he had a divine message to
deliver, and I thought he was entitled to at least one auditor, so I
stayed with him.”

We may believe that for that one auditor the young author was willing to
sacrifice all the others.

One might continue these anecdotes for as long as the young man’s poem
lasted, and perhaps hold as large an audience. But anecdotes are not all
of history. These are set down because they reflect a phase of the man
and an aspect of his life at this period. For at the most we can only
present an angle here and there, and tell a little of the story, letting
each reader from his fancy construct the rest.



CVI. HIS FIRST STAGE APPEARANCE

Once that winter the Monday Evening Club met at Mark Twain’s home, and
instead of the usual essay he read them a story: “The Facts Concerning
the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.” It was the story of a
man’s warfare with a personified conscience--a sort of “William Wilson”
 idea, though less weird, less somber, and with more actuality, more
verisimilitude. It was, in fact, autobiographical, a setting-down of the
author’s daily self-chidings. The climax, where conscience is slain, is
a startling picture which appeals to most of humanity. So vivid is it
all, that it is difficult in places not to believe in the reality of the
tale, though the allegory is always present.

The club was deeply impressed by the little fictional sermon. One of its
ministerial members offered his pulpit for the next Sunday if Mark
Twain would deliver it to his congregation. Howells welcomed it for the
Atlantic, and published it in June. It was immensely successful at the
time, though for some reason it seems to be little known or remembered
to-day. Now and then a reader mentions it, always with enthusiasm.
Howells referred to it repeatedly in his letters, and finally persuaded
Clemens to let Osgood bring it out, with “A True Story,” in dainty,
booklet form. If the reader does not already know the tale, it will pay
him to look it up and read it, and then to read it again.

Meantime Tom Sawyer remained unpublished.

“Get Bliss to hurry it up!” wrote Howells. “That boy is going to make a
prodigious hit.”

But Clemens delayed the book, to find some means to outwit the Canadian
pirates, who thus far had laid hands on everything, and now were
clamoring at the Atlantic because there was no more to steal.

Moncure D. Conway was in America, and agreed to take the manuscript
of Sawyer to London and arrange for its publication and copyright. In
Conway’s Memoirs he speaks of Mark Twain’s beautiful home, comparing it
and its surroundings with the homes of Surrey, England. He tells of an
entertainment given to Harriet Beecher Stowe, a sort of animated jarley
wax-works. Clemens and Conway went over as if to pay a call, when
presently the old lady was rather startled by an invasion of costumed.
figures. Clemens rose and began introducing them in his gay, fanciful
fashion. He began with a knight in full armor, saying, as if in an
aside, “Bring along that tinshop,” and went on to tell the romance of
the knight’s achievements.

Conway read Tom Sawyer on the ship and was greatly excited over
it. Later, in London, he lectured on it, arranging meantime for its
publication with Chatto & Windus, thus establishing a friendly business
relation with that firm which Mark Twain continued during his lifetime.

Clemens lent himself to a number of institutional amusements that year,
and on the 26th of April, 1876, made his first public appearance on the
dramatic stage.

It was an amateur performance, but not of the usual kind. There was
genuine dramatic talent in Hartford, and the old play of the “Loan of
the Lover,” with Mark Twain as Peter Spuyk and Miss Helen Smith--[Now
Mrs. William W. Ellsworth.]--as Gertrude, with a support sufficient
for their needs, gave a performance that probably furnished as much
entertainment as that pleasant old play is capable of providing. Mark
Twain had in him the making of a great actor. Henry Irving once said to
him:

“You made a mistake by not adopting the stage as a profession. You would
have made even a greater actor than a writer.”

Yet it is unlikely that he would ever have been satisfied with the
stage. He had too many original literary ideas. He would never have been
satisfied to repeat the same part over and over again, night after night
from week to month, and from month to year. He could not stick to the
author’s lines even for one night. In his performance of the easy-going,
thick-headed Peter Spuyk his impromptu additions to the lines made it
hard on the company, who found their cues all at sixes and sevens, but
it delighted the audience beyond measure. No such impersonation of that.
character was ever given before, or ever will be given again. It was
repeated with new and astonishing variations on the part of Peter,
and it could have been put on for a long run. Augustin Daly wrote
immediately, offering the Fifth Avenue Theater for a “benefit”
 performance, and again, a few days later, urging acceptance. “Not for
one night, but for many.”

Clemens was tempted, no doubt. Perhaps, if he had yielded, he would
today have had one more claim on immortality.



CVII. HOWELLS, CLEMENS, AND “GEORGE”

Howells and Clemens were visiting back and forth rather oftener just
then. Clemens was particularly fond of the Boston crowd--Aldrich,
Fields, Osgood, and the rest--delighting in those luncheons or dinners
which Osgood, that hospitable publisher, was always giving on one
pretext or another. No man ever loved company more than Osgood, or to
play the part of host and pay for the enjoyment of others. His dinners
were elaborate affairs, where the sages and poets and wits of that day
(and sometimes their wives) gathered. They were happy reunions, those
fore-gatherings, though perhaps a more intimate enjoyment was found at
the luncheons, where only two or three were invited, usually Aldrich,
Howells, and Clemens, and the talk continued through the afternoon and
into the deepening twilight, such company and such twilight as somehow
one seems never to find any more.

On one of the visits which Howells made to Hartford that year he took
his son John, then a small boy, with him. John was about six years old
at the time, with his head full of stories of Aladdin, and of other
Arabian fancies. On the way over his father said to him:

“Now, John, you will see a perfect palace.”

They arrived, and John was awed into silence by the magnificence and
splendors of his surroundings until they went to the bath-room to wash
off the dust of travel. There he happened to notice a cake of pink soap.

“Why,” he said, “they’ve even got their soap painted!” Next morning
he woke early--they were occupying the mahogany room on the ground
floor--and slipping out through the library, and to the door of
the dining-room, he saw the colored butler, George--the immortal
George--setting the breakfast-table. He hurriedly tiptoed back and
whispered to his father:

“Come quick! The slave is setting the table!”

This being the second mention of George, it seems proper here that he
should be formally presented. Clemens used to say that George came one
day to wash windows and remained eighteen years. He was precisely
the sort of character that Mark Twain loved. He had formerly been the
body-servant of an army general and was typically racially Southern,
with those delightful attributes of wit and policy and gentleness which
go with the best type of negro character. The children loved him no less
than did their father. Mrs. Clemens likewise had a weakness for George,
though she did not approve of him. George’s morals were defective. He
was an inveterate gambler. He would bet on anything, though prudently
and with knowledge. He would investigate before he invested. If he
placed his money on a horse, he knew the horse’s pedigree and the
pedigree of the horses against it, also of their riders. If he invested
in an election, he knew all about the candidates. He had agents
among his own race, and among the whites as well, to supply him with
information. He kept them faithful to him by lending them money--at
ruinous interest. He buttonholed Mark Twain’s callers while he was
removing their coats concerning the political situation, much to the
chagrin of Mrs. Clemens, who protested, though vainly, for the men liked
George and his ways, and upheld him in his iniquities.

Mrs. Clemens’s disapproval of George reached the point, now and then,
where she declared he could not remain.

She even discharged him once, but next morning George was at the
breakfast-table, in attendance, as usual. Mrs. Clemens looked at him
gravely:

“George,” she said, “didn’t I discharge you yesterday?”

“Yes, Mis’ Clemens, but I knew you couldn’t get along without me, so I
thought I’d better stay a while.”

In one of the letters to Howells, Clemens wrote:

When George first came he was one of the most religious of men. He had
but one fault--young George Washington’s. But I have trained him; and
now it fairly breaks Mrs. Clemens’s heart to hear him stand at that
front door and lie to an unwelcome visitor.

George was a fine diplomat. He would come up to the billiard-room with a
card or message from some one waiting below, and Clemens would fling his
soul into a sultry denial which became a soothing and balmy subterfuge
before it reached the front door.

The “slave” must have been setting the table in good season, for the
Clemens breakfasts were likely to be late. They usually came along about
nine o’clock, by which time Howells and John were fairly clawing with
hunger.

Clemens did not have an early appetite, but when it came it was a good
one. Breakfast and dinner were his important meals. He seldom ate at
all during the middle of the day, though if guests were present he would
join them at luncheon-time and walk up and down while they were eating,
talking and gesticulating in his fervent, fascinating way. Sometimes
Mrs. Clemens would say:

“Oh, Youth, do come and sit down with us. We can listen so much better.”

But he seldom did. At dinner, too, it was his habit, between the
courses, to rise from the table and walk up and down the room, waving
his napkin and talking!--talking in a strain and with a charm that he
could never quite equal with his pen. It’s the opinion of most people
who knew Mark Twain personally that his impromptu utterances, delivered
with that ineffable quality of speech, manifested the culmination of his
genius.

When Clemens came to Boston the Howells household was regulated, or
rather unregulated, without regard to former routine. Mark Twain’s
personality was of a sort that unconsciously compelled the general
attendance of any household. The reader may recall Josh Billings’s
remark on the subject. Howells tells how they kept their guest to
themselves when he visited their home in Cambridge, permitting him to
indulge in as many unconventions as he chose; how Clemens would take
a room at the Parker House, leaving the gas burning day and night, and
perhaps arrive at Cambridge, after a dinner or a reading, in evening
dress and slippers, and joyously remain with them for a day or more in
that guise, slipping on an overcoat and a pair of rubbers when they went
for a walk. Also, how he smoked continuously in every room of the house,
smoked during every waking moment, and how Howells, mindful of his
insurance, sometimes slipped in and removed the still-burning cigar
after he was asleep.

Clemens had difficulty in getting to sleep in that earlier day, and for
a time found it soothing to drink a little champagne on retiring. Once,
when he arrived in Boston, Howells said:

“Clemens, we’ve laid in a bottle of champagne for you.”

But he answered:

“Oh, that’s no good any more. Beer’s the thing.”

So Howells provided the beer, and always afterward had a vision of his
guest going up-stairs that night with a pint bottle under each arm.

He invented other methods of inducing slumber as the years went by,
and at one time found that this precious boon came more easily when he
stretched himself on the bath-room floor.

He was a perpetual joy to the Howells family when he was there, even
though the household required a general reorganization when he was gone.

Mildred Howells remembers how, as a very little girl, her mother
cautioned her not to ask for anything she wanted at the table when
company was present, but to speak privately of it to her. Miss Howells
declares that while Mark Twain was their guest she nearly starved
because it was impossible to get her mother’s attention; and Mrs.
Howells, after one of those visits of hilarity and disorder, said:

“Well, it ‘most kills me, but it pays,” a remark which Clemens vastly
enjoyed. Howells himself once wrote:

Your visit was a perfect ovation for us; we never enjoy anything so much
as those visits of yours. The smoke and the Scotch and the late hours
almost kill us; but we look each other in the eyes when you are gone,
and say what a glorious time it was, and air the library, and begin
sleeping and longing to have you back again....



CVIII. SUMMER LABORS AT QUARRY FARM

They went to Elmira, that summer of ‘76, to be “hermits and eschew caves
and live in the sun,” as Clemens wrote in a letter to Dr. Brown. They
returned to the place as to Paradise: Clemens to his study and the books
which he always called for, Mrs. Clemens to a blessed relief from social
obligations, the children to the shady play-places, the green, sloping
hill, where they could race and tumble, and to all their animal friends.

Susy was really growing up. She had had several birthdays, quite grand
affairs, when she had been brought down in the morning, decked, and
with proper ceremonies, with subsequent celebration. She was a strange,
thoughtful child, much given to reflecting on the power and presence of
infinity, for she was religiously taught. Down in the city, one night,
there was a grand display of fireworks, and the hilltop was a good place
from which to enjoy it; but it grew late after a little, and Susy was
ordered to bed. She said, thoughtfully:

“I wish I could sit up all night, as God does.”

The baby, whom they still called “Bay,” was a tiny, brown creature who
liked to romp in the sun and be rocked to sleep at night with a
song. Clemens often took them for extended’ walks, pushing Bay in her
carriage. Once, in a preoccupied moment, he let go of the little vehicle
and it started downhill, gaining speed rapidly.

He awoke then, and set off in wild pursuit. Before he could overtake the
runaway carriage it had turned to the roadside and upset. Bay was lying
among the stones and her head was bleeding. Hastily binding the wound
with a handkerchief he started full speed with her up the hill toward
the house, calling for restoratives as he came. It was no serious
matter. The little girl was strong and did not readily give way to
affliction.

The children were unlike: Susy was all contemplation and nerves; Bay
serene and practical. It was said, when a pet cat died--this was
some years later--that Susy deeply reflected as to its life here and
hereafter, while Bay was concerned only as to the style of its funeral.
Susy showed early her father’s quaintness of remark. Once they bought
her a heavier pair of shoes than she approved of. She was not in the
best of humors during the day, and that night, when at prayer-time her
mother said, “Now, Susy, put your thoughts on God,” she answered, “Mama,
I can’t with those shoes.”

Clemens worked steadily that summer and did a variety of things. He
had given up a novel, begun with much enthusiasm, but he had undertaken
another long manuscript. By the middle of August he had written
several hundred pages of a story which was to be a continuation of Tam
Sawyer--The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now, here is a curious phase
of genius. The novel which for a time had filled him with enthusiasm
and faith had no important literary value, whereas, concerning this new
tale, he says:

“I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have gone, and may possibly
pigeonhole or burn the manuscript when it is done”--this of the story
which, of his books of pure fiction, will perhaps longest survive. He
did, in fact, give the story up, and without much regret, when it was
about half completed, and let it lie unfinished for years.

He wrote one short tale, “The Canvasser’s Story,” a burlesque of no
special distinction, and he projected for the Atlantic a scheme of
“blindfold novelettes,” a series of stories to be written by well-known
authors and others, each to be constructed on the same plot. One can
easily imagine Clemens’s enthusiasm over a banal project like that; his
impulses were always rainbow-hued, whether valuable or not; but it is
curious that Howells should welcome and even encourage an enterprise so
far removed from all the traditions of art. It fell to pieces, at
last, of inherent misconstruction. The title was to be, “A Murder and
a Marriage.” Clemens could not arrive at a logical climax that did not
bring the marriage and the hanging on the same day.

The Atlantic started its “Contributors’ Club,” and Howells wrote to
Clemens for a paragraph or more of personal opinion on any subject,
assuring him that he could “spit his spite” out at somebody or
something as if it were a passage from a letter. That was a fairly large
permission to give Mark Twain. The paragraph he sent was the sort of
thing he would write with glee, and hug himself over in the thought of
Howells’s necessity of rejecting it. In the accompanying note he said:

Say, Boss, do you want this to lighten up your old freight-train with? I
suppose you won’t, but then it won’t take long to say, so.

He was always sending impossible offerings to the magazines; innocently
enough sometimes, but often out of pure mischievousness. Yet they
were constantly after him, for they knew they were likely to get a
first-water gem. Mary Mopes Dodge, of St. Nicholas, wrote time and
again, and finally said:

“I know a man who was persecuted by an editor till he went distracted.”

In his reading that year at the farm he gave more than customary
attention to one of his favorite books, Pepys’ Diary, that captivating
old record which no one can follow continuously without catching the
infection of its manner and the desire of imitation. He had been reading
diligently one day, when he determined to try his hand on an imaginary
record of conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the
phrase of the period. The result was Fireside Conversation in the Time
of Queen Elizabeth, or, as he later called it, 1601. The “conversation,”
 recorded by a supposed Pepys of that period, was written with all the
outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside
sociabilities were limited only by the range of loosened fancy,
vocabulary, and physical performance, and not by any bounds of
convention. Howells has spoken of Mark Twain’s “Elizabethan breadth of
parlance,” and how he, Howells, was always hiding away in discreet holes
and corners the letters in which Clemens had “loosed his bold fancy to
stoop on rank suggestion.” “I could not bear to burn them,” he declares,
“and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them.”

In the 1601 Mark Twain outdid himself in the Elizabethan field. It was
written as a letter to that robust divine, Rev. Joseph Twichell, who
had no special scruples concerning Shakespearian parlance and customs.
Before it was mailed it was shown to David Gray, who was spending a
Sunday at Elmira. Gray said:

“Print it and put your name to it, Mark. You have never done a greater
piece of work than that.”

John Hay, whom it also reached in due time, pronounce it a classic--a
“most exquisite bit of old English morality.” Hay surreptitiously
permitted some proofs to be made of it, and it has been circulated
privately, though sparingly, ever since. At one time a special font
of antique type was made for it and one hundred copies were taken on
hand-made paper. They would easily bring a hundred dollars each to-day.

1601 is a genuine classic, as classics of that sort go. It is better
than the gross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps, in some day to
come, the taste that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give
this literary refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional
writings of Mark Twain. Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is
purely a matter of environment and point of view.--[In a note-book of
a later period Clemens himself wrote: “It depends on who writes a
thing whether it is coarse or not. I once wrote a conversation between
Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Sir W. Raleigh, Lord
Bacon, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, and a stupid old nobleman--this latter
being cup-bearer to the queen and ostensible reporter of the talk.

“There were four maids of honor present and a sweet young girl two years
younger than the boy Beaumont. I built a conversation which could have
happened--I used words such as were used at that time--1601. I sent it
anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and the sender!
But that man was a praiser of Rabelais, and had been saying, ‘O that we
had a Rabelais!’ I judged that I could furnish him one.”]

Eighteen hundred and seventy-six was a Presidential year--the year
of the Hayes-Tilden campaign. Clemens and Howells were both warm
Republicans and actively interested in the outcome, Clemens, as he
confessed, for the first time in his life. Before his return to Hartford
he announced himself publicly as a Hayes man, made so by Governor
Hayes’s letter of acceptance, which, he said, “expresses my own
political convictions.” His politics had not been generally known up to
that time, and a Tilden and Hendricks club in Jersey City had
invited him to be present and give them some political counsel, at a
flag-raising. He wrote, declining pleasantly enough, then added:

“You have asked me for some political counsel or advice: In view of Mr.
Tilden’s Civil War record my advice is not to raise the flag.”

He wrote Howells: “If Tilden is elected I think the entire country will
go pretty straight to--Mrs. Howells’s bad place.”

Howells was writing a campaign biography of Hayes, which he hoped would
have a large sale, and Clemens urged him to get it out quickly and save
the country. Howells, working like a beaver, in turn urged Clemens to
take the field in the cause. Returning to Hartford, Clemens presided
at a political rally and made a speech, the most widely quoted of the
campaign. All papers, without distinction as to party, quoted it, and
all readers, regardless of politics, read it with joy.

Yet conditions did not improve. When Howells’s book had been out a
reasonable length of time he wrote that it had sold only two thousand
copies.

“There’s success for you,” he said. “It makes me despair of the
Republic, I can tell you.”

Clemens, however, did not lose faith, and went on shouting for Hayes and
damning Tilden till the final vote was cast. In later life he changed
his mind about Tilden (as did many others) through sympathy. Sympathy
could make--Mark Twain change his mind any time. He stood for the right,
but, above all, for justice. He stood for the wronged, regardless of all
other things.



CIX. THE PUBLIC APPEARANCE OF “TOM SAWYER”

Clemens gave a few readings in Boston and Philadelphia, but when urged
to go elsewhere made the excuse that he was having his portrait painted
and could not leave home.

As a matter of fact, he was enjoying himself with Frank Millet, who
had been invited to the house to do the portrait and had captured the
fervent admiration of the whole family. Millet was young, handsome, and
lively; Clemens couldn’t see enough of him, the children adored him
and added his name to the prayer which included each member of the
household--the “Holy Family,” Clemens called it.

Millet had brought with him but one piece of canvas for the portrait,
and when the first sketch was finished Mrs. Clemens was so delighted
with it that she did not wish him to touch it again. She was afraid of
losing some particular feeling in it which she valued. Millet went to
the city for another canvas and Clemens accompanied him. While Millet
was doing his shopping it happened to occur to Clemens that it would
be well to fill in the time by having his hair cut. He left word with a
clerk to tell Millet that he had gone across the street. By and by the
artist came over, and nearly wept with despair when he saw his subject
sheared of the auburn, gray-sprinkled aureola that had made his first
sketch a success. He tried it again, and the result was an excellent
likeness, but it never satisfied Millet.

The ‘Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ appeared late in December (1876), and
immediately took its place as foremost of American stories of boy life,
a place which it unquestionably holds to this day. We have already
considered the personal details of this story, for they were essentially
nothing more than the various aspects of Mark Twain’s own boyhood. It is
only necessary to add a word concerning the elaboration of this period
in literary form.

From every point it is a masterpiece, this picture of boy life in a
little lazy, drowsy town, with all the irresponsibility and general
disreputability of boy character coupled with that indefinable,
formless, elusive something we call boy conscience, which is more likely
to be boy terror and a latent instinct of manliness. These things are
so truly portrayed that every boy and man reader finds the tale fitting
into his own remembered years, as if it had grown there. Every boy has
played off sick to escape school; every boy has reflected in his heart
Tom’s picture of himself being brought home dead, and gloated over the
stricken consciences of those who had blighted his young life; every
boy--of that day, at least--every normal, respectable boy, grew up
to “fear God and dread the Sunday-school,” as Howells puts it in his
review.

As for the story itself, the narrative of it, it is pure delight. The
pirate camp on the island is simply boy heaven. What boy, for instance,
would not change any other glory or boon that the world holds for this:

    They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty
    steps within the somber depths of the forest, and then cooked some
    bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn
    “pone” stock they had brought. It seemed glorious sport to be
    feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an
    unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and
    they said they never would return to civilization. The climbing
    fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared
    tree-trunks of their forest-temple, and upon the varnished foliage
    and the festooning vines.

There is a magic in it. Mark Twain, when he wrote it, felt renewed
in him all the old fascination of those days and nights with Tom
Blankenship, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys on Glasscock’s Island.
Everywhere in Tom Sawyer there is a quality, entirely apart from the
humor and the narrative, which the younger reader is likely to overlook.
No one forgets the whitewashing scene, but not many of us, from our
early reading, recall this delicious bit of description which introduces
it:

    The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms
    filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was
    green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a
    delectable land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.

Tom’s night visit home; the graveyard scene, with the murder of Dr.
Robinson; the adventures of Tom and Becky in the cave--these are all
marvelously invented. Literary thrill touches the ultimate in one
incident of the cave episode. Brander Matthews has written:

    Nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment
    in the cave when the boy and girl are lost in the darkness, and when
    Tom suddenly sees a human hand bearing a light, and then finds that
    the hand is the hand of Indian Joe, his one mortal enemy. I have
    always thought that the vision of the hand in the cave in Tom Sawyer
    was one of the very finest things in the literature of adventure
    since Robinson Crusoe first saw a single footprint in the sand of
    the sea-shore.

Mark Twain’s invention was not always a reliable quantity, but with that
eccentricity which goes with any attribute of genius, it was likely at
any moment to rise supreme. If to the critical, hardened reader the
tale seems a shade overdone here and there, a trifle extravagant in its
delineations, let him go back to his first long-ago reading of it and
see if he recalls anything but his pure delight in it then. As a boy’s
story it has not been equaled.

Tom Sawyer has ranked in popularity with Roughing It.

Its sales go steadily on from year to year, and are likely to continue
so long as boys and girls do not change, and men and women remember.
--[Col. Henry Watterson, when he finished Tom Sawyer, wrote: “I have
just laid down Tom Sawyer, and cannot resist the pressure. It is
immense! I read every word of it, didn’t skip a line, and nearly
disgraced myself several times in the presence of a sleeping-car full
of honorable and pious people. Once I had to get to one side and have a
cry, and as for an internal compound of laughter and tears there was no
end to it.... The ‘funeral’ of the boys, the cave business, and the
hunt for the hidden treasure are as dramatic as anything I know of in
fiction, while the pathos--particularly everything relating to Huck
and Aunt Polly--makes a cross between Dickens’s skill and Thackeray’s
nature, which, resembling neither, is thoroughly impressive and
original.”]



CX. MARK TWAIN AND BRET HARTE WRITE A PLAY

It was the fall and winter of ‘76 that Bret Harte came to Hartford and
collaborated with Mark Twain on the play “Ah Sin,” a comedy-drama, or
melodrama, written for Charles T. Parsloe, the great impersonator
of Chinese character. Harte had written a successful play which
unfortunately he had sold outright for no great sum, and was eager
for another venture. Harte had the dramatic sense and constructive
invention. He also had humor, but he felt the need of the sort of humor
that Mark Twain could furnish. Furthermore, he believed that a play
backed by both their reputations must start with great advantages.
Clemens also realized these things, and the arrangement was made.
Speaking of their method of working, Clemens once said:

“Well, Bret came down to Hartford and we talked it over, and then Bret
wrote it while I played billiards, but of course I had to go over it
to get the dialect right. Bret never did know anything about dialect.”
 Which is hardly a fair statement of the case. They both worked on the
play, and worked hard.

During the period of its construction Harte had an order for a story
which he said he must finish at once, as he needed the money. It must
be delivered by the following night, and he insisted that he must be
getting at it without a moment’s delay. Still he seemed in no haste to
begin. The evening passed; bedtime came. Then he asked that an open fire
might be made in his room and a bottle of whisky sent up, in case he
needed something to keep him awake. George attended to these matters,
and nothing more was heard of Harte until very early next morning, when
he rang for George and asked for a fresh fire and an additional supply
of whisky. At breakfast-time he appeared, fresh, rosy, and elate, with
the announcement that his story was complete.

That forenoon the Saturday Morning Club met at the Clemens home. It
was a young women’s club, of which Mark Twain was a sort of honorary
member--a club for the purpose of intellectual advancement, somewhat on
the order of the Monday Evening Club of men, except that the papers read
before it were not prepared by members, but by men and women prominent
in some field of intellectual progress. Bret Harte had agreed to read
to them on this particular occasion, and he gaily appeared and gave them
the story just finished, “Thankful Blossom,” a tale which Mark Twain
always regarded as one of Harte’s very best.

The new play, “Ah Sin,” by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, was put on at
Washington, at the National Theater, on the evening of May 7, 1877. It
had been widely exploited in the newspapers, and the fame of the authors
insured a crowded opening. Clemens was unable to go over on account of
a sudden attack of bronchitis. Parsloe was nervous accordingly, and the
presence of Harte does not seem to have added to his happiness.

“I am not very well myself,” he wrote to Clemens. “The excitement of the
first night is bad enough, but to have the annoyance with Harte that I
have is too much for a new beginner.”

Nevertheless, the play seems to have gone well, with Parsloe as Ah
Sin--a Chinese laundryman who was also a great number of other diverting
things--with a fair support and a happy-go-lucky presentation of
frontier life, which included a supposed murder, a false accusation, and
a general clearing-up of mystery by the pleasant and wily and useful
and entertaining Ah Sin. It was not a great play. It was neither very
coherent nor convincing, but it had a lot of good fun in it, with
character parts which, if not faithful to life, were faithful enough to
the public conception of it to be amusing and exciting. At the end
of each act not only Parsloe, but also the principal members of the
company, were called before the curtain for special acknowledgments.
When it was over there was a general call for Ah Sin, who came before
the curtain and read a telegram.

CHARLES T. PARSLOE,--I am on the sick-list, and therefore cannot come to
Washington; but I have prepared two speeches--one to deliver in event of
failure of the play, and the other if successful. Please tell me which I
shall send. May be better to put it to vote.

                            MARK TWAIN.

The house cheered the letter, and when it was put to vote decided
unanimously that the play had been a success--a verdict more kindly than
true.

J. I. Ford, of the theater management, wrote to Clemens, next morning
after the first performance, urging him to come to Washington in person
and “wet nurse” the play until “it could do for itself.”

Ford expressed satisfaction with the play and its prospects, and
concludes:

I inclose notices. Come if you can. “Your presence will be worth ten
thousand men. The king’s name is a tower of strength.” I have urged the
President to come to-night.

The play made no money in Washington, but Augustin Daly decided to put
it on in New York at the Fifth Avenue Theater, with a company which
included, besides Parsloe, Edmund Collier, P. A. Anderson, Dora
Goldthwaite, Henry Crisp, and Mrs. Wells, a very worthy group of players
indeed. Clemens was present at the opening, dressed in white, which he
affected only for warm-weather use in those days, and made a speech at
the end of the third act.

“Ah Sin” did not excite much enthusiasm among New York dramatic
critics. The houses were promising for a time, but for some reason the
performance as a whole did not contain the elements of prosperity. It
set out on its provincial travels with no particular prestige beyond the
reputation of its authors; and it would seem that this was not enough,
for it failed to pay, and all parties concerned presently abandoned
it to its fate and it was heard of no more. Just why “Ah Sin” did not
prosper it would not become us to decide at this far remove of time and
taste. Poorer plays have succeeded and better plays have failed since
then, and no one has ever been able to demonstrate the mystery. A touch
somewhere, a pulling-about and a readjustment, might have saved “Ali
Sin,” but the pullings and haulings which they gave it did not. Perhaps
it still lies in some managerial vault, and some day may be dragged to
light and reconstructed and recast, and come into its reward. Who knows?
Or it may have drifted to that harbor of forgotten plays, whence there
is no returning.

As between Harte and Clemens, the whole matter was unfortunate. In the
course of their association there arose a friction and the long-time
friendship disappeared.



CXI. A BERMUDA HOLIDAY

On the 16th of May, 1877, Mark Twain set out on what, in his note-book,
he declared to be “the first actual pleasure-trip” he had ever taken,
meaning that on every previous trip he had started with a purpose other
than that of mere enjoyment. He took with him his, friend and pastor,
the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and they sailed for Bermuda, an island
resort not so well known or so fashionable as to-day.

They did not go to a hotel. Under assumed names they took up quarters
in a boarding-house, with a Mrs. Kirkham, and were unmolested and
altogether happy in their wanderings through four golden days. Mark
Twain could not resist keeping a note-book, setting down bits of scenery
and character and incident, just as he had always done. He was impressed
with the cheapness of property and living in the Bermuda of that period.
He makes special mention of some cottages constructed of coral blocks:
“All as beautiful and as neat as a pin, at the cost of four hundred and
eighty dollars each.” To Twichell he remarked:

“Joe, this place is like Heaven, and I’m going to make the most of it.”

“Mark,” said Twichell, “that’s right; make the most of a place that is
like Heaven while you have a chance.”

In one of the entries--the final one--Clemens says:

“Bermuda is free (at present) from the triple curse of railways,
telegraphs, and newspapers, but this will not last the year. I propose
to spend next year here and no more.”

When they were ready to leave, and started for the steamer, Twichell
made an excuse to go back, his purpose being to tell their landlady and
her daughter that, without knowing it, they had been entertaining Mark
Twain.

“Did you ever hear of Mark Twain?” asked Twichell.

The daughter answered.

“Yes,” she said, “until I’m tired of the name. I know a young man who
never talks of anything else.”

“Well,” said Twichell, “that gentleman with me is Mark Twain.”

The Kirkhams declined to believe it at first, and then were in deep
sorrow that they had not known it earlier. Twichell promised that he
and Clemens would come back the next year; and they meant to go back--we
always mean to go back to places--but it was thirty years before they
returned at last, and then their pleasant landlady was dead.

On the home trip they sighted a wandering vessel, manned by blacks,
trying to get to New York. She had no cargo and was pretty helpless.
Later, when she was reported again, Clemens wrote about it in a Hartford
paper, telling the story as he knew it. The vessel had shipped the crew,
on a basis of passage to New York, in exchange for labor. So it was a
“pleasure-excursion!” Clemens dwelt on this fancy:

    I have heard of a good many pleasure-excursions, but this heads the
    list. It is monumental, and if ever the tired old tramp is found I
    should like to be there and see him in his sorrowful rags and his
    venerable head of grass and seaweed, and hear the ancient mariners
    tell the story of their mysterious wanderings through the solemn
    solitudes of the ocean.

Long afterward this vagrant craft was reported again, still drifting
with the relentless Gulf Stream. Perhaps she reached New York in time;
one would like to know, but there seems no good way to find out.

That first Bermuda voyage was always a happy memory to Mark Twain. To
Twichell he wrote that it was the “joyousest trip” he had ever made:

    Not a heartache anywhere, not a twinge of conscience. I often come
    to myself out of a reverie and detect an undertone of thought that
    had been thinking itself without volition of mind--viz., that if we
    had only had ten days of those walks and talks instead of four.

There was but one regret: Howells had not been with them. Clemens
denounced him for his absence:

    If you had gone with us and let me pay the fifty dollars, which the
    trip and the board and the various knick-knacks and mementos would
    cost, I would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation
    to pay me five hundred per cent. profit in the way of the several
    magazine articles which I could have written; whereas I can now
    write only one or two, and am therefore largely out of pocket by
    your proud ways.

Clemens would not fail to write about his trip. He could not help doing
that, and he began “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion” as soon
as he landed in Hartford. They were quite what the name would
signify--leisurely, pleasant commentaries on a loafing, peaceful
vacation. They are not startling in their humor or description, but are
gently amusing and summery, reflecting, bubble-like, evanescent fancies
of Bermuda. Howells, shut up in a Boston editorial office, found them
delightful enough, and very likely his Atlantic readers agreed with him.
The story of “Isaac and the Prophets of Baal” was one that Capt. Ned
Wakeman had told to Twichell during a voyage which the latter had made
to Aspinwall with that vigorous old seafarer; so in the “Rambling Notes”
 Wakeman appears as Captain Hurricane Jones, probably a step in the
evolution of the later name of Stormfield. The best feature of the
series (there were four papers in all) is a story of a rescue in
mid-ocean; but surely the brightest ripple of humor is the reference to
Bermuda’s mahogany-tree:

    There was exactly one mahogany-tree on the island. I know this to
    be reliable because I saw a man who said he had counted it many a
    time and could not be mistaken. He was a man with a haze lip and a
    pure heart, and everybody said he was as true as steel. Such men
    are all too few.

Clemens cared less for these papers than did Howells. He had serious
doubts about the first two and suggested their destruction, but with
Howells’s appreciation his own confidence in them returned and he let
them all go in. They did not especially advance his reputation, but
perhaps they did it no harm.



CXII. A NEW PLAY AND A NEW TALE

He wrote a short story that year which is notable mainly for the fact
that in it the telephone becomes a literary property, probably for the
first time. “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz-Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton”
 employed in the consummation what was then a prospect, rather than a
reality--long-distance communication.

His work that summer consisted mainly of two extensive undertakings, one
of which he completed without delay. He still had the dramatic ambition,
and he believed that he was capable now of constructing a play entirely
from his own resources.

To Howells, in June, he wrote:

To-day I am deep in a comedy which I began this morning--principal
character an old detective. I skeletoned the first act and wrote the
second to-day, and am dog-tired now. Fifty-four pages of MS. in seven
hours.

Seven days later, the Fourth of July, he said:

I have piled up one hundred and fifty-one pages on my comedy. The first,
second and fourth acts are done, and done to my satisfaction, too.
To-morrow and next day will finish the third act, and the play. Never
had so much fun over anything in my life never such consuming interest
and delight. And just think! I had Sol Smith Russell in my mind’s eye
for the old detective’s part, and bang it! he has gone off pottering
with Oliver Optic, or else the papers lie.

He was working with enthusiasm, you see, believing in it with a faith
which, alas, was no warrant for its quality. Even Howells caught his
enthusiasm and became eager to see the play, and to have the story it
contained told for the Atlantic.

But in the end it proved a mistake. Dion Boucicault, when he read
the manuscript, pronounced it better than “Ah Sin,” but that was only
qualified praise. Actors who considered the play, anxious enough to
have Mark Twain’s name on their posters and small bills, were obliged to
admit that, while it contained marvelous lines, it wouldn’t “go.” John
Brougham wrote:

    There is an absolute “embarrassment of riches” in your “Detective”
     most assuredly, but the difficulty is to put it into profitable
    form. The quartz is there in abundance, only requiring the
    necessary manipulation to extract the gold.

    In narrative structure the story would be full of life, character,
    and the most exuberant fun, but it is altogether too diffuse in its
    present condition for dramatic representation, and I confess I do
    not feel sufficient confidence in my own experience (even if I had
    the time, which on reflection I find I have not) to undertake what,
    under different circumstances, would be a “labor of love.”

                     Yours sincerely,  JOHN BROUGHAM.

That was frank, manly, and to the point; it covered the ground exactly.
“Simon Wheeler, the Amateur Detective,” had plenty of good material in
it--plenty of dialogue and situations; but the dialogue wouldn’t play,
and the situations wouldn’t act. Clemens realized that perhaps the drama
was not, after all, his forte; he dropped “Simon Wheeler,” lost his
interest in “Ah Sin,” even leased “Colonel Sellers” for the coming
season, and so, in a sort of fury, put theatrical matters out of his
mind.

He had entered upon what, for him, was a truer domain. One day he picked
up from among the books at the farm a little juvenile volume, an English
story of the thirteenth century by Charlotte M. Yonge, entitled, The
Prince and the Page. It was a story of Edward I. and his cousins,
Richard and Henry de Montfort; in part it told of the submerged
personality of the latter, picturing him as having dwelt in disguise as
a blind beggar for a period of years. It was a story of a sort and with
a setting that Mark Twain loved, and as he read there came a correlative
idea. Not only would he disguise a prince as a beggar, but a beggar as
a prince. He would have them change places in the world, and each learn
the burdens of the other’s life.--[There is no point of resemblance
between the Prince and the Pauper and the tale that inspired it. No
one would ever guess that the one had grown out of the readings of the
other, and no comparison of any sort is possible between them.]

The plot presented physical difficulties. He still had some lurking
thought of stage performance, and saw in his mind a spectacular
presentation, with all the costumery of an early period as background
for a young and beautiful creature who would play the part of prince.
The old device of changelings in the cradle (later used in Pudd’nhead
Wilson) presented itself to him, but it could not provide the situations
he had in mind. Finally came the thought of a playful interchange of
raiment and state (with startling and unlooked-for consequence)--the
guise and personality of Tom Canty, of Offal Court, for those of the son
of Henry VIII., little Edward Tudor, more lately sixth English king of
that name. This little prince was not his first selection for the part.
His original idea had been to use the late King Edward VII. (then Prince
of Wales) at about fifteen, but he found that it would never answer
to lose a prince among the slums of modern London, and have his proud
estate denied and jeered at by a modern mob. He felt that he could not
make it seem real; so he followed back through history, looking along
for the proper time and prince, till he came to little Edward, who was
too young--but no matter, he would do.

He decided to begin his new venture in story form. He could dramatize
it later. The situation appealed to him immensely. The idea seemed
a brand-new one; it was delightful, it was fascinating, and he was
saturated with the atmosphere and literature and history--the data and
detail of that delightful old time. He put away all thought of cheap,
modern play-acting and writing, to begin one of the loveliest and most
entertaining and instructive tales of old English life. He decided to
be quite accurate in his picture of the period, and he posted himself
on old London very carefully. He bought a pocket-map which he studied in
the minutest detail.

He wrote about four hundred manuscript pages of the tale that summer;
then, as the inspiration seemed to lag a little, put it aside, as was
his habit, to wait until the ambition for it should be renewed. It was
a long wait, as usual. He did not touch it again for more than three
years.



CXIII. TWO DOMESTIC DRAMAS

Some unusual happenings took place that summer of 1877. John T. Lewis
(colored), already referred to as the religious antagonist of Auntie
Cord, by great presence of mind and bravery saved the lives of Mrs.
Clemens’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles (“Charley”) Langdon, her little
daughter Julia, and her nurse-maid. They were in a buggy, and their
runaway horse was flying down East Hill toward Elmira to certain
destruction, when Lewis, laboring slowly homeward with a loaded wagon,
saw them coming and turned his team across the road, after which he
leaped out and with extraordinary strength and quickness grabbed the
horse’s bridle and brought him to a standstill. The Clemens and Crane
families, who had seen the runaway start at the farm gate, arrived half
wild with fear, only to find the supposed victims entirely safe.

Everybody contributed in rewarding Lewis. He received money ($1,500) and
various other presents, including inscribed books and trinkets, also,
what he perhaps valued more than anything, a marvelous stem-winding gold
watch. Clemens, writing a full account to Dr. Brown of the watch, says:

    And if any scoffer shall say, “behold this thing is out of
    character,” there is an inscription within which will silence him;
    for it will teach him that this wearer aggrandizes the watch, not
    the watch the wearer.

In another paragraph he says:

    When Lewis arrived the other evening, after having saved those lives
    by a feat which I think is the most marvelous I can call to mind,
    when he arrived hunched up on his manure-wagon and as grotesquely
    picturesque as usual, everybody wanted to go and see how he looked.
    They came back and said he was beautiful. It was so, too, and yet
    he would have photographed exactly as he would have done any day
    these past seven years that he has occupied this farm.

Lewis acknowledged his gifts in a letter which closed with a paragraph
of rare native loftiness:

    But I beg to say, humbly, that inasmuch as divine Providence saw fit
    to use me as an instrument for the saving of those preshious lives,
    the honner conferd upon me was greater than the feat performed.

Lewis lived to enjoy his prosperity, and the honor of the Clemens and
Langdon households, for twenty-nine years. When he was too old to work
there was a pension, to which Clemens contributed; also Henry H. Rogers.
So the simple-hearted, noble old negro closed his days in peace.

Mrs. Crane, in a letter, late in July, 1906, told of his death:

    He was always cheerful, and seemed not to suffer much pain, told
    stories, and was able to eat almost everything.

    Three days ago a new difficulty appeared, on account of which his
    doctor said he must go to the hospital for care such as it was quite
    impossible to give in his home.

    He died on his way there.

    Thus it happened that he died on the road where he had performed his
    great deed.

A second unusual incident of that summer occurred in Hartford. There had
been a report of a strange man seen about the Clemens place, thought to
be a prospecting burglar, and Clemens went over to investigate. A
little searching inquiry revealed that the man was not a burglar, but a
mechanic out of employment, a lover of one of the house-maids, who had
given him food and shelter on the premises, intending no real harm. When
the girl found that her secret was discovered, she protested that he was
her fiance, though she said he appeared lately to have changed his mind
and no longer wished to marry her.

The girl seemed heartbroken, and sympathy for her was naturally the
first and about the only feeling which Clemens developed, for the time
being. He reasoned with the young man, but without making much headway.
Finally his dramatic instinct prompted him to a plan of a sort which
would have satisfied even Tom Sawyer. He asked Twichell to procure
a license for the couple, and to conceal himself in a ground floor
bath-room. He arranged with the chief of police to be on hand in another
room; with the rest of the servants quietly to prepare a wedding-feast,
and finally with Lizzie herself to be dressed for the ceremony. He had
already made an appointment with the young man to come to, see him at a
certain hour on a “matter of business,” and the young man arrived in the
belief, no doubt, that it was something which would lead to profitable
employment. When he came in Clemens gently and quietly reviewed the
situation, told him of the young girl’s love for him; how he had been
sheltered and fed by her; how through her kindness to him she had
compromised her reputation for honesty and brought upon her all the
suspicion of having sheltered a burglar; how she was ready and willing
to marry him, and how he (Clemens) was ready to assist them to obtain
work and a start in life.

But the young man was not enthusiastic. He was a Swede and slow of
action. He resolutely declared that he was not ready to marry yet, and
in the end refused to do so. Then came the dramatic moment. Clemens
quietly but firmly informed him that the wedding ceremony must take
place; that by infesting his premises he had broken the law, not only
against trespass, but most likely against house-breaking. There was a
brief discussion of this point. Finally Clemens gave him five minutes to
make up his mind, with the statement that he had an officer in waiting,
and unless he would consent to the wedding he would be taken in charge.
The young man began to temporize, saying that it would be necessary for
him to get a license and a preacher. But Clemens stepped to the door of
the bath-room, opened it, and let out Twichell, who had been sweltering
there in that fearful place for more than an hour, it being August. The
delinquent lover found himself confronted with all the requisites of
matrimony except the bride, and just then this detail appeared on the
scene, dressed for the occasion. Behind her ranged the rest of the
servants and a few invited guests. Before the young man knew it he had
a wife, and on the whole did not seem displeased. It ended with a gay
supper and festivities. Then Clemens started them handsomely by giving
each of them a check for one hundred dollars; and in truth (which in
this case, at least, is stranger than fiction) they lived happily and
prosperously ever after.

Some years later Mark Twain based a story on this episode, but it was
never entirely satisfactory and remains unpublished.



CXIV. THE WHITTIER BIRTHDAY SPEECH

It was the night of December 17, 1877, that Mark Twain made his
unfortunate speech at the dinner given by the Atlantic staff to John G.
Whittier on his seventieth birthday. Clemens had attended a number of
the dinners which the Atlantic gave on one occasion or another, and had
provided a part of the entertainment. It is only fair to say that his
after-dinner speeches at such times had been regarded as very special
events, genuine triumphs of humor and delivery. But on this particular
occasion he determined to outdo himself, to prepare something unusual,
startling, something altogether unheard of.

When Mark Twain had an impulse like that it was possible for it to
result in something dangerous, especially in those earlier days. This
time it produced a bombshell; not just an ordinary bombshell, or even a
twelve-inch projectile, but a shell of planetary size. It was a sort
of hoax-always a doubtful plaything--and in this case it brought even
quicker and more terrible retribution than usual. It was an imaginary
presentation of three disreputable frontier tramps who at some time had
imposed themselves on a lonely miner as Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes,
quoting apposite selections from their verses to the accompaniment of
cards and drink, and altogether conducting themselves in a most unsavory
fashion. At the end came the enlightenment that these were not what they
pretended to be, but only impostors--disgusting frauds. A feature like
that would be a doubtful thing to try in any cultured atmosphere. The
thought of associating, ever so remotely, those three old bummers which
he had conjured up with the venerable and venerated Emerson, Longfellow,
and Holmes, the Olympian trinity, seems ghastly enough to-day, and
must have seemed even more so then. But Clemens, dazzled by the rainbow
splendor of his conception, saw in it only a rare colossal humor, which
would fairly lift and bear his hearers along on a tide of mirth. He did
not show his effort to any one beforehand. He wanted its full beauty to
burst upon the entire company as a surprise.

It did that. Howells was toastmaster, and when he came to present
Clemens he took particular pains to introduce him as one of his foremost
contributors and dearest friends. Here, he said, was “a humorist who
never left you hanging you head for having enjoyed his joke.”

Thirty years later Clemens himself wrote of his impressions as he rose
to deliver his speech.

    I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering: dimly I
    can see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures,
    sitting at tables feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless
    forevermore. I don’t know who they were, but I can very distinctly
    see, seated at the grand table and facing the rest of us, Mr.
    Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave,
    lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; Mr.
    Longfellow, with his silken-white hair and his benignant face; Dr.
    Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good-
    fellowship everywhere, like a rose-diamond whose facets are being
    turned toward the light, first one way and then another--a charming
    man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he
    was sitting still (what he would call still, but what would be more
    or less motion to other people). I can see those figures with
    entire distinctness across this abyss of time.

William Winter, the poet, had just preceded him, and it seemed a moment
aptly chosen for his so-different theme. “And then,” to quote Howells,
“the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was
upon us.”

After the first two or three hundred words, when the general plan and
purpose of the burlesque had developed, when the names of Longfellow,
Emerson, and Holmes began to be flung about by those bleary outcasts,
and their verses given that sorry association, those Atlantic diners
became petrified with amazement and horror. Too late, then, the speaker
realized his mistake. He could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly
end. And somehow he did it, while “there fell a silence weighing many
tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was
broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single
guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy.”

Howells can remember little more than that, but Clemens recalls that
one speaker made an effort to follow him--Bishop, the novelist, and that
Bishop didn’t last long.

    It was not many sentences after his first before he began to
    hesitate and break, and lose his grip, and totter and wobble, and at
    last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile.

The next man had not strength to rise, and somehow the company broke up.

Howells’s next recollection is of being in a room of the hotel, and of
hearing Charles Dudley Warner saying in the gloom:

“Well, Mark, you’re a funny fellow.”

He remembers how, after a sleepless night, Clemens went out to buy some
bric-a-brac, with a soul far from bric-a-brac, and returned to Hartford
in a writhing agony of spirit. He believed that he was ruined forever,
so far as his Boston associations were concerned; and when he confessed
all the tragedy to Mrs. Clemens it seemed to her also that the mistake
could never be wholly repaired. The fact that certain papers quoted the
speech and spoke well of it, and certain readers who had not listened
to it thought it enormously funny, gave very little comfort. But perhaps
his chief concern was the ruin which he believed he had brought upon
Howells. He put his heart into a brief letter:

    MY DEAR HOWELLS,--My sense of disgrace does not abate. It grows.
    I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies, a
    list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years
    old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentances.

    I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country;
    therefore it will be best that I retire from before the public at
    present. It will hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages
    now. So it is my opinion, and my wife’s, that the telephone story
    had better be suppressed. Will you return those proofs or revises
    to me, so that I can use the same on some future occasion?

    It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech and
    saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced
    so much. And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in
    introducing me! It burns me like fire to think of it.

    The whole matter is a dreadful subject. Let me drop it here--at
    least on paper.

                         Penitently yours,  MARK

So, all in a moment, his world had come to an end--as it seemed. But
Howells’s letter, which came rushing back by first mail, brought hope.

“It was a fatality,” Howells said. “One of those sorrows into which a
man walks with his eyes wide open, no one knows why.”

Howells assured him that Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes would so
consider it, beyond doubt; that Charles Eliot Norton had already
expressed himself exactly in the right spirit concerning it. Howells
declared that there was no intention of dropping Mark Twain’s work from
the Atlantic.

    You are not going to be floored by it; there is more justice than
    that even in this world. Especially as regards me, just call the
    sore spot well. I can say more, and with better heart, in praise of
    your good feeling (which was what I always liked in you), since this
    thing happened than I could before.

It was agreed that he should at once write a letter to Longfellow,
Emerson, and Holmes, and he did write, laying his heart bare to them.
Longfellow and Holmes answered in a fine spirit of kindliness, and Miss
Emerson wrote for her father in the same tone. Emerson had not been
offended, for he had not heard the speech, having arrived even then at
that stage of semi-oblivion as to immediate things which eventually so
completely shut him away. Longfellow’s letter made light of the whole
matter. The newspapers, he said, had caused all the mischief.

    A bit of humor at a dinner-table talk is one thing; a report of it
    in the morning papers is another. One needs the lamplight and the
    scenery. These failing, what was meant in jest assumes a serious
    aspect.

    I do not believe that anybody was much hurt. Certainly I was not,
    and Holmes tells me that he was not. So I think you may dismiss the
    matter from your mind, without further remorse.

    It was a very pleasant dinner, and I think Whittier enjoyed it very
    much.

Holmes likewise referred to it as a trifle.

    It never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or to feel
    wounded by your playful use of my name. I have heard some mild
    questioning as to whether, even in fun, it was good taste to
    associate the names of the authors with the absurdly unlike
    personalities attributed to them, but it seems to be an open
    question. Two of my friends, gentlemen of education and the highest
    social standing, were infinitely amused by your speech, and stoutly
    defended it against the charge of impropriety. More than this, one
    of the cleverest and best-known ladies we have among us was highly
    delighted with it.

Miss Emerson’s letter was to Mrs. Clemens and its homelike New England
fashion did much to lift the gloom.

    DEAR MRS. CLEMENS,--At New Year’s our family always meets, to spend
    two days together. To-day my father came last, and brought with him
    Mr. Clemens’s letter, so that I read it to the assembled family, and
    I have come right up-stairs to write to you about it. My sister
    said, “Oh, let father write!” but my mother said, “No, don’t wait
    for him. Go now; don’t stop to pick that up. Go this minute and
    write. I think that is a noble letter. Tell them so.” First let
    me say that no shadow of indignation has ever been in any of our
    minds. The night of the dinner, my father says, he did not hear Mr.
    Clemens’s speech. He was too far off, and my mother says that when
    she read it to him the next day it amused him. But what you will
    want is to know, without any softening, how we did feel. We were
    disappointed. We have liked almost everything we have ever seen
    over Mark Twain’s signature. It has made us like the man, and we
    have delighted in the fun. Father has often asked us to repeat
    certain passages of The Innocents Abroad, and of a speech at a
    London dinner in 1872, and we all expect both to approve and to
    enjoy when we see his name. Therefore, when we read this speech it
    was a real disappointment. I said to my brother that it didn’t seem
    good or funny, and he said, “No, it was unfortunate. Still some of
    those quotations were very good”; and he gave them with relish and
    my father laughed, though never having seen a card in his life, he
    couldn’t understand them like his children. My mother read it
    lightly and had hardly any second thoughts about it. To my father
    it is as if it had not been; he never quite heard, never quite
    understood it, and he forgets easily and entirely. I think it
    doubtful whether he writes to Mr. Clemens, for he is old and long
    ago gave up answering letters, I think you can see just how bad, and
    how little bad, it was as far as we are concerned, and this lovely
    heartbreaking letter makes up for our disappointment in our much-
    liked author, and restores our former feeling about him.

                         ELLEN T. EMERSON.

The sorrow dulled a little as the days passed. Just after Christmas
Clemens wrote to Howells:

    I haven’t done a stroke of work since the Atlantic dinner. But I’m
    going to try to-morrow. How could I ever----

    Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God’s fool,
    and all his work must be contemplated with respect.

So long as that unfortunate speech is remembered there will be
differences of opinion as to its merits and propriety. Clemens himself,
reading it for the first time in nearly thirty years, said:

“I find it gross, coarse--well, I needn’t go on with particulars. I
don’t like any part of it, from the beginning to the end. I find it
always offensive and detestable. How do I account for this change of
view? I don’t know.”

But almost immediately afterward he gave it another consideration and
reversed his opinion completely. All the spirit and delight of his old
first conception returned, and preparing it for publication, he wrote:
--[North American Review, December, 1907, now with comment included
in the volume of “Speeches.” (Also see Appendix O, at the end of last
volume.)--I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot it hasn’t a
single defect in it, from the first word to the last. It is just as good
as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with humor. There isn’t a
suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere.]

It was altogether like Mark Twain to have those two absolutely opposing
opinions in that brief time; for, after all, it was only a question of
the human point of view, and Mark Twain’s points of view were likely to
be as extremely human as they were varied.

Of course the first of these impressions, the verdict of the fresh mind
uninfluenced by the old conception, was the more correct one. The
speech was decidedly out of place in that company. The skit was harmless
enough, but it was of the Comstock grain. It lacked refinement, and,
what was still worse, it lacked humor, at least the humor of a kind
suited to that long-ago company of listeners. It was another of those
grievous mistakes which genius (and not talent) can make, for genius is
a sort of possession. The individual is pervaded, dominated for a
time by an angel or an imp, and he seldom, of himself, is able to
discriminate between his controls. A literary imp was always lying in
wait for Mark Twain; the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the
‘outre’, the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia
Clemens had to labor hardest against: the cheapening of his own high
purpose with an extravagant false note, at which sincerity, conviction,
and artistic harmony took wings and fled away. Notably he did a good
burlesque now and then, but his fame would not have suffered if he had
been delivered altogether from his besetting temptation.



CXV. HARTFORD AND BILLIARDS

Clemens was never much inclined to work, away from his Elmira study.
“Magnanimous Incident Literature” (for the Atlantic) was about his only
completed work of the winter of 1877-78. He was always tinkering with
the “Visit to Heaven,” and after one reconstruction Howells suggested
that he bring it out as a book, in England, with Dean Stanley’s
indorsement, though this may have been only semi-serious counsel. The
story continued to lie in seclusion.

Clemens had one new book in the field--a small book, but profitable. Dan
Slote’s firm issued for him the Mark Twain Scrap-book, and at the end
of the first royalty period rendered a statement of twenty-five thousand
copies sold, which was well enough for a book that did not contain a
single word that critics could praise or condemn. Slote issued another
little book for him soon after Punch, Brothers, Punch!--which, besides
that lively sketch, contained the “Random Notes” and seven other
selections.

Mark Twain was tempted to go into the lecture field that winter, not by
any of the offers, though these were numerous enough, but by the idea
of a combination which he thought night be not only profitable but
pleasant. Thomas Nast had made a great success of his caricature
lectures, and Clemens, recalling Nast’s long-ago proposal, found it
newly attractive. He wrote characteristically:

    MY DEAR NAST,--I did not think I should ever stand on a platform
    again until the time was come for me to say, “I die innocent.” But
    the same old offers keep arriving. I have declined them all, just
    as usual, though sorely tempted, as usual.

    Now, I do not decline because I mind talking to an audience, but
    because (1) traveling alone is so heartbreakingly dreary, and (2)
    shouldering the whole show is such a cheer-killing responsibility.

    Therefore, I now propose to you what you proposed to me in 1867, ten
    years ago (when I was unknown)--viz., that you stand on the platform
    and make pictures, and I stand by you and blackguard the audience.
    I should enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns--don’t
    want to go to the little ones), with you for company.

    My idea is not to fatten the lecture agents and lyceums on the
    spoils, but to put all the ducats religiously into two equal piles,
    and say to the artist and lecturer, “absorb these.”

    For instance, [here follows a plan and a possible list of the cities
    to be visited]. The letter continues:

    Call the gross receipts $100,00 for four months and a half, and the
    profit from $60,000 to $75,000 (I try to make the figures large
    enough, and leave it to the public to reduce them).

    I did not put in Philadelphia because Pugh owns that town, and last
    winter, when I made a little reading-trip, he only paid me $300, and
    pretended his concert (I read fifteen minutes in the midst of a
    concert) cost him a vast sum, and so he couldn’t afford any more.
    I could get up a better concert with a barrel of cats.

    I have imagined two or three pictures and concocted the accompanying
    remarks, to see how the thing would go. I was charmed.

    Well, you think it over, Nast, and drop me a line. We should have
    some fun.

Undoubtedly this would have been a profitable combination, but Nast had
a distaste for platforming--had given it up, as he thought, for life. So
Clemens settled down to the fireside days, that afforded him always the
larger comfort. The children were at an age “to be entertaining, and to
be entertained.” In either case they furnished him plenty of diversion
when he did not care to write. They had learned his gift as a romancer,
and with this audience he might be as extravagant as he liked. They
sometimes assisted by furnishing subjects. They would bring him a
picture, requiring him to invent a story for it without a moment’s
delay. Sometimes they suggested the names of certain animals or objects,
and demanded that these be made into a fairy tale. If they heard the
name of any new creature or occupation they were likely to offer them as
impromptu inspiration. Once he was suddenly required to make a story out
of a plumber and a “bawgunstrictor,” but he was equal to it. On one side
of the library, along the book-shelves that joined the mantelpiece, were
numerous ornaments and pictures. At one end was the head of a girl, that
they called “Emeline,” and at the other was an oil-painting of a cat.
When other subjects failed, the romancer was obliged to build a story
impromptu, and without preparation, beginning with the cat, working
along through the bric-a-brac, and ending with “Emeline.” This was the
unvarying program. He was not allowed to begin with “Emeline” and end
with the cat, and he was not permitted to introduce an ornament from any
other portion of the room. He could vary the story as much as he liked.
In fact, he was required to do that. The trend of its chapters, from the
cat to “Emeline,” was a well-trodden and ever-entertaining way.

He gave up his luxurious study to the children as a sort of nursery and
playroom, and took up his writing-quarters, first in a room over the
stables, then in the billiard-room, which, on the whole, he preferred to
any other place, for it was a third-story remoteness, and he could knock
the balls about for inspiration.

The billiard-room became his headquarters. He received his callers there
and impressed them into the game. If they could play, well and good;
if they could not play, so much the better--he could beat them
extravagantly, and he took a huge delight in such conquests. Every
Friday evening, or oftener, a small party of billiard-lovers gathered,
and played until a late hour, told stories, and smoked till the room was
blue, comforting themselves with hot Scotch and general good-fellowship.
Mark Twain always had a genuine passion for billiards. He was never
tired of the game. He could play all night. He would stay till the last
man gave out from sheer weariness; then he would go on knocking the
balls about alone. He liked to invent new games and new rules for old
games, often inventing a rule on the spur of the moment to fit some
particular shot or position on the table. It amused him highly to do
this, to make the rule advantage his own play, and to pretend a deep
indignation when his opponents disqualified his rulings and rode him
down. S. C. Dunham was among those who belonged to the “Friday Evening
Club,” as they called it, and Henry C. Robinson, long dead, and rare
Ned Bunce, and F. G. Whitmore; and the old room there at the top of the
house, with its little outside balcony, rang with their voices and their
laughter in that day when life and the world for them was young. Clemens
quoted to them sometimes:

    Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring
    Your winter garment of repentance fling;
    The bird of time has but a little way
    To flutter, and the bird is on the wing.

Omar was new then on this side of the Atlantic, and to his serene “eat,
drink, and be merry” philosophy, in Fitzgerald’s rhyme, these were early
converts. Mark Twain had an impressive, musical delivery of verse; the
players were willing at any moment to listen as he recited:

    For some we loved, the loveliest and best
    That from his vintage rolling time has prest,
    Have drunk their cup a round or two before,
    And one by one crept silently to rest.
    Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
    Before we too into the dust descend;
    Dust unto dust, and under dust to lie,
    Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and--sans End.’
--[The ‘Rubaiyat’ had made its first appearance, in Hartford, a little
before in a column of extracts published in the Courant.] Twichell
immediately wrote Clemens a card:

“Read (if you haven’t) the extracts from Oman Khayyam, on the first page
of this morning’s Courant. I think we’ll have to get the book. I never
yet came across anything that uttered certain thoughts of mine so.
adequately. And it’s only a translation. Read it, and we’ll talk it
over. There is something in it very like the passage of Emerson you read
me last night, in fact identical with it in thought.

“Surely this Omar was a great poet. Anyhow, he has given me an immense
revelation this morning.

“Hoping that you are better,

                     J. H. T.”

Twichell’s “only a translation” has acquired a certain humor with time.



CXVI. OFF FOR GERMANY

The German language became one of the interests of the Clemens home
during the early months of 1878. The Clemenses had long looked forward
to a sojourn in Europe, and the demand for another Mark Twain book of
travel furnished an added reason for their going. They planned for the
spring sailing, and to spend a year or more on the Continent, making
their headquarters in Germany. So they entered into the study of the
language with an enthusiasm and perseverance that insured progress.
There was a German nurse for the children, and the whole atmosphere of
the household presently became lingually Teutonic. It amused Mark Twain,
as everything amused him, but he was a good student; he acquired a
working knowledge of the language in an extraordinarily brief time, just
as in an earlier day he had picked up piloting. He would never become
a German scholar, but his vocabulary and use of picturesque phrases,
particularly those that combined English and German words, were
often really startling, not only for their humor, but for their
expressiveness.

Necessarily the new study would infect his literature. He conceived
a plan for making Captain Wakeman (Stormfield) come across a copy of
Ollendorf in Heaven, and proceed to learn the language of a near-lying
district.

They arranged to sail early in April, and, as on their former trip,
persuaded Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira, to accompany them. They wrote
to the Howellses, breaking the news of the journey, urging them to
come to Hartford for a good-by visit. Howells and his wife came. The
Twichells, Warners, and other Hartford friends paid repeated farewell
calls. The furniture was packed, the rooms desolated, the beautiful home
made ready for closing.

They were to have pleasant company on the ship. Bayard Taylor, then
recently appointed Minister to Germany, wrote that he had planned to
sail on the same vessel; Murat Halstead’s wife and daughter were listed
among the passengers. Clemens made a brief speech at Taylor’s “farewell
dinner.”

The “Mark Twain” party, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens, Miss
Spaulding, little Susy and Clara (“Bay”), and a nurse-maid, Rosa, sailed
on the Holsatia, April 11, 1878. Bayard Taylor and the Halstead ladies
also sailed, as per program; likewise Murat Halstead himself, for whom
no program had been made. There was a storm outside, and the Holsatia
anchored down the bay to wait until the worst was over. As the weather
began to moderate Halstead and others came down in a tug for a final
word of good-by. When the tug left, Halstead somehow managed to get
overlooked, and was presently on his way across the ocean with only such
wardrobe as he had on, and what Bayard Taylor, a large man like himself,
was willing to lend him. Halstead was accused of having intentionally
allowed himself to be left behind, and his case did have a suspicious
look; but in any event they were glad to have him along.

In a written word of good-by to Howells, Clemens remembered a debt of
gratitude, and paid it in the full measure that was his habit.

    And that reminds me, ungrateful dog that I am, that I owe as much to
    your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city boss
    who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his
    art. I was talking to Mrs. Clemens about this the other day, and
    grieving because I never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming to
    ignore it or to be unaware of it. Nothing that has passed under
    your eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all my
    other stuff does need so much.

In that ancient day, before the wireless telegraph, the voyager, when
the land fell away behind him, felt a mighty sense of relief and rest,
which to some extent has gone now forever. He cannot entirely escape
the world in this new day; but then he had a complete sense of dismissal
from all encumbering cares of life. Among the first note-book entries
Mark Twain wrote:

To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings--“I am
no longer of ye; what ye say of me is now of no consequence--but of how
much consequence when I am with ye and of ye. I know you will refrain
from saying harsh things because they cannot hurt me, since I am out of
reach and cannot hear them. This is why we say no harsh things of the
dead.”

It was a rough voyage outside, but the company made it pleasant within.
Halstead and Taylor were good smoking-room companions. Taylor had a
large capacity for languages and a memory that was always a marvel. He
would repeat for them Arabian, Hungarian, and Russian poetry, and show
them the music and construction of it. He sang German folk-lore songs
for them, and the “Lorelei,” then comparatively unknown in America. Such
was his knowledge of the language that even educated Germans on board
submitted questions of construction to him and accepted his decisions.
He was wisely chosen for the mission he had to fill, but unfortunately
he did not fill it long. Both Halstead and Taylor were said to have
heart trouble. Halstead, however, survived many years. Taylor died
December 19, 1878.



CXVII. GERMANY AND GERMAN

From the note-book:

    It is a marvel that never loses its surprise by repetition, this
    aiming a ship at a mark three thousand miles away and hitting the
    bull’s-eye in a fog--as we did. When the fog fell on us the captain
    said we ought to be at such and such a spot (it had been eighteen
    hours since an observation was had), with the Scilly islands bearing
    so and so, and about so many miles away. Hove the lead and got
    forty-eight fathoms; looked on the chart, and sure enough this depth
    of water showed that we were right where the captain said we were.

    Another idea. For ages man probably did not know why God carpeted
    the ocean bottom with sand in one place, shells in another, and so
    on. But we see now; the kind of bottom the lead brings up shows
    where a ship is when the soundings don’t, and also it confirms the
    soundings.

They reached Hamburg after two weeks’ stormy sailing. They rested a few
days there, then went to Hanover and Frankfort, arriving at Heidelberg
early in May.

They had no lodgings selected in Heidelberg, and leaving the others
at an inn, Clemens set out immediately to find apartments. Chance or
direction, or both, led him to the beautiful Schloss Hotel, on a hill
overlooking the city, and as fair a view as one may find in all Germany.
He did not go back after his party. He sent a message telling them to
take carriage and drive at once to the Schloss, then he sat down to
enjoy the view.

Coming up the hill they saw him standing on the veranda, waving his hat
in welcome. He led them to their rooms--spacious apartments--and pointed
to the view. They were looking down on beautiful Heidelberg Castle,
densely wooded hills, the far-flowing Neckar, and the haze-empurpled
valley of the Rhine. By and by, pointing to a small cottage on the
hilltop, he said:

“I have been picking out my little house to work in; there it is over
there; the one with the gable in the roof. Mine is the middle room on
the third floor.”

Mrs. Clemens thought the occupants of the house might be surprised if
he should suddenly knock and tell them he had come to take possession
of his room. Nevertheless, they often looked over in that direction and
referred to it as his office. They amused themselves by watching his
“people” and trying to make out what they were like. One day he went
over there, and sure enough there was a sign out, “Moblirte Wohnung zu
Vermiethen.” A day or two later he was established in the very room he
had selected, it being the only room but one vacant.

In A Tramp Abroad Mark Twain tells of the beauty of their Heidelberg
environment. To Howells he wrote:

    Our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (inclosed balconies), one
    looking toward the Rhine Valley and sunset, the other looking up the
    Neckar cul-de-sac, and naturally we spend pearly all our time in
    these. We have tables and chairs in them; we do our reading,
    writing, studying, smoking, and suppering in them.... It
    must have been a noble genius who devised this hotel. Lord, how
    blessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this place! Only two
    sounds: the happy clamor of the birds in the groves and the muffled
    music of the Neckar tumbling over the opposing dikes. It is no
    hardship to lie awake awhile nights, for this subdued roar has
    exactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof. It is so
    healing to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one’s
    imaginings as the accompaniment bears up a song....

    I have waited for a “call” to go to work--I knew it would come.
    Well, it began to come a week ago; my note-book comes out more and
    more frequently every day since; three days ago I concluded to move
    my manuscripts over to my den. Now the call is loud and decided at
    last. So to-morrow I shall begin regular, steady work, and stick to
    it till the middle of July or August 1st, when I look for Twichell;
    we will then walk about Germany two or three weeks, and then I’ll go
    to work again (perhaps in Munich).

The walking tour with Twichell had been contemplated in the scheme for
gathering book material, but the plan for it had not been completed when
he left Hartford. Now he was anxious that they should start as soon as
possible. Twichell, receiving the news in Hartford, wrote that it was a
great day for him: that his third son had been happily born early that
morning, and now the arrival of this glorious gift of a tramp through
Germany and Switzerland completed his blessings.

    I am almost too joyful for pleasure [he wrote]. I labor with my
    felicities. How I shall get to sleep to-night I don’t know, though
    I have had a good start, in not having slept much last night. Oh,
    my! do you realize, Mark, what a symposium it is to be? I do. To
    begin with, I am thoroughly tired and the rest will be worth
    everything. To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together
    --why, it’s my dream of luxury. Harmony, who at sunrise this morning
    deemed herself the happiest woman on the Continent when I read your
    letter to her, widened her smile perceptibly, and revived another
    degree of strength in a minute. She refused to consider her being
    left alone; but: only the great chance opened to me.

    SHOES--Mark, remember that ever so much of our pleasure depends upon
    your shoes. Don’t fail to have adequate preparation made in that
    department.

Meantime, the struggle with the “awful German language” went on. It was
a general hand-to-hand contest. From the head of the household down
to little Clara not one was exempt. To Clemens it became a sort of
nightmare. Once in his note-book he says:

“Dreamed all bad foreigners went to German heaven; couldn’t talk, and
wished they had gone to the other place”; and a little farther along, “I
wish I could hear myself talk German.”

To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira, he reported their troubles:

    Clara Spaulding is working herself to death with her German; never
    loses an instant while she is awake--or asleep, either, for that
    matter; dreams of enormous serpents, who poke their heads up under
    her arms and glare upon her with red-hot eyes, and inquire about the
    genitive case and the declensions of the definite article. Livy is
    bully-ragging herself about as hard; pesters over her grammar and
    her reader and her dictionary all day; then in the evening these two
    students stretch themselves out on sofas and sigh and say, “Oh,
    there’s no use! We never can learn it in the world!” Then Livy
    takes a sentence to go to bed on: goes gaping and stretching to her
    pillow murmuring, “Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr
    verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--I wonder if I can get that
    packed away so it will stay till morning”--and about an hour after
    midnight she wakes me up and says, “I do so hate to disturb you, but
    is it ‘Ich Ben Jonson sehr befinden’?”

And Mrs. Clemens wrote:

    Oh, Sue dear, strive to enter in at the straight gate, for many
    shall seek to enter it and shall not be able. I am not striving
    these days. I am just interested in German.

Rosa, the maid, was required to speak to the children only in German,
though Bay at first would have none of it. The nurse and governess tried
to blandish her, in vain. She maintained a calm and persistent attitude
of scorn. Little Susy tried, and really made progress; but one, day she
said, pathetically:

“Mama, I wish Rosa was made in English.”

Yet a little later Susy herself wrote her Aunt Sue:

    I know a lot of German; everybody says I know a lot. I give you a
    million dollars to see you, and you would give two hundred dollars
    to see the lovely woods that we see.

Even Howells, in far-off America, caught the infection and began a
letter in German, though he hastened to add, “Or do you prefer English
by this time? Really I could imagine the German going hard with you, for
you always seemed to me a man who liked to be understood with the least
possible personal inconvenience.”

Clemens declared more than once that he scorned the “outrageous
and impossible German grammar,” and abandoned it altogether. In his
note-book he records how two Germans, strangers in Heidelberg, asked him
a direction, and that when he gave it, in the most elaborate and correct
German he could muster, one of them only lifted his eyes and murmured:

“Gott im Himmel!”

He was daily impressed with the lingual attainments of foreigners and
his own lack of them. In the notes he comments:

    Am addressed in German, and when I can’t speak it immediately the
    person tackles me in French, and plainly shows astonishment when I
    stop him. They naturally despise such an ignoramus. Our doctor
    here speaks as pure English, as I.

On the Fourth of July he addressed the American students in Heidelberg
in one of those mixtures of tongues for which he had a peculiar gift.

The room he had rented for a study was let by a typical German family,
and he was a great delight to them. He practised his German on them, and
interested himself in their daily affairs.

Howells wrote insistently for some assurance of contributions to the
Atlantic.

“I must begin printing your private letters to satisfy the popular
demand,” he said. “People are constantly asking when you are going to
begin.”

Clemens replied that he would be only too glad to write for the Atlantic
if his contributions could be copyrighted in Canada, where pirates were
persistently enterprising.

I do not know that I have any printable stuff just now--separatable
stuff, that is--but I shall have by and by. It is very gratifying to
hear that it is wanted by anybody. I stand always prepared to hear
the reverse, and am constantly surprised that it is delayed so long.
Consequently it is not going to astonish me when it comes.

The Clemens party enjoyed Heidelberg, though in different ways. The
children romped and picnicked in the castle grounds, which adjoined
the hotel; Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding were devoted to bric-a-brac
hunting, picture-galleries, and music. Clemens took long walks, or made
excursions by rail and diligence to farther points. Art and opera did
not appeal to him. The note-book says:

    I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteen
    years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening
    to an unfamiliar opera. I am enchanted with the airs of “Trovatore”
     and other old operas which the hand-organ and the music-box have
    made entirely familiar to my ear. I am carried away with delighted
    enthusiasm when they are sung at the opera. But oh, how far between
    they are! And what long, arid, heartbreaking and headaching
    “between-times” of that sort of intense but incoherent noise which
    always so reminds me of the time the orphan asylum burned down.

    Sunday night, 11th. Huge crowd out to-night to hear the band play
    the “Fremersberg.” I suppose it is very low-grade music--I know it
    must be low-grade music--because it so delighted me, it so warmed
    me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me, enraptured me, that at times
    I could have cried, and at others split my throat with shouting.
    The great crowd was another evidence that it was low-grade music,
    for only the few are educated up to a point where high-class music
    gives pleasure. I have never heard enough classic music to be able
    to enjoy it, and the simple truth is I detest it. Not mildly, but
    with all my heart.

    What a poor lot we human beings are anyway! If base music gives me
    wings, why should I want any other? But I do. I want to like the
    higher music because the higher and better like it. But you see I
    want to like it without taking the necessary trouble, and giving the
    thing the necessary amount of time and attention. The natural
    suggestion is, to get into that upper tier, that dress-circle, by a
    lie--we will pretend we like it. This lie, this pretense, gives to
    opera what support it has in America.

    And then there is painting. What a red rag is to a bull Turner’s
    “Slave Ship” is to me. Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point
    where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as
    it throws me into one of rage. His cultivation enables him to see
    water in that yellow mud; his cultivation reconciles the floating of
    unfloatable things to him--chains etc.; it reconciles him to fishes
    swimming on top of the water. The most of the picture is a manifest
    impossibility, that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can
    enable a man to find truth in a lie. A Boston critic said the
    “Slave Ship” reminded him of a cat having a fit in a platter of
    tomatoes. That went home to my non-cultivation, and I thought, here
    is a man with an unobstructed eye.

Mark Twain has dwelt somewhat upon these matters in ‘A Tramp Abroad’. He
confesses in that book that later he became a great admirer of Turner,
though perhaps never of the “Slave Ship” picture. In fact, Mark Twain
was never artistic, in the common acceptance of that term; neither his
art nor his tastes were of an “artistic” kind.



CXVIII. TRAMPING WITH TWICHELL. Twichell arrived on time, August 1st.
Clemens met him at Baden-Baden, and they immediately set out on a tramp
through the Black Forest, excursioning as pleased them, and having an
idyllic good time. They did not always walk, but they often did. At
least they did sometimes, when the weather was just right and Clemens’s
rheumatism did not trouble him. But they were likely to take a carriage,
or a donkey-cart, or a train, or any convenient thing that happened
along. They did not hurry, but idled and talked and gathered flowers, or
gossiped with wayside natives and tourists, though always preferring to
wander along together, beguiling the way with discussion and speculation
and entertaining tales. They crossed on into Switzerland in due time
and considered the conquest of the Alps. The family followed by rail or
diligence, and greeted them here and there when they rested from their
wanderings. Mark Twain found an immunity from attention in Switzerland,
which for years he had not known elsewhere. His face was not so well
known and his pen-name was carefully concealed.

It was a large relief to be no longer an object of public curiosity; but
Twichell, as in the Bermuda trip, did not feel quite honest, perhaps, in
altogether preserving the mask of unrecognition. In one of his letters
home he tells how; when a young man at their table was especially
delighted with Mark Twain’s conversation, he could not resist taking the
young man aside and divulging to him the speaker’s identity.

“I could not forbear telling him who Mark was,” he says, “and the
mingled surprise and pleasure his face exhibited made me glad I had done
so.”

They climbed the Rigi, after which Clemens was not in good walking trim
for some time; so Twichell went on a trip on his own account, to give
his comrade a chance to rest. Then away again to Interlaken, where the
Jungfrau rises, cold and white; on over the loneliness of Gemini Pass,
with glaciers for neighbors and the unfading white peaks against the
blue; to Visp and to Zermatt, where the Matterhorn points like a finger
that directs mankind to God. This was true Alpine wandering--sweet
vagabondage.

The association of the wanderers was a very intimate one. Their
minds were closely attuned, and there were numerous instances of
thought--echo-mind answering to mind--without the employment of words.
Clemens records in his notes:

    Sunday A.M., August 11th. Been reading Romola yesterday afternoon,
    last night, and this morning; at last I came upon the only passage
    which has thus far hit me with force--Tito compromising with his
    conscience, and resolving to do; not a bad thing, but not the best
    thing. Joe entered the room five minutes--no, three minutes later
    --and without prelude said, “I read that book you’ve got there six
    years ago, and got a mighty good text for a sermon out of it the
    passage where the young fellow compromises with his conscience, and
    resolves to do, not a bad thing, but not the best thing.” This is
    Joe’s first reference to this book since he saw me buy it twenty-
    four hours ago. So my mind operated on his in this instance. He
    said he was sitting yonder in the reading-room, three minutes ago (I
    have not got up yet), thinking of nothing in particular, and didn’t
    know what brought Romola into his head; but into his head it came
    and that particular passage. Now I, forty feet away, in another
    room, was reading that particular passage at that particular moment.

    Couldn’t suggest Romola to him earlier, because nothing in the book
    had taken hold of me till I came to that one passage on page 112,
    Tauchnitz edition.

And again:

    The instances of mind-telegraphing are simply innumerable. This
    evening Joe and I sat long at the edge of the village looking at the
    Matterhorn. Then Joe said, “We ought to go to the Cervin Hotel and
    inquire for Livy’s telegram.” If he had been but one instant later
    I should have said those words instead of him.

Such entries are frequent, and one day there came along a kind of
object-lesson. They were toiling up a mountainside, when Twichell began
telling a very interesting story which had happened in connection with a
friend still living, though Twichell had no knowledge of his whereabouts
at this time. The story finished just as they rounded a turn in, the
cliff, and Twichell, looking up, ended his last sentence, “And there’s
the man!” Which was true, for they were face to face with the very man
of whom he had been telling.

Another subject that entered into their discussion was the law of
accidents. Clemens held that there was no such thing an accident: that
it was all forewritten in the day of the beginning; that every event,
however slight, was embryonic in that first instant of created life, and
immutably timed to its appearance in the web of destiny. Once on their
travels, when they were on a high bank above a brawling stream, a little
girl, who started to run toward them, slipped and rolled under the
bottom rail of the protecting fence, her feet momentarily hanging out
over the precipice and the tearing torrent below. It seemed a miraculous
escape from death, and furnished an illustration for their discussion.
The condition of the ground, the force of her fall, the nearness of
the fatal edge, all these had grown inevitably out of the first great
projection of thought, and the child’s fall and its escape had been
invested in life’s primal atom.

The author of A Tramp Abroad tells us of the rushing stream that flows
out of the Arcadian sky valley, the Gasternthal, and goes plunging down
to Kandersteg, and how he took exercise by making “Harris” (Twichell)
set stranded logs adrift while he lounged comfortably on a boulder, and
watched them go tearing by; also how he made Harris run a race with one
of those logs. But that is literature. Twichell, in a letter home, has
preserved a likelier and lovelier story:

    Mark is a queer fellow. There is nothing that he so delights in as
    a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him to leave one when
    once he is within the influence of its fascinations. To throw in
    stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. Tonight, as we were
    on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood caught by
    the torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in.
    When I got back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as
    hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the
    wildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to
    view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. He said
    afterward that he hadn’t been so excited in three months. He acted
    just like a boy; another feature of his extreme sensitiveness in
    certain directions.

Then generalizing, Twichell adds:

    He has coarse spots in him. But I never knew a person so finely
    regardful of the feelings of others in some ways. He hates to pass
    another person walking, and will practise some subterfuge to take
    off what he feels is the discourtesy of it. And he is exceedingly
    timid, tremblingly timid, about approaching strangers; hates to ask
    a question. His sensitive regard for others extends to animals.
    When we are driving his concern is all about the horse. He can’t
    bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard. To-day,
    when the driver clucked up his horse and quickened his pace a
    little, Mark said, “The fellow’s got the notion that we are in a
    hurry.” He is exceedingly considerate toward me in regard of
    everything--or most things.

The days were not all sunshine. Sometimes it rained and they took
shelter by the wayside, or, if there was no shelter, they plodded along
under their umbrellas, still talking away, and if something occurred
that Clemens wanted to put down they would stand stock still in the
rain, and Twichell would hold the umbrella while Clemens wrote--a good
while sometimes--oblivious to storm and discomfort and the long way yet
ahead.

After the day on Gemmi Pass Twichell wrote home:

    Mark, to-day, was immensely absorbed in the flowers. He scrambled
    around and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensest
    pleasure in them. He crowded a pocket of his note-book with his
    specimens and wanted more room. So I stopped the guide and got out
    my needle and thread, and out of a stiff paper, a hotel
    advertisement, I had about me made a paper bag, a cornucopia like,
    and tied it to his vest in front, and it answered the purpose
    admirably. He filled it full with a beautiful collection, and as
    soon as we got here to-night he transferred it to a cardboard box
    and sent it by mail to Livy. A strange Mark he is, full of
    contradictions. I spoke last night of his sensitive to others’
    feelings. To-day the guide got behind, and came up as if he would
    like to go by, yet hesitated to do so. Mark paused, went aside and
    busied himself a minute picking a flower. In the halt the guide got
    by and resumed his place in front. Mark threw the flower away,
    saying, “I didn’t want that. I only wanted to give the old man a
    chance to go on without seeming to pass us.” Mark is splendid to
    walk with amid such grand scenery, for he talks so well about it,
    has such a power of strong, picturesque expression. I wish you
    might have heard him to-day. His vigorous speech nearly did justice
    to the things we saw.

In an address which Twichell gave many years later he recalls another
pretty incident of their travels. They had been toiling up the Gorner
Grat.

As we paused for a rest, a lamb from a flock of sheep near by ventured
inquisitively toward us, whereupon Mark seated himself on a rock, and
with beckoning hand and soft words tried to get it to come to him.

On the lamb’s part it was a struggle between curiosity and timidity, but
in a succession of advances and retreats it gained confidence, though
at a very gradual rate. It was a scene for a painter: the great American
humorist on one side of the game and that silly little creature on the
other, with the Matterhorn for a background. Mark was reminded that the
time he was consuming was valuable--but to no purpose. The Gorner Grat
could wait. He held on with undiscouraged perseverance till he carried
his point: the lamb finally put its nose in his hand, and he was happy
over it all the rest of the day.

The matter of religion came up now and again in the drift of their
discussions. It was Twichell’s habit to have prayers in their room every
night at the hotels, and Clemens was willing to join in the observances.
Once Twichell, finding him in a responsive mood--a remorseful mood--gave
his sympathy, and spoke of the larger sympathy of divinity. Clemens
listened and seemed soothed and impressed, but his philosophies were too
wide and too deep for creeds and doctrines. A day or two later, as they
were tramping along in the hot sun, his honesty had to speak out.

“Joe,” he said, “I’m going to make a confession. I don’t believe in your
religion at all. I’ve been living a lie right straight along whenever
I pretended to. For a moment, sometimes, I have been almost a believer,
but it immediately drifts away from me again. I don’t believe one
word of your Bible was inspired by God any more than any other book. I
believe it is entirely the work of man from beginning to end--atonement
and all. The problem of life and death and eternity and the true
conception of God is a bigger thing than is contained in that book.”

So the personal side of religious discussion closed between them, and
was never afterward reopened.

They joined Mrs. Clemens and the others at Lausanne at last, and their
Swiss holiday was over. Twichell set out for home by way of England,
and Clemens gave himself up to reflection and rest after his wanderings.
Then, as the days of their companionship passed in review, quickly and
characteristically he sent a letter after his comrade:

    DEAR OLD JOE, It is actually all over! I was so low-spirited at the
    station yesterday, and this morning, when I woke, I couldn’t seem to
    accept the dismal truth that you were really gone, and the pleasant
    tramping and talking at an end. Ah, my boy! it has been such a
    rich holiday to me, and I feel under such deep and honest
    obligations to you for coming. I am putting out of my mind all
    memory of the times when I misbehaved toward you and hurt you; I am
    resolved to consider it forgiven, and to store up and remember only
    the charming hours of the journeys and the times when I was not
    unworthy to be with you and share a companionship which to me stands
    first after Livy’s. It is justifiable to do this; for why should I
    let my small infirmities of disposition live and grovel among my
    mental pictures of the eternal sublimities of the Alps?

    Livy can’t accept or endure the fact that you are gone. But you
    are, and we cannot get around it. So take our love with you, and
    bear it also over the sea to Harmony, and God bless you both.

                                MARK.



CXIX. ITALIAN DAYS

The Clemens party wandered down into Italy--to the lakes, Venice,
Florence, Rome--loitering through the galleries, gathering here and
there beautiful furnishings--pictures, marbles, and the like--for the
Hartford home.

In Venice they bought an old careen bed, a massive regal affair with
serpentine columns surmounted by singularly graceful cupids, and with
other cupids sporting on the headboard: the work of some artist who had
been dust three centuries maybe, for this bed had come out of an old
Venetian palace, dismantled and abandoned. It was a furniture with a
long story, and the years would add mightily to its memories. It would
become a stately institution in the Clemens household. The cupids on
the posts were removable, and one of the highest privileges of childhood
would be to occupy that bed and have down one of the cupids to play
with. It was necessary to be ill to acquire that privilege--not
violently and dangerously ill, but interestingly so--ill enough to be
propped up with pillows and have one’s meals served on a tray, with
dolls and picture-books handy, and among them a beautiful rosewood cupid
who had kept dimpled and dainty for so many, many years.

They spent three weeks in Venice: a dreamlike experience, especially for
the children, who were on the water most of the time, and became fast
friends with their gondolier, who taught them some Italian words; then
a week in Florence and a fortnight in Rome.

--[From the note-book:

“BAY--When the waiter brought my breakfast this morning I spoke to him
in Italian.

“MAMA--What did you say?

“B.--I said, ‘Polly-vo fransay.’

“M.--What does it mean? “B.--I don’t know. What does it mean, Susy?

“S.--It means, ‘Polly wants a cracker.’”]

Clemens discovered that in twelve years his attitude had changed
somewhat concerning the old masters. He no longer found the bright,
new copies an improvement on the originals, though the originals still
failed to wake his enthusiasm. Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding spent
long hours wandering down avenues of art, accompanied by him on
occasion, though not always willingly. He wrote his sorrow to Twichell:

I do wish you were in Rome to do my sight-seeing for me. Rome interests
me as much as East Hartford could, and no more; that is, the Rome which
the average tourist feels an interest in. There are other things here
which stir me enough to make life worth living. Livy and Clara are
having a royal time worshiping the old masters, and I as good a time
gritting my ineffectual teeth over them.

Once when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party he remarked that if the
old masters had labeled their fruit one wouldn’t be so likely to mistake
pears for turnips.

“Youth,” said Mrs. Clemens, gravely, “if you do not care for these
masterpieces yourself, you might at least consider the feelings of
others”; and Miss Jewett, regarding him severely, added, in her quaint
Yankee fashion:

“Now, you’ve been spoke to!”

He felt duly reprimanded, but his taste did not materially reform. He
realized that he was no longer in a proper frame of mind to write of
general sight-seeing. One must be eager, verdant, to write happily the
story of travel. Replying to a letter from Howells on the subject he
said:

    I wish I could give those sharp satires on European life which you
    mention, but of course a man can’t write successful satire except he
    be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I hate travel, and I hate
    hotels, and I hate the opera, and I hate the old masters. In truth
    I don’t ever seem to be in a good enough humor with anything to
    satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it and foam
    at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I have
    got in two or three chapters about Wagner’s operas, and managed to
    do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort
    would burst me.

Clemens became his own courier for a time in Italy, and would seem
to have made more of a success of it than he did a good many years
afterward, if we may believe the story he has left us of his later
attempt:

“Am a shining success as a courier,” he records, “by the use of francs.
Have learned how to handle the railway guide intelligently and with
confidence.”

He declares that he will have no more couriers; but possibly he could
have employed one to advantage on the trip out of Italy, for it was a
desperately hard one, with bad connections and delayed telegrams. When,
after thirty-six hours weary, continuous traveling, they arrived at
last in Munich in a drizzle and fog, and were domiciled in their winter
quarters, at No. 1a, Karlstrasse, they felt that they had reached the
home of desolation itself, the very throne of human misery.

    And the rooms were so small, the conveniences so meager, and the
    porcelain stove was grim, ghastly, dismal, intolerable! So Livy and
    Clara Spaulding sat down forlorn and cried, and I retired to a
    private place to pray. By and by we all retired to our narrow
    German beds, and when Livy and I had finished talking across the
    room it was all decided that we should rest twenty-four hours, then
    pay whatever damages were required and straightway fly to the south
    of France.

The rooms had been engaged by letter, months before, of their
proprietress, Fraulein Dahlweiner, who had met them at the door with
a lantern in her hand, full of joy in their arrival and faith in her
ability to make them happy. It was a faith that was justified. Next
morning, when they all woke, rested, the weather had cleared, there were
bright fires in the rooms, the world had taken on a new aspect. Fraulein
Dahlweiner, the pathetic, hard-working little figure, became almost
beautiful in their eyes in her efforts for their comfort. She arranged
larger rooms and better conveniences for them. Their location was
central and there was a near-by park. They had no wish to change.
Clemens, in his letter to Howells, boasts that he brought the party
through from Rome himself, and that they never had so little trouble
before; but in looking over this letter, thirty years later, he
commented, “Probably a lie.”

He secured a room some distance away for his work, but then could not
find his Swiss note-book. He wrote Twichell that he had lost it, and
that after all he might not be obliged to write a volume of travels.
But the notebook turned up and the work on the new book proceeded. For a
time it went badly. He wrote many chapters, only to throw them aside.
He had the feeling that he had somehow lost the knack of descriptive
narrative. He had become, as it seemed, too didactic. He thought his
description was inclined to be too literal, his humor manufactured.
These impressions passed, by and by; interest developed, and with it
enthusiasm and confidence. In a letter to Twichell he reported his
progress:

I was about to write to my publisher and propose some other book, when
the confounded thing [the note-book] turned up, and down went my heart
into my boots. But there was now no excuse, so I went solidly to work,
tore up a great part of the MS. written in Heidelberg--wrote and tore
up, continued to write and tear up--and at last, reward of patient and
noble persistence, my pen got the old swing again! Since then I’m glad
that Providence knew better what to do with the Swiss notebook than I
did.

Further along in the same letter there breaks forth a true heart-answer
to that voice of the Alps which, once heard, is never wholly silent:

    O Switzerland! The further it recedes into the enriching haze of
    time, the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer
    of it and the glory and majesty, and solemnity and pathos of it
    grow. Those mountains had a soul: they thought, they spoke. And
    what a voice it was! And how real! Deep down in my memory it is
    sounding yet. Alp calleth unto Alp! That stately old Scriptural
    wording is the right one for God’s Alps and God’s ocean. How puny
    we were in that awful Presence, and how painless it was to be so!
    How fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of
    our unspeakable insignificance! And Lord, how pervading were the
    repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the
    invisible Great Spirit of the mountains!

    Now what is it? There are mountains and mountains and mountains in
    this world, but only these take you by the heartstrings. I wonder
    what the secret of it is. Well, time and time and again it has
    seemed to me that I must drop everything and flee to Switzerland
    once more. It is a longings deep, strong, tugging longing. That is
    the word. We must go again, Joe.



CXX. IN MUNICH

That winter in Munich was not recalled as an unpleasant one in
after-years. His work went well enough--always a chief source of
gratification. Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding found interest in the
galleries, in quaint shops, in the music and picturesque life of that
beautiful old Bavarian town. The children also liked Munich. It was easy
for them to adopt any new environment or custom. The German Christmas,
with its lavish tree and toys and cakes, was an especial delight. The
German language they seemed fairly to absorb. Writing to his mother
Clemens said:

I cannot see but that the children speak German as well as they do
English. Susy often translates Livy’s orders to the servants. I cannot
work and study German at the same time; so I have dropped the latter and
do not even read the language, except in the morning paper to get the
news.

In Munich--as was the case wherever they were known--there were many
callers. Most Americans and many foreigners felt it proper to call on
Mark Twain. It was complimentary, but it was wearying sometimes. Mrs.
Clemens, in a letter written from Venice, where they had received even
more than usual attention, declared there were moments when she almost
wished she might never see a visitor again.

Originally there was a good deal about Munich in the new book, and some
of the discarded chapters might have been retained with advantage. They
were ruled out in the final weeding as being too serious, along with
the French chapters. Only a few Italian memories were left to follow the
Switzerland wanderings.

The book does record one Munich event, though transferring it to
Heilsbronn. It is the incident of the finding of the lost sock in
the vast bedroom. It may interest the reader to compare what really
happened, as set down in a letter to Twichell, with the story as written
for publication:

    Last night I awoke at three this morning, and after raging to myself
    for two interminable hours I gave it up. I rose, assumed a catlike
    stealthiness, to keep from waking Livy, and proceeded to dress in
    the pitch-dark. Slowly but surely I got on garment after garment
    --all down to one sock; I had one slipper on and the other in my hand.
    Well, on my hands and knees I crept softly around, pawing and
    feeling and scooping along the carpet, and among chair-legs, for
    that missing sock, I kept that up, and still kept it up, and kept it
    up. At first I only said to myself, “Blame that sock,” but that
    soon ceased to answer. My expletives grew steadily stronger and
    stronger, and at last, when I found I was lost, I had to sit flat
    down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting
    the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out
    of me. I could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was
    in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where I
    was. But I had one comfort--I had not waked Livy; I believed I
    could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough.
    So I started again and softly pawed all over the place, and sure
    enough, at the end of half an hour I laid my hand on the missing
    article. I rose joyfully up and butted the washbowl and pitcher off
    the stand, and simply raised----so to speak. Livy screamed, then
    said, “Who is it? What is the matter?” I said, “There ain’t
    anything the matter. I’m hunting for my sock.” She said, “Are you
    hunting for it with a club?”

    I went in the parlor and lit the lamp, and gradually the fury
    subsided and the ridiculous features of the thing began to suggest
    themselves. So I lay on the sofa with note-book and pencil, and
    transferred the adventure to our big room in the hotel at
    Heilsbronn, and got it on paper a good deal to my satisfaction.

He wrote with frequency to Howells, and sent him something for the
magazine now and then: the “Gambetta Duel” burlesque, which would make
a chapter in the book later, and the story of “The Great Revolution
in Pitcairn.”--[Included in The Stolen White Elephant volume. The
“Pitcairn” and “Elephant” tales were originally chapters in ‘A Tramp
Abroad’; also the unpleasant “Coffin-box” yarn, which Howells rejected
for the Atlantic and generally condemned, though for a time it remained
a favorite with its author.]

Howells’s novel, ‘The Lady of the Aroostook’, was then running through
the ‘Atlantic’, and in one of his letters Clemens expresses the general
deep satisfaction of his household in that tale:

If your literature has not struck perfection now we are not able to see
what is lacking. It is all such truth--truth to the life; everywhere
your pen falls it leaves a photograph.... Possibly you will not be a
fully accepted classic until you have been dead one hundred years--it is
the fate of the Shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then your
books will be as common as Bibles, I believe. In that day I shall be
in the encyclopedias too, thus: “Mark Twain, history and occupation
unknown; but he was personally acquainted with Howells.”

Though in humorous form, this was a sincere tribute. Clemens always
regarded with awe William Dean Howells’s ability to dissect and
photograph with such delicacy the minutiae of human nature; just as
Howells always stood in awe of Mark Twain’s ability to light, with a
single flashing sentence, the whole human horizon.



CXXI. PARIS, ENGLAND, AND HOMEWARD BOUND

They decided to spend the spring months in Paris, so they gave up their
pleasant quarters with Fraulein Dahlweiner, and journeyed across Europe,
arriving at the French capital February 28, 1879. Here they met another
discouraging prospect, for the weather was cold and damp, the cabmen
seemed brutally ill-mannered, their first hotel was chilly, dingy,
uninviting. Clemens, in his note-book, set down his impressions of their
rooms. A paragraph will serve:

    Ten squatty, ugly arm-chairs, upholstered in the ugliest and
    coarsest conceivable scarlet plush; two hideous sofas of the same
    --uncounted armless chairs ditto. Five ornamental chairs, seats
    covered with a coarse rag, embroidered in flat expanse with a
    confusion of leaves such as no tree ever bore, six or seven a dirty
    white and the rest a faded red. How those hideous chairs do swear
    at the hideous sofa near them! This is the very hatefulest room I
    have seen in Europe.

    Oh, how cold and raw and unwarmable it is!

It was better than that when the sun came out, and they found happier
quarters presently at the Hotel Normandy, rue de l’Echelle.

But, alas, the sun did not come out often enough. It was one of those
French springs and summers when it rains nearly every day, and is
distressingly foggy and chill between times. Clemens received a bad
impression of France and the French during that Parisian-sojourn, from
which he never entirely recovered. In his note-book he wrote: “France
has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks
it is a fine country.”

The weather may not have been entirely accountable for his prejudice,
but from whatever cause Mark Twain, to the day of his death, had no
great love for the French as a nation. Conversely, the French as a
nation did not care greatly for Mark Twain. There were many individual
Frenchmen that Mark Twain admired, as there were many Frenchmen who
admired the work and personality of Mark Twain; but on neither side
was there the warm, fond, general affection which elsewhere throughout
Europe he invited and returned.

His book was not yet finished. In Paris he worked on it daily, but
without enthusiasm. The city was too noisy, the weather too dismal. His
note-book says:

May 7th. I wish this terrible winter would come to an end. Have had rain
almost without intermission for two months and one week.

May 28th. This is one of the coldest days of this most damnable and
interminable winter.

It was not all gloom and discomfort. There was congenial company
in Paris, and dinner-parties, and a world of callers. Aldrich the
scintillating--[ Of Aldrich Clemens used to say: “When Aldrich speaks it
seems to me he is the bright face of the moon, and I feel like the other
side.” Aldrich, unlike Clemens, was not given to swearing. The Parisian
note-book has this memorandum: “Aldrich gives his seat in the horse-car
to a crutched cripple, and discovers that what he took for a crutch is
only a length of walnut beading and the man not lame; whereupon Aldrich
uses the only profanity that ever escaped his lips: ‘Damn a dam’d man
who would carry a dam’d piece of beading under his dam’d arm!’”]--was
there, also Gedney Bunce, of Hartford, Frank Millet and his wife,
Hjalinar Hjorth Boyesen and his wife, and a Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain,
artist people whom the Clemenses had met pleasantly in Italy.
Turgenieff, as in London, came to call; also Baron Tauchnitz, that nobly
born philanthropist of German publishers, who devoted his life, often at
his personal cost, to making the literature of other nations familiar
to his own. Tauchnitz had early published the ‘Innocents’, following it
with other Mark Twain volumes as they appeared, paying always, of his
own will and accord, all that he could afford to pay for this privilege;
which was not really a privilege, for the law did not require him to pay
at all. He traveled down to Paris now to see the author, and to pay
his respects to him. “A mighty nice old gentleman,” Clemens found him.
Richard Whiteing was in Paris that winter, and there were always plenty
of young American painters whom it was good to know.

They had what they called the Stomach Club, a jolly organization, whose
purpose was indicated by its name. Mark Twain occasionally attended its
sessions, and on one memorable evening, when Edwin A. Abbey was there,
speeches were made which never appeared in any printed proceedings. Mark
Twain’s address that night has obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs
of the world, though no line of it, or even its title has ever found its
way into published literature.

Clemens had a better time in Paris than the rest of his party. He could
go and come, and mingle with the sociabilities when the abnormal weather
kept the others housed in. He did a good deal of sight-seeing of his
own kind, and once went up in a captive balloon. They were all studying
French, more or less, and they read histories and other books relating
to France. Clemens renewed his old interest in Joan of Arc, and for the
first time appears to have conceived the notion of writing the story of
that lovely character.

The Reign of Terror interested him. He reread Carlyle’s Revolution, a
book which he was never long without reading, and they all read ‘A Tale
of Two Cities’. When the weather permitted they visited the scenes of
that grim period.

In his note-book he comments:

    “The Reign of Terror shows that, without distinction or rank, the
    people were savages. Marquises, dukes, lawyers, blacksmiths, they
    each figure in due proportion to their crafts.”

And again:

    “For 1,000 years this savage nation indulged itself in massacre;
    every now and then a big massacre or a little one. The spirit is
    peculiar to France--I mean in Christendom--no other state has had
    it. In this France has always walked abreast, kept her end up with
    her brethren, the Turks and the Burmese. Their chief traits--love
    of glory and massacre.”

Yet it was his sense of fairness that made him write, as a sort of
quittance:

    “You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances.
    It is the tourists’ custom. When I see a man jump from the Vendome
    Column I say, ‘They like to do that in Paris.’”

Following this implied atonement, he records a few conclusions, drawn
doubtless from Parisian reading and observation:

    “Childish race and great.”

    “I’m for cremation.”

    “I disfavor capital punishment.”

    “Samson was a Jew, therefore not a fool. The Jews have the best
    average brain of any people in the world. The Jews are the only
    race in the world who work wholly with their brains, and never with
    their hands. There are no Jew beggars, no Jew tramps, no Jew
    ditchers, hod-carriers, day-laborers, or followers of toilsome
    mechanical trade.

    “They are peculiarly and conspicuously the world’s intellectual
    aristocracy.”

    “Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose
    they did it. It requires brains to keep money as well as to make
    it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the
    former owner’s hands and the communist would be poor again. The
    division would have to be remade every three years or it would do
    the communist no good.”

A curious thing happened one day in Paris. Boyesen; in great excitement,
came to the Normandy and was shown to the Clemens apartments. He was
pale and could hardly speak, for his emotion. He asked immediately
if his wife had come to their rooms. On learning that she had not, he
declared that she was lost or had met with an accident. She had been
gone several hours, he said, and had sent no word, a thing which she had
never done before. He besought Clemens to aid him in his search for her,
to do something to help him find her. Clemens, without showing the least
emotion or special concentration of interest, said quietly:

“I will.”

“Where will you go first,” Boyesen demanded.

Still in the same even voice Clemens said:

“To the elevator.”

He passed out of the room, with Boyesen behind him, into the hall. The
elevator was just coming up, and as they reached it, it stopped at
their landing, and Mrs. Boyesen stepped out. She had been delayed by a
breakdown and a blockade. Clemens said afterward that he had a positive
conviction that she would be on the elevator when they reached it.
It was one of those curious psychic evidences which we find all along
during his life; or, if the skeptics prefer to call them coincidences,
they are privileged to do so.

    Paris, June 1, 1879. Still this vindictive winter continues. Had a
    raw, cold rain to-day. To-night we sit around a rousing wood fire.

They stood it for another month, and then on the 10th of July, when
it was still chilly and disagreeable, they gave it up and left for
Brussels, which he calls “a dirty, beautiful (architecturally),
interesting town.”

Two days in Brussels, then to Antwerp, where they dined on the Trenton
with Admiral Roan, then to Rotterdam, Dresden, Amsterdam, and London,
arriving there the 29th of July, which was rainy and cold, in keeping
with all Europe that year.

    Had to keep a rousing big cannel-coal fire blazing in the grate all
    day. A remarkable summer, truly!

London meant a throng of dinners, as always: brilliant, notable affairs,
too far away to recall. A letter written by Mrs. Clemens at the time
preserves one charming, fresh bit of that departed bloom.

    Clara [Spaulding] went in to dinner with Mr. Henry James; she
    enjoyed him very much. I had a little chat with him before dinner,
    and he was exceedingly pleasant and easy to talk with. I had
    expected just the reverse, thinking one would feel looked over by
    him and criticized.

    Mr. Whistler, the artist, was at the dinner, but he did not attract
    me. Then there was a lady, over eighty years old, a Mrs. Stuart,
    who was Washington Irving’s love, and she is said to have been his
    only love, and because of her he went unmarried to his grave.
    --[Mrs. Clemens was misinformed. Irving’s only “love” was a Miss
    Hoffman.]--She was also an intimate friend of Madame Bonaparte.
    You would judge Mrs. Stuart to be about fifty, and she was the life
    of the drawing-room after dinner, while the ladies were alone,
    before the gentlemen came up. It was lovely to see such a sweet old
    age; every one was so fond of her, every one deferred to her, yet
    every one was joking her, making fun of her, but she was always
    equal to the occasion, giving back as bright replies as possible;
    you had not the least sense that she was aged. She quoted French in
    her stories with perfect ease and fluency, and had all the time such
    a kindly, lovely way. When she entered the room, before dinner, Mr.
    James, who was then talking with me, shook hands with her and said,
    “Good evening, you wonderful lady.” After she had passed...
    he said, “She is the youngest person in London. She has the
    youngest feelings and the youngest interests.... She is
    always interested.”

    It was a perfect delight to hear her and see her.

For more than two years they had had an invitation from Reginald
Cholmondeley to pay him another visit.

So they went for a week to Condover, where many friends were gathered,
including Millais, the painter, and his wife (who had been the wife of
Ruskin), numerous relatives, and other delightful company. It was one of
the happiest chapters of their foreign sojourn.--[Moncure D. Conway, who
was in London at the time, recalls, in his Autobiography, a visit which
he made with Mr. and Mrs. Clemens to Stratford-on-Avon. “Mrs. Clemens
was an ardent Shakespearian, and Mark Twain determined to give her a
surprise. He told her that we were going on a journey to Epworth, and
persuaded me to connive with the joke by writing to Charles Flower not
to meet us himself, but send his carriage. On arrival at the station we
directed the driver to take us straight to the church. When we entered,
and Mrs. Clemens read on Shakespeare’s grave, ‘Good friend, for Jesus’
sake, forbear,’ she started back, exclaiming, ‘where am I?’ Mark
received her reproaches with an affluence of guilt, but never did lady
enjoy a visit more than that to Avonbank. Mrs. Charles Flower (nee
Martineau) took Mrs. Clemens to her heart, and contrived that every
social or other attraction of that region should surround her.”]

From the note-book:

    Sunday, August 17,’79. Raw and cold, and a drenching rain. Went to
    hear Mr. Spurgeon. House three-quarters full-say three thousand
    people. First hour, lacking one minute, taken up with two prayers,
    two ugly hymns, and Scripture-reading. Sermon three-quarters of an
    hour long. A fluent talker, good, sonorous voice. Topic treated in
    the unpleasant, old fashion: Man a mighty bad child, God working at
    him in forty ways and having a world of trouble with him.

    A wooden-faced congregation; just the sort to see no incongruity in
    the majesty of Heaven stooping to plead and sentimentalize over
    such, and see in their salvation an important matter.

    Tuesday, August 19th. Went up Windermere Lake in the steamer.
    Talked with the great Darwin.

They had planned to visit Dr. Brown in Scotland. Mrs. Clemens, in
particular, longed to go, for his health had not been of the best, and
she felt that they would never have a chance to see him again. Clemens
in after years blamed himself harshly for not making the trip, declaring
that their whole reason for not going was an irritable reluctance on
his part to take the troublesome journey and a perversity of spirit for
which there was no real excuse. There is documentary evidence against
this harsh conclusion. They were, in fact, delayed here and there by
misconnections and the continued terrific weather, barely reaching
Liverpool in time for their sailing date, August 23d. Unquestionably
he was weary of railway travel, far he always detested it. Time would
magnify his remembered reluctance, until, in the end, he would load his
conscience with the entire burden of blame.

Their ship was the Gallia, and one night, when they were nearing the
opposite side of the Atlantic, Mark Twain, standing on deck, saw for
the third time in his experience a magnificent lunar rainbow: a complete
arch, the colors part of the time very brilliant, but little different
from a day rainbow. It is not given to many persons in this world to see
even one of these phenomena. After each previous vision there had come
to him a period of good-fortune. Perhaps this also boded well for him.



CXXII. AN INTERLUDE

The Gallia reached New York September 3, 1879. A report of his arrival,
in the New York Sun, stated that Mark Twain had changed in his absence;
that only his drawl seemed natural.

    His hat, as he stood on the deck of the incoming Cunarder, Gallia,
    was of the pattern that English officers wear in India, and his suit
    of clothes was such as a merchant might wear in his store. He
    looked older than when he went to Germany, and his hair has turned
    quite gray.

It was a late hour when they were finally up to the dock, and Clemens,
anxious to get through the Custom House, urged the inspector to accept
his carefully prepared list of dutiable articles, without opening the
baggage. But the official was dubious. Clemens argued eloquently, and
a higher authority was consulted. Again Clemens stated his case
and presented his arguments. A still higher chief of inspection was
summoned, evidently from his bed. He listened sleepily to the preamble,
then suddenly said: “Oh, chalk his baggage, of course! Don’t you know
it’s Mark Twain and that he’ll talk all night?”

They went directly to the farm, for whose high sunlit loveliness they
had been longing through all their days of absence. Mrs. Clemens, in her
letters, had never failed to dwell on her hunger for that fair hilltop.
From his accustomed study-table Clemens wrote to Twichell:

“You have run about a good deal, Joe, but you have never seen any place
that was so divine as the farm. Why don’t you come here and take a
foretaste of Heaven?” Clemens declared he would roam no more forever,
and settled down to the happy farm routine. He took up his work, which
had not gone well in Paris, and found his interest in it renewed. In the
letter to Twichell he said:

    I am revising my MS. I did not expect to like it, but I do. I have
    been knocking out early chapters for more than a year now, not
    because they had not merit, but merely because they hindered the
    flow of the narrative; it was a dredging process. Day before
    yesterday my shovel fetched up three more chapters and laid them,
    reeking, on the festering shore-pile of their predecessors, and now
    I think the yarn swims right along, without hitch or halt. I
    believe it will be a readable book of travels. I cannot see that it
    lacks anything but information.

Mrs. Clemens was no less weary of travel than her husband. Yet she had
enjoyed their roaming, and her gain from it had been greater than his.
Her knowledge of art and literature, and of the personal geography of
nations, had vastly increased; her philosophy of life had grown beyond
all counting.

She had lost something, too; she had outstripped her traditions. One
day, when she and her sister had walked across the fields, and had
stopped to rest in a little grove by a pretty pond, she confessed,
timidly enough and not without sorrow, how she had drifted away from
her orthodox views. She had ceased to believe, she said, in the orthodox
Bible God, who exercised a personal supervision over every human soul.
The hordes of people she had seen in many lands, the philosophies she
had listened to from her husband and those wise ones about him, the
life away from the restricted round of home, all had contributed to this
change. Her God had become a larger God; the greater mind which exerts
its care of the individual through immutable laws of time and change and
environment--the Supreme Good which comprehends the individual flower,
dumb creature, or human being only as a unit in the larger scheme of
life and love. Her sister was not shocked or grieved; she too had grown
with the years, and though perhaps less positively directed, had by a
path of her own reached a wider prospect of conclusions. It was a sweet
day there in the little grove by the water, and would linger in the
memory of both so long as life lasted. Certainly it was the larger
faith; though the moment must always come when the narrower, nearer,
more humanly protecting arm of orthodoxy lends closer comfort. Long
afterward, in the years that followed the sorrow of heavy bereavement,
Clemens once said to his wife, “Livy, if it comforts you to lean on the
Christian faith do so,” and she answered, “I can’t, Youth. I haven’t
any.”

And the thought that he had destroyed her illusion, without affording a
compensating solace, was one that would come back to him, now and then,
all his days.



CXXIII. THE GRANT SPEECH OF 1879

If the lunar rainbow had any fortuitous significance, perhaps we may
find it in the two speeches which Mark Twain made in November and
December of that year. The first of these was delivered at Chicago,
on the occasion of the reception of General Grant by the Army of the
Tennessee, on the evening of November 73, 1879. Grant had just returned
from his splendid tour of the world. His progress from San Francisco
eastward had been such an ovation as is only accorded to sovereignty.
Clemens received an invitation to the reunion, but, dreading the long
railway journey, was at first moved to decline. He prepared a letter in
which he made “business” his excuse, and expressed his regret that he
would not be present to see and hear the veterans of the Army of the
Tennessee at the moment when their old commander entered the room and
rose in his place to speak.

“Besides,” he said, “I wanted to see the General again anyway and renew
the acquaintance. He would remember me, because I was the person who did
not ask him for an office.”

He did not send the letter. Reconsidering, it seemed to him that there
was something strikingly picturesque in the idea of a Confederate
soldier who had been chased for a fortnight in the rain through Ralls
and Monroe counties, Missouri, now being invited to come and give
welcome home to his old imaginary pursuer. It was in the nature of an
imperative command, which he could not refuse to obey.

He accepted and agreed to speak. They had asked him to respond to the
toast of “The Ladies,” but for him the subject was worn out. He had
already responded to that toast at least twice. He telegraphed that
there was one class of the community that had always been overlooked
upon such occasions, and that if they would allow him to do so he would
take that class for a toast: the babies. Necessarily they agreed, and he
prepared himself accordingly.

He arrived in Chicago in time for the prodigious procession of welcome.
Grant was to witness the march from a grand reviewing stand, which had
been built out from the second story of the Palmer House. Clemens
had not seen the General since the “embarrassing” introduction in
Washington, twelve years before. Their meeting was characteristic
enough. Carter Harrison, Mayor of Chicago, arriving with Grant, stepped
over to Clemens, and asked him if he wouldn’t like to be presented.
Grant also came forward, and a moment later Harrison was saying:

“General, let me present Mr. Clemens, a man almost as great as
yourself.” They shook hands; there was a pause of a moment, then Grant
said, looking at him gravely:

“Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed, are you?”

So he remembered that first, long-ago meeting. It was a conspicuous
performance. The crowd could not hear the words, but they saw the
greeting and the laugh, and cheered both men.

Following the procession, there were certain imposing ceremonies of
welcome at Haverly’s Theater where long, laudatory eloquence was poured
out upon the returning hero, who sat unmoved while the storm of music
and cheers and oratory swept about him. Clemens, writing of it that
evening to Mrs. Clemens, said:

    I never sat elbow to elbow with so many historic names before.
    Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Schofield, Pope, Logan, and so on.

    What an iron man Grant is! He sat facing the house, with his right
    leg crossed over his left, his right boot sole tilted up at an
    angle, and his left hand and arm reposing on the arm of his chair.
    You note that position? Well, when glowing references were made to
    other grandees on the stage, those grandees always showed a trifle
    of nervous consciousness, and as these references came frequently
    the nervous changes of position and attitude were also frequent.
    But Grant! He was under a tremendous and ceaseless bombardment of
    praise and congratulation; but as true as I’m sitting here he never
    moved a muscle of his body for a single instant during thirty
    minutes! You could have played him on a stranger for an effigy.
    Perhaps he never would have moved, but at last a speaker made such a
    particularly ripping and blood-stirring remark about him that the
    audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped and clapped an
    entire minute--Grant sitting as serene as ever-when General Sherman
    stepped up to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder,
    bent respectfully down, and whispered in his ear. Then Grant got up
    and bowed, and the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane.

But it was the next evening that the celebration rose to a climax. This
was at the grand banquet at the Palmer House, where six hundred guests
sat down to dinner and Grant himself spoke, and Logan and Hurlbut,
and Vilas and Woodford and Pope, fifteen in all, including Robert G.
Ingersoll and Mark Twain. Chicago has never known a greater event than
that dinner, for there has never been a time since when those great
soldiers and citizens could have been gathered there.

To Howells Clemens wrote:

    Imagine what it was like to see a bullet-shredded old battle-flag
    reverently unfolded to the gaze of a thousand middle-aged soldiers,
    most of whom hadn’t seen it since they saw it advancing over
    victorious fields when they were in their prime. And imagine what
    it was like when Grant, their first commander, stepped into view
    while they were still going mad over the flag, and then right in the
    midst of it all somebody struck up “When we were marching through
    Georgia.” Well, you should have heard the thousand voices lift that
    chorus and seen the tears stream down. If I live a hundred years I
    sha’n’t ever forget these things, nor be able to talk about them. I
    sha’n’t ever forget that I saw Phil Sheridan, with martial cloak and
    plumed chapeau, riding his big black horse in the midst of his own
    cannon; by all odds the superbest figure of a soldier. I ever
    looked upon!
    Grand times, my boy, grand times!

Mark Twain declared afterward that he listened to four speeches that
night which he would remember as long as he lived. One of them was by
Emory Storrs, another by General Vilas, another by Logan, and the last
and greatest by Robert Ingersoll, whose eloquence swept the house like a
flame. The Howells letter continues:

    I doubt if America has ever seen anything quite equal to it; I am
    well satisfied I shall not live to see its equal again. How pale
    those speeches are in print, but how radiant, how full of color, how
    blinding they were in the delivery! Bob Ingersoll’s music will sing
    through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my
    ears. And I shall always see him, as he stood that night on a
    dinner-table, under the flash of lights and banners, in the midst of
    seven hundred frantic shouters, the most beautiful human creature
    that ever lived. “They fought, that a mother might own her child.”
     The words look like any other print, but, Lord bless me! he
    borrowed the very accent of the angel of mercy to say them in, and
    you should have seen that vast house rise to its feet; and you
    should have heard the hurricane that followed. That’s the only
    test! People may shout, clap their hands, stamp, wave their
    napkins, but none but the master can make them get up on their feet.

Clemens’s own speech came last. He had been placed at the end to hold
the house. He was preceded by a dull speaker, and his heart sank, for
it was two o’clock and the diners were weary and sleepy, and the dreary
speech had made them unresponsive.

They gave him a round of applause when he stepped up upon the table in
front of him--a tribute to his name. Then he began the opening words of
that memorable, delightful fancy.

“We haven’t all had the good-fortune to be ladies; we haven’t all been
generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the
babies--we stand on common ground--”

The tired audience had listened in respectful silence through the first
half of the sentence. He made one of his effective pauses on the word
“babies,” and when he added, in that slow, rich measure of his, “we
stand on common ground,” they let go a storm of applause. There was no
weariness and inattention after that. At the end of each sentence, he
had to stop to let the tornado roar itself out and sweep by. When he
reached the beginning of the final paragraph, “Among the three or four
million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this nation would
preserve for ages as sacred things if we could know which ones they
are,” the vast audience waited breathless for his conclusion. Step by
step he led toward some unseen climax--some surprise, of course, for
that would be his way. Then steadily, and almost without emphasis, he
delivered the opening of his final sentence:

“And now in his cradle, somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious
commander-in-chief of the American armies is so little burdened with
his approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole
strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find out some way to
get his own big toe into his mouth, an achievement which (meaning
no disrespect) the illustrious guest of this evening also turned his
attention to some fifty-six years ago.”

He paused, and the vast crowd had a chill of fear. After all, he seemed
likely to overdo it to spoil everything with a cheap joke at the end. No
one ever knew better than Mark Twain the value of a pause. He waited now
long enough to let the silence become absolute, until the tension was
painful, then wheeling to Grant himself he said, with all the dramatic
power of which he was master:

“And if the child is but the father of the man, there are mighty few who
will doubt that he succeeded!”

The house came down with a crash. The linking of their hero’s great
military triumphs with that earliest of all conquests seemed to them so
grand a figure that they went mad with the joy of it. Even Grant’s iron
serenity broke; he rocked and laughed while the tears streamed down his
cheeks.

They swept around the speaker with their congratulations, in their
efforts to seize his hand. He was borne up and down the great
dining-hall. Grant himself pressed up to make acknowledgments.

“It tore me all to pieces,” he said; and Sherman exclaimed, “Lord bless
you, my boy! I don’t know how you do it!”

The little speech has been in “cold type” so many years since then that
the reader of it to-day may find it hard to understand the flame of
response it kindled so long ago. But that was another day--and another
nation--and Mark Twain, like Robert Ingersoll, knew always his period
and his people.



CXXIV. ANOTHER “ATLANTIC” SPEECH

The December good-fortune was an opportunity Clemens had to redeem
himself with the Atlantic contingent, at a breakfast given to Dr.
Holmes.

Howells had written concerning it as early as October, and the first
impulse had been to decline. It would be something of an ordeal; for
though two years had passed since the fatal Whittier dinner, Clemens had
not been in that company since, and the lapse of time did not signify.
Both Howells and Warner urged him to accept, and he agreed to do so on
condition that he be allowed to speak.

If anybody talks there I shall claim the right to say a word myself, and
be heard among the very earliest, else it would be confoundedly awkward
for me--and for the rest, too. But you may read what I say beforehand,
and strike out whatever you choose.

Howells advised against any sort of explanation. Clemens accepted this
as wise counsel, and prepared an address relevant only to the guest of
honor.

It was a noble gathering. Most of the guests of the Whittier dinner
were present, and this time there were ladies. Emerson, Longfellow, and
Whittier were there, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe; also the
knightly Colonel Waring, and Stedman, and Parkman, and grand old John
Bigelow, old even then.--[He died in 1911 in his 94th year.]

Howells was conservative in his introduction this time. It was better
taste to be so. He said simply:

“We will now listen to a few words of truth and soberness from Mark
Twain.”

Clemens is said to have risen diffidently, but that was his natural
manner. It probably did not indicate anything of the inner tumult he
really felt.

Outwardly he was calm enough, and what he said was delicate and
beautiful, the kind of thing that he could say so well. It seems fitting
that it should be included here, the more so that it tells a story not
elsewhere recorded. This is the speech in full:

    MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES, AND GENTLEMEN,--I would have traveled a much
    greater distance than I have come to witness the paying of honors to
    Dr. Holmes, for my feeling toward him has always been one of
    peculiar warmth. When one receives a letter from a great man for
    the first time in his life it is a large event to him, as all of you
    know by your own experience. You never can receive letters enough
    from famous men afterward to obliterate that one or dim the memory
    of the pleasant surprise it was and the gratification it gave you.
    Lapse of time cannot make it commonplace or cheap. Well, the first
    great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest, Oliver Wendell
    Holmes. He was also the first great literary man I ever stole
    anything from, and that is how I came to write to him and he to me.
    When my first book was new a friend of mine said, “The dedication is
    very neat.” Yes, I said, I thought it was. My friend said,
    “I always admired it, even before I saw it in The Innocents Abroad.”
     I naturally said, “What do you mean? Where did you ever see it
    before?” “Well, I saw it first, some years ago, as Dr. Holmes’s
    dedication to his Songs in Many Keys.” Of course my first impulse
    was to prepare this man’s remains for burial, but upon reflection I
    said I would reprieve him for a moment or two, and give him a chance
    to prove his assertion if he could. We stepped into a book-store.
    and he did prove it. I had stolen that dedication almost word for
    word. I could not imagine how this curious thing happened; for I
    knew one thing, for a dead certainty--that a certain amount of pride
    always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride
    protects a man from deliberately stealing other people’s ideas.
    That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man, and admirers
    had often told me I had nearly a basketful, though they were rather
    reserved as to the size of the basket. However, I thought the thing
    out and solved the mystery. Some years before I had been laid up a
    couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, and had read and reread Dr.
    Holmes’s poems till my mental reservoir was filled with them to the
    brim. The dedication lay on top and handy, so by and by I
    unconsciously took it. Well, of course, I wrote to Dr. Holmes and
    told him I hadn’t meant to steal, and he wrote back and said, in the
    kindest way, that it was all right, and no harm done, and added that
    he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in
    reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves.
    He stated a truth and did it in such a pleasant way, and salved over
    my sore spot so gently and so healingly, that I was rather glad I
    had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter. I afterward
    called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of
    mine that struck him as good protoplasm for poetry. He could see by
    that time that there wasn’t anything mean about me; so we got along,
    right from the start.--[Holmes in his letter had said: “I rather
    think The Innocents Abroad will have many more readers than Songs in
    Many Keys... You will be stolen from a great deal oftener than
    you will borrow from other people.”]

    I have met Dr. Holmes many times since; and lately he said--However,
    I am wandering wildly away from the one thing which I got on my feet
    to do; that is, to make my compliments to you, my fellow-teachers of
    the great public, and likewise to say I am right glad to see that
    Dr. Holmes is still in his prime and full of generous life, and as
    age is not determined by years but by trouble, and by infirmities of
    mind and body, I hope it may be a very long time yet before any can
    truthfully say, “He is growing old.”

Whatever Mark Twain may have lost on that former occasion, came back to
him multiplied when he had finished this happy tribute. So the year for
him closed prosperously. The rainbow of promise was justified.



CXXV. THE QUIETER THINGS OF HOME

Upset and disturbed as Mark Twain often was, he seldom permitted his
distractions to interfere with the program of his fireside. His days and
his nights might be fevered, but the evenings belonged to another world.
The long European wandering left him more than ever enamoured of his
home; to him it had never been so sweet before, so beautiful, so full
of peace. Company came: distinguished guests and the old neighborhood
circles. Dinner-parties were more frequent than ever, and they were
likely to be brilliant affairs. The best minds, the brightest wits,
gathered around Mark Twain’s table. Booth, Barrett, Irving, Sheridan,
Sherman, Howells, Aldrich: they all assembled, and many more. There was
always some one on the way to Boston or New York who addressed himself
for the day or the night, or for a brief call, to the Mark Twain
fireside.

Certain visitors from foreign lands were surprised at his environment,
possibly expecting to find him among less substantial, more bohemian
surroundings. Henry Drummond, the author of Natural Law in the Spiritual
World, in a letter of this time, said:

    I had a delightful day at Hartford last Wednesday.... Called
    on Mark Twain, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the widow of Horace
    Bushnell. I was wishing A----had been at the Mark Twain interview.
    He is funnier than any of his books, and to my surprise a most
    respected citizen, devoted to things esthetic, and the friend of the
    poor and struggling.--[Life of Henry Drummond, by George Adam
    Smith.]

The quieter evenings were no less delightful. Clemens did not often go
out. He loved his own home best. The children were old enough now to
take part in a form of entertainment that gave him and them especial
pleasure-acting charades. These he invented for them, and costumed the
little performers, and joined in the acting as enthusiastically and as
unrestrainedly as if he were back in that frolicsome boyhood on John
Quarles’s farm. The Warner and Twichell children were often there and
took part in the gay amusements. The children of that neighborhood
played their impromptu parts well and naturally. They were in a dramatic
atmosphere, and had been from infancy. There was never any preparation
for the charades. A word was selected and the parts of it were whispered
to the little actors. Then they withdrew to the hall, where all sorts
of costumes had been laid out for the evening, dressed their parts, and
each detachment marched into the library, performed its syllable and
retired, leaving the audience, mainly composed of parents, to guess the
answer. Often they invented their own words, did their own costuming,
and conducted the entire performance independent of grown-up assistance
or interference. Now and then, even at this early period, they conceived
and produced little plays, and of course their father could not resist
joining in these. At other times, evenings, after dinner, he would
sit at the piano and recall the old darky songs-spirituals and jubilee
choruses-singing them with fine spirit, if not with perfect technic, the
children joining in these moving melodies.

He loved to read aloud to them. It was his habit to read his manuscript
to Mrs. Clemens, and, now that the children were older, he was likely to
include them in his critical audience.

It would seem to have been the winter after their return from Europe
that this custom was inaugurated, for ‘The Prince and the Pauper’
manuscript was the first one so read, and it was just then he was
resuming work on this tale. Each afternoon or evening, when he had
finished his chapter, he assembled his little audience and read them the
result. The children were old enough to delight in that half real, half
fairy tale of the wandering prince and the royal pauper: and the charm
and simplicity of the story are measurably due to those two small
listeners, to whom it was adapted in that early day of its creation.

Clemens found the Prince a blessed relief from ‘A Tramp Abroad’, which
had become a veritable nightmare. He had thought it finished when he
left the farm, but discovered that he must add several hundred pages
to complete its bulk. It seemed to him that he had been given a
life-sentence. He wrote six hundred pages and tore up all but two
hundred and eighty-eight. He was about to destroy these and begin again,
when Mrs. Clemens’s health became poor and he was advised to take her to
Elmira, though it was then midwinter. To Howells he wrote:

    I said, “if there is one death that is painfuler than another, may I
    get it if I don’t do that thing.”

    So I took the 288 pages to Bliss and told him that was the very last
    line I should ever write on this book (a book which required 600
    pages of MS., and I have written nearly four thousand, first and
    last).

    I am as soary (and flighty) as a rocket to-day, with the unutterable
    joy of getting that Old Man of the Sea off my back, where he has
    been roosting more than a year and a half.

They remained a month at Elmira, and on their return Clemens renewed
work on ‘The Prince and the Pauper’. He reported to Howells that if he
never sold a copy his jubilant delight in writing it would suffer no
diminution. A week later his enthusiasm had still further increased:

    I take so much pleasure in my story that I am loath to hurry, not
    wanting to get it done. Did I ever tell you the plot of it? It
    begins at 9 A.M., January 27, 1547.

He follows with a detailed synopsis of his plot, which in this instance
he had worked out with unusual completeness--a fact which largely
accounts for the unity of the tale. Then he adds:

    My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of
    the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the
    king himself, and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them
    applied to others; all of which is to account for certain mildnesses
    which distinguished Edward VI.’s reign from those that precede it
    and follow it.

    Imagine this fact: I have even fascinated Mrs. Clemens with this
    yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable damning with
    faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other way. She
    is become the horse-leech’s daughter, and my mill doesn’t grind fast
    enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir.

He forgot, perhaps, to mention his smaller auditors, but we may believe
they were no less eager in their demands for the tale’s continuance.



CXXVI. “A TRAMP ABROAD”

‘A Tramp Abroad’ came from the presses on the 13th of March, 1880. It
had been widely heralded, and there was an advance sale of twenty-five
thousand copies. It was of the same general size and outward character
as the Innocents, numerously illustrated, and was regarded by its
publishers as a satisfactory book.

It bore no very striking resemblance to the Innocents on close
examination. Its pictures-drawn, for the most part, by a young art
student named Brown, whom Clemens had met in Paris--were extraordinarily
bad, while the crude engraving process by which they had been
reproduced; tended to bring them still further into disrepute. A few
drawings by True Williams were better, and those drawn by Clemens
himself had a value of their own. The book would have profited had there
been more of what the author calls his “works of art.”

Mark Twain himself had dubious anticipations as to the book’s reception.

But Howells wrote:

    Well, you are a blessing. You ought to believe in God’s goodness,
    since he has bestowed upon the world such a delightful genius as
    yours to lighten its troubles.

Clemens replied:

    Your praises have been the greatest uplift I ever had. When a body
    is not even remotely expecting such things, how the surprise takes
    the breath away! We had been interpreting your stillness to
    melancholy and depression, caused by that book. This is honest.
    Why, everything looks brighter now. A check for untold cash could
    not have made our hearts sing as your letter has done.

A letter from Tauchnitz, proposing to issue an illustrated edition
in Germany, besides putting it into his regular series, was an added
satisfaction. To be in a Tauchnitz series was of itself a recognition of
the book’s merit.

To Twichell, Clemens presented a special copy of the Tramp with a
personal inscription, which must not be omitted here:

    MY DEAR “HARRIS”--NO, I MEAN MY DEAR JOE,--Just imagine it for a
    moment: I was collecting material in Europe during fourteen months
    for a book, and now that the thing is printed I find that you, who
    were with me only a month and a half of the fourteen, are in actual
    presence (not imaginary) in 440 of the 531 pages the book contains!
    Hang it, if you had stayed at home it would have taken me fourteen
    years to get the material. You have saved me an intolerable whole
    world of hated labor, and I’ll not forget it, my boy.

    You’ll find reminders of things, all along, that happened to us, and
    of others that didn’t happen; but you’ll remember the spot where
    they were invented. You will see how the imaginary perilous trip up
    the Riffelberg is preposterously expanded. That horse-student is on
    page 192. The “Fremersberg” is neighboring. The Black Forest novel
    is on page 211. I remember when and where we projected that: in the
    leafy glades with the mountain sublimities dozing in the blue haze
    beyond the gorge of Allerheiligen. There’s the “new member,” page
    213; the dentist yarn, 223; the true Chamois, 242; at page 248 is a
    pretty long yarn, spun from a mighty brief text meeting, for a
    moment, that pretty girl who knew me and whom I had forgotten; at
    281 is “Harris,” and should have been so entitled, but Bliss has
    made a mistake and turned you into some other character; 305 brings
    back the whole Rigi tramp to me at a glance; at 185 and 186 are
    specimens of my art; and the frontispiece is the combination which I
    made by pasting one familiar picture over the lower half of an
    equally familiar one. This fine work being worthy of Titian, I have
    shed the credit of it upon him. Well, you’ll find more reminders of
    things scattered through here than are printed, or could have been
    printed, in many books.

    All the “legends of the Neckar,” which I invented for that unstoried
    region, are here; one is in the Appendix. The steel portrait of me
    is just about perfect.

    We had a mighty good time, Joe, and the six weeks I would dearly
    like to repeat any time; but the rest of the fourteen months-never.
    With love,
                            Yours, MARK.

    Hartford, March 16, 1880.

Possibly Twichell had vague doubts concerning a book of which he was so
large a part, and its favorable reception by the critics and the public
generally was a great comfort. When the Howells letter was read to him
he is reported as having sat with his hands on his knees, his head bent
forward--a favorite attitude--repeating at intervals:

“Howells said that, did he? Old Howells said that!”

There have been many and varying opinions since then as to the literary
merits of ‘A Tramp Abroad’. Human tastes differ, and a “mixed” book of
this kind invites as many opinions as it has chapters. The word
“uneven” pretty safely describes any book of size, but it has a special
application to this one. Written under great stress and uncertainty of
mind, it could hardly be uniform. It presents Mark Twain at his best,
and at his worst. Almost any American writer was better than Mark Twain
at his worst: Mark Twain at his best was unapproachable.

It is inevitable that ‘A Tramp Abroad’ and ‘The Innocents Abroad’ should
be compared, though with hardly the warrant of similarity. The books are
as different as was their author at the periods when they were written.
‘A Tramp Abroad’ is the work of a man who was traveling and observing
for the purpose of writing a book, and for no other reason. The
Innocents Abroad was written by a man who was reveling in every scene
and experience, every new phase and prospect; whose soul was alive to
every historic association, and to every humor that a gay party of young
sight-seers could find along the way. The note-books of that trip fairly
glow with the inspiration of it; those of the later wanderings are
mainly filled with brief, terse records, interspersed with satire and
denunciation. In the ‘Innocents’ the writer is the enthusiast with a
sense of humor. In the ‘Tramp’ he has still the sense of humor, but
he has become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less. In the
‘Innocents’ he laughs at delusions and fallacies--and enjoys them. In
the ‘Tramp’ he laughs at human foibles and affectations--and wants to
smash them. Very often he does not laugh heartily and sincerely at all,
but finds his humor in extravagant burlesque. In later life his gentler
laughter, his old, untroubled enjoyment of human weakness, would return,
but just now he was in that middle period, when the “damned human race”
 amused him indeed, though less tenderly. (It seems proper to explain
that in applying this term to mankind he did not mean that the race was
foredoomed, but rather that it ought to be.)

Reading the ‘Innocents’, the conviction grows that, with all its
faults, it is literature from beginning to end. Reading the ‘Tramp’,
the suspicion arises that, regardless of technical improvement, its
percentage of literature is not large. Yet, as noted in an earlier
volume, so eminent a critic as Brander Matthews has pronounced in its
favor, and he undoubtedly had a numerous following; Howells expressed.
his delight in the book at the time of its issue, though one wonders how
far the personal element entered into his enjoyment, and what would
be his final decision if he read the two books side by side to-day. He
reviewed ‘A Tramp Abroad’ adequately and finely in the Atlantic, and
justly; for on the whole it is a vastly entertaining book, and he did
not overpraise it.

‘A Tramp Abroad’ had an “Introduction” in the manuscript, a pleasant
word to the reader but not a necessary one, and eventually it was
omitted. Fortunately the appendix remained. Beyond question it contains
some of the very best things in the book. The descriptions of the German
Portier and the German newspaper are happy enough, and the essay on the
awful German language is one of Mark Twain’s supreme bits of humor. It
is Mark Twain at his best; Mark Twain in a field where he had no rival,
the field of good-natured, sincere fun-making-ridicule of the manifest
absurdities of some national custom or institution which the nation
itself could enjoy, while the individual suffered no wound. The present
Emperor of Germany is said to find comfort in this essay on his national
speech when all other amusements fail. It is delicious beyond words to
express; it is unique.

In the body of the book there are also many delights. The description of
the ant might rank next to the German language almost in its humor, and
the meeting with the unrecognized girl at Lucerne has a lively charm.

Of the serious matter, some of the word-pictures are flawless in their
beauty; this, for instance, suggested by the view of the Jungfrau from
Interlaken:

    There was something subduing in the influence of that silent and
    solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the
    indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial
    and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the
    contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding
    contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a
    spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a
    million vanished races of men and judged them; and would judge a
    million more--and still be there, watching unchanged and
    unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have
    become a vacant desolation

    While I was feeling these things, I was groping, without knowing it,
    toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in
    the Alps, and in no other mountains; that strange, deep, nameless
    influence which, once felt, cannot be forgotten; once felt, leaves
    always behind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing
    which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning, which
    will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will. I met
    dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative, cultivated and
    uncultivated, who had come from far countries and roamed through the
    Swiss Alps year after year--they could not explain why. They had
    come first, they said, out of idle curiosity, because everybody
    talked about it; they had come since because they could not help it,
    and they should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same
    reason; they had tried to break their chains and stay away, but it
    was futile; now they had no desire to break them. Others came
    nearer formulating what they felt; they said they could find perfect
    rest and peace nowhere else when they were troubled: all frets and
    worries and chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant
    serenity of the Alps; the Great Spirit of the mountain breathed his
    own peace upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them;
    they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid things
    here, before the visible throne of God.

Indeed, all the serious matter in the book is good. The reader’s chief
regret is likely to be that there is not more of it. The main difficulty
with the humor is that it seems overdone. It is likely to be carried
too far, and continued too long. The ascent of Riffelberg is an example.
Though spotted with delights it seems, to one reader at least, less
admirable than other of the book’s important features, striking, as it
does, more emphatically the chief note of the book’s humor--that is to
say, exaggeration.

Without doubt there must be many--very many--who agree in finding a
fuller enjoyment in ‘A Tramp Abroad’ than in the ‘Innocents’; only,
the burden of the world’s opinion lies the other way. The world has a
weakness for its illusions: the splendor that falls on castle walls, the
glory of the hills at evening, the pathos of the days that are no more.
It answers to tenderness, even on the page of humor, and to genuine
enthusiasm, sharply sensing the lack of these things; instinctively
resenting, even when most amused by it, extravagance and burlesque.
The Innocents Abroad is more soul-satisfying than its successor, more
poetic; more sentimental, if you will. The Tramp contains better English
usage, without doubt, but it is less full of happiness and bloom and the
halo of romance. The heart of the world has felt this, and has demanded
the book in fewer numbers.--[The sales of the Innocents during the
earlier years more than doubled those of the Tramp during a similar
period. The later ratio of popularity is more nearly three to one. It
has been repeatedly stated that in England the Tramp has the greater
popularity, an assertion not sustained by the publisher’s accountings.]



CXXVII. LETTERS, TALES, AND PLANS

The reader has not failed to remark the great number of letters
which Samuel Clemens wrote to his friend William Dean Howells; yet
comparatively few can even be mentioned. He was always writing to
Howells, on every subject under the sun; whatever came into his
mind--business, literature, personal affairs--he must write about it
to Howells. Once, when nothing better occurred, he sent him a series of
telegrams, each a stanza from an old hymn, possibly thinking they might
carry comfort.--[“Clemens had then and for many years the habit of
writing to me about what he was doing, and still more of what he was
experiencing. Nothing struck his imagination, in or out of the daily
routine, but he wished to write me of it, and he wrote with the greatest
fullness and a lavish dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty
or forty pages:” (My Mark Twain, by W. D. Howells.)] Whatever of
picturesque happened in the household he immediately set it down for
Howells’s entertainment. Some of these domestic incidents carry the
flavor of his best humor. Once he wrote:

    Last night, when I went to bed, Mrs. Clemens said, “George didn’t
    take the cat down to the cellar; Rosa says he has left it shut up in
    the conservatory.” So I went down to attend to Abner (the cat).
    About three in the morning Mrs. C. woke me and said, “I do believe
    I hear that cat in the drawing-room. What did you do with him?” I
    answered with the confidence of a man who has managed to do the
    right thing for once, and said, “I opened the conservatory doors,
    took the library off the alarm, and spread everything open, so that
    there wasn’t any obstruction between him and the cellar.” Language
    wasn’t capable of conveying this woman’s disgust. But the sense of
    what she said was, “He couldn’t have done any harm in the
    conservatory; so you must go and make the entire house free to him
    and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to the
    drawing-room. If you had had Mr. Howells to help you I should have
    admired, but not have been astonished, because I should know that
    together you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive
    such a stately blunder all by yourself is what I cannot understand.”

    So, you see, even she knows how to appreciate our gifts....

    I knocked off during these stirring hours, and don’t intend to go to
    work again till we go away for the summer, four or six weeks hence.
    So I am writing to you, not because I have anything to say, but
    because you don’t have to answer and I need something to do this
    afternoon.

    The rightful earl has----
              Friday, 7th.

    Well, never mind about the rightful earl; he merely wanted to-borrow
    money. I never knew an American earl that didn’t.

After a trip to Boston, during which Mrs. Clemens did some bric-a-brac
shopping, he wrote:

    Mrs. Clemens has two imperishable topics now: the museum of andirons
    which she collected and your dinner. It is hard to tell which she
    admires the most. Sometimes she leans one way and sometimes the
    other; but I lean pretty steadily toward the dinner because I can
    appreciate that, whereas I am no prophet in andirons. There has
    been a procession of Adams Express wagons filing before the door all
    day delivering andirons.

In a more serious vein he refers to the aged violinist Ole Bull and his
wife, whom they had met during their visit, and their enjoyment of that
gentle-hearted pair.

Clemens did some shorter work that spring, most of which found its
way into the Atlantic. “Edward Mills and George Benton,” one of the
contributions of this time, is a moral sermon in its presentation of a
pitiful human spectacle and misdirected human zeal.

It brought a pack of letters of approval, not only from laity, but
the church, and in some measure may have helped to destroy the silly
sentimentalism which manifested itself in making heroes of spectacular
criminals. That fashion has gone out, largely. Mark Twain wrote
frequently on the subject, though never more effectively than in this
particular instance. “Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning” was another
Atlantic story, a companion piece to “Mrs. McWilliams’s Experience with
the Membranous Croup,” and in the same delightful vein--a vein in which
Mark Twain was likely to be at his best--the transcription of a scene
not so far removed in character from that in the “cat” letter just
quoted: something which may or may not have happened, but might have
happened, approximately as set down. Rose Terry Cooke wrote:

    Horrid man, how did you know the way I behave in a thunderstorm?
    Have you been secreted in the closet or lurking on the shed roof?
    I hope you got thoroughly rained on; and worst of all is that you
    made me laugh at myself; my real terrors turned round and grimaced
    at me: they were sublime, and you have made them ridiculous just
    come out here another year and have four houses within a few rods of
    you struck and then see if you write an article of such exasperating
    levity. I really hate you, but you are funny.

In addition to his own work, he conceived a plan for Orion. Clemens
himself had been attempting, from time to time, an absolutely faithful
autobiography; a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even his
moods and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down. He had found it an
impossible task. He confessed freely that he lacked the courage, even
the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his soul bare, but
he believed Orion equal to the task. He knew how rigidly honest he was,
how ready to confess his shortcomings, how eager to be employed at some
literary occupation. It was Mark Twain’s belief that if Orion would
record in detail his long, weary struggle, his succession of attempts
and failures, his past dreams and disappointments, along with his sins
of omission and commission, it would make one of those priceless human
documents such as have been left by Benvenuto Cellini, Cazenova, and
Rousseau.

“Simply tell your story to yourself,” he wrote, “laying all hideousness
utterly bare, reserving nothing. Banish the idea of the audience and all
hampering things.”

Orion, out in Keokuk, had long since abandoned the chicken farm and
a variety of other enterprises. He had prospected insurance, mining,
journalism, his old trade of printing, and had taken down and hung up
his law shingle between each of these seizures. Aside from business,
too, he had been having a rather spectacular experience. He had changed
his politics three times (twice in one day), and his religion as many
more. Once when he was delivering a political harangue in the street,
at night, a parade of the opposition (he had but just abandoned them)
marched by carrying certain flaming transparencies, which he himself
had made for them the day before. Finally, after delivering a series of
infidel lectures; he had been excommunicated and condemned to eternal
flames by the Presbyterian Church. He was therefore ripe for any new
diversion, and the Autobiography appealed to him. He set about it with
splendid enthusiasm, wrote a hundred pages or so of his childhood with
a startling minutia of detail and frankness, and mailed them to his
brother for inspection.

They were all that Mark Twain had expected; more than he had expected.
He forwarded them to Howells with great satisfaction, suggesting, with
certain excisions, they be offered anonymously to the Atlantic readers.

But Howells’s taste for realism had its limitations. He found the story
interesting--indeed, torturingly, heart-wringingly so--and, advising
strongly against its publication, returned it.

Onion was steaming along at the rate of ten to twenty pages a day now,
forwarding them as fast as written, while his courage was good and the
fires warm. Clemens, receiving a package by every morning mail, soon
lost interest, then developed a hunted feeling, becoming finally
desperate. He wrote wildly to shut Orion off, urging him to let his
manuscript accumulate, and to send it in one large consignment at the
end. This Orion did, and it is fair to say that in this instance at
least he stuck to his work faithfully to the bitter, disheartening end.
And it would have been all that Mark Twain had dreamed it would be, had
Orion maintained the simple narrative spirit of its early pages. But
he drifted off into theological byways; into discussions of his
excommunication and infidelities, which were frank enough, but lacked
human interest.

In old age Mark Twain once referred to Orion’s autobiography in print
and his own disappointment in it, which he attributed to Orion’s having
departed from the idea of frank and unrestricted confession to exalt
himself as a hero-a statement altogether unwarranted, and due to one of
those curious confusions of memory and imagination that more than once
resulted in a complete reversal of the facts. A quantity of Orion’s
manuscript has been lost and destroyed, but enough fragments of it
remain to show its fidelity to the original plan. It is just one long
record of fleeting hope, futile effort, and humiliation. It is the story
of a life of disappointment; of a man who has been defeated and beaten
down and crushed by the world until he has nothing but confession left
to surrender.--[Howells, in his letter concerning the opening chapters,
said that they would some day make good material. Fortunately the
earliest of these chapters were preserved, and, as the reader may
remember, furnished much of the childhood details for this biography.]

Whatever may have been Mark Twain’s later impression of his brother’s
manuscript, its story of failure and disappointment moved him to
definite action at the time.

Several years before, in Hartford, Orion had urged him to make his
publishing contracts on a basis of half profits, instead of on the
royalty plan. Clemens, remembering this, had insisted on such an
arrangement for the publication of ‘A Tramp Abroad’, and when his first
statement came in he realized that the new contract was very largely to
his advantage. He remembered Orion’s anxiety in the matter, and made it
now a valid excuse for placing his brother on a firm financial footing.

Out of the suspicions which you bred in me years ago has grown this
result, to wit: that I shall within the twelve months get $40,000 out of
this Tramp, instead of $20,000. $20,000, after taxes and other expenses
are stripped away, is worth to the investor about $75 a month, so I
shall tell Mr. Perkins [his lawyer and financial agent] to make your
check that amount per month hereafter.... This ends the loan business,
and hereafter you can reflect that you are living not on borrowed money,
but on money which you have squarely earned, and which has no taint or
savor of charity about it, and you can also reflect that the money which
you have been receiving of me is charged against the heavy bill which
the next publisher will have to stand who gets a book of mine.

From that time forward Orion Clemens was worth substantially twenty
thousand dollars--till the day of his death, and, after him, his widow.
Far better was it for him that the endowment be conferred in the form of
an income, than had the capital amount been placed in his hands.



CXXVIII. MARK TWAIN’s ABSENT-MINDEDNESS.

A number of amusing incidents have been more or less accurately reported
concerning Mark Twain’s dim perception of certain physical surroundings,
and his vague resulting memories--his absent-mindedness, as we say.

It was not that he was inattentive--no man was ever less so if the
subject interested him--but only that the casual, incidental thing
seemed not to find a fixed place in his deeper consciousness.

By no means was Mark Twain’s absent-mindedness a development of old age.
On the two occasions following he was in the very heyday of his mental
strength. Especially was it, when he was engaged upon some absorbing or
difficult piece of literature, that his mind seemed to fold up and shut
most of the world away. Soon after his return from Europe, when he was
still struggling with ‘A Tramp Abroad’, he wearily put the manuscript
aside, one day, and set out to invite F. G. Whitmore over for a game of
billiards. Whitmore lived only a little way down the street, and Clemens
had been there time and again. It was such a brief distance that he
started out in his slippers and with no hat. But when he reached the
corner where the house, a stone’s-throw away, was in plain view he
stopped. He did not recognize it. It was unchanged, but its outlines
had left no impress upon his mind. He stood there uncertainly a little
while, then returned and got the coachman, Patrick McAleer, to show him
the way.

The second, and still more picturesque instance, belongs also to this
period. One day, when he was playing billiards with Whitmore, George,
the butler, came up with a card.

“Who is he, George?” Clemens asked, without looking at the card.

“I don’t know, suh, but he’s a gentleman, Mr. Clemens.”

“Now, George, how many times have I told you I don’t want to see
strangers when I’m playing billiards! This is just some book agent, or
insurance man, or somebody with something to sell. I don’t want to see
him, and I’m not going to.”

“Oh, but this is a gentleman, I’m sure, Mr. Clemens. Just look at his
card, suh.”

“Yes, of course, I see--nice engraved card--but I don’t know him, and if
it was St. Peter himself I wouldn’t buy the key of salvation! You tell
him so--tell him--oh, well, I suppose I’ve got to go and get rid of him
myself. I’ll be back in a minute, Whitmore.”

He ran down the stairs, and as he got near the parlor door, which stood
open, he saw a man sitting on a couch with what seemed to be some framed
water-color pictures on the floor near his feet.

“Ah, ha!” he thought, “I see. A picture agent. I’ll soon get rid of
him.”

He went in with his best, “Well, what can I do for you?” air, which he,
as well as any man living, knew how to assume; a friendly air enough,
but not encouraging. The gentleman rose and extended his hand.

“How are you, Mr. Clemens?” he said.

Of course this was the usual thing with men who had axes to grind or
goods to sell. Clemens did not extend a very cordial hand. He merely
raised a loose, indifferent hand--a discouraging hand.

“And how is Mrs. Clemens?” asked the uninvited guest.

So this was his game. He would show an interest in the family and
ingratiate himself in that way; he would be asking after the children
next.

“Well--Mrs. Clemens is about as usual--I believe.”

“And the children--Miss Susie and little Clara?”

This was a bit startling. He knew their names! Still, that was easy to
find out. He was a smart agent, wonderfully smart. He must be got rid
of.

“The children are well, quite well,” and (pointing down at the
pictures)--“We’ve got plenty like these. We don’t want any more. No, we
don’t care for any more,” skilfully working his visitor toward the door
as he talked.

The man, looking non-plussed--a good deal puzzled--allowed himself to be
talked into the hall and toward the front door. Here he paused a moment:

“Mr. Clemens, will you tell me where Mr. Charles Dudley Warner lives?”

This was the chance! He would work him off on Charlie Warner. Perhaps
Warner needed pictures.

“Oh, certainly, certainly! Right across the yard. I’ll show you. There’s
a walk right through. You don’t need to go around the front way at all.
You’ll find him at home, too, I’m pretty sure”; all the time working his
caller out and down the step and in the right direction.

The visitor again extended his hand.

“Please remember me to Mrs. Clemens and the children.”

“Oh, certainly, certainly, with pleasure. Good day. Yes, that’s the
house Good-by.”

On the way back to the billiard-room Mrs. Clemens called to him. She was
ill that day.

“Youth!”

“Yes, Livy.” He went in for a word.

“George brought me Mr. B----‘s card. I hope you were very nice to him;
the B----s were so nice to us, once last year, when you were gone.”,

“The B----s--Why, Livy----”

“Yes, of course, and I asked him to be sure to call when he came to
Hartford.”

He gazed at her helplessly.

“Well, he’s been here.”

“Oh, Youth, have you done anything?”

“Yes, of course I have. He seemed to have some pictures to sell, so I
sent him over to Warner’s. I noticed he didn’t take them with him. Land
sakes, Livy, what can I do?”

“Which way did he go, Youth?”

“Why, I sent him to Charlie Warner’s. I thought----”

“Go right after him. Go quick! Tell him what you have done.”

He went without further delay, bareheaded and in his slippers, as usual.
Warner and B----were in cheerful and friendly converse. They had met
before. Clemens entered gaily:

“Oh Yes, I see! You found him all right. Charlie, we met Mr. B----and
his wife in Europe last summer and they made things pleasant for us.
I wanted to come over here with him, but was a good deal occupied just
then. Livy isn’t very well, but she seems a good deal better, so I just
followed along to have a good talk, all together.”

He stayed an hour, and whatever bad impression had formed in B----‘s
mind faded long before the hour ended. Returning home Clemens noticed
the pictures still on the parlor floor.

“George,” he said, “what pictures are those that gentleman left?”

“Why, Mr. Clemens, those are our own pictures. I’ve been straightening
up the room a little, and Mrs. Clemens had me set them around to see how
they would look in new places. The gentleman was looking at them while
he was waiting for you to come down.”



CXXIX. FURTHER AFFAIRS AT THE FARM

It was at Elmira, in July (1880), that the third little girl came--Jane
Lampton, for her grandmother, but always called Jean. She was a large,
lovely baby, robust and happy. When she had been with them a little more
than a month Clemens, writing to Twichell, said:

    DEAR OLD JOE,--Concerning Jean Clemens, if anybody said he “didn’t
    see no pints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog,” I
    should think he was convicting himself of being a pretty poor sort
    of observer. She is the comeliest and daintiest and perfectest
    little creature the continents and archipelagos have seen since the
    Bay and Susy were her size. I will not go into details; it is not
    necessary; you will soon be in Hartford, where I have already hired
    a hall; the admission fee will be but a trifle.

    It is curious to note the change in the stock-quotations of the
    Affection Board brought about by throwing this new security on the
    market. Four weeks ago the children still put Mama at the head of
    the list right along, where she had always been. But now:

              Jean
              Mama
              Motley  |cats
              Fraulein |
              Papa

    That is the way it stands now. Mama is become No. 2; I have dropped
    from No. 4, and am become No. 5. Some time ago it used to be nip
    and tuck between me and the cats, but after the cats “developed” I
    didn’t stand any more show.

    Been reading Daniel Webster’s Private Correspondence. Have read a
    hundred of his diffuse, conceited, “eloquent,” bathotic (or
    bathostic) letters, written in that dim (no, vanished) past, when he
    was a student. And Lord! to think that this boy, who is so real to
    me now, and so booming with fresh young blood and bountiful life,
    and sappy cynicisms about girls, has since climbed the Alps of fame
    and stood against the sun one brief, tremendous moment with the
    world’s eyes on him, and then----fzt! where is he? Why, the only
    long thing, the only real thing about the whole shadowy business, is
    the sense of the lagging dull and hoary lapse of time that has
    drifted by since then; a vast, empty level, it seems, with a
    formless specter glimpsed fitfully through the smoke and mist that
    lie along its remote verge.

    Well, we are all getting along here first-rate. Livy gains strength
    daily and sits up a deal; the baby is five weeks old and----But no
    more of this. Somebody may be reading this letter eighty years
    hence. And so, my friend (you pitying snob, I mean, who are holding
    this yellow paper in your hand in 1960), save yourself the trouble
    of looking further. I know how pathetically trivial our small
    concerns would seem to you, and I will not let your eye profane
    them. No, I keep my news; you keep your compassion. Suffice it you
    to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little child is old and blind
    now, and once more tooth less; and the rest of us are shadows these
    many, many years. Yes, and your time cometh!
                                          MARK.

It is the ageless story. He too had written his youthful letters, and
later had climbed the Alps of fame and was still outlined against the
sun. Happily, the little child was to evade that harsher penalty--the
unwarranted bitterness and affront of a lingering, palsied age.

Mrs. Clemens, in a letter somewhat later, set down a thought similar to
his:

“We are all going so fast. Pretty soon we shall have been dead a hundred
years.”

Clemens varied his work that summer, writing alternately on ‘The Prince
and the Pauper’ and on the story about ‘Huck Finn’, which he had begun
four years earlier.

He read the latter over and found in it a new interest. It did not
fascinate him, as did the story of the wandering prince. He persevered
only as the spirit moved him, piling up pages on both the tales.

He always took a boy’s pride in the number of pages he could complete
at a sitting, and if the day had gone well he would count them
triumphantly, and, lighting a fresh cigar, would come tripping down the
long stair that led to the level of the farm-house, and, gathering his
audience, would read to them the result of his industry; that is to say,
he proceeded with the story of the Prince. Apparently he had not yet
acquired confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to
friends.

The reference (in the letter to Twichell) to the cats at the farm
introduces one of the most important features of that idyllic resort.
There were always cats at the farm. Mark Twain himself dearly loved
cats, and the children inherited this passion. Susy once said:

“The difference between papa and mama is, that mama loves morals and
papa loves cats.”

The cats did not always remain the same, but some of the same ones
remained a good while, and were there from season to season, always
welcomed and adored. They were commendable cats, with such names as
Fraulein, Blatherskite, Sour Mash, Stray Kit, Sin, and Satan, and when,
as happened now and then, a vacancy occurred in the cat census there
followed deep sorrow and elaborate ceremonies.

Naturally, there would be stories about cats: impromptu bedtime stories,
which began anywhere and ended nowhere, and continued indefinitely
through a land inhabited only by cats and dreams. One of these stories,
as remembered and set down later, began:

    Once upon a time there was a noble, big cat whose christian name was
    Catasaqua, because she lived in that region; but she didn’t have any
    surname, because she was a short-tailed cat, being a manx, and
    didn’t need one. It is very just and becoming in a long-tailed cat
    to have a surname, but it would be very ostentatious, and even
    dishonorable, in a manx. Well, Catasaqua had a beautiful family of
    cattings; and they were of different colors, to harmonize with their
    characters. Cattaraugus, the eldest, was white, and he had high
    impulses and a pure heart; Catiline, the youngest, was black, and he
    had a self-seeking nature, his motives were nearly always base, he
    was truculent and insincere. He was vain and foolish, and often
    said that he would rather be what he was, and live like a bandit,
    yet have none above him, than be a cat-o’-nine-tails and eat with
    the king.

And so on without end, for the audience was asleep presently and the end
could wait.

There was less enthusiasm over dogs at Quarry Farm.

Mark Twain himself had no great love for the canine breed. To a woman
who wrote, asking for his opinion on dogs, he said, in part:

    By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a “noble” animal?
    The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your
    fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully
    misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve
    toward you afterward you can never get her full confidence again.

He was not harsh to dogs; occasionally he made friends with them. There
was once at the farm a gentle hound, named Bones, that for some reason
even won his way into his affections. Bones was always a welcome
companion, and when the end of summer came, and Clemens, as was his
habit, started down the drive ahead of the carriage, Bones, half-way to
the entrance, was waiting for him. Clemens stooped down, put his arms
around him, and bade him an affectionate good-by. He always recalled
Bones tenderly, and mentioned him in letters to the farm.



CXXX. COPYRIGHT AND OTHER FANCIES

The continued assault of Canadian pirates on his books kept Mark Twain’s
interest sharply alive on the subject of copyright reform. He invented
one scheme after another, but the public-mind was hazy on the subject,
and legislators were concerned with purposes that interested a larger
number of voters. There were too few authors to be of much value at
the polls, and even of those few only a small percentage were vitally
concerned. For the others, foreign publishers rarely paid them the
compliment of piracy, while at home the copyright limit of forty-two
years was about forty-two times as long as they needed protection. Bliss
suggested a law making the selling of pirated books a penal offense, a
plan with a promising look, but which came to nothing.

Clemens wrote to his old friend Rollin M. Daggett, who by this time was
a Congressman. Daggett replied that he would be glad to introduce any
bill that the authors might agree upon, and Clemens made at least one
trip to Washington to discuss the matter, but it came to nothing in the
end. It was a Presidential year, and it would do just as well to
keep the authors quiet by promising to do something next year. Any
legislative stir is never a good thing for a campaign.

Clemens’s idea for copyright betterment was not a fixed one. Somewhat
later, when an international treaty which would include protection for
authors was being discussed, his views had undergone a change. He wrote,
asking Howells:

    Will the proposed treaty protect us (and effectually) against
    Canadian piracy? Because, if it doesn’t, there is not a single
    argument in favor of international copyright which a rational
    American Senate could entertain for a moment. My notions have
    mightily changed lately. I can buy Macaulay’s History, three vols.;
    bound, for $1.25; Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, ten vols., cloth, for
    $7.25 (we paid $60), and other English copyrights in proportion; I
    can buy a lot of the great copyright classics, in paper, at from
    three cents to thirty cents apiece. These things must find their
    way into the very kitchens and hovels of the country. A generation
    of this sort of thing ought to make this the most intelligent and
    the best-read nation in the world. International copyright must
    becloud this sun and bring on the former darkness and dime novel
    reading.

    Morally this is all wrong; governmentally it is all right. For it
    is the duty of governments and families to be selfish, and look out
    simply for their own. International copyright would benefit a few
    English authors and a lot of American publishers, and be a profound
    detriment to twenty million Americans; it would benefit a dozen
    American authors a few dollars a year, and there an end. The real
    advantages all go to English authors and American publishers.

    And even if the treaty will kill Canadian piracy, and thus save me
    an average of $5,000 a year, I’m down on it anyway, and I’d like
    cussed well to write an article opposing the treaty.

It is a characteristic expression. Mark Twain might be first to grab for
the life-preserver, but he would also be first to hand it to a humanity
in greater need. He could damn the human race competently, but in the
final reckoning it was the interest of that race that lay closest to his
heart.

Mention has been made in an earlier chapter of Clemens’s enthusiasms or
“rages” for this thing and that which should benefit humankind. He was
seldom entirely without them. Whether it was copyright legislation, the
latest invention, or a new empiric practice, he rarely failed to have a
burning interest in some anodyne that would provide physical or mental
easement for his species. Howells tells how once he was going to save
the human race with accordion letter-files--the system of order which
would grow out of this useful device being of such nerve and labor
saving proportions as to insure long life and happiness to all. The
fountain-pen, in its first imperfect form, must have come along about
the same time, and Clemens was one of the very earliest authors to own
one. For a while it seemed that the world had known no greater boon
since the invention of printing; but when it clogged and balked, or
suddenly deluged his paper and spilled in his pocket, he flung it to the
outer darkness. After which, the stylo-graphic pen. He tried one, and
wrote severally to Dr. Brown, to Howells, and to Twichell, urging its
adoption. Even in a letter to Mrs. Howells he could not forget his new
possession:

    And speaking of Howells, he ought to use the stylographic pen, the
    best fountain-pen yet invented; he ought to, but of course he won’t
    --a blamed old sodden-headed conservative--but you see yourself what
    a nice, clean, uniform MS. it makes.

And at the same time to Twichell:

    I am writing with a stylographic pen. It takes a royal amount of
    cussing to make the thing go the first few days or a week, but by
    that time the dullest ass gets the hang of the thing, and after that
    no enrichments of expression are required, and said ass finds the
    stylographic a genuine God’s blessing. I carry one in each breeches
    pocket, and both loaded. I’d give you one of them if I had you
    where I could teach you how to use it--not otherwise. For the
    average ass flings the thing out of the window in disgust the second
    day, believing it hath no virtue, no merit of any sort; whereas the
    lack lieth in himself, God of his mercy damn him.

It was not easy to withstand Mark Twain’s enthusiasm. Howells, Twichell,
and Dr. Brown were all presently struggling and swearing (figuratively)
over their stylographic pens, trying to believe that salvation lay in
their conquest. But in the midst of one letter, at last, Howells broke
down, seized his old steel weapon, and wrote savagely: “No white man
ought to use a stylographic pen, anyhow!” Then, with the more ancient
implement, continued in a calmer spirit.

It was only a little later that Clemens himself wrote:

    You see I am trying a new pen. I stood the stylograph as long as I
    could, and then retired to the pencil. The thing I am trying now is
    that fountain-pen which is advertised to employ and accommodate
    itself to any kind of pen. So I selected an ordinary gold pen--a
    limber one--and sent it to New York and had it cut and fitted to
    this thing. It goes very well indeed--thus far; but doubtless the
    devil will be in it by tomorrow.

Mark Twain’s schemes were not all in the line of human advancement; some
of them were projected, primarily at least, for diversion. He was likely
at any moment to organize a club, a sort of private club, and at the
time of which we are writing he proposed what was called the “Modest”
 Club. He wrote to Howells, about it:

    At present I am the only member, and as the modesty required must be
    of a quite aggravated type the enterprise did seem for a time doomed
    to stop dead still with myself, for lack of further material; but on
    reflection I have come to the conclusion that you are eligible.
    Therefore, I have held a meeting and voted to offer you the
    distinction of membership. I do not know that we can find any
    others, though I have had some thought of Hay, Warner, Twichell,
    Aldrich, Osgood, Fields, Higginson, and a few more, together with
    Mrs. Howells, Mrs. Clemens, and certain others of the sex. I have
    long felt there ought to be an organized gang of our kind.

He appends the by-laws, the main ones being:

    The object of the club shall be to eat and talk.

    Qualification for membership shall be aggravated modesty,
    unobtrusiveness, native humility, learning, talent, intelligence,
    unassailable character.

    There shall be no officers except a president, and any member who
    has anything to eat and talk about may constitute himself president
    for the time being.

    Any brother or sister of the order finding a brother or a sister in
    imminently deadly peril shall forsake his own concerns, no matter at
    what cost, and call the police.

    Any member knowing anything scandalous about himself shall
    immediately inform the club, so that they shall call a meeting and
    have the first chance to talk about it.

It was one of his whimsical fancies, and Howells replied that he would
like to join it, only that he was too modest--that is, too modest to
confess that he was modest enough for membership.

He added that he had sent a letter, with the rules, to Hay, but doubted
his modesty. He said:

“He will think he has a right to belong as much as you or I.”

Howells agreed that his own name might be put down, but the idea seems
never to have gone any further. Perhaps the requirements of membership
were too severe.



CXXXI. WORKING FOR GARFIELD

Eighteen hundred and eighty was a Presidential year. General Garfield
was nominated on the Republican ticket (against General Hancock), and
Clemens found him satisfactory.

Garfield suits me thoroughly and exactly [he wrote Howells]. I prefer
him to Grant’s friends. The Presidency can’t add anything to Grant; he
will shine on without it. It is ephemeral; he is eternal.

That was the year when the Republican party became panicky over the
disaffection in its ranks, due to the defeat of Grant in the convention,
and at last, by pleadings and promises, conciliated Platt and Conkling
and brought them into the field. General Grant also was induced to save
the party from defeat, and made a personal tour of oratory for that
purpose. He arrived in Hartford with his family on the 16th of October,
and while his reception was more or less partizan, it was a momentous
event. A vast procession passed in review before him, and everywhere
houses and grounds were decorated. To Mrs. Clemens, still in Elmira,
Clemens wrote:

    I found Mr. Beals hard at work in the rain with his decorations.
    With a ladder he had strung flags around our bedroom balcony, and
    thence around to the porte-cochere, which was elaborately flagged;
    thence the flags of all nations were suspended from a line which
    stretched past the greenhouse to the limit of our grounds. Against
    each of the two trees on the mound, half-way down to our gate,
    stands a knight in complete armor. Piles of still-bundled flags
    clutter up the ombra (to be put up), also gaudy shields of various
    shapes (arms of this and other countries), also some huge glittering
    arches and things done in gold and silver paper, containing mottoes
    in big letters. I broke Mr. Beals’s heart by persistently and
    inflexibly annulling and forbidding the biggest and gorgeousest of
    the arches--it had on it, in all the fires of the rainbow, “The Home
    of Mark Twain,” in letters as big as your head. Oh, we’re going to
    be decorated sufficient, don’t you worry about that, madam.

Clemens was one of those delegated to receive Grant and to make a speech
of welcome. It was a short speech but an effective one, for it made
Grant laugh. He began:

    “I am among those deputed to welcome you to the sincere and cordial
    hospitalities of Hartford, the city of the historic and revered
    Charter Oak, of which most of the town is built.” He seemed to be
    at loss what to say next, and, leaning over, pretended to whisper to
    Grant; then, as if he had obtained the information he wanted, he
    suddenly straightened up and poured out the old-fashioned eulogy on
    Grant’s achievements, adding, in an aside, as he finished:

    “I nearly forgot that part of my speech,” which evoked roars of
    laughter from the assembly and a grim smile from Grant. He spoke of
    Grant as being out of public employment, with private opportunities
    closed against him, and added, “But your country will reward you,
    never fear.”

Then he closed:

    When Wellington won Waterloo, a battle about on a level with any one
    of a dozen of your victories, sordid England tried to pay him for
    that service with wealth and grandeurs. She made him a duke and
    gave him $4,000,000. If you had done and suffered for any other
    country what you have done and suffered for your own you would have
    been affronted in the same sordid way. But, thank God! this vast
    and rich and mighty republic is imbued to the core with a delicacy
    which will forever preserve her from so degrading you.

    Your country loves you--your country’s proud of you--your country is
    grateful to you. Her applauses, which have been many, thundering in
    your ears all these weeks and months, will never cease while the
    flag you saved continues to wave.

    Your country stands ready from this day forth to testify her
    measureless love and pride and gratitude toward you in every
    conceivable--inexpensive way. Welcome to Hartford, great soldier,
    honored statesman, unselfish citizen.

Grant’s grim smile showed itself more than once during the speech, and
when Clemens reached the sentence that spoke of his country rewarding
him in “every conceivable--inexpensive way” his composure broke up
completely and he “nearly laughed his entire head off,” according to
later testimony, while the spectators shouted their approval.

Grant’s son, Col. Fred Grant,--[Maj.-Gen’l, U. S. Army, 1906. Died
April, 1912.]--dined at the Clemens home that night, and Rev. Joseph
Twichell and Henry C. Robinson. Twichell’s invitation was in the form of
a telegram. It said:

    I want you to dine with us Saturday half past five and meet Col.
    Fred Grant. No ceremony. Wear the same shirt you always wear.

The campaign was at its height now, and on the evening of October 26th
there was a grand Republican rally at the opera-house with addresses
by Charles Dudley Warner, Henry C. Robinson, and Mark Twain. It was
an unpleasant, drizzly evening, but the weather had no effect on their
audience. The place was jammed and packed, the aisles, the windows,
and the gallery railings full. Hundreds who came as late as the hour
announced for the opening were obliged to turn back, for the building
had been thronged long before. Mark Twain’s speech that night is still
remembered in Hartford as the greatest effort of his life. It was hardly
that, except to those who were caught in the psychology of the moment,
the tumult and the shouting of patriotism, the surge and sweep of the
political tide. The roaring delight of the audience showed that to them
at least it was convincing. Howells wrote that he had read it twice, and
that he could not put it out of his mind. Whatever its general effect
was need not now be considered. Garfield was elected, and perhaps
Grant’s visit to Hartford and the great mass-meeting that followed
contributed their mite to that result.

Clemens saw General Grant again that year, but not on political
business. The Educational Mission, which China had established in
Hartford--a thriving institution for eight years or more--was threatened
now by certain Chinese authorities with abolishment. Yung Wing (a Yale
graduate), the official by whom it had been projected and under whose
management it had prospered, was deeply concerned, as was the Rev.
Joseph Twichell, whose interest in the mission was a large and personal
one. Yung Wing declared that if influence could be brought upon Li Hung
Chang, then the most influential of Chinese counselors, the mission
might be saved. Twichell, remembering the great honors which Li Hung
Chang had paid to General Grant in China, also Grant’s admiration of
Mark Twain, went to the latter without delay. Necessarily Clemens would
be enthusiastic, and act promptly. He wrote to Grant, and Grant replied
by telegraph, naming a day when he would see them in New York.

They met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Grant was in fine spirits, and by no
means the “silent man” of his repute.

He launched at once into as free and flowing talk as I have ever heard
[says Twichell], marked by broad and intelligent views on the subject of
China, her wants, disadvantages, etc. Now and then he asked a question,
but kept the lead of the conversation. At last he proposed, of his own
accord, to write a letter to Li Hung Chang, advising the continuance of
the Mission, asking only that I would prepare him some notes, giving
him points to go by. Thus we succeeded easily beyond our expectations,
thanks, very largely, to Clemens’s assistance.

Clemens wrote Howells of the interview, detailing at some length
Twichell’s comical mixture of delight and chagrin at not being given
time to air the fund of prepared statistics with which he had come
loaded. It was as if he had come to borrow a dollar and had been offered
a thousand before he could unfold his case.



CXXXII. A NEW PUBLISHER

It was near the end of the year that Clemens wrote to his mother:

    I have two stories, and by the verbal agreement they are both going
    into the same book; but Livy says they’re not, and by George! she
    ought to know. She says they’re going into separate books, and that
    one of them is going to be elegantly gotten up, even if the elegance
    of it eats up the publisher’s profits and mine too.

    I anticipate that publisher’s melancholy surprise when he calls here
    Tuesday. However, let him suffer; it is his own fault. People who
    fix up agreements with me without first finding out what Livy’s
    plans are take their fate into their own hands.

    I said two stories, but one of them is only half done; two or three
    months’ work on it yet. I shall tackle it Wednesday or Thursday;
    that is, if Livy yields and allows both stories to go in one book,
    which I hope she won’t.

The reader may surmise that the finished story--the highly regarded
story--was ‘The Prince and the Pauper’. The other tale--the unfinished
and less considered one was ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’. Nobody
appears to have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly,
the publisher.

The publisher was not the American Company. Elisha Bliss, after long ill
health, had died that fall, and this fact, in connection with a growing
dissatisfaction over the earlier contracts, had induced Clemens to
listen to offers from other makers of books. The revelation made by the
“half-profit” returns from A Tramp Abroad meant to him, simply that the
profits had not been fairly apportioned, and he was accordingly hostile.
To Orion he wrote that, had Bliss lived, he would have remained with the
company and made it reimburse him for his losses, but that as matters
stood he would sever the long connection. It seemed a pity, later, that
he did this, but the break was bound to come. Clemens was not a business
man, and Bliss was not a philanthropist. He was, in fact, a shrewd,
capable publisher, who made as good a contract as he could; yet he
was square in his dealings, and the contract which Clemens held most
bitterly against him--that of ‘Roughing It’--had been made in good faith
and in accordance with the conditions, of that period. In most of the
later contracts Clemens himself had named his royalties, and it was not
in human nature--business human nature--for Bliss to encourage the size
of these percentages. If one wished to draw a strictly moral conclusion
from the situation, one might say that it would have been better for
the American Publishing Company, knowing Mark Twain, voluntarily to have
allowed him half profits, which was the spirit of his old understanding
even if not the letter of it, rather than to have waited till he
demanded it and then to lose him by the result. Perhaps that would be
also a proper business deduction; only, as a rule, business morals
are regulated by the contract, and the contract is regulated by the
necessities and the urgency of demand.

Never mind. Mark Twain revised ‘The Prince and the Pauper’, sent it to
Howells, who approved of it mightily (though with reservations as to
certain chapters), and gave it to James R. Osgood, who was grateful and
agreed to make it into a book upon which no expense for illustration
or manufacture should be spared. It was to be a sort of partnership
arrangement as between author and publisher, and large returns were
anticipated.

Among the many letters which Clemens was just then writing to Howells
one was dated “Xmas Eve.” It closes with the customary pleasantries and
the final line:

“But it is growing dark. Merry Christmas to all of you!”

That last was a line of large significance. It meant that the air was
filled with the whisper of hovering events and that he must mingle with
the mystery of preparation. Christmas was an important season in the
Clemens home. Almost the entire day before, Patrick was out with the
sleigh, delivering food and other gifts in baskets to the poor, and the
home preparations were no less busy. There was always a tree--a large
one--and when all the gifts had been gathered in--when Elmira and
Fredonia had delivered their contributions, and Orion and his wife in
Keokuk had sent the annual sack of hickory-nuts (the big river-bottom
nuts, big as a silver dollar almost, such nuts as few children of
this later generation ever see) when all this happy revenue had been
gathered, and the dusk of Christmas Eve had hurried the children off to
bed, it was Mrs. Clemens who superintended the dressing of the tree, her
husband assisting, with a willingness that was greater than his skill,
and with a boy’s anticipation in the surprise of it next morning.

Then followed the holidays, with parties and dances and charades, and
little plays, with the Warner and Twichell children. To the Clemens
home the Christmas season brought all the old round of juvenile
happiness--the spirit of kindly giving, the brightness and the
merrymaking, the gladness and tenderness and mystery that belong to
no other season, and have been handed down through all the ages since
shepherds watched on the plains of Bethlehem.



CXXXIII. THE THREE FIRES--SOME BENEFACTIONS

The tradition that fires occur in groups of three was justified in the
Clemens household that winter. On each of three successive days flames
started that might have led to ghastly results.

The children were croupy, and one morning an alcohol lamp near little
Clara’s bed, blown by the draught, set fire to the canopy. Rosa, the
nurse, entered just as the blaze was well started. She did not lose her
presence of mind,--[Rosa was not the kind to lose her head. Once, in
Europe, when Bay had crept between the uprights of a high balustrade,
and was hanging out over destruction, Rosa, discovering her, did not
scream but spoke to her playfully and lifted her over into safety.]--but
snatched the little girl out of danger, then opened the window and threw
the burning bedding on the lawn. The child was only slightly scorched,
but the escape was narrow enough.

Next day little Jean was lying asleep in her crib, in front of an open
wood fire, carefully protected by a firescreen, when a spark, by some
ingenuity, managed to get through the mesh of the screen and land on the
crib’s lace covering. Jean’s nurse, Julia, arrived to find the lace a
gust of flame and the fire spreading. She grabbed the sleeping Jean and
screamed. Rosa, again at hand, heard the scream, and rushing in once
more opened a window and flung out the blazing bedclothes. Clemens
himself also arrived, and together they stamped out the fire.

On the third morning, just before breakfast-time, Susy was practising at
the piano in the school-room, which adjoined the nursery. At one end of
the room a fire of large logs was burning. Susy was at the other end of
the room, her back to the fire. A log burned in two and fell, scattering
coals around the woodwork which supported the mantel. Just as the blaze
was getting fairly started a barber, waiting to trim Mr. Clemens’s
hair, chanced to look in and saw what was going on. He stepped into
the nursery bath-room, brought a pitcher of water and extinguished the
flames. This period was always referred to in the Clemens household as
the “three days of fire.”

Clemens would naturally make philosophical deductions from these
coincidental dangers and the manner in which they had been averted. He
said that all these things were comprehended in the first act of the
first atom; that, but for some particular impulse given in that remote
time, the alcohol flame would not have blown against the canopy, the
spark would not have found its way through the screen, the log would not
have broken apart in that dangerous way, and that Rosa and Julia and the
barber would not have been at hand to save precious life and property.
He did not go further and draw moral conclusions as to the purpose of
these things: he never drew conclusions as to purpose. He was willing to
rest with the event. Logically he did not believe in reasons for things,
but only that things were.

Nevertheless, he was always trying to change them; to have a hand in
their improvement. Had you asked him, he would have said that this, too,
was all in the primal atom; that his nature, such as it was, had been
minutely embodied there.

In that charming volume, ‘My Mark Twain’, Howells tells us of Clemens’s
consideration, and even tenderness, for the negro race and his effort to
repair the wrong done by his nation. Mark Twain’s writings are full of
similar evidence, and in his daily life he never missed an opportunity
to pay tribute to the humbler race. He would go across the street to
speak to an old negro, and to take his hand. He would read for a negro
church when he would have refused a cathedral. Howells mentions the
colored student whose way through college Clemens paid as a partial
reparation “due from every white man to every black man.”--[Mark Twain
paid two colored students through college. One of them, educated in
a Southern institution, became a minister of the gospel. The other
graduated from the Yale Law School.]--This incident belongs just to the
period of which we are now writing, and there is another which, though
different enough, indicates the same tendency.

Garfield was about to be inaugurated, and it was rumored that Frederick
Douglass might lose his position as Marshal of the District of Columbia.
Clemens was continually besought by one and another to use his influence
with the Administration, and in every case had refused. Douglass had
made no such, application. Clemens, learning that the old negro’s place
was in danger, interceded for him of his own accord. He closed his
letter to General Garfield:

    A simple citizen may express a desire, with all propriety, in the
    matter of recommendation to office, and so I beg permission to hope
    that you will retain Mr. Douglass in his present office of Marshal
    of the District of Columbia, if such a course will not clash with
    your own preferences or with the expediencies and interests of your
    Administration. I offer this petition with peculiar pleasure and
    strong desire, because I so honor this man’s high and blemishless
    character, and so admire his brave, long crusade for the liberties
    and elevation of his race.

    He is a personal friend of mine, but that is nothing to the point;
    his history would move me to say these things without that, and I
    feel them, too.

Douglass wrote to Clemens, thanking him for his interest; at the end he
said:

    I think if a man is mean enough to want an office he ought to be
    noble enough to ask for it, and use all honorable means of getting
    it. I mean to ask, and I will use your letter as a part of my
    petition. It will put the President-elect in a good humor, in any
    case, and that is very important.

           With great respect,
                  Gratefully yours,
                         FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

Mark Twain’s benefactions were not all for the colored race. One morning
in February of this same year, while the family were at late breakfast,
George came in to announce “a lady waiting to see Mr. Clemens in the
drawing-room.” Clemens growled.

“George,” he said, “it’s a book agent. I won’t see her. I’ll die, in my
tracks first.”

He went, fuming and raging inwardly, and began at once to ask the nature
of the intruder’s business. Then he saw that she was very young and
modest, with none of the assurance of a canvasser, so he gave her a
chance to speak. She told him that a young man employed in Pratt &
Whitney’s machine-shops had made a statue in clay, and would like to
have Mark Twain come and look at it and see if it showed any promise of
future achievement. His name, she said, was Karl Gerhardt, and he was
her husband. Clemens protested that he knew nothing about art, but the
young woman’s manner and appearance (she seemed scarcely more than a
child) won him. He wavered, and finally promised that he would come the
first chance he had; that in fact he would come some time during the
next week. On her suggestion he agreed to come early in the week; he
specified Monday, “without fail.”

When she was gone, and the door shut behind her, his usual remorse came
upon him. He said to himself:

“Why didn’t I go now? Why didn’t I go with her now?”

She went from Clemens’s over to Warner’s. Warner also resisted, but,
tempted beyond his strength by her charm, laid down his work and went at
once. When he returned he urged Clemens to go without fail, and, true
to promise, Clemens took Patrick, the coachman, and hunted up the place.
Clemens saw the statue, a seminude, for which the young wife had posed,
and was struck by its evident merit. Mrs. Gerhardt told him the story of
her husband’s struggles between his daily work and the effort to develop
his talent. He had never had a lesson, she said; if he could only have
lessons what might he not accomplish?

Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding called next day, and were equally
carried away with Karl Gerhardt, his young wife, and his effort to
win his way in art. Clemens and Warner made up their minds to interest
themselves personally in the matter, and finally persuaded the painter
J. Wells Champney to come over from New York and go with them to the
Gerhardts’ humble habitation, to see his work. Champney approved of it.
He thought it well worth while, he said, for the people of Hartford to
go to the expense of Gerhardt’s art education. He added that it would
be better to get the judgment of a sculptor. So they brought over John
Quincy Adams Ward, who, like all the others, came away bewitched with
these young people and their struggles for the sake of art. Ward said:

“If any stranger had told me that this ‘prentice did not model that
thing from plaster-casts I should not have believed it. It’s full of
crudities, but it’s full of genius, too. Hartford must send him to Paris
for two years; then, if the promise holds good, keep him there three
more.”

When he was gone Mrs. Clemens said:

“Youth, we won’t wait for Hartford to do it. It would take too long. Let
us send the Gerhardts to Paris ourselves, and say nothing about it to
any one else.”

So the Gerhardts, provided with funds and an arrangement that would
enable them to live for five years in Paris if necessary, were started
across the sea without further delay.

Clemens and his wife were often doing something of this sort. There was
seldom a time that they were not paying the way of some young man
or woman through college, or providing means and opportunity for
development in some special field of industry.



CXXXIV. LITERARY PROJECTS AND A MONUMENT TO ADAM

Mark Twain’s literary work languished during this period. He had a world
of plans, as usual, and wrote plentifully, but without direction or
conclusion. “A Curious Experience,” which relates a circumstance told to
him by an army officer, is about the most notable of the few completed
manuscripts of this period.

Of the books projected (there were several), a burlesque manual of
etiquette would seem to have been the most promising. Howells had faith
in it, and of the still remaining fragments a few seem worth quoting:

                     AT BILLIARDS

    If your ball glides along in the intense and immediate vicinity of
    the object-ball, and a count seems exquisitely imminent, lift one
    leg; then one shoulder; then squirm your body around in sympathy
    with the direction of the moving ball; and at the instant when the
    ball seems on the point of colliding throw up both of your arms
    violently. Your cue will probably break a chandelier, but no
    matter; you have done what you could to help the count.

                     AT THE DOG-FIGHT

    If it occur in your block, courteously give way to strangers
    desiring a view, particularly ladies.

    Avoid showing partiality toward the one dog, lest you hurt the
    feelings of the other one.

    Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the
    under dog in the fight--this is magnanimity; but bet on the other
    one--this is business.

                     AT POKER

    If you draw to a flush and fail to fill, do not continue the
    conflict.

    If you hold a pair of trays, and your opponent is blind, and it
    costs you fifty to see him, let him remain unperceived.

    If you hold nothing but ace high, and by some means you know that
    the other man holds the rest of the aces, and he calls, excuse
    yourself; let him call again another time.

                     WALL STREET

    If you live in the country, buy at 80, sell at 40. Avoid all forms
    of eccentricity.

                     IN THE RESTAURANT

    When you wish to get the waiter’s attention, do not sing out “Say!”
     Simply say “Szt!”

His old abandoned notion of “Hamlet” with an added burlesque character
came back to him and stirred his enthusiasm anew, until even Howells
manifested deep interest in the matter. One reflects how young Howells
must have been in those days; how full of the joy of existence; also how
mournfully he would consider such a sacrilege now.

Clemens proposed almost as many things to Howells as his brother Orion
proposed to him. There was scarcely a letter that didn’t contain some
new idea, with a request for advice or co-operation. Now it was some
book that he meant to write some day, and again it would be a something
that he wanted Howells to write.

Once he urged Howells to make a play, or at least a novel, out of Orion.
At another time he suggested as material the “Rightful Earl of Durham.”

He is a perfectly stunning literary bonanza, and must be dug up and put
on the market. You must get his entire biography out of him and have it
ready for Osgood’s magazine. Even if it isn’t worth printing, you must
have it anyway, and use it one of these days in one of your stories or
in a play.

It was this notion about ‘The American Claimant’ which somewhat later
would lead to a collaboration with Howells on a drama, and eventually to
a story of that title.

But Clemens’s chief interest at this time lay in publishing, rather
than in writing. His association with Osgood inspired him to devise
new ventures of profit. He planned a ‘Library of American Humor’, which
Howells (soon to leave the Atlantic) and “Charley” Clark--[Charles
Hopkins Clark, managing editor of the Hartford Courant.]--were to edit,
and which Osgood would publish, for subscription sale. Without realizing
it, Clemens was taking his first step toward becoming his own publisher.
His contract with Osgood for ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ made him
essentially that, for by the terms of it he agreed to supply all the
money for the making of the book, and to pay Osgood a royalty of seven
and one-half per cent. for selling it, reversing the usual conditions.
The contract for the Library of Humor was to be a similar one, though
in this case Osgood was to have a larger royalty return, and to share
proportionately in the expense and risk. Mark Twain was entering into
a field where he did not belong; where in the end he would harvest only
disaster and regret.

One curious project came to an end in 1881--the plan for a monument to
Adam. In a sketch written a great many years later Mark Twain tells of
the memorial which the Rev. Thomas K. Beecher and himself once proposed
to erect to our great common ancestor. The story is based on a real
incident. Clemens, in Elmira one day (it was October, 1879), heard of
a jesting proposal made by F. G. Hall to erect a monument in Elmira
to Adam. The idea promptly caught Mark Twain’s fancy. He observed to
Beecher that the human race really showed a pretty poor regard for its
great progenitor, who was about to be deposed by Darwin’s simian, not
to pay him the tribute of a single monument. Mankind, he said, would
probably accept the monkey ancestor, and in time the very name of Adam
would be forgotten. He declared Mr. Hall’s suggestion to be a sound
idea.

Beecher agreed that there were many reasons why a monument should be
erected to Adam, and suggested that a subscription be started for the
purpose. Certain business men, seeing an opportunity for advertising the
city, took the matter semi-seriously, and offered to contribute large
sums in the interest of the enterprise. Then it was agreed that Congress
should be petitioned to sanction the idea exclusively to Elmira,
prohibiting the erection of any such memorial elsewhere. A document
to this effect was prepared, headed by F. G. Hall, and signed by other
leading citizens of Elmira, including Beecher himself. General Joe
Hawley came along just then on a political speech-making tour. Clemens
introduced him, and Hawley, in turn, agreed to father the petition in
Congress. What had begun merely as pleasantry began to have a formidable
look.

But alas! in the end Hawley’s courage had failed him. He began to hate
his undertaking. He was afraid of the national laugh it would arouse,
the jeers of the newspapers. It was certain to leak out that Mark Twain
was behind it, in spite of the fact that his name nowhere appeared; that
it was one of his colossal jokes. Now and then, in the privacy of his
own room at night, Hawley would hunt up the Adam petition and read it
and feel the cold sweat breaking out. He postponed the matter from one
session to another till the summer of 1881, when he was about to sail
for Europe. Then he gave the document to his wife, to turn over to
Clemens, and ignominiously fled.

[For text of the petition in full, etc., see Appendix P, at the end of
last volume.]

Mark Twain’s introduction of Hawley at Elmira contained this pleasantry:
“General Hawley was president of the Centennial Commission. Was a
gallant soldier in the war. He has been Governor of Connecticut, member
of Congress, and was president of the convention that nominated Abraham
Lincoln.”

General Hawley: “That nominated Grant.”

Twain: “He says it was Grant, but I know better. He is a member of my
church at Hartford, and the author of ‘Beautiful Snow.’ Maybe he will
deny that. But I am only here to give him a character from his last
place. As a pure citizen, I respect him; as a personal friend of years,
I have the warmest regard for him; as a neighbor whose vegetable garden
joins mine, why--why, I watch him. That’s nothing; we all do that with
any neighbor. General Hawley keeps his promises, not only in private,
but in public. He is an editor who believes what he writes in his own
paper. As the author of ‘Beautiful Snow’ he added a new pang to winter.
He is broad-souled, generous, noble, liberal, alive to his moral and
religious responsibilities. Whenever the contribution-box was passed I
never knew him to take out a cent.”



CXXXV. A TRIP WITH SHERMAN AND AN INTERVIEW WITH GRANT.

The Army of the Potomac gave a dinner in Hartford on the 8th of June,
1881. But little memory remains of it now beyond Mark Twain’s speech and
a bill of fare containing original comments, ascribed to various revered
authors, such as Johnson, Milton, and Carlyle. A pleasant incident
followed, however, which Clemens himself used to relate. General Sherman
attended the banquet, and Secretary of War, Robert Lincoln. Next morning
Clemens and Twichell were leaving for West Point, where they were to
address the military students, guests on the same special train on which
Lincoln and Sherman had their private car. This car was at the end of
the train, and when the two passengers reached the station, Sherman and
Lincoln were out on the rear platform addressing the multitude. Clemens
and Twichell went in and, taking seats, waited for them.

As the speakers finished the train started, but they still remained
outside, bowing and waving to the assembled citizens, so that it was
under good headway before they came in. Sherman came up to Clemens, who
sat smoking unconcernedly.

“Well,” he said, “who told you you could go in this car?”

“Nobody,” said Clemens.

“Do you expect to pay extra fare?” asked Sherman.

“No,” said Clemens. “I don’t expect to pay any fare.”

“Oh, you don’t. Then you’ll work your way.”

Sherman took off his coat and military hat and made Clemens put them on.

“Now,” said he, “whenever the train stops you go out on the platform and
represent me and make a speech.”

It was not long before the train stopped, and Clemens, according to
orders, stepped out on the rear platform and bowed to the crowd. There
was a cheer at the sight of his military uniform. Then the cheer waned,
became a murmur of uncertainty, followed by an undertone of discussion.
Presently somebody said:

“Say, that ain’t Sherman, that’s Mark Twain,” which brought another
cheer.

Then Sherman had to come out too, and the result was that both spoke.
They kept this up at the different stations, and sometimes Lincoln
came out with them. When there was time all three spoke, much to the
satisfaction of their audiences.

President Garfield was shot that summer--July 2, 1881.--[On the day
that President Garfield was shot Mrs. Clemens received from their friend
Reginald Cholmondeley a letter of condolence on the death of her husband
in Australia; startling enough, though in reality rather comforting
than otherwise, for the reason that the “Mark Twain” who had died in
Australia was a very persistent impostor. Clemens wrote Cholmondeley:
“Being dead I might be excused from writing letters, but I am not that
kind of a corpse. May I never be so dead as to neglect the hail of
a friend from a far land.” Out of this incident grew a feature of an
anecdote related in Following the Equator the joke played by the man
from Bendigo.]--He died September 19th, and Arthur came into power.
There was a great feeling of uncertainty as to what he would do. He was
regarded as “an excellent gentleman with a weakness for his friends.”
 Incumbents holding appointive offices were in a state of dread.

Howells’s father was consul at Toronto, and, believing his place to be
in danger, he appealed to his son. In his book Howells tells how, in
turn, he appealed to Clemens, remembering his friendship with Grant and
Grant’s friendship with Arthur. He asked Clemens to write to Grant, but
Clemens would hear of nothing less than a call on the General, during
which the matter would be presented to him in person. Howells relates
how the three of them lunched together, in a little room just out of
the office, on baked beans and coffee, brought in from some near-by
restaurant:

    The baked beans and coffee were of about the railroad-refreshment
    quality; but eating them with Grant was like sitting down to baked
    beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander, or some other
    great Plutarchan captain.

Clemens, also recalling the interview, once added some interesting
details:

“I asked Grant if he wouldn’t write a word on a card which Howells could
carry to Washington and hand to the President. But, as usual, General
Grant was his natural self--that is to say, ready and determined to do
a great deal more for you than you could possibly ask him to do. He
said he was going to Washington in a couple of days to dine with the
President, and he would speak to him himself on the subject and make it
a personal matter. Grant was in the humor to talk--he was always in a
humor to talk when no strangers were present--he forced us to stay and
take luncheon in a private room, and continued to talk all the time.
It was baked beans, but how ‘he sits and towers,’ Howells said, quoting
Dame. Grant remembered ‘Squibob’ Derby (John Phoenix) at West Point
very well. He said that Derby was always drawing caricatures of the
professors and playing jokes on every body. He told a thing which I
had heard before but had never seen in print. A professor questioning a
class concerning certain particulars of a possible siege said, ‘Suppose
a thousand men are besieging a fortress whose equipment of provisions is
so-and-so; it is a military axiom that at the end of forty-five days the
fort will surrender. Now, young men, if any of you were in command of
such a fortress, how would you proceed?’

“Derby held up his hand in token that he had an answer for that
question. He said, ‘I would march out, let the enemy in, and at the end
of forty-five days I would change places with him.’

“I tried hard, during that interview, to get General Grant to agree to
write his personal memoirs for publication, but he wouldn’t listen to
the suggestion. His inborn diffidence made him shrink from voluntarily
coming before the public and placing himself under criticism as an
author. He had no confidence in his ability to write well; whereas we
all know now that he possessed an admirable literary gift and style. He
was also sure that the book would have no sale, and of course that would
be a humility too. I argued that the book would have an enormous sale,
and that out of my experience I could save him from making unwise
contracts with publishers, and would have the contract arranged in such
a way that they could not swindle him, but he said he had no necessity
for any addition to his income. Of course he could not foresee that he
was camping on a volcano; that as Ward’s partner he was a ruined man
even then, and of course I had no suspicion that in four years from
that time I would become his publisher. He would not agree to write his
memoirs. He only said that some day he would make very full notes and
leave them behind him, and then if his children chose to make them into
a book they could do so. We came away then. He fulfilled his promise
entirely concerning Howells’s father, who held his office until he
resigned of his own accord.”



CXXXVI. “THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER”

During the summer absence alterations were made in the Hartford home,
with extensive decorations by Tiffany. The work was not completed when
the family returned. Clemens wrote to Charles Warren Stoddard, then
in the Sandwich Islands, that the place was full of carpenters and
decorators, whereas what they really needed was “an incendiary.”

If the house would only burn down we would pack up the cubs and fly to
the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes
of the crater of Haleakala and get a good rest, for the mails do not
intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph; and after
resting we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly,
breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt, and give thanks to whom all
thanks belong for these privileges, and never housekeep any more.

They had acquired more ground. One morning in the spring Mark Twain had
looked out of his window just in time to see a man lift an ax to
cut down a tree on the lot which lay between his own and that of his
neighbor. He had heard that a house was to be built there; altogether
too close to him for comfort and privacy. Leaning out of the window he
called sonorously, “Woodman, spare that tree!” Then he hurried down,
obtained a stay of proceedings, and without delay purchased the lot from
the next-door neighbor who owned it, acquiring thereby one hundred feet
of extra ground and a greenhouse which occupied it. It was a costly
purchase; the owner knew he could demand his own price; he asked and
received twelve thousand dollars for the strip.

In November, Clemens found that he must make another trip to Canada.
‘The Prince and the Pauper’ was ready for issue, and to insure Canadian
copyright the author must cross the line in person. He did not enjoy the
prospect of a cold-weather trip to the north, and tried to tempt Howells
to go with him, but only succeeded in persuading Osgood, who would
do anything or go anywhere that offered the opportunity for pleasant
company and junket.

It was by no means an unhappy fortnight. Clemens took a note-book, and
there are plenty of items that give reality to that long-ago excursion.
He found the Canadian girls so pretty that he records it as a relief now
and then to see a plain one. On another page he tells how one night
in the hotel a mouse gnawed and kept him awake, and how he got up and
hunted for it, hoping to destroy it. He made a rebus picture for the
children of this incident in a letter home.

We get a glimpse just here of how he was constantly viewing himself as
literary material--human material--an example from which some literary
aspect or lesson may be drawn. Following the mouse adventure we find it
thus dramatized:

    Trace Father Brebeuf all through this trip, and when I am in a rage
    and can’t endure the mouse be reading of Brebeuf’s marvelous
    endurances and be shamed.

    And finally, after chasing the bright-eyed rascal several days, and
    throwing things and trying to jump on him when in my overshoes, he
    darts away with those same bright eyes, then straightway I read
    Brebeuf’s magnificent martyrdom, and turn in, subdued and wondering.
    By and by the thought occurs to me, Brebeuf, with his good, great
    heart would spare even that poor humble mousie--and for his sake so
    will I--I will throw the trap in the fire--jump out of bed, reach
    under, fetch out the trap, and find him throttled there and not two
    minutes dead.

They gave him a dinner in Montreal. Louis Frechette, the Canadian poet,
was there and Clemens addressed him handsomely in the response he made
to the speech of welcome. From that moment Frechette never ceased to
adore Mark Twain, and visited him soon after the return to Hartford.

‘The Prince and the Pauper’ was published in England, Canada, Germany,
and America early in December, 1881. There had been no stint of money,
and it was an extremely handsome book. The pen-and-ink drawings were
really charming, and they were lavish as to number. It was an attractive
volume from every standpoint, and it was properly dedicated “To those
good-mannered and agreeable children, Susy and Clara Clemens.”

The story itself was totally unlike anything that Mark Twain had done
before. Enough of its plan and purpose has been given in former chapters
to make a synopsis of it unnecessary here. The story of the wandering
prince and the pauper king--an impressive picture of ancient legal and
regal cruelty--is as fine and consistent a tale as exists in the
realm of pure romance. Unlike its great successor, the ‘Yankee at King
Arthur’s Court’, it never sacrifices the illusion to the burlesque,
while through it all there runs a delicate vein of humor. Only here and
there is there the slightest disillusion, and this mainly in the use of
some ultra-modern phrase or word.

Mark Twain never did any better writing than some of the splendid scenes
in ‘The Prince and the Pauper’. The picture of Old London Bridge; the
scene in the vagabond’s retreat, with its presentation to the little
king of the wrongs inflicted by the laws of his realm; the episode of
the jail where his revelation reaches a climax--these are but a few of
the splendid pictures which the chapters portray, while the spectacle
of England acquiring mercy at the hands of two children, a king and a
beggar, is one which only genius could create. One might quote here, but
to do so without the context would be to sacrifice atmosphere, half the
story’s charm. How breathlessly interesting is the tale of it! We may
imagine that first little audience at Mark Twain’s fireside hanging
expectant on every paragraph, hungry always for more. Of all Mark
Twain’s longer works of fiction it is perhaps the most coherent as
to plot, the most carefully thought out, the most perfect as to
workmanship. This is not to say that it is his greatest story. Probably
time will not give it that rank, but it comes near to being a perfectly
constructed story, and it has an imperishable charm.

It was well received, though not always understood by the public. The
reviewer was so accustomed to looking for the joke in Mark Twain’s work,
that he found it hard to estimate this new product. Some even went so
far as to refer to it as one of Mark Twain’s big jokes, meaning probably
that he had created a chapter in English history with no foundation
beyond his fancy. Of course these things pained the author of the book.
At one time, he had been inclined to publish it anonymously, to avert
this sort of misunderstanding, and sometimes now he regretted not having
done so.

Yet there were many gratifying notices. The New York Herald reviewer
gave the new book two columns of finely intelligent appreciation. In
part he said:

    To those who have followed the career of Mark Twain, his appearance
    as the author of a charming and noble romance is really no more of a
    surprise than to see a stately structure risen upon sightly ground
    owned by an architect of genius, with the resources of abundant
    building material and ample training at command. Of his capacity
    they have had no doubt, and they rejoice in his taking a step which
    they felt he was able to take. Through all his publications may be
    traced the marks of the path which half led up to this happy height.
    His humor has often been the cloak, but not the mask, of a sturdy
    purpose. His work has been characterized by a manly love of truth,
    a hatred of humbug, and a scorn for cant. A genial warmth and
    whole-souledness, a beautiful fancy, a fertile imagination, and a
    native feeling for the picturesque and a fine eye for color have
    afforded the basis of a style which has become more and more plastic
    and finished.

And in closing:

    The characters of these two boys, twins in spirit, will rank with
    the purest and loveliest creations of child-life in the realm of
    fiction.



CXXXVII. CERTAIN ATTACKS AND REPRISALS

Beyond the publication of The Prince and the Pauper Clemens was
sparingly represented in print in ‘81. A chapter originally intended for
the book, the “Whipping Boy’s Story,” he gave to the Bazaar Budget, a
little special-edition sheet printed in Hartford. It was the story of
the ‘Bull and the Bees’ which he later adapted for use in Joan of Arc,
the episode in which Joan’s father rides a bull to a funeral. Howells
found that it interfered with the action in the story of the Prince, and
we might have spared it from the story of Joan, though hardly without
regret.

The military story “A Curious Episode” was published in the Century
Magazine for November. The fact that Clemens had heard, and not
invented, the story was set forth quite definitely and fully in his
opening paragraphs. Nevertheless, a “Captious Reader” thought it
necessary to write to a New York publication concerning its origin:

    I am an admirer of the writings of Mr. Mark Twain, and consequently,
    when I saw the table of contents of the November number of the
    Century, I bought it and turned at once to the article bearing his
    name, and entitled, “A Curious Episode.” When I began to read it,
    it struck me as strangely familiar, and I soon recognized the story
    as a true one, told me in the summer of 1878 by an officer of the
    United States artillery. Query: Did Mr. Twain expect the public to
    credit this narrative to his clever brain?

The editor, seeing a chance for Mark Twain “copy,” forwarded a clipping
to Clemens and asked him if he had anything to say in the matter.
Clemens happened to know the editor very well, and he did have something
to say, not for print, but for the editor’s private ear.

    The newspaper custom of shooting a man in the back and then calling
    upon him to come out in a card and prove that he was not engaged in
    any infamy at the time is a good enough custom for those who think
    it justifiable. Your correspondent is not stupid, I judge, but
    purely and simply malicious. He knew there was not the shadow of a
    suggestion, from the beginning to the end of “A Curious Episode,”
     that the story was an invention; he knew he had no warrant for
    trying to persuade the public that I had stolen the narrative and
    was endeavoring to palm it off as a piece of literary invention; he
    also knew that he was asking his closing question with a base
    motive, else he would have asked it of me by letter, not spread it
    before the public.

    I have never wronged you in any way, and I think you had no right to
    print that communication; no right, neither any excuse. As to
    publicly answering that correspondent, I would as soon think of
    bandying words in public with any other prostitute.

The editor replied in a manly, frank acknowledgment of error. He had
not looked up the article itself in the Century before printing the
communication.

    “Your letter has taught me a lesson,” he said. “The blame belongs
    to me for not hunting up the proofs. Please accept my apology.”

Mark Twain was likely to be peculiarly sensitive to printed innuendos.
Not always. Sometimes he would only laugh at them or be wholly
indifferent. Indeed, in his later years, he seldom cared to read
anything about himself, one way or the other, but at the time of which
we are now writing--the period of the early eighties--he was alive to
any comment of the press. His strong sense of humor, and still stronger
sense of human weakness, caused him to overlook many things which
another might regard as an affront; but if the thing printed were merely
an uncalled-for slur, an inexcusable imputation, he was inclined to rage
and plan violence. Sometimes he conceived retribution in the form of
libel suits with heavy damages. Sometimes he wrote blasting answers,
which Mrs. Clemens would not let him print.

At one time he planned a biography of a certain editor who seemed to be
making a deliberate personal campaign against his happiness. Clemens
had heard that offending items were being printed in this man’s paper;
friends, reporting with customary exaggeration, declared that these
sneers and brutalities appeared almost daily, so often as to cause
general remark.

This was enough. He promptly began to collect data--damaging
data--relating to that editor’s past history. He even set a man to work
in England collecting information concerning his victim. One of his
notebooks contains the memoranda; a few items will show how terrific was
to be the onslaught.

    When the naturalist finds a new kind of animal, he writes him up in
    the interest of science. No matter if it is an unpleasant animal.
    This is a new kind of animal, and in the cause of society must be
    written up. He is the polecat of our species.... He is
    purely and simply a Guiteau with the courage left out....

    Steel portraits of him as a sort of idiot, from infancy up--to a
    dozen scattered through the book--all should resemble him.

But never mind the rest. When he had got thoroughly interested in his
project Mrs. Clemens, who had allowed the cyclone to wear itself out a
little with its own vehemence, suggested that perhaps it would be well
to have some one make an examination of the files of the paper and see
just what had been said of him. So he subscribed for the paper himself
and set a man to work on the back numbers. We will let him tell the
conclusion of the matter himself, in his report of it to Howells:

    The result arrived from my New York man this morning. Oh, what a
    pitiable wreck of high hopes! The “almost daily” assaults for two
    months consist of (1) adverse criticism of P. & P. from an enraged
    idiot in the London Athenaeum, (2) paragraphs from some indignant
    Englishman in the Pall Mall Gazette, who pays me the vast compliment
    of gravely rebuking some imaginary ass who has set me up in the
    neighborhood of Rabelais, (3) a remark about the Montreal dinner,
    touched with an almost invisible satire, and, (4) a remark about
    refusal of Canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not
    necessarily malicious; and of course adverse criticism which is not
    malicious is a thing which none but fools irritate themselves about.

    There, that is the prodigious bugaboo in its entirety! Can you
    conceive of a man’s getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive
    a provocation? I am sure I can’t. What the devil can those friends
    of mine have been thinking about to spread those three or four
    harmless things out into two months of daily sneers and affronts?

    Boiled down, this vast outpouring of malice amounts to simply this:
    one jest (one can make nothing more serious than that out of it).
    One jest, and that is all; for foreign criticisms do not count, they
    being matters of news, and proper for publication in anybody’s
    newspaper....

    Well, my mountain has brought forth its mouse, and a sufficiently
    small mouse it is, God knows. And my three weeks’ hard work has got
    to go into the ignominious pigeonhole. Confound it, I could have
    earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble.

Howells refers to this episode, and concludes:

    So the paper was acquitted and the editor’s life was spared. The
    wretch never, never knew how near he was to losing it, with
    incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a subsequent devotion to
    lasting infamy.



CXXXVIII. MANY UNDERTAKINGS

To write a detailed biography of Mark Twain at this period would be to
defy perusal. Even to set down all the interesting matters, interesting
to the public of his time, would mean not only to exhaust the subject,
but the reader. He lived at the top of his bent, and almost anything
relating to him was regarded as news. Daily and hourly he mingled
with important matters or spoke concerning them. A bare list of the
interesting events of Mark Twain’s life would fill a large volume.

He was so busy, so deeply interested himself, so vitally alive to every
human aspect. He read the papers through, and there was always enough to
arouse his indignation--the doings of the human race at large could
be relied upon to do that--and he would write, and write, to relieve
himself. His mental Niagara was always pouring away, turning out
articles, essays, communications on every conceivable subject, mainly
with the idea of reform. There were many public and private abuses,
and he wanted to correct them all. He covered reams of paper with lurid
heresies--political, religious, civic--for most of which there was no
hope of publication.

Now and then he was allowed to speak out: An order from the Past-office
Department at Washington concerning the superscription of envelopes
seemed to him unwarranted. He assailed it, and directly the nation
was being entertained by a controversy between Mark Twain and the
Postmaster-General’s private secretary, who subsequently receded from
the field. At another time, on the matter of postage rates he wrote a
paper which began: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you
were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

It is hardly necessary to add that the paper did not appear.

On the whole, Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to
print, and such of these papers as are preserved to-day form a curious
collection of human documents. Many of them could be printed to-day,
without distress to any one. The conditions that invited them are
changed; the heresies are not heresies any more. He may have had some
thought of their publication in later years, for once he wrote:

    Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put
    them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then
    all that ink and labor are wasted because I can’t print the result.
    I have just finished an article of this kind, and it satisfies me
    entirely. It does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and
    admire the trouble it would make for me and the family. I will
    leave it behind and utter it from the grave. There is a free speech
    there, and no harm to the family.

It is too late and too soon to print most of these things; too late
to print them for their salutary influence, too soon to print them as
literature.

He was interested in everything: in music, as little as he knew of it.
He had an ear for melody, a dramatic vision, and the poetic conception
of sound. Reading some lilting lyric, he could fancy the words marching
to melody, and would cast about among his friends for some one who
could supply a tuneful setting. Once he wrote to his friend the Rev.
Dr. Parker, who was a skilled musician, urging him to write a score for
Tennyson’s “Bugle Song,” outlining an attractive scheme for it which the
order of his fancy had formulated. Dr. Parker replied that the “Bugle
Song,” often attempted, had been the despair of many musicians.

He was interested in business affairs. Already, before the European
trip, he had embarked in, and disembarked from, a number of pecuniary
ventures. He had not been satisfied with a strictly literary income. The
old tendency to speculative investment, acquired during those restless
mining days, always possessed him. There were no silver mines in the
East, no holes in the ground into which to empty money and effort; but
there were plenty of equivalents--inventions, stock companies, and the
like. He had begun by putting five thousand dollars into the American
Publishing Company; but that was a sound and profitable venture, and
deserves to be remembered for that reason.

Then a man came along with a patent steam generator which would save
ninety per cent. of the fuel energy, or some such amount, and Mark Twain
was early persuaded that it would revolutionize the steam manufactures
of the world; so he put in whatever bank surplus he had and bade it a
permanent good-by.

Following the steam generator came a steam pulley, a rather small
contrivance, but it succeeded in extracting thirty-two thousand dollars
from his bank account in a period of sixteen months.

By the time he had accumulated a fresh balance, a new method of marine
telegraphy was shown him, so he used it up on that, twenty-five thousand
dollars being the price of this adventure.

A watch company in western New York was ready to sell him a block of
shares by the time he was prepared to experiment again, but it did not
quite live to declare the first dividend on his investment.

Senator John P. Jones invited him to join in the organization of an
accident insurance company, and such was Jones’s confidence in the
venture that he guaranteed Clemens against loss. Mark Twain’s only
profit from this source was in the delivery of a delicious speech, which
he made at a dinner given to Cornelius Walford, of London, an insurance
author of repute. Jones was paying back the money presently, and about
that time came a young inventor named Graham Bell, offering stock in a
contrivance for carrying the human voice on an electric wire. At almost
any other time Clemens would eagerly have welcomed this opportunity; but
he was so gratified at having got his money out of the insurance venture
that he refused to respond to the happy “hello” call of fortune. In some
memoranda made thirty years later he said:

I declined. I said I didn’t want anything more to do with wildcat
speculation. Then he [Bell] offered the stock to me at twenty-five. I
said I didn’t want it at any price. He became eager; insisted that I
take five hundred dollars’ worth. He said he would sell me as much as
I wanted for five hundred dollars; offered to let me gather it up in my
hands and measure it in a plug hat; said I could have a whole hatful
for five hundred dollars. But I was the burnt child, and I resisted all
these temptations-resisted them easily; went off with my check intact,
and next day lent five thousand of it, on an unendorsed note, to a
friend who was going to go bankrupt three days later.

About the end of the year I put up a telephone wire from my house down
to the Courant office, the only telephone wire in town, and the first
one that was ever used in a private house in the world.

That had been only a little while before he sailed for Europe. When he
returned he would have been willing to accept a very trifling interest
in the telephone industry for the amount of his insurance salvage.

He had a fresh interest in patents now, and when his old friend
Dan Slote got hold of a new process for engraving--the kaolatype or
“chalk-plate” process--which was going to revolutionize the world of
illustration, he promptly acquired a third interest, and eventually was
satisfied with nothing short of control. It was an ingenious process: a
sheet of perfectly smooth steel was coated with a preparation of kaolin
(or china clay), and a picture was engraved through the coating down to
the steel surface. This formed the matrix into which the molten metal
was poured to make the stereotype plate, or die, for printing. It was
Clemens’s notion that he could utilize this process for the casting of
brass dies for stamping book covers--that, so applied, the fortunes to
be made out of it would be larger and more numerous. Howells tells how,
at one time, Clemens thought the “damned human race” was almost to be
redeemed by a process of founding brass without air-bubbles in it. This
was the time referred to and the race had to go unredeemed; for, after
long, worried, costly experimenting, the brass refused to accommodate
its nature to the new idea, while the chalk plate itself, with all its
subsidiary and auxiliary possibilities, was infringed upon right and
left, and the protecting patent failed to hold. The process was doomed,
in any case. It was barely established before the photographic etching
processes, superior in all ways, were developed and came quickly into
use. The kaolatype enterprise struggled nobly for a considerable period.
Clemens brought his niece’s husband, young Charles L. Webster, from
Fredonia to manage it for him, and backed it liberally. Webster was
vigorous, hard-working, and capable; but the end of each month showed a
deficit, until Clemens was from forty to fifty thousand dollars out of
pocket in his effort to save the race with chalk and brass. The history
of these several ventures (and there were others), dismissed here in
a few paragraphs, would alone make a volume not without interest,
certainly not without humor. Following came the type-setting machine,
but we are not ready for that. Of necessity it is a longer, costlier
story.

Mrs. Clemens did not share his enthusiasm in these various enterprises.
She did not oppose them, at least not strenuously, but she did not
encourage them. She did not see their need. Their home was beautiful;
they were happy; he could do his work in deliberation and comfort. She
knew the value of money better than he, cared more for it in her own
way; but she had not his desire to heap up vast and sudden sums, to
revel in torrential golden showers. She was willing to let well enough
alone. Clemens could not do this, and suffered accordingly. In the midst
of fair home surroundings and honors we find him writing to his mother:

    Life has come to be a very serious matter with me. I have a
    badgered, harassed feeling a good part of my time. It comes mainly
    from business responsibilities and annoyances.

He had no moral right to be connected with business at all. He had
a large perception of business opportunity, but no vision of its
requirements--its difficulties and details. He was the soul of honor,
but in anything resembling practical direction he was but a child.
During any period of business venture he was likely to be in hot
water: eagerly excited, worried, impatient; alternately suspicious and
over-trusting, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset.

Yet never, even to the end of his days, would he permanently lose faith
in speculative ventures. Human traits are sometimes modified, but never
eliminated. The man who is born to be a victim of misplaced confidence
will continue to be one so long as he lives and there are men willing
to victimize him. The man who believes in himself as an investor will
uphold that faith against all disaster so long as he draws breath and
has money to back his judgments.



CXXXIX. FINANCIAL AND LITERARY

By a statement made on the 1st of January, 1882, of Mark Twain’s
disbursements for the preceding year, it is shown that considerably more
than one hundred thousand dollars had been expended during that twelve
months. It is a large sum for an author to pay out in one year. It would
cramp most authors to do it, and it was not the best financing, even for
Mark Twain. It required all that the books could earn, all the income
from the various securities, and a fair sum from their principal. There
is a good deal of biography in the statement. Of the amount expended
forty-six thousand dollars represented investments; but of this
comfortable sum less than five thousand dollars would cover the
legitimate purchases; the rest had gone in the “ventures” from whose
bourne no dollar would ever return. Also, a large sum had been spent for
the additional land and for improvements on the home--somewhat more than
thirty thousand dollars altogether--while the home life had become more
lavish, the establishment had grown each year to a larger scale, the
guests and entertainments had become more and, more numerous, until the
actual household expenditure required about as much as the books and
securities could earn.

It was with the increased scale of living that Clemens had become
especially eager for some source of commercial profit; something
that would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of
thousands. Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with “millions
in it.” Almost any proposition that seemed to offer these possible
millions appealed to him, and in his imagination he saw the golden
freshet pouring in.

His natural taste was for a simple, inexpensive life; yet in his large
hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur, he gloried in the
splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and delight of his guests.
There were always guests; they were coming and going constantly. Clemens
used to say that he proposed to establish a bus line between their
house and the station for the accommodation of his company. He had the
Southern hospitality. Much company appealed to a very large element in
his strangely compounded nature. For the better portion of the year he
was willing to pay the price of it, whether in money or in endurance,
and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these things also,
in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that they were
a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed for the
simpler life--above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit cried
out for the rest and comfort there. In one of her letters she says:

    The house has been full of company, and I have been “whirled
    around.” How can a body help it? Oh, I cannot help sighing for the
    peace and quiet of the farm. This is my work, and I know that I do
    very wrong when I feel chafed by it, but how can I be right about
    it? Sometimes it seems as if the simple sight of people would drive
    me mad. I am all wrong; if I would simply accept the fact that this
    is my work and let other things go, I know I should not be so
    fretted; but I want so much to do other things, to study and do
    things with the children, and I cannot.

    I have the best French teacher that I ever had, and if I could give
    any time to it I could not help learning French.

When we reflect on the conditions, we are inclined to say how much
better it would have been to have remained there among the hills in that
quiet, inexpensive environment, to have let the world go. But that was
not possible. The game was of far larger proportions than any that could
be restricted to the limits of retirement and the simpler round of life.
Mark Twain’s realm had become too large for his court to be established
in a cottage.

It is hard to understand that in spite of a towering fame Mark Twain
was still not regarded by certain American arbiters of reputations as
a literary fixture; his work was not yet recognized by them as being of
important meaning and serious purport.

In Boston, at that time still the Athens of America, he was enjoyed,
delighted in; but he was not honored as being quite one of the elect.
Howells tells us that:

    In proportion as people thought themselves refined they questioned
    that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the
    inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude.

Even at the Atlantic dinners his place was “below the salt”--a place of
honor, but not of the greatest honor. He did not sit on the dais with
Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Howells, and Aldrich. We of a
later period, who remember him always as the center of every board--the
one supreme figure, his splendid head and crown of silver hair the
target of every eye-find it hard to realize the Cambridge conservatism
that clad him figuratively always in motley, and seated him lower than
the throne itself.

Howells clearly resented this condition, and from random review corners
had ventured heresy. Now in 1882 he seems to have determined to declare
himself, in a large, free way, concerning his own personal estimate
of Mark Twain. He prepared for the Century Magazine a biographical
appreciation, in which he served notice to the world that Mark Twain’s
work, considered even as literature, was of very considerable importance
indeed. Whether or not Howells then realized the “inspired knowledge of
the multitude,” and that most of the nation outside of the counties of
Suffolk and Essex already recognized his claim, is not material. Very
likely he did; but he also realized the mental dusk of the cultured
uninspired and his prerogative to enlighten them. His Century article
was a kind of manifesto, a declaration of independence, no longer
confined to the obscurities of certain book notices, where of course
one might be expected to stretch friendly favor a little for a popular
Atlantic contributor. In the open field of the Century Magazine Howells
ventured to declare:

    Mark Twain’s humor is as simple in form and as direct as the
    statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant.

    When I think how purely and wholly American it is I am a little
    puzzled at its universal acceptance.... Why, in fine, should
    an English chief-justice keep Mark Twain’s books always at hand?
    Why should Darwin have gone to them for rest and refreshment at
    midnight, when spent with scientific research?

    I suppose that Mark Twain transcends all other American humorists in
    the universal qualities. He deals very little with the pathetic,
    which he nevertheless knows very well how to manage, as he has
    shown, notably in the true story of the old slave-mother; but there
    is a poetic lift in his work, even when he permits you to recognize
    it only as something satirized. There is always the touch of
    nature, the presence of a sincere and frank manliness in what he
    says, the companionship of a spirit which is at once delightfully
    open and deliciously shrewd. Elsewhere I have tried to persuade the
    reader that his humor is, at its best, the foamy break of the strong
    tide of earnestness in him. But it would be limiting him unjustly
    to describe him as a satirist, and it is hardly practicable to
    establish him in people’s minds as a moralist; he has made them
    laugh too long; they will not believe him serious; they think some
    joke is always intended. This is the penalty, as Dr. Holmes has
    pointed out, of making one’s first success as a humorist. There was
    a paper of Mark Twain’s printed in the Atlantic Monthly some years
    ago and called, “The Facts Concerning the Late Carnival of Crime in
    Connecticut,” which ought to have won popular recognition of the
    ethical intelligence underlying his humor. It was, of course,
    funny; but under the fun it was an impassioned study of the human
    conscience. Hawthorne or Bunyan might have been proud to imagine
    that powerful allegory, which had a grotesque force far beyond
    either of them.... Yet it quite failed of the response I had hoped
    for it, and I shall not insist here upon Mark Twain as a moralist;
    though I warn the reader that if he leaves out of the account an
    indignant sense of right and wrong, a scorn of all affectations and
    pretense, an ardent hate of meanness and injustice, he will come
    infinitely short of knowing Mark Twain.

Howells realized the unwisdom and weakness of dogmatic insistence,
and the strength of understatement. To him Mark Twain was already the
moralist, the philosopher, and the statesman; he was willing that the
reader should take his time to realize these things. The article, with
his subject’s portrait as a frontispiece, appeared in the Century for
September, 1882. If it carried no new message to many of its readers, it
at least set the stamp of official approval upon what they had already
established in their hearts.



CXL. DOWN THE RIVER

Osgood was doing no great things with The Prince and the Pauper, but
Clemens gave him another book presently, a collection of sketches--The
Stolen White Elephant. It was not an especially important volume, though
some of the features, such as “Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning” and
the “Carnival of Crime,” are among the best of their sort, while the
“Elephant” story is an amazingly good take-off on what might be called
the spectacular detective. The interview between Inspector Blunt and the
owner of the elephant is typical. The inspector asks:

    “Now what does this elephant eat, and how much?”

    “Well, as to what he eats--he will eat anything. He will eat a man,
    he will eat a Bible; he will eat anything between a man and a
    Bible.”

    “Good-very good, indeed, but too general. Details are necessary;
    details are the only valuable thing in our trade. Very well, as to
    men. At one meal--or, if you prefer, during one day--how many men
    will he eat if fresh?”

    “He would not care whether they were fresh or not; at a single meal
    he would eat five ordinary men.”

    “Very good; five men. We will put that down. What nationalities
    would he prefer?”

    “He is indifferent about nationalities. He prefers acquaintances,
    but is not prejudiced against strangers.”

    “Very good. Now, as to Bibles. How many Bibles would he eat at a
    meal?”

    “He would eat an entire edition.”

Clemens and Osgood had a more important publishing enterprise on
hand. The long-deferred completion of the Mississippi book was to be
accomplished; the long-deferred trip down the river was to be taken.
Howells was going abroad, but the charming Osgood was willing to make
the excursion, and a young man named Roswell Phelps, of Hartford, was
engaged as a stenographer to take the notes.

Clemens made a farewell trip to Boston to see Howells before his
departure, and together they went to Concord to call on Emerson; a
fortunate thing, for he lived but a few weeks longer. They went again in
the evening, not to see him, but to stand reverently outside and look
at his house. This was in April. Longfellow had died in March. The fact
that Howells was going away indefinitely, made them reminiscent and sad.

Just what breach Clemens committed during this visit is not remembered
now, and it does not matter; but his letter to Howells, after his return
to Hartford, makes it pretty clear that it was memorable enough at the
time. Half-way in it he breaks out:

    But oh, hell, there is no hope for a person that is built like me,
    because there is no cure, no cure.

    If I could only know when I have committed a crime: then I could
    conceal it, and not go stupidly dribbling it out, circumstance by
    circumstance, into the ears of a person who will give no sign till
    the confession is complete; and then the sudden damnation drops on a
    body like the released pile-driver, and he finds himself in the
    earth down to his chin. When he merely supposed he was being
    entertaining.

Next day he was off with Osgood and the stenographer for St. Louis,
where they took the steamer Gold Dust down the river. He intended to
travel under an assumed name, but was promptly recognized, both at the
Southern Hotel and on the boat. In ‘Life on the Mississippi’ he has
given us the atmosphere of his trip, with his new impressions of
old scenes; also his first interview with the pilot, whom he did not
remember, but who easily remembered him.

“I did not write that story in the book quite as it happened,” he
reflected once, many years later. “We went on board at night. Next
morning I was up bright and early and out on deck to see if I could
recognize any of the old landmarks. I could not remember any. I did not
know where we were at all. It was a new river to me entirely. I climbed
up in the pilot-house and there was a fellow of about forty at the
wheel. I said ‘Good morning.’ He answered pleasantly enough. His face
was entirely strange to me. Then I sat down on the high seat back of the
wheel and looked out at the river and began to ask a few questions, such
as a landsman would ask. He began, in the old way, to fill me up with
the old lies, and I enjoyed letting him do it. Then suddenly he turned
round to me and said:

“‘I want to get a cup of coffee. You hold her, will you, till I come
back?’ And before I could say a word he was out of the pilot-house door
and down the steps. It all came so suddenly that I sprang to the wheel,
of course, as I would have done twenty years before. Then in a moment
I realized my position. Here I was with a great big steamboat in the
middle of the Mississippi River, without any further knowledge than
that fact, and the pilot out of sight. I settled my mind on three
conclusions: first, that the pilot might be a lunatic; second, that he
had recognized me and thought I knew the river; third, that we were in a
perfectly safe place, where I could not possibly kill the steamboat.
But that last conclusion, though the most comforting, was an extremely
doubtful one. I knew perfectly well that no sane pilot would trust his
steamboat for a single moment in the hands of a greenhorn unless he were
standing by the greenhorn’s side. Of course, by force of habit, when I
grabbed the wheel, I had taken the steering marks ahead and astern, and
I made up my mind to hold her on those marks to the hair; but I could
feel myself getting old and gray. Then all at once I recognized where we
were; we were in what is called the Grand Chain--a succession of hidden
rocks, one of the most dangerous places on the river. There were two
rocks there only about seventy feet apart, and you’ve got to go exactly
between them or wreck the boat. There was a time when I could have done
it without a tremor, but that time wasn’t now. I would have given any
reasonable sum to have been on the shore just at that moment. I think
I was about ready to drop dead when I heard a step on the pilothouse
stair; then the door opened and the pilot came in, quietly picking his
teeth, and took the wheel, and I crawled weakly back to the seat. He
said:

“‘You thought you were playing a nice joke on me, didn’t you? You
thought I didn’t know who you were. Why, I recognized that drawl of
yours as soon as you opened your mouth.’

“I said, ‘Who the h--l are you? I don’t remember you.’

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘perhaps you don’t, but I was a cub pilot on the river
before the war, when you were a licensed pilot, and I couldn’t get a
license when I was qualified for one, because the Pilots’ Association
was so strong at that time that they could keep new pilots out if they
wanted to, and the law was that I had to be examined by two licensed
pilots, and for a good while I could not get any one to make that
examination. But one day you and another pilot offered to do it, and you
put me through a good, healthy examination and indorsed my application
for a license. I had never seen you before, and I have never seen you
since until now, but I recognized you.’

“‘All right,’ I said. ‘But if I had gone half a mile farther with that
steamboat we might have all been at the bottom of the river.’

“We got to be good friends, of course, and I spent most of my time up
there with him. When we got down below Cairo, and there was a big, full
river--for it was highwater season and there was no danger of the boat
hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--I had her most of the
time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep, and leave me there to
dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war,
no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy
and care-free as I had been twenty years before.”

From the book we gather that he could not keep out of the pilot-house.
He was likely to get up at any hour of the night to stand his watch, and
truly enough the years had slipped away. He was the young fellow in his
twenties again, speculating on the problems of existence and reading his
fortune in the stars. To heighten the illusion, he had himself called
regularly with the four-o’clock watch, in order not to miss the
mornings.--[It will repay the reader to turn to chap. xxx of Life on
the Mississippi, and consider Mark Twain’s word-picture of the river
sunrise.]

The majesty and solitude of the river impressed him more than ever
before, especially its solitude. It had been so full of life in his
time; now it had returned once more to its primal loneliness--the
loneliness of God.

At one place two steamboats were in sight at once an unusual spectacle.
Once, in the mouth of a river, he noticed a small boat, which he made
out to be the Mark Twain. There had been varied changes in twenty-one
years; only the old fascination of piloting remained unchanged. To Bixby
afterward he wrote:

“I’d rather be a pilot than anything else I’ve ever done in my life. How
do you run Plum Point?”

He met Bixby at New Orleans. Bixby was captain now on a splendid new
Anchor Line steamboat, the City of Baton Rouge. The Anchor Line steamers
were the acme of Mississippi River steamboat-building, and they were
about the end of it. They were imposingly magnificent, but they were
only as gorgeous clouds that marked the sunset of Mississippi steamboat
travel. Mark Twain made his trip down the river just in time.

In New Orleans he met George W. Cable and Joel Chandler Harris, and
they had a fraternizing good time together, mousing about the old French
Quarter or mingling with the social life of the modern city. He made a
trip with Bixby in a tug to the Warmouth plantation, and they reviewed
old days together, as friends parted for twenty-one years will.
Altogether the New Orleans sojourn was a pleasant one, saddened only by
a newspaper notice of the death, in Edinburgh, of the kindly and gentle
and beloved Dr. Brown.

Clemens arranged to make the trip up the river on the Baton Rouge. Bixby
had one pretty inefficient pilot, and stood most of the watches
himself, so that with “Sam Clemens” in the pilot-house with him, it was
wonderfully like those old first days of learning the river, back in the
fifties.

“Sam was ever making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always
did,” said Bixby to the writer, recalling the time. “I was sorry I
had to stay at the wheel so much. I wanted to have more time with Sam
without thinking of the river at all. Sam was sorry, too, from what he
wrote after he got home.”

Bixby produced a letter in the familiar handwriting. It was a tender,
heart-spoken letter:

    I didn’t see half enough of you. It was a sore disappointment.
    Osgood could have told you, if he would--discreet old dog--I
    expected to have you with me all the time. Altogether, the most
    pleasant part of my visit with you was after we arrived in St.
    Louis, and you were your old natural self again. Twenty years have
    not added a month to your age or taken a fraction from your
    loveliness.

Said Bixby: “When we arrived in St. Louis we came to the Planters’
Hotel; to this very table where you and I are sitting now, and we had
a couple of hot Scotches between us, just as we have now, and we had a
good last talk over old times and old acquaintances. After he returned
to New York he sent for my picture. He wanted to use it in his book.”

At St. Louis the travelers changed boats, and proceeded up the
Mississippi toward St. Paul. Clemens laid off three days at Hannibal.

Delightful days [he wrote home]. Loitering around all day long,
examining the old localities, and talking with the gray heads who were
boys and girls with me thirty or forty years ago. I spent my nights
with John and Helen Garth, three miles from town, in their spacious and
beautiful house. They were children with me, and afterward schoolmates.
That world which I knew in its blooming youth is old and bowed and
melancholy now; its soft cheeks are leathery and withered, the fire
has gone out of its eyes, the spring from its step. It will be dust and
ashes when I come again.

He had never seen the far upper river, and he found it very satisfying.
His note-book says:

    The bluffs all along up above St. Paul are exquisitely beautiful
    where the rough and broken turreted rocks stand up against the sky
    above the steep, verdant slopes. They are inexpressibly rich and
    mellow in color; soft dark browns mingled with dull greens--the very
    tints to make an artist worship.

In a final entry he wrote:

The romance of boating is gone now. In Hannibal the steamboat man is no
longer the god.



CXLI. LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY

Clemens took a further step toward becoming a publisher on his own
account. Not only did he contract to supply funds for the Mississippi
book, but, as kaolatype, the chalk-engraving process, which had been
lingeringly and expensively dying, was now become merely something to
swear at, he had his niece’s husband, Webster, installed as Osgood’s New
York subscription manager, with charge of the general agencies. There
was no delay in this move. Webster must get well familiarized with the
work before the Mississippi book’s publication.

He had expected to have the manuscript finished pretty promptly, but the
fact that he had promised it for a certain time paralyzed his effort.
Even at the farm he worked without making much headway. At the end of
October he wrote Howells:

    The weather turned cold, and we had to rush home, while I still
    lacked thirty thousand words. I had been sick and got delayed. I
    am going to write all day and two-thirds of the night until the
    thing is done or break down at it. The spur and burden of the
    contract are intolerable to me. I can endure the irritation of it
    no longer. I went to work at nine o’clock yesterday morning and
    went to bed an hour after midnight. Result of the day (mainly
    stolen from books though credit given), 9,500 words, so I reduced my
    burden by one-third in one day. It was five days’ work in one. I
    have nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all be written.
    It is ten days’ work and unless something breaks it will be finished
    in five.

He had sworn once, when he had finally finished ‘A Tramp Abroad’, that
he would never limit himself as to time again. But he had forgotten that
vow, and was suffering accordingly.

Howells wrote from London urging him to drop everything and come over to
Europe for refreshment.

    We have seen lots of nice people, and have been most pleasantly made
    of; but I would rather have you smoke in my face and talk for half a
    day, just for pleasure, than to go to the best house or club in
    London.

Clemens answered:

    Yes, it would be more profitable to me to do that because, with your
    society to help me, I should swiftly finish this now apparently
    interminable book. But I cannot come, because I am not boss here,
    and nothing but dynamite can move Mrs. Clemens away from home in the
    winter season.

This was in November, and he had broken all restrictions as to time. He
declared that he had never had such a fight over any book before, and
that he had told Osgood and everybody concerned that they must wait.

    I have said with sufficient positiveness that I will finish the book
    at no particular date; that I will not hurry it; that I will not
    hurry myself; that I will take things easy and comfortably--write
    when I choose to write, leave it alone when I do so prefer...
    I have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where it
    ought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any other
    policy would be to make the book worse than it already is. I ought
    to have finished it before showing it to anybody, and then sent it
    across the ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be a
    great many shades happier than you deserve to be, and if I had
    thought of this thing earlier I would have acted upon it and taken
    the tuck somewhat out of your joyousness.

It was a long, heartfelt letter. Near the end of it he said:

    Cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands. He is a
    marvelous talker on a deep subject. I do not see how even Spencer
    could unwind a thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in
    cleaner, clearer, crisper English. He astounded Twichell with his
    faculty. You know that when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid
    innocence, and utterly blemishless piety, the apostles were mere
    policemen to Cable; so with this in mind you must imagine him at a
    midnight dinner in Boston the other night, where we gathered around
    the board of the Summerset Club: Osgood full, Boyle O’Reilly full,
    Fairchild responsively loaded, and Aldrich and myself possessing the
    floor and properly fortified. Cable told Mrs. Clemens, when he
    returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining himself with
    horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to Boston in a
    cattle-car. It was a very large time. He called it an orgy. And
    no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint.

Osgood wanted Mark Twain to lecture that fall, as preliminary
advertising for the book, with “Life on the Mississippi” as his subject.
Osgood was careful to make this proposition by mail, and probably it was
just as well; for if there was any single straw that could have broken
the back of Clemens’s endurance and made him violent at this particular
time, it was a proposition to go back on the platform. His answer to
Osgood has not been preserved.

Clemens spoke little that winter. In February he addressed the Monday
Evening Club on “What is Happiness?” presenting a theory which in later
years he developed as a part of his “gospel,” and promulgated in a
privately printed volume, ‘What is Man’? It is the postulate already
mentioned in connection with his reading of Lecky, that every human
action, bad or good, is the result of a selfish impulse; that is to say,
the result of a desire for the greater content of spirit. It is not a
new idea; philosophers in all ages have considered it, and accepted or
rejected it, according to their temperament and teachings, but it was
startling and apparently new to the Monday Evening Club. They scoffed
and jeered at it; denounced it as a manifest falsity. They did not quite
see then that there may be two sorts of selfishness--brutal and divine;
that he who sacrifices others to himself exemplifies the first, whereas
he who sacrifices himself for others personifies the second--the divine
contenting of his soul by serving the happiness of his fellow-men. Mark
Twain left this admonition in furtherance of that better sort:

“Diligently train your ideals upward, and still upward, toward a summit
where you will find your chiefest pleasure, in conduct which, while
contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and
the community.”

It is a divine admonition, even if, in its suggested moral freedom, it
does seem to conflict with that other theory--the inevitable sequence
of cause and effect, descending from the primal atom. There is seeming
irrelevance in introducing this matter here; but it has a chronological
relation, and it presents a mental aspect of the time. Clemens was
forty-eight, and becoming more and more the philosopher; also, in logic
at least, a good deal of a pessimist. He made a birthday aphorism on the
subject:

“The man who is a pessimist before he is forty-eight knows too much; the
man who is an optimist after he is forty-eight knows too little.”

He was never more than a pessimist in theory at any time. In practice
he would be a visionary; a builder of dreams and fortunes, a veritable
Colonel Sellers to the end of his days.



CXLII. “LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI”

The Mississippi book was completed at last and placed in Osgood’s hands
for publication. Clemens was immensely fond of Osgood. Osgood would come
down to Hartford and spend days discussing plans and playing billiards,
which to Mark Twain’s mind was the proper way to conduct business.
Besides, there was Webster, who by this time, or a very little later,
had the word “publisher” printed in his letter-heads, and was truly
that, so far as the new book was concerned. Osgood had become little
more than its manufacturer, shipping-agent, and accountant. It should
be added that he made the book well, though somewhat expensively. He was
unaccustomed to getting out big subscription volumes. His taste ran to
the artistic, expensive product.

“That book cost me fifty thousand dollars to make,” Clemens once
declared. “Bliss could have built a whole library, for that sum. But
Osgood was a lovely fellow.”

Life on the Mississippi was issued about the middle of May. It was a
handsome book of its kind and a successful book, but not immediately a
profitable one, because of the manner of its issue. It was experimental,
and experiments are likely to be costly, even when successful in the
final result.

Among other things, it pronounced the final doom of kaolatype. The
artists who drew the pictures for it declined to draw them if they
were to be reproduced by that process, or indeed unless some one of
the lately discovered photographic processes was used. Furthermore, the
latter were much cheaper, and it was to the advantage of Clemens himself
to repudiate kaolatype, even for his own work.

Webster was ordered to wind up the last ends of the engraving business
with as little sacrifice as possible, and attend entirely to more
profitable affairs--viz., the distribution of books.

As literature, the Mississippi book will rank with Mark Twain’s best--so
far, at least, as the first twenty chapters of it are concerned. Earlier
in this history these have been sufficiently commented upon. They
constitute a literary memorial seemingly as enduring as the river
itself.

Concerning the remaining chapters of the book, they are also literature,
but of a different class. The difference is about the same as that
between ‘A Tramp Abroad’ and the ‘Innocents’. It is the difference
between the labors of love and duty; between art and industry,
literature and journalism.

But the last is hardly fair. It is journalism, but it is literary
journalism, and there are unquestionably areas that are purely literary,
and not journalistic at all. There would always be those in any book
of travel he might write. The story of the river revisited is an
interesting theme; and if the revisiting had been done, let us say eight
or ten years earlier, before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and
before the river itself had become a background for pessimism, the tale
might have had more of the literary glamour and illusion, even if less
that is otherwise valuable.

‘Life on the Mississippi’ has been always popular in Germany. The
Emperor William of Germany once assured Mark Twain that it was his
favorite American book, and on the same evening the portier of the
author’s lodging in Berlin echoed the Emperor’s opinion.

Paul Lindau, a distinguished German author and critic, in an interview
at the time the Mississippi book appeared, spoke of the general delight
of his countrymen in its author. When he was asked, “But have not the
Germans been offended by Mark Twain’s strictures on their customs and
language in his ‘Tramp Abroad’” he replied, “We know what we are and how
we look, and the fanciful picture presented to our eyes gives us only
food for laughter, not cause for resentment. The jokes he made on our
long words, our inverted sentences, and the position of the verb have
really led to a reform in style which will end in making our language as
compact and crisp as the French or English. I regard Mark Twain as the
foremost humorist of the age.”

Howells, traveling through Europe, found Lindau’s final sentiment echoed
elsewhere, and he found something more: in Europe Mark Twain was already
highly regarded as a serious writer. Thomas Hardy said to Howells one
night at dinner:

“Why don’t people understand that Mark Twain is not merely a great
humorist? He is a very remarkable fellow in a very different way.”

The Rev. Dr. Parker, returning from England just then, declared that,
wherever he went among literary people, the talk was about Mark Twain;
also that on two occasions, when he had ventured diffidently to say that
he knew that author personally, he was at once so evidently regarded as
lying for effect that he felt guilty, and looked it, and did not venture
to say it any more; thus, in a manner, practising untruth to save his
reputation for veracity.

That the Mississippi book throughout did much to solidify this foreign
opinion of Mark Twain’s literary importance cannot be doubted, and it is
one of his books that will live longest in the memory of men.



CXLIII. A GUEST OF ROYALTY

For purposes of copyright another trip to Canada was necessary, and when
the newspapers announced (May, 1883) that Mark Twain was about to cross
the border there came one morning the following telegram:

    Meeting of Literary and Scientific Society at Ottawa from 22d to
    26th. It would give me much pleasure if you could come and be my
    guest during that time.

                                   LORNE.

The Marquis of Lorne, then Governor-General of Canada, was the husband
of Queen Victoria’s daughter, the Princess Louise. The invitation was
therefore in the nature of a command. Clemens obeyed it graciously
enough, and with a feeling of exaltation no doubt. He had been honored
by the noble and the great in many lands, but this was royalty--English
royalty--paying a tribute to an American writer whom neither the Marquis
nor the Princess, his wife, had ever seen. They had invited him because
they had cared enough for his books to make them wish to see him,
to have him as a guest in Rideau Hall, their home. Mark Twain was
democratic. A king to him was no more than any other man; rather less
if he were not a good king. But there was something national in this
tribute; and, besides, Lord Lorne and the Princess Louise were the kind
of sovereigns that honored their rank, instead of being honored by it.

It is a good deal like a fairy tale when you think of it; the barefooted
boy of Hannibal, who had become a printer, a pilot, a rough-handed
miner, being summoned, not so many years later, by royalty as one of
America’s foremost men of letters. The honor was no greater than many
others he had received, certainly not greater than the calls of
Canon Kingsley and Robert Browning and Turgenieff at his London hotel
lodgings, but it was of a less usual kind.

Clemens enjoyed his visit. Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne kept
him with them almost continually, and were loath to let him go. Once
they took him tobogganing--an exciting experience.

It happened that during his stay with them the opening of the Canadian
Parliament took place. Lord Lorne and the principal dignitaries of state
entered one carriage, and in a carriage behind them followed Princess
Louise with Mark Twain. As they approached the Parliament House
the customary salute was fired. Clemens pretended to the Princess
considerable gratification. The temptation was too strong to resist:

    “Your Highness,” he said, “I have had other compliments paid to me,
    but none equal to this one. I have never before had a salute fired
    in my honor.”

Returning to Hartford, he sent copies of his books to Lord Lorne, and to
the Princess a special copy of that absurd manual, The New Guide of
the Conversation in Portuguese and English, for which he had written
an introduction.--[A serious work, in Portugal, though issued by Osgood
[‘83) as a joke. Clemens in the introduction says: “Its delicious,
unconscious ridiculousness and its enchanting naivety are as supreme and
unapproachable in their way as Shakespeare’s sublimities.” An extract,
the closing paragraph from the book’s preface, will illustrate his
meaning:

“We expect then, who the little book (for the care that we wrote him,
and for her typographical correction), that maybe worth the acceptation
of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth, at which we
dedicate him particularly.”]



CXLIV. A SUMMER LITERARY HARVEST

Arriving at the farm in June, Clemens had a fresh crop of ideas for
stories of many lengths and varieties. His note-book of that time
is full of motifs and plots, most of them of that improbable and
extravagant kind which tended to defeat any literary purpose, whether
humorous or otherwise. It seems worth while setting down one or more of
these here, for they are characteristic of the myriad conceptions that
came and went, and beyond these written memoranda left no trace behind.
Here is a fair example of many:

    Two men starving on a raft. The pauper has a Boston cracker,
    resolves to keep it till the multimillionaire is beginning to
    starve, then make him pay $50,000 for it. Millionaire agrees.
    Pauper’s cupidity rises, resolves to wait and get more; twenty-four
    hours later asks him a million for the cracker. Millionaire agrees.
    Pauper has a wild dream of becoming enormously rich off his cracker;
    backs down; lies all night building castles in the air; next day
    raises his price higher and higher, till millionaire has offered
    $100,000,000, every cent he has in the world. Pauper accepts.
    Millionaire: “Now give it to me.”

    Pauper: “No; it isn’t a trade until you sign documental history of
    the transaction and make an oath to pay.”

    While pauper is finishing the document millionaire sees a ship.
    When pauper says, “Sign and take the cracker,” millionaire smiles a
    smile, declines, and points to the ship.

Yet this is hardly more extravagant than another idea that is mentioned
repeatedly among the notes--that of an otherwise penniless man wandering
about London with a single million-pound bank-note in his possession, a
motif which developed into a very good story indeed.

            IDEA FOR “STORMFIELD’S VISIT TO HEAVEN”

    In modern times the halls of heaven are warmed by registers
    connected with hell; and this is greatly applauded by Jonathan
    Edwards, Calvin, Baxter and Company, because it adds a new pang to
    the sinner’s sufferings to know that the very fire which tortures
    him is the means of making the righteous comfortable.

Then there was to be another story, in which the various characters were
to have a weird, pestilential nomenclature; such as “Lockjaw Harris,”
 “Influenza Smith,” “Sinapism Davis,” and a dozen or two more, a perfect
outbreak of disorders.

Another--probably the inspiration of some very hot afternoon--was to
present life in the interior of an iceberg, where a colony would live
for a generation or two, drifting about in a vast circular current year
after year, subsisting on polar bears and other Arctic game.

An idea which he followed out and completed was the 1002d Arabian Night,
in which Scheherazade continues her stories, until she finally talks the
Sultan to death. That was a humorous idea, certainly; but when Howells
came home and read it in the usual way he declared that, while the
opening was killingly funny, when he got into the story itself it
seemed to him that he was “made a fellow-sufferer with the Sultan from
Scheherazade’s prolixity.”

“On the whole,” he said, “it is not your best, nor your second best; but
all the way it skirts a certain kind of fun which you can’t afford to
indulge in.”

And that was the truth. So the tale, neatly typewritten, retired to
seclusion, and there remains to this day.

Clemens had one inspiration that summer which was not directly literary,
but historical, due to his familiarity with English dates. He wrote
Twichell:

    Day before yesterday, feeling not in condition for writing, I left
    the study, but I couldn’t hold in--had to do something; so I spent
    eight hours in the sun with a yardstick, measuring off the reigns of
    the English kings on the roads in these grounds, from William the
    Conqueror to 1883, calculating to invent an open-air game which
    shall fill the children’s heads with dates without study. I give
    each king’s reign one foot of space to the year and drive one stake
    in the ground to mark the beginning of each reign, and I make the
    children call the stake by the king’s name. You can stand in the
    door and take a bird’s-eye view of English monarchy, from the
    Conqueror to Edward IV.; then you can turn and follow the road up
    the hill to the study and beyond with an opera-glass, and bird’s-eye
    view the rest of it to 1883.

    You can mark the sharp difference in the length of reigns by the
    varying distances of the stakes apart. You can see Richard II., two
    feet; Oliver Cromwell, two feet; James II., three feet, and so on
    --and then big skips; pegs standing forty-five, forty-six, fifty,
    fifty-six, and sixty feet apart (Elizabeth, Victoria, Edward III.,
    Henry III., and George III.). By the way, third’s a lucky number
    for length of days, isn’t it? Yes, sir; by my scheme you get a
    realizing notion of the time occupied by reigns.

    The reason it took me eight hours was because, with little Jean’s
    interrupting assistance, I had to measure from the Conquest to the
    end of Henry VI. three times over, and besides I had to whittle out
    all those pegs.

    I did a full day’s work and a third over, yesterday, but was full of
    my game after I went to bed trying to fit it for indoors. So I
    didn’t get to sleep till pretty late; but when I did go off I had
    contrived a new way to play my history game with cards and a board.

We may be sure the idea of the game would possess him, once it got a
fair start like that. He decided to save the human race that year with
a history game. When he had got the children fairly going and interested
in playing it, he adapted it to a cribbage-board, and spent his days and
nights working it out and perfecting it to a degree where the world at
large might learn all the facts of all the histories, not only without
effort, but with an actual hunger for chronology. He would have a game
not only of the English kings, but of the kings of every other nation;
likewise of great statesmen, vice-chancellors, churchmen, of celebrities
in every line. He would prepare a book to accompany these games. Each
game would contain one thousand facts, while the book would contain
eight thousand; it would be a veritable encyclopedia. He would organize
clubs throughout the United States for playing the game; prizes were
to be given. Experts would take it up. He foresaw a department in every
newspaper devoted to the game and its problems, instead of to chess and
whist and other useless diversions. He wrote to Orion, and set him to
work gathering facts and dates by the bushel. He wrote to Webster,
sent him a plan, and ordered him to apply for the patent without delay.
Patents must also be applied for abroad. With all nations playing this
great game, very likely it would produce millions in royalties; and so,
in the true Sellers fashion, the iridescent bubble was blown larger and
larger, until finally it blew up. The game on paper had become so large,
so elaborate, so intricate, that no one could play it. Yet the first
idea was a good one: the king stakes driven along the driveway and up
the hillside of Quarry Farm. The children enjoyed it, and played it
through many sweet summer afternoons. Once, in the days when he had
grown old, he wrote, remembering:

    Among the principal merits of the games which we played by help of
    the pegs were these: that they had to be played in the open air, and
    that they compelled brisk exercise. The peg of William the
    Conqueror stood in front of the house; one could stand near the
    Conqueror and have all English history skeletonized and landmarked
    and mile-posted under his eye.... The eye has a good memory.
    Many years have gone by and the pegs have disappeared, but I still
    see them and each in its place; and no king’s name falls upon my ear
    without my seeing his pegs at once, and noticing just how many feet
    of space he takes up along the road.

It turned out an important literary year after all. In the Mississippi
book he had used a chapter from the story he had been working at from
time to time for a number of years, ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn’. Reading over the manuscript now he found his interest in it sharp
and fresh, his inspiration renewed. The trip down the river had revived
it. The interest in the game became quiescent, and he set to work to
finish the story at a dead heat.

To Howells, August 22 (1883), he wrote:

    I have written eight or nine hundred manuscript pages in such a
    brief space of time that I mustn’t name the number of days; I
    shouldn’t believe it myself, and of course couldn’t expect you to.
    I used to restrict myself to four and five hours a day and five days
    in the week, but this time I have wrought from breakfast till 5.15
    P.M. six days in the week, and once or twice I smouched a Sunday
    when the boss wasn’t looking. Nothing is half so good as literature
    hooked on Sunday, on the sly.

He refers to the game, though rather indifferently.

    When I wrote you I thought I had it; whereas I was merely entering
    upon the initiatory difficulties of it. I might have known it
    wouldn’t be an easy job or somebody would have invented a decent
    historical game long ago--a thing which nobody has done.

Notwithstanding the fact that he was working at Huck with enthusiasm, he
seems to have been in no hurry to revise it for publication, either as a
serial or as a book. But the fact that he persevered until Huck Finn
at last found complete utterance was of itself a sufficient matter for
congratulation.



CXLV. HOWELLS AND CLEMENS WRITE A PLAY

Before Howells went abroad Clemens had written:

    Now I think that the play for you to write would be one entitled,
    “Colonel Mulberry Sellers in Age” (75), with Lafayette Hawkins (at
    50) still sticking to him and believing in him and calling him “My
    lord.” He [Sellers] is a specialist and a scientist in various
    ways. Your refined people and purity of speech would make the best
    possible background, and when you are done, I could take your
    manuscript and rewrite the Colonel’s speeches, and make him properly
    extravagant, and I would let the play go to Raymond, and bind him up
    with a contract that would give him the bellyache every time he read
    it. Shall we think this over, or drop it as being nonsense?

Howells, returned and settled in Boston once more, had revived an
interest in the play idea. He corresponded with Clemens concerning it
and agreed that the American Claimant, Leathers, should furnish the
initial impulse of the drama.

They decided to revive Colonel Sellers and make him the heir; Colonel
Sellers in old age, more wildly extravagant than ever, with new schemes,
new patents, new methods of ameliorating the ills of mankind.

Howells came down to Hartford from Boston full of enthusiasm. He found
Clemens with some ideas of the plan jotted down: certain effects and
situations which seemed to him amusing, but there was no general scheme
of action. Howells, telling of it, says:

    I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly
    nothing as chaos could be. He agreed hilariously with me, and was
    willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability.

Howells, in turn, proposed a plan which Clemens approved, and they set
to work. Howells could imitate Clemens’s literary manner, and they had a
riotously jubilant fortnight working out their humors. Howells has
told about it in his book, and he once related it to the writer of this
memoir. He said:

“Clemens took one scene and I another. We had loads and loads of fun
about it. We cracked our sides laughing over it as it went along. We
thought it mighty good, and I think to this day that it was mighty good.
We called the play ‘Colonel Sellers.’ We revived him. Clemens had
a notion of Sellers as a spiritual medium-there was a good deal of
excitement about spiritualism then; he also had a notion of Sellers
leading a women’s temperance crusade. We conceived the idea of Sellers
wanting to try, in the presence of the audience, how a man felt who
had fallen, through drink. Sellers was to end with a sort of corkscrew
performance on the stage. He always wore a marvelous fire extinguisher,
one of his inventions, strapped on his back, so in any sudden emergency,
he could give proof of its effectiveness.”

In connection with the extinguisher, Howells provided Sellers with a
pair of wings, which Sellers declared would enable him to float around
in any altitude where the flames might break out. The extinguisher, was
not to be charged with water or any sort of liquid, but with Greek fire,
on the principle that like cures like; in other words, the building was
to be inoculated with Greek fire against the ordinary conflagration. Of
course the whole thing was as absurd as possible, and, reading the old
manuscript to-day, one is impressed with the roaring humor of some of
the scenes, and with the wild extravagance of the farce motive, not
wholly warranted by the previous character of Sellers, unless, indeed,
he had gone stark mad. It is, in fact, Sellers caricatured. The gentle,
tender side of Sellers--the best side--the side which Clemens and
Howells themselves cared for most, is not there. Chapter III of Mark
Twain’s novel, The American Claimant, contains a scene between Colonel
Sellers and Washington Hawkins which presents the extravagance of the
Colonel’s materialization scheme. It is a modified version of one of the
scenes in the play, and is as amusing and unoffending as any.

The authors’ rollicking joy in their work convinced them that they had
produced a masterpiece for which the public in general, and the actors
in particular, were waiting. Howells went back to Boston tired out, but
elate in the prospect of imminent fortune.



CXLVI. DISTINGUISHED VISITORS

Meantime, while Howells had been in Hartford working at the play with
Clemens, Matthew Arnold had arrived in Boston. On inquiring for Howells,
at his home, the visitor was told that he had gone to see Mark Twain.
Arnold was perhaps the only literary Englishman left who had not
accepted Mark Twain at his larger value. He seemed surprised and said:

“Oh, but he doesn’t like that sort of thing, does he?”

To which Mrs. Howells replied:

“He likes Mr. Clemens very much, and he thinks him one of the greatest
men he ever knew.”

Arnold proceeded to Hartford to lecture, and one night Howells and
Clemens went to meet him at a reception. Says Howells:

    While his hand laxly held mine in greeting I saw his eyes fixed
    intensely on the other side of the room. “Who--who in the world is
    that?” I looked and said, “Oh, that is Mark Twain.” I do not
    remember just how their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold’s
    wish; but I have the impression that they were not parted for long
    during the evening, and the next night Arnold, as if still under the
    glamour of that potent presence, was at Clemens’s house.

He came there to dine with the Twichells and the Rev. Dr. Edwin P.
Parker. Dr. Parker and Arnold left together, and, walking quietly
homeward, discussed the remarkable creature whose presence they had just
left. Clemens had been at his best that night--at his humorous best. He
had kept a perpetual gale of laughter going, with a string of comment
and anecdote of a kind which Twichell once declared the world had never
before seen and would never see again. Arnold seemed dazed by it, unable
to come out from under its influence. He repeated some of the things
Mark Twain had said; thoughtfully, as if trying to analyze their magic.
Then he asked solemnly:

“And is he never serious?”

And Dr. Parker as solemnly answered:

“Mr. Arnold, he is the most serious man in the world.” Dr. Parker,
recalling this incident, remembered also that Protap Chunder Mazoomdar,
a Hindoo Christian prelate of high rank, visited Hartford in 1883, and
that his one desire was to meet Mark Twain. In some memoranda of this
visit Dr. Parker has written:

    I said that Mark Twain was a friend of mine, and we would
    immediately go to his house. He was all eagerness, and I perceived
    that I had risen greatly in this most refined and cultivated
    gentleman’s estimation. Arriving at Mr. Clemens’s residence, I
    promptly sought a brief private interview with my friend for his
    enlightenment concerning the distinguished visitor, after which they
    were introduced and spent a long while together. In due time
    Mazoomdar came forth with Mark’s likeness and autograph, and as we
    walked away his whole air and manner seemed to say, with Simeon of
    old, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!”



CXLVII. THE FORTUNES OF A PLAY

Howells is of the impression that the “Claimant” play had been offered
to other actors before Raymond was made aware of it; but there are
letters (to Webster) which indicate that Raymond was to see the play
first, though Clemens declares, in a letter of instruction, that he
hopes Raymond will not take it. Then he says:

    Why do I offer him the play at all? For these reasons: he plays
    that character well; there are not thirty actors in the country who
    can do it better; and, too, he has a sort of sentimental right to be
    offered the piece, though no moral, or legal, or other kind of
    right.

    Therefore we do offer it to him; but only once, not twice. Let us
    have no hemming and hawing; make short, sharp work of the business.
    I decline to have any correspondence with R. myself in any way.

This was at the end of November, 1883, while the play was still being
revised. Negotiations with Raymond had already begun, though he does not
appear to have actually seen the play during that theatrical season, and
many and various were the attempts made to place it elsewhere; always
with one result--that each actor or manager, in the end, declared it
to be strictly a Raymond play. The thing was hanging fire for nearly
a year, altogether, while they were waiting on Raymond, who had a
profitable play, and was in no hurry for the recrudescence of Sellers.
Howells tells how he eventually took the manuscript to Raymond, whom he
found “in a mood of sweet reasonableness” at one of Osgood’s luncheons.
Raymond said he could not do the play then, but was sure he would like
it for the coming season, and in any case would be glad to read it.

In due time Raymond reported favorably on the play, at least so far
as the first act was concerned, but he objected to the materialization
feature and to Sellers as claimant for the English earldom. He asked
that these features be eliminated, or at least much ameliorated; but as
these constituted the backbone and purpose of the whole play, Clemens
and Howells decided that what was left would be hardly worth while.
Raymond finally agreed to try the play as it was in one of the larger
towns--Howells thinks in Buffalo. A week later the manuscript came back
to Webster, who had general charge of the business negotiations, as
indeed he had of all Mark Twain’s affairs at this time, and with it a
brief line:

    DEAR SIR,--I have just finished rereading the play, and am convinced
    that in its present form it would not prove successful. I return
    the manuscript by express to your address.

    Thanking you for your courtesy, I am,

    Yours truly, JOHN T. RAYMOND.

    P.S.--If the play is altered and made longer I will be pleased to
    read it again.

In his former letter Raymond had declared that “Sellers, while a very
sanguine man, was not a lunatic, and no one but a lunatic could for
a moment imagine that he had done such a work” (meaning the
materialization). Clearly Raymond wanted a more serious presentation,
something akin to his earlier success, and on the whole we can hardly
blame him. But the authors had faith in their performance as it stood,
and agreed they would make no change.

Finally a well-known elocutionist, named Burbank, conceived the notion
of impersonating Raymond as well as Sellers, making of it a sort of
double burlesque, and agreed to take the play on those terms. Burbank
came to Hartford and showed what he could do. Howells and Clemens agreed
to give him the play, and they hired the old Lyceum Theater for a week,
at seven hundred dollars, for its trial presentation. Daniel Frohman
promoted it. Clemens and Howells went over the play and made some
changes, but they were not as hilarious over it or as full of
enthusiasm as they had been in the beginning. Howells put in a night of
suffering--long, dark hours of hot and cold waves of fear--and rising
next morning from a tossing bed, wrote: “Here’s a play which every
manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor known to us has
refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We are fools.”

Clemens hurried over to Boston to consult with Howells, and in the end
they agreed to pay the seven hundred dollars for the theater, take the
play off and give Burbank his freedom. But Clemens’s faith in it did
not immediately die. Howells relinquished all right and title in it,
and Clemens started it out with Burbank and a traveling company, doing
one-night stands, and kept it going for a week or more at his own
expense. It never reached New York.

“And yet,” says Howells, “I think now that if it had come it would have
been successful. So hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist
die.”--[This was as late as the spring of 1886, at which time Howells’s
faith in the play was exceedingly shaky. In one letter he wrote: “It
is a lunatic that we have created, and while a lunatic in one act might
amuse, I’m afraid that in three he would simply bore.”

And again:

“As it stands, I believe the thing will fail, and it would be a disgrace
to have it succeed.”]



CXLVIII. CABLE AND HIS GREAT JOKE

Meanwhile, with the completion of the Sellers play Clemens had flung
himself into dramatic writing once more with a new and more violent
impetuosity than ever. Howells had hardly returned to Boston when he
wrote:

Now let’s write a tragedy.

The inclosed is not fancy, it is history; except that the little girl
was a passing stranger, and not kin to any of the parties. I read
the incident in Carlyle’s Cromwell a year ago, and made a note in my
note-book; stumbled on the note to-day, and wrote up the closing scene
of a possible tragedy, to see how it might work.

If we made this colonel a grand fellow, and gave him a wife to
suit--hey? It’s right in the big historical times--war; Cromwell in big,
picturesque power, and all that.

Come, let’s do this tragedy, and do it well. Curious, but didn’t
Florence want a Cromwell? But Cromwell would not be the chief figure
here.

It was the closing scene of that pathetic passage in history from which
he would later make his story, “The Death Disc.” Howells was too tired
and too occupied to undertake immediately a new dramatic labor, so
Clemens went steaming ahead alone.

    My billiard-table is stacked up with books relating to the Sandwich
    Islands; the walls are upholstered with scraps of paper penciled
    with notes drawn from them. I have saturated myself with knowledge
    of that unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and
    fascinating people. And I have begun a story. Its hidden motive
    will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature: that
    the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what
    apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its
    place; meanwhile abolished and obliterated it. I start Bill
    Ragsdale at eleven years of age, and the heroine at four, in the
    midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and
    amazing customs and superstitions, three months before the arrival
    of the missionaries and--the erection of a shallow Christianity upon
    the ruins of the old paganism.

    Then these two will become educated Christians and highly civilized.

    And then I will jump fifteen years and do Ragsdale’s leper business.
    When we come to dramatize, we can draw a deal of matter from the
    story, all ready to our hand.

He made elaborate preparations for the Sandwich Islands story, which he
and Howells would dramatize later, and within the space of a few weeks
he actually did dramatize ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’,
and was prodding Webster to find proper actors or managers; stipulating
at first severe and arbitrary terms, which were gradually modified,
as one after another of the prospective customers found these dramatic
wares unsuited to their needs. Mark Twain was one of the most
dramatic creatures that ever lived, but he lacked the faculty of stage
arrangement of the dramatic idea. It is one of the commonest defects in
the literary make-up; also one of the hardest to realize and to explain.

The winter of 1883-84 was a gay one in the Clemens home. Henry Irving
was among those entertained, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Aldrich and his
wife, Howells of course, and George W. Cable. Cable had now permanently
left the South for the promised land which all authors of the South and
West seek eventually, and had in due course made his way to Hartford.
Clemens took Cable’s fortunes in hand, as he had done with many another,
invited him to his home, and undertook to open negotiations with the
American Publishing Company, of which Frank Bliss was now the manager,
for the improvement of his fortunes.

Cable had been giving readings from his stories and had somewhere picked
up the measles. He suddenly came down with the complaint during his
visit to Clemens, and his case was a violent one. It required the
constant attendance of a trained nurse and one or two members of the
household to pull him through.

In the course of time he was convalescent, and when contagion was no
longer to be feared guests were invited in for his entertainment. At one
of these gatherings, Cable produced a curious book, which he said
had been lent to him by Prof. Francis Bacon, of New Haven, as a great
rarity. It was a little privately printed pamphlet written by a Southern
youth, named S. Watson Wolston, a Yale student of 1845, and was an
absurd romance of the hyperflorid, grandiloquent sort, entitled, “Love
Triumphant, or the Enemy Conquered.” Its heroine’s name was Ambulinia,
and its flowery, half-meaningless periods and impossible situations
delighted Clemens beyond measure. He begged Cable to lend it to him, to
read at the Saturday Morning Club, declaring that he certainly must
own the book, at whatever cost. Henry C. Robinson, who was present,
remembered having seen a copy in his youth, and Twichell thought he
recalled such a book on sale in New Haven during his college days.
Twichell said nothing as to any purpose in the matter; but somewhat
later, being in New Haven, he stepped into the old book-store and found
the same proprietor, who remembered very well the book and its author.
Twichell rather fearfully asked if by any chance a copy of it might
still be obtained.

“Well,” was the answer, “I undertook to put my cellar in order the other
day, and found about a cord of them down there. I think I can supply
you.”

Twichell took home six of the books at ten cents each, and on their
first spring walk to Talcott’s Tower casually mentioned to Clemens the
quest for the rare Ambulinia. But Clemens had given up the pursuit.
New York dealers had reported no success in the matter. The book was no
longer in existence.

“What would you give for a copy?” asked. Twichell.

Clemens became excited.

“It isn’t a question of price,” he said; “that would be for the owner to
set if I could find him.”

Twichell drew a little package from his pocket.

“Well, Mark,” he said, “here are six copies of that book, to begin with.
If that isn’t enough, I can get you a wagon-load.”

It was enough. But it did not deter Clemens in his purpose, which was to
immortalize the little book by pointing out its peculiar charms. He did
this later, and eventually included the entire story, with comments, in
one of his own volumes.

Clemens and Twichell did not always walk that spring. The early form of
bicycle, the prehistoric high-wheel, had come into vogue, and they each
got one and attempted its conquest. They practised in the early morning
hours on Farmington Avenue, which was wide and smooth, and they had an
instructor, a young German, who, after a morning or two, regarded Mark
Twain helplessly and said:

“Mr. Clemens, it’s remarkable--you can fall off of a bicycle more
different ways than the man that invented it.”

They were curious things, those old high-wheel machines. You were
perched away up in the air, with the feeling that you were likely at any
moment to strike a pebble or something that would fling you forward with
damaging results. Frequently that is what happened. The word “header”
 seems to have grown out of that early bicycling period. Perhaps Mark
Twain invented it. He had enough experience to do it. He always declared
afterward that he invented all the new bicycle profanity that has since
come into general use. Once he wrote:

    There was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the street,
    a measured yard apart. Even after I got so I could steer pretty
    fairly I was so afraid of those stones that I always hit them. They
    gave me the worst falls I ever got in that street, except those
    which I got from dogs. I have seen it stated that no expert is
    quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always able to skip
    out of his way. I think that that may be true; but I think that the
    reason he couldn’t run over the dog was because he was trying to. I
    did not try to run over any dog. But I ran over every dog that came
    along. I think it makes a great deal of difference. If you try to
    run over the dog he knows how to calculate, but if you are trying to
    miss him he does not know how to calculate, and is liable to jump
    the wrong way every time. It was always so in my experience. Even
    when I could not hit a wagon I could hit a dog that came to see me
    practise. They all liked to see me practise, and they all came, for
    there was very little going on in our neighborhood to entertain a
    dog.

He conquered, measurably, that old, discouraging thing, and he and
Twichell would go on excursions, sometimes as far as Wethersfield or to
the tower. It was a pleasant change, at least it was an interesting one;
but bicycling on the high wheel was never a popular diversion with Mark
Twain, and his enthusiasm in the sport had died before the “safety” came
along.

He had his machine sent out to Elmira, but there were too many hills in
Chemung County, and after one brief excursion he came in, limping and
pushing his wheel, and did not try it again.

To return to Cable. When the 1st of April (1884) approached he concluded
it would be a good time to pay off his debt of gratitude for his
recent entertainment in the Clemens’s home. He went to work at it
systematically. He had a “private and confidential” circular letter
printed, and he mailed it to one hundred and fifty of Mark Twain’s
literary friends in Boston, Hartford, Springfield, New York, Brooklyn,
Washington, and elsewhere, suggesting that they write to him, so that
their letters would reach him simultaneously April 1st, asking for his
autograph. No stamps or cards were to be inclosed for reply, and it was
requested that “no stranger to Mr. Clemens and no minor” should take
part. Mrs. Clemens was let into the secret, so that she would see to
it that her husband did not reject his mail or commit it to the flames
unopened.

It would seem that every one receiving the invitation must have
responded to it, for on the morning of April 1st a stupefying mass of
letters was unloaded on Mark Twain’s table. He did not know what to make
of it, and Mrs. Clemens stood off to watch the results. The first one
he opened was from Dean Sage, a friend whom he valued highly. Sage wrote
from Brooklyn:

    DEAR CLEMENS,--I have recently been asked by a young lady who
    unfortunately has a mania for autograph-collecting, but otherwise is
    a charming character, and comely enough to suit your fastidious
    taste, to secure for her the sign manual of the few distinguished
    persons fortunate enough to have my acquaintance. In enumerating
    them to her, after mentioning the names of Geo. Shepard Page, Joe
    Michell, Capt. Isaiah Ryndus, Mr. Willard, Dan Mace, and J. L.
    Sullivan, I came to yours. “Oh!” said she, “I have read all his
    works--Little Breeches, The Heathen Chinee, and the rest--and think
    them delightful. Do oblige me by asking him for his autograph,
    preceded by any little sentiment that may occur to him, provided it
    is not too short.”

    Of course I promised, and hope you will oblige me by sending some
    little thing addressed to Miss Oakes.

    We are all pretty well at home just now, though indisposition has
    been among us for the past fortnight. With regards to Mrs. Clemens
    and the children, in which my wife joins,

                         Yours truly,  DEAN SAGE.

It amused and rather surprised him, and it fooled him completely; but
when he picked up a letter from Brander Matthews, asking, in some absurd
fashion, for his signature, and another from Ellen Terry, and from
Irving, and from Stedman, and from Warner, and Waring, and H. C. Bunner,
and Sarony, and Laurence Hutton, and John Hay, and R. U. Johnson, and
Modjeska, the size and quality of the joke began to overawe him. He was
delighted, of course; for really it was a fine compliment, in its way,
and most of the letters were distinctly amusing. Some of them asked for
autographs by the yard, some by the pound. Henry Irving said:

    I have just got back from a very late rehearsal-five o’clock--very
    tired--but there will be no rest till I get your autograph.

Some requested him to sit down and copy a few chapters from The
Innocents Abroad for them or to send an original manuscript. Others
requested that his autograph be attached to a check of interesting size.
John Hay suggested that he copy a hymn, a few hundred lines of Young’s
“Night Thoughts,” and an equal amount of Pollak’s “Course of Time.”

    I want my boy to form a taste for serious and elevated poetry, and
    it will add considerable commercial value to have them in your
    handwriting.

Altogether the reading of the letters gave him a delightful day, and his
admiration for Cable grew accordingly. Cable, too, was pleased with the
success of his joke, though he declared he would never risk such a thing
again. A newspaper of the time reports him as saying:

    I never suffered so much agony as for a few days previous to the 1st
    of April. I was afraid the letters would reach Mark when he was in
    affliction, in which case all of us would never have ceased flying
    to make it up to him.
    When I visited Mark we used to open our budgets of letters together
    at breakfast. We used to sing out whenever we struck an autograph-
    hunter. I think the idea came from that. The first person I spoke
    to about it was Robert Underwood Johnson, of the Century. My most
    enthusiastic ally was the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. We never thought
    it would get into the papers. I never played a practical joke
    before. I never will again, certainly.

Mark Twain in those days did not encourage the regular
autograph-collectors, and seldom paid any attention to their requests
for his signature. He changed all this in later years, and kept a supply
always on hand to satisfy every request; but in those earlier days he
had no patience with collecting fads, and it required a particularly
pleasing application to obtain his signature.



CXLIX. MARK TWAIN IN BUSINESS

Samuel Clemens by this time was definitely engaged in the publishing
business. Webster had a complete office with assistants at 658
Broadway, and had acquired a pretty thorough and practical knowledge
of subscription publishing. He was a busy, industrious young man,
tirelessly energetic, and with a good deal of confidence, by no means
unnecessary to commercial success. He placed this mental and physical
capital against Mark Twain’s inspiration and financial backing, and the
combination of Charles L. Webster & Co. seemed likely to be a strong
one.

Already, in the spring of 1884., Webster had the new Mark Twain book,
‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, well in hand, and was on the watch
for promising subscription books by other authors. Clemens, with his
usual business vision and eye for results, with a generous disregard of
detail, was supervising the larger preliminaries, and fulminating at the
petty distractions and difficulties as they came along. Certain plays
he was trying to place were enough to keep him pretty thoroughly upset
during this period, and proof-reading never added to his happiness. To
Howells he wrote:

    My days are given up to cursings, both loud and deep, for I am
    reading the ‘Huck Finn’ proofs. They don’t make a very great many
    mistakes, but those that do occur are of a nature that make a man
    swear his teeth loose.

Whereupon Howells promptly wrote him that he would help him out with the
Huck Finn proofs for the pleasure of reading the story. Clemens, among
other things, was trying to place a patent grape-scissors, invented by
Howells’s father, so that there was, in some degree, an equivalent for
the heavy obligation. That it was a heavy one we gather from his fervent
acknowledgment:

    It took my breath away, and I haven’t recovered it yet, entirely--I
    mean the generosity of your proposal to read the proofs of Huck
    Finn.

    Now, if you mean it, old man--if you are in earnest-proceed, in
    God’s name, and be by me forever blessed. I can’t conceive of a
    rational man deliberately piling such an atrocious job upon himself.
    But if there be such a man, and you be that man, pile it on. The
    proof-reading of ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ cost me the last rags
    of my religion.

Clemens decided to have the Huckleberry Finn book illustrated after his
own ideas. He looked through the various comic papers to see if he could
find the work of some new man that appealed to his fancy. In the pages
of Life he discovered some comic pictures illustrating the possibility
of applying electrical burners to messenger boys, waiters, etc. The
style and the spirit of these things amused him. He instructed Webster
to look up the artist, who proved to be a young man, E. W. Kemble by
name, later one of our foremost cartoonists. Webster engaged Kemble
and put the manuscript in his hands. Through the publication of certain
chapters of Huck Finn in the Century Magazine, Kemble was brought to
the notice of its editors, who wrote Clemens that they were profoundly
indebted to him for unearthing “such a gem of an illustrator.”

Clemens, encouraged and full of enthusiasm, now endeavored to interest
himself in the practical details of manufacture, but his stock of
patience was light and the details were many. His early business period
resembles, in some of its features, his mining experience in Esmeralda,
his letters to Webster being not unlike those to Orion in that former
day. They are much oftener gentle, considerate, even apologetic, but
they are occasionally terse, arbitrary, and profane. It required effort
for him to be entirely calm in his business correspondence. A criticism
of one of Webster’s assistants will serve as an example of his less
quiet method:

    Charley, your proof-reader, is an idiot; and not only an idiot, but
    blind; and not only blind, but partly dead.

Of course, one must regard many of Mark Twain’s business aspects
humorously. To consider them otherwise is to place him in a false light
altogether. He wore himself out with his anxieties and irritations; but
that even he, in the midst of his furies, saw the humor of it all is
sufficiently evidenced by the form of his savage phrasing. There were
few things that did not amuse him, and certainly nothing amused more, or
oftener, than himself.

It is proper to add a detail in evidence of a business soundness which
he sometimes manifested. He had observed the methods of Bliss and
Osgood, and had drawn his conclusions. In the beginning of the Huck Finn
canvass he wrote Webster:

    Keep it diligently in mind that we don’t issue till we have made a
    big sale.

    Get at your canvassing early and drive it with all your might, with
    an intent and purpose of issuing on the 10th or 15th of next
    December (the best time in the year to tumble a big pile into the
    trade); but if we haven’t 40,000 subscriptions we simply postpone
    publication till we’ve got them. It is a plain, simple policy, and
    would have saved both of my last books if it had been followed.
    [That is to say, ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ and the Mississippi
    book, neither of which had sold up to his expectations on the
    initial canvass.]



CL. FARM PICTURES

Gerhardt returned from Paris that summer, after three years of study,
a qualified sculptor. He was prepared to take commissions, and came to
Elmira to model a bust of his benefactor. The work was finished
after four or five weeks of hard effort and pronounced admirable; but
Gerhardt, attempting to make a cast one morning, ruined it completely.
The family gathered round the disaster, which to them seemed final, but
the sculptor went immediately to work, and in an amazingly brief time
executed a new bust even better than the first, an excellent piece of
modeling and a fine likeness. It was decided that a cut of it should be
used as a frontispiece for the new book, The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn.

Clemens was at this time giving the final readings to the Huck Finn
pages, a labor in which Mrs. Clemens and the children materially
assisted. In the childish biography which Susy began of her father, a
year later, she says:

    Ever since papa and mama were married papa has written his books and
    then taken them to mama in manuscript, and she has expurgated
    --[Susy’s spelling is preserved]--them. Papa read Huckleberry Finn to
    us in manuscript,--[Probably meaning proof.]--just before it came
    out, and then he would leave parts of it with mama to expurgate,
    while he went off to the study to work, and sometimes Clara and I
    would be sitting with mama while she was looking the manuscript
    over, and I remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to
    see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some
    delightfully terrible part must be scratched out. And I remember
    one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was so
    terrible, that Clara and I used to delight in and oh, with what
    despair we saw mama turn down the leaf on which it was written, we
    thought the book would almost be ruined without it. But we
    gradually came to think as mama did.

Commenting on this phase of Huck’s evolution Mark Twain has since
written:

    I remember the special case mentioned by Susy, and can see the group
    yet--two-thirds of it pleading for the life of the culprit sentence
    that was so fascinatingly dreadful, and the other third of it
    patiently explaining why the court could not grant the prayer of the
    pleaders; but I do not remember what the condemned phrase was. It
    had much company, and they all went to the gallows; but it is
    possible that that especially dreadful one which gave those little
    people so much delight was cunningly devised and put into the book
    for just that function, and not with any hope or expectation that it
    would get by the “expergator” alive. It is possible, for I had that
    custom.

Little Jean was probably too youthful yet to take part in that literary
arbitration. She was four, and had more interest in cows. In some
memoranda which her father kept of that period--the “Children’s
Book”--he says:

    She goes out to the barn with one of us every evening toward six
    o’clock, to look at the cows--which she adores--no weaker word can
    express her feeling for them. She sits rapt and contented while
    David milks the three, making a remark now and then--always about
    the cows. The time passes slowly and drearily for her attendant,
    but not for her. She could stand a week of it. When the milking is
    finished, and “Blanche,” “Jean,” and “the cross cow” are turned into
    the adjoining little cow-lot, we have to set Jean on a shed in that
    lot, and stay by her half an hour, till Eliza, the German nurse,
    comes to take her to bed. The cows merely stand there, and do
    nothing; yet the mere sight of them is all-sufficient for Jean. She
    requires nothing more. The other evening, after contemplating them
    a long time, as they stood in the muddy muck chewing the cud, she
    said, with deep and reverent appreciation, “Ain’t this a sweet
    little garden?”

    Yesterday evening our cows (after being inspected and worshiped by
    Jean from the shed for an hour) wandered off down into the pasture
    and left her bereft. I thought I was going to get back home, now,
    but that was an error. Jean knew of some more cows in a field
    somewhere, and took my hand and led me thitherward. When we turned
    the corner and took the right-hand road, I saw that we should
    presently be out of range of call and sight; so I began to argue
    against continuing the expedition, and Jean began to argue in favor
    of it, she using English for light skirmishing and German for
    “business.” I kept up my end with vigor, and demolished her
    arguments in detail, one after the other, till I judged I had her
    about cornered. She hesitated a moment, then answered up, sharply:

    “Wir werden nichts mehr daruber sprechen!” (We won’t talk any more
    about it.)

    It nearly took my breath away, though I thought I might possibly
    have misunderstood. I said:

    “Why, you little rascal! Was hast du gesagt?”

    But she said the same words over again, and in the same decided way.
    I suppose I ought to have been outraged, but I wasn’t; I was
    charmed.

His own note-books of that summer are as full as usual, but there are
fewer literary ideas and more philosophies. There was an excitement,
just then, about the trichina germ in pork, and one of his memoranda
says:

    I think we are only the microscopic trichina concealed in the blood
    of some vast creature’s veins, and that it is that vast creature
    whom God concerns himself about and not us.

And there is another which says:

    People, in trying to justify eternity, say we can put it in by
    learning all the knowledge acquired by the inhabitants of the
    myriads of stars. We sha’n’t need that. We could use up two
    eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own
    world, and the thousands of nations that have risen, and flourished,
    and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight
    million years.

He records an incident which he related more fully in a letter to
Howells:

    Before I forget it I must tell you that Mrs. Clemens has said a
    bright thing. A drop-letter came to me asking me to lecture here
    for a church debt. I began to rage over the exceedingly cool
    wording of the request, when Mrs. Clemens said: “I think I know that
    church, and, if so, this preacher is a colored man; he doesn’t know
    how to write a polished letter. How should he?”

    My manner changed so suddenly and so radically that Mrs. C. said: “I
    will give you a motto, and it will be useful to you if you will
    adopt it: ‘Consider every man colored till he is proved white.’”

It is dern good, I think.

One of the note-books contains these entries:

    Talking last night about home matters, I said, “I wish I had said to
    George when we were leaving home, ‘Now, George, I wish you would
    take advantage of these three or four months’ idle time while I am
    away----’”

    “To learn to let my matches alone,” interrupted Livy. The very
    words I was going to use. Yet George had not been mentioned before,
    nor his peculiarities.

Several years ago I said:

    “Suppose I should live to be ninety-two, and just as I was dying a
    messenger should enter and say----”

    “You are become Earl of Durham,” interrupted Livy. The very words I
    was going to utter. Yet there had not been a word said about the
    earl, or any other person, nor had there been any conversation
    calculated to suggest any such subject.



CLI. MARK TWAIN MUGWUMPS

The Republican Presidential nomination of James G. Blaine resulted in a
political revolt such as the nation had not known. Blaine was immensely
popular, but he had many enemies in his own party. There
were strong suspicions of his being connected with doubtful
financiering-enterprises, more or less sensitive to official influence,
and while these scandals had become quieted a very large portion of the
Republican constituency refused to believe them unjustified. What might
be termed the intellectual element of Republicanism was against Blame:
George William Curtis, Charles Dudley Warner, James Russell Lowell,
Henry Ward Beecher, Thomas Nast, the firm of Harper & Brothers, Joseph
W. Hawley, Joseph Twichell, Mark Twain--in fact the majority of thinking
men who held principle above party in their choice.

On the day of the Chicago nomination, Henry C. Robinson, Charles E.
Perkins, Edward M. Bunce, F. G. Whitmore, and Samuel C. Dunham were
collected with Mark Twain in his billiard-room, taking turns at the game
and discussing the political situation, with George, the colored butler,
at the telephone down-stairs to report the returns as they came in. As
fast as the ballot was received at the political headquarters down-town,
it was telephoned up to the house and George reported it through the
speaking-tube.

The opposition to Blaine in the convention was so strong that no one of
the assembled players seriously expected his nomination. What was their
amazement, then, when about mid-afternoon George suddenly announced
through the speaking-tube that Blaine was the nominee. The butts of the
billiard cues came down on the floor with a bump, and for a moment the
players were speechless. Then Henry Robinson said:

“It’s hard luck to have to vote for that man.”

Clemens looked at him under his heavy brows.

“But--we don’t--have to vote for him,” he said.

“Do you mean to say that you’re not going to vote for him?”

“Yes, that is what I mean to say. I am not going to vote for him.”

There was a general protest. Most of those assembled declared that when
a party’s representatives chose a man one must stand by him. They might
choose unwisely, but the party support must be maintained. Clemens said:

“No party holds the privilege of dictating to me how I shall vote. If
loyalty to party is a form of patriotism, I am no patriot. If there is
any valuable difference between a monarchist and an American, it lies
in the theory that the American can decide for himself what is patriotic
and what isn’t. I claim that difference. I am the only person in the
sixty millions that is privileged to dictate my patriotism.”

There was a good deal of talk back and forth, and, in the end, most of
those there present remained loyal to Blaine. General Hawley and his
paper stood by Blaine. Warner withdrew from his editorship of the
Courant and remained neutral. Twichell stood with Clemens and came near
losing his pulpit by it. Open letters were published in the newspapers
about him. It was a campaign when politics divided neighbors, families,
and congregations. If we except the Civil War period, there never had
been a more rancorous political warfare than that waged between the
parties of James G. Blaine and Grover Cleveland in 1884.

That Howells remained true to Blaine was a grief to Clemens. He had gone
to the farm with Howells on his political conscience and had written
fervent and imploring letters on the subject. As late as September 17th,
he said:

    Somehow I can’t seem to rest quiet under the idea of your voting for
    Blaine. I believe you said something about the country and the
    party. Certainly allegiance to these is well, but certainly a man’s
    first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country
    come second to that, and never first. I don’t ask you to vote at
    all. I only urge you not to soil yourself by voting for Blaine....
    Don’t be offended; I mean no offense. I am not concerned about the
    rest of the nation, but well, good-by.
                                   Yours ever, MARK.

Beyond his prayerful letters to Howells, Clemens did not greatly concern
himself with politics on the farm, but, returning to Hartford, he went
vigorously into the campaign, presided, as usual, at mass-meetings, and
made political speeches which invited the laughter of both parties,
and were universally quoted and printed without regard to the paper’s
convictions.

It was during one such speech as this that, in the course of his
remarks, a band outside came marching by playing patriotic music so
loudly as to drown his voice. He waited till the band got by, but by the
time he was well under way again another band passed, and once more he
was obliged to wait till the music died away in the distance. Then he
said, quite serenely:

“You will find my speech, without the music, in the morning paper.”

In introducing Carl Schurz at a great mugwump mass-meeting at
Hartford, October 20, 1884., he remarked that he [Clemens] was the only
legitimately elected officer, and was expected to read a long list of
vice-presidents; but he had forgotten all about it, and he would ask all
the gentlemen there, of whatever political complexion, to do him a great
favor by acting as vice-presidents. Then he said:

    As far as my own political change of heart is concerned, I have not
    been convinced by any Democratic means. The opinion I hold of Mr.
    Blaine is due to the comments of the Republican press before the
    nomination. Not that they have said bitter or scandalous things,
    because Republican papers are above that, but the things they said
    did not seem to be complimentary, and seemed to me to imply
    editorial disapproval of Mr. Blame and the belief that he was not
    qualified to be President of the United States.

    It is just a little indelicate for me to be here on this occasion
    before an assemblage of voters, for the reason that the ablest
    newspaper in Colorado--the ablest newspaper in the world--has
    recently nominated me for President. It is hardly fit for me to
    preside at a discussion of the brother candidate, but the best among
    us will do the most repulsive things the moment we are smitten with
    a Presidential madness. If I had realized that this canvass was to
    turn on the candidate’s private character I would have started that
    Colorado paper sooner. I know the crimes that can be imputed and
    proved against me can be told on the fingers of your hands. This
    cannot be said of any other Presidential candidate in the field.

Inasmuch as the Blaine-Cleveland campaign was essentially a campaign of
scurrility, this touch was loudly applauded.

Mark Twain voted for Grover Cleveland, though up to the very eve of
election he was ready to support a Republican nominee in whom he had
faith, preferably Edmunds, and he tried to inaugurate a movement by
which Edmunds might be nominated as a surprise candidate and sweep the
country.

It was probably Dr. Burchard’s ill-advised utterance concerning the
three alleged R’s of Democracy, “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” that
defeated Blaine, and by some strange, occult means Mark Twain’s butler
George got wind of this damning speech before it became news on
the streets of Hartford. George had gone with his party, and had a
considerable sum of money wagered on Blaine’s election; but he knew it
was likely to be very close, and he had an instant and deep conviction
that these three fatal words and Blaine’s failure to repudiate them
meant the candidate’s downfall. He immediately abandoned everything in
the shape of household duties, and within the briefest possible time had
changed enough money to make him safe, and leave him a good margin of
winnings besides, in the event of Blame’s defeat. This was evening.
A very little later the news of Blaine’s blunder, announced from the
opera-house stage, was like the explosion of a bomb. But it was no news
to George, who went home rejoicing with his enemies.



CLII. PLATFORMING WITH CABLE

The drain of many investments and the establishment of a publishing
house had told heavily on Clemens’s finances. It became desirable to
earn a large sum of money with as much expedition as possible. Authors’
readings had become popular, and Clemens had read in Philadelphia and
Boston with satisfactory results. He now conceived the idea of a grand
tour of authors as a commercial enterprise. He proposed to Aldrich,
Howells, and Cable that he charter a private car for the purpose, and
that with their own housekeeping arrangements, cooking, etc., they could
go swinging around the circuit, reaping, a golden harvest. He offered
to be general manager of the expedition, the impresario as it were, and
agreed to guarantee the others not less than seventy-five dollars a day
apiece as their net return from the “circus,” as he called it.

Howells and Aldrich liked well enough to consider it as an amusing
prospect, but only Cable was willing to realize it. He had been scouring
the country on his own account, and he was willing enough to join forces
with Mark Twain.

Clemens detested platforming, but the idea of reading from his books or
manuscript for some reason seemed less objectionable, and, as already
stated, the need of much money had become important.

He arranged with J. B. Pond for the business side of the expedition,
though in reality he was its proprietor. The private-car idea was given
up, but he employed Cable at a salary of four hundred and fifty dollars
a week and expenses, and he paid Pond a commission. Perhaps, without
going any further, we may say that the tour was a financial success, and
yielded a large return of the needed funds.

Clemens and Cable had a pleasant enough time, and had it not been for
the absence from home and the disagreeableness of railway travel, there
would have been little to regret. They were a curiously associated pair.
Cable was orthodox in his religion, devoted to Sunday-school, Bible
reading, and church affairs in general. Clemens--well, Clemens was
different. On the first evening of their tour, when the latter was
comfortably settled in bed with an entertaining book, Cable appeared
with his Bible, and proceeded to read a chapter aloud. Clemens made no
comment, and this went on for an evening or two more. Then he said:

“See here, Cable, we’ll have to cut this part of the program out. You
can read the Bible as much as you please so long as you don’t read it to
me.”

Cable retired courteously. He had a keen sense of humor, and most things
that Mark Twain did, whether he approved or not, amused him. Cable did
not smoke, but he seemed always to prefer the smoking compartment when
they traveled, to the more respectable portions of the car. One day
Clemens sand to him:

“Cable, why do you sit in here? You don’t smoke, and you know I always
smoke, and sometimes swear.”

Cable said, “I know, Mark, I don’t do these things, but I can’t help
admiring the way you do them.”

When Sunday came it was Mark Twain’s great happiness to stay in bed all
day, resting after his week of labor; but Cable would rise, bright
and chipper, dress himself in neat and suitable attire, and visit the
various churches and Sunday-schools in town, usually making a brief
address at each, being always invited to do so.

It seems worth while to include one of the Clemens-Cable programs
here--a most satisfactory one. They varied it on occasion, and when they
were two nights in a place changed it completely, but the program here
given was the one they were likely to use after they had proved its
worth:

                       PROGRAM

              Richling’s visit to Kate Riley
                                GEO. W. CABLE

              King Sollermun
                                MARK TWAIN

              (a) Kate Riley and Ristofolo
              (b) Narcisse in mourning for “Lady Byron”
               (c) Mary’s Night Ride
                                GEO. W. CABLE
              (a) Tragic Tale of the Fishwife
              (b) A Trying Situation
              (c) A Ghost Story
                                MARK TWAIN

At a Mark Twain memorial meeting (November 30, 1910), where the few who
were left of his old companions told over quaint and tender memories,
George Cable recalled their reading days together and told of Mark
Twain’s conscientious effort to do his best, to be worthy of himself,
regardless of all other concerns. He told how when they had been
traveling for a while Clemens seemed to realize that he was only giving
the audience nonsense; making them laugh at trivialities which they
would forget before they had left the entertainment hall. Cable said
that up to that time he had supposed Clemens’s chief thought was the
entertainment of the moment, and that if the audience laughed he was
satisfied. He told how he had sat in the wings, waiting his turn, and
heard the tides of laughter gather and roll forward and break against
the footlights, time and time again, and how he had believed his
colleague to be glorying in that triumph. What was his surprise, then,
on the way to the hotel in the carriage, when Clemens groaned and seemed
writhing in spirit and said:

“Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself. I am allowing myself to be a mere
buffoon. It’s ghastly. I can’t endure it any longer.”

Cable added that all that night and the next day Mark Twain devoted
himself to the study and rehearsal of selections which were justified
not only as humor, but as literature and art.

A good many interesting and amusing things would happen on such a tour.
Many of these are entirely forgotten, of course, but of others certain
memoranda have been preserved. Grover Cleveland had been elected when
they set out on their travels, but was still holding his position in
Albany as Governor of New York. When they reached Albany Cable and
Clemens decided to call on him. They drove to the Capitol and were shown
into the Governor’s private office. Cleveland made them welcome, and,
after greetings, said to Clemens:

“Mr. Clemens, I was a fellow-citizen of yours in Buffalo a good many
months some years ago, but you never called on me then. How do you
explain this?”

Clemens said: “Oh, that is very simple to answer, your Excellency. In
Buffalo you were a sheriff. I kept away from the sheriff as much as
possible, but you’re Governor now, and on the way to the Presidency.
It’s worth while coming to see you.”

Clemens meantime had been resting, half sitting, on the corner of the
Executive desk. He leaned back a little, and suddenly about a dozen
young men opened various doors, filed in and stood at attention, as if
waiting for orders.

No one spoke for a moment; then the Governor said to this collection of
attendants:

“You are dismissed, young gentlemen. Your services are not required. Mr.
Clemens is sitting on the bells.”

In Buffalo, when Clemens appeared on the stage, he leisurely considered
the audience for a moment; then he said:

“I miss a good many faces. They have gone--gone to the tomb, to the
gallows, or to the White House. All of us are entitled to at least one
of these distinctions, and it behooves us to be wise and prepare for
all.”

On Thanksgiving Eve the readers were in Morristown, New Jersey, where
they were entertained by Thomas Nast. The cartoonist prepared a quiet
supper for them and they remained overnight in the Nast home. They were
to leave next morning by an early train, and Mrs. Nast had agreed to see
that they were up in due season. When she woke next morning there seemed
a strange silence in the house and she grew suspicious. Going to the
servants’ room, she found them sleeping soundly. The alarm-clock in the
back hall had stopped at about the hour the guests retired. The studio
clock was also found stopped; in fact, every timepiece on the premises
had retired from business. Clemens had found that the clocks interfered
with his getting to sleep, and he had quieted them regardless of early
trains and reading engagements. On being accused of duplicity he said:

“Well, those clocks were all overworked, anyway. They will feel much
better for a night’s rest.”

A few days later Nast sent him a caricature drawing--a picture which
showed Mark Twain getting rid of the offending clocks.

At Christmas-time they took a fortnight’s holiday and Clemens went home
to Hartford. A surprise was awaiting him there. Mrs. Clemens had made an
adaptation of ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ play, and the children of
the neighborhood had prepared a presentation of it for his special
delectation. He knew, on his arrival home, that something mysterious was
in progress, for certain rooms were forbidden him; but he had no inkling
of their plan until just before the performance--when he was led across
the grounds to George Warner’s home, into the large room there where it
was to be given, and placed in a seat directly in front of the stage.

Gerhardt had painted the drop-curtain, and assisted in the general
construction of scenery and effects. The result was really imposing; but
presently, when the curtain rose and the guest of honor realized what
it was all about, and what they had undertaken for his pleasure, he was
deeply moved and supremely gratified.

There was but one hitch in the performance. There is a place where the
Prince says, “Fathers be alike, mayhap; mine hath not a doll’s temper.”

This was Susy’s part, and as she said it the audience did not fail to
remember its literal appropriateness. There was a moment’s silence, then
a titter, followed by a roar of laughter, in which everybody but the
little actors joined. They did not see the humor and were disturbed and
grieved. Curiously enough, Mrs Clemens herself, in arranging and casting
the play, had not considered the possibility of this effect. The parts
were all daintily played. The children wore their assumed personalities
as if native to them. Daisy Warner played the part of Tom Canty, Clara
Clemens was Lady Jane Grey.

It was only the beginning of The Prince and the Pauper productions. The
play was repeated, Clemens assisting, adding to the parts, and himself
playing the role of Miles Hendon. In her childish biography Susy says:

    Papa had only three days to learn the part in, but still we were all
    sure that he could do it. The scene that he acted in was the scene
    between Miles Hendon and the Prince, the “Prithee, pour the water”
     scene. I was the Prince and papa and I rehearsed together two or
    three times a day for the three days before the appointed evening.
    Papa acted his part beautifully, and he added to the scene, making
    it a good deal longer. He was inexpressibly funny, with his great
    slouch hat and gait----oh such a gait! Papa made the Miles Hendon
    scene a splendid success and every one was delighted with the scene,
    and papa too. We had great fun with our “Prince and Pauper,” and I
    think we none of us shall forget how immensely funny papa was in it.
    He certainly could have been an actor as well as an author.

The holidays over, Cable and Clemens were off on the circuit again. At
Rochester an incident happened which led to the writing of one of Mark
Twain’s important books, ‘A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court’.
Clemens and Cable had wandered into a book-store for the purpose of
finding something to read. Pulling over some volumes on one of the
tables, Clemens happened to pick up a little green, cloth-bound book,
and after looking at the title turned the pages rather curiously and
with increasing interest.

“Cable,” he said, “do you know anything about this book, the Arthurian
legends of Sir Thomas Malory, Morte Arthure?”

Cable answered: “Mark, that is one of the most beautiful books in the
world. Let me buy it for you. You will love it more than any book you
ever read.”

So Clemens came to know the old chronicler’s version of the rare Round
Table legends, and from that first acquaintance with them to the last
days of his life seldom let the book go far from him. He read and reread
those quaint, stately tales and reverenced their beauty, while fairly
reveling in the absurdities of that ancient day. Sir Ector’s lament he
regarded as one of the most simply beautiful pieces of writing in
the English tongue, and some of the combats and quests as the most
ridiculous absurdities in romance. Presently he conceived the idea
of linking that day, with its customs, costumes, and abuses, with the
progress of the present, or carrying back into that age of magicians
and armor and superstition and cruelties a brisk American of progressive
ideas who would institute reforms. His note-book began to be filled with
memoranda of situations and possibilities for the tale he had in mind.
These were vague, unformed fancies as yet, and it would be a long time
before the story would become a fact. This was the first entry:

    Dream of being a knight-errant in armor in the Middle Ages. Have
    the notions and habits, though, of the present day mixed with the
    necessities of that. No pockets in the armor. No way to manage
    certain requirements of nature. Can’t scratch. Cold in the head
    and can’t blow. Can’t get a handkerchief; can’t use iron sleeve;
    iron gets red-hot in the sun; leaks in the rain; gets white with
    frost and freezes me solid in winter; makes disagreeable clatter
    when I enter church. Can’t dress or undress myself. Always getting
    struck by lightning. Fall down and can’t get up.

Twenty-one years later, discussing the genesis of the story, he said:

“As I read those quaint and curious old legends I suppose I naturally
contrasted those days with ours, and it made me curious to fancy what
might be the picturesque result if we could dump the nineteenth century
down into the sixth century and observe the consequences.”

The reading tour continued during the first two months of the new year
and carried them as far west as Chicago. They read in Hannibal and
Keokuk, and Clemens spent a day in the latter place with his mother, now
living with Orion, brisk and active for her years and with her old-time
force of character. Mark Twain, arranging for her Keokuk residence, had
written:

    Ma wants to board with you, and pay her board. She will pay you $20
    a month (she wouldn’t pay a cent more in heaven; she is obstinate on
    this point), and as long as she remains with you and is content I
    will add $25 a month to the sum Perkins already sends you.

Jane Clemens attended the Keokuk reading, and later, at home, when her
children asked her if she could still dance, she rose, and at eighty-one
tripped as lightly as a girl. It was the last time that Mark Twain ever
saw his mother in the health and vigor which had been always so much a
part of her personality.

Clemens saw another relative on that trip; in St. Louis, James Lampton,
the original of Colonel Sellers, called.

He was become old and white-headed, but he entered to me in the same old
breezy way of his earlier life, and he was all there, yet--not a detail
wanting: the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart,
the persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination--they were all
there; and before I could turn around he was polishing up his Aladdin’s
lamp and flashing the secret riches of the world before me. I said to
myself: “I did not overdraw him by a shade, I set him down as he was;
and he is the same man to-day. Cable will recognize him.”

Clemens opened the door into Cable’s room and allowed the golden
dream-talk to float in. It was of a “small venture” which the caller had
undertaken through his son.

“Only a little thing--a mere trifle--a bagatelle. I suppose there’s a
couple of millions in it, possibly three, but not more, I think; still,
for a boy, you know----”

It was the same old Cousin Jim. Later, when he had royally accepted some
tickets for the reading and bowed his exit, Cable put his head in at the
door.

“That was Colonel Sellers,” he said.



CLIII. HUCK FINN COMES INTO HIS OWN

In the December Century (1884) appeared a chapter from ‘The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn’, “The Grangerford-Shepherdson Feud,” a piece of
writing which Edmund Clarence Stederian, Brander Matthews, and others
promptly ranked as among Mark Twain’s very best; when this was followed,
in the January number, by “King Sollermun,” a chapter which in its
way delighted quite as many readers, the success of the new book was
accounted certain.--[Stedman, writing to Clemens of this instalment,
said: “To my mind it is not only the most finished and condensed thing
you have done but as dramatic and powerful an episode as I know in
modern literature.”]

‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ was officially published in England
and America in December, 1884, but the book was not in the canvassers’
hands for delivery until February. By this time the orders were
approximately for forty thousand copies, a number which had increased
to fifty thousand a few weeks later. Webster’s first publication venture
was in the nature of a triumph. Clemens wrote to him March 16th:

“Your news is splendid. Huck certainly is a success.”

He felt that he had demonstrated his capacity as a general director and
Webster had proved his efficiency as an executive. He had no further
need of an outside publisher.

The story of Huck Finn will probably stand as the best of Mark Twain’s
purely fictional writings. A sequel to Tom Sawyer, it is greater
than its predecessor; greater artistically, though perhaps with less
immediate interest for the juvenile reader. In fact, the books are so
different that they are not to be compared--wherein lies the success
of the later one. Sequels are dangerous things when the story is
continuous, but in Huckleberry Finn the story is a new one, wholly
different in environment, atmosphere, purpose, character, everything.
The tale of Huck and Nigger Jim drifting down the mighty river on a
raft, cross-secting the various primitive aspects of human existence,
constitutes one of the most impressive examples of picaresque fiction
in any language. It has been ranked greater than Gil Blas, greater even
than Don Quixote; certainly it is more convincing, more human, than
either of these tales. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “It is a book
I have read four times, and am quite ready to begin again to-morrow.”

It is by no means a flawless book, though its defects are trivial
enough. The illusion of Huck as narrator fails the least bit here and
there; the “four dialects” are not always maintained; the occasional
touch of broad burlesque detracts from the tale’s reality. We are
inclined to resent this. We never wish to feel that Huck is anything but
a real character. We want him always the Huck who was willing to go
to hell if necessary, rather than sacrifice Nigger Jim; the Huck who
watched the river through long nights, and, without caring to explain
why, felt his soul go out to the sunrise.

    Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum
    by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way
    we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there
    --sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights and laid up and hid
    daytimes; soon as the night was most gone we stopped navigating and
    tied up--nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then
    cut young cottonwoods and willows and hid the raft with them. Then
    we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim,
    so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy
    bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight
    come. Not a sound anywheres--perfectly still--just like the whole
    world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe.
    The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of
    dull line--that was the woods on t’other side, you couldn’t make
    nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness,
    spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t
    black anymore, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting
    along, ever so far away--trading scows, and such things; and long
    black streaks--rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or
    jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-
    and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the
    look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current
    which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see
    the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up, and the
    river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away
    on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely,
    and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it
    anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you
    over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the
    woods and the flowers.... And next you’ve got the full day, and
    everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!

This is the Huck we want, and this is the Huck we usually have, and that
the world has long been thankful for.

Take the story as a whole, it is a succession of startling and unique
pictures. The cabin in the swamp which Huck and his father used together
in their weird, ghastly relationship; the night adventure with Jim
on the wrecked steamboat; Huck’s night among the towheads; the
Grangerford-Shepherdson battle; the killing of Boggs--to name a few of
the many vivid presentations--these are of no time or literary fashion
and will never lose their flavor nor their freshness so long as humanity
itself does not change. The terse, unadorned Grangerford-Shepherdson
episode--built out of the Darnell--Watson feuds--[See Life on the
Mississippi, chap. xxvi. Mark Twain himself, as a cub pilot, came near
witnessing the battle he describes.]--is simply classic in its vivid
casualness, and the same may be said of almost every incident on
that long river-drift; but this is the strength, the very essence of
picaresque narrative. It is the way things happen in reality; and the
quiet, unexcited frame of mind in which Huck is prompted to set
them down would seem to be the last word in literary art. To Huck,
apparently, the killing of Boggs and Colonel Sherburn’s defiance of the
mob are of about the same historical importance as any other incidents
of the day’s travel. When Colonel Sherburn threw his shotgun across his
arm and bade the crowd disperse Huck says:

    The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart and went
    tearing off every which way, and Buck Harkness he heeled it after
    them, looking tolerable cheap. I could a staid if I’d a wanted to,
    but I didn’t want to.

    I went to the circus, and loafed around the back side till the
    watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent.

That is all. No reflections, no hysterics; a murder and a mob dispersed,
all without a single moral comment. And when the Shepherdsons had got
done killing the Grangerfords, and Huck had tugged the two bodies ashore
and covered Buck Grangerford’s face with a handkerchief, crying a little
because Buck had been good to him, he spent no time in sentimental
reflection or sermonizing, but promptly hunted up Jim and the raft and
sat down to a meal of corn-dodgers, buttermilk, pork and cabbage, and
greens:

    There ain’t nothing in the world so good, when it is cooked right;
    and while I eat my supper we talked, and had a good time. I was
    powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away
    from the swamp. We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after
    all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft
    don’t; you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

It was Huck Finn’s morality that caused the book to be excluded from the
Concord Library, and from other libraries here and there at a later day.
The orthodox mental attitude of certain directors of juvenile literature
could not condone Huck’s looseness in the matter of statement and
property rights, and in spite of New England traditions, Massachusetts
librarians did not take any too kindly to his uttered principle that,
after thinking it over and taking due thought on the deadly sin of
abolition, he had decided that he’d go to hell rather than give Jim over
to slavery. Poor vagrant Ben Blankenship, hiding his runaway negro in an
Illinois swamp, could not dream that his humanity would one day supply
the moral episode of an immortal book.

Able critics have declared that the psychology of Huck Finn is the
book’s large feature: Huck’s moral point of view--the struggle between
his heart and his conscience concerning the sin of Jim’s concealment,
and his final decision of self-sacrifice. Time may show that as an epic
of the river, the picture of a vanished day, it will rank even greater.
The problems of conscience we have always with us, but periods once
passed are gone forever. Certainly Huck’s loyalty to that lovely soul
Nigger Jim was beautiful, though after all it may not have been so hard
for Huck, who could be loyal to anything. Huck was loyal to his father,
loyal to Tom Sawyer of course, loyal even to those two river tramps
and frauds, the King and the Duke, for whom he lied prodigiously, only
weakening when a new and livelier loyalty came into view--loyalty to
Mary Wilks.

The King and the Duke, by the way, are not elsewhere matched in fiction.
The Duke was patterned after a journeyman-printer Clemens had known in
Virginia City, but the King was created out of refuse from the whole
human family--“all tears and flapdoodle,” the very ultimate of disrepute
and hypocrisy--so perfect a specimen that one must admire, almost love,
him. “Hain’t we all the fools in town on our side? and ain’t that a big
enough majority in any town?” he asks in a critical moment--a remark
which stamps him as a philosopher of classic rank. We are full of pity
at last when this pair of rapscallions ride out of the history on a
rail, and feel some of Huck’s inclusive loyalty and all the sorrowful
truth of his comment: “Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”

The “poor old king” Huck calls him, and confesses how he felt “ornery
and humble and to blame, somehow,” for the old scamp’s misfortunes. “A
person’s conscience ain’t got no sense,” he says, and Huck is never more
real to us, or more lovable, than in that moment. Huck is what he
is because, being made so, he cannot well be otherwise. He is a boy
throughout--such a boy as Mark Twain had known and in some degree
had been. One may pettily pick a flaw here and there in the tale’s
construction if so minded, but the moral character of Huck himself is
not open to criticism. And indeed any criticism of this the greatest of
Mark Twain’s tales of modern life would be as the mere scratching of the
granite of an imperishable structure. Huck Finn is a monument that no
puny pecking will destroy. It is built of indestructible blocks of human
nature; and if the blocks do not always fit, and the ornaments do not
always agree, we need not fear. Time will blur the incongruities and
moss over the mistakes. The edifice will grow more beautiful with the
years.



CLIV. THE MEMOIRS OF GENERAL GRANT

The success of Huck Finn, though sufficiently important in itself,
prepared the way for a publishing venture by the side of which it
dwindled to small proportions. One night (it was early in November,
1884), when Cable and Clemens had finished a reading at Chickering Hall,
Clemens, coming out into the wet blackness, happened to hear Richard
Watson Gilder’s voice say to some unseen companion:

“Do you know General Grant has actually determined to write his memoirs
and publish them. He has said so to-day, in so many words.”

Of course Clemens was immediately interested. It was the thing he had
proposed to Grant some three years previously, during his call that day
with Howells concerning the Toronto consulship.

With Mrs. Clemens, he promptly overtook Gilder and accompanied him to
his house, where they discussed the matter in its various particulars.
Gilder said that the Century Editors had endeavored to get Grant
to contribute to their war series, but that not until his financial
disaster, as a member of the firm of Grant & Ward, had he been willing
to consider the matter. He said that Grant now welcomed the idea of
contributing three papers to the series, and that the promised payment
of five hundred dollars each for these articles had gladdened his heart
and relieved him of immediate anxiety.--[Somewhat later the Century
Company, voluntarily, added liberally to this sum.]

Gilder added that General Grant seemed now determined to continue his
work until he had completed a book, though this at present was only a
prospect.

Clemens was in the habit of calling on Grant, now and then, to smoke a
cigar with him, and he dropped in next morning to find out just how far
the book idea had developed, and what were the plans of publication.
He found the General and his son, Colonel Fred Grant, discussing some
memoranda, which turned out to be a proposition from the Century Company
for the book publication of his memoirs. Clemens asked to be allowed to
look over the proposed terms, and when he had done so he said:

“General, it is clear that the Century people do not realize the
importance--the commercial magnitude of your book. It is not strange
that this is true, for they are comparatively new publishers and have
had little or no experience with books of this class. The terms they
propose indicate that they expect to sell five, possibly ten thousand
copies. A book from your hand, telling the story of your life and
battles, should sell not less than a quarter of a million, perhaps twice
that sum. It should be sold only by subscription, and you are entitled
to double the royalty here proposed. I do not believe it is to
your interest to conclude this contract without careful thought and
investigation. Write to the American Publishing Company at Hartford and
see what they will do for you.”

But Grant demurred. He said that, while no arrangements had been made
with the Century Company, he thought it only fair and right that they
should have the book on reasonable terms; certainly on terms no greater
than he could obtain elsewhere. He said that, all things being equal,
the book ought to go to the man who had first suggested it to him.

Clemens spoke up: “General, if that is so, it belongs to me.”

Grant did not understand until Clemens recalled to him how he had urged
him, in that former time, to write his memoirs; had pleaded with him,
agreeing to superintend the book’s publication. Then he said:

“General, I am publishing my own book, and by the time yours is ready
it is quite possible that I shall have the best equipped subscription
establishment in the country. If you will place your book with
my firm--and I feel that I have at least an equal right in the
consideration--I will pay you twenty per cent. of the list price, or, if
you prefer, I will give you seventy per cent. of the net returns and I
will pay all office expenses out of my thirty per cent.”

General Grant was really grieved at this proposal. It seemed to him
that here was a man who was offering to bankrupt himself out of pure
philanthropy--a thing not to be permitted. He intimated that he had
asked the Century Company president, Roswell Smith, a careful-headed
business man, if he thought his book would pay as well as Sherman’s,
which the Scribners had published at a profit to Sherman of twenty-five
thousand dollars, and that Smith had been unwilling to guarantee that
amount to the author.--[Mark Twain’s note-book, under date of March,
1885, contains this memorandum: “Roswell Smith said to me: ‘I’m glad you
got the book, Mr. Clemens; glad there was somebody with courage enough
to take it, under the circumstances. What do you think the General
wanted to require of me?’

“‘He wanted me to insure a sale of twenty-five thousand sets of his
book. I wouldn’t risk such a guarantee on any book that was ever
published.’”

Yet Roswell Smith, not so many years later, had so far enlarged his
views of subscription publishing that he fearlessly and successfully
invested a million dollars or more in a dictionary, regardless of the
fact that the market was already thought to be supplied.]

Clemens said:

“General, I have my check-book with me. I will draw you a check now for
twenty-five thousand dollars for the first volume of your memoirs,
and will add a like amount for each volume you may write as an advance
royalty payment, and your royalties will continue right along when this
amount has been reached.”

Colonel Fred Grant now joined in urging that matters be delayed,
at least until more careful inquiry concerning the possibilities of
publishing could be made.

Clemens left then, and set out on his trip with Cable, turning the whole
matter over to Webster and Colonel Fred for settlement. Meantime, the
word that General Grant was writing his memoirs got into the newspapers
and various publishing propositions came to him. In the end the General
sent over to Philadelphia for his old friend, George W. Childs, and laid
the whole matter before him. Childs said later it was plain that General
Grant, on the score of friendship, if for no other reason, distinctly
wished to give the book to Mark Twain. It seemed not to be a question
of how much money he would make, but of personal feeling entirely.
Webster’s complete success with Huck Finn being now demonstrated,
Colonel Fred Grant agreed that he believed Clemens and Webster could
handle the book as profitably as anybody; and after investigation Childs
was of the same opinion. The decision was that the firm of Charles L.
Webster & Co. should have the book, and arrangements for drawing the
contract were made.

General Grant, however, was still somewhat uneasy as to the terms.
He thought he was taking an unfair advantage in receiving so large a
proportion of the profits. He wrote to Clemens, asking him which of his
two propositions--the twenty per cent. gross-royalty or the seventy
per cent. of the net profit--would be the best all around. Clemens sent
Webster to tell him that he believed the simplest, as well as the most
profitable for the author, would be the twenty per cent. arrangement.
Whereupon Grant replied that he would take the alternative; as in that
case, if the book were a failure, and there were no profits, Clemens
would not be obliged to pay him anything. He could not consent to the
thought of receiving twenty per cent. on a book published at a loss.

Meantime, Grant had developed a serious illness. The humiliation of his
business failure had undermined his health. The papers announced his
malady as cancer of the tongue. In a memorandum which Clemens made,
February 26, 1885, he states that on the 21st he called at the Grant
home, 3 East 66th Street, and was astonished to see how thin and weak
the General looked. He was astonished because the newspaper, in a second
report, had said the threatening symptoms had disappeared, that the
cancer alarm was a false one.

    I took for granted the report, and said I had been glad to see that
    news. He smiled and said, “Yes--if it had only been true.”

    One of the physicians was present, and he startled me by saying the
    General’s condition was the opposite of encouraging.

    Then the talk drifted to business, and the General presently said:
    “I mean you shall have the book--I have about made up my mind to
    that--but I wish to write to Mr. Roswell Smith first, and tell him I
    have so decided. I think this is due him.”

    From the beginning the General has shown a fine delicacy toward
    those people--a delicacy which was native to the character of the
    man who put into the Appomattox terms of surrender the words,
    “Officers may retain their side-arms,” to save General Lee the
    humiliation of giving up his sword. [Note-book.]

The physician present was Dr. Douglas, and upon Clemens assuming that
the General’s trouble was probably due to smoking, also that it was a
warning to those who smoked to excess, himself included, Dr. Douglas
said that General Grant’s affliction could not be attributed altogether
to smoking, but far more to his distress of mind, his year-long
depression of spirit, the grief of his financial disaster. Dr. Douglas’s
remark started General Grant upon the subject of his connection with
Ward, which he discussed with great freedom and apparent relief of
mind. Never at any time did he betray any resentment toward Ward, but
characterized him as one might an offending child. He spoke as a man
who has been deeply wronged and humiliated and betrayed, but without a
venomous expression or one with revengeful nature. Clemens confessed in
his notes that all the time he himself was “inwardly boiling--scalping
Ward--flaying him alive--breaking him on the wheel--pounding him to a
jelly.”

While he was talking Colonel Grant said:

“Father is letting you see that the Grant family are a pack of fools,
Mr. Clemens.”

The General objected to this statement. He said that the facts could
be produced which would show that when Ward laid siege to a man he was
pretty certain to turn out to be a fool; as much of a fool as any of the
Grant family. He said that nobody could call the president of the Erie
Railroad a fool, yet Ward had beguiled him of eight hundred thousand
dollars, robbed him of every cent of it.

He cited another man that no one could call a fool who had invested in
Ward to the extent of half a million. He went on to recall many such
cases. He told of one man who had come to the office on the eve of
departure for Europe and handed Ward a check for fifty thousand dollars,
saying:

“I have no use for it at present. See what you can do with it for me.”
 By and by this investor, returning from Europe, dropped in and said:

“Well, did anything happen?”

Ward indifferently turned to his private ledger, consulted it, then drew
a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and handed it over,
with the casual remark:

“Well, yes, something happened; not much yet--a little too soon.”

The man stared at the check, then thrust it back into Ward’s hand.
“That’s all right. It’s plenty good enough for me. Set that hen again,”
 and left the place.

Of course Ward made no investments. His was the first playing on a
colossal scale of the now worn-out “get rich quick” confidence game.
Such dividends as were made came out of the principal. Ward was the
Napoleon of that game, whether he invented it or not. Clemens agreed
that, as far as himself or any of his relatives were concerned, they
would undoubtedly have trusted Ward.

Colonel Grant followed him to the door when he left, and told him that
the physicians feared his father might not live more than a few weeks
longer, but that meantime he had been writing steadily, and that the
first volume was complete and fully half the second. Three days later
the formal contract was closed, and Webster & Co. promptly advanced.
General Grant ten thousand dollars for imminent demands, a welcome
arrangement, for Grant’s debts and expenses were many, and his available
resources restricted to the Century payments for his articles.

Immediately the office of Webster & Co. was warm with affairs. Reporters
were running hot-foot for news of the great contract by which Mark Twain
was to publish the life of General Grant. No publishing enterprise of
such vast moment had ever been undertaken, and no publishing event,
before or since, ever received the amount of newspaper comment. The
names of General Grant and Mark Twain associated would command columns,
whatever the event, and that Mark Twain was to become the publisher of
Grant’s own story of his battles was of unprecedented importance.

The partners were sufficiently occupied. Estimates and prices for
vast quantities of paper were considered, all available presses were
contracted for, binderies were pledged exclusively for the Grant book.
Clemens was boiling over with plans and suggestions for distribution.
Webster was half wild with the tumult of the great campaign.
Applications for agencies poured in.

In those days there were general subscription agencies which divided the
country into districts, and the heads of these agencies Webster summoned
to New York and laid down the law to them concerning the new book. It
was not a time for small dealings, and Webster rose to the occasion. By
the time these men returned to their homes they had practically pledged
themselves to a quarter of a million sets of the Grant Memoirs, and this
estimate they believed to be conservative.

Webster now moved into larger and more pretentious quarters. He took a
store-room at 42 East 14th Street, Union Square, and surrounded himself
with a capable force of assistants. He had become, all at once, the most
conspicuous publisher in the world.



CLV. DAYS WITH A DYING HERO

The contract for the publication of the Grant Life was officially closed
February 27, 1885. Five days later, on the last day and at the last hour
of President Arthur’s administration, and of the Congress then sitting,
a bill was passed placing Grant as full General, with full pay, on
the retired army list. The bill providing for this somewhat tardy
acknowledgment was rushed through at the last moment, and it is said
that the Congressional clock was set back so that this enactment might
become a law before the administration changed.

Clemens was with General Grant when the news of this action was read to
him. Grant had greatly desired such recognition, and it meant more to
him than to any one present, yet Clemens in his notes records:

    Every face there betrayed strong excitement and emotion except one
    --General Grant’s. He read the telegram, but not a shade or
    suggestion of a change exhibited itself in his iron countenance.
    The volume of his emotion was greater than all the other emotions
    there present combined, but he was able to suppress all expression
    of it and make no sign.

Grant’s calmness, endurance, and consideration during these final days
astonished even those most familiar with his noble character. One night
Gerhardt came into the library at Hartford with the announcement that
he wished to show his patron a small bust he had been making in clay of
General Grant. Clemens did not show much interest in the prospect, but
when the work was uncovered he became enthusiastic. He declared it was
the first likeness he had ever seen of General Grant that approached
reality. He agreed that the Grant family ought to see it, and that he
would take Gerhardt with him next day in order that he might be within
reach in case they had any suggestions. They went to New York next
morning, and called at the Grant home during the afternoon.

From the note-book:

    Friday, March 20, 1885. Gerhardt and I arrived at General Grant’s
    about 2.30 P.m. and I asked if the family would look at a small
    clay bust of the General which Gerhardt had made from a photograph.
    Colonel Fred and Jesse were absent to receive their sister, Mrs.
    Sartoris, who would arrive from Europe about 4.30; but the three
    Mrs. Grants examined the work and expressed strong approval of it,
    and also great gratification that Mr. Gerhardt had undertaken it.
    Mrs. Jesse Grant had lately dreamed that she was inquiring where the
    maker of my bust could be found (she had seen a picture of it in
    Huck Finn, which was published four weeks ago), for she wanted the
    same artist to make one of General Grant. The ladies examined the
    bust critically and pointed out defects, while Gerhardt made the
    necessary corrections. Presently Mrs. General Grant suggested that
    Gerhardt step in and look at the General. I had been in there
    talking with the General, but had never thought of asking him to let
    a stranger come in. So Gerhardt went in with the ladies and me, and
    the inspection and cross-fire began: “There, I was sure his nose was
    so and so,” and, “I was sure his forehead was so and so,” and,
    “Don’t you think his head is so and so?” And so everybody walked
    around and about the old hero, who lay half reclining in his easy
    chair, but well muffled up, and submitting to all this as serenely
    as if he were used to being served so. One marked feature of
    General Grant’s character is his exceeding gentleness, goodness,
    sweetness. Every time I have been in his presence--lately and
    formerly--my mind was drawn to that feature. I wonder it has not
    been more spoken of.

    Presently he said, let Gerhardt bring in his clay and work there, if
    Gerhardt would not mind his reclining attitude. Of course we were
    glad. A table for the bust was moved up in front of him; the ladies
    left the room; I got a book; Gerhardt went to work; and for an hour
    there was perfect stillness, and for the first time during the day
    the General got a good, sound, peaceful nap. General Badeau came
    in, and probably interrupted that nap. He spoke out as strongly as
    the others concerning the great excellence of the likeness. He had
    some sheets of MS. in his hand, and said, “I’ve been reading what
    you wrote this morning, General, and it is of the utmost value; it
    solves a riddle that has puzzled men’s brains all these years and
    makes the thing clear and rational.” I asked what the puzzle was,
    and he said, “It was why Grant did not immediately lay siege to
    Vicksburg after capturing Port Hudson” (at least that is my
    recollection, now toward midnight, of General Badeau’s answer).

The little bust of Grant which Gerhardt worked on that day was widely
reproduced in terra-cotta, and is still regarded by many as the most
nearly correct likeness of Grant. The original is in possession of the
family.

General Grant worked industriously on his book. He had a superb
memory and worked rapidly. Webster & Co. offered to supply him with a
stenographer, and this proved a great relief. Sometimes he dictated ten
thousand words at a sitting. It was reported at the time, and it has
been stated since, that Grant did not write the Memoirs himself, but
only made notes, which were expanded by others. But this is not true.
General Grant wrote or dictated every word of the story himself, then
had the manuscript read aloud to him and made his own revisions. He
wrote against time, for he knew that his disease was fatal. Fortunately
the lease of life granted him was longer than he had hoped for, though
the last chapters were written when he could no longer speak, and when
weakness and suffering made the labor a heavy one indeed; but he never
flinched or faltered, never at any time suggested that the work be
finished by another hand.

Early in April General Grant’s condition became very alarming, and on
the night of the 3d it was believed he could not live until morning.
But he was not yet ready to surrender. He rallied and renewed his task;
feebly at first, but more perseveringly as each day seemed to bring a
little added strength, or perhaps it was only resolution. Now and then
he appeared depressed as to the quality of his product. Once Colonel
Fred Grant suggested to Clemens that if he could encourage the General a
little it might be worth while. Clemens had felt always such a reverence
and awe for the great soldier that he had never dreamed of complimenting
his literature.

“I was as much surprised as Columbus’s cook could have been to learn
that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his
navigating.”

He did not hesitate to give it, however, and with a clear conscience.
Grant wrote as he had fought; with a simple, straightforward dignity,
with a style that is not a style at all but the very absence of it, and
therefore the best of all literary methods. It happened that Clemens had
been comparing some of Grant’s chapters with Caesar’s Commentaries,
and was able to say, in all sincerity, that the same high merits
distinguished both books: clarity of statement, directness, simplicity,
manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike,
soldierly candor and frankness, and soldierly avoidance of flowery
speech.

“I placed the two books side by side upon the same level,” he said, “and
I still think that they belong there. I learned afterward that General
Grant was pleased with this verdict. It shows that he was just a man,
just a human being, just an author.”

Within two months after the agents had gone to work canvassing for the
Grant Memoirs--which is to say by the 1st of May, 1885--orders for sixty
thousand sets had been received, and on that day Mark Twain, in his
note-book, made a memorandum estimate of the number of books that
the country would require, figuring the grand total at three hundred
thousand sets of two volumes each. Then he says:

    If these chickens should really hatch according to my account,
    General Grant’s royalties will’ amount to $420,000, and will make
    the largest single check ever paid an author in the world’s history.
    Up to the present time the largest one ever paid was to Macaulay on
    his History of England, L20,000. If I pay the General in silver
    coin at $12 per pound it will weigh seventeen tons.

Certainly this has a flavor in it of Colonel Sellers, but we shall see
by and by in how far this calculation was justified.

Grant found the society of Mark Twain cheering and comforting, and
Clemens held himself in readiness to go to the dying man at call. On the
26th of May he makes this memorandum:

    It is curious and dreadful to sit up in this way and talk cheerful
    nonsense to General Grant, and he under sentence of death with that
    cancer. He says he has made the book too large by 200 pages--not a
    bad fault. A short time ago we were afraid we would lack 400 of
    being enough.

    To-day talked with General Grant about his and my first great
    Missouri campaign in 1861. He surprised an empty camp near Florida,
    Missouri, on Salt River, which I had been occupying a day or two
    before. How near he came to playing the devil with his future
    publisher.

Of course Clemens would amuse the old commander with the tale of his
soldiering, how his company had been chased through the brush and mud
by the very announcement that Grant was coming. Some word of this got to
the Century editors, who immediately proposed that Mark Twain contribute
to the magazine War Series the story of his share in the Rebellion, and
particularly of his war relations with General Grant. So the “Private
History of a Campaign that Failed” was prepared as Mark Twain’s
side-light on the history of the Rebellion; and if it was not important
history it was at least amusing, and the telling of that tale in Mark
Twain’s inimitable fashion must have gone far toward making cheerful
those last sad days of his ancient enemy.

During one of their talks General Grant spoke of the question as to
whether he or Sherman had originated the idea of the march to the sea.
Grant said:

“Neither of us originated the idea of that march. The enemy did it.”

Reports were circulated of estrangements between General Grant and the
Century Company, and between Mark Twain and the Century Company, as a
result of the book decision. Certain newspapers exploited and magnified
these rumors--some went so far as to accuse Mark Twain of duplicity, and
to charge him with seeking to obtain a vast fortune for himself at the
expense of General Grant and his family. All of which was the merest
nonsense. The Century Company, Webster & Co., General Grant, and Mark
Twain individually, were all working harmoniously, and nothing but the
most cordial relations and understanding prevailed. As to the charge
of unfair dealing on the part of Mark Twain, this was too absurd, even
then, to attract more than momentary attention. Webster & Co., somewhat
later in the year, gave to the press a clear statement of their
publishing arrangement, though more particularly denying the report that
General Grant had been unable to complete his work.



CLVI. THE CLOSE OF A GREAT CAREER

The Clemens household did not go to Elmira that year until the 27th of
June. Meantime General Grant had been taken to Mount McGregor, near the
Adirondacks. The day after Clemens reached Elmira there came a summons
saying that the General had asked to see him. He went immediately, and
remained several days. The resolute old commander was very feeble by
this time. It was three months since he had been believed to be dying,
yet he was still alive, still at work, though he could no longer speak.
He was adding, here and there, a finishing touch to his manuscript,
writing with effort on small slips of paper containing but a few words
each. His conversation was carried on in the same way. Mark Twain
brought back a little package of those precious slips, and some of them
are still preserved. The writing is perfectly legible, and shows no
indication of a trembling hand.

On one of these slips is written:

    There is much more that I could do if I was a well man. I do not
    write quite as clearly as I could if well. If I could read it over
    myself many little matters of anecdote and incident would suggest
    themselves to me.

On another:

    Have you seen any portion of the second volume? It is up to the
    end, or nearly so. As much more work as I have done to-day will
    finish it. I have worked faster than if I had been well. I have
    used my three boys and a stenographer.

And on still another:

    If I could have two weeks of strength I could improve it very much.
    As I am, however, it will have to go about as it is, with
    verifications by the boys and by suggestions which will enable me to
    make a point clear here and there.

Certainly no campaign was ever conducted with a braver heart. As long as
his fingers could hold a pencil he continued at his task. Once he asked
if any estimate could now be made of what portion would accrue to his
family from the publication. Clemens’s prompt reply, that more than one
hundred thousand sets had been sold, and that already the amount of his
share, secured by safe bonds, exceeded one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars, seemed to give him deep comfort. Clemens told him that the
country was as yet not one-third canvassed, and that without doubt there
turns would be twice as much more by the end of the year. Grant made no
further inquiry, and probably never again mentioned the subject to any
one.

When Clemens left, General Grant was sitting, fully dressed, with a
shawl about his shoulders, pencil and paper beside him. It was a picture
that would never fade from the memory. In a later memorandum he says:

    I then believed he would live several months. He was still adding
    little perfecting details to his book, and preface, among other
    things. He was entirely through a few days later. Since then the
    lack of any strong interest to employ his mind has enabled the
    tedious weariness to kill him. I think his book kept him alive
    several months. He was a very great man and superlatively good.

This note was made July 23, 1885, at 10 A.M., on receipt of the news
that General Grant was dead. To Henry Ward Beecher, Clemens wrote:

    One day he put his pencil aside and said there was nothing more to
    do. If I had been there I could have foretold the shock that struck
    the world three days later.

It can be truly said that all the nation mourned. General Grant had no
enemies, political or sectional, in those last days. The old soldier
battling with a deadly disease, yet bravely completing his task, was
a figure at once so pathetic and so noble that no breath of animosity
remained to utter a single word that was not kind.

Memorial services were held from one end of the country to the other.
Those who had followed him in peace or war, those who had fought beside
him or against him, alike paid tribute to his memory. Twichell, from the
mountains of Vermont, wrote:

    I suppose I have said to Harmony forty times since I got up here,
    “How I wish I could see Mark!” My notion is that between us we could
    get ourselves expressed. I have never known any one who could help
    me read my own thoughts in such a case as you can and have done many
    a time, dear old fellow.

    I’d give more to sit on a log with you in the woods this afternoon,
    while we twined a wreath together for Launcelot’s grave, than
    to hear any conceivable eulogy of him pronounced by mortal lips.

The death of Grant so largely and so suddenly augmented the orders for
his Memoirs that it seemed impossible to get the first volume printed in
time for the delivery, which had been promised for December 1st. J. J.
Little had the contract of manufacture, and every available press and
bindery was running double time to complete the vast contract.

In the end more than three hundred thousand sets of two volumes each
were sold, and between four hundred and twenty and four hundred and
fifty thousand dollars was paid to Mrs. Grant. The first check of two
hundred thousand dollars, drawn February 27, 1886, remains the largest
single royalty check in history. Mark Twain’s prophecy had been almost
exactly verified.



CLVII. MINOR MATTERS OF A GREAT YEAR

The Grant episode, so important in all its phases, naturally
overshadowed other events of 1885. Mark Twain was so deeply absorbed in
this great publishing enterprise that he wasted little thought or energy
in other directions.

Yet there are a few minor things that it seems worth while to remember.
Howells has told something of the Authors’ Reading given for the
Longfellow Memorial, an entertainment managed by George Parsons Lathrop,
though Howells justly claims the glory of having fixed the price of
admission at five dollars. Then he recalls a pleasing anecdote of
Charles Eliot Norton, who introduced the attractions.

Norton presided, and when it came Clemens’s turn to read he introduced
him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give, but before
he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which are
the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded of
Darwin’s delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long day’s
exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a volume
of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him, and
whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt
secure of a good night’s rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which
Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be
glad he had contributed to the repose of that great man, to whom science
owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every breast to
burst forth, he began to read.

Howells tells of Mark Twain’s triumph on this occasion, and in a letter
at the time he wrote: “You simply straddled down to the footlights and
took that house up in the hollow of your hand and tickled it.”

Howells adds that the show netted seventeen hundred dollars. This was
early in May.

Of literary work, beyond the war paper, the “Private History of a
Campaign that Failed” (published December, 1885), Clemens appears to
have done very little. His thoughts were far too busy with plans for
furthering the sale of the great military Memoir to follow literary
ventures of his own. At one time he was impelled to dictate an
autobiography--Grant’s difficulties in his dying hour suggesting
this--and he arranged with Redpath, who was no longer a lecture agent
and understood stenography, to co-operate with him in the work. He
dictated a few chapters, but he was otherwise too much occupied to
continue. Also, he was unused to dictation, and found it hard and the
result unsatisfactory.

Two open communications from Mark Twain that year deserve to be
remembered. One of these; unsigned, was published in the Century
Magazine, and expressed the need for a “universal tinker,” the man who
can accept a job in a large household or in a community as master of
all trades, with sufficient knowledge of each to be ready to undertake
whatever repairs are likely to be required in the ordinary household,
such as--“to put in windowpanes, mend gas leaks, jack-plane the edges of
doors that won’t shut, keep the waste-pipe and other water-pipe joints,
glue and otherwise repair havoc done in furniture, etc.” The letter was
signed X. Y. Z., and it brought replies from various parts of the world.
None of the applicants seemed universally qualified, but in Kansas City
a business was founded on the idea, adopting “The Universal Tinker” as
its firm name.

The other letter mentioned was written to the ‘Christian Union’,
inspired by a tale entitled, “What Ought We to Have Done?” It was a
tale concerning the government of children; especially concerning the
government of one child--John Junior--a child who, as it would appear
from the tale, had a habit of running things pretty much to his own
notion. The performance of John junior, and of his parents in trying to
manage him, stirred Mark Twain considerably--it being “enough to make
a body’s blood boil,” as he confesses--and it impelled him to set down
surreptitiously his impressions of what would have happened to John
Junior as a member of the Clemens household. He did not dare to show the
communication to Mrs. Clemens before he sent it, for he knew pretty well
what its fate would be in that case. So he took chances and printed it
without her knowledge. The letter was published July 16, 1885. It is too
long to be included entire, but it is too illuminating to be altogether
omitted. After relating, in considerable detail, Mrs. Clemens’s method
of dealing with an unruly child--the gentleness yet firmness of her
discipline--he concludes:

    The mother of my children adores them--there is no milder term for
    it--and they worship her; they even worship anything which the touch
    of her hand has made sacred. They know her for the best and truest
    friend they have ever had, or ever shall have; they know her for one
    who never did them a wrong, and cannot do them a wrong; who never
    told them a lie, nor the shadow of one; who never deceived them by
    even an ambiguous gesture; who never gave them an unreasonable
    command, nor ever contented herself with anything short of a perfect
    obedience; who has always treated them as politely and considerately
    as she would the best and oldest in the land, and has always
    required of them gentle speech and courteous conduct toward all, of
    whatsoever degree with whom they chanced to come in contact; they
    know her for one whose promise, whether of reward or punishment, is
    gold, and always worth its face, to the uttermost farthing. In a
    word, they know her, and I know her, for the best and dearest mother
    that lives--and by a long, long way the wisest....

    In all my life I have never made a single reference to my wife in
    print before, as far as I can remember, except once in the
    dedication of a book; and so, after these fifteen years of silence,
    perhaps I may unseal my lips this one time without impropriety or
    indelicacy. I will institute one other novelty: I will send this
    manuscript to the press without her knowledge and without asking her
    to edit it. This will save it from getting edited into the stove.

Susy’s biography refers to this incident at considerable length. She
states that her father had misgivings after he had sent it to the
Christian Union, and that he tried to recall the manuscript, but found
it too late. She sets down some comments of her own on her mother’s
government, then tells us of the appearance of the article:

When the Christian Union reached the farm and papa’s article in it, all
ready and waiting to be read to mama, papa hadn’t the courage to show
it to her (for he knew she wouldn’t like it at all) at first, and
he didn’t, but he might have let it go and never let her see it; but
finally he gave his consent to her seeing it, and told Clara and I we
could take it to her, which we did with tardiness, and we all stood
around mama while she read it, all wondering what she would say and
think about it.

She was too much surprised (and pleased privately too) to say much at
first; but, as we all expected, publicly (or rather when she remembered
that this article was to be read by every one that took the Christian
Union) she was rather shocked and a little displeased.

Susy goes on to tell that the article provoked a number of letters, most
of them pleasant ones, but some of them of quite another sort. One of
the latter fell into her mother’s hands, after which there was general
regret that the article had been printed, and the subject was no longer
discussed at Quarry Farm.

Susy’s biography is a unique record. It was a sort of combined memoir
and journal, charming in its innocent frankness and childish insight.
She used to keep it under her pillow, and after she was asleep the
parents would steal it out and find a tender amusement and pathos in
its quaint entries. It is a faithful record so far as it goes, and the
period it covers is an important one; for it presents a picture of Mark
Twain in the fullness of his manhood, in the golden hour of his fortune.
Susy’s beginning has a special value here:--[Susy’s’ spelling and
punctuation are preserved.]

    We are a very happy family! We consist of papa, mama, Jean, Clara
    and me. It is papa I am writing about, and I shall have no trouble
    in not knowing what to say about him, as he is a very striking
    character. Papa’s appearance has been described many times, but
    very incorrectly; he has beautiful curly grey hair, not any too
    thick, or any too long, just right; a Roman nose, which greatly
    improves the beauty of his features, kind blue eyes, and a small
    mustache, he has a wonderfully shaped head, and profile, he has a
    very good figure in short he is an extraordinarily fine looking man.
    All his features are perfect, except that he hasn’t extraordinary
    teeth. His complexion is very fair, and he doesn’t ware a beard:

    He is a very good man, and a very funny one; he has got a temper but
    we all of us have in this family. He is the loveliest man I ever
    saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent-minded!

That this is a fair statement of the Clemens home, and the truest
picture of Mark Twain at fifty that has been preserved, cannot be
doubted. His hair was iron-gray, not entirely white at this time, the
auburn tints everywhere mingled with the shining white that later would
mantle it like a silver crown. He did not look young for his years, but
he was still young, always young--indestructibly young in spirit and
bodily vigor. Susy tells how that summer he blew soap-bubbles for the
children, filling the bubbles with tobacco smoke; how he would play
with the cats, and come clear down from his study on the hill to see how
“Sour Mash,” then a kitten, was getting along; also how he wrote a poem
for Jean’s donkey, Cadichon (which they made Kiditchin): She quotes the
poem:

                  KIDITCHIN

              O du lieb’ Kiditchin
              Du bist ganz bewitchin,
              Waw- - - -he!

              In summer days Kiditchin
              Thou’rt dear from nose to britchin
              Waw----he!

              No dought thoult get a switchin
              When for mischief thou’rt itchin’
              Waw- - - -he!

              But when you’re good Kiditchin
              You shall feast in James’s kitchin
              Waw- - - -he!

              O now lift up thy song
              Thy noble note prolong
              Thou living Chinese gong!
              Waw---he! waw---he waw
              Sweetest donkey man ever saw.

Clemens undertook to ride Kiditchin one day, to show the children how
it should be done, but Kiditchin resented this interference and promptly
flung him over her head. He thought she might have been listening to the
poem he had written of her.

Susy’s discovery that the secret of her biography was known is shown
by the next entry, and the touch of severity in it was probably not
entirely unconscious:

    Papa said the other day, “I am a mugwump and a mugwump is pure from
    the marrow out.” (Papa knows that I am writing this biography of
    him, and he said this for it.) He doesn’t like to go to church at
    all, why I never understood, until just now. He told us the other
    day that he couldn’t bear to hear anyone talk but himself, but that
    he could listen to himself talk for hours without getting tired, of
    course he said this in joke, but I’ve no doubt it was founded on
    truth.

Susy’s picture of life at Quarry Farm at this period is realistic and
valuable--too valuable to be spared from this biography:

    There are eleven cats at the farm here now. Papa’s favorite is a
    little tortoise-shell kitten he has named “Sour Mash,” and a little
    spotted one “Fannie.” It is very pretty to see what papa calls the
    cat procession; it was formed in this way. Old Minniecat headed,
    (the mother of all the cats) next to her came aunt Susie, then Clara
    on the donkey, accompanied by a pile of cats, then papa and Jean
    hand in hand and a pile of cats brought up in the rear, mama and I
    made up the audience.

    Our varius occupations are as follows. Papa rises about 1/2 past 7
    in the morning, breakfasts at eight, writes, plays tennis with Clara
    and me and tries to make the donkey go, in the morning; does varius
    things in P.M., and in the evening plays tennis with Clara and me
    and amuses Jean and the donkey.

    Mama rises about 1/4 to eight, breakfasts at eight, teaches Jean
    German reading from 9-10; reads German with me from 10-11. Then she
    reads studdies or visits with aunt Susie for a while, and then she
    reads to Clara and I till lunch time things connected with English
    history (for we hope to go to England next summer) while we sew.
    Then we have lunch. She studdies for about half an hour or visits
    with aunt Susie, then reads to us an hour or more, then studdies
    writes reads and rests till supper time. After supper she sits out
    on the porch and works till eight o’clock, from eight o’clock to
    bedtime she plays whist with papa and after she has retired she
    reads and studdies German for a while.

    Clara and I do most everything from practicing to donkey riding and
    playing tag. While Jean’s time is spent in asking mama what she can
    have to eat.

It is impossible, at this distance, to convey all that the farm meant
to the children during the summers of their infancy and childhood and
girlhood which they spent there. It was the paradise, the dreamland they
looked forward to during all the rest of the year. Through the long,
happy months there they grew strong and brown, and drank deeply of the
joy of life. Their cousins Julia, Jervis, and Ida Langdon ranged about
their own ages and were almost their daily companions. Their games were
mainly of the out-of-doors; the woods and meadows and hillside pastures
were their playground. Susy was thirteen when she began her diary;
a gentle, thoughtful, romantic child. One afternoon she discovered a
wonderful tangle of vines and bushes between the study and the sunset--a
rare hiding-place. She ran breathlessly to her aunt:

“Can I have it? Can Clara and I have it all for our own?”

The petition was granted, of course, and the place was named Helen’s
Bower, for they were reading Thaddeus of Warsaw and the name appealed to
Susy’s poetic fancy. Then Mrs. Clemens conceived the idea of building a
house for the children just beyond the bower. It was a complete little
cottage when finished, with a porch and with furnishings contributed by
friends and members of the family. There was a stove--a tiny affair, but
practical--dishes, table, chairs, shelves, and a broom. The little house
was named Ellerslie, out of Grace Aguilar’s Days of Robert Bruce, and
became one of the children’s most beloved possessions. But alas for
Helen’s Bower! A workman was sent to clear away the debris after
the builders, and being a practical man, he cut away Helen’s
Bower--destroyed it utterly. Susy first discovered the vandalism, and
came rushing to the house in a torrent of sorrow. For her the joy of
life seemed ended, and it was long before she could be comforted. But
Ellerslie in time satisfied her hunger for retreat, became, in fact, the
nucleus around which the children’s summer happiness centered.

To their elders the farm remained always the quiet haven. Once to
Orion’s wife Clemens wrote:

    This is a superb Sunday....

    The city in the valley is purple with shade, as seen from up here at
    the study. The Cranes are reading and loafing in the canvas-
    curtained summer-house, fifty yards away, on a higher (the highest)
    point; the cats are loafing over at Ellerslie, which is the
    children’s estate and dwelling house in their own private grounds
    (by deed from Susie Crane), a hundred yards from the study, among
    the clover and young oaks and willows. Livy is down at the house,
    but I shall now go and bring her up to the Cranes to help us occupy
    the lounges and hammocks, whence a great panorama of distant hills
    and valley and city is seeable. The children have gone on a lark
    through the neighboring hills and woods, Susie and Clara horseback
    and Jean, driving a buggy, with the coachman for comrade and
    assistant at need. It is a perfect day indeed.

The ending of each year’s summer brought only regret. Clemens would
never take away all his things. He had an old superstition that to
leave some article insured return. Mrs. Clemens also left something--her
heart’s content. The children went around bidding various objects
good-by and kissed the gates of Ellerslie too.



CLVIII. MARK TWAIN AT FIFTY

Mark Twain’s fiftieth birthday was one of the pleasantly observed events
of that year. There was no special celebration, but friends sent kindly
messages, and The Critic, then conducted by Jeannette and Joseph Gilder,
made a feature of it. Miss Gilder wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes and
invited some verses, which with his never-failing kindliness he sent,
though in his accompanying note he said:

“I had twenty-three letters spread out on my table for answering, all
marked immediate, when your note came.”

Dr. Holmes’s stanzas are full of his gentle spirit:

              TO MARK TWAIN

              (On his fiftieth birthday)

              Ah, Clemens, when I saw thee last,
              We both of us were younger;
              How fondly mumbling o’er the past
              Is Memory’s toothless hunger!

              So fifty years have fled, they say,
              Since first you took to drinking;
              I mean in Nature’s milky way
              Of course no ill I’m thinking.

              But while on life’s uneven road
              Your track you’ve been pursuing,
              What fountains from your wit have flowed
              What drinks you have been brewing!

              I know whence all your magic came,
              Your secret I’ve discovered,
              The source that fed your inward flame,
              The dreams that round you hovered.

              Before you learned to bite or munch,
              Still kicking in your cradle,
              The Muses mixed a bowl of punch
              And Hebe seized the ladle.

              Dear babe, whose fiftieth year to-day
              Your ripe half-century rounded,
              Your books the precious draught betray
              The laughing Nine compounded.

              So mixed the sweet, the sharp, the strong,
              Each finds its faults amended,
              The virtues that to each belong
              In happiest union blended.

              And what the flavor can surpass
              Of sugar, spirit, lemons?
              So while one health fills every glass
              Mark Twain for Baby Clemens!

              OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

Frank R. Stockton, Charles Dudley Warner, and Joel Chandler Harris sent
pleasing letters. Warner said:

    You may think it an easy thing to be fifty years old, but you will
    find it’s not so easy to stay there, and your next fifty years will
    slip away much faster than those just accomplished.

Many wrote letters privately, of course, and Andrew Lang, like Holmes,
sent a poem that has a special charm.

                  FOR MARK TWAIN

              To brave Mark Twain, across the sea,
              The years have brought his jubilee.
              One hears it, half in pain,
              That fifty years have passed and gone
              Since danced the merry star that shone
              Above the babe Mark Twain.

              We turn his pages and we see
              The Mississippi flowing free;
              We turn again and grin
              O’er all Tom Sawyer did and planned
              With him of the ensanguined hand,
              With Huckleberry Finn!

              Spirit of Mirth, whose chime of bells
              Shakes on his cap, and sweetly swells
              Across the Atlantic main,
              Grant that Mark’s laughter never die,
              That men through many a century
              May chuckle o’er Mark Twain!

Assuredly Mark Twain was made happy by these attentions; to Dr. Holmes
he wrote:

DEAR DR. HOLMES,--I shall never be able to tell you the half of how
proud you have made me. If I could you would say you were nearly paid
for the trouble you took. And then the family: If I could convey the
electrical surprise and gratitude and exaltation of the wife and the
children last night, when they happened upon that Critic where I had,
with artful artlessness, spread it open and retired out of view to see
what would happen--well, it was great and fine and beautiful to see, and
made me feel as the victor feels when the shouting hosts march by:
and if you also could have seen it you would have said the account was
squared. For I have brought them up in your company, as in the company
of a warm and friendly and beneficent but far-distant sun; and so, for
you to do this thing was for the sun to send down out of the skies the
miracle of a special ray and transfigure me before their faces. I knew
what that poem would be to them; I knew it would raise me up to remote
and shining heights in their eyes, to very fellowship with the chambered
Nautilus itself, and that from that fellowship they could never more
dissociate me while they should live; and so I made sure to be by when
the surprise should come.

Charles Dudley Warner is charmed with the poem for its own felicitous
sake; and so indeed am I, but more because it has drawn the sting of my
fiftieth year; taken away the pain of it, the grief of it, the somehow
shame of it, and made me glad and proud it happened.

           With reverence and affection,
                  Sincerely yours,
                            S. L. CLEMENS.

So Samuel Clemens had reached the half-century mark; reached it in what
seemed the fullness of success from every viewpoint. If he was not yet
the foremost American man of letters, he was at least the most widely
known he sat upon the highest mountain-top. Furthermore, it seemed to
him that fortune was showering her gifts into his lap. His unfortunate
investments were now only as the necessary experiments that had led him
to larger successes. As a publisher, he was already the most conspicuous
in the world, and he contemplated still larger ventures: a type-setting
machine patent, in which he had invested, and now largely controlled, he
regarded as the chief invention of the age, absolutely certain to yield
incalculable wealth. His connection with the Grant family had associated
him with an enterprise looking to the building of a railway from
Constantinople to the Persian Gulf. Charles A. Dana, of the Sun, had put
him in the way of obtaining for publication the life of the Pope, Leo
XIII, officially authorized by the Pope himself, and this he regarded as
a certain fortune.

Now that the tide had turned he felt no hesitancy in reckoning a fortune
from almost any venture. The Grant book, even on the liberal terms
allowed to the author, would yield a net profit of one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars to its publishers. Huck Finn would yield fifty thousand
dollars more. The sales of his other books had considerably increased.
Certainly, at fifty, Mark Twain’s fortunes were at flood-tide; buoyant
and jubilant, he was floating on the topmost wave. If there were
undercurrents and undertow they were down somewhere out of sight. If
there were breakers ahead, they were too far distant to be heard. So
sure was he of the triumphant consummation of every venture that to a
friend at his home one night he said:

“I am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me
that whatever I touch turns to gold.”



CLIX. THE LIFE OF THE POPE

As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had temporarily put
aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now again literature
had dropped into the background, had become an avocation, while
financial interests prevailed. There were two chief ventures--the
business of Charles L. Webster & Co. and the promotion of the Paige
type-setting machine. They were closely identified in fortunes, so
closely that in time the very existence of each depended upon the
success of the other; yet they were quite distinct, and must be so
treated in this story.

The success of the Grant Life had given the Webster business an immense
prestige. It was no longer necessary to seek desirable features for
publication. They came uninvited. Other war generals preparing
their memoirs naturally hoped to appear with their great commander.
McClellan’s Own Story was arranged for without difficulty. A Genesis of
the Civil War, by Gen. Samuel Wylie Crawford, was offered and accepted.
General Sheridan’s Memoirs were in preparation, and negotiations with
Webster & Co. for their appearance were not delayed. Probably neither
Webster nor Clemens believed that the sale of any of these books would
approach those of the Grant Life, but they expected them to be large,
for the Grant book had stimulated the public taste for war literature,
and anything bearing the stamp of personal battle experience was
considered literary legal-tender.

Moreover, these features, and even the Grant book itself, seemed likely
to dwindle in importance by the side of The Life of Pope Leo XIII.,
who in his old and enfeebled age had consented to the preparation of
a memoir, to be published with his sanction and blessing.--[By Bernard
O’Reilly, D.D., LL.D. “Written with the Encouragement, Approbation, and
Blessings of His Holiness the Pope.”]--Clemens and Webster--every one,
in fact, who heard of the project--united in the belief that no book,
with the exception of the Holy Scripture itself or the Koran, would have
a wider acceptance than the biography of the Pope. It was agreed by
good judges--and they included Howells and Twichell and even the shrewd
general agents throughout the country--that every good Catholic would
regard such a book not only as desirable, but as absolutely necessary
to his salvation. Howells, recalling Clemens’s emotions of this time,
writes:

    He had no words in which to paint the magnificence of the project or
    to forecast its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded
    only by the number of Catholics in Christendom. It would be
    translated into every language which was anywhere written or
    printed; it would be circulated literally in every country of the
    globe.

The formal contract for this great undertaking was signed in Rome in
April, 1886, and Webster immediately prepared to go over to consult with
his Holiness in person as to certain details, also, no doubt, for the
newspaper advertising which must result from such an interview.

It was decided to carry a handsome present to the Pope in the form of a
specially made edition of the Grant Memoirs in a rich-casket, and it was
Clemens’s idea that the binding of the book should be solid gold--this
to be done by Tiffany at an estimated cost of about three thousand
dollars. In the end, however, the binding was not gold, but the
handsomest that could be designed of less precious and more appropriate
materials.

Webster sailed toward the end of June, and was warmly received and
highly honored in Rome. The great figures of the Grant success had
astonished Europe even more than America, where spectacular achievements
were more common. That any single publication should pay a profit to
author and publisher of six hundred thousand dollars was a thing
which belonged with the wonders of Aladdin’s garden. It was natural,
therefore, that Webster, who had rubbed the magic lamp with this result,
who was Mark Twain’s partner, and who had now traveled across the seas
to confer with the Pope himself, should be received with royal honors.
In letters written at the time, Webster relates how he found it
necessary to have an imposing carriage and a footman to maintain the
dignity of his mission, and how, after various impressive formalities,
he was granted a private audience, a very special honor indeed.
Webster’s letter gives us a picture of his Holiness which is worth
preserving.

    We--[Mrs. Webster, who, the reader will remember, was Annie Moffett,
    a daughter of Pamela Clemens, was included in the invitation to the
    Presence Chamber.]--found ourselves in a room perhaps twenty-five by
    thirty-five feet; the furniture was gilt, upholstered in light-red
    silk, and the side-walls were hung with the same material. Against
    the wall by which we entered and in the middle space was a large
    gilt throne chair, upholstered in red plush, and upon it sat a man
    bowed with age; his hair was silvery white and as pure as the driven
    snow. His head was partly covered with a white skullcap; he was
    dressed in a long white cassock which reached to his feet, which
    rested upon a red-plush cushion and were inclosed in red embroidered
    slippers with a design of a cross. A golden chain was about his
    neck and suspended by it in his lap was a gold cross set in precious
    stones. Upon a finger of his right hand was a gold ring with an
    emerald setting nearly an inch in diameter. His countenance was
    smiling, and beamed with benevolence. His face at once impressed us
    as that of a noble, pure man who could not do otherwise than good.

    This was the Pope of Rome, and as we advanced, making the three
    genuflexions prescribed by etiquette, he smiled benignly upon us.
    We advanced and, kneeling at his feet, kissed the seal upon his
    ring. He took us each by the hand repeatedly during the audience
    and made us perfectly at our ease.

They remained as much as half an hour in the Presence; and the Pope
conversed on a variety of subjects, including the business failure of
General Grant, his last hours, and the great success of his book. The
figures seemed to him hardly credible, and when Webster assured him
that already a guaranteed sale of one hundred thousand copies of his own
biography had been pledged by the agents he seemed even more astonished.
“We in Italy cannot comprehend such things,” he said. “I know you do
great work in America; I know you have done a great and noble work in
regard to General Grant’s book, but that my Life should have such a sale
seems impossible.”

He asked about their home, their children, and was in every way the
kindly, gentle-hearted man that his pictured face has shown him. Then he
gave them his final blessing and the audience closed.

    We each again kissed the seal on his ring. As Annie was about to
    kiss it he suddenly withdrew his hand and said, “And will you, a
    little Protestant, kiss the Pope’s ring?” As he said this, his face
    was all smiles, and mischief was clearly delineated upon it. He
    immediately put back his hand and she kissed the ring. We now
    withdrew, backing out and making three genuflexions as before. Just
    as we reached the door he called to Dr. O’Reilly, “Now don’t praise
    me too much; tell the truth, tell the truth.”



CLX. A GREAT PUBLISHER AT HOME

Men are likely to be spoiled by prosperity, to be made arrogant, even
harsh. Success made Samuel Clemens merely elate, more kindly, more
humanly generous. Every day almost he wrote to Webster, suggesting
some new book or venture, but always considerately, always deferring to
suggestions from other points of view. Once, when it seemed to him that
matters were not going as well as usual, a visit from Webster showed him
that it was because of his own continued absence from the business that
he did not understand. Whereupon he wrote:

    DEAR CHARLEY,--Good--it’s all good news. Everything is on the
    pleasantest possible basis now, and is going to stay so. I blame
    myself in not looking in on you oftener in the past--that would have
    prevented all trouble. I mean to stand to my duty better now.

At another time, realizing the press of responsibility, and that Webster
was not entirely well, he sent a warning from Mrs. Clemens against
overwork. He added:

    Your letter shows that you need such a warning. So I warn you
    myself to look after that. Overwork killed Mr. Langdon and it can
    kill you.

Clemens found his own cares greatly multiplied. His connection with the
firm was widely known, and many authors sent him their manuscripts or
wrote him personal letters concerning them. Furthermore, he was beset
by all the cranks and beggars in Christendom. His affairs became so
numerous at length that he employed a business agent, F. G. Whitmore, to
relieve him of a part of his burden. Whitmore lived close by, and was a
good billiard-player. Almost anything from the morning mail served as an
excuse to send for Whitmore.

Clemens was fond of affairs when they were going well; he liked the game
of business, especially when it was pretentious and showily prosperous.
It is probable that he was never more satisfied with his share of
fortune than just at this time. Certainly his home life was never
happier. Katie Leary, for thirty years in the family service, has set
down some impressions of that pleasant period.

    Mr. Clemens was a very affectionate father. He seldom left the
    house at night, but would read to the family, first to the children
    until bedtime, afterward to Mrs. Clemens. He usually read Browning
    to her. They were very fond of it. The children played charades a
    great deal, and he was wonderful at that game and always helped
    them. They were very fond of private theatricals. Every Saturday
    of their lives they had a temporary stage put up in the school-room
    and we all had to help. Gerhardt painted the scenery. They
    frequently played the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet” and
    several plays they wrote themselves. Now and then we had a big
    general performance of “The Prince and the Pauper.” That would be
    in the library and the dining-room with the folding-doors open. The
    place just held eighty-four chairs, and the stage was placed back
    against the conservatory. The children were crazy about acting and
    we all enjoyed it as much as they did, especially Mr. Clemens, who
    was the best actor of all. I had a part, too, and George. I have
    never known a happier household than theirs was during those years.

    Mr. Clemens spent most of his time up in the billiard-room, writing
    or playing billiards. One day when I went in, and he was shooting
    the balls around the tables, I noticed smoke coming up from the
    hearth. I called Patrick, and John O’Neill, the gardener, and we
    began taking up the hearth to see what was the matter. Mr. Clemens
    kept on playing billiards right along and paid no attention to what
    we were doing. Finally, when we got the hearth up, a lot of flame
    and smoke came out into the room. The house was on fire. Mr.
    Clemens noticed then what we were about, and went over to the corner
    where there were some bottle fire-extinguishers. He took one down
    and threw it into the flames. This put them out a good deal, and he
    took up his cue, went back to the table, and began to shoot the
    balls around again as if nothing had happened. Mrs. Clemens came in
    just then and said, “Why, the house is afire!”

    “Yes, I know it,” he said, but went on playing.

    We had a telephone and it didn’t work very well. It annoyed him a
    good deal and sometimes he’d say:

    “I’ll tear it out.”

    One day he tried to call up Mrs. Dr. Tafft. He could not hear
    plainly and thought he was talking to central. “Send down and take
    this d---thing out of here,” he said; “I’m tired of it.” He was
    mad, and using a good deal of bad language. All at once he heard
    Mrs. Dr. Tafft say, “Oh, Mr. Clemens, good morning.” He said, “Why,
    Mrs. Tafft, I have just come to the telephone. George, our butler,
    was here before me and I heard him swearing as I came up. I shall
    have to talk to him about it.”

    Mrs. Tafft often told it on him.--[ Mark Twain once wrote to the
    telephone management: “The time is coming very soon when the
    telephone will be a perfect instrument, when proximity will no
    longer be a hindrance to its performance, when, in fact, one will
    hear a man who is in the next block just as easily and comfortably
    as he would if that man were in San Francisco.”]
    Mrs. Clemens, before I went there, took care of his desk, but little
    by little I began to look after it when she was busy at other
    things. Finally I took care of it altogether, but he didn’t know it
    for a long time. One morning he caught me at it. “What are you
    doing here?” he asked.

    “Dusting, Mr. Clemens,” I said.

    “You have no business here,” he said, very mad.

    “I’ve been doing it for a year, Mr. Clemens,” I said. “Mrs. Clemens
    told me to do it.”

    After that, when he missed anything--and he missed things often--he
    would ring for me. “Katie,” he would say, “you have lost that
    manuscript.”

    “Oh, Mr. Clemens,”, I would say, “I am sure I didn’t touch it.”

    “Yes, you did touch it, Katie. You put it in the fire. It is
    gone.”

    He would scold then, and fume a great deal. Then he would go over
    and mark out with his toe on the carpet a line which I was never to
    cross. “Katie,” he would say, “you are never to go nearer to my
    desk than that line. That is the dead-line.” Often after he had
    scolded me in the morning he would come in in the evening where I
    was dressing Mrs. Clemens to go out and say, “Katie, I found that
    manuscript.” And I would say, “Mr. Clemens, I felt so bad this
    morning that I wanted to go away.”

    He had a pipe-cleaner which he kept on a high shelf. It was an
    awful old dirty one, and I didn’t know that he ever used it. I took
    it to the balcony which was built out into the woods and threw it
    away as far as I could throw it. Next day he asked, “Katie, did you
    see my pipe-cleaner? You did see it; I can tell by your looks.”

    I said, “Yes, Mr. Clemens, I threw it away.”

    “Well,” he said, “it was worth a thousand dollars,” and it seemed so
    to me, too, before he got done scolding about it.

It is hard not to dwell too long on the home life of this period. One
would like to make a long chapter out of those play-acting evenings
alone. They remained always fresh in Mark Twain’s memory. Once he wrote
of them:

    We dined as we could, probably with a neighbor, and by quarter to
    eight in the evening the hickory fire in the hall was pouring a
    sheet of flame up the chimney, the house was in a drench of gas-
    light from the ground floor up, the guests were arriving, and there
    was a babble of hearty greetings, with not a voice in it that was
    not old and familiar and affectionate; and when the curtain went up
    we looked out from the stage upon none but faces that were dear to
    us, none but faces that were lit up with welcome for us.



CLXI. HISTORY: MAINLY BY SUSY

Suzy, in her biography, which she continued through this period, writes:

    Mama and I have both been very much troubled of late because papa,
    since he had been publishing General Grant’s books, has seemed to
    forget his own books and works entirely; and the other evening, as
    papa and I were promonading up and down the library, he told me that
    he didn’t expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready
    to give up work altogether, die, or, do anything; he said that he
    had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book
    that he had been pertickularly anxious to write was one locked up in
    the safe downstairs, not yet published.

The book locked in the safe was Captain Stormfield, and the one he
expected to write was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. He
had already worked at it in a desultory way during the early months of
1886, and once wrote of it to Webster:

    I have begun a book whose scene is laid far back in the twilight of
    tradition; I have saturated myself with the atmosphere of the day
    and the subject and got myself into the swing of the work. If I peg
    away for some weeks without a break I am safe.

But he could not peg away. He had too many irons in the fire for that.
Matthew Arnold had criticized General Grant’s English, and Clemens
immediately put down other things to rush to his hero’s defense. He
pointed out that in Arnold’s criticism there were no less than “two
grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and
slovenly English,” and said:

    There is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and
    when we think of General Grant our pulses quicken and his grammar
    vanishes; we only remember that this is the simple soldier, who, all
    untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an
    art surpassing the art of the schools, and put into them a something
    which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall
    last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching
    hosts.--[Address to Army and Navy Club. For full text see
    Appendix]

Clemens worked at the Yankee now and then, and Howells, when some of
the chapters were read to him, gave it warm approval and urged its
continuance.

Howells was often in Hartford at this time. Webster & Co. were planning
to publish The Library of Humor, which Howells and “Charley” Clark had
edited several years before, and occasional conferences were desirable.
Howells tells us that, after he and Clark had been at great trouble to
get the matter logically and chronologically arranged, Clemens pulled it
all to pieces and threw it together helter-skelter, declaring that there
ought to be no sequence in a book of that sort, any more than in the
average reader’s mind; and Howells admits that this was probably
the truer method in a book made for the diversion rather than the
instruction of the reader.

One of the literary diversions of this time was a commentary on
a delicious little book by Caroline B. Le Row--English as She Is
Taught--being a compilation of genuine answers given to examination
questions by pupils in our public schools. Mark Twain was amused by such
definitions as: “Aborigines, system of mountains”; “Alias--a good man
in the Bible”; “Ammonia--the food of the gods,” and so on down the
alphabet.

Susy, in her biography, mentions that her father at this is time read
to them a little article which he had just written, entitled “Luck,” and
that they thought it very good. It was a story which Twichell had heard
and told to Clemens, who set it down about as it came to him. It was
supposed to be true, yet Clemens seemed to think it too improbable for
literature and laid it away for a number of years. We shall hear of it
again by and by.

From Susy’s memoranda we gather that humanity at this time was to be
healed of all evils and sorrows through “mind cure.”

    Papa has been very much interested of late in the “mind-cure”
     theory. And, in fact, so have we all. A young lady in town has
    worked wonders by using the “mind cure” upon people; she is
    constantly busy now curing peoples’ diseases in this way--and curing
    her own, even, which to me seems the most remarkable of all.

    A little while past papa was delighted with the knowledge of what he
    thought the best way of curing a cold, which was by starving it.
    This starving did work beautifully, and freed him from a great many
    severe colds. Now he says it wasn’t the starving that helped his
    colds, but the trust in the starving, the “mind cure” connected with
    the starving.

    I shouldn’t wonder if we finally became firm believers in “mind
    cure.” The next time papa has a cold I haven’t a doubt he will send
    for Miss Holden, the young lady who is doctoring in the “mind-cure”
     theory, to cure him of it.

Again, a month later, she writes:

    April 19, 1886. Yes, the “mind cure” does seem to be working
    wonderfully. Papa, who has been using glasses now for more than a
    year, has laid them off entirely. And my near-sightedness is really
    getting better. It seems marvelous. When Jean has stomack-ache
    Clara and I have tried to divert her by telling her to lie on her
    side and try “mind cure.” The novelty of it has made her willing to
    try it, and then Clara and I would exclaim about how wonderful it
    was she was getting better. And she would think it realy was
    finally, and stop crying, to our delight.

    The other day mama went into the library and found her lying on the
    sofa with her back toward the door. She said, “Why, Jean, what’s
    the matter? Don’t you feel well?” Jean said that she had a little
    stomack-ache, and so thought she would lie down. Mama said, “Why
    don’t you try ‘mind cure’?” “I am,” Jean answered.

Howells and Twichell were invited to try the “mind cure,” as were all
other friends who happened along. To the end of his days Clemens would
always have some panacea to offer to allay human distress. It was a good
trait, when all is said, for it had its root in his humanity. The “mind
cure” did not provide all the substance of things hoped for, though he
always allowed for it a wide efficacy. Once, in later years, commenting
on Susy’s record, he said:

    The mind cannot heal broken bones, and doubtless there are many
    other physical ills which it cannot heal, but it can greatly help to
    modify the severities of all of them without exception, and there
    are mental and nervous ailments which it can wholly heal without the
    help of physician or surgeon.

Susy records another burning interest of this time:

    Clara sprained her ankle a little while ago by running into a tree
    when coasting, and while she was unable to walk with it she played
    solotaire with cards a great deal. While Clara was sick and papa
    saw her play solotaire so much he got very much interested in the
    game, and finally began to play it himself a little; then Jean took
    it up, and at last mama even played it occasionally; Jean’s and
    papa’s love for it rapidly increased, and now Jean brings the cards
    every night to the table and papa and mama help her play, and before
    dinner is at an end papa has gotten a separate pack of cards and is
    playing alone, with great interest. Mama and Clara next are made
    subject to the contagious solotaire, and there are four
    solotarireans at the table, while you hear nothing but “Fill up the
    place,” etc. It is dreadful!

But a little further along Susy presents her chief subject more
seriously. He is not altogether absorbed with “mind cure” and solitaire,
or even with making humorous tales.

    Papa has done a great deal in his life I think that is good and very
    remarkable, but I think if he had had the advantages with which he
    could have developed the gifts which he has made no use of in
    writing his books, or in any other way, for peoples’ pleasure and
    benefit outside of his own family and intimate friends, he could
    have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even. He is
    known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that
    is earnest than that is humorous. He has a keen sense of the
    ludicrous, notices funny stories and incidents, knows how to tell
    them, to improve upon them, and does not forget them.

And again:

    When we are all alone at home nine times out of ten he talks about
    some very earnest subject (with an occasional joke thrown in), and
    he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than upon the
    other kind.

    He is as much of a philosopher as anything, I think. I think he
    could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied
    while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter
    what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in
    the gifts which have made him famous.

It was with the keen eyes and just mind of childhood that Susy
estimated, and there is little to add to her valuation.

Susy’s biography came to an end that summer after starting to record a
visit which they all made to Keokuk to see Grandma Clemens. They went
by way of the Lakes and down the Mississippi from St. Paul. A pleasant
incident happened that first evening on the river. Soon after
nightfall they entered a shoal crossing. Clemens, standing alone on the
hurricane-deck, heard the big bell forward boom out the call for
leads. Then came the leadsman’s long-drawn chant, once so familiar, the
monotonous repeating in river parlance of the depths of water. Presently
the lead had found that depth of water signified by his nom de plume and
the call of “Mark Twain, Mark Twain” floated up to him like a summons
from the past. All at once a little figure came running down the deck,
and Clara confronted him, reprovingly:

“Papa,” she said, “I have hunted all over the boat for you. Don’t you
know they are calling for you?”

They remained in Keokuk a week, and Susy starts to tell something of
their visit there. She begins:

“We have arrived in Keokuk after a very pleasant----”

The sentence remains unfinished. We cannot know what was the
interruption or what new interest kept her from her task. We can
only regret that the loving little hand did not continue its pleasant
history. Years later, when Susy had passed from among the things we
know, her father, commenting, said:

    When I look at the arrested sentence that ends the little book it
    seems as if the hand that traced it cannot be far--it is gone for a
    moment only, and will come again and finish it. But that is a
    dream; a creature of the heart, not of the mind--a feeling, a
    longing, not a mental product; the same that lured Aaron Burr, old,
    gray, forlorn, forsaken, to the pier day after day, week after week,
    there to stand in the gloom and the chill of the dawn, gazing
    seaward through veiling mists and sleet and snow for the ship which
    he knew was gone down, the ship that bore all his treasure--his
    daughter.



VOLUME II, Part 2: 1886-1900



CLXII. BROWNING, MEREDITH, AND MEISTERSCHAFT

The Browning readings must have begun about this time. Just what
kindled Mark Twain’s interest in the poetry of Robert Browning is not
remembered, but very likely his earlier associations with the poet had
something to do with it. Whatever the beginning, we find him, during
the winter of 1886 and 1887, studiously, even violently, interested in
Browning’s verses, entertaining a sort of club or class who gathered
to hear his rich, sympathetic, and luminous reading of the
Payleyings--“With Bernard de Mandeville,” “Daniel Bartoli,” or
“Christopher Smart.” Members of the Saturday Morning Club were among his
listeners and others-friends of the family. They were rather remarkable
gatherings, and no one of that group but always vividly remembered the
marvelously clear insight which Mark Twain’s vocal personality gave to
those somewhat obscure measures. They did not all of them realize that
before reading a poem he studied it line by line, even word by word;
dug out its last syllable of meaning, so far as lay within human
possibility, and indicated with pencil every shade of emphasis which
would help to reveal the poet’s purpose. No student of Browning ever
more devoutly persisted in trying to compass a master’s intent--in such
poems as “Sordello,” for instance--than Mark Twain. Just what permanent
benefit he received from this particular passion it is difficult to
know. Once, at a class-meeting, after finishing “Easter Day,” he made a
remark which the class requested him to “write down.” It is recorded on
the fly-leaf of Dramatis Personae as follows:

    One’s glimpses & confusions, as one reads Browning, remind me of
    looking through a telescope (the small sort which you must move with
    your hand, not clock-work). You toil across dark spaces which are
    (to your lens) empty; but every now & then a splendor of stars &
    suns bursts upon you and fills the whole field with flame. Feb.
    23, 1887.

In another note he speaks of the “vague dim flash of splendid
hamming-birds through a fog.” Whatever mental treasures he may or may
not have laid up from Browning there was assuredly a deep gratification
in the discovery of those splendors of “stars and suns” and the flashing
“humming-birds,” as there must also have been in pointing out those
wonders to the little circle of devout listeners. It all seemed so worth
while.

It was at a time when George Meredith was a reigning literary favorite.
There was a Meredith cult as distinct as that of Browning. Possibly it
exists to-day, but, if so, it is less militant. Mrs. Clemens and her
associates were caught in the Meredith movement and read Diana of the
Crossways and the Egoist with reverential appreciation.

The Meredith epidemic did not touch Mark Twain. He read but few novels
at most, and, skilful as was the artistry of the English favorite, he
found his characters artificialities--ingeniously contrived puppets
rather than human beings, and, on the whole, overrated by their creator.
Diana of the Crossways was read aloud, and, listening now and then, he
was likely to say:

“It doesn’t seem to me that Diana lives up to her reputation. The author
keeps telling us how smart she is, how brilliant, but I never seem to
hear her say anything smart or brilliant. Read me some of Diana’s smart
utterances.”

He was relentless enough in his criticism of a literature he did not
care for, and he never learned to care for Meredith.

He read his favorite books over and over with an ever-changing point of
view. He re-read Carlyle’s French Revolution during the summer at the
farm, and to Howells he wrote:

    How stunning are the changes which age makes in man while he sleeps!
    When I finished Carlyle’s French Revolution in 1871 I was a
    Girondin; every time I have read it since I have read it
    differently--being influenced & changed, little by little, by life &
    environment (& Taine & St. Simon); & now I lay the book down once
    more, & recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale,
    characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Carlyle teaches no such
    gospel, so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences.

    People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it
    did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they
    can lie so. It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say
    that of Dickens’s or Scott’s books. Nothing remains the same. When
    a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood it has always
    shrunk; there is no instance of such house being as big as the
    picture in memory & imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its
    correct dimensions; the house hasn’t altered; this is the first time
    it has been in focus.

    Well, that’s loss. To have house & Bible shrink so, under the
    disillusioning corrected angle, is loss--for a moment. But there
    are compensations. You tilt the tube skyward & bring planets &
    comets & corona flames a hundred & fifty thousand miles high into
    the field. Which I see you have done, & found Tolstoi. I haven’t
    got him in focus yet, but I’ve got Browning.

In time the Browning passion would wane and pass, and the club was
succeeded by, or perhaps it blended with, a German class which met at
regular intervals at the Clemens home to study “der, die, and das” and
the “gehabt habens” out of Meisterschaft and such other text-books as
Professor Schleutter could provide. They had monthly conversation days,
when they discussed in German all sorts of things, real and imaginary.
Once Dr. Root, a prominent member, and Clemens had a long wrangle over
painting a house, in which they impersonated two German neighbors.

Clemens finally wrote for the class a three-act play “Meisterschaft”--a
literary achievement for which he was especially qualified, with its
picturesque mixture of German and English and its unfailing humor. It
seems unlike anything ever attempted before or since. No one but Mark
Twain could have written it. It was given twice by the class with
enormous success, and in modified form it was published in the Century
Magazine (January, 1888). It is included to-day in his “Complete Works,”
 but one must have a fair knowledge of German to capture the full delight
of it.--[On the original manuscript Mark Twain wrote: “There is some
tolerably rancid German here and there in this piece. It is attributable
to the proof-reader.” Perhaps the proof-reader resented this and cut it
out, for it does not appear as published.]

Mark Twain probably exaggerated his sentiments a good deal when in the
Carlyle letter he claimed to be the most rabid of Sansculottes. It is
unlikely that he was ever very bare-kneed and crimson in his anarchy. He
believed always that cruelty should be swiftly punished, whether in king
or commoner, and that tyrants should be destroyed. He was for the people
as against kings, and for the union of labor as opposed to the union of
capital, though he wrote of such matters judicially--not radically. The
Knights of Labor organization, then very powerful, seemed to Clemens
the salvation of oppressed humanity. He wrote a vehement and convincing
paper on the subject, which he sent to Howells, to whom it appealed very
strongly, for Howells was socialistic, in a sense, and Clemens made his
appeal in the best and largest sense, dramatizing his conception in
a picture that was to include, in one grand league, labor of whatever
form, and, in the end, all mankind in a final millennium. Howells
wrote that he had read the essay “with thrills amounting to yells of
satisfaction,” and declared it to be the best thing yet said on the
subject. The essay closed:

    He [the unionized workman] is here and he will remain. He is the
    greatest birth of the greatest age the nations of the world have
    known. You cannot sneer at him--that time has gone by. He has
    before him the most righteous work that was ever given into the hand
    of man to do; and he will do it. Yes, he is here; and the question
    is not--as it has been heretofore during a thousand ages--What shall
    we do with him? For the first time in history we are relieved of
    the necessity of managing his affairs for him. He is not a broken
    dam this time--he is the Flood!

It must have been about this time that Clemens developed an intense,
even if a less permanent, interest in another matter which was to
benefit the species. He was one day walking up Fifth Avenue when he
noticed the sign,

                  PROFESSOR LOISETTE
                   SCHOOL OF MEMORY
           The Instantaneous Art of Never Forgetting

Clemens went inside. When he came out he had all of Professor Loisette’s
literature on “predicating correlation,” and for the next several days
was steeping himself in an infusion of meaningless words and figures
and sentences and forms, which he must learn backward and forward and
diagonally, so that he could repeat them awake and asleep in order to
predicate his correlation to a point where remembering the ordinary
facts of life, such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers, would be
a mere diversion.

It was another case of learning the multitudinous details of the
Mississippi River in order to do the apparently simple thing of steering
a boat from New Orleans to St. Louis, and it is fair to say that, for
the time he gave it, he achieved a like success. He was so enthusiastic
over this new remedy for human distress that within a very brief time he
was sending out a printed letter recommending Loisette to the public at
large. Here is an extract:

   ... I had no SYSTEM--and some sort of rational order of
    procedure is, of course, necessary to success in any study. Well,
    Loisette furnished me a system. I cannot undertake to say it is the
    best, or the worst, because I don’t know what the other systems are.
    Loisette, among other cruelties, requires you to memorize a great
    long string of words that, haven’t any apparent connection or
    meaning--there are perhaps 500 of these words, arranged in maniacal
    lines of 6 to 8 or 9 words in each line--71 lines in all. Of course
    your first impulse is to resign, but at the end of three or four
    hours you find to your surprise that you’ve GOT them and can deliver
    them backward or forward without mistake or hesitation. Now, don’t
    you see what a world of confidence that must necessarily breed?
    --confidence in a memory which before you wouldn’t even venture to
    trust with the Latin motto of the U. S. lest it mislay it and the
    country suffer.

    Loisette doesn’t make memories, he furnishes confidence in memories
    that already exist. Isn’t that valuable? Indeed it is to me.
    Whenever hereafter I shall choose to pack away a thing properly in
    that refrigerator I sha’n’t be bothered with the aforetime doubts; I
    shall know I’m going to find it sound and sweet when I go for it
    again.

Loisette naturally made the most of this advertising and flooded the
public with Mark Twain testimonials. But presently Clemens decided that
after all the system was not sufficiently simple to benefit the race at
large. He recalled his printed letters and prevailed upon Loisette to
suppress his circulars. Later he decided that the whole system was a
humbug.



CLXIII. LETTER TO THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND

It was one day in 1887 that Clemens received evidence that his
reputation as a successful author and publisher--a man of wealth and
revenues--had penetrated even the dimness of the British Tax Offices. A
formidable envelope came, inclosing a letter from his London publishers
and a very large printed document all about the income tax which the
Queen’s officers had levied upon his English royalties as the result of
a report that he had taken Buckenham Hall, Norwich, for a year, and was
to become an English resident. The matter amused and interested him. To
Chatto & Windus he wrote:

    I will explain that all that about Buckenham Hall was an English
    newspaper’s mistake. I was not in England, and if I had been I
    wouldn’t have been at Buckenham Hall anyway, but Buckingham Palace,
    or I would have endeavored to have found out the reason why...

    But we won’t resist. We’ll pay as if I were really a resident. The
    country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me.

Reflecting on the matter, Clemens decided to make literature of it.
He conceived the notion of writing an open letter to the Queen in the
character of a rambling, garrulous, but well-disposed countryman whose
idea was that her Majesty conducted all the business of the empire
herself. He began:

                     HARTFORD, November 6, 2887.

    MADAM, You will remember that last May Mr. Edward Bright, the clerk
    of the Inland Revenue Office, wrote me about a tax which he said was
    due from me to the Government on books of mine published in London
    --that is to say, an income tax on the royalties. I do not know Mr.
    Bright, and it is embarrassing to me to correspond with strangers,
    for I was raised in the country and have always lived there, the
    early part in Marion County, Missouri, before the war, and this part
    in Hartford County, Connecticut, near Bloomfield and about 8 miles
    this side of Farmington, though some call it 9, which it is
    impossible to be, for I have walked it many and many a time in
    considerably under three hours, and General Hawley says he has done
    it in two and a quarter, which is not likely; so it has seemed best
    that I write your Majesty.

The letter proceeded to explain that he had never met her Majesty
personally, but that he once met her son, the Prince of Wales, in Oxford
Street, at the head of a procession, while he himself was on the top of
an omnibus. He thought the Prince would probably remember him on account
of a gray coat with flap pockets which he wore, he being the only person
on the omnibus who had on that kind of a coat.

“I remember him,” he said, “as easily as I would a comet.”

He explained the difficulty he had in understanding under what heading
he was taxed. There was a foot-note on the list which stated that he was
taxed under “Schedule D, section 14.” He had turned to that place and
found these three things: “Trades, Offices, Gas Works.” He did not
regard authorship as a trade, and he had no office, so he did not
consider that he was taxable under “Schedule D, section 14.” The letter
concludes:

    Having thus shown your Majesty that I am not taxable, but am the
    victim of the error of a clerk who mistakes the nature of my
    commerce, it only remains for me to beg that you will, of your
    justice, annul my letter that I spoke of, so that my publisher can
    keep back that tax money which, in the confusion and aberration
    caused by the Document, I ordered him to pay. You will not miss the
    sum, but this is a hard year for authors, and as for lectures I do
    not suppose your Majesty ever saw such a dull season.

    With always great and ever-increasing respect, I beg to sign myself
    your Majesty’s servant to command,
                                MARK TWAIN.
    Her Majesty the Queen, London.

The letter, or “petition,” as it was called, was published in the
Harper’s Magazine “Drawer” (December, 1889), and is now included in the
“Complete Works.” Taken as a whole it is one of the most exquisite of
Mark Twain’s minor humors. What other humorist could have refrained from
hinting, at least, the inference suggested by the obvious “Gas Works”?
Yet it was a subtler art to let his old, simple-minded countryman ignore
that detail. The little skit was widely copied and reached the Queen
herself in due time, and her son, Prince Edward, who never forgot its
humor.

Clemens read a notable paper that year before the Monday Evening Club.
Its subject was “Consistency”--political consistency--and in it he took
occasion to express himself pretty vigorously regarding the virtue
of loyalty to party before principle, as exemplified in the
Blaine-Cleveland campaign. It was in effect a scathing reply to those
who, three years, before, had denounced Twichell and himself for
standing by their convictions.--[ Characteristic paragraphs from this
paper will be found under Appendix R, at the end of last volume.]



CLXIV. SOME FURTHER ACCOUNT OF CHARLES L. WEBSTER & CO.

Flood-tide is a temporary condition, and the ebb in the business of
Charles L. Webster & Co., though very deliberate, was not delayed in
its beginning. Most of the books published--the early ones at least-were
profitable. McClellan’s memoirs paid, as did others of the war series.

Even The Life of Pope Leo XIII. paid. What a statement to make,
after all their magnificent dreams and preparations! It was published
simultaneously in six languages. It was exploited in every conceivable
fashion, and its aggregate sales fell far short of the number which the
general agents had promised for their first orders. It was amazing,
it was incredible, but, alas! it was true. The prospective Catholic
purchaser had decided that the Pope’s Life was not necessary to his
salvation or even to his entertainment. Howells explains it, to his own
satisfaction at least, when he says:

    We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often,
    when they could, they might not wish to read. The event proved
    that, whether they could read or not, the immeasurable majority did
    not wish to read The Life of the Pope, though it was written by a
    dignitary of the Church and issued to the world with sanction from
    the Vatican.

Howells, of course, is referring to the laboring Catholic of that day.
There are no Catholics of this day--no American Catholics, at least--who
do not read, and money among them has become plentiful. Perhaps had the
Pope’s Life been issued in this new hour of enlightenment the tale of
its success might have been less sadly told.

A variety of books followed. Henry Ward Beecher agreed to write an
autobiography, but he died just when he was beginning the work, and
the biography, which his family put together, brought only a moderate
return. A book of Sandwich Islands tales and legends, by his Hawaiian
Majesty King Kalakaua, edited by Clemens’s old friend, Rollin M.
Daggett, who had become United States minister to the islands, barely
paid for the cost of manufacture, while a volume of reminiscences by
General Hancock was still less fortunate. The running expenses of the
business were heavy. On the strength of the Grant success Webster had
moved into still larger quarters at No. 3 East Fifteenth Street, and
had a ground floor for a salesroom. The force had become numerous and
costly. It was necessary that a book should pay largely to maintain this
pretentious establishment. A number of books were published at a heavy
loss. Never mind their titles; we may forget them, with the name of the
bookkeeper who presently embezzled thirty thousand dollars of the firm’s
money and returned but a trifling sum.

By the end of 1887 there were three works in prospect on which great
hopes were founded--‘The Library of Humor’, which Howells and Clark
had edited; a personal memoir of General Sheridan’s, and a Library of
American Literature in ten volumes, compiled by Edmund Clarence Stedman
and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson. It was believed these would restore
the fortunes and the prestige of the firm. They were all excellent,
attractive features. The Library of Humor was ably selected and
contained two hundred choice drawings by Kemble. The Sheridan Memoir was
finely written, and the public interest in it was bound to be general.
The Library of American Literature was a collection of the best American
writing, and seemed bound to appeal to every American reading-home. It
was necessary to borrow most of the money required to build these books,
for the profit made from the Grant Life and less fortunate ventures was
pretty well exhausted. Clemens presently found a little drift of his
notes accumulating at this bank and that--a disturbing condition, when
he remembered it, for he was financing the typesetting machine by this
time, and it was costing a pretty sum.

Meantime, Webster was no longer active in the management. In two years
he had broken down from overwork, and was now desperately ill with an
acute neuralgia that kept him away from the business most of the time.
Its burdens had fallen upon his assistant, Fred J. Hall, a willing,
capable young man, persevering and hopeful, lacking only years and
experience. Hall worked like a beaver, and continually looked forward to
success. He explained, with each month’s report of affairs, just why the
business had not prospered more during that particular month, and
just why its profits would be greater during the next. Webster finally
retired from the business altogether, and Hall was given a small
partnership in the firm. He reduced expenses, worked desperately,
pumping out the debts, and managed to keep the craft afloat.

The Library of Humor, the Life of Sheridan, and The Library of American
Literature all sold very well; not so well as had been hoped, but the
sales yielded a fair profit. It was thought that if Clemens himself
would furnish a new book now and then the business might regain
something of its original standing.

We may believe that Clemens had not been always patient, not always
gentle, during this process of decline. He had differed with Webster,
and occasionally had gone down and reconstructed things after his own
notions. Once he wrote to Orion that he had suddenly awakened to find
that there was no more system in the office than in a nursery without a
nurse.

“But,” he added, “I have spent a good deal of time there since, and
reduced everything to exact order and system.”

Just what were the new features of order instituted it would be
interesting to know. That the financial pressure was beginning to be
felt even in the Clemens home is shown by a Christmas letter to Mrs.
Moffett.

                     HARTFORD, December 18, 1887.

DEAR PAMELA,--Will you take this $15 & buy some candy or other trifle
for yourself & Sam & his wife to remind you that we remember you?

If we weren’t a little crowded this year by the type-setter I’d send a
check large enough to buy a family Bible or some other useful thing like
that. However, we go on & on, but the type-setter goes on forever--at
$3,000 a month; which is much more satisfactory than was the case the
first 17 months, when the bill only averaged $2,000, & promised to take
a thousand years. We’ll be through now in 3 or 4 months, I reckon, &
then the strain will let up and we can breathe freely once more, whether
success ensues or failure.

Even with a type-setter on hand we ought not to be in the least
scrimped-but it would take a long letter to explain why & who is to
blame.

All the family send love to all of you, & best Christmas wishes for your
prosperity.

Affectionately, SAM.



CLXV. LETTERS, VISITS, AND VISITORS

There were many pleasanter things, to be sure. The farm life never
failed with each returning summer; the winters brought gay company and
fair occasions. Sir Henry and Lady Stanley, visiting. America, were
entertained in the Clemens home, and Clemens went on to Boston to
introduce Stanley to his lecture audience. Charles Dickens’s son, with
his wife and daughter, followed a little later. An incident of their
visit seems rather amusing now. There is a custom in England which
requires the host to give the guest notice of bedtime by handing him a
lighted candle. Mrs. Clemens knew of this custom, but did not have the
courage to follow it in her own home, and the guests knew of no other
way to relieve the situation; as a result, all sat up much later than
usual. Eventually Clemens himself suggested that possibly the guests
would like to retire.

Robert Louis Stevenson came down from Saranac, and Clemens went in
to visit him at his New York hotel, the St. Stevens, on East Eleventh
Street. Stevenson had orders to sit in the sunshine as much as possible,
and during the few days of their association he and Clemens would walk
down to Washington Square and sit on one of the benches and talk. They
discussed many things--philosophies, people, books; it seems a pity
their talk could not have been preserved.

Stevenson was a great admirer of Mark Twain’s work. He said that during
a recent painting of his portrait he had insisted on reading Huck
Finn aloud to the artist, a Frenchman, who had at first protested,
and finally had fallen a complete victim to Huck’s yarn. In one of
Stevenson’s letters to Clemens he wrote:

    My father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read Roughing It
    (his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening
    spent with the book he declared: “I am frightened. It cannot be
    safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much.”

What heaps of letters, by the way, remain from this time, and how
curious some of them are! Many of them are requests of one sort or
another, chiefly for money--one woman asking for a single day’s income,
conservatively estimated at five thousand dollars. Clemens seldom
answered an unwarranted letter; but at one time he began a series of
unmailed answers--that is to say, answers in which he had let himself go
merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual balance. He
prepared an introduction for this series. In it he said:

   ... You receive a letter. You read it. It will be tolerably
    sure to produce one of three results: 1, pleasure; 2, displeasure;
    3, indifference. I do not need to say anything about Nos. 1 & 3;
    everybody knows what to do with those breeds of letters; it is breed
    No. 2 that I am after. It is the one that is loaded up with
    trouble.

    When you get an exasperating letter what happens? If you are young
    you answer it promptly, instantly--and mail the thing you have
    written. At forty what do you do? By that time you have found out
    that a letter written in a passion is a mistake in ninety-nine cases
    out of a hundred; that it usually wrongs two persons, and always
    wrongs one--yourself. You have grown weary of wronging yourself and
    repenting; so you manacle, you fetter, you log-chain the frantic
    impulse to write a pulverizing answer. You will wait a day or die.
    But in the mean time what do you do? Why, if it is about dinner-
    time, you sit at table in a deep abstraction all through the meal;
    you try to throw it off and help do the talking; you get a start
    three or four times, but conversation dies on your lips every time
    --your mind isn’t on it; your heart isn’t in it. You give up, and
    subside into a bottomless deep of silence, permanently; people must
    speak to you two or three times to get your attention, and then say
    it over again to make you understand. This kind of thing goes on
    all the rest of the evening; nobody can interest you in anything;
    you are useless, a depressing influence, a burden. You go to bed at
    last; but at three in the morning you are as wide awake as you were
    in the beginning. Thus we see what you have been doing for nine
    hours--on the outside. But what were you doing on the inside? You
    were writing letters--in your mind. And enjoying it, that is quite
    true; that is not to be denied. You have been flaying your
    correspondent alive with your incorporeal pen; you have been
    braining him, disemboweling him, carving him into little bits, and
    then--doing it all over again. For nine hours.

    It was wasted time, for you had no intention of putting any of this
    insanity on paper and mailing it. Yes, you know that, and confess
    it--but what were you to do? Where was your remedy? Will anybody
    contend that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, Go, and
    be obeyed?

    No, he cannot; that is certainly true. Well, then, what is he to
    do? I will explain by the suggestion contained in my opening
    paragraph. During the nine hours he has written as many as forty-
    seven furious letters--in his mind. If he had put just one of them
    on paper it would have brought him relief, saved him eight hours of
    trouble, and given him an hour’s red-hot pleasure besides.

    He is not to mail this letter; he understands that, and so he can
    turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm. He is only
    writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a volcano:
    imaging himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater
    and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he would
    get relief.

    Before he has filled his first sheet sometimes the relief is there.
    He degenerates into good-nature from that point.

    Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as
    three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry
    one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in
    it here and there. He pigeonholes these and then does one of two
    things--dismisses the whole matter from his mind or writes the
    proper sort of letter and mails it.

    To this day I lose my balance and send an overwarm letter--or more
    frequently telegram--two or three times a year. But that is better
    than doing it a hundred times a year, as I used to do years ago.
    Perhaps I write about as many as ever, but I pigeonhole them. They
    ought not to be thrown away. Such a letter a year or so old is as
    good as a sermon to the maw who wrote it. It makes him feel small
    and shabby, but--well, that wears off. Any sermon does; but the
    sermon does some little good, anyway. An old cold letter like that
    makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about
    nothing.

The unmailed answers that were to accompany this introduction were
plentiful enough and generally of a fervent sort. One specimen will
suffice. It was written to the chairman of a hospital committee.

    DEAR SIR,--If I were Smithfield I would certainly go out and get
    behind something and blush. According to your report, “the
    politicians are afraid to tax the people for the support” of so
    humane and necessary a thing as a hospital. And do your “people”
     propose to stand that?--at the hands of vermin officials whom the
    breath of their votes could blow out of official existence in a
    moment if they had the pluck to band themselves together and blow.
    Oh, come, these are not “people”--they are cowed school-boys with
    backbones made of boiled macaroni. If you are not misreporting
    those “people” you are just in the right business passing the
    mendicant hat for them. Dear sir, communities where anything like
    citizenship exists are accustomed to hide their shames, but here we
    have one proposing to get up a great “exposition” of its dishonor
    and advertise it all it can.

    It has been eleven years since I wrote anything for one of those
    graveyards called a “Fair paper,” and so I have doubtless lost the
    knack of it somewhat; still I have done the best I could for you.

    This was from a burning heart and well deserved. One may almost
    regret that he did not send it.

Once he received a letter intended for one Samuel Clements, of Elma, New
York, announcing that the said Clements’s pension had been allowed. But
this was amusing. When Clemens had forwarded the notice to its proper
destination he could not resist sending this comment to the commissioner
at Washington:

    DEAR SIR,--I have not applied for a pension. I have often wanted a
    pension--often--ever so often--I may say, but in as much as the only
    military service I performed during the war was in the Confederate
    army, I have always felt a delicacy about asking you for it.
    However, since you have suggested the thing yourself, I feel
    strengthened. I haven’t any very pensionable diseases myself, but I
    can furnish a substitute--a man who is just simply a chaos, a museum
    of all the different kinds of aches and pains, fractures,
    dislocations and malformations there are; a man who would regard
    “rheumatism and sore eyes” as mere recreation and refreshment after
    the serious occupations of his day. If you grant me the pension,
    dear sir, please hand it to General Jos. Hawley, United States
    Senator--I mean hand him the certificate, not the money, and he will
    forward it to me. You will observe by this postal-card which I
    inclose that he takes a friendly interest in the matter. He thinks
    I’ve already got the pension, whereas I’ve only got the rheumatism;
    but didn’t want that--I had that before. I wish it were catching. I
    know a man that I would load up with it pretty early. Lord, but we
    all feel that way sometimes. I’ve seen the day when but never mind
    that; you may be busy; just hand it to Hawley--the certificate, you
    understand, is not transferable.

Clemens was in good standing at Washington during the Cleveland
administration, and many letters came, asking him to use his influence
with the President to obtain this or that favor. He always declined,
though once--a few years later, in Europe--when he learned that Frank
Mason, consul-general at Frankfort, was about to be displaced, Clemens,
of his own accord, wrote to Baby Ruth Cleveland about it.

    MY DEAR RUTH, I belong to the Mugwumps, and one of the most sacred
    rules of our order prevents us from asking favors of officials or
    recommending men to office, but there is no harm in writing a
    friendly letter to you and telling you that an infernal outrage is
    about to be committed by your father in turning out of office the
    best Consul I know (and I know a great many) just because he is a
    Republican and a Democrat wants his place.

    He went on to recall Mason’s high and honorable record, suggesting
    that Miss Ruth take the matter into her own hands. Then he said:

    I can’t send any message to the President, but the next time you
    have a talk with him concerning such matters I wish you would tell
    him about Captain Mason and what I think of a Government that so
    treats its efficient officials.

Just what form of appeal the small agent made is not recorded, but
by and by Mark Twain received a tiny envelope, postmarked Washington,
inclosing this note in President Cleveland’s handwriting:

    Miss Ruth Cleveland begs to acknowledge the receipt of Mr. Twain’s
    letter and say that she took the liberty of reading it to the
    President, who desires her to thank Mr. Twain for her information,
    and to say to him that Captain Mason will not be disturbed in the
    Frankfort Consulate. The President also desires Miss Cleveland to
    say that if Mr. Twain knows of any other cases of this kind he will
    be greatly obliged if he will write him concerning them at his
    earliest convenience.

Clemens immensely admired Grover Cleveland, also his young wife, and his
visits to Washington were not infrequent. Mrs. Clemens was not always
able to accompany him, and he has told us how once (it was his first
visit after the President’s marriage) she put a little note in the
pocket of his evening waistcoat, which he would be sure to find when
dressing, warning him about his deportment. Being presented to Mrs.
Cleveland, he handed her a card on which he had written “He didn’t,” and
asked her to sign her name below those words. Mrs. Cleveland protested
that she couldn’t sign it unless she knew what it was he hadn’t
done; but he insisted, and she promised to sign if he would tell her
immediately afterward all about it. She signed, and he handed her Mrs.
Clemens’s note, which was very brief. It said:

“Don’t wear your arctics in the White House.”

Mrs. Cleveland summoned a messenger and had the card she had signed
mailed at once to Mrs. Clemens at Hartford.

He was not always so well provided against disaster. Once, without
consulting his engagements, he agreed to assist Mrs. Cleveland at a
dedication, only to find that he must write an apology later. In his
letter he said:

    I do not know how it is in the White House, but in this house of
    ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run
    itself without the help of the major half it gets aground.

He explained his position, and added:

    I suppose the President often acts just like that; goes and makes an
    impossible promise, and you never find it out until it is next to
    impossible to break it up and set things straight again. Well, that
    is just our way exactly--one-half the administration always busy
    getting the family into trouble and the other half busy getting it
    out.



CLVXI. A “PLAYER” AND A MASTER OF ARTS

One morning early in January Clemens received the following note:

              DALY’S THEATER, NEW YORK, January 2, 1888.

    Mr. Augustin Daly will be very much pleased to have Mr. S. L.
    Clemens meet Mr. Booth, Mr. Barrett, and Mr. Palmer and a few
    friends at lunch on Friday next, January 6th (at one o’clock in
    Delmonico’s), to discuss the formation of a new club which it is
    thought will claim your (sic) interest.

    R. S. V. P.

There were already in New York a variety of literary and artistic
societies, such as The Kinsmen and Tile clubs, with which Clemens
was more or less associated. It was proposed now to form a more
comprehensive and pretentious organization--one that would include the
various associated arts. The conception of this new club, which was to
be called The Players, had grown out of a desire on the part of
Edwin Booth to confer some enduring benefit upon the members of his
profession. It had been discussed during a summer cruise on Mr. E.
C. Benedict’s steam-yacht by a little party which, besides the owner,
consisted of Booth himself, Aldrich, Lawrence Barrett, William Bispham,
and Laurence Hutton. Booth’s original idea had been to endow some sort
of an actors’ home, but after due consideration this did not appear
to be the best plan. Some one proposed a club, and Aldrich, with
never-failing inspiration, suggested its name, The Players, which
immediately impressed Booth and the others. It was then decided that
members of all the kindred arts should be admitted, and this was the
plan discussed and perfected at the Daly luncheon. The guests became
charter members, and The Players became an incorporated fact early in
January, 1888.--[Besides Mr. Booth himself, the charter members were:
Lawrence Barrett, William Bispham, Samuel L. Clemens, Augustin Daly,
Joseph F. Daly, John Drew, Henry Edwards, Laurence Hutton, Joseph
Jefferson, John A. Lane, James Lewis, Brander Matthews, Stephen H. Olin,
A. M. Palmer, and William T. Sherman.]--Booth purchased the fine old
brownstone residence at 16 Gramercy Park, and had expensive alterations
made under the directions of Stanford White to adapt it for club
purposes. He bore the entire cost, furnished it from garret to cellar,
gave it his books and pictures, his rare collections of every sort.
Laurence Hutton, writing of it afterward, said:

And on the first Founder’s Night, the 31st of December, 1888, he
transferred it all to the association, a munificent gift; absolutely
without parallel in its way. The pleasure it gave to Booth during the
few remaining years of his life was very great. He made it his home.
Next to his own immediate family it was his chief interest, care,
and consolation. He nursed and petted it, as it nursed and petted and
honored him. He died in it. And it is certainly his greatest monument.

There is no other club quite like The Players. The personality of Edwin
Booth pervades it, and there is a spirit in its atmosphere not found
in other large clubs--a spirit of unity, and ancient friendship,
and mellowness which usually come only of small membership and long
establishment. Mark Twain was always fond of The Players, and more than
once made it his home. It is a true home, and its members are a genuine
brotherhood.

It was in June, 1888, that Yale College conferred upon Samuel Clemens
the degree of Master of Arts. It was his first honor of this kind, and
he was proud of it. To Charles Hopkins (“Charley”) Clark, who had been
appointed to apprise him of the honor, he wrote:

    I felt mighty proud of that degree; in fact I could squeeze the
    truth a little closer and say vain of it. And why shouldn’t I be?
    I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has
    ever been given a degree by any college in any age of the world as
    far as I know.

To which Clark answered:

    MY DEAR FRIEND, You are “the only literary animal of your particular
    subspecies” in existence, and you’ve no cause for humility in the
    fact. Yale has done herself at least as much credit as she has done
    you, and “don’t you forget it.”
                                 C. H. C.

Clemens could not attend the alumni dinner, being at Elmira and unable
to get away, but in an address he made at Yale College later in the year
he thus freely expressed himself:

    I was sincerely proud and grateful to be made a Master of Arts by
    this great and venerable University, and I would have come last June
    to testify this feeling, as I do now testify it, but that the sudden
    and unexpected notice of the honor done me found me at a distance
    from home and unable to discharge that duty and enjoy that
    privilege.

    Along at first, say for the first month or so, I, did not quite know
    hove to proceed because of my not knowing just what authorities and
    privileges belonged to the title which had been granted me, but
    after that I consulted some students of Trinity--in Hartford--and
    they made everything clear to me. It was through them that I found
    out that my title made me head of the Governing Body of the
    University, and lodged in me very broad and severely responsible
    powers.

    I was told that it would be necessary to report to you at this time,
    and of course I comply, though I would have preferred to put it off
    till I could make a better showing; for indeed I have been so
    pertinaciously hindered and obstructed at every turn by the faculty
    that it would be difficult to prove that the University is really in
    any better shape now than it was when I first took charge. By
    advice, I turned my earliest attention to the Greek department. I
    told the Greek professor I had concluded to drop the use of Greek-
    written character because it is so hard to spell with, and so
    impossible to read after you get it spelt. Let us draw the curtain
    there. I saw by what followed that nothing but early neglect saved
    him from being a very profane man. I ordered the professor of
    mathematics to simplify the whole system, because the way it was I
    couldn’t understand it, and I didn’t want things going on in the
    college in what was practically a clandestine fashion. I told him
    to drop the conundrum system; it was not suited to the dignity of a
    college, which should deal in facts, not guesses and suppositions;
    we didn’t want any more cases of if A and B stand at opposite poles
    of the earth’s surface and C at the equator of Jupiter, at what
    variations of angle will the left limb of the moon appear to these
    different parties?--I said you just let that thing alone; it’s
    plenty time to get in a sweat about it when it happens; as like as
    not it ain’t going to do any harm, anyway. His reception of these
    instructions bordered on insubordination, insomuch that I felt
    obliged to take his number and report him. I found the astronomer
    of the University gadding around after comets and other such odds
    and ends--tramps and derelicts of the skies. I told him pretty
    plainly that we couldn’t have that. I told him it was no economy to
    go on piling up and piling up raw material in the way of new stars
    and comets and asteroids that we couldn’t ever have any use for till
    we had worked off the old stock. At bottom I don’t really mind
    comets so much, but somehow I have always been down on asteroids.
    There is nothing mature about them; I wouldn’t sit up nights the way
    that man does if I could get a basketful of them. He said it was
    the bast line of goods he had; he said he could trade them to
    Rochester for comets, and trade the comets to Harvard for nebulae,
    and trade the nebula to the Smithsonian for flint hatchets. I felt
    obliged to stop this thing on the spot; I said we couldn’t have the
    University turned into an astronomical junk shop. And while I was
    at it I thought I might as well make the reform complete; the
    astronomer is extraordinarily mutinous, and so, with your approval,
    I will transfer him to the law department and put one of the law
    students in his place. A boy will be more biddable, more tractable,
    also cheaper. It is true he cannot be intrusted with important work
    at first, but he can comb the skies for nebulae till he gets his
    hand in. I have other changes in mind, but as they are in the
    nature of surprises I judge it politic to leave them unspecified at
    this time.

Very likely it was in this new capacity, as the head of the governing
body, that he wrote one morning to Clark advising him as to the
misuse of a word in the Courant, though he thought it best to sign the
communication with the names of certain learned friends, to give it
weight with the public, as he afterward explained.

    SIR,--The word “patricide” in your issue of this morning (telegrams)
    was an error. You meant it to describe the slayer of a father; you
    should have used “parricide” instead. Patricide merely means the
    killing of an Irishman--any Irishman, male or female.

           Respectfully,
                  J. HAMMOND TRUMBULL.
                  N. J. BURTON.
                  J. H. TWICHELL.



CLXVII. NOTES AND LITERARY MATTERS

Clemens’ note-books of this time are full of the vexations of his
business ventures, figures, suggestions, and a hundred imagined
combinations for betterment--these things intermingled with the usual
bits of philosophy and reflections, and amusing reminders.

    Aldrich’s man who painted the fat toads red, and naturalist chasing
    and trying to catch them.

    Man who lost his false teeth over Brooklyn Bridge when he was on his
    way to propose to a widow.

    One believes St. Simon and Benvenuto and partly believes the
    Margravine of Bayreuth. There are things in the confession of
    Rousseau which one must believe.

    What is biography? Unadorned romance. What is romance? Adorned
    biography. Adorn it less and it will be better than it is.

    If God is what people say there can be none in the universe so
    unhappy as he; for he sees unceasingly myriads of his creatures
    suffering unspeakable miseries, and, besides this, foresees all they
    are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might
    well say “as unhappy as God.”

In spite of the financial complexities and the drain of the enterprises
already in hand he did not fail to conceive others. He was deeply
interested in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress at the moment, and from
photography and scenic effect he presaged a possibility to-day realized
in the moving picture.

Dress up some good actors as Apollyon, Greatheart, etc., & the other
Bunyan characters, take them to a wild gorge and photograph them--Valley
of the Shadow of Death; to other effective places & photo them along
with the scenery; to Paris, in their curious costumes, place them near
the Arc de l’Etoile & photo them with the crowd-Vanity Fair; to Cairo,
Venice, Jerusalem, & other places (twenty interesting cities) & always
make them conspicuous in the curious foreign crowds by their costume.
Take them to Zululand. It would take two or three years to do the
photographing & cost $10,000; but this stereopticon panorama of Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress could be exhibited in all countries at the same time
& would clear a fortune in a year. By & by I will do this.

    If in 1891 I find myself not rich enough to carry out my scheme of
    buying Christopher Columbus’s bones & burying them under the Statue
    of Liberty Enlightening the World I will give the idea to somebody
    who is rich enough.

Incidentally he did an occasional piece of literary work. Early in the
year, with Brander Matthews, he instructed and entertained the public
with a copyright controversy in the Princeton Review. Matthews would
appear to have criticized the English copyright protection, or rather
the lack of it, comparing it unfavorably with American conditions.
Clemens, who had been amply protected in Great Britain, replied that
America was in no position to criticize England; that if American
authors suffered in England they had themselves to blame for not taking
the proper trouble and precautions required by the English law, that is
to say, “previous publication” on English soil. He declared that his own
books had been as safe in England as at home since he had undertaken
to comply with English requirements, and that Professor Matthews was
altogether mistaken, both as to premise and conclusion.

“You are the very wrong-headedest person in America,” he said; “and you
are injudicious.” And of the article: “I read it to the cat--well, I
never saw a cat carry on so before.... The American author can go
to Canada, spend three days there and come home with an English and
American copyright as strong as if it had been built out of railroad
iron.”

Matthews replied that not every one could go to Canada, any more than to
Corinth. He said:

“It is not easy for a poor author who may chance to live in Florida or
Texas, those noted homes of literature, to go to Canada.”

Clemens did not reply again; that is to say, he did not publish his
reply. It was a capable bomb which he prepared, well furnished with
amusing instance, sarcasm, and ridicule, but he did not use it. Perhaps
he was afraid it would destroy his opponent, which would not do. In his
heart he loved Matthews. He laid the deadly thing away and maintained a
dignified reserve.

Clemens often felt called upon to criticize American institutions, but
he was first to come to their defense, especially when the critic was an
alien. When Matthew Arnold offered some strictures on America. Clemens
covered a good many quires of paper with caustic replies. He even
defended American newspapers, which he had himself more than once
violently assailed for misreporting him and for other journalistic
shortcomings, and he bitterly denounced every shaky British institution,
touched upon every weak spot in hereditary rule. He did not print--not
then--[An article on the American press, probably the best of those
prepared at this time, was used, in part, in The American Claimant, as
the paper read before the Mechanics’ Club, by “Parker,” assistant editor
of the ‘Democrat’.]--he was writing mainly for relief--without success,
however, for he only kindled the fires of his indignation. He was at
Quarry Farm and he plunged into his neglected story--A Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court--and made his astonishing hero the mouthpiece of
his doctrines. He worked with an inspiration and energy born of his
ferocity. To Whitmore, near the end of the summer, he wrote:

I’ve got 16 working-days left yet, and in that time I will add another
120,000 words to my book if I have luck.

In his memoranda of this time he says:

    There was never a throne which did not represent a crime. There is
    no throne to-day which does not represent a crime....

Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn’t tell from a
journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all that is worth
being, is the shoemaker’s inferior; and in the shoemaker I will show you
a dull animal, a poor-spirited insect; for there are enough of him to
rise and chuck the lords and royalties into the sea where they belong,
and he doesn’t do it.

But his violence waned, maybe, for he did not finish the Yankee in the
sixteen days as planned. He brought the manuscript back to Hartford, but
found it hard work there, owing to many interruptions. He went over to
Twichell’s and asked for a room where he might work in seclusion. They
gave him a big upper chamber, but some repairs were going on below. From
a letter written to Theodore Crane we gather that it was not altogether
quiet.

                     Friday, October 5, 1888.

    DEAR THEO, I am here in Twichell’s house at work, with the noise of
    the children and an army of carpenters to help: Of course they don’t
    help, but neither do they hinder. It’s like a boiler factory for
    racket, and in nailing a wooden ceiling on to the room under me the
    hammering tickles my feet amazingly sometimes and jars my table a
    good deal, but I never am conscious of the racket at all, and I move
    my feet into positions of relief without knowing when I do it. I
    began here Monday morning, and have done eighty pages since. I was
    so tired last night that I thought I would lie abed and rest to-day;
    but I couldn’t resist. I mean to try to knock off tomorrow, but
    it’s doubtful if I do. I want to finish the day the machine
    finishes, and a week ago the closest calculations for that indicated
    Oct. 22--but experience teaches me that the calculations will miss
    fire as usual.

    The other day the children were projecting a purchase, Livy and I to
    furnish the money--a dollar and a half. Jean discouraged the idea.
    She said, “We haven’t got any money. Children, if you would think,
    you would remember the machine isn’t done.”

    It’s billiards to-night. I wish you were here.

    With love to you both,                S. L. C.

    P. S. I got it all wrong. It wasn’t the children, it was Marie.
    She wanted a box of blacking for the children’s shoes. Jean
    reproved her and said, “Why, Marie, you mustn’t ask for things now.
    The machine isn’t done.”

Neither the Yankee nor the machine was completed that fall, though
returns from both were beginning to be badly needed. The financial pinch
was not yet severe, but it was noticeable, and it did not relax.

A memorandum of this time tells of an anniversary given to Charles and
Susan Warner in their own home. The guests assembled at the Clemens
home, the Twichells among them, and slipped across to Warner’s, entering
through a window. Dinner was then announced to the Warners, who were
sitting by their library fire. They came across the hall and opened the
dining-room door, to be confronted by a table fully spread and lighted
and an array of guests already seated.



CLXVIII. INTRODUCING NYE AND RILEY AND OTHERS

It was the winter (1888-89) that the Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley
entertainment combination set out on its travels. Mark Twain introduced
them to their first Boston audience. Major J. B. Pond was exploiting Nye
and Riley, and Clemens went on to Boston especially to hear them. Pond
happened upon him in the lobby of the Parker House and insisted that
nothing would do but he must introduce them. In his book of memories
which he published later Pond wrote:

He replied that he believed I was his mortal enemy, and determined
that he should never have an evening’s enjoyment in my presence. He
consented, however, and conducted his brother-humorist and the Hoosier
poet to the platform. Mark’s presence was a surprise to the audience,
and when they recognized him the demonstration was tremendous. The
audience rose in a body, and men and women shouted at the very top of
their voices. Handkerchiefs waved, the organist even opened every forte
key and pedal in the great organ, and the noise went on unabated for
minutes. It took some time for the crowd to get down to listening, but
when they did subside, as Mark stepped to the front, the silence was as
impressive as the noise had been.

He presented the Nye-Riley pair as the Siamese Twins. “I saw them
first,” he sand, “a great many years ago, when Mr. Barnum had them, and
they were just fresh from Siam. The ligature was their best hold then,
but literature became their best hold later, when one of them committed
an indiscretion, and they had to cut the old bond to accommodate the
sheriff.”

He continued this comic fancy, and the audience was in a proper frame of
mind, when he had finished, to welcome the “Twins of Genius” who were to
entertain them:

Pond says:

It was a carnival of fun in every sense of the word. Bostonians will not
have another such treat in this generation.

Pond proposed to Clemens a regular tour with Nye and Riley. He wrote:

    I will go partners with you, and I will buy Nye and Riley’s time and
    give an entertainment something like the one we gave in Boston. Let
    it be announced that you will introduce the “Twins of Genius.”
     Ostensibly a pleasure trip for you. I will take one-third of the
    profits and you two-thirds. I can tell you it will be the biggest
    thing that can be brought before the American public.

But Clemens, badly as he was beginning to need the money, put this
temptation behind him. His chief diversion these days was in gratuitous
appearances. He had made up his mind not to read or lecture again for
pay, but he seemed to take a peculiar enjoyment in doing these things as
a benefaction. That he was beginning to need the money may have added a
zest to the joy of his giving. He did not respond to all invitations; he
could have been traveling constantly had he done so. He consulted with
Mrs. Clemens and gave himself to the cause that seemed most worthy. In
January Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston was billed to give a reading with
Thomas Nelson Page in Baltimore. Page’s wife fell ill and died, and
Colonel Johnston, in extremity, wired Charles Dudley Warner to come in
Page’s place. Warner, unable to go, handed the invitation to Clemens,
who promptly wired that he would come. They read to a packed house, and
when the audience was gone and the returns had been counted an equal
division of the profits was handed to each of the authors. Clemens
pushed his share over to Johnston, saying:

“That’s yours, Colonel. I’m not reading for money these days.”

Colonel Johnston, to whom the sum was important, tried to thank him, but
he only said:

“Never mind, Colonel, it only gave me pleasure to do you that little
favor. You can pass it on some day.”

As a matter of fact, hard put to it as he was for funds, Clemens at this
time regarded himself as a potential multi-millionaire. The type-setting
machine which for years had been sapping his financial strength was
believed to be perfected, and ship-loads of money were waiting in the
offing. However, we shall come to this later.

Clemens read for the cadets at West Point and for a variety of
institutions and on many special occasions. He usually gave chapters
from his Yankee, now soon to be finished, chapters generally beginning
with the Yankee’s impression of the curious country and its people,
ending with the battle of the Sun-belt, when the Yankee and his
fifty-four adherents were masters of England, with twenty-five thousand
dead men lying about them. He gave this at West Point, including the
chapter where the Yankee has organized a West Point of his own in King
Arthur’s reign.

In April, ‘89, he made an address at a dinner given to a victorious
baseball team returning from a tour of the world by way of the Sandwich
Islands. He was on familiar ground there. His heart was in his words. He
began:

    I have been in the Sandwich Islands-twenty-three years ago--that
    peaceful land, that beautiful land, that far-off home of solitude,
    and soft idleness, and repose, and dreams, where life is one long
    slumberous Sabbath, the climate one long summer day, and the good
    that die experience no change, for they but fall asleep in one
    heaven and wake up in another. And these boys have played baseball
    there!--baseball, which is the very symbol, the outward and visible
    expression, of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the
    living, tearing, booming nineteenth, the mightiest of all the
    centuries!

He told of the curious island habits for his hearers’ amusement, but at
the close the poetry of his memories once more possessed him:

    Ah, well, it is refreshment to the jaded, it is water to the
    thirsty, to look upon men who have so lately breathed the soft air
    of those Isles of the Blest and had before their eyes the
    inextinguishable vision of their beauty. No alien land in all the
    earth has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land
    could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and
    waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things
    leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the
    same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas
    flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see
    its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing
    by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the
    cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the
    plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of
    flowers that perished twenty years ago.



CLXIX. THE COMING OF KIPLING

It was the summer of 1889 that Mark Twain first met Rudyard Kipling.
Kipling was making his tour around the world, a young man wholly unheard
of outside of India. He was writing letters home to an Indian journal,
The Pioneer, and he came to Elmira especially to see Mark Twain. It was
night when he arrived, and next morning some one at the hotel directed
him to Quarry Farm. In a hired hack he made his way out through the
suburbs, among the buzzing planing-mills and sash factories, and toiled
up the long, dusty, roasting east hill, only to find that Mark Twain was
at General Langdon’s, in the city he had just left behind. Mrs. Crane
and Susy Clemens were the only ones left at the farm, and they gave
him a seat on the veranda and brought him glasses of water or cool milk
while he refreshed them with his talk-talk which Mark Twain once
said might be likened to footprints, so strong and definite was the
impression which it left behind. He gave them his card, on which the
address was Allahabad, and Susy preserved it on that account, because to
her India was a fairyland, made up of magic, airy architecture, and dark
mysteries. Clemens once dictated a memory of Kipling’s visit.

    Kipling had written upon the card a compliment to me. This gave it
    an additional value in Susy’s eyes, since, as a distinction, it was
    the next thing to being recognized by a denizen of the moon.

    Kipling came down that afternoon and spent a couple of hours with
    me, and at the end of that time I had surprised him as much as he
    had surprised me--and the honors were easy. I believed that he knew
    more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that
    I knew less than any person he had met before--though he did not say
    it, and I was not expecting that he would. When he was gone Mrs.
    Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said:

    “He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man--and I am
    the other one. Between us we cover all knowledge; he knows all that
    can be known, and I know the rest.”

    He was a stranger to me and to all the world, and remained so for
    twelve months, then he became suddenly known, and universally known.
    From that day to this he has held this unique distinction--that of
    being the only living person, not head of a nation, whose voice is
    heard around the world the moment it drops a remark; the only such
    voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail, but
    always travels first-class--by cable.

    About a year after Kipling’s visit in Elmira George Warner came into
    our library one morning in Hartford with a small book in his hand
    and asked me if I had ever heard of Rudyard Kipling. I said, “No.”

    He said I would hear of him very soon, and that the noise he was
    going to make would be loud and continuous. The little book was the
    Plain Tales, and he left it for me to read, saying it was charged
    with a new and inspiriting fragrance, and would blow a refreshing
    breath around the world that would revive the nations. A day or two
    later he brought a copy of the London World which had a sketch of
    Kipling in it, and a mention of the fact that he had traveled in the
    United States. According to this sketch he had passed through
    Elmira. This remark, with the additional fact that he hailed from
    India, attracted my attention--also Susy’s. She went to her room
    and brought his card from its place in the frame of her mirror, and
    the Quarry Farm visitor stood identified.

Kipling also has left an account of that visit. In his letter recording
it he says:

    You are a contemptible lot over yonder. Some of you are
    Commissioners and some are Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the
    V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm
    with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning,
    have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar--no, two cigars--with him,
    and talked with him for more than two hours! Understand clearly
    that I do not despise you; indeed, I don’t. I am only very sorry
    for you, from the Viceroy downward.

    A big, darkened drawing-room; a huge chair; a man with eyes, a mane
    of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a
    woman’s, a strong, square hand shaking mine, and the slowest,
    calmest, levelest voice in all the world saying:

    “Well, you think you owe me something, and you’ve come to tell me
    so. That’s what I call squaring a debt handsomely.”

    “Piff!” from a cob-pipe (I always said that a Missouri meerschaum
    was the best smoking in the world), and behold! Mark Twain had
    curled himself up in the big arm-chair, and I was smoking
    reverently, as befits one in the presence of his superior.

    The thing that struck me first was that he was an elderly man; yet,
    after a minute’s thought, I perceived that it was otherwise, and in
    five minutes, the eyes looking at me, I saw that the gray hair was
    an accident of the most trivial. He was quite young. I was shaking
    his hand. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk--this
    man I had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away.

    Reading his books, I had striven to get an idea of his personality,
    and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality.
    Blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face
    to face with a revered writer.

The meeting of those two men made the summer of ‘89 memorable in later
years. But it was recalled sadly, too. Theodore Crane, who had been
taken suddenly and dangerously ill the previous autumn, had a recurring
attack and died July 3d. It was the first death in the immediate
families for more than seventeen years, Mrs. Clemens, remembering that
earlier period of sorrow, was depressed with forebodings.



CLXX. “THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER” ON THE STAGE

There was an unusual dramatic interest in the Clemens home that autumn.
Abby Sage Richardson had dramatized ‘The Prince and the Pauper’, and
Daniel Frohman had secured Elsie Leslie (Lyde) to take the double role
of the Prince and Tom Canty. The rehearsals were going on, and the
Clemens children were naturally a good deal excited over the outcome.
Susy Clemens was inspired to write a play of her own--a pretty
Greek fancy, called “The Triumph of Music,” and when it was given on
Thanksgiving night, by herself, with Clara and Jean and Margaret Warner,
it was really a lovely performance, and carried one back to the days
when emotions were personified, and nymphs haunted the seclusions of
Arcady. Clemens was proud of Susy’s achievement, and deeply moved by it.
He insisted on having the play repeated, and it was given again later in
the year.

Pretty Elsie Leslie became a favorite of the Clemens household. She was
very young, and when she visited Hartford Jean and she were companions
and romped together in the hay-loft. She was also a favorite of William
Gillette. One day when Clemens and Gillette were together they decided
to give the little girl a surprise--a unique one. They agreed to
embroider a pair of slippers for her--to do the work themselves. Writing
to her of it, Mark Twain said:

    Either one of us could have thought of a single slipper, but it took
    both of us to think of two slippers. In fact, one of us did think
    of one slipper, and then, quick as a flash, the other of the other
    one. It shows how wonderful the human mind is....

    Gillette embroidered his slipper with astonishing facility and
    splendor, but I have been a long time pulling through with mine.
    You see, it was my very first attempt at art, and I couldn’t rightly
    get the hang of it along at first. And then I was so busy that I
    couldn’t get a chance to work at it at home, and they wouldn’t let
    me embroider on the cars; they said it made the other passengers
    afraid. They didn’t like the light that flared into my eye when I
    had an inspiration. And even the most fair-minded people doubted me
    when I explained what it was I was making--especially brakemen.
    Brakemen always swore at it and carried on, the way ignorant people
    do about art. They wouldn’t take my word that it was a slipper;
    they said they believed it was a snow-shoe that had some kind of
    disease.

He went on to explain and elucidate the pattern of the slipper, and
how Dr. Root had come in and insisted on taking a hand in it, and how
beautiful it was to see him sit there and tell Mrs. Clemens what had
been happening while they were away during the summer, holding the
slipper up toward the end of his nose, imagining the canvas was a
“subject” with a scalp-wound, working with a “lovely surgical stitch,”
 never hesitating a moment in his talk except to say “Ouch!” when he
stuck himself with the needle.

    Take the slippers and wear them next your heart, Elsie dear; for
    every stitch in them is a testimony of the affection which two of
    your loyalest friends bear you. Every single stitch cost us blood.
    I’ve got twice as many pores in me now as I used to have; and you
    would never believe how many places you can stick a needle in
    yourself until you go into the embroidery line and devote yourself
    to art.

    Do not wear these slippers in public, dear; it would only excite
    envy; and, as like as not, somebody would try to shoot you.

    Merely use them to assist you in remembering that among the many,
    many people who think all the world of you is your friend,

                            MARK TWAIN.

The play of “The Prince and the Pauper,” dramatized by Mrs. Richardson
and arranged for the stage by David Belasco, was produced at the Park
Theater, Philadelphia, on Christmas Eve. It was a success, but not a
lavish one. The play was well written and staged, and Elsie Leslie was
charming enough in her parts, but in the duality lay the difficulty.
The strongest scenes in the story had to be omitted when one performer
played both Tom Canty and the little Prince. The play came to New
York--to the Broadway Theater--and was well received. On the opening
night there Mark Twain made a speech, in which he said that the
presentation of “The Prince and the Pauper” realized a dream which
fifteen years before had possessed him all through a long down-town
tramp, amid the crowds and confusion of Broadway. In Elsie Leslie, he
said, he had found the embodiment of his dream, and to her he offered
homage as the only prince clothed in a divine right which was not rags
and sham--the divine right of an inborn supremacy in art.

It seems incredible to-day that, realizing the play’s possibilities as
Mark Twain did, and as Belasco and Daniel Frohman must have done, they
did not complete their partial triumph by finding another child actress
to take the part of Tom Canty. Clemens urged and pleaded with them, but
perhaps the undertaking seemed too difficult--at all events they did not
find the little beggar king. Then legal complications developed.
Edward House, to whom Clemens had once given a permission to attempt
a dramatization of the play, suddenly appeared with a demand for
recognition, backed by a lawsuit against all those who had a proprietary
interest in the production. House, with his adopted Japanese daughter
Koto, during a period of rheumatism and financial depression, had made
a prolonged visit in the Clemens home and originally undertook the
dramatization as a sort of return for hospitality. He appears not to
have completed it and to have made no arrangement for its production
or to have taken any definite step until Mrs. Richardson’s play was
profitably put on; whereupon his suit and injunction.

By the time a settlement of this claim had been reached the play had run
its course, and it was not revived in that form. It was brought out in
England, where it was fairly prosperous, though it seems not to have
been long continued. Variously reconstructed, it has occasionally been
played since, and always, when the parts of Tom Canty and the Prince
were separate, with great success. Why this beautiful drama should ever
be absent from the boards is one of the unexplainable things. It is a
play for all times and seasons, the difficulty of obtaining suitable
“twin” interpreters for the characters of the Prince and the Pauper
being its only drawback.



CLXXI. “A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT”

From every point of view it seemed necessary to make the ‘Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court’ an important and pretentious publication. It was Mark
Twain’s first book after a silence of five years; it was a book badly
needed by his publishing business with which to maintain its prestige
and profit; it was a book which was to come out of his maturity and
present his deductions, as to humanity at large and kings in particular,
to a waiting public. It was determined to spare no expense on the
manufacture, also that its illustrations must be of a sort to illuminate
and, indeed, to elaborate the text. Clemens had admired some pictures
made by Daniel Carter (“Dan”) Beard for a Chinese story in the
Cosmopolitan, and made up his mind that Beard was the man for the
Yankee. The manuscript was sent to Beard, who met Clemens a little later
in the office of Webster & Co. to discuss the matter. Clemens said:

“Mr. Beard, I do not want to subject you to any undue suffering, but I
wish you would read the book before you make the pictures.”

Beard replied that he had already read it twice.

“Very good,” Clemens said; “but I wasn’t led to suppose that that was
the usual custom among illustrators, judging from some results I have
seen. You know,” he went on, “this Yankee of mine has neither the
refinement nor the weakness of a college education; he is a perfect
ignoramus; he is boss of a machine shop; he can build a locomotive or
a Colt’s revolver, he can put up and run a telegraph line, but he’s an
ignoramus, nevertheless. I am not going to tell you what to draw. If a
man comes to me and says, ‘Mr. Clemens, I want you to write me a story,’
I’ll write it for him; but if he undertakes to tell me what to write
I’ll say, ‘Go hire a typewriter.’”

To Hall a few days later he wrote:

    Tell Beard to obey his own inspirations, and when he sees a picture
    in his mind put that picture on paper, be it humorous or be it
    serious. I want his genius to be wholly unhampered. I sha’n’t have
    any fear as to results.

Without going further it is proper to say here that the pictures in the
first edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court justified
the author’s faith in the artist of his selection. They are far and away
Dan Beard’s best work. The socialism of the text strongly appealed to
him. Beard himself had socialistic tendencies, and the work inspired him
to his highest flights of fancy and to the acme of his technic. Clemens
examined the pictures from time to time, and once was moved to write:

    My pleasure in them is as strong and as fresh as ever. I do not
    know of any quality they lack. Grace, dignity, poetry, spirit,
    imagination, these enrich them and make them charming and beautiful;
    and wherever humor appears it is high and fine--easy, unforced, kept
    under, masterly, and delicious.

He went on to describe his appreciation in detail, and when the drawings
were complete he wrote again:

    Hold me under permanent obligations. What luck it was to find you!
    There are hundreds of artists who could illustrate any other book of
    mine, but there was only one who could illustrate this one. Yes, it
    was a fortunate hour that I went netting for lightning-bugs and
    caught a meteor. Live forever!

This was not too much praise. Beard realized the last shade of the
author’s allegorical intent and portrayed it with a hundred accents
which the average reader would otherwise be likely to miss.

Clemens submitted his manuscript to Howells and to Stedman, and he read
portions of it, at least, to Mrs. Clemens, whose eyes were troubling
her so that she could not read for herself. Stedman suggested certain
eliminations, but, on the whole, would seem to have approved of the
book. Howells was enthusiastic. It appealed to him as it had appealed to
Beard. Its sociology and its socialism seemed to him the final word
that could be said on those subjects. When he had partly finished it he
wrote:

    It’s a mighty great book and it makes my heart, burn with wrath. It
    seems that God didn’t forget to put a soul in you. He shuts most
    literary men off with a brain, merely.

A few days later he wrote again:

    The book is glorious-simply noble. What masses of virgin truth
    never touched in print before!

And when he had finished it:

    Last night I read your last chapter. As Stedman says of the whole
    book, it’s titanic.

Clemens declared, in one of his replies to Howells:

    I’m not writing for those parties who miscall themselves critics,
    and I don’t care to have them paw the book at all. It’s my swan
    song, my retirement from literature permanently, and I wish to pass
    to the cemetery unclodded.... Well, my book is written--let
    it go, but if it were only to write over again there wouldn’t be so
    many things left out. They burn in me; they keep multiplying and
    multiplying, but now they can’t ever be said; and besides they would
    require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell.

In another letter of this time to Sylvester Baxter, apropos of the
tumbling Brazilian throne, he wrote:

    When our great brethren, the disenslaved Brazilians, frame their
    declaration of independence I hope they will insert this missing
    link: “We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all monarchs
    are usurpers and descendants of usurpers, for the reason that no
    throne was ever set up in this world by the will, freely exercised,
    of the only body possessing the legitimate right to set it up--the
    numerical mass of the nation.”

He was full of it, as he had been all along, and ‘A Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur’s Court’ is nothing less than a brief for human rights
and human privileges. That is what it is, and it is a pity that it
should be more than that. It is a pity that he should have been beset
by his old demon of the burlesque, and that no one should have had the
wisdom or the strength to bring it under control.

There is nothing more charming in any of Mark Twain’s work than his
introductory chapter, nothing more delightful than the armoring of the
Yankee and the outset and the wandering with Alisande. There is nothing
more powerful or inspiring than his splendid panoramic picture--of the
King learning mercy through his own degradation, his daily intercourse
with a band of manacled slaves; nothing more fiercely moving than that
fearful incident of the woman burned to warm those freezing chattels,
or than the great gallows scene, where the priest speaks for the young
mother about to pay the death penalty for having stolen a halfpenny’s
worth, that her baby might have bread. Such things as these must save
the book from oblivion; but alas! its greater appeal is marred almost
to ruin by coarse and extravagant burlesque, which destroys illusion
and antagonizes the reader often at the very moment when the tale should
fill him with a holy fire of a righteous wrath against wrong. As an
example of Mark Twain at his literary worst and best the Yankee ranks
supreme. It is unnecessary to quote examples; one cannot pick up the
volume and read ten pages of it, or five pages, without finding them.
In the midst of some exalted passage, some towering sublimity, you
are brought suddenly to earth with a phrase which wholly destroys the
illusion and the diviner purpose. Howells must have observed these
things, or was he so dazzled by the splendor of its intent, its
righteous charge upon the ranks of oppression, that he regarded its
offenses against art as unimportant. This is hard to explain, for the
very thing that would sustain such a great message and make it permanent
would be the care, the restraint, the artistic worthiness of its
construction. One must believe in a story like that to be convinced of
its logic. To lose faith in it--in its narrative--is absolutely fatal
to its purpose. The Yankee in King Arthur’s Court not only offended the
English nation, but much of it offended the better taste of Mark Twain’s
own countrymen, and in time it must have offended even Mark Twain
himself. Reading it, one can visualize the author as a careering
charger, with a bit in his teeth, trampling the poetry and the tradition
of the romantic days, the very things which he himself in his happier
moods cared for most. Howells likened him to Cervantes, laughing Spain’s
chivalry away. The comparison was hardly justified. It was proper enough
to laugh chivalry out of court when it was a reality; but Mark Twain,
who loved Sir Thomas Malory to the end of his days, the beauty and
poetry of his chronicles; who had written ‘The Prince and the Pauper’,
and would one day write that divine tale of the ‘Maid of Orleans’;
who was himself no more nor less than a knight always ready to redress
wrong, would seem to have been the last person to wish to laugh it out
of romance.

And yet, when all is said, one may still agree with Howells in ranking
the Yankee among Mark Twain’s highest achievements in the way of “a
greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale.” It is of that class,
beyond doubt. Howells goes further:

    Of all the fanciful schemes in fiction it pleases me most, and I
    give myself with absolute delight to its notion of a keen East
    Hartford Yankee finding himself, by a retroactionary spell, at the
    court of King Arthur of Britain, and becoming part of the sixth
    century with all the customs and ideas of the nineteenth in him and
    about him. The field for humanizing satire which this scheme opens
    is illimitable.

Colossal it certainly is, as Howells and Stedman agreed: colossal in
its grotesqueness as in its sublimity. Howells, summarizing Mark Twain’s
gifts (1901), has written:

    He is apt to burlesque the lighter colloquiality, and it is only in
    the more serious and most tragical junctures that his people utter
    themselves with veracious simplicity and dignity. That great, burly
    fancy of his is always tempting him to the exaggeration which is the
    condition of so much of his personal humor, but which when it
    invades the drama spoils the illusion. The illusion renews itself
    in the great moments, but I wish it could be kept intact in the
    small, and I blame him that he does not rule his fancy better.

All of which applies precisely to the writing of the Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court. Intended as a fierce heart-cry against human
injustice--man’s inhumanity to man--as such it will live and find
readers; but, more than any other of Mark Twain’s pretentious works, it
needs editing--trimming by a fond but relentless hard.



CLXXII. THE “YANKEE” IN ENGLAND

The London publishers of the Yankee were keenly anxious to revise
the text for their English readers. Clemens wrote that he had already
revised the Yankee twice, that Stedman had critically read it, and that
Mrs. Clemens had made him strike out many passages and soften others.
He added that he had read chapters of it in public several times where
Englishmen were present and had profited by their suggestions. Then he
said:

    Now, mind you, I have taken all this pains because I wanted to say a
    Yankee mechanic’s say against monarchy and its several natural
    props, and yet make a book which you would be willing to print
    exactly as it comes to you, without altering a word.

    We are spoken of (by Englishmen) as a thin-skinned people. It is
    you who are thin-skinned. An Englishman may write with the most
    brutal frankness about any man or institution among us and we
    republish him without dreaming of altering a line or a word. But
    England cannot stand that kind of a book written about herself. It
    is England that is thin-skinned. It causeth me to smile when I read
    the modifications of my language which have been made in my English
    editions to fit them for the sensitive English palate.

    Now, as I say, I have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of
    offense that you’ll not lack the nerve to print it just as it
    stands. I am going to get the proofs to you just as early as I can.
    I want you to read it carefully. If you can publish it without
    altering a single word, go ahead. Otherwise, please hand it to
    J. R. Osgood in time for him to have it published at my expense.

    This is important, for the reason that the book was not written for
    America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done
    their sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that
    it seems to me high time that some of us should substantially
    recognize the good intent by trying to pry up the English nation to
    a little higher level of manhood in turn.

So the Yankee was published in England just as he had written it,--[The
preface was shortened and modified for both the American and English
editions. The reader will find it as originally written under Appendix
S, at the end of last volume.]--and the criticisms were as plentiful as
they were frank. It was referred to as a “lamentable failure” and as
an “audacious sacrilege” and in terms still less polite. Not all of the
English critics were violent. The Daily Telegraph gave it something more
than a column of careful review, which did not fail to point out the
book’s sins with a good deal of justice and dignity; but the majority of
English papers joined in a sort of objurgatory chorus which, for a time
at least, spared neither the author nor his work. Strictures on the
Yankee extended to his earlier books. After all, Mark Twain’s work was
not for the cultivated class.

These things must have begun to gravel Clemens a good deal at last, for
he wrote to Andrew Lang at considerable length, setting forth his case
in general terms--that is to say, his position as an author--inviting
Lang to stand as his advocate before the English public. In part he
said:

    The critic assumes every time that if a book doesn’t meet the
    cultivated-class standard it isn’t valuable... The critic has
    actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by
    Raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a
    chromo; and the august opera more than the hurdy-gurdy and the
    villagers’ singing society; and the Latin classics than Kipling’s
    far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan Edwards than the Salvation
    Army.... If a critic should start a religion it would not
    have any object but to convert angels, and they wouldn’t need it.
    It is not that little minority who are already saved that are best
    worth lifting up, I should think, but the mighty mass of the
    uncultivated who are underneath! That mass will never see the old
    masters--that sight is for the few; but the chromo-maker can lift
    them all one step upward toward appreciation of art; they cannot
    have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy and the singing-class lift them
    a little way toward that far height; they will never know Homer, but
    the passing rhymester of their day leaves them higher than he found
    them; they may never even hear of the Latin classics, but they will
    strike step with Kipling’s drum-beat and they will march; for all
    Jonathan Edwards’s help they would die in their slums, but the
    Salvation Army will beguile some of them to a purer air and a
    cleaner life.

   ... I have never tried, in even one single little instance, to
    help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it
    either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in
    that direction, but always hunted for bigger game--the masses. I
    have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but I have done my
    best to entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere..
   .. My audience is dumb; it has no voice in print, and so I cannot
    know whether I have won its approval or only got its censure.

He closed by asking that Lang urge the critics to adopt a rule
recognizing the masses, and to formulate a standard whereby work done
for them might be judged. “No voice can reach further than yours in a
case of this kind,” he said, “or carry greater weight of authority.”
 There was no humor in this letter, and the writer of it was clearly in
earnest.

Lang’s response was an article published in the Illustrated London
News on the art of Mark Twain. He began by gently ridiculing
hyperculture--the new culture--and ended with a eulogy on Huck Finn. It
seems worth while, however, to let Andrew Lang speak for himself.

    I have been educated till I nearly dropped; I have lived with the
    earliest apostles of culture, in the days when Chippendale was first
    a name to conjure with, and Japanese art came in like a raging lion,
    and Ronsard was the favorite poet, and Mr. William Morris was a
    poet, too, and blue and green were the only wear, and the name of
    Paradise was Camelot. To be sure, I cannot say that I took all this
    quite seriously, but “we, too, have played” at it, and know all
    about it. Generally speaking, I have kept up with culture. I can
    talk (if desired) about Sainte-Beuve, and Merimee, and Felicien
    Rops; I could rhyme “Ballades” when they were “in,” and knew what a
    “pantoom” was.... And yet I have not culture. My works are
    but tinkling brass because I have not culture. For culture has got
    into new regions where I cannot enter, and, what is perhaps worse,
    I find myself delighting in a great many things which are under the
    ban of culture.

He confesses that this is a dreadful position; one that makes a man feel
like one of those Liberal politicians who are always “sitting on the
fence,” and who follow their party, if follow it they do, with the
reluctant acquiescence of the prophet’s donkey. He further confesses
that he has tried Hartmann and prefers Plato, that he is shaky about
Blake, though stalwart concerning Rudyard Kipling.

    This is not the worst of it. Culture has hardly a new idol but I
    long to hurl things at it. Culture can scarcely burn anything, but
    I am impelled to sacrifice to that same. I am coming to suspect
    that the majority of culture’s modern disciples are a mere crowd of
    very slimly educated people who have no natural taste or impulses;
    who do not really know the best things in literature; who have a
    feverish desire to admire the newest thing, to follow the latest
    artistic fashion; who prate about “style,” without the faintest
    acquaintance with the ancient examples of style in Greek, French, or
    English; who talk about the classics and--criticize the classical
    critics and poets, without being able to read a line of them in the
    original. Nothing of the natural man is left in these people; their
    intellectual equipment is made up of ignorant vanity and eager
    desire for novelty, and a yearning to be in the fashion. Take, for
    example--and we have been a long time in coming to him--Mark Twain.
    [Here follow some observations concerning the Yankee, which Lang
    confesses that he has not read, and has abstained from reading
    because----]. Here Mark Twain is not, and cannot be, at the proper
    point of view. He has not the knowledge which would enable him to
    be a sound critic of the ideals of the Middle Ages. An Arthurian
    Knight in New York or in Washington would find as much to blame, and
    justly, as a Yankee at Camelot.

Of Mark Twain’s work in general he speaks with another conclusion:

    Mark Twain is a benefactor beyond most modern writers, and the
    cultured who do not laugh are merely to be pitied. But his art is
    not only that of the maker of the scarce article--mirth. I have no
    hesitation in saying that Mark Twain is one among the greatest
    contemporary makers of fiction.... I can never forget or be
    ungrateful for the exquisite pleasure with which I read Huckleberry
    Finn for the first time years ago. I read it again last night,
    deserting Kenilworth for Huck. I never laid it down till I had
    finished it. I perused several passages more than once, and rose
    from it with a higher opinion of its merits than ever.

    What is it that we want in a novel? We want a vivid and original
    picture of life; we want character naturally displayed in action;
    and if we get the excitement of adventure into the bargain, and that
    adventure possible and plausible, I so far differ from the newest
    school of criticism as to think that we have additional cause for
    gratitude. If, moreover, there is an unstrained sense of humor in
    the narrator we have a masterpiece, and Huckleberry Finn is, nothing
    less.

He reviews Huck sympathetically in detail, and closes:

    There are defects of taste, or passages that to us seem deficient in
    taste, but the book remains a nearly flawless gem of romance and of
    humor. The world appreciates it, no doubt, but “cultured critics”
     are probably unaware of its singular value. The great American
    novel has escaped the eyes of those who watch to see this new planet
    swim into their ken. And will Mark Twain never write such another?
    One is enough for him to live by, and for our gratitude, but not
    enough for our desire.

In the brief column and a half which it occupies, this comment of Andrew
Lang’s constitutes as thoughtful and fair an estimate of Mark Twain’s
work as was ever written.

W. T. Stead, of the Review of Reviews, was about the only prominent
English editor to approve of the Yankee and to exploit its merits. Stead
brought down obloquy upon himself by so doing, and his separation from
his business partner would seem to have been at least remotely connected
with this heresy.

The Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was dramatized in America by Howard
Taylor, one of the Enterprise compositors, whom Clemens had known in
the old Comstock days. Taylor had become a playwright of considerable
success, with a number of well-known actors and actresses starring in
his plays. The Yankee, however, did not find a manager, or at least it
seems not to have reached the point of production.



CLXXIII. A SUMMER AT ONTEORA

With the exception of one article--“A Majestic Literary
Fossil”--[Harper’s Magazine, February, 1890. Included in the “Complete
Works.”]--Clemens was writing nothing of importance at this time.
This article grew out of a curious old medical work containing absurd
prescriptions which, with Theodore Crane, he had often laughed over at
the farm. A sequel to Huckleberry Finn--Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among
the Indians--was begun, and a number of its chapters were set in type
on the new Paige compositor, which had cost such a gallant sum, and
was then thought to be complete. There seems to have been a plan to
syndicate the story, but at the end of Chapter IX Huck and Tom had
got themselves into a predicament from which it seemed impossible to
extricate them, and the plot was suspended for further inspiration,
which apparently never came.

Clemens, in fact, was troubled with rheumatism in his arm and shoulder,
which made writing difficult. Mrs. Clemens, too, had twinges of the
malady. They planned to go abroad for the summer of 1890, to take the
waters of some of the German baths, but they were obliged to give up
the idea. There were too many business complications; also the health
of Clemens’s mother had become very feeble. They went to Tannersville in
the Catskills, instead--to the Onteora Club, where Mrs. Candace Wheeler
had gathered a congenial colony in a number of picturesque cottages,
with a comfortable hotel for the more transient visitor. The Clemenses
secured a cottage for the season. Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, Laurence
Hutton, Carroll Beckwith, the painter; Brander Matthews, Dr. Heber
Newton, Mrs. Custer, and Dora Wheeler were among those who welcomed Mark
Twain and his family at a generous home-made banquet.

It was the beginning of a happy summer. There was a constant visiting
from one cottage to another, with frequent assemblings at the Bear and
Fox Inn, their general headquarters. There were pantomimes and charades,
in which Mark Twain and his daughters always had star parts. Susy
Clemens, who was now eighteen, brilliant and charming, was beginning
to rival her father as a leader of entertainment. Her sister Clara gave
impersonations of Modjeska and Ada Rehan. When Fourth of July came there
were burlesque races, of which Mark Twain was starter, and many of that
lighthearted company took part. Sometimes, in the evening, they gathered
in one of the cottages and told stories by the firelight, and once he
told the story of the Golden Arm, so long remembered, and brought
them up with the same old jump at the sudden climax. Brander Matthews
remembers that Clemens was obliged frequently to go to New York on
business connected with the machine and the publishing, and that during
one of these absences a professional entertainer came along, and in the
course of his program told a Mark Twain story, at which Mrs. Clemens
and the girls laughed without recognizing its authorship. Matthews also
remembers Jean, as a little girl of ten, allowed to ride a pony and
to go barefoot, to her great delight, full of health and happiness, a
favorite of the colony.

Clemens would seem to have forgiven Brander Matthews for his copyright
articles, for he walked over to the Matthews cottage one morning and
asked to be taught piquet, the card game most in vogue there that
season. At odd times he sat to Carroll Beckwith for his portrait, and
smoked a cob pipe meantime, so Beckwith painted him in that way.

It was a season that closed sadly. Clemens was called to Keokuk in
August, to his mother’s bedside, for it was believed that her end
was near. She rallied, and he returned to Onteora. But on the 27th of
October came the close of that long, active life, and the woman who two
generations before had followed John Clemens into the wilderness, and
along the path of vicissitude, was borne by her children to Hannibal and
laid to rest at his side. She was in her eighty-eighth year.

The Clemens family were back in Hartford by this time, and it was only a
little later that Mrs. Clemens was summoned to the death-bed of her
own mother, in Elmira. Clemens accompanied her, but Jean being taken
suddenly ill he returned to Hartford. Watching by the little girl’s
bedside on the night of the 27th of November, he wrote Mrs. Clemens a
birthday letter, telling of Jean’s improved condition and sending other
good news and as many loving messages as he could devise. But it proved
a sad birthday for Mrs. Clemens, for on that day her mother’s gentle and
beautiful soul went out from among them. The foreboding she had felt at
the passing of Theodore Crane had been justified. She had a dread that
the harvest of death was not yet ended. Matters in general were going
badly with them, and an anxiety began to grow to get away from America,
and so perhaps leave sorrow and ill-luck behind. Clemens, near the end
of December, writing to his publishing manager, Hall, said:

    Merry Christmas to you, and I wish to God I could have one myself
    before I die.

The house was emptier that winter than before, for Susy was at Bryn
Mawr. Clemens planned some literary work, but the beginning, after his
long idleness, was hard. A diversion was another portrait of himself,
this time undertaken by Charles Noel Flagg. Clemens rather enjoyed
portrait-sittings. He could talk and smoke, and he could incidentally
acquire information. He liked to discuss any man’s profession with him,
and in his talks with Flagg he made a sincere effort to get that insight
which would enable him to appreciate the old masters. Flagg found him
a tractable sitter, and a most interesting one. Once he paid him a
compliment, then apologized for having said the obvious thing.

“Never mind the apology,” said Clemens. “The compliment that helps us on
our way is not the one that is shut up in the mind, but the one that is
spoken out.”

When Flagg’s portrait was about completed, Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Crane
came to the studio to look at it. Mrs. Clemens complained only that the
necktie was crooked.

“But it’s always crooked,” said Flagg, “and I have a great fancy for the
line it makes.”

She straightened it on Clemens himself, but it immediately became
crooked again. Clemens said:

“If you were to make that necktie straight people would say; ‘Good
portrait, but there is something the matter with it. I don’t know where
it is.’”

The tie was left unchanged.



CLXXIV. THE MACHINE

The reader may have realized that by the beginning of 1891 Mark Twain’s
finances were in a critical condition. The publishing business had
managed to weather along. It was still profitable, and could have been
made much more so if the capital necessary to its growth had not been
continuously and relentlessly absorbed by that gigantic vampire of
inventions--that remorseless Frankenstein monster--the machine.

The beginning of this vast tragedy (for it was no less than that) dated
as far back as 1880, when Clemens one day had taken a minor and purely
speculative interest in patent rights, which was to do away with setting
type by hand. In some memoranda which he made more than ten years later,
when the catastrophe was still a little longer postponed, he gave some
account of the matter.

    This episode has now spread itself over more than one-fifth of my
    life, a considerable stretch of time, as I am now 55 years old.

    Ten or eleven years ago Dwight Buell, a jeweler, called at our house
    and was shown up to the billiard-room-which was my study; and the
    game got more study than the other sciences. He wanted me to take
    some stock in a type-setting machine. He said it was at the Colt’s
    Arms factory, and was about finished. I took $2,000 of the stock.
    I was always taking little chances like that, and almost always
    losing by it, too. Some time afterward I was invited to go down to
    the factory and see the machine. I went, promising myself nothing,
    for I knew all about type-setting by practical experience, and held
    the settled and solidified opinion that a successful type-setting
    machine was an impossibility, for the reason that a machine cannot
    be made to think, and the thing that sets movable type must think or
    retire defeated. So, the performance I witnessed did most
    thoroughly amaze me. Here was a machine that was really setting
    type, and doing it with swiftness and accuracy, too. Moreover, it
    was distributing its case at the same time. The distribution was
    automatic; the machine fed itself from a galley of dead matter and
    without human help or suggestion, for it began its work of its own
    accord when the type channels needed filling, and stopped of its own
    accord when they were full enough. The machine was almost a
    complete compositor; it lacked but one feature--it did not “justify”
     the lines. This was done by the operator’s assistant.

    I saw the operator set at the rate of 3,000 ems an hour, which,
    counting distribution, was but little short of four casemen’s work.
    William Hamersley was there. He said he was already a considerable
    owner, and was going to take as much more of the stock as he could
    afford. Wherefore, I set down my name for an additional $3,000. It
    is here that the music begins.

It was the so-called Farnham machine that he saw, invented by James W.
Paige, and if they had placed it on the market then, without waiting
for the inventor to devise improvements, the story might have been
a different one. But Paige was never content short of absolute
perfection--a machine that was not only partly human, but entirely
so. Clemens’ used to say later that the Paige type-setter would do
everything that a human being could do except drink and swear and go
on a strike. He might properly have omitted the last item, but of that
later. Paige was a small, bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed man, with
a crystal-clear mind, but a dreamer and a visionary. Clemens says
of him: “He is a poet; a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime
creations are written in steel.”

It is easy to see now that Mark Twain and Paige did not make a good
business combination. When Paige declared that, wonderful as the machine
was, he could do vastly greater things with it, make it worth many more
and much larger fortunes by adding this attachment and that, Clemens
was just the man to enter into his dreams and to furnish the money to
realize them. Paige did not require much money at first, and on the
capital already invested he tinkered along with his improvements for
something like four or five years; Hamersley and Clemens meantime
capitalizing the company and getting ready to place the perfected
invention on the market. By the time the Grant episode had ended Clemens
had no reason to believe but that incalculable wealth lay just ahead,
when the newspapers should be apprised of the fact that their types were
no longer to be set by hand. Several contracts had been made with Paige,
and several new attachments had been added to the machine. It seemed to
require only one thing more, the justifier, which would save the labor
of the extra man. Paige could be satisfied with nothing short of that,
even though the extra man’s wage was unimportant. He must have his
machine do it all, and meantime five precious years had slipped away.
Clemens, in his memoranda, says:

    End of 1885. Paige arrives at my house unheralded. I had seen
    little or nothing of him for a year or two. He said:

    “What will you complete the machine for?”

    “What will it cost?”

    “Twenty thousand dollars; certainly not over $30,000.”

    “What will you give?”

    “I’ll give you half.”

Clemens was “flush” at this time. His reading tour with Cable, the great
sale of Huck Finn, the prospect of the Grant book, were rosy realities.
He said:

    “I’ll do it, but the limit must be $30,000.”

They agreed to allow Hamersley a tenth interest for the money he had
already invested and for legal advice.

Hamersley consented readily enough, and when in February, 1886, the new
contract was drawn they believed themselves heir to the millions of the
Fourth Estate.

By this time F. G. Whitmore had come into Clemens’s business affairs,
and he did not altogether approve of the new contract. Among other
things, it required that Clemens should not only complete the machine,
but promote it, capitalize it commercially. Whitmore said:

“Mr. Clemens, that clause can bankrupt you.”

Clemens answered: “Never mind that, Whitmore; I’ve considered that. I
can get a thousand men worth a million apiece to go in with me if I can
get a perfect machine.”

He immediately began to calculate the number of millions he would be
worth presently when the machine was completed and announced to the
waiting world. He covered pages with figures that never ran short of
millions, and frequently approached the billion mark. Colonel Sellers in
his happiest moments never dreamed more lavishly. He obtained a list of
all the newspapers in the United States and in Europe, and he counted up
the machines that would be required by each. To his nephew, Sam Moffett,
visiting him one day, he declared that it would take ten men to count
the profits from the typesetter. He realized clearly enough that a
machine which would set and distribute type and do the work of half a
dozen men or more would revolutionize type composition. The fact that
other inventors besides Paige were working quite as diligently and
perhaps toward more simple conclusions did not disturb him. Rumors
came of the Rogers machine and the Thorne machine and the Mergenthaler
linotype, but Mark Twain only smiled. When the promoters of the
Mergenthaler offered to exchange half their interests for a half
interest in the Paige patent, to obtain thereby a wider insurance of
success, it only confirmed his trust, and he let the golden opportunity
go by.

Clemens thinks the thirty thousand dollars lasted about a year. Then
Paige confessed that the machine was still incomplete, but he said that
four thousand dollars more would finish it, and that with ten thousand
dollars he could finish it and give a big exhibition in New York. He had
discarded the old machine altogether, it seems, and at Pratt & Whitney’s
shops was building a new one from the ground up--a machine of twenty
thousand minutely exact parts, each of which must be made by expert hand
workmanship after elaborate drawings and patterns even more expensive.
It was an undertaking for a millionaire.

Paige offered to borrow from Clemens the amount needed, offering the
machine as security. Clemens supplied the four thousand dollars, and
continued to advance money from time to time at the rate of three
to four thousand dollars a month, until he had something like eighty
thousand dollars invested, with the machine still unfinished. This would
be early in 1888, by which time other machines had reached a state of
completion and were being placed on the market. The Mergenthaler, in
particular, was attracting wide attention. Paige laughed at it, and
Clemens, too, regarded it as a joke. The moment their machine was
complete all other machines would disappear. Even the fact that the
Tribune had ordered twenty-three of the linotypes, and other journals
were only waiting to see the paper in its new dress before ordering,
did not disturb them. Those linotypes would all go into the scrap-heap
presently. It was too bad people would waste their money so. In January,
1888, Paige promised that the machine would be done by the 1st of April.
On the 1st of April he promised it for September, but in October he
acknowledged there were still eighty-five days’ work to be done on it.
In November Clemens wrote to Orion:

The machine is apparently almost done--but I take no privileges on that
account; it must be done before I spend a cent that can be avoided. I
have kept this family on very short commons for two years and they must
go on scrimping until the machine is finished, no matter how long that
may be.

By the end of ‘88 the income from the books and the business and Mrs.
Clemens’s Elmira investments no longer satisfied the demands of the
type-setter, in addition to the household expense, reduced though
the latter was; and Clemens began by selling and hypothecating his
marketable securities. The whole household interest by this time
centered in the machine. What the Tennessee land had been to John and
Jane Clemens and their children, the machine had now become to Samuel
Clemens and his family. “When the machine is finished everything will be
all right again” afforded the comfort of that long-ago sentence, “When
the Tennessee land is sold.”

They would have everything they wanted then. Mrs. Clemens planned
benefactions, as was her wont. Once she said to her sister:

“How strange it will seem to have unlimited means, to be able to do
whatever you want to do, to give whatever you want to give without
counting the cost.”

Straight along through another year the three thousand dollars and more
a month continued, and then on the 5th of January, 1889, there came what
seemed the end--the machine and justifier were complete! In his notebook
on that day Mark Twain set down this memorandum:

                       EUREKA!

    Saturday, January 5, 1889-12.20 P.M. At this moment I have seen a
    line of movable type spaced and justified by machinery! This is the
    first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has
    ever been done. Present:
    J. W. Paige, the inventor;
    Charles Davis, | Mathematical assistants
    Earll          | & mechanical
    Graham         | experts
    Bates, foreman, and S. L. Clemens.
    This record is made immediately after the prodigious event.

Two days later he made another note:

    Monday, January 7--4.45 P.m. The first proper name ever set by this
    new keyboard was William Shakspeare. I set it at the above hour; &
    I perceive, now that I see the name written, that I either
    misspelled it then or I’ve misspelled it now.

    The space-bar did its duty by the electric connections & steam &
    separated the two words preparatory to the reception of the space.

It seemed to him that his troubles were at an end. He wrote overflowing
letters, such as long ago he had written about his first mining claims,
to Orion and to other members of the family and to friends in America
and Europe. One of these letters, written to George Standring, a London
printer and publisher, also an author, will serve as an example.

    The machine is finished! An hour and forty minutes ago a line of
    movable type was spaced and justified by machinery for the first
    time in the history of the world. And I was there to see.

    That was the final function. I had before seen the machine set
    type, automatically, and distribute type, and automatically
    distribute its eleven different thicknesses of spaces. So now I
    have seen the machine, operated by one individual, do the whole
    thing, and do it a deal better than any man at the case can do it.

    This is by far and away the most marvelous invention ever contrived
    by man. And it is not a thing of rags and patches; it is made of
    massive steel, and will last a century.

    She will do the work of six men, and do it better than any six men
    that ever stood at a case.

    The death-warrant of all other type-setting machines in this world
    was signed at 12.20 this afternoon, when that first line was shot
    through this machine and came out perfectly spaced and justified.
    And automatically, mind you.

    There was a speck of invisible dirt on one of those nonpareil types.
    Well, the machine allowed for that by inserting of its own accord a
    space which was the 5-1,000 of an inch thinner than it would have
    used if the dirt had been absent. But when I send you the details
    you will see that that’s nothing for this machine to do; you’ll see
    that it knows more and has got more brains than all the printers in
    the world put together.

His letter to Orion was more technical, also more jubilant. At the end
he said:

    All the witnesses made written record of the immense historical
    birth--the first justification of a line of movable type by
    machinery--& also set down the hour and the minute. Nobody had
    drank anything, & yet everybody seemed drunk. Well-dizzy,
    stupefied, stunned.

    All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty
    nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical
    miracle. Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton-gins, sewing-
    machines, Babbage calculators, jacquard looms, perfecting presses,
    all mere toys, simplicities! The Paige Compositor marches alone and
    far in the land of human inventions.

In one paragraph of Orion’s letter he refers to the machine as a
“cunning devil, knowing more than any man that ever lived.” That was
a profound truth, though not as he intended it. That creation of
James Paige’s brain reflected all the ingenuity and elusiveness of
its creator, and added something on its own account. It was discovered
presently that it had a habit of breaking the types. Paige said it was
a trifling thing: he could fix it, but it meant taking down the machine,
and that deadly expense of three thousand or four thousand dollars a
month for the band of workmen and experts in Pratt & Whitney’s machine
shops did not cease. In February the machine was again setting and
justifying type “to a hair,” and Whitmore’s son, Fred, was running it
at a rate of six thousand ems an hour, a rate of composition hitherto
unknown in the history of the world. His speed was increased to eight
thousand ems an hour by the end of the year, and the machine was
believed to have a capacity of eleven thousand. No type-setter invented
to this day could match it for accuracy and precision when it was in
perfect order, but its point of perfection was apparently a vanishing
point. It would be just reached, when it would suddenly disappear,
and Paige would discover other needed corrections. Once, when it was
apparently complete as to every detail; and running like a human thing,
with such important customers as the New York Herald and other great
papers ready to place their orders, Paige suddenly discovered that it
required some kind of an air-blast, and it was all taken down again and
the air-blast, which required months to invent and perfect, was added.

But what is the use of remembering all these bitter details? The steady
expense went on through another year, apparently increasing instead of
diminishing, until, by the beginning of 1890, Clemens was finding
it almost impossible to raise funds to continue the work. Still he
struggled on. It was the old mining fascination--“a foot farther into
the ledge and we shall strike the vein of gold.”

He sent for Joe Goodman to come and help him organize a capital-stock
company, in which Senator Jones and John Mackay, old Comstock friends,
were to be represented. He never for a moment lost faith in the final
outcome, and he believed that if they could build their own factory
the delays and imperfections of construction would be avoided. Pratt &
Whitney had been obliged to make all the parts by hand. With their own
factory the new company would have vast and perfect machinery dedicated
entirely to the production of type-setters.

Nothing short of two million dollars capitalization was considered,
and Goodman made at least three trips from California to the East and
labored with Jones and Mackay all that winter and at intervals during
the following year, through which that “cunning devil,” the machine,
consumed its monthly four thousand dollars--money that was the final
gleanings and sweepings of every nook and corner of the strong-box and
bank-account and savings of the Clemens family resources. With all of
Mark Twain’s fame and honors his life at this period was far from an
enviable one. It was, in fact, a fevered delirium, often a veritable
nightmare.

Reporters who approached him for interviews, little guessing what he was
passing through, reported that Mark Twain’s success in life had made him
crusty and sour.

Goodman remembers that when they were in Washington, conferring with
Jones, and had rooms at the Arlington, opening together, often in the
night he would awaken to see a light burning in the next room and to
hear Mark Twain’s voice calling:

“Joe, are you awake?”

“Yes, Mark, what is it?”

“Oh, nothing, only I can’t sleep. Won’t you talk awhile? I know it’s
wrong to disturb you, but I am so d--d miserable that I can’t help it.”

Whereupon he would get up and talk and talk, and pace the floor and
curse the delays until he had refreshed himself, and then perhaps wallow
in millions until breakfast-time.

Jones and Mackay, deeply interested, were willing to put up a reasonable
amount of money, but they were unable to see a profit in investing so
large a capital in a plant for constructing the machines.

Clemens prepared estimates showing that the American business alone
would earn thirty-five million dollars a year, and the European business
twenty million dollars more. These dazzled, but they did not convince
the capitalists. Jones was sincerely anxious to see the machine succeed,
and made an engagement to come out to see it work, but a day or
two before he was to come Paige was seized with an inspiration. The
type-setter was all in parts when the day came, and Jones’s visit had to
be postponed. Goodman wrote that the fatal delay had “sicklied over the
bloom” of Jones’s original enthusiasm.

Yet Clemens seems never to have been openly violent with Paige. In the
memorandum which he completed about this time he wrote:

    Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he
    knows perfectly well that if I had him in a steel trap I would shut
    out all human succor and watch that trap until he died.

He was grabbing at straws now. He offered a twentieth or a hundredth or
a thousandth part of the enterprise for varying sums, ranging from one
thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. He tried to capitalize his
advance (machine) royalties, and did dispose of a few of these; but
when the money came in for them he was beset by doubts as to the final
outcome, and though at his wit’s ends for further funds, he returned the
checks to the friends who had sent them. One five-thousand-dollar check
from a friend named Arnot, in Elmira, went back by the next mail. He
was willing to sacrifice his own last penny, but he could not take money
from those who were blindly backing his judgment only and not their
own. He still had faith in Jones, faith which lasted up to the 13th of
February, 1891. Then came a final letter, in which Jones said that he
had canvassed the situation thoroughly with such men as Mackay, Don
Cameron, Whitney, and others, with the result that they would have
nothing to do with the machine. Whitney and Cameron, he said, were large
stockholders in the Mergenthaler. Jones put it more kindly and more
politely than that, and closed by saying that there could be no doubt as
to the machine’s future an ambiguous statement. A letter from young
Hall came about the same time, urging a heavy increase of capital in the
business. The Library of American Literature, its leading feature, was
handled on the instalment plan. The collections from this source were
deferred driblets, while the bills for manufacture and promotion must
be paid down in cash. Clemens realized that for the present at least the
dream was ended. The family securities were exhausted. The book trade
was dull; his book royalties were insufficient even to the demands of
the household. He signed further notes to keep business going, left the
matter of the machine in abeyance, and turned once more to the trade of
authorship. He had spent in the neighborhood of one hundred and ninety
thousand dollars on the typesetter--money that would better have been
thrown into the Connecticut River, for then the agony had been more
quickly over. As it was, it had shadowed many precious years.



CLXXV. “THE CLAIMANT”--LEAVING HARTFORD

For the first time in twenty years Mark Twain was altogether dependent
on literature. He did not feel mentally unequal to the new problem; in
fact, with his added store of experience, he may have felt himself more
fully equipped for authorship than ever before. It had been his habit to
write within his knowledge and observation. To a correspondent of this
time he reviewed his stock in trade--

   ... I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when
    pretending to portray life. But I confined myself to the boy-life
    out on the Mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and
    not because I was not familiar with other phases of life. I was a
    soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted
    like a rat the whole time. Familiar? My splendid Kipling himself
    hasn’t a more burnt-in, hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity
    with that death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which
    is a raw soldier’s first fortnight in the field--and which, without
    any doubt, is the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is
    ever going to see.

    Yes, and I have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple
    of weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that
    direction. And I’ve done “pocket-mining” during three months in the
    one little patch of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals
    gold in pockets--or did before we robbed all of those pockets and
    exhausted, obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak Nature
    ever indulged in. There are not thirty men left alive who, being
    told there was a pocket hidden on the broad slope of a mountain,
    would know how to go and find it, or have even the faintest idea of
    how to set about it; but I am one of the possible 20 or 30 who
    possess the secret, and I could go and put my hand on that hidden
    treasure with a most deadly precision.

    And I’ve been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when I find
    it--just with a touch of the tongue. And I’ve been a silver miner
    and know how to dig and shovel and drill and put in a blast. And so
    I know the mines and the miners interiorly as well as Bret Harte
    knows them exteriorly.

    And I was a newspaper reporter four years in cities, and so saw the
    inside of many things; and was reporter in a legislature two
    sessions and the same in Congress one session, and thus learned to
    know personally three sample bodies of the smallest minds and the
    selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.

    And I was some years a Mississippi pilot, and familiarly knew all
    the different kinds of steamboatmen--a race apart, and not like
    other folk.

    And I was for some years a traveling “jour” printer, and wandered
    from city to city--and so I know that sect familiarly.

    And I was a lecturer on the public platform a number of seasons and
    was a responder to toasts at all the different kinds of banquets
    --and so I know a great many secrets about audiences--secrets not to
    be got out of books, but only acquirable by experience.

    And I watched over one dear project of mine for years, spent a
    fortune on it, and failed to make it go--and the history of that
    would make a large book in which a million men would see themselves
    as in a mirror; and they would testify and say, Verily, this is not
    imagination; this fellow has been there--and after would they cast
    dust upon their heads, cursing and blaspheming.

    And I am a publisher, and did pay to one author’s widow (General
    Grant’s) the largest copyright checks this world has seen
    --aggregating more than L80,000 in the first year.

    And I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.

    Now then: as the most valuable capital or culture or education
    usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to
    be well equipped for that trade.

    I surely have the equipment, a wide culture, and all of it real,
    none of it artificial, for I don’t know anything about books.

This generous bill of literary particulars was fully warranted. Mark
Twain’s equipment was equal to his occasions. It is true that he was no
longer young, and that his health was not perfect, but his resolution
and his energy had not waned.

His need was imminent and he lost no time. He dug out from his
pigeonholes such materials as he had in stock, selecting a few completed
manuscripts for immediate disposal--among them his old article entitled,
“Mental Telegraphy,” written in 1878, when he had hesitated to offer it,
in the fear that it would not be accepted by the public otherwise than
as a joke. He added to it now a supplement and sent it to Mr. Alden, of
Harper’s Magazine.

Psychic interest had progressed in twelve years; also Mark Twain had
come to be rather more seriously regarded. The article was accepted
promptly!--[The publication of this article created a good deal of a
stir and resulted in the first general recognition of what later became
known as Telepathy. A good many readers insisted on regarding the whole
matter as one of Mark Twain’s jokes, but its serious acceptance was
much wider.]--The old sketch, “Luck,” also found its way to Harper’s
Magazine, and other manuscripts were looked over and furbished up with a
view to their disposal. Even the history game was dragged from the dust
of its retirement, and Hall was instructed to investigate its chance of
profit.

Then Mark Twain went to work in earnest. Within a week after the
collapse of the Jones bubble he was hard at work on a new book--the
transmigration of the old “Claimant” play into a novel.

Ever since the appearance of the Yankee there had been what was
evidently a concerted movement to induce him to write a novel with
the theories of Henry George as the central idea. Letters from every
direction had urged him to undertake such a story, and these had
suggested a more serious purpose for the Claimant book. A motif in which
there is a young lord who renounces his heritage and class to come to
America and labor with his hands; who attends socialistic meetings at
which men inspired by readings of ‘Progress and Poverty’ and ‘Looking
Backward’ address their brothers of toil, could have in it something
worth while. Clemens inserted portions of some of his discarded essays
in these addresses, and had he developed this element further, and
abandoned Colonel Sellers’s materialization lunacies to the oblivion
they had earned, the result might have been more fortunate.

But his faith in the new Sellers had never died, and the temptation
to use scenes from the abandoned play proved to be too strong to be
resisted. The result was incongruous enough. The author, however,
admired it amazingly at the time. He sent Howells stirring reports of
his progress. He wrote Hall that the book would be ready soon and that
there must be seventy-five thousand orders by the date of issue, “not
a single one short of that.” Then suddenly, at the end of February, the
rheumatism came back into his shoulder and right arm and he could hardly
hold the pen. He conceived the idea of dictating into a phonograph, and
wrote Howells to test this invention and find out as to terms for three
months, with cylinders enough to carry one hundred and seventy-five
thousand words.

    I don’t want to erase any of them. My right arm is nearly disabled
    by rheumatism, but I am bound to write this book (and sell 100,000
    copies of it-no, I mean 1,000,000--next fall). I feel sure I can
    dictate the book into a phonograph if I don’t have to yell. I write
    2,000 words a day. I think I can dictate twice as many.

    But mind, if this is going to be too much trouble to you--go ahead
    and do it all the same.

Howells replied encouragingly. He had talked a letter into a phonograph
and the phonograph man had talked his answer into it, after which the
cylinder had been taken to a typewriter in the-next room and correctly
written out. If a man had the “cheek” to dictate his story into a
phonograph, Howells said, all the rest seemed perfectly easy.

Clemens ordered a phonograph and gave it a pretty fair trial. It was
only a partial success. He said he couldn’t write literature with it
because it hadn’t any ideas or gift for elaboration, but was just as
matter-of-fact, compressive and unresponsive, grave and unsmiling as the
devil--a poor audience.

I filled four dozen cylinders in two sittings, then I found I could have
said it about as easy with the pen, and said it a deal better. Then I
resigned.

He did not immediately give it up. To relieve his aching arm he
alternated the phonograph with the pen, and the work progressed rapidly.
Early in May he was arranging for its serial disposition, and it was
eventually sold for twelve thousand dollars to the McClure Syndicate,
who placed it with a number of papers in America and with the Idler
Magazine in England. W. M. Laffan, of the Sun, an old and tried friend,
combined with McClure in the arrangement. Laffan also proposed to join
with McClure in paying Mark Twain a thousand dollars each for a series
of six European letters. This was toward the end of May, 1891, when
Clemens had already decided upon a long European sojourn.

There were several reasons why this was desirable. Neither Clemens nor
his wife was in good health. Both of them were troubled with rheumatism,
and a council of physicians had agreed that Mrs. Clemens had some
disturbance of the heart. The death of Charles L. Webster in April--the
fourth death among relatives in two years--had renewed her forebodings.
Susy, who had been at Bryn Mawr, had returned far from well. The
European baths and the change of travel it was believed would be
beneficial to the family health. Furthermore, the maintenance of the
Hartford home was far too costly for their present and prospective
income. The house with its associations of seventeen incomparable years
must be closed. A great period had ended.

They arranged to sail on the 6th of June by the French line.--[On the
Gascogne.]--Mrs. Crane was to accompany them, and came over in April to
help in breaking the news to the servants. John and Ellen O’Neill (the
gardener and his wife) were to remain in charge; places were found for
George and Patrick. Katie Leary was retained to accompany the family. It
was a sad dissolution.

The day came for departure and the carriage was at the door. Mrs.
Clemens did not come immediately. She was looking into the rooms,
bidding a kind of silent good-by to the home she had made and to all
its memories. Following the others she entered the carriage, and Patrick
McAleer drove them together for the last time. They were going on a long
journey. They did not guess how long, or that the place would never be
home to them again.



CLXXVI. A EUROPEAN SUMMER

They landed at Havre and went directly to Paris, where they remained
about a week. From Paris Clemens wrote to Hall that a deal by which he
had hoped to sell out his interest in the type-setter to the Mallorys,
of the Churchman, had fallen through.

“Therefore,” he said, “you will have to modify your instalment system
to meet the emergency of a constipated purse; for if you should need to
borrow any more money I would not know how or where to raise it.”

The Clemens party went to Geneva, then rested for a time at the baths
of Aix; from Aix to Bayreuth to attend the Wagner festival, and from
Bayreuth to Marienbad for further additions of health. Clemens began
writing his newspaper letters at Aix, the first of which consists of
observations at that “paradise of rheumatics.” This letter is really a
careful and faithful description of Aix-les-Bains, with no particular
drift of humor in it. He tells how in his own case the baths at first
developed plenty of pain, but that the subsequent ones removed almost
all of it.

“I’ve got back the use of my arm the last few days, and I am going away
now,” he says, and concludes by describing the beautiful drives and
scenery about Aix--the pleasures to be found paddling on little Lake
Bourget and the happy excursions to Annecy.

    At the end of an hour you come to Annecy and rattle through its old
    crooked lanes, built solidly up with curious old houses that are a
    dream of the Middle Ages, and presently you come to the main object
    of your trip--Lake Annecy. It is a revelation. It is a miracle.
    It brings the tears to a body’s eyes. It is so enchanting. That is
    to say, it affects you just as all other things that you instantly
    recognize as perfect affect you--perfect music, perfect eloquence,
    perfect art, perfect joy, perfect grief.

He was getting back into his old descriptive swing, but his dislike
for travel was against him, and he found writing the letters hard.
From Bayreuth he wrote “At the Shrine of St. Wagner,” one of the best
descriptions of that great musical festival that has been put into
words. He paid full tribute to the performance, also to the Wagner
devotion, confessing its genuineness.

    This opera of “Tristan and Isolde” last night broke the hearts of
    all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some, and have
    heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night
    away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the
    one sane person in the community of the mad; sometimes I feel like
    the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in
    the college of the learned, and always during service I feel like a
    heretic in heaven.

He tells how he really enjoyed two of the operas, and rejoiced in
supposing that his musical regeneration was accomplished and perfected;
but alas! he was informed by experts that those particular events were
not real music at all. Then he says:

    Well, I ought to have recognized the sign the old, sure sign that
    has never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in
    art it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this
    fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of
    many and many a chromo. However, my base instinct does bring me
    profit sometimes; I was the only man out of 3,200 who got his money
    back on those two operas.

His third letter was from Marienbad, in Bohemia, another
“health-factory,” as he calls it, and is of the same general character
as those preceding. In his fourth letter he told how he himself took
charge of the family fortunes and became courier from Aix to Bayreuth.
It is a very delightful letter, most of it, and probably not greatly
burlesqued or exaggerated in its details. It is included now in the
“Complete Works,” as fresh and delightful as ever. They returned to
Germany at the end of August, to Nuremberg, which he notes as the “city
of exquisite glimpses,” and to Heidelberg, where they had their old
apartment of thirteen years before, Room 40 at the Schloss Hotel, with
its wonderful prospect of wood and hill, and the haze-haunted valley of
the Rhine. They remained less than a week in that beautiful place, and
then were off for Switzerland, Lucerne, Brienz, Interlaken, finally
resting at the Hotel Beau Rivage, Ouchy, Lausanne, on beautiful Lake
Leman.

Clemens had agreed to write six of the newspaper letters, and he had by
this time finished five of them, the fifth being dated from Interlaken,
its subject, “Switzerland, the Cradle of Liberty.” He wrote to Hall that
it was his intention to write another book of travel and to take a year
or two to collect the material. The Century editors were after him for
a series after the style of Innocents Abroad. He considered this
suggestion, but declined by cable, explaining to Hall that he intended
to write for serial publication no more than the six newspaper letters.
He said:

    To write a book of travel would be less trouble than to write six
    detached chapters. Each of these letters requires the same variety
    of treatment and subject that one puts into a book; but in the book
    each chapter doesn’t have to be rounded and complete in itself.

He suggested that the six letters be gathered into a small volume which
would contain about thirty-five or forty thousand words, to be sold as
low as twenty-five cents, but this idea appears to have been dropped.

At Ouchy Clemens conceived the idea of taking a little trip on his own
account, an excursion that would be a rest after the strenuous three
months’ travel and sightseeing--one that he could turn into literature.
He engaged Joseph Very, a courier used during their earlier European
travels, and highly recommended in the Tramp Abroad. He sent Joseph over
to Lake Bourget to engage a boat and a boatman for a ten days’ trip
down the river Rhone. For five dollars Joseph bought a safe, flat-bottom
craft; also he engaged the owner as pilot. A few days later--September
19--Clemens followed. They stopped overnight on an island in Lake
Bourget, and in his notes Clemens tells how he slept in the old castle
of Chatillon, in the room where a pope was born. They started on their
drift next morning. To Mrs. Clemens, in some good-by memoranda, he said:

    The lake is as smooth as glass; a brilliant sun is shining.

    Our boat is so comfortable and shady with its awning.

    11.20. We have crossed the lake and are entering the canal. Shall
    presently be in the Rhone.

    Noon. Nearly down to the Rhone, passing the village of Chanaz.

    Sunday, 3.15 P.M. We have been in the Rhone three hours. It
    is unimaginably still & reposeful & cool & soft & breezy. No rowing
    or work of any kind to do--we merely float with the current we glide
    noiseless and swift--as fast as a London cab-horse rips along--8
    miles an hour--the swiftest current I’ve ever boated in. We have the
    entire river to ourselves nowhere a boat of any kind.

Pleasant it must have been in the warm September days to go swinging
down that swift, gray stream which comes racing out of Switzerland into
France, fed from a thousand glaciers. He sent almost daily memoranda of
his progress. Half-way to Arles he wrote:

    It’s too delicious, floating with the swift current under the
    awning these superb, sunshiny days in deep peace and quietness.

    Some of these curious old historical towns strangely persuade me,
    but it is so lovely afloat that I don’t stop, but view them from the
    outside and sail on. We get abundance of grapes and peaches for
    next to nothing. My, but that inn was suffocating with garlic where
    we stayed last night! I had to hold my nose as we went up-stairs or
    I believe I should have fainted.

    Little bit of a room, rude board floor unswept, 2 chairs, unpainted
    white pine table--void the furniture! Had a good firm bed, solid as
    a rock, & you could have brained an ox with the bolster.

    These six hours have been entirely delightful. I want to do all the
    rivers of Europe in an open boat in summer weather.

    Still further along he described one of their shore accommodations.

    Night caught us yesterday where we had to take quarters in a
    peasant’s house which was occupied by the family and a lot of cows &
    calves, also several rabbits.--[His word for fleas. Neither fleas
    nor mosquitoes ever bit him--probably because of his steady use of
    tobacco.]--The latter had a ball & I was the ballroom; but they
    were very friendly and didn’t bite.

    The peasants were mighty kind and hearty & flew around & did their
    best to make us comfortable. This morning I breakfasted on the
    shore in the open air with two sociable dogs & a cat. Clean cloth,
    napkins & table furniture, white sugar, a vast hunk of excellent
    butter, good bread, first-class coffee with pure milk, fried fish
    just caught. Wonderful that so much cleanliness should come out of
    such a phenomenally dirty house.

    An hour ago we saw the Falls of the Rhone, a prodigiously rough and
    dangerous-looking place; shipped a little water, but came to no
    harm. It was one of the most beautiful pieces of piloting & boat
    management I ever saw. Our admiral knew his business.

    We have had to run ashore for shelter every time it has rained
    heretofore, but Joseph has been putting in his odd time making a
    waterproof sun-bonnet for the boat, & now we sail along dry,
    although we have had many heavy showers this morning.

Here follows a pencil-drawing of the boat and its new awning, and he
adds: “I’m on the stern, under the shelter, and out of sight.”

The trip down the Rhone proved more valuable as an outing than as
literary material. Clemens covered one hundred and seventy-four pages
with his notes of it, then gave it up. Traveling alone with no one but
Joseph and the Admiral (former owner of the craft) was reposeful and
satisfactory, but it did not inspire literary flights. He tried to
rectify the lack of companionship by introducing fictitious characters,
such as Uncle Abner, Fargo, and Stavely, a young artist; also Harris,
from the Tramp Abroad; but Harris was not really there this time, and
Mark Twain’s genius, given rather to elaboration than to construction,
found it too severe a task to imagine a string of adventures without at
least the customary ten per cent. of fact to build upon.

It was a day above Avignon that he had an experience worth while. They
were abreast of an old castle, nearing a village, one of the huddled
jumble of houses of that locality, when, glancing over his left shoulder
toward the distant mountain range, he received what he referred to later
as a soul-stirring shock. Pointing to the outline of the distant range
he said to the courier:

“Name it. Who is it?”

The courier said, “Napoleon.”

Clemens assented. The Admiral, when questioned, also promptly agreed
that the mountain outlined was none other than the reclining figure of
the great commander himself. They watched and discussed the phenomenon
until they reached the village. Next morning Clemens was up for a first
daybreak glimpse of his discovery. Later he reported it to Mrs. Clemens:

    I did so long for you and Sue yesterday morning--the most superb
    sunrise--the most marvelous sunrise--& I saw it all, from the very
    faintest suspicion of the coming dawn, all the way through to the
    final explosion of glory. But it had an interest private to itself
    & not to be found elsewhere in the world; for between me & it, in
    the far-distant eastward, was a silhouetted mountain range, in which
    I had discovered, the previous afternoon, a most noble face upturned
    to the sky, & mighty form outstretched, which I had named Napoleon
    Dreaming of Universal Empire--& now this prodigious face, soft,
    rich, blue, spirituelle, asleep, tranquil, reposeful, lay against
    that giant conflagration of ruddy and golden splendors, all rayed
    like a wheel with the up-streaming & far-reaching lances of the sun.
    It made one want to cry for delight, it was so supreme in its
    unimaginable majesty & beauty.

He made a pencil-sketch of the Napoleon head in his note-book, and
stated that the apparition could be seen opposite the castle of
Beauchastel; but in later years his treacherous memory betrayed him,
and, forgetting these identifying marks, he told of it as lying a few
hours above Arles, and named it the “Lost Napoleon,” because those who
set out to find it did not succeed. He even wrote an article upon the
subject, in which he urged tourists to take steamer from Arles and make
a short trip upstream, keeping watch on the right-hand bank, with the
purpose of rediscovering the natural wonder. Fortunately this sketch
was not published. It would have been set down as a practical joke
by disappointed travelers. One of Mark Twain’s friends, Mr. Theodore
Stanton, made a persistent effort to find the Napoleon, but with the
wrong directions naturally failed.

It required ten days to float to Arles. Then the current gave out and
Clemens ended the excursion and returned to Lausanne by rail. He said:

“It was twenty-eight miles to Marseilles, and somebody would have to
row. That would not have been pleasure; it would have meant work for the
sailor, and I do not like work even when another person does it.”

To Twichell in America he wrote:

    You ought to have been along--I could have made room for you easily,
    & you would have found that a pedestrian tour in Europe doesn’t
    begin with a raft voyage for hilarity & mild adventure & intimate
    contact with the unvisited native of the back settlements &
    extinction from the world and newspapers & a conscience in a state
    of coma & lazy comfort & solid happiness. In fact, there’s nothing
    that’s so lovely.

But it’s all over. I gave the raft away yesterday at Arles & am loafing
along back by short stages on the rail to Ouchy, Lausanne, where the
tribe are staying at the Beau Rivage and are well and prosperous.



CLXXVII. KORNERSTRASSE,7

They had decided to spend the winter in Berlin, and in October Mrs.
Clemens and Mrs. Crane, after some previous correspondence with an
agent, went up to that city to engage an apartment. The elevator had not
reached the European apartment in those days, and it was necessary, on
Mrs. Clemens’s account, to have a ground floor. The sisters searched a
good while without success, and at last reached Kornerstrasse, a short,
secluded street, highly recommended by the agent. The apartment they
examined in Kornerstrasse was Number 7, and they were so much pleased
with the conveniences and comfort of it and so tired that they did not
notice closely its, general social environment. The agent supplied an
assortment of furniture for a consideration, and they were soon settled
in the attractive, roomy place. Clemens and the children, arriving
somewhat later, expressed themselves as satisfied.

Their contentment was somewhat premature. When they began to go
out socially, which was very soon, and friends inquired as to their
location, they noticed that the address produced a curious effect.
Semi-acquaintances said, “Ah, yes, Kornerstrasse”; acquaintances said,
“Dear me, do you like it?” An old friend exclaimed, “Good gracious!
How in the world did you ever come to locate there?” Then they began
to notice what they had not at first seen. Kornerstrasse was not
disreputable, but it certainly was not elegant. There were rag
warehouses across the street and women who leaned out the windows to
gossip. The street itself was thronged with children. They played on a
sand pile and were often noisy and seldom clean. It was eminently not
the place for a distinguished man of letters. The family began to be
sensitive on the subject of their address.

Clemens, of course, made humor out of it. He wrote a newspaper letter on
the subject, a burlesque, naturally, which the family prevailed upon
him not to print. But the humiliation is out of it now, and a bit of its
humor may be preserved. He takes upon himself the renting of the place,
and pictures the tour of inspection with the agent’s assistant.

He was greatly moved when they came to the street and said, softly and
lovingly:

    “Ah, Korner Street, Korner Street, why did I not think of you
    before! A place fit for the gods, dear sir. Quiet?--notice how
    still it is; and remember this is noonday--noonday. It is but one
    block long, you see, just a sweet, dear little nest hid away here in
    the heart of the great metropolis, its presence and its sacred quiet
    unsuspected by the restless crowds that swarm along the stately
    thoroughfares yonder at its two extremities. And----”

    “This building is handsome, but I don’t think much of the others.
    They look pretty commonplace, compared with the rest of Berlin.”

    “Dear! dear! have you noticed that? It is just an affectation of
    the nobility. What they want----”

    “The nobility? Do they live in----”

    “In this street? That is good! very good, indeed! I wish the Duke
    of Sassafras-Hagenstein could hear you say that. When the Duke
    first moved in here he----”

    “Does he live in this street?”

    “Him! Well, I should say so! Do you see the big, plain house over
    there with the placard in the third floor window? That’s his
    house.”

    “The placard that says ‘Furnished rooms to let’? Does he keep
    boarders?”

    “What an idea! Him! With a rent-roll of twelve hundred thousand
    marks a year? Oh, positively this is too good.”

    “Well, what does he have that sign up for?”

    The assistant took me by the buttonhole & said, with a merry light
    beaming in his eye:

    “Why, my dear sir, a person would know you are new to Berlin just by
    your innocent questions. Our aristocracy, our old, real, genuine
    aristocracy, are full of the quaintest eccentricities,
    eccentricities inherited for centuries, eccentricities which they
    are prouder of than they are of their titles, and that sign-board
    there is one of them. They all hang them out. And it’s regulated
    by an unwritten law. A baron is entitled to hang out two, a count
    five, a duke fifteen----”

    “Then they are all dukes over on that side, I sup----”

    “Every one of them. Now the old Duke of Backofenhofenschwartz not
    the present Duke, but the last but one, he----”

    “Does he live over the sausage-shop in the cellar?”

    “No, the one farther along, where the eighteenth yellow cat is
    chewing the door-mat----”

    “But all the yellow cats are chewing the door-mats.”

    “Yes, but I mean the eighteenth one. Count. No, never mind;
    there’s a lot more come. I’ll get you another mark. Let me see---”

They could not remain permanently in Komerstrasse, but they stuck it
out till the end of December--about two months. Then they made such
settlement with the agent as they could--that is to say, they paid the
rest of their year’s rent--and established themselves in a handsome
apartment at the Hotel Royal, Unter den Linden. There was no need to be
ashamed of this address, for it was one of the best in Berlin.

As for Komerstrasse, it is cleaner now. It is still not aristocratic,
but it is eminently respectable. There is a new post-office that takes
in Number 7, where one may post mail and send telegrams and use the
Fernsprecher--which is to say the telephone--and be politely treated
by uniformed officials, who have all heard of Mark Twain, but have no
knowledge of his former occupation of their premises.



CLXXVIII. A WINTER IN BERLIN

Clemens, meantime, had been trying to establish himself in his work, but
his rheumatism racked him occasionally and was always a menace. Closing
a letter to Hall, he said:

    “I must stop-my arm is howling.”

He put in a good deal of time devising publishing schemes, principal
among them being a plan for various cheap editions of his books,
pamphlets, and such like, to sell for a few cents. These projects appear
never to have been really undertaken, Hall very likely fearing that a
flood of cheap issues would interfere with the more important trade. It
seemed dangerous to trifle with an apparently increasing prosperity, and
Clemens was willing enough to agree with this view.

Clemens had still another letter to write for Laffan and McClure, and he
made a pretty careful study of Berlin with that end in view. But his arm
kept him from any regular work. He made notes, however. Once he wrote:

    The first gospel of all monarchies should be Rebellion; the second
    should be Rebellion; and the third and all gospels, and the only
    gospel of any monarchy, should be Rebellion--against Church and
    State.

And again:

    I wrote a chapter on this language 13 years ago and tried my level
    best to improve it and simplify it for these people, and this is the
    result--a word of thirty-nine letters. It merely concentrates the
    alphabet with a shovel. It hurts me to know that that chapter is
    not in any of their text-books and they don’t use it in the
    university.

Socially, that winter in Berlin was eventful enough. William Walter
Phelps, of New Jersey (Clemens had known him in America), was United
States minister at the German capital, while at the Emperor’s court
there was a cousin, Frau von Versen, nee Clemens, one of the St. Louis
family. She had married a young German officer who had risen to the rank
of a full general. Mark Twain and his family were welcome guests at
all the diplomatic events--often brilliant levees, gatherings of
distinguished men and women from every circle of achievement.
Labouchere of ‘Truth’ was there, De Blowitz of the ‘Times’, and authors,
ambassadors, and scientists of rank. Clemens became immediately a
distinguished figure at these assemblies. His popularity in Germany was
openly manifested. At any gathering he was surrounded by a brilliant
company, eager to do him honor. He was recognized whenever he appeared
on the street, and saluted, though in his notes he says he was sometimes
mistaken for the historian Mommsen, whom he resembled in hair and
features. His books were displayed for sale everywhere, and a special
cheap edition of them was issued at a few cents per copy.

Captain Bingham (later General Bingham, Commissioner of Police in New
York City) and John Jackson were attaches of the legation, both of them
popular with the public in general, and especially so with the Clemens
family. Susy Clemens, writing to her father during a temporary absence,
tells of a party at Mrs. Jackson’s, and especially refers to Captain
Bingham in the most complimentary terms.

“He never left me sitting alone, nor in an awkward situation of any
kind, but always came cordially to the rescue. My gratitude toward him
was absolutely limitless.”

She adds that Mrs. Bingham was very handsome and decidedly the most
attractive lady present. Berlin was Susy’s first real taste of society,
and she was reveling in it. In her letter she refers to Minister Phelps
by the rather disrespectful nickname of “Yaas,” a term conferred because
of his pronunciation of that affirmative. The Clemens children were not
entirely happy in the company of the minister. They were fond of him,
but he was a great tease. They were quite young enough, but it seemed
always to give him delight to make them appear much younger. In the
letter above quoted Susy says:

    When I saw Mr. Phelps I put out my hand enthusiastically and said,
    “Oh, Mr. Phelps, good evening,” whereat he drew back and said, so
    all could hear, “What, you here! why, you’re too young. Do you
    think you know how to behave?” As there were two or three young
    gentlemen near by to whom I hadn’t been introduced I wasn’t exactly
    overjoyed at this greeting.

We may imagine that the nickname “Yaas” had been invented by Susy in
secret retaliation, though she was ready enough to forgive him, for he
was kindness itself at heart.

In one of his later dictations Clemens related an anecdote concerning
a dinner with Phelps, when he (Clemens) had been invited to meet Count
S----, a cabinet minister of long and illustrious descent. Clemens, and
Phelps too, it seems, felt overshadowed by this ancestry.

    Of course I wanted to let out the fact that I had some ancestors,
    too; but I did not want to pull them out of their graves by the
    ears, and I never could seem to get the chance to work them in, in a
    way that would look sufficiently casual. I suppose Phelps was in
    the same difficulty. In fact he looked distraught now and then just
    as a person looks who wants to uncover an ancestor purely by
    accident and cannot think of a way that will seem accidental enough.
    But at last, after dinner, he made a try. He took us about his
    drawing-room, showing us the pictures, and finally stopped before a
    rude and ancient engraving. It was a picture of the court that
    tried Charles I. There was a pyramid of judges in Puritan slouch
    hats, and below them three bareheaded secretaries seated at a table.
    Mr. Phelps put his finger upon one of the three and said, with
    exulting indifference:

    “An ancestor of mine.”

    I put a finger on a judge and retorted with scathing languidness:
    “Ancestor of mine. But it is a small matter. I have others.”

Clemens was sincerely fond of Phelps and spent a good deal of time
at the legation headquarters. Sometimes he wrote there. An American
journalist, Henry W. Fischer, remembers seeing him there several times
scribbling on such scraps of paper as came handy, and recalls that on
one occasion he delivered an address to a German and English audience
on the “Awful German Tongue.” This was probably the lecture that brought
Clemens to bed with pneumonia. With Mrs. Clemens he had been down to
Ilsenburg, in the Hartz Mountains, for a week of change. It was pleasant
there, and they would have remained longer but for the Berlin lecture
engagement. As it was, they found Berlin very cold and the lecture-room
crowded and hot. When the lecture was over they stopped at General von
Versen’s for a ball, arriving at home about two in the morning. Clemens
awoke with a heavy cold and lung congestion. He remained in bed, a
very sick man indeed, for the better part of a month. It was unpleasant
enough at first, though he rather enjoyed the convalescent period. He
could sit up in bed and read and receive occasional callers.
Fischer brought him Memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth, always a
favorite.--[Clemens was deeply interested in the Margravine, and at one
time began a novel with her absorbing history as its theme. He gave it
up, probably feeling that the romantic form could add nothing to the
Margravine’s own story.]--The Emperor sent Frau von Versen with an
invitation for him to attend the consecration of some flags in the
palace. When she returned, conveying thanks and excuses, his Majesty
commanded her to prepare a dinner at her home for Mark Twain and
himself and a few special guests, the date to be arranged when Clemens’s
physician should pronounce him well enough to attend.

Members of the Clemens household were impressed by this royal attention.
Little Jean was especially awed. She said:

“I wish I could be in papa’s clothes”; then, after reflection, “but that
wouldn’t be any use. I reckon the Emperor wouldn’t recognize me.” And
a little later, when she had been considering all the notables and
nobilities of her father’s recent association, she added:

“Why, papa, if it keeps on like this, pretty soon there won’t be anybody
for you to get acquainted with but God,” which Mark Twain decided was
not quite as much of a compliment as it had at first seemed.

It was during the period of his convalescence that Clemens prepared his
sixth letter for the New York Sun and McClure’s syndicate, “The German
Chicago,” a finely descriptive article on Berlin, and German customs
and institutions generally. Perhaps the best part of it is where he
describes the grand and prolonged celebration which had been given in
honor of Professor Virchow’s seventieth birthday.--[Rudolph Virchow, an
eminent German pathologist and anthropologist and scholar; then one
of the most prominent figures of the German Reichstag. He died in
1902.]--He tells how the demonstrations had continued in one form or
another day after day, and merged at last into the seventieth birthday
of Professor Helmholtz--[Herman von Helmholtz, an eminent German
physicist, one of the most distinguished scientists of the nineteenth
century. He died in 1894.]--also how these great affairs finally
culminated in a mighty ‘commers’, or beer-fest, given in their honor
by a thousand German students. This letter has been published in Mark
Twain’s “Complete Works,” and is well worth reading to-day. His place
had been at the table of the two heroes of the occasion, Virchow and
Helmholtz, a place where he could see and hear all that went on; and he
was immensely impressed at the honor which Germany paid to her men
of science. The climax came when Mommsen unexpectedly entered the
room.--[Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), an eminent German historian and
archeologist, a powerful factor in all liberal movements. From 1874-1895
permanent secretary of the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences.]

    There seemed to be some signal whereby the students on the platform
    were made aware that a professor had arrived at the remote door of
    entrance, for you would see them suddenly rise to their feet, strike
    an erect military attitude, then draw their swords; the swords of
    all their brethren standing guard at the innumerable tables would
    flash from the scabbard and be held aloft--a handsome spectacle.
    Three clear bugle-notes would ring out, then all these swords would
    come down with a crash, twice repeated, on the tables and be
    uplifted and held aloft again; then in the distance you would see
    the gay uniforms and uplifted swords of a guard of honor clearing
    the way and conducting the guest down to his place. The songs were
    stirring, and the immense outpour from young life and young lungs,
    the crash of swords, and the thunder of the beer-mugs gradually
    worked a body up to what seemed the last possible summit of
    excitement. It surely seemed to me that I had reached that summit,
    that I had reached my limit, and that there was no higher lift
    devisable for me. When apparently the last eminent guest had long
    ago taken his place, again those three bugle-blasts rang out, and
    once more the swords leaped from their scabbards. Who might this
    late comer be? Nobody was interested to inquire. Still, indolent
    eyes were turned toward the distant entrance, and we saw the silken
    gleam and the lifted sword of a guard of honor plowing through the
    remote crowds. Then we saw that end of the house rising to its
    feet; saw it rise abreast the advancing guard all along like a wave.
    This supreme honor had been offered to no one before. There was an
    excited whisper at our table--“Mommsen!”--and the whole house rose
    --rose and shouted and stamped and clapped and banged the beer-mugs.
    Just simply a storm! Then the little man with his long hair and
    Emersonian face edged his way past us and took his seat. I could
    have touched him with my hand--Mommsen!--think of it!

    This was one of those immense surprises that can happen only a few
    times in one’s life. I was not dreaming of him; he was to me only a
    giant myth, a world-shadowing specter, not a reality. The surprise
    of it all can be only comparable to a man’s suddenly coming upon
    Mont Blanc, with its awful form towering into the sky, when he
    didn’t suspect he was in its neighborhood. I would have walked a
    great many miles to get a sight of him, and here he was, without
    trouble, or tramp, or cost of any kind. Here he was, clothed in a
    titanic deceptive modesty which made him look like other men. Here
    he was, carrying the Roman world and all the Caesars in his
    hospitable skull, and doing it as easily as that other luminous
    vault, the skull of the universe, carries the Milky Way and the
    constellations.

During his convalescent days, Clemens had plenty of time to reflect
and to look out of the window. His notebook preserves some of his
reflections. In one place he says:

    The Emperor passes in a modest open carriage. Next that happy
    12-year-old butcher-boy, all in white apron and turban, standing up
    & so proud!

    How fast they drive-nothing like it but in London. And the horses
    seem to be of very fine breed, though I am not an expert in horses
    & do not speak with assurance. I can always tell which is the front
    end of a horse, but beyond that my art is not above the ordinary.

    The “Court Gazette” of a German paper can be covered with a playing-
    card. In an English paper the movements of titled people take up
    about three times that room. In the papers of Republican France
    from six to sixteen times as much. There, if a Duke’s dog should
    catch cold in the head they would stop the press to announce it and
    cry about it. In Germany they respect titles, in England they
    revere them, in France they adore them. That is, the French
    newspapers do.

    Been taken for Mommsen twice. We have the same hair, but on
    examination it was found the brains were different.

On February 14th he records that Professor Helmholtz called, but
unfortunately leaves no further memorandum of that visit. He was quite
recovered by this time, but was still cautioned about going out in the
severe weather. In the final entry he says:

    Thirty days sick abed--full of interest--read the debates and get
    excited over them, though don’t ‘versteh’. By reading keep in a
    state of excited ignorance, like a blind man in a house afire;
    flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don’t
    know how I got in and can’t find the way out, but I’m having a
    booming time all to myself.

Don’t know what a ‘Schelgesetzentwurf’ is, but I keep as excited over it
and as worried about it as if it was my own child. I simply live on the
Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn’t have the question settled for
anything in the world. Especially now that I’ve lost the ‘offentliche
Militargericht circus’. I read all the debates on that question with
a never-failing interest, but all at once they sprung a vote on me
a couple of days ago & did something by a vote of 100 to 143, but I
couldn’t find out what it was.



CLXXIX. A DINNER WITH WILLIAM II.

The dinner with Emperor William II. at General von Versen’s was set
for the 20th of February. A few days before, Mark Twain entered in his
note-book:

    In that day the Imperial lion and the Democratic lamb shall sit down
    together, and a little General shall feed them.

Mark Twain was the guest of honor on this occasion, and was seated at
the Emperor’s right hand. The Emperor’s brother, Prince Heinrich, sat
opposite; Prince Radolin farther along. Rudolf Lindau, of the Foreign
Office, was also present. There were fourteen at the table, all told. In
his memorandum made at the time, Clemens gave no account of the dinner
beyond the above details, only adding:

    After dinner 6 or 8 officers came in, & all hands adjourned to the
    big room out of the smoking-room and held a “smoking parliament”
     after the style of the ancient Potsdam one, till midnight, when the
    Emperor shook hands and left.

It was not until fourteen years later that Mark Twain related some
special matters pertaining to that evening. He may have expanded then
somewhat to fill out spaces of his memory, and embroidered them, as
was his wont; but that something happened, either in reality or in his
imagination, which justified his version of it we may believe. He told
it as here given, premising: “This may appear in print after I am dead,
but not before.

    “From 1891 until day before yesterday I had never mentioned the
    matter, nor set it down with a pen, nor ever referred to it in any
    way--not even to my wife, to whom I was accustomed to tell
    everything that happened to me.

    “At the dinner his Majesty chatted briskly and entertainingly along
    in easy and flowing English, and now and then he interrupted himself
    to address a remark to me or to some other individual of the guests.
    When the reply had been delivered he resumed his talk. I noticed
    that the table etiquette tallied with that which was the law of my
    house at home when we had guests; that is to say, the guests
    answered when the host favored them with a remark, and then quieted
    down and behaved themselves until they got another chance. If I had
    been in the Emperor’s chair and he in mine I should have felt
    infinitely comfortable and at home, but I was guest now, and
    consequently felt less at home. From old experience I was familiar
    with the rules of the game and familiar with their exercise from the
    high place of host; but I was not familiar with the trammeled and
    less satisfactory position of guest, therefore I felt a little
    strange and out of place. But there was no animosity--no, the
    Emperor was host, therefore, according to my own rule, he had a
    right to do the talking, and it was my honorable duty to intrude no
    interruptions or other improvements except upon invitation; and of
    course it could be my turn some day--some day, on some friendly
    visit of inspection to America, it might be my pleasure and
    distinction to have him as guest at my table; then I would give him
    a rest and a quiet time.

    “In one way there was a difference between his table and mine-for
    instance, atmosphere; the guests stood in awe of him, and naturally
    they conferred that feeling upon me, for, after all, I am only
    human, although I regret it. When a guest answered a question he
    did it with a deferential voice and manner; he did not put any
    emotion into it, and he did not spin it out, but got it out of his
    system as quickly as he could, and then looked relieved. The
    Emperor was used to this atmosphere, and it did not chill his blood;
    maybe it was an inspiration to him, for he was alert, brilliant, and
    full of animation; also he was most gracefully and felicitously
    complimentary to my books--and I will remark here that the happy
    phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts and the
    happy delivery of it another. I once mentioned the high compliment
    which he paid to the book ‘Old Times on the Mississippi’; but there
    were others, among them some high praise of my description in ‘A
    Tramp Abroad’ of certain striking phases of German student life.

    “Fifteen or twenty minutes before the dinner ended the Emperor made
    a remark to me in praise of our generous soldier pensions; then,
    without pausing, he continued the remark, not speaking to me, but
    across the table to his brother, Prince Heinrich. The Prince
    replied, endorsing the Emperor’s view of the matter. Then I
    followed with my own view of it. I said that in the beginning our
    government’s generosity to the soldier was clear in its intent and
    praiseworthy, since the pensions were conferred upon soldiers who
    had earned them, soldiers who had been disabled in the war and could
    no longer earn a livelihood for themselves and their families, but
    that the pensions decreed and added later lacked the virtue of a
    clean motive, and had, little by little, degenerated into a wider
    and wider and more and more offensive system of vote-purchasing, and
    was now become a source of corruption, which was an unpleasant thing
    to contemplate and was a danger besides. I think that that was
    about the substance of my remark; but in any case the remark had a
    quite definite result, and that is the memorable thing about it
    --manifestly it made everybody uncomfortable. I seemed to perceive
    this quite plainly. I had committed an indiscretion. Possibly it
    was in violating etiquette by intruding a remark when I had not been
    invited to make one; possibly it was in taking issue with an opinion
    promulgated by his Majesty. I do not know which it was, but I quite
    clearly remember the effect which my act produced--to wit, the
    Emperor refrained from addressing any remarks to me afterward, and
    not merely during the brief remainder of the dinner, but afterward
    in the kneip-room, where beer and cigars and hilarious anecdoting
    prevailed until about midnight. I am sure that the Emperor’s good
    night was the only thing he said to me in all that time.

    “Was this rebuke studied and intentional? I don’t know, but I
    regarded it in that way. I can’t be absolutely sure of it because
    of modifying doubts created afterward by one or two circumstances.
    For example: the Empress Dowager invited me to her palace, and the
    reigning Empress invited me to breakfast, and also sent for General
    von Versen to come to her palace and read to her and her ladies from
    my books.”

It was a personal message from the Emperor that fourteen years later
recalled to him this curious circumstance. A gentleman whom Clemens knew
went on a diplomatic mission to Germany. Upon being presented to Emperor
William, the latter had immediately begun to talk of Mark Twain and his
work. He spoke of the description of German student life as the greatest
thing of its kind ever written, and of the sketch on the German language
as wonderful; then he said:

“Convey to Mr. Clemens my kindest regards, ask him if he remembers that
dinner at Von Versen’s, and ask him why he didn’t do any more talking at
that dinner.”

It seemed a mysterious message. Clemens thought it might have been meant
to convey some sort of an imperial apology; but again it might have
meant that Mark Twain’s breach and the Emperor’s coolness on that
occasion were purely imaginary, and that the Emperor had really expected
him to talk far more than he did.

Returning to the Royal Hotel after the Von Versen dinner, Mark Twain
received his second high compliment that day on the Mississippi book.
The portier, a tow-headed young German, must have been comparatively
new at the hotel; for apparently he had just that day learned that his
favorite author, whose books he had long been collecting, was actually
present in the flesh. Clemens, all ready to apologize for asking so late
an admission, was greeted by the portier’s round face all sunshine
and smiles. The young German then poured out a stream of welcome and
compliments and dragged the author to a small bedroom near the front
door, where he excitedly pointed out a row of books, German translations
of Mark Twain.

“There,” he said; “you wrote them. I’ve found it out. Lieber Gott! I
did not know it before, and I ask a million pardons. That one there, Old
Times on the Mississippi, is the best you ever wrote.”

The note-book records only one social event following the Emperor’s
dinner--a dinner with the secretary of the legation. The note says:

At the Emperor’s dinner black cravats were ordered. Tonight I went in a
black cravat and everybody else wore white ones. Just my luck.

The Berlin activities came to an end then. He was still physically far
from robust, and his doctors peremptorily ordered him to stay indoors or
to go to a warmer climate. This was March 1st. Clemens and his wife took
Joseph Very, and, leaving the others for the time in Berlin, set out for
Mentone, in the south of France.



CLXXX. MANY WANDERINGS

Mentone was warm and quiet, and Clemens worked when his arm permitted.
He was alone there with Mrs. Clemens, and they wandered about a good
deal, idling and picture-making, enjoying a sort of belated honeymoon.
Clemens wrote to Susy:

Joseph is gone to Nice to educate himself in kodaking--and to get the
pictures mounted which mama thinks she took here; but I noticed she
didn’t take the plug out, as a rule. When she did she took nine pictures
on top of each other--composites.

They remained a month in Mentone, then went over to Pisa, and sent
Joseph to bring the rest of the party to Rome. In Rome they spent
another month--a period of sight-seeing, enjoyable, but to Clemens
pretty profitless.

“I do not expect to be able to write any literature this year,” he said
in a letter to Hall near the end of April. “The moment I take up my pen
my rheumatism returns.”

Still he struggled along and managed to pile up a good deal of copy in
the course of weeks. From Rome to Florence, at the end of April, and
so pleasing was the prospect, and so salubrious the air of that ancient
city, that they resolved to engage residence there for the next winter.
They inspected accommodations of various kinds, and finally, through
Prof. Willard Fiske, were directed to the Villa Viviani, near
Settignano, on a hill to the eastward of Florence, with vineyard and
olive-grove sloping away to the city lying in a haze-a vision of beauty
and peace. They closed the arrangement for Viviani, and about the middle
of May went up to Venice for a fortnight of sight-seeing--a break in the
travel back to Germany. William Gedney Bunce, the Hartford artist, was
in Venice, and Sarah Orne Jewett and other home friends.

From Venice, by way of Lake Como and “a tangled route” (his note-book
says) to Lucerne, and so northward to Berlin and on to Bad Nauheim,
where they had planned to spend the summer. Clemens for some weeks had
contemplated a trip to America, for matters there seemed to demand
his personal attention. Summer arrangements for the family being now
concluded, he left within the week and set sail on the Havel for New
York. To Jean he wrote a cheerful good-by letter, more cheerful, we may
believe, than he felt.

                         BREMEN, 7.45 A.M., June 14, 1892.

DEAR JEAN CLEMENS,--I am up & shaved & got my clean shirt on & feel
mighty fine, & am going down to show off before I put on the rest of my
clothes.

Perhaps mama & Mrs. Hague can persuade the Hauswirth to do right; but if
he don’t you go down & kill his dog.

I wish you would invite the Consul-General and his ladies down to take
one of those slim dinners with mama, then he would complain to the
Government.

Clemens felt that his presence in America, was demanded by two things.
Hall’s reports continued, as ever, optimistic; but the semi-annual
statements were less encouraging. The Library of Literature and some of
the other books were selling well enough; but the continuous increase
of capital required by a business conducted on the instalment plan
had steadily added to the firm’s liabilities, while the prospect of
a general tightening in the money-market made the outlook not a
particularly happy one. Clemens thought he might be able to dispose of
the Library or an interest in it, or even of his share of the business
itself, to some one with means sufficient to put it on an easier
financial footing. The uncertainties of trade and the burden of
increased debt had become a nightmare which interfered with his sleep.
It seemed hard enough to earn a living with a crippled arm, without this
heavy business care.

The second interest requiring attention was that other old one--the
machine. Clemens had left the matter in Paige’s hands, and Paige, with
persuasive eloquence, had interested Chicago capital to a point where
a company had been formed to manufacture the type-setter in that city.
Paige reported that he had got several million dollars subscribed for
the construction of a factory, and that he had been placed on a salary
as a sort of general “consulting omniscient” at five thousand dollars a
month. Clemens, who had been negotiating again with the Mallorys for the
disposal of his machine royalties, thought it proper to find out just
what was going on. He remained in America less than two weeks, during
which he made a flying trip to Chicago and found that Paige’s company
really had a factory started, and proposed to manufacture fifty
machines. It was not easy to find out the exact status of this new
company, but Clemens at least was hopeful enough of its prospects
to call off the negotiations with the Mallorys which had promised
considerable cash in hand. He had been able to accomplish nothing
material in the publishing situation, but his heart-to-heart talk
with Hall for some reason had seemed comforting. The business had been
expanding; they would now “concentrate.” He returned on the Lahn, and he
must have been in better health and spirits, for it is said he kept the
ship very merry during the passage. He told many extravagantly amusing
yarns; so many that a court was convened to try him on the charge of
“inordinate and unscientific lying.” Many witnesses testified, and his
own testimony was so unconvincing that the jury convicted him without
leaving the bench. He was sentenced to read aloud from his own works for
a considerable period every day until the steamer should reach port.
It is said that he faithfully carried out this part of the program, and
that the proceeds from the trial and the various readings amounted to
something more than six hundred dollars, which was turned over to the
Seamen’s Fund.

Clemens’s arm was really much better, and he put in a good deal of spare
time during the trip writing an article on “All Sorts and Conditions of
Ships,” from Noah’s Ark down to the fine new Havel, then the latest word
in ship-construction. It was an article written in a happy vein and is
profitable reading to-day. The description of Columbus as he appeared on
the deck of his flag-ship is particularly rich and flowing:

    If the weather was chilly he came up clad from plumed helmet to
    spurred heel in magnificent plate-armor inlaid with arabesques of
    gold, having previously warmed it at the galley fire. If the
    weather was warm he came up in the ordinary sailor toggery of the
    time-great slouch hat of blue velvet, with a flowing brush of snowy
    ostrich-plumes, fastened on with a flashing cluster of diamonds and
    emeralds; gold-embroidered doublet of green velvet, with slashed
    sleeves exposing undersleeves of crimson satin; deep collar and cuff
    ruffles of rich, limp lace; trunk hose of pink velvet, with big
    knee-knots of brocaded yellow ribbon; pearl-tinted silk stockings,
    clocked and daintily embroidered; lemon-colored buskins of unborn
    kid, funnel-topped, and drooping low to expose the pretty stockings;
    deep gauntlets of finest white heretic skin, from the factory of the
    Holy Inquisition, formerly part of the person of a lady of rank;
    rapier with sheath crusted with jewels and hanging from a broad
    baldric upholstered with rubies and sapphires.



CLXXXI. NAUHEIM AND THE PRINCE OF WALES

Clemens was able to write pretty steadily that summer in Nauheim and
turned off a quantity of copy. He completed several short articles
and stories, and began, or at least continued work on, two books--‘Tom
Sawyer Abroad’ and ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’--the latter being the
original form of ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’. As early as August 4th he wrote
to Hall that he had finished forty thousand words of the “Tom Sawyer”
 story, and that it was to be offered to some young people’s magazine,
Harper’s Young People or St. Nicholas; but then he suddenly decided that
his narrative method was altogether wrong. To Hall on the 10th he wrote:

    I have dropped that novel I wrote you about because I saw a more
    effective way of using the main episode--to wit, by telling it
    through the lips of Huck Finn. So I have started Huck Finn & Tom
    Sawyer (still 15 years old) & their friend the freed slave Jim
    around the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator, &
    somewhere after the end of that great voyage he will work in that
    original episode & then nobody will suspect that a whole book has
    been written & the globe circumnavigated merely to get that episode
    in in an effective (& at the same time apparently unintentional)
    way. I have written 12,000 words of this new narrative, & find that
    the humor flows as easily as the adventures & surprises--so I shall
    go along and make a book of from 50,000 to 100,000 words.

    It is a story for boys, of course, & I think it will interest any
    boy between 8 years & 80.

    When I was in New York the other day Mrs. Dodge, editor of St.
    Nicholas, wrote and offered me $5,000 for (serial right) a story for
    boys 50,000 words long. I wrote back and declined, for I had other
    matter in my mind then.

    I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write
    so that it will not only interest boys, but will also strongly
    interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges
    the audience.

    Now, this story doesn’t need to be restricted to a child’s magazine
    --it is proper enough for any magazine, I should think, or for a
    syndicate. I don’t swear it, but I think so.

    Proposed title--New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

He was full of his usual enthusiasm in any new undertaking, and writes
of the Extraordinary Twins:

    By and by I shall have to offer (for grown folks’ magazine) a novel
    entitled, ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’. It’s the howling farce I
    told you I had begun awhile back. I laid it aside to ferment while
    I wrote Tom Sawyer Abroad, but I took it up again on a little
    different plan lately, and it is swimming along satisfactorily now.
    I think all sorts of folks will read it. It is clear out of the
    common order--it is a fresh idea--I don’t think it resembles
    anything in literature.

He was quite right; it did not resemble anything in literature, nor did
it greatly resemble literature, though something at least related to
literature would eventually grow out of it.

In a letter written many years afterward by Frank Mason, then
consul-general at Frankfort, he refers to “that happy summer at
Nauheim.” Mason was often a visitor there, and we may believe that his
memory of the summer was justified. For one thing, Clemens himself was
in better health and spirits and able to continue his work. But an
even greater happiness lay in the fact that two eminent physicians had
pronounced Mrs. Clemens free from any organic ills. To Orion, Clemens
wrote:

    We are in the clouds because the bath physicians say positively that
    Livy has no heart disease but has only weakness of the heart muscles
    and will soon be well again. That was worth going to Europe to find
    out.

It was enough to change the whole atmosphere of the household, and
financial worries were less considered. Another letter to Orion relates
history:

    The Twichells have been here four days & we have had good times with
    them. Joe & I ran over to Homburg, the great pleasure-resort,
    Saturday, to dine with friends, & in the morning I went walking in
    the promenade & met the British ambassador to the Court of Berlin
    and he introduced me to the Prince of Wales. I found him a most
    unusually comfortable and unembarrassing Englishman.

Twichell has reported Mark Twain’s meeting with the Prince (later Edward
VII) as having come about by special request of the latter, made through
the British ambassador. “The meeting,” he says, “was a most cordial one
on both sides, and presently the Prince took Mark Twain’s arm and the
two marched up and down, talking earnestly together, the Prince, solid,
erect, and soldier-like, Clemens weaving along in his curious, swinging
gait in a full tide of talk, and brandishing a sun-umbrella of the most
scandalous description.”

When they parted Clemens said:

“It has been, indeed, a great pleasure to meet your Royal Highness.”

The Prince answered:

“And it is a pleasure, Mr. Clemens, to have met you--again.”

Clemens was puzzled to reply.

“Why,” he said, “have we met before?”

The Prince smiled happily.

“Oh yes,” he said; “don’t you remember that day on the Strand when you
were on the top of a bus and I was heading a procession and you had on
your new overcoat with flap-pockets?”--[See chap. clxiii, “A Letter to
the Queen of England.”]

It was the highest compliment he could have paid, for it showed that
he had read, and had remembered all those years. Clemens expressed
to Twichell regret that he had forgotten to mention his visit to the
Prince’s sister, Louise, in Ottawa, but he had his opportunity at a
dinner next day. Later the Prince had him to supper and they passed an
entire evening together.

There was a certain uneasiness in the Nauheim atmosphere that year, for
the cholera had broken out at Hamburg, and its victims were dying at a
terrific rate. It was almost impossible to get authentic news as to
the spread of the epidemic, for the German papers were curiously
conservative in their reports. Clemens wrote an article on the subject
but concluded not to print it. A paragraph will convey its tenor.

    What I am trying to make the reader understand is the strangeness of
    the situation here--a mighty tragedy being played upon a stage that
    is close to us, & yet we are as ignorant of its details as we should
    be if the stage were in China. We sit “in front,” & the audience is
    in fact the world; but the curtain is down, & from behind it we hear
    only an inarticulate murmur. The Hamburg disaster must go into
    history as the disaster without a history.

He closes with an item from a physician’s letter--an item which he says
“gives you a sudden and terrific sense of the situation there.”

    For in a line it flashes before you--this ghastly picture--a thing
    seen by the physician: a wagon going along the street with five sick
    people in it, and with them four dead ones.



CLXXXII. THE VILLA VIVIANI. ‘The American Claimant’, published in May
l (1892), did not bring a very satisfactory return. For one thing, the
book-trade was light, and then the Claimant was not up to his usual
standard. It had been written under hard circumstances and by a pen
long out of practice; it had not paid, and its author must work all
the harder on the new undertakings. The conditions at Nauheim seemed
favorable, and they lingered there until well into September. To Mrs.
Crane, who had returned to America, Clemens wrote on the 18th, from
Lucerne, in the midst of their travel to Italy:

    We remained in Nauheim a little too long. If we had left four or
    five days earlier we should have made Florence in three days. Hard
    trip because it was one of those trains that gets tired every 7
    minutes and stops to rest three-quarters of an hour. It took us
    3 1/2 hours to get there instead of the regulation 2 hours. We
    shall pull through to Milan to-morrow if possible. Next day we
    shall start at 10 AM and try to make Bologna, 5 hours. Next day,
    Florence, D. V. Next year we will walk. Phelps came to Frankfort
    and we had some great times--dinner at his hotel; & the Masons,
    supper at our inn--Livy not in it. She was merely allowed a
    glimpse, no more. Of course Phelps said she was merely pretending
    to be ill; was never looking so well & fine.

    A Paris journal has created a happy interest by inoculating one of
    its correspondents with cholera. A man said yesterday he wished to
    God they would inoculate all of them. Yes, the interest is quite
    general and strong & much hope is felt.

    Livy says I have said enough bad things, and better send all our
    loves & shut up. Which I do--and shut up.

They lingered at Lucerne until Mrs. Clemens was rested and better able
to continue the journey, arriving at last in Florence, September
26th. They drove out to the Villa Viviani in the afternoon and found
everything in readiness for their reception, even to the dinner, which
was prepared and on the table. Clemens, in his notes, speaks of this and
adds:

It takes but a sentence to state that, but it makes an indolent person
tired to think of the planning & work and trouble that lie concealed in
it.

Some further memoranda made at this time have that intimate interest
which gives reality and charm. The ‘contadino’ brought up their trunks
from the station, and Clemens wrote:

    The ‘contadino’ is middle-aged & like the rest of the peasants--that
    is to say, brown, handsome, good-natured, courteous, & entirely
    independent without making any offensive show of it. He charged too
    much for the trunks, I was told. My informer explained that this
    was customary.

    September 27. The rest of the trunks brought up this morning. He
    charged too much again, but I was told that this was also customary.
    It’s all right, then. I do not wish to violate the customs. Hired
    landau, horses, & coachman. Terms, 480 francs a month & a pourboire
    to the coachman, I to furnish lodging for the man & the horses, but
    nothing else. The landau has seen better days & weighs 30 tons.
    The horses are feeble & object to the landau; they stop & turn
    around every now & then & examine it with surprise & suspicion.
    This causes delay. But it entertains the people along the road.
    They came out & stood around with their hands in their pockets &
    discussed the matter with each other. I was told that they said
    that a 30-ton landau was not the thing for horses like those--what
    they needed was a wheelbarrow.

His description of the house pictures it as exactly today as it did
then, for it has not changed in these twenty years, nor greatly,
perhaps, in the centuries since it was built.

    It is a plain, square building, like a box, & is painted light
    yellow & has green window-shutters. It stands in a commanding
    position on the artificial terrace of liberal dimensions, which is
    walled around with masonry. From the walls the vineyards & olive
    orchards of the estate slant away toward the valley. There are
    several tall trees, stately stone-pines, also fig-trees & trees of
    breeds not familiar to me. Roses overflow the retaining-walls, &
    the battered & mossy stone urn on the gate-posts, in pink & yellow
    cataracts exactly as they do on the drop-curtains in the theaters.
    The house is a very fortress for strength. The main walls--all
    brick covered with plaster--are about 3 feet thick. I have several
    times tried to count the rooms of the house, but the irregularities
    baffle me. There seem to be 28. There are plenty of windows &
    worlds of sunlight. The floors are sleek & shiny & full of
    reflections, for each is a mirror in its way, softly imaging all
    objects after the subdued fashion of forest lakes. The curious
    feature of the house is the salon. This is a spacious & lofty
    vacuum which occupies the center of the house. All the rest of the
    house is built around it; it extends up through both stories & its
    roof projects some feet above the rest of the building. The sense
    of its vastness strikes you the moment you step into it & cast your
    eyes around it & aloft. There are divans distributed along its
    walls. They make little or no show, though their aggregate length
    is 57 feet. A piano in it is a lost object. We have tried to
    reduce the sense of desert space & emptiness with tables & things,
    but they have a defeated look, & do not do any good. Whatever
    stands or moves under that soaring painted vault is belittled.

He describes the interior of this vast room (they grew to love it),
dwelling upon the plaster-relief portraits above its six doors,
Florentine senators and judges, ancient dwellers there and former owners
of the estate.

    The date of one of them is 1305--middle-aged, then, & a judge--he
    could have known, as a youth, the very greatest Italian artists, &
    he could have walked & talked with Dante, & probably did. The date
    of another is 1343--he could have known Boccaccio & spent his
    afternoons wandering in Fiesole, gazing down on plague-reeking
    Florence & listening to that man’s improper tales, & he probably
    did. The date of another is 1463--he could have met Columbus & he
    knew the magnificent Lorenzo, of course. These are all Cerretanis
    --or Cerretani-Twains, as I may say, for I have adopted myself into
    their family on account of its antiquity--my origin having been
    heretofore too recent to suit me.

We are considering the details of Viviani at some length, for it was in
this setting that he began and largely completed what was to be his most
important work of this later time--in some respects his most important
of any time--the ‘Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc’. If the reader
loves this book, and he must love it if he has read it, he will not
begrudge the space here given to the scene of its inspiration. The
outdoor picture of Viviani is of even more importance, for he wrote
oftener out-of-doors than elsewhere. Clemens added it to his notes
several months later, but it belongs here.

    The situation of this villa is perfect. It is three miles from
    Florence, on the side of a hill. Beyond some hill-spurs is Fiesole
    perched upon its steep terraces; in the immediate foreground is the
    imposing mass of the Ross castle, its walls and turrets rich with
    the mellow weather-stains of forgotten centuries; in the distant
    plain lies Florence, pink & gray & brown, with the ruddy, huge dome
    of the cathedral dominating its center like a captive balloon, &
    flanked on the right by the smaller bulb of the Medici chapel & on
    the left by the airy tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; all around the
    horizon is a billowy rim of lofty blue hills, snowed white with
    innumerable villas. After nine months of familiarity with this
    panorama I still think, as I thought in the beginning, that this is
    the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon,
    the most satisfying to the eye & the spirit. To see the sun sink
    down, drowned in his pink & purple & golden floods, & overwhelm
    Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim &
    faint & turn the solid city into a city of dreams, is a sight to
    stir the coldest nature & make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy.

The Clemens household at Florence consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens,
Susy, and Jean. Clara had soon returned to Berlin to attend Mrs.
Willard’s school and for piano instruction. Mrs. Clemens improved in
the balmy autumn air of Florence and in the peaceful life of their
well-ordered villa. In a memorandum of October 27th Clemens wrote:

    The first month is finished. We are wonted now. This carefree life
    at a Florentine villa is an ideal existence. The weather is divine,
    the outside aspects lovely, the days and nights tranquil and
    reposeful, the seclusion from the world and its worries as
    satisfactory as a dream. Late in the afternoons friends come out
    from the city & drink tea in the open air & tell what is happening
    in the world; & when the great sun sinks down upon Florence & the
    daily miracle begins they hold their breath & look. It is not a
    time for talk.

No wonder he could work in that environment. He finished ‘Tom Sawyer
Abroad’, also a short story, ‘The L 1,000,000 Bank-Note’ (planned many
years before), discovered the literary mistake of the ‘Extraordinary
Twins’ and began converting it into the worthier tale, ‘Pudd’nhead
Wilson’, soon completed and on its way to America.

With this work out of his hands, Clemens was ready for his great new
undertaking. A seed sown by the wind more than forty years before was
ready to bloom. He would write the story of Joan of Arc.



CLXXXIII. THE SIEUR DE CONTE AND JOAN

In a note which he made many years later Mark Twain declared that he
was fourteen years at work on Joan of Arc; that he had been twelve years
preparing for it, and that he was two years in writing it.

There is nothing in any of his earlier notes or letters to indicate that
he contemplated the story of Joan as early as the eighties; but there
is a bibliographical list of various works on the subject, probably
compiled for him not much later than 1880, for the latest published work
of the list bears that date. He was then too busy with his inventions
and publishing schemes to really undertake a work requiring such vast
preparation; but without doubt he procured a number of books and renewed
that old interest begun so long ago when a stray wind had blown a leaf
from that tragic life into his own. Joan of Arc, by Janet Tuckey, was
apparently the first book he read with the definite idea of study, for
this little volume had been recently issued, and his copy, which still
exists, is filled with his marginal notes. He did not speak of this
volume in discussing the matter in after-years. He may have forgotten
it. He dwelt mainly on the old records of the trial which had been dug
out and put into modern French by Quicherat; the ‘Jeanne d’Arc’ of J.
Michelet, and the splendid ‘Life of the Maid’ of Lord Ronald Gower,
these being remembered as his chief sources of information.--[The book
of Janet Tuckey, however, and ten others, including those mentioned, are
credited as “authorities examined in verification” on a front page of
his published book. In a letter written at the conclusion of “Joan” in
1895, the author states that in the first two-thirds of the story he
used one French and one English authority, while in the last third he
had constantly drawn from five French and five English sources.]

“I could not get the Quicherat and some of the other books in English,”
 he said, “and I had to dig them out of the French. I began the story
five times.”

None of these discarded beginnings exists to-day, but we may believe
they were wisely put aside, for no story of the Maid could begin more
charmingly, more rarely, than the one supposedly told in his old age by
Sieur Louis de Conte, secretary of Joan of Arc, and translated by
Jean Francois Alden for the world to read. The impulse which had once
prompted Mark Twain to offer The Prince and the Pauper anonymously now
prevailed. He felt that the Prince had missed a certain appreciation by
being connected with his signature, and he resolved that its companion
piece (he so regarded Joan) should be accepted on its merits and without
prejudice. Walking the floor one day at Viviani, smoking vigorously, he
said to Mrs. Clemens and Susy:

“I shall never be accepted seriously over my own signature. People
always want to laugh over what I write and are disappointed if they
don’t find a joke in it. This is to be a serious book. It means more to
me than anything I have ever undertaken. I shall write it anonymously.”

So it was that that gentle, quaint Sieur de Conte took up the pen, and
the tale of Joan was begun in that beautiful spot which of all others
seems now the proper environment for its lovely telling.

He wrote rapidly once he got his plan perfected and his material
arranged. The reading of his youth and manhood, with the vivid
impressions of that earlier time, became now something remembered, not
merely as reading, but as fact.

Others of the family went down into the city almost daily, but he
remained in that still garden with Joan as his companion--the old Sieur
de Conte, saturated with memories, pouring out that marvelous and tragic
tale. At the end of each day he would read to the others what he had
written, to their enjoyment and wonder.

How rapidly he worked may be judged from a letter which he wrote to Hall
in February, in which he said:

I am writing a companion piece to ‘The Prince and the Pauper’, which is
half done & will make 200,000 words.

That is to say, he had written one hundred thousand words in a period of
perhaps six weeks, marvelous work when one remembers that after all
he was writing history, some of which he must dig laboriously from a
foreign source. He had always, more or less, kept up his study of the
French, begun so long ago on the river and it stood him in good stead
now. Still, it was never easy for him, and the multitude of notes along
the margin of his French authorities bears evidence of his faithfulness
and the magnitude of his toil. No previous work had ever required
so much of him, such thorough knowledge; none had ever so completely
commanded his interest. He would have been willing to remain shut away
from visitors, to have been released altogether from social obligations;
and he did avoid most of them. Not all, for he could not always escape,
and perhaps did not always really wish to. Florence and its suburbs
were full of delightful people--some of them his old friends. There were
luncheons, dinners, teas, dances, concerts, operas always in progress
somewhere, and not all of these were to be resisted even by an absorbed
author who was no longer himself, but sad old Sieur de Conte, following
again the banner of the Maid of Orleans, marshaling her twilight armies
across his illumined page.



CLXXXIV. NEW HOPE IN THE MACHINE

If all human events had not been ordered in the first act of the primal
atom, and so become inevitable, it would seem a pity now that he must
abandon his work half-way, and make another hard, distracting trip to
America.

But it was necessary for him to go. Even Hall was no longer optimistic.
His letters provided only the barest shreds of hope. Times were hard and
there was every reason to believe they would be worse. The World’s
Fair year promised to be what it speedily became--one of the hardest
financial periods this country has ever seen. Chicago could hardly have
selected a more profitless time for her great exposition. Clemens
wrote urging Hall to sell out all, or a portion, of the business--to do
anything, indeed, that would avoid the necessity of further liability
and increased dread. Every payment that could be spared from the sales
of his manuscript was left in Hall’s hands, and such moneys as still
came to Mrs. Clemens from her Elmira interests were flung into the
general fund. The latter were no longer large, for Langdon & Co. were
suffering heavily in the general depression, barely hoping to weather
the financial storm.

It is interesting to note that age and misfortune and illness had a
tempering influence on Mark Twain’s nature. Instead of becoming harsh
and severe and bitter, he had become more gentle, more kindly. He wrote
often to Hall, always considerately, even tenderly. Once, when something
in Hall’s letter suggested that he had perhaps been severe, he wrote:

    Mrs. Clemens is deeply distressed, for she thinks I have been
    blaming you or finding fault with you about something. But most
    assuredly that cannot be. I tell her that although I am prone to
    write hasty and regrettable things to other people I am not a bit
    likely to write such things to you. I can’t believe I have done
    anything so ungrateful. If I have, pile coals of fire upon my head
    for I deserve it. You have done magnificently with the business, &
    we must raise the money somehow to enable you to reap a reward for
    all that labor.

He was fond of Hall. He realized how honest and resolute and industrious
he had been. In another letter he wrote him that it was wonderful he had
been able to “keep the ship afloat in the storm that has seen fleets and
fleets go down”; and he added: “Mrs. Clemens says I must tell you not to
send us any money for a month or two, so that you may be afforded what
little relief is in our power.”

The type-setter situation seemed to promise something. In fact, the
machine once more had become the principal hope of financial salvation.
The new company seemed really to begetting ahead in spite of the money
stringency, and was said to have fifty machines well under way: About
the middle of March Clemens packed up two of his shorter manuscripts
which he had written at odd times and forwarded them to Hall, in the
hope that they would be disposed of and the money waiting him on his
arrival; and a week later, March 22, 1893, he sailed from Genoa on the
Kaiser Wilhelm II, a fine, new boat. One of the manuscripts was ‘The
Californian’s Tale’ and the other was ‘Adam’s Diary’.--[It seems
curious that neither of these tales should have found welcome with
the magazines. “The Californian’s Tale” was published in the Liber
Scriptorum, an Authors’ Club book, edited by Arthur Stedman. The ‘Diary’
was disposed of to the Niagara Book, a souvenir of Niagara Falls, which
contained sketches by Howells, Clemens, and others. Harper’s Magazine
republished both these stories in later years--the Diary especially with
great success.]

Some joke was likely to be played on Mark Twain during these ocean
journeys, and for this particular voyage an original one was planned.
They knew how he would fume and swear if he should be discovered with
dutiable goods and held up in the Custom House, and they planned for
this effect. A few days before arriving in New York one passenger after
another came to him, each with a box of expensive cigars, and some
pleasant speech expressing friendship and appreciation and a hope that
they would be remembered in absence, etc., until he had perhaps ten or
a dozen very choice boxes of smoking material. He took them all with
gratitude and innocence. He had never declared any dutiable baggage,
entering New York alone, and it never occurred to him that he would need
to do so now. His trunk and bags were full; he had the cigars made into
a nice package, to be carried handily, and on his arrival at the North
German Lloyd docks stood waiting among his things for the formality of
Customs examination, his friends assembled for the explosion.

They had not calculated well; the Custom-House official came along
presently with the usual “Open your baggage, please,” then suddenly
recognizing the owner of it he said:

“Oh, Mr. Clemens, excuse me. We have orders to extend to you the
courtesies of the port. No examination of your effects is necessary.”

It was the evening of Monday, April 3d, when he landed in New York and
went to the Hotel Glenham. In his notes he tells of having a two-hour
talk with Howells on the following night. They had not seen each other
for two years, and their correspondence had been broken off. It was a
happy, even if somewhat sad, reunion, for they were no longer young, and
when they called the roll of friends there were many vacancies. They
had reached an age where some one they loved died every year. Writing to
Mrs. Crane, Clemens speaks of the ghosts of memory; then he says:

    I dreamed I was born & grew up & was a pilot on the Mississippi & a
    miner & a journalist in Nevada & a pilgrim in the Quaker City & had
    a wife & children & went to live in a villa at Florence--& this
    dream goes on & on & sometimes seems so real that I almost believe
    it is real. I wonder if it is? But there is no way to tell, for if
    one applies tests they would be part of the dream, too, & so would
    simply aid the deceit. I wish I knew whether it is a dream or real.

He was made handsomely welcome in New York. His note-book says:

    Wednesday. Dined with Mary Mapes Dodge, Howells, Rudyard Kipling &
    wife, Clarke,--[ William Fayal Clarke, now editor of St. Nicholas
    Magazine.]--Jamie Dodge & wife.

    Thursday, 6th. Dined with Andrew Carnegie, Prof. Goldwin Smith,
    John Cameron, Mr. Glenn. Creation of league for absorbing Canada
    into our Union. Carnegie also wants to add Great Britain & Ireland.

It was on this occasion that Carnegie made his celebrated maxim about
the basket and the eggs. Clemens was suggesting that Carnegie take an
interest in the typesetter, and quoted the old adage that one should
not put all of his eggs into one basket. Carnegie regarded him through
half-closed lids, as was his custom, and answered:

    “That’s a mistake; put all your eggs into one basket--and watch that
    basket.”

He had not come to America merely for entertainment. He was at the New
York office of the type-setter company, acquiring there what seemed to
be good news, for he was assured that his interests were being taken
care of, and that within a year at most his royalty returns would place
him far beyond the fear of want. He forwarded this good news to Italy,
where it was sorely needed, for Mrs. Clemens found her courage not easy
to sustain in his absence. That he had made his letter glowing enough,
we may gather from her answer.

    It does not seem credible that we are really again to have money to
    spend. I think I will jump around and spend money just for fun, and
    give a little away, if we really get some. What should we do and
    how should we feel if we had no bright prospects before us, and yet
    how many people are situated in that way?

He decided to make another trip to Chicago to verify, with his own eyes,
the manufacturing reports, and to see Paige, who would appear to have
become more elusive than ever as to contracts, written and implied. He
took Hall with him, and wrote Orion to meet him at the Great Northern
Hotel. This would give him a chance to see Orion and would give Orion a
chance to see the great Fair. He was in Chicago eleven days, and in bed
with a heavy cold almost the whole of that time. Paige came to see him
at his rooms, and, as always, was rich in prospects and promises; full
of protestations that, whatever came, when the tide of millions rolled
in, they would share and share alike. The note-book says:

    Paige shed even more tears than usual. What a talker he is! He
    could persuade a fish to come out and take a walk with him. When he
    is present I always believe him; I can’t help it.

Clemens returned to New York as soon as he was able to travel. Going
down in the elevator a man stepped in from one of the floors swearing
violently. Clemens, leaning over to Hall, with his hand to his mouth,
and in a whisper audible to every one, said:

“Bishop of Chicago.”

The man, with a quick glance, recognized his fellow-passenger and
subsided.

On May 13th Clemens took the Kaiser Wilhelm II. for Genoa. He had
accomplished little, but he was in better spirits as to the machine.
If only the strain of his publishing business had slackened even for a
moment! Night and day it was always with him. Hall presently wrote that
the condition of the money-market was “something beyond description.
You cannot get money on anything short of government bonds.” The Mount
Morris Bank would no longer handle their paper. The Clemens household
resorted to economies hitherto undreamed of. Mrs. Clemens wrote to her
sister that she really did not see sometimes where their next money
would come from. She reported that her husband got up in the night and
walked the floor in his distress.

He wrote again to Hall, urging him to sell and get rid of the debts and
responsibilities at whatever sacrifice:

    I am terribly tired of business. I am by nature and disposition
    unfit for it, & I want to get out of it. I am standing on the Mount
    Morris volcano with help from the machine a long, long way off--&
    doubtless a long way further off than the Connecticut company
    imagine.

    Get me out of business!

He knew something of the delays of completing a typesetting machine, and
he had little faith in any near relief from that source. He wrote again
go Hall, urging him to sell some of his type-setter royalties. They
should be worth something now since the manufacturing company was
actually in operation; but with the terrible state of the money-market
there was no sale for anything. Clemens attempted to work, but put in
most of his time footing up on the margin of his manuscript the
amount of his indebtedness, the expenses of his household, and
the possibilities of his income. It was weary, hard, nerve-racking
employment. About the muddle of June they closed Viviani. Susy Clemens
went to Paris to cultivate her voice, a rare soprano, with a view to
preparing for the operatic stage. Clemens took Mrs. Clemens, with little
Jean, to Germany for the baths. Clara, who had graduated from Mrs.
Willard’s school in Berlin, joined them in Munich, and somewhat
later Susy also joined them, for Madame Marchesi, the great master of
voice-culture, had told her that she must acquire physique to carry that
voice of hers before she would undertake to teach her.

In spite of his disturbed state of mind Clemens must have completed some
literary work during this period, for we find first mention, in a letter
to Hall, of his immortal defense of Harriet Shelley, a piece of
writing all the more marvelous when we consider the conditions of
its performance. Characteristically, in the same letter, he suddenly
develops a plan for a new enterprise--this time for a magazine which
Arthur Stedman or his father will edit, and the Webster company will
publish as soon as their present burdens are unloaded. But we hear no
more of this project.

But by August he was half beside himself with anxiety. On the 6th he
wrote Hall:

    Here we never see a newspaper, but even if we did I could not come
    anywhere near appreciating or correctly estimating the tempest you
    have been buffeting your way through--only the man who is in it can
    do that--but I have tried not to burden you thoughtlessly or
    wantonly. I have been overwrought & unsettled in mind by
    apprehensions, & that is a thing that is not helpable when one is in
    a strange land & sees his resources melt down to a two months’
    supply & can’t see any sure daylight beyond. The bloody machine
    offers but a doubtful outlook--& will still offer nothing much
    better for a long time to come; for when the “three weeks” are up,
    there will be three months’ tinkering to follow, I guess. That is
    unquestionably the boss machine of the world, but is the toughest
    one on prophets when it is in an incomplete state that has ever seen
    the light.

And three days later:

    Great Scott, but it’s a long year--for you & me! I never knew the
    almanac to drag so. At least not since I was finishing that other
    machine.

    I watch for your letters hungrily--just as I used to watch for the
    telegram saying the machine’s finished--but when “next week
    certainly” suddenly swelled into “three weeks sure” I recognized the
    old familiar tune I used to hear so much. W----don’t know what
    sick-heartedness is--but he is in a way to find out.

And finally, on the 4th:

    I am very glad indeed if you and Mr. Langdon are able to see any
    daylight ahead. To me none is visible. I strongly advise that
    every penny that comes in shall be applied to paying off debts. I
    may be in error about this, but it seems to me that we have no other
    course open. We can pay a part of the debts owing to outsiders
    --none to Clemenses. In very prosperous times we might regard our
    stock & copyrights as assets sufficient, with the money owing to us,
    to square up & quit even, but I suppose we may not hope for such
    luck in the present condition of things.

    What I am mainly hoping for is to save my book royalties. If they
    come into danger I hope you will cable me so that I can come over &
    try to save them, for if they go I am a beggar.

    I would sail to-day if I had anybody to take charge of my family &
    help them through the difficult journeys commanded by the doctors.

A few days later he could stand it no longer, and on August 29 (1893)
sailed, the second time that year, for New York.



CLXXXV. AN INTRODUCTION TO H. H. ROGERS

Clemens took a room at The Players--“a cheap room,” he wrote, “at $1.50
per day.” It was now the end of September, the beginning of a long
half-year, during which Mark Twain’s fortunes were at a lower ebb than
ever before; lower, even, than during those mining days among the bleak
Esmeralda hills. Then he had no one but him self and was young. Now,
at fifty-eight, he had precious lives dependent upon him, and he was
weighed down with a vast burden of debt. The liabilities of Charles L.
Webster & Co. were fully two hundred thousand dollars. Something like
sixty thousand dollars of this was money supplied by Mrs. Clemens, but
the vast remaining sum was due to banks, to printers, to binders, and to
dealers in various publishing materials. Somehow it must be paid. As for
their assets, they looked ample enough on paper, but in reality, at a
time like this, they were problematical. In fact, their value was very
doubtful indeed. What he was to do Clemens did not know. He could not
even send cheerful reports to Europe. There was no longer anything to
promise concerning the type-setter. The fifty machines which the company
had started to build had dwindled to ten machines; there was a prospect
that the ten would dwindle to one, and that one a reconstruction of
the original Hartford product, which had cost so much money and so
many weary years. Clemens spent a good part of his days at The Players,
reading or trying to write or seeking to divert his mind in the company
of the congenial souls there, waiting for-he knew not what.

Yet at this very moment a factor was coming into his life, a human
element, a man to whom in his old age Mark Twain owed more than to any
other of his myriad of friends. One night, when he was with Dr. Clarence
C. Rice at the Murray Hill Hotel, Rice said:

“Clemens, I want you to know my friend, Mr. H. H. Rogers. He is an
admirer of your books.”

Clemens turned and was looking into the handsome, clean-cut features of
the great financier, whose name was hardly so familiar then as it became
at a later period, but whose power was already widely known and felt
among his kind.

“Mr. Clemens,” said Mr. Rogers, “I was one of your early admirers.
I heard you lecture a long time ago on the Sandwich Islands. I was
interested in the subject in those days, and I heard that Mark Twain
was a man who had been there. I didn’t suppose I’d have any difficulty
getting a seat, but I did; the house was jammed. When I came away I
realized that Mark Twain was a great man, and I have read everything of
yours since that I could get hold of.”

They sat down at a table, and Clemens told some of his amusing stories.
Rogers was in a perpetual gale of laughter. When at last he rose to go
the author and the financier were as old friends. Mr. Rogers urged him
to visit him at his home. He must introduce him to Mrs. Rogers, he said,
who was also his warm admirer. It was only a little while after this
that Dr. Rice said to the millionaire:

“Mr. Rogers, I wish you would look into Clemens’s finances a little: I
am afraid they are a good deal confused.”

This would be near the end of September, 1893. On October 18 Clemens
wrote home concerning a possible combination of Webster & Co. with John
Brisben Walker, of the ‘Cosmopolitan’, and added:

    I have got the best and wisest man of the whole Standard Oil group-a
    multi-millionaire--a good deal interested in looking into the type-
    setter. He has been searching into that thing for three weeks and
    yesterday he said to me:

    “I find the machine to be all you represent it. I have here
    exhaustive reports from my own experts, and I know every detail of
    its capacity, its immense construction, its cost, its history, and
    all about its inventor’s character. I know that the New York
    company and the Chicago company are both stupid, and that they are
    unbusinesslike people, destitute of money and in a hopeless boggle.”

Then he told me the scheme he had planned and said:

    “If I can arrange with these people on this basis--it will take
    several weeks to find out--I will see to it that they get the money
    they need. In the mean time you ‘stop walking the floor’.”

Of course, with this encouragement, Clemens was in the clouds again.
Furthermore, Rogers had suggested to his son-in-law, William Evarts
Benjamin, also a subscription publisher, that he buy from the Webster
company The Library of American Literature for fifty thousand dollars, a
sum which provided for the more insistent creditors. There was hope that
the worst was over. Clemens did in reality give up walking the floor,
and for the time, at least, found happier diversions. He must not
return to Europe as yet, for the type-setter matter was still far from
conclusion. On the 11th of November he was gorgeously entertained by
the Lotos Club in its new building. Introducing him, President Frank
Lawrence said:

“What name is there in literature that can be likened to his? Perhaps
some of the distinguished gentlemen about this table can tell us, but I
know of none. Himself his only parallel, it seems to me. He is all our
own--a ripe and perfect product of the American soil.”



CLXXXVI. “THE BELLE OF NEW YORK”

Those were feverish weeks of waiting, with days of alternate depression
and exaltation as the pendulum swung to and fro between hope and
despair. By daylight Clemens tried to keep himself strenuously busy;
evenings and nights he plunged into social activities--dinners,
amusements, suppers, balls, and the like. He was besieged with
invitations, sought for by the gayest and the greatest; “Jamie” Dodge
conferred upon him the appropriate title: of “The Belle of New York.” In
his letters home he describes in detail many of the festivities and
the wildness with which he has flung himself into them, dilating on
his splendid renewal of health, his absolute immunity from fatigue. He
attributes this to his indifference to diet and regularities of meals
and sleep; but we may guess that it was due to a reaction from having
shifted his burden to stronger financial shoulders. Henry Rogers had
taken his load upon him.

“It rests me,” Rogers said, “to experiment with the affairs of a friend
when I am tired of my own. You enjoy yourself. Let me work at the puzzle
a little.”

And Clemens, though his conscience pricked him, obeyed, as was his habit
at such times. To Mrs. Clemens (in Paris now, at the Hotel Brighton) he
wrote:

    He is not common clay, but fine-fine & delicate. I did hate to
    burden his good heart & overworked head, but he took hold with
    avidity & said it was no burden to work for his friends, but a
    pleasure. When I arrived in September, Lord! how black the prospect
    was & how desperate, how incurably desperate! Webster & Co. had to
    have a small sum of money or go under at once. I flew to Hartford
    --to my friends--but they were not moved, not strongly interested, &
    I was ashamed that I went. It was from Mr. Rogers, a stranger, that
    I got the money and was by it saved. And then--while still a
    stranger--he set himself the task of saving my financial life
    without putting upon me (in his native delicacy) any sense that I
    was the recipient of a charity, a benevolence. He gave time to me
    --time, which could not be bought by any man at $100,000 a
    month--no, nor for three times the money.

He adds that a friend has just offered to Webster & Co. a book that
arraigns the Standard Oil magnates individual by individual.

    I wanted to say the only man I care for in the world, the only man I
    would give a d---n for, the only man who is lavishing his sweat &
    blood to save me & mine from starvation is a Standard Oil magnate.
    If you know me, you know whether I want the book or not.

    But I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t want any book; I wanted to
    get out of this publishing business & out of all business & was here
    for that purpose & would accomplish it if I could.

He tells how he played billiards with Rogers, tirelessly as always,
until the millionaire had looked at him helplessly and asked:

“Don’t you ever get tired?”

And he answered:

“I don’t know what it is to get tired. I wish I did.”

He wrote of going with Mr. Rogers to the Madison Square Garden to see an
exhibition of boxing given by the then splendid star of pugilism, James
J. Corbett. Dr. Rice accompanied him, and painters Robert Reid and
Edward Simmons, from The Players. They had five seats in a box, and
Stanford White came along presently and took Clemens into the champion’s
dressing-room.

    Corbett has a fine face and is modest and diffident, besides being
    the most perfectly & beautifully constructed human animal in the
    world. I said:

    “You have whipped Mitchell & maybe you will whip Jackson in June
    --but you are not done then. You will have to tackle me.”

    He answered, so gravely that one might easily have thought him in
    earnest:

    “No, I am not going to meet you in the ring. It is not fair or
    right to require it. You might chance to knock me out, by no merit
    of your own, but by a purely accidental blow, & then my reputation
    would be gone & you would have a double one. You have got fame
    enough & you ought not to want to take mine away from me.”

    Corbett was for a long time a clerk in the Nevada Bank, in San
    Francisco.

    There were lots of little boxing-matches to entertain the crowd;
    then at last Corbett appeared in the ring & the 8,000 people present
    went mad with enthusiasm. My two artists went mad about his form.
    They said they had never seen anything that came reasonably near
    equalling its perfection except Greek statues, & they didn’t surpass
    it.

    Corbett boxed 3 rounds with the middle-weight Australian champion
    --oh, beautiful to see!--then the show was over and we struggled out
    through a perfect mash of humanity. When we reached the street I
    found I had left my arctics in the box. I had to have them, so
    Simmons said he would go back & get them, & I didn’t dissuade him.
    I wouldn’t see how he was going to make his way a single yard into
    that solid incoming wave of people--yet he must plow through it full
    50 yards. He was back with the shoes in 3 minutes!

    How do you reckon he accomplished that miracle? By saying:

    “Way, gentlemen, please--coming to fetch Mr. Corbett’s overshoes.”

    The word flew from mouth to mouth, the Red Sea divided, & Simmons
    walked comfortably through & back, dry-shod. This is Fire-escape
    Simmons, the inveterate talker, you know: Exit--in case of Simmons.

    I had an engagement at a beautiful dwelling close to The Players for
    10.30; I was there by 10.45. Thirty cultivated & very musical
    ladies & gentlemen present--all of them acquaintances & many of them
    personal friends of mine. That wonderful Hungarian band was there
    (they charge $500 for an evening). Conversation and band until
    midnight; then a bite of supper; then the company was compactly
    grouped before me & I told them about Dr. B. E. Martin & the
    etchings, & followed it with the Scotch-Irish christening. My, but
    the Martin is a darling story! Next, the head tenor from the Opera
    sang half a dozen great songs that set the company wild, yes, mad
    with delight, that nobly handsome young Damrosch accompanying on the
    piano.

    Just a little pause, then the band burst out into an explosion of
    weird and tremendous dance-music, a Hungarian celebrity & his wife
    took the floor; I followed--I couldn’t help it; the others drifted
    in, one by one, & it was Onteora over again.

    By half past 4. I had danced all those people down--& yet was not
    tired; merely breathless. I was in bed at 5 & asleep in ten
    minutes. Up at 9 & presently at work on this letter to you. I
    think I wrote until 2 or half past. Then I walked leisurely out to
    Mr. Rogers’s (it is called 3 miles, but is short of it), arriving at
    3.30, but he was out--to return at 5.30--so I didn’t stay, but
    dropped over and chatted with Howells until five.
--[Two Mark Twain anecdotes are remembered of that winter at The
Players:

Just before Christmas a member named Scott said one day:

“Mr. Clemens, you have an extra overcoat hanging in the coatroom. I’ve
got to attend my uncle’s funeral and it’s raining very hard. I’d like to
wear it.”

The coat was an old one, in the pockets of which Clemens kept a
melancholy assortment of pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, neckties, letters,
and what not.

“Scott,” he said, “if you won’t lose anything out of the pockets of that
coat you may wear it.”

An hour or two later Clemens found a notice in his mail-box that a
package for him was in the office. He called for it and found a neat
bundle, which somehow had a Christmas look. He carried it up to the
reading-room with a showy, air.

“Now, boys,” he said, “you may make all the fun of Christmas you like,
but it’s pretty nice, after all, to be remembered.”

They gathered around and he undid the package. It was filled with the
pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, and other articles from the old overcoat.
Scott had taken special precautions against losing them.

Mark Twain regarded them a moment in silence, then he drawled:

“Well--, d---n Scott. I hope his uncle’s funeral will be a failure!”

The second anecdote concerns The Player egg-cups. They easily hold two
eggs, but not three. One morning a new waiter came to take the breakfast
order. Clemens said:

“Boy, put three soft eggs in that cup for me.”

By and by the waiter returned, bringing the breakfast. Clemens looked at
the egg portion and asked:

“Boy, what was my order?”

“Three soft eggs broken in the cup, Mr. Clemens.”

“And you’ve filled that order, have you?”

“Yes, Mr. Clemens.”

“Boy, you are trifling with the truth; I’ve been trying all winter to
get three eggs into that cup.”]

In one letter he tells of a dinner with his old Comstock friend, John
Mackay--a dinner without any frills, just soup and raw oysters and
corned beef and cabbage, such as they had reveled in sometimes, in
prosperous moments, thirty years before.

“The guests were old gray Pacific coasters,” he said, “whom I knew when
they were young and not gray. The talk was of the days when we went
gipsying-along time ago--thirty years.”

Indeed, it was a talk of the dead. Mainly that. And of how they looked &
the harum-scarum things they did & said. For there were no cares in that
life, no aches & pains, & not time enough in the day (& three-fourths
of the night) to work off one’s surplus vigor & energy. Of the midnight
highway-robbery joke played upon me with revolvers at my head on the
windswept & desolate Gold Hill Divide no witness was left but me, the
victim. Those old fools last night laughed till they cried over the
particulars of that old forgotten crime.

In still another letter he told of a very wonderful entertainment at
Robert Reid’s studio. There were present, he says:

    Coquelin;
    Richard Harding Davis;
    Harrison, the great outdoor painter;
    Wm. H. Chase, the artist;
    Bettini, inventor of the new phonograph;
    Nikola Tesla, the world-wide illustrious electrician; see article
    about him in Jan. or Feb. Century.
    John Drew, actor;
    James Barnes, a marvelous mimic; my, you should see him!
    Smedley, the artist;
    Zorn,    “ ”
     Zogbaum,  “ ”
     Reinhart, “ ”
     Metcalf,  “ ”
     Ancona, head tenor at the Opera;

    Oh, & a great lot of others. Everybody there had done something &
    was in his way famous.

    Somebody welcomed Coquelin in a nice little French speech, John Drew
    did the like for me in English, & then the fun began. Coquelin did
    some excellent French monologues--one of them an ungrammatical
    Englishman telling a colorless historiette in French. It nearly
    killed the fifteen or twenty people who understood it.

    I told a yarn, Ancona sang half a dozen songs, Barnes did his
    darling imitations, Handing Davis sang the hanging of Danny Deever,
    which was of course good, but he followed it with that mast
    fascinating (for what reason I don’t know) of all Kipling’s poems,
    “On the Road to Mandalay,” sang it tenderly, & it searched me deeper
    & charmed me more than the Deever.

    Young Gerrit Smith played some ravishing dance-music, & we all
    danced about an hour. There couldn’t be a pleasanter night than
    that one was. Some of those people complained of fatigue, but I
    don’t seem to know what the sense of fatigue is.

In his reprieve he was like some wild thing that had regained liberty.

He refers to Susy’s recent illness and to Mrs. Clemens’s own poor state
of health.

    Dear, dear Susy! My strength reproaches me when I think of her and
    you.

    It is an unspeakable pity that you should be without any one to go
    about with the girls, & it troubles me, & grieves me, & makes me
    curse & swear; but you see, dear heart, I’ve got to stick right
    where I am till I find out whether we are rich or whether the
    poorest person we are acquainted with in anybody’s kitchen is better
    off than we are.. I stand on the land-end of a springboard, with
    the family clustered on the other end; if I take my foot----

He realized his hopes to her as a vessel trying to make port; once he
wrote:

    The ship is in sight now....

    When the anchor is down then I shall say:

    “Farewell--a long farewell--to business! I will never touch it
    again!”

    I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I will
    swim in ink! ‘Joan of Arc’--but all this is premature; the anchor
    is not down yet.

Sometimes he sent her impulsive cables calculating to sustain hope. Mrs.
Clemens, writing to her sister in January, said:

    Mr. Clemens now for ten days has been hourly expecting to send me
    word that Paige had signed the (new) contract, but as yet no
    despatch comes.... On the 5th of this month I received a
    cable, “Expect good news in ten days.” On the 15th I receive a
    cable, “Look out for good news.” On the 19th a cable, “Nearing
    success.”

It appealed to her sense of humor even in these dark days. She added:

    They make me laugh, for they are so like my beloved “Colonel.”

Mr. Rogers had agreed that he would bring Paige to rational terms, and
with Clemens made a trip to Chicago. All agreed now that the machine
promised a certain fortune as soon as a contract acceptable to everybody
could be concluded--Paige and his lawyer being the last to dally and
dicker as to terms. Finally a telegram came from Chicago saying that
Paige had agreed to terms. On that day Clemens wrote in his note-book:

This is a great date in my history. Yesterday we were paupers with but 3
months’ rations of cash left and $160,000 in debt, my wife & I, but this
telegram makes us wealthy.

But it was not until a fortnight later that Paige did actually sign.
This was on the 1st of February, ‘94, and Clemens that night cabled to
Paris, so that Mrs. Clemens would have it on her breakfast-plate the
morning of their anniversary:

“Wedding news. Our ship is safe in port. I sail the moment Rogers can
spare me.”

So this painted bubble, this thing of emptiness, had become as substance
again--the grand hope. He was as concerned with it as if it had been an
actual gold-mine with ore and bullion piled in heaps--that shadow, that
farce, that nightmare. One longs to go back through the years and face
him to the light and arouse him to the vast sham of it all.



CLXXXVII. SOME LITERARY MATTERS

Clemens might have lectured that winter with profit, and Major Pond did
his best to persuade him; but Rogers agreed that his presence in New
York was likely to be too important to warrant any schedule of absence.
He went once to Boston to lecture for charity, though his pleasure
in the experience was a sufficient reward. On the evening before the
lecture Mrs. James T. Fields had him to her house to dine with Dr.
Holmes, then not far from the end of his long, beautiful life.--[He died
that same year, October, 1894.]

Clemens wrote to Paris of their evening together:

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes never goes out (he is in his 84th year), but
he came out this time--said he wanted to “have a time” once more with
me.

Mrs. Fields said Aldrich begged to come, & went away crying because
she wouldn’t let him. She allowed only her family (Sarah Orne Jewett &
sister) to be present, because much company would overtax Dr. Holmes.

Well, he was just delightful! He did as brilliant and beautiful talking
(& listening) as he ever did in his life, I guess. Fields and Jewett
said he hadn’t been in such splendid form for years. He had ordered his
carriage for 9. The coachman sent in for him at 9, but he said, “Oh,
nonsense!--leave glories & grandeurs like these? Tell him to go away &
come in an hour!”

At 10 he was called for again, & Mrs. Fields, getting uneasy, rose, but
he wouldn’t go--& so we rattled ahead the same as ever. Twice more Mrs.
Fields rose, but he wouldn’t go--& he didn’t go till half past 10--an
unwarrantable dissipation for him in these days. He was prodigiously
complimentary about some of my books, & is having Pudd’nhead read to
him. I told him you & I used the Autocrat as a courting book & marked
it all through, & that you keep it in the sacred green box with the
loveletters, & it pleased him.

One other address Clemens delivered that winter, at Fair Haven, on
the opening of the Millicent Library, a present to the town from Mrs.
Rogers. Mrs. Rogers had suggested to her husband that perhaps Mr.
Clemens would be willing to say a few words there. Mr. Rogers had
replied, “Oh, Clemens is in trouble. I don’t like to ask him,” but a day
or two later told him of Mrs. Rogers’s wish, adding:

“Don’t feel at all that you need to do it. I know just how you are
feeling, how worried you are.”

Clemens answered, “Mr. Rogers, do you think there is anything I could do
for you that I wouldn’t do?”

It was on this occasion that he told for the first time the “stolen
watermelon” story, so often reprinted since; how once he had stolen a
watermelon, and when he found it to be a green one, had returned it to
the farmer, with a lecture on honesty, and received a ripe one in its
place.

In spite of his cares and diversions Clemens’s literary activities
of this time were considerable. He wrote an article for the Youth’s
Companion--“How to Tell a Story”--and another for the North American
Review on Fenimore Cooper’s “Literary Offenses.” Mark Twain had not
much respect for Cooper as a literary artist. Cooper’s stilted
artificialities and slipshod English exasperated him and made it
hard for him to see that in spite of these things the author of the
Deerslayer was a mighty story-teller. Clemens had also promised some
stories to Walker, of the Cosmopolitan, and gave him one for his
Christmas number, “Traveling with a Reformer,” which had grown out
of some incidents of that long-ago journey with Osgood to Chicago,
supplemented by others that had happened on the more recent visit to
that city with Hall. This story had already appeared when Clemens and
Rogers had made their Chicago trip. Rogers had written for passes over
the Pennsylvania road, and the president, replying, said:

“No, I won’t give Mark Twain a pass over our road. I’ve been reading his
‘Traveling with a Reformer,’ in which he abuses our road. I wouldn’t let
him ride over it again if I could help it. The only way I’ll agree to
let him go over it at all is in my private car. I have stocked it with
everything he can possibly want, and have given orders that if there
is anything else he wants the train is to be stopped until they can get
it.”

“Pudd’nhead Wilson” was appearing in the Century during this period, and
“Tom Sawyer Abroad” in the St. Nicholas. The Century had issued a tiny
calendar of the Pudd’nhead maxims, and these quaint bits of philosophy,
the very gems of Mark Twain mental riches, were in everybody’s mouth.
With all this going on, and with his appearance at various social
events, he was rather a more spectacular figure that winter than ever
before.

From the note-book:

    The Haunted Looking-glass. The guest (at midnight a dim light
    burning) wakes up & sees appear & disappear the faces that have
    looked into the glass during 3 centuries.

    Love seems the swiftest but is the slowest of all growths. No man
    and woman really know what perfect love is until they have been
    married a quarter of a century.

    It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.

    Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made the
    slave of the lash--that one is the cat.

    Truth is stranger than fiction--to some people, but I am measurably
    familiar with it.



CLXXXVIII. FAILURE

It was the first week in March before it was thought to be safe for
Clemens to return to France, even for a brief visit to his family. He
hurried across and remained with them what seemed an infinitesimal time,
a bare three weeks, and was back again in New York by the middle of
April. The Webster company difficulties had now reached an acute stage.
Mr. Rogers had kept a close watch on its financial affairs, hoping to be
able to pull it through or to close it without failure, paying all the
creditors in full; but on the afternoon of the 16th of April, 1894, Hall
arrived at Clemens’s room at The Players in a panic. The Mount Morris
Bank had elected a new president and board of directors, and had
straightway served notice on him that he must pay his notes--two notes
of five thousand dollars each in a few days when due. Mr. Rogers was
immediately notified, of course, and said he would sleep on it and
advise them next day. He did not believe that the bank would really push
them to the wall. The next day was spent in seeing what could be done,
and by evening it was clear that unless a considerable sum of money was
raised a voluntary assignment was the proper course. The end of the long
struggle had come. Clemens hesitated less on his own than on his wife’s
account. He knew that to her the word failure would be associated with
disgrace. She had pinched herself with a hundred economies to keep the
business afloat, and was willing to go on economizing to avert this
final disaster. Mr. Rogers said:

“Mr. Clemens, assure her from me that there is not even a tinge of
disgrace in making this assignment. By doing it you will relieve
yourself of a fearful load of dread, and in time will be able to pay
everything and stand clear before the world. If you don’t do it you will
probably never be free from debt, and it will kill you and Mrs. Clemens
both. If there is any disgrace it would be in not taking the course that
will give you and her your freedom and your creditors a better chance
for their claims. Most of them will be glad enough to help you.”

It was on the afternoon of the next day, April 18, 1894, that the firm
of Charles L. Webster & Co. executed assignment papers and closed its
doors. A meeting of the creditors was called, at which H. H. Rogers
was present, representing Clemens. For the most part the creditors were
liberal and willing to agree to any equitable arrangement. But there
were a few who were grumpy and fussy. They declared that Mark Twain
should turn over his copyrights, his Hartford home, and whatever other
odds and ends could be discovered. Mr. Rogers, discussing the matter in
1908, said:

“They were bent on devouring every pound of flesh in sight and picking
the bones afterward, as Clemens and his wife were perfectly willing they
should do. I was getting a little warm all the time at the highhanded
way in which these few men were conducting the thing, and presently
I got on my feet and said, ‘Gentlemen, you are not going to have this
thing all your way. I have something to say about Mr. Clemens’s affairs.
Mrs. Clemens is the chief creditor of this firm. Out of her own personal
fortune she has lent it more than sixty thousand dollars. She will be a
preferred creditor, and those copyrights will be assigned to her until
her claim is paid in full. As for the home in Hartford, it is hers
already.’

“There was a good deal of complaint, but I refused to budge. I insisted
that Mrs. Clemens had the first claims on the copyrights, though, to
tell the truth, these did not promise much then, for in that hard year
the sale of books was small enough. Besides Mrs. Clemens’s claim the
debts amounted to one hundred thousand dollars, and of course there must
be a definite basis of settlement, so it was agreed that Clemens should
pay fifty cents on the dollar, when the assets were finally realized
upon, and receive a quittance. Clemens himself declared that sooner or
later he would pay the other fifty cents, dollar for dollar, though
I believe there was no one besides himself and his wife and me who
believed he would ever be able to do it. Clemens himself got discouraged
sometimes, and was about ready to give it up, for he was getting on in
years--nearly sixty--and he was in poor health. Once when we found
the debt, after the Webster salvage, was going to be at least seventy
thousand dollars, he said, ‘I need not dream of paying it. I never could
manage it.’ But he stuck to it. He was at my house a good deal at first.
We gave him a room there and he came and went as he chose. The worry
told upon him. He became frail during those weeks, almost ethereal, yet
it was strange how brilliant he was, how cheerful.”

The business that had begun so promisingly and prosperously a decade
before had dwindled to its end. The last book it had in hand was ‘Tom
Sawyer Abroad’, just ready for issue. It curiously happened that on the
day of the failure copies of it were filed in Washington for copyright.
Frank Bliss came over from Hartford, and Clemens arranged with him
for the publication of ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’, thereby renewing the old
relationship with the American Publishing Company after a break of a
dozen years.

Naturally, the failure of Mark Twain’s publishing firm made a public
stir, and it showed how many and sincere were his friends, how ready
they were with sympathy and help of a more material kind. Those who
understood best, congratulated him on being out of the entanglement.

Poultney Bigelow, Douglas Taylor, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Dudley
Warner, and others extended financial help, Bigelow and Taylor each
inclosing him a check of one thousand dollars for immediate necessities.
He was touched by these things, but the checks were returned. Many of
his creditors sent him personal letters assuring him that he was
to forget his obligation to them completely until such time as the
remembering would cost him no uneasiness.

Clemens, in fact, felt relieved, now that the worst had come, and wrote
bright letters home. In one he said:

Mr. Rogers is perfectly satisfied that our course was right, absolutely
right and wise--cheer up, the best is yet to come.

And again:

    Now & then a good and dear Joe Twichell or Susy Warner condoles with
    me & says, “Cheer up-don’t be downhearted,” and some other friend
    says, “I’m glad and surprised to see how cheerful you are & how
    bravely you stand it,” & none of them suspect what a burden has been
    lifted from me & how blithe I am inside. Except when I think of
    you, dear heart--then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you
    grieving and ashamed, & dreading to look people in the face. For in
    the thick of the fight there is cheer, but you are far away & cannot
    hear the drum nor see the wheeling squadrons. You only seem to see
    rout, retreat, & dishonored colors dragging in the dirt--whereas
    none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but no
    dishonor--& we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, “Sho,
    Livy isn’t worrying. So long as she’s got you and the children she
    doesn’t care what happens. She knows it isn’t her affair.” Which
    didn’t convince me.

Olivia Clemens wrote bravely and encouragingly to him, and more
cheerfully than she felt, for in a letter to her sister she said:

    The hideous news of Webster & Co.’s failure reached me by cable on
    Thursday, and Friday morning Galignani’s Messenger had a squib about
    it. Of course I knew it was likely to come, but I had great hope
    that it would be in some way averted. Mr. Rogers was so sure there
    was no way out but failure that I suppose it was true. But I have a
    perfect horror and heart-sickness over it. I cannot get away from
    the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I suppose it
    always will mean that to me. We have put a great deal of money into
    the concern, and perhaps there would have been nothing but to keep
    putting it in and losing it. We certainly now have not much to
    lose. We might have mortgaged the house; that was the only thing I
    could think of to do. Mr. Clemens felt that there would never be
    any end, and perhaps he was right. At any rate, I know that he was
    convinced that it was the only thing, because when he went back he
    promised me that if it was possible to save the thing he would do so
    if only on account of my sentiment in the matter.

    Sue, if you were to see me you would see that I have grown old very
    fast during this last year. I have wrinkled.

    Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems to me
    so impossible. I do not make things go very well, and I feel that
    my life is an absolute and irretrievable failure. Perhaps I am
    thankless, but I so often feel that I should like to give it up and
    die. However, I presume that if I could have the opportunity I
    should at once desire to live.

    Clemens now hurried back to Paris, arriving about the middle of May,
    his second trip in two months. Scarcely had he got the family
    settled at La Bourboule-les-Bains, a quiet watering-place in the
    southern part of France, when a cable from Mr. Rogers, stating that
    the typesetter was perfected, made him decide to hurry back to
    America to assist in securing the new fortune. He did not go,
    however. Rogers wrote that the machine had been installed in the
    Times-Herald office, Chicago, for a long and thorough trial. There
    would be plenty of time, and Clemens concluded to rest with his
    family at La Bourboule-les-Bains. Later in the summer they went to
    Etretat, where he settled down to work.



CLXXXIX. AN EVENTFUL YEAR ENDS

That summer (July, ‘94.) the ‘North American Review’ published “In
Defense of Harriet Shelley,” a rare piece of literary criticism and
probably the most human and convincing plea ever made for that injured,
ill-fated woman. An admirer of Shelley’s works, Clemens could not resist
taking up the defense of Shelley’s abandoned wife. It had become the
fashion to refer to her slightingly, and to suggest that she had not
been without blame for Shelley’s behavior. A Shelley biography by
Professor Dowden, Clemens had found particularly irritating. In the
midst of his tangle of the previous year he had paused to give it
attention. There were times when Mark Twain wrote without much sequence,
digressing this way and that, as his fancy led him, charmingly and
entertainingly enough, with no large, logical idea. He pursued no such
method in this instance. The paper on Harriet Shelley is a brief as
direct and compact and cumulative as could have been prepared by a
trained legal mind of the highest order, and it has the added advantage
of being the utterance of a human soul voicing an indignation inspired
by human suffering and human wrong. By no means does it lack humor,
searching and biting sarcasm. The characterization of Professor Dowden’s
Life of Shelley as a “literary cake-walk” is a touch which only Mark
Twain could have laid on. Indeed, the “Defense of Harriet Shelly,” with
those early chapters of Joan at Florence, maybe counted as the beginning
for Mark Twain of a genuine literary renaissance. It was to prove a
remarkable period less voluminous than the first, but even more choice,
containing, as it would, besides Joan and the Shelley article, the
rest of that remarkable series collected now as Literary Essays; the
Hadleyburg story; “Was it Heaven or Hell?”; those masterly articles on
our national policies; closing at last with those exquisite memories, in
his final days.

The summer of 1894 found Mark Twain in the proper frame of mind for
literary work. He was no longer in a state of dread. At Etretat,
a watering-place on the French coast, he returned eagerly to the
long-neglected tale of Joan--“a book which writes itself,” he wrote
Mr. Rogers”--a tale which tells itself; I merely have to hold the pen.”
 Etretat, originally a fishing-village, was less pretentious than to-day,
and the family had taken a small furnished cottage a little way back
from the coast--a charming place, and a cheap one--as became their
means. Clemens worked steadily at Etretat for more than a month,
finishing the second part of his story, then went over to Rouen to visit
the hallowed precincts where Joan dragged out those weary months that
brought her to the stake. Susy Clemens was taken ill at Rouen, and they
lingered in that ancient city, wandering about its venerable streets,
which have been changed but slowly by the centuries, and are still full
of memories.

They returned to Paris at length--to the Brighton; their quarters of the
previous winter--but presently engaged for the winter the studio home
of the artist Pomroy at 169 rue de l’Universite, beyond the Seine. Mark
Twain wrote of it once:

    It was a lovely house; large, rambling, quaint, charmingly furnished
    and decorated, built upon no particular plan, delightfully uncertain
    and full of surprises. You were always getting lost in it, and
    finding nooks and corners which you did not know were there and
    whose presence you had not suspected before. It was built by a rich
    French artist, and he had also furnished it and decorated it
    himself. The studio was coziness itself. With us it served as a
    drawing-room, sitting-room, living-room, dancing-room--we used it
    for everything. We couldn’t get enough of it. It is odd that it
    should have been so cozy, for it was 40 feet long, 40 feet high, and
    30 feet wide, with a vast fireplace on, each side, in the middle,
    and a musicians’ gallery at one end.

Mrs. Clemens had hoped to return to America, to their Hartford home.
That was her heart’s desire--to go back once more to their old life and
fireside, to forget all this period of exile and wandering. Her letters
were full of her home-longing; her three years of absence seemed like an
eternity.

In its way, the Pomroy house was the best substitute for home they
had found. Its belongings were of the kind she loved. Susy had better
health, and her husband was happy in his work. They had much delightful
and distinguished company. Her letters tell of these attractive things,
and of their economies to make their income reach.

It was near the end of the year that the other great interest--the
machine--came finally to a conclusion. Reports from the test had been
hopeful during the summer. Early in October Clemens, receiving a copy of
the Times-Herald, partly set by the machine, wrote: “The Herald has just
arrived, and that column is healing for sore eyes. It affects me like
Columbus sighting land.” And again on the 28th:

    It seems to me that things couldn’t well be going better at Chicago
    than they are. There’s no other machine that can set type eight
    hours with only seventeen minutes’ stoppage through cussedness. The
    others do rather more stopping than working. By and by our machines
    will be perfect; then they won’t stop at all.

But that was about the end of the good news. The stoppages became worse
and worse. The type began to break--the machine had its old trouble: it
was too delicately adjusted--too complicated.

“Great guns, what is the matter with it?” wrote Clemens in November when
he received a detailed account of its misconduct.

Mr. Rogers and his son-in-law, Mr. Broughton, went out to Chicago
to investigate. They went to the Times-Herald office to watch the
type-setter in action. Mr. Rogers once told of this visit to the writer
of these chapters. He said:

“Certainly it was a marvelous invention. It was the nearest approach to
a human being in the wonderful things it could do of any machine I have
ever known. But that was just the trouble; it was too much of a human
being and not enough of a machine. It had all the complications of the
human mechanism, all the liability of getting out of repair, and it
could not be replaced with the ease and immediateness of the human
being. It was too costly; too difficult of construction; too hard to set
up. I took out my watch and timed its work and counted its mistakes. We
watched it a long time, for it was most interesting, most fascinating,
but it was not practical--that to me was clear.”

It had failed to stand the test. The Times-Herald would have no more
of it. Mr. Rogers himself could see the uselessness of the endeavor.
He instructed Mr. Broughton to close up the matter as best he could and
himself undertook the harder task of breaking the news to Mark Twain.
His letters seem not to have been preserved, but the replies to them
tell the story.

                         169 rue de l’Universite,

    PARIS, December 22, 1894.

    DEAR MR. ROGERS,--I seemed to be entirely expecting your letter, and
    also prepared and resigned; but Lord, it shows how little we know
    ourselves and how easily we can deceive ourselves. It hit me like a
    thunder-clap. It knocked every rag of sense out of my head, and I
    went flying here and there and yonder, not knowing what I was doing,
    and only one clearly defined thought standing up visible and
    substantial out of the crazy storm-drift--that my dream of ten years
    was in desperate peril and out of the 60,000 or 70,000 projects for
    its rescue that came flocking through my skull not one would hold
    still long enough for me to examine it and size it up. Have you
    ever been like that? Not so much, I reckon.

    There was another clearly defined idea--I must be there and see it
    die. That is, if it must die; and maybe if I were there we might
    hatch up some next-to-impossible way to make it take up its bed and
    take a walk.

    So, at the end of four hours I started, still whirling, and walked
    over to the rue Scribe--4 p.m.--and asked a question or two and was
    told I should be running a big risk if I took the 9 p.m. train for
    London and Southampton; “better come right along at 6.52 per Havre
    special and step aboard the New York all easy and comfortable.”
     Very! and I about two miles from home and no packing done.

    Then it occurred to me that none of these salvation notions that
    were whirlwinding through my head could be examined or made
    available unless at least a month’s time could be secured. So I
    cabled you, and said to myself that I would take the French steamer
    to-morrow (which will be Sunday).

    By bedtime Mrs. Clemens had reasoned me into a fairly rational and
    contented state of mind; but of course it didn’t last long. So I
    went on thinking--mixing it with a smoke in the dressing-room once
    an hour--until dawn this morning. Result--a sane resolution; no
    matter what your answer to my cable might be I would hold still and
    not sail until I should get an answer to this present letter which I
    am now writing or a cable answer from you saying “Come” or “Remain.”

    I have slept 6 hours, my pond has clarified, and I find the sediment
    of my 70,000 projects to be of this character:

He follows with a detailed plan for reconstructing the machine, using
brass type, etc., and concludes:

    Don’t say I’m wild. For really I’m sane again this morning.

    I am going right along with Joan now, and wait untroubled till I
    hear from you. If you think I can be of the least use cable me
    “Come.” I can write Joan on board ship and lose no time. Also I
    could discuss my plan with the publisher for a de luxe Joan, time
    being an object, for some of the pictures could be made over here,
    cheaply and quickly, that would cost much more time and money in
    America.

The second letter followed five days later:

                     169 rue de l’Universite,
                     PARIS, December 27, 1894.

    DEAR MR. ROGERS,--Notwithstanding your heart is “old and hard” you
    make a body choke up. I know you “mean every word you say” and I do
    take it “in the same spirit in which you tender it.” I shall keep
    your regard while we two live--that I know; for I shall always
    remember what you have done for me, and that will insure me against
    ever doing anything that could forfeit it or impair it.

    It is six days or seven days ago that I lived through that
    despairing day, and then through a night without sleep; then settled
    down next day into my right mind (or thereabouts) and wrote you. I
    put in the rest of that day till 7 P.m. plenty comfortably enough
    writing a long chapter of my book; then went to a masked ball
    blacked up as Uncle Remus, taking Clara along, and we had a good
    time. I have lost no day since, and suffered no discomfort to speak
    of, but drove my troubles out of my mind and had good success in
    keeping them out--through watchfulness. I have done a good week’s
    work and put the book a good way ahead in the Great Trial [of Joan],
    which is the difficult part: the part which requires the most
    thought and carefulness. I cannot see the end of the Trial yet, but
    I am on the road. I am creeping surely toward it.

    “Why not leave them all to me?” My business brothers? I take you by
    the hand! I jump at the chance!

    I ought to be ashamed and I am trying my best to be ashamed--and yet
    I do jump at the chance in spite of it. I don’t want to write
    Irving and I don’t want to write Stoker. It doesn’t seem as if I
    could. But I can suggest something for you to write them; and then
    if you see that I am unwise you can write them something quite
    different. Now this is my idea:

       1. To return Stoker’s $100 to him and keep his stock.

       2. And tell Irving that when luck turns with me I will make
       good to him what the salvage from the dead Co. fails to pay him
       of his $500.

    [P. S. Madam says No, I must face the music. So I inclose my
    effort--to be used if you approve, but not otherwise.]

    We shall try to find a tenant for our Hartford house; not an easy
    matter, for it costs heavily to live in. We can never live in it
    again; though it would break the family’s hearts if they could
    believe it.

    Nothing daunts Mrs. Clemens or makes the world look black to her
    --which is the reason I haven’t drowned myself.

    I got the Xmas journals which you sent and I thank you for that Xmas
    remembrance.

    We all send our deepest and warmest greetings to you and all of
    yours and a Happy New Year!

                     S. L. CLEMENS.
--[Brain Stoker and Sir Henry Irving had each taken a small interest in
the machine. The inclosure for Stoker ran as follows:]

    MY DEAR STOKER,--I am not dating this, because it is not to be
    mailed at present.

    When it reaches you it will mean that there is a hitch in my machine
    enterprise--a hitch so serious as to make it take to itself the
    aspect of a dissolved dream. This letter, then, will contain cheque
    for the $100 which you have paid. And will you tell Irving for me
    --I can’t get up courage enough to talk about this misfortune myself,
    except to you, whom by good luck I haven’t damaged yet--that when
    the wreckage presently floats ashore he will get a good deal of his
    $500 back; and a dab at a time I will make up to him the rest.

    I’m not feeling as fine as I was when I saw you there in your home.
    Please remember me kindly to Mrs. Stoker. I gave up that London
    lecture-project entirely. Had to--there’s never been a chance since
    to find the time.

    Sincerely yours,
                            S. L. CLEMENS.

A week later he added what was about his final word on the subject:

    Yours of December 21 has arrived, containing the circular to
    stockholders, and I guess the Co. will really quit--there doesn’t
    seem to be any other wise course.

    There’s one thing which makes it difficult for me to soberly realize
    that my ten-year dream is actually dissolved; and that is that it
    reverses my horoscope. The proverb says, “Born lucky, always
    lucky.”

    It was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned
    in the Mississippi or in Bear Creek, but I was pulled out in a
    drowned condition 9 times before I learned to swim, and was
    considered to be a cat in disguise. When the Pennsylvania blew up
    and the telegraph reported my brother as fatally injured (with 60
    others) but made no mention of me, my uncle said to my mother “it
    means that Sam was somewhere else, after being on that boat a year
    and a half--he was born lucky.” Yes, I was somewhere else. I am so
    superstitious that I have always been afraid to have business
    dealings with certain relatives and friends of mine because they
    were unlucky people. All my life I have stumbled upon lucky chances
    of large size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my
    own stupidity and carelessness. And so I have felt entirely certain
    that the machine would turn up trumps eventually. It disappointed
    me lots of times, but I couldn’t shake off the confidence of a
    lifetime in my luck.

    Well, whatever I get out of the wreckage will be due to good luck
    --the good luck of getting you into the scheme--for, but for that
    there wouldn’t be any wreckage; it would be total loss.

    I wish you had been in at the beginning. Then we should have had
    the good luck to step promptly ashore.

So it was that the other great interest died and was put away forever.
Clemens scarcely ever mentioned it again, even to members of his family.
It was a dead issue; it was only a pity that it had ever seemed a
live one. A combination known as the Regius Company took over Paige’s
interest, but accomplished nothing. Eventually--irony of fate--the
Mergenthaler Company, so long scorned and derided, for twenty thousand
dollars bought out the rights and assets and presented that marvelous
work of genius, the mechanical wonder of the age, to the Sibley College
of Engineering, where it is shown as the costliest piece of machinery,
for its size, ever constructed. Mark Twain once received a letter from
an author who had written a book calculated to assist inventors and
patentees, asking for his indorsement. He replied:

    DEAR SIR,--I have, as you say, been interested in patents and
    patentees. If your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me
    nine editions. Send them by express.

                     Very truly yours,
                            S. L. CLEMENS.

The collapse of the “great hope” meant to the Clemens household that
their struggle with debt was to continue, that their economies were to
become more rigid. In a letter on her wedding anniversary, February a
(1895), Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister:

As I was starting down the stairs for my breakfast this morning Mr.
Clemens called me back and took out a five-franc piece and gave it to
me, saying: “It is our silver-wedding day, and so I give you a present.”

It was a symbol of their reduced circumstances--of the change that
twenty-five years had brought.

Literary matters, however, prospered. The new book progressed amazingly.
The worst had happened; other and distracting interests were dead. He
was deep in the third part-the story of Joan’s trial and condemnation,
and he forgot most other things in his determination to make that one a
reality.

As at Viviani, Clemens read his chapters to the family circle. The
story was drawing near the end now; tragedy was closing in on the frail
martyr; the farce of her trial was wringing their hearts. Susy would
say, “Wait, wait till I get a handkerchief,” and one night when the last
pages had been written and read, and Joan had made the supreme expiation
for devotion to a paltry king, Susy wrote in her diary, “To-night Joan
of Arc was burned at the stake,” meaning that the book was finished.

Susy herself had literary taste and might have written had it not been
that she desired to sing. There are fragments of her writing that show
the true literary touch. Her father, in an unpublished article which he
once wrote of her, quoted a paragraph, doubtless intended some day to
take its place at the end of a story:

    And now at last when they lie at rest they must go hence. It is
    always so. Completion; perfection, satisfaction attained--a human
    life has fulfilled its earthly destiny. Poor human life! It may
    not pause and rest, for it must hasten on to other realms and
    greater consummations.

She was a deep reader, and she had that wonderful gift of brilliant,
flowing, scintillating speech. From her father she had inherited a rare
faculty of oral expression, born of a superior depth of mind, swiftness
and clearness of comprehension, combined with rapid, brilliant, and
forceful phrasing. Her father wrote of her gift:

    Sometimes in those days of swift development her speech was rocket-
    like for vividness and for the sense it carried of visibility. I
    seem to see it stream into the sky and burst full in a shower of
    colored fire.

We are dwelling here a moment on Susy, for she was at her best that
winter.

She was more at home than the others. Her health did not permit her
to go out so freely and her father had more of her companionship. They
discussed many things--the problems of life and of those beyond life,
philosophies of many kinds, and the subtleties of literary art. He
recalled long after how once they lost themselves in trying to solve the
mystery of the emotional effect of certain word-combinations--certain
phrases and lines of verse--as, for instance, the wild, free breath of
the open that one feels in “the days when we went gipsying a long time
ago” and the tender, sunlit, grassy slope and mossy headstones suggested
by the simple words, “departed this life.” Both Susy and her father
cared more for Joan than any of the former books. To Mr. Rogers, Clemens
wrote:

“Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for
love.” A memorandum which he made at the time, apparently for no one but
himself, brings us very close to the personality behind it.

    Do you know that shock? I mean when you come at your regular hour
    into the sick-room where you have watched for months and find the
    medicine-bottles all gone, the night-table removed, the bed
    stripped, the furniture set stiffly to rights, the windows up, the
    room cold, stark, vacant--& you catch your breath & realize what has
    happened.

    Do you know that shock?

    The man who has written a long book has that experience the morning
    after he has revised it for the last time & sent it away to the
    printer. He steps into his study at the hour established by the
    habit of months--& he gets that little shock. All the litter &
    confusion are gone. The piles of dusty reference-books are gone
    from the chairs, the maps from the floor; the chaos of letters,
    manuscripts, note-books, paper-knives, pipes, matches, photographs,
    tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the writing-table, the
    furniture is back where it used to be in the long-ago. The
    housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there &
    tidied it up & scoured it clean & made it repellent & awful.

    I stand here this morning contemplating this desolation, & I realize
    that if I would bring back the spirit that made this hospital home-
    like & pleasant to me I must restore the aids to lingering
    dissolution to their wonted places & nurse another patient through
    & send it forth for the last rites, With many or few to assist
    there, as may happen; & that I will do.



CXC. STARTING ON THE LONG TRAIL. The tragedy of ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’,
with its splendid illustrations by Louis Loeb, having finished its
course in the Century Magazine, had been issued by the American
Publishing Company. It proved not one of Mark Twain’s great books, but
only one of his good books. From first to last it is interesting, and
there are strong situations and chapters finely written. The character
of Roxy is thoroughly alive, and her weird relationship with her
half-breed son is startling enough. There are not many situations in
fiction stronger than that where half-breed Tom sells his mother
down the river into slavery. The negro character is well drawn, of
course-Mark Twain could not write it less than well, but its realism
is hardly to be compared with similar matter in his other books--in Tom
Sawyer, for instance, or Huck Finn. With the exceptions of Tom, Roxy,
and Pudd’nhead the characters are slight. The Twins are mere bodiless
names that might have been eliminated altogether. The character of
Pudd’nhead Wilson is lovable and fine, and his final triumph at the
murder trial is thrilling in the extreme. Identification by thumb-marks
was a new feature in fiction then--in law, too, for that matter. But it
is chiefly Pudd’nhead Wilson’s maxims, run at the head of each chapter,
that will stick in the memory of men. Perhaps the book would live
without these, but with them it is certainly immortal.

Such aphorisms as: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s
habits”; “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of
a good example”; “When angry count four, and when very angry swear,”
 cannot perish; these, with the forty or so others in this volume and
the added collection of rare philosophies that head the chapters
of Following the Equator, have insured to Philosopher Pudd’nhead a
respectful hearing for all time.--[The story of Pudd’nhead Wilson was
dramatized by Frank Mayo, who played it successfully as long as he
lived. It is by no means dead, and still pays a royalty to the Mayo and
Clemens estates.]

Clemens had meant to begin another book, but he decided first to make a
trip to America, to give some personal attention to publishing matters
there. They were a good deal confused. The Harpers had arranged for
the serial and book publication of Joan, and were negotiating for the
Webster contracts. Mr. Rogers was devoting priceless time in an effort
to establish amicable relations between the Harpers and the American
Company at Hartford so that they could work on some general basis that
would be satisfactory and profitable to all concerned. It was time that
Clemens was on the scene of action. He sailed on the New York on the
end of February, and a little more than a month later returned by the
Paris--that is, at the end of March. By this time he had altogether a
new thought. It was necessary to earn a large sum of money as promptly
as possible, and he adopted the plan which twice before in his life
in 1872 and in 1884:--had supplied him with needed funds. Loathing the
platform as he did, he was going back to it. Major Pond had proposed a
lecture tour soon after his failure.

“The loss of a fortune is tough,” wrote Pond, “but there are other
resources for another fortune. You and I will make the tour together.”

Now he had resolved to make a tour-one that even Pond himself had not
contemplated. He would go platforming around the world! He would take
Pond with him as far as the Pacific coast, arranging with some one
equally familiar with the lecture circuit on the other side of the
Pacific. He had heard of R. S. Smythe, who had personally conducted
Henry M. Stanley and other great lecturers through Australia and the
East, and he wrote immediately, asking information and advice concerning
such a tour. Clemens himself has told us in one of his chapters how his
mental message found its way to Smythe long before his written one, and
how Smythe’s letter, proposing just such a trip, crossed his own.

He sailed for America, with the family on the 11th of May, and a little
more than a week later, after four years of exile, they found themselves
once more at beautiful Quarry Farm. We may imagine how happy they were
to reach that peaceful haven. Mrs. Clemens had written:

“It is, in a way, hard to go home and feel that we are not able to open
our house. But it is an immense delight to me to think of seeing our
friends.”

Little at the farm was changed. There were more vines on the home--the
study was overgrown--that was all. Even Ellerslie remained as the
children had left it, with all the small comforts and utensils in place.
Most of the old friends were there; only Mrs. Langdon and Theodore Crane
were missing. The Beechers drove up to see them, as formerly, and the
old discussions on life and immortality were taken up in the old places.

Mrs. Beecher once came with some curious thin layers of leaves of stone
which she had found, knowing Mark Twain’s interest in geology. Later,
when they had been discussing the usual problems, he said he would write
an agreement on those imperishable leaves, to be laid away until the
ages should solve their problems. He wrote it in verse:

           If you prove right and I prove wrong,
           A million years from now,
           In language plain and frank and strong
           My error I’ll avow
           To your dear waking face.

           If I prove right, by God His grace,
           Full sorry I shall be,
           For in that solitude no trace
           There’ll be of you and me.

           A million years, O patient stone,
           You’ve waited for this message.
           Deliver it a million hence;
           (Survivor pays expressage.)
                                MARK TWAIN

    Contract with Mrs. T. K. Beecher, July 2, 1895.


Pond came to Elmira and the route westward was arranged. Clemens decided
to give selections from his books, as he had done with Cable, and to
start without much delay. He dreaded the prospect of setting out on
that long journey alone, nor could Mrs. Clemens find it in her heart to
consent to such a plan. It was bitterly hard to know what to do, but
it was decided at last that she and one of the elder daughters should
accompany him, the others remaining with their aunt at Quarry Farm.
Susy, who had the choice, dreaded ocean travel, and felt that she would
be happier and healthier to rest in the quiet of that peaceful hilltop.
She elected to remain with her aunt and jean; and it fell to Clara to
go. Major Pond and his wife would accompany them as far as Vancouver.
They left Elmira on the night of the 14th of July. When the train pulled
away their last glimpse was of Susy, standing with the others under the
electric light of the railway platform, waving them good-by.



CXCI. Clemens had been ill in Elmira with a distressing carbuncle, and
was still in no condition to undertake steady travel and entertainment
in that fierce summer heat. He was fearful of failure. “I sha’n’t be
able to stand on a platform,” he wrote Mr. Rogers; but they pushed along
steadily with few delays. They began in Cleveland, thence by the Great
Lakes, traveling by steamer from one point to another, going constantly,
with readings at every important point--Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Paul,
Winnipeg, Butte, and through the great Northwest, arriving at Vancouver
at last on August 16th, but one day behind schedule time.

It had been a hot, blistering journey, but of immense interest, for none
of them had traveled through the Northwest, and the wonder and grandeur
of it all, its scenery, its bigness, its mighty agriculture, impressed
them. Clemens in his notes refers more than once to the “seas” and
“ocean” of wheat.

    There is the peace of the ocean about it and a deep contentment, a
    heaven-wide sense of ampleness, spaciousness, where pettiness and
    all small thoughts and tempers must be out of place, not suited to
    it, and so not intruding. The scattering, far-off homesteads, with
    trees about them, were so homelike and remote from the warring
    world, so reposeful and enticing. The most distant and faintest
    under the horizon suggested fading ships at sea.

The Lake travel impressed him; the beauties and cleanliness of the Lake
steamers, which he compares with those of Europe, to the disadvantage of
the latter. Entering Port Huron he wrote:

    The long approach through narrow ways with flat grass and wooded
    land on both sides, and on the left a continuous row of summer
    cottages, with small-boat accommodations for visiting across the
    little canals from family to family, the groups of summer-dressed
    young people all along waving flags and handkerchiefs and firing
    cannon, our boat replying with toots of the hoarse whistle and now
    and then a cannon, and meeting steamers in the narrow way, and once
    the stately sister-ship of the line crowded with summer-dressed
    people waving-the rich browns and greens of the rush-grown, far-
    reaching flat-lands, with little glimpses of water away on their
    farther edges, the sinking sun throwing a crinkled broad carpet of
    gold on the water-well, it is the perfection of voyaging.

It had seemed a doubtful experiment to start with Mrs. Clemens on that
journey in the summer heat; but, strange to say, her health improved,
and she reached Vancouver by no means unfit for the long voyage ahead.
No doubt the change and continuous interest and their splendid welcome
everywhere and their prosperity were accountable. Everywhere they were
entertained; flowers filled their rooms; carriages and committees were
always waiting. It was known that Mark Twain had set out for the purpose
of paying his debts, and no cause would make a deeper appeal to his
countrymen than that, or, for that matter, to the world at large.

From Winnipeg he wrote to Mr. Rogers:

    At the end of an hour and a half I offered to let the audience go,
    but they said “go on,” and I did.

He had five thousand dollars to forward to Rogers to place against
his debt account by the time he reached the Coast, a fine return for a
month’s travel in that deadly season. At no more than two places were
the houses less than crowded. One of these was Anaconda, then a small
place, which they visited only because the manager of the entertainment
hall there had known Clemens somewhere back in the sixties and was eager
to have him. He failed to secure the amount of the guarantee required by
Pond, and when Pond reported to Clemens that he had taken “all he had”
 Clemens said:

“And you took the last cent that poor fellow had. Send him one hundred
dollars, and if you can’t afford to stand your share charge it all to
me. I’m not going around robbing my friends who are disappointed in my
commercial value. I don’t want to get money that way.”

“I sent the money,” said Pond afterward, “and was glad of the privilege
of standing my share.”

Clemens himself had not been in the best of health during the trip. He
had contracted a heavy cold and did not seem to gain strength. But in
a presentation copy of ‘Roughing It’, given to Pond as a souvenir, he
wrote:

“Here ends one of the smoothest and pleasantest trips across the
continent that any group of five has ever made.”

There were heavy forest fires in the Northwest that year, and smoke
everywhere. The steamer Waryimoo, which was to have sailed on the 16th,
went aground in the smoke, and was delayed a week. While they were
waiting, Clemens lectured in Victoria, with the Governor-General and
Lady Aberdeen and their little son in the audience. His note-book says:

    They came in at 8.45, 15 minutes late; wish they would always be
    present, for it isn’t permissible to begin until they come; by that
    time the late-comers are all in.

Clemens wrote a number of final letters from Vancouver. In one of them
to Mr. J. Henry Harper, of Harper & Brothers, he expressed the wish that
his name might now be printed as the author of “Joan,” which had begun
serially in the April Magazine. He thought it might, help his lecturing
tour and keep his name alive. But a few days later, with Mrs. Clemens’s
help, he had reconsidered, and wrote:

    My wife is a little troubled by my wanting my nom de plume put to
    the “Joan of Arc” so soon. She thinks it might go counter to your
    plans, and that you ought to be left free and unhampered in the
    matter.

    All right-so be it. I wasn’t strenuous about it, and wasn’t meaning
    to insist; I only thought my reasons were good, and I really think
    so yet, though I do confess the weight and fairness of hers.

As a matter of fact the authorship of “Joan” had been pretty generally
guessed by the second or third issue. Certain of its phrasing and
humor could hardly have come from another pen than Mark Twain’s. The
authorship was not openly acknowledged, however, until the publication
of the book, the following May.

Among the letters from Vancouver was this one to Rudyard Kipling

    DEAR KIPLING,--It is reported that you are about to visit India.
    This has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may
    unload from my conscience a debt long due to you. Years ago you
    came from India to Elmira to visit me, as you said at the time. It
    has always been my purpose to return that visit & that great
    compliment some day. I shall arrive next January & you must be
    ready. I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with
    silver bells & ribbons & escorted by a troop of native howdahs
    richly clad & mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; & you must be
    on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.

To the press he gave this parting statement:

    It has been reported that I sacrificed for the benefit of the
    creditors the property of the publishing firm whose financial backer
    I was and that I am now lecturing for my own benefit. This is an
    error. I intend the lectures as well as the property for the
    creditors. The law recognizes no mortgage on a man’s brain, and a
    merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws
    of insolvency and start free again for himself. But I am not a
    business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot
    compromise for less than 100 cents on the dollar and its debts never
    outlaw. From my reception thus far on my lecturing tour I am
    confident that if I live I can pay off the last debt within four
    years, after which, at the age of sixty-four, I can make a fresh and
    unincumbered start in life. I am going to Australia, India, and
    South Africa, and next year I hope to make a tour of the great
    cities of the United States. I meant, when I began, to give my
    creditors all the benefit of this, but I am beginning to feel that I
    am gaining something from it, too, and that my dividends, if not
    available for banking purposes, may be even more satisfactory than
    theirs.

There was one creditor, whose name need, not be “handed down to infamy,”
 who had refused to consent to any settlement except immediate payment
in full, and had pursued with threatened attachment of earnings and
belongings, until Clemens, exasperated, had been disposed to turn over
to his creditors all remaining properties and let that suffice, once and
for all. But this was momentary. He had presently instructed Mr. Rogers
to “pay Shylock in full,” and to assure any others that he would pay
them, too, in the end. But none of the others annoyed him.

It was on the afternoon of August 23, 1895, that they were off at
last. Major Pond and his wife lunched with them on board and waved them
good-by as long as they could see the vessel. The far voyage which was
to carry them for the better part of the year to the under side of the
world had begun.



CXCII. “FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR”

Mark Twain himself has written with great fulness the story of that
traveling--setting down what happened, and mainly as it happened, with
all the wonderful description, charm, and color of which he was so great
a master. We need do little more than summarize then--adding a touch
here and there, perhaps, from another point of view.

They had expected to stop at the Sandwich Islands, but when they arrived
in the roadstead of Honolulu, word came that cholera had broken out
and many were dying daily. They could not land. It was a double
disappointment; not only were the lectures lost, but Clemens had long
looked forward to revisiting the islands he had so loved in the days of
his youth. There was nothing for them to do but to sit on the decks in
the shade of the awnings and look at the distant shore. In his book he
says:

    We lay in luminous blue water; shoreward the water was green-green
    and brilliant; at the shore itself it broke in a long, white ruffle,
    and with no crash, no sound that we could hear. The town was buried
    under a mat of foliage that looked like a cushion of moss. The
    silky mountains were clothed in soft, rich splendors of melting
    color, and some of the cliffs were veiled in slanting mists. I
    recognized it all. It was just as I had seen it long before, with
    nothing of its beauty lost, nothing of its charm wanting.

In his note-book he wrote: “If I might, I would go ashore and never
leave.”

This was the 31 st of August. Two days later they were off again,
sailing over the serene Pacific, bearing to the southwest for Australia.
They crossed the equator, which he says was wisely put where it is,
because if it had been run through Europe all the kings would have
tried to grab it. They crossed it September 6th, and he notes that Clara
kodaked it. A day or two later the north star disappeared behind them
and the constellation of the Cross came into view above the southern
horizon. Then presently they were among the islands of the southern
Pacific, and landed for a little time on one of the Fiji group. They had
twenty-four days of halcyon voyaging between Vancouver and Sydney with
only one rough day. A ship’s passengers get closely acquainted on a trip
of that length and character. They mingle in all sorts of diversions
to while away the time; and at the end have become like friends of many
years.

On the night of September 15th-a night so dark that from the ship’s deck
one could not see the water--schools of porpoises surrounded the ship,
setting the water alive with phosphorescent splendors: “Like glorified
serpents thirty to fifty feet long. Every curve of the tapering long
body perfect. The whole snake dazzlingly illumined. It was a weird sight
to see this sparkling ghost come suddenly flashing along out of the
solid gloom and stream past like a meteor.”

They were in Sydney next morning, September 16, 1895, and landed in a
pouring rain, the breaking up of a fierce drought. Clemens announced
that he had brought Australia good-fortune, and should expect something
in return.

Mr. Smythe was ready for them and there was no time lost in getting to
work. All Australia was ready for them, in fact, and nowhere in their
own country were they more lavishly and royally received than in that
faraway Pacific continent. Crowded houses, ovations, and gorgeous
entertainment--public and private--were the fashion, and a little more
than two weeks after arrival Clemens was able to send back another two
thousand dollars to apply on his debts. But he had hard luck, too, for
another carbuncle developed at Melbourne and kept him laid up for nearly
a week. When he was able to go before an audience again he said:

“The doctor says I am on the verge of being a sick man. Well, that may
be true enough while I am lying abed all day trying to persuade his
cantankerous, rebellious medicines to agree with each other; but when
I come out at night and get a welcome like this I feel as young and
healthy as anybody, and as to being on the verge of being a sick man I
don’t take any stock in that. I have been on the verge of being an angel
all my life, but it’s never happened yet.”

In his book Clemens has told us his joy in Australia, his interest in
the perishing native tribes, in the wonderfully governed cities, in
the gold-mines, and in the advanced industries. The climate he thought
superb; “a darling climate,” he says in a note-book entry.

Perhaps one ought to give a little idea of the character of his
entertainment. His readings were mainly from his earlier books,
‘Roughing It’ and ‘Innocents Abroad’. The story of the dead man which,
as a boy, he had discovered in his father’s office was one that he often
told, and the “Mexican Plug” and his “Meeting with Artemus Ward” and the
story of Jim Blaine’s old ram; now and again he gave chapters from ‘Huck
Finn’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’. He was likely to finish with that old fireside
tale of his early childhood, the “Golden Arm.” But he sometimes told the
watermelon story, written for Mrs. Rogers, or gave extracts from Adam’s
Diary, varying his program a good deal as he went along, and changing it
entirely where he appeared twice in one city.

Mrs. Clemens and Clara, as often as they had heard him, generally went
when the hour of entertainment came: They enjoyed seeing his triumph
with the different audiences, watching the effect of his subtle art.

One story, the “Golden Arm,” had in it a pause, an effective, delicate
pause which must be timed to the fraction of a second in order to
realize its full value. Somewhere before we have stated that no one
better than Mark Twain knew the value of a pause. Mrs. Clemens and Clara
were willing to go night after night and hear that tale time and again,
for its effect on each new, audience.

From Australia to New Zealand--where Clemens had his third persistent
carbuncle,--[In Following the Equator the author says: “The dictionary
says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. Humor is out of place in a
dictionary.”]--and again lost time in consequence. It was while he was
in bed with this distressing ailment that he wrote Twichell:

    I think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here
    at Napier instead of in some hotel in the center of a noisy city.
    Here we have the smooth & placidly complaining sea at our door, with
    nothing between us & it but 20 yards of shingle--& hardly a
    suggestion of life in that space to mar it or to make a noise. Away
    down here fifty-five degrees south of the equator this sea seems to
    murmur in an unfamiliar tongue--a foreign tongue--a tongue bred
    among the ice-fields of the antarctic--a murmur with a note of
    melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come
    from. It was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night &
    find it still pulsing there. I wish you were here--land, but it
    would be fine!

Mrs. Clemens and himself both had birthdays in New Zealand; Clemens
turned sixty, and his wife passed the half-century mark.

“I do not like it one single bit,” she wrote to her sister. “Fifty years
old-think of it; that seems very far on.”

And Clemens wrote:

    Day before yesterday was Livy’s birthday (underworld time) &
    tomorrow will be mine. I shall be 60--no thanks for it!

From New Zealand back to Australia, and then with the new year away
to Ceylon. Here they were in the Orient at last, the land of color,
enchantment, and gentle races. Clemens was ill with a heavy cold when
they arrived; and in fact, at no time during this long journeying was
his health as good as that of his companions. The papers usually spoke
of him as looking frail, and he was continually warned that he must not
remain in India until the time of the great heat. He was so determined
to work, however, and working was so profitable, that he seldom spared
himself.

He traveled up and down and back and forth the length and breadth of
India--from Bombay to Allahabad, to Benares, to Calcutta and Darjeeling,
to Lahore, to Lucknow, to Delhi--old cities of romance--and to
Jeypore--through the heat and dust on poor, comfortless railways,
fighting his battle and enjoying it too, for he reveled in that amazing
land--its gorgeous, swarming life, the patience and gentleness of its
servitude, its splendid pageantry, the magic of its architecture, the
maze and mystery of its religions, the wonder of its ageless story.

One railway trip he enjoyed--a thirty-five-mile flight down the steep
mountain of Darjeeling in a little canopied hand-car. In his book he
says:

    That was the most enjoyable time I have spent in the earth. For
    rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that
    approaches the bird-flight down the Himalayas in a handcar. It has
    no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty-
    five miles of it, instead of five hundred.

Mark Twain found India all that Rudyard Kipling had painted it and more.
“INDIA THE MARVELOUS” he printed in his note-book in large capitals, as
an effort to picture his thought, and in his book he wrote:

    So far as I am able to judge nothing has been left undone, either by
    man or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the
    sun visits on his rounds. “Where every prospect pleases, and only
    man is vile.”

Marvelous India is, certainly; and he saw it all to the best advantage,
for government official and native grandee spared no effort to do honor
to his party--to make their visit something to be remembered for a
lifetime. It was all very gratifying, and most of it of extraordinary
interest. There are not many visitors who get to see the inner household
of a native prince of India, and the letter which Mark Twain wrote to
Kumar Shri Samatsinhji, a prince of the Palitana state, at Bombay, gives
us a notion of how his unostentatious, even if lavish, hospitality was
appreciated.

    DEAR KUMAR SAHIB,--It would be hard for me to put into words how
    much my family & I enjoyed our visit to your hospitable house. It
    was our first glimpse of the home of an Eastern Prince, & the charm
    of it, the grace & beauty & dignity of it realized to us the
    pictures which we had long ago gathered from books of travel &
    Oriental tales. We shall not forget that happy experience, nor your
    kind courtesies to us, nor those of her Highness to my wife &
    daughter. We shall keep always the portrait & the beautiful things
    you gave us; & as long as we live a glance at them will bring your
    house and its life & its sumptuous belongings & rich harmonies of
    color instantly across the years & the oceans, & we shall see them
    again, & how welcome they will be!

    We make our salutation to your Highness & to all members of your
    family--including, with affectionate regard, that littlest little
    sprite of a Princess--& I beg to sign myself

                  Sincerely yours,
                            S. L. CLEMENS.

    BENARES, February 5, 1896.

They had been entertained in truly royal fashion by Prince Kumar, who,
after refreshments, had ordered in “bales of rich stuffs” in the true
Arabian Nights fashion, and commanded his servants to open them and
allow his guests to select for themselves.

With the possible exception of General Grant’s long trip in ‘78 and
‘79 there has hardly been a more royal progress than Mark Twain’s trip
around the world. Everywhere they were overwhelmed with honors and
invitations, and their gifts became so many that Mrs. Clemens wrote she
did not see how they were going to carry them all. In a sense, it was
like the Grant trip, for it was a tribute which the nations paid not
only to a beloved personality, but to the American character and people.

The story of that East Indian sojourn alone would fill a large book, and
Mark Twain, in his own way, has written that book, in the second volume
of Following the Equator, an informing, absorbing, and enchanting story
of Indian travel.

Clemens lectured everywhere to jammed houses, which were rather less
profitable than in Australia, because in India the houses were not built
for such audiences as he could command. He had to lecture three times in
Calcutta, and then many people were turned away. At one place, however,
his hall was large enough. This was in the great Hall of the Palace,
where durbars are held, at Bombay.

Altogether they were two months in India, and then about the middle of
March an English physician at Jeypore warned them to fly for Calcutta
and get out of the country immediately before the real heat set in.

They sailed toward the end of March, touched at Madras and again at
Ceylon, remaining a day or two at Colombo, and then away to sea again,
across the Indian Ocean on one of those long, peaceful, eventless,
tropic voyages, where at night one steeps on deck and in daytime wears
the whitest and lightest garments and cares to do little more than sit
drowsily in a steamer-chair and read and doze and dream.

From the note-book:

    Here in the wastes of the Indian Ocean just under the equator the
    sea is blue, the motion gentle, the sunshine brilliant, the broad
    decks with their grouped companies of talking, reading, or game-
    playing folk suggestive of a big summer hotel--but outside of the
    ship is no life visible but the occasional flash of a flying-fish.
    I would like the voyage, under these conditions, to continue
    forever.

           The Injian Ocean sits and smiles
           So sof’, so bright, so bloomin’ blue,
           There aren’t a wave for miles an’ miles
           Excep’ the jiggle of the screw.

                              --KIP.

    How curiously unanecdotical the colonials and the ship-going English
    are--I believe I haven’t told an anecdote or heard one since I left
    America, but Americans when grouped drop into anecdotes as soon as
    they get a little acquainted.

    Preserve your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist,
    but not live.

    Swore off from profanity early this morning--I was on deck in the
    peaceful dawn, the calm of holy dawn. Went down, dressed, bathed,
    put on white linen, shaved--a long, hot, troublesome job and no
    profanity. Then started to breakfast. Remembered my tonic--first
    time in 3 months without being told--poured it into measuring-glass,
    held bottle in one hand, it in the other, the cork in my teeth
    --reached up & got a tumbler--measuring-glass slipped out of my
    fingers--caught it, poured out another dose, first setting the
    tumbler on wash-stand--just got it poured, ship lurched, heard a
    crash behind me--it was the tumbler, broken into millions of
    fragments, but the bottom hunk whole. Picked it up to throw out of
    the open port, threw out the measuring-glass instead--then I
    released my voice. Mrs. Clemens behind me in the door.

    “Don’t reform any more. It is not an improvement.”

    This is a good time to read up on scientific matters and improve the
    mind, for about us is the peace of the great deep. It invites to
    dreams, to study, to reflection. Seventeen days ago this ship
    sailed out of Calcutta, and ever since, barring a day or two in
    Ceylon, there has been nothing in sight but the tranquil blue sea &
    a cloudless blue sky. All down the Bay of Bengal it was so. It is
    still so in the vast solitudes of the Indian Ocean--17 days of
    heaven. In 11 more it will end. There will be one passenger who
    will be sorry. One reads all day long in this delicious air. Today
    I have been storing up knowledge from Sir John Lubbock about the
    ant. The thing which has struck me most and most astonished me is
    the ant’s extraordinary powers of identification--memory of his
    friend’s person. I will quote something which he says about Formica
    fusca. Formica fusca is not something to eat; it’s the name of a
    breed of ants.

He does quote at great length and he transferred most of it later to his
book. In another note he says:

    In the past year have read Vicar of Wakefield and some of Jane
    Austen--thoroughly artificial. Have begun Children of the Abbey.
    It begins with this “Impromptu” from the sentimental heroine:

    “Hail, sweet asylum of my infancy! Content and innocence reside
    beneath your humble roof and charity unboastful of the good it
    renders.... Here unmolested may I wait till the rude storm
    of sorrow is overblown and my father’s arms are again extended to
    receive me.”

    Has the ear-marks of preparation.

They were at the island of Mauritius by the middle of April, that
curious bit of land mainly known to the world in the romance of Paul
and Virginia, a story supposed by some in Mauritius to be “a part of the
Bible.” They rested there for a fortnight and then set sail for South
Africa on the ship Arundel Castle, which he tells us is the finest boat
he has seen in those waters.

It was the end of the first week in May when they reached Durban and
felt that they were nearing home.

One more voyage and they would be in England, where they had planned for
Susy and Jean to join them.

Mrs. Clemens, eager for letters, writes of her disappointment in not
finding one from Susy. The reports from Quarry Farm had been cheerful,
and there had been small snap-shot photographs which were comforting,
but her mother heart could not be entirely satisfied that Susy did not
send letters. She had a vague fear that some trouble, some illness, had
come to Susy which made her loath to write. Susy was, in fact, far from
well, though no one, not even Susy herself, suspected how serious was
her condition.

Mrs. Clemens writes of her own hopefulness, but adds that her husband is
often depressed.

    Mr. Clemens has not as much courage as I wish he had, but, poor old
    darling, he has been pursued with colds and inabilities of various
    sorts. Then he is so impressed with the fact that he is sixty years
    old. Naturally I combat that thought all I can, trying to make him
    rejoice that he is not seventy....

    He does not believe that any good thing will come, but that we must
    all our lives live in poverty. He says he never wants to go back to
    America. I cannot think that things are as black as he paints them,
    and I trust that if I get him settled down for work in some quiet
    English village he will get back much of his cheerfulness; in fact,
    I believe he will because that is what he wants to do, and that is
    the work that he loves: The platform he likes for the two hours that
    he is on it, but all the rest of the time it grinds him, and he says
    he is ashamed of what he is doing. Still, in spite of this sad
    undercurrent, we are having a delightful trip. People are so nice,
    and with people Mr. Clemens seems cheerful. Then the ocean trips
    are a great rest to him.

Mrs. Clemens and Clara remained at the hotel in Durban while Clemens
made his platform trip to the South African cities. It was just at the
time when the Transvaal invasion had been put down--when the Jameson
raid had come to grief and John Hares Hammond, chief of the reformers,
and fifty or more supporters were lying in the jail at Pretoria under
various sentences, ranging from one to fifteen years, Hammond himself
having received the latter award. Mrs. Hammond was a fellow-Missourian;
Clemens had known her in America. He went with her now to see the
prisoners, who seemed to be having a pretty good time, expecting to be
pardoned presently; pretending to regard their confinement mainly as a
joke. Clemens, writing of it to Twichell, said:

    A Boer guard was at my elbow all the time, but was courteous &
    polite, only he barred the way in the compound (quadrangle or big
    open court) & wouldn’t let me cross a white mark that was on the
    ground--the “deathline,” one of the prisoners called it. Not in
    earnest, though, I think. I found that I had met Hammond once when
    he was a Yale senior & a guest of General Franklin’s. I also found
    that I had known Captain Mein intimately 32 years ago. One of the
    English prisoners had heard me lecture in London 23 years ago....

    These prisoners are strong men, prominent men, & I believe they are
    all educated men. They are well off; some of them are wealthy.
    They have a lot of books to read, they play games & smoke, & for a
    while they will be able to bear up in their captivity; but not for
    long, not for very long, I take it. I am told they have times of
    deadly brooding and depression. I made them a speech--sitting down.
    It just happened so. I don’t prefer that attitude. Still, it has
    one advantage--it is only a talk, it doesn’t take the form of a
    speech.... I advised them at considerable length to stay
    where they were--they would get used to it & like it presently; if
    they got out they would only get in again somewhere else, by the
    look of their countenances; & I promised to go and see the President
    & do what I could to get him to double their jail terms....
    We had a very good sociable time till the permitted time was up &.
    a little over & we outsiders had to go. I went again to-day, but
    the Rev. Mr. Gray had just arrived, & the warden, a genial, elderly
    Boer named Du Plessis, explained that his orders wouldn’t allow him
    to admit saint & sinner at the same time, particularly on a Sunday.
    Du Plessis descended from the Huguenot fugitives, you see, of 200
    years ago--but he hasn’t any French left in him now--all Dutch.

Clemens did visit President Kruger a few days later, but not for the
purpose explained. John Hayes Hammond, in a speech not long ago (1911),
told how Mark Twain was interviewed by a reporter after he left the
jail, and when the reporter asked if the prisoners were badly treated
Clemens had replied that he didn’t think so, adding:

“As a matter of fact, a great many of these gentlemen have fared far
worse in the hotels and mining-camps of the West.”

Said Hammond in his speech: “The result of this was that the interview
was reported literally and a leader appeared in the next morning’s issue
protesting against such lenience. The privations, already severe enough,
were considerably augmented by that remark, and it required some three
or four days’ search on the part of some of our friends who were already
outside of jail to get hold of Mark Twain and have him go and explain to
Kruger that it was all a joke.”

Clemens made as good a plea to “Oom Paul” as he could, and in some
degree may have been responsible for the improved treatment and the
shortened terms of the unlucky reformers.

They did not hurry away from South Africa. Clemens gave many readings
and paid a visit to the Kimberley mines. His note-book recalls how poor
Riley twenty-five years before had made his fatal journey.

It was the 14th of July, 1896, a year to a day since they left Elmira,
that they sailed by the steamer Norman for England, arriving at
Southampton the 31st. It was from Southampton that they had sailed for
America fourteen months before. They had completed the circuit of the
globe.



CXCIII. THE PASSING OF SUSY

It had been arranged that Katie Leary should bring Jean and Susy to
England. It was expected that they would arrive soon, not later than
the 12th, by which time the others would be established. The travelers
proceeded immediately to London and engaged for the summer a house in
Guildford, modest quarters, for they were still economizing, though
Mark Twain had reason to hope that with the money already earned and the
profits of the book he would write of his travels he could pay himself
free. Altogether, the trip had been prosperous. Now that it was behind
him, his health and spirits had improved. The outlook was brighter.

August 12th came, but it did not bring Katie and the children. A letter
came instead. Clemens long afterward wrote:

    It explained that Susy was slightly ill-nothing of consequence. But
    we were disquieted and began to cable for later news. This was
    Friday. All day no answer--and the ship to leave Southampton next
    day at noon. Clara and her mother began packing, to be ready in
    case the news should be bad. Finally came a cablegram saying, “Wait
    for cablegram in the morning.” This was not satisfactory--not
    reassuring. I cabled again, asking that the answer be sent to
    Southampton, for the day was now closing. I waited in the post-
    office that night till the doors were closed, toward midnight, in
    the hope that good news might still come, but there was no message.
    We sat silent at home till one in the morning waiting--waiting for
    we knew not what. Then we took the earlier morning train, and when
    we reached Southampton the message was there. It said the recovery
    would be long but certain. This was a great relief to me, but not
    to my wife. She was frightened. She and Clara went aboard the
    steamer at once and sailed for America, to nurse Susy. I remained
    behind to search for another and larger house in Guildford.

    That was the 15th of August, 1896. Three days later, when my wife
    and Clara were about half-way across the ocean, I was standing in
    our dining-room, thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram
    was put into my hand. It said, “Susy was peacefully released
    to-day.”

Some of those who in later years wondered at Mark Twain’s occasional
attitude of pessimism and bitterness toward all creation, when his
natural instinct lay all the other way, may find here some reasons
in his logic of gloom. For years he and his had been fighting various
impending disasters. In the end he had torn his family apart and set
out on a weary pilgrimage to pay, for long financial unwisdom, a heavy
price--a penance in which all, without complaint, had joined. Now, just
when it seemed about ended, when they were ready to unite and be happy
once more, when he could hold up his head among his fellows--in this
moment of supreme triumph had come the message that Susy’s lovely and
blameless life was ended. There are not many greater dramas in fiction
or in history than this. The wonder is not that Mark Twain so often
preached the doctrine of despair during his later life, but that he did
not exemplify it--that he did not become a misanthrope in fact.

Mark Twain’s life had contained other tragedies, but no other that
equaled this one. This time none of the elements were lacking--not the
smallest detail. The dead girl had been his heart’s pride; it was a year
since he had seen her face, and now by this word he knew that he would
never see it again. The blow had found him alone absolutely alone among
strangers--those others--half-way across the ocean, drawing nearer
and nearer to it, and he with no way to warn them, to prepare them, to
comfort them.

Clemens sought no comfort for himself. Just as nearly forty years before
he had writhed in self-accusation for the death of his younger brother,
and as later he held himself to blame for the death of his infant son,
so now he crucified himself as the slayer of Susy. To Mrs. Clemens he
poured himself out in a letter in which he charged himself categorically
as being wholly and solely responsible for the tragedy, detailing step
by step with fearful reality his mistakes and weaknesses which had led
to their downfall, the separation from Susy, and this final incredible
disaster. Only a human being, he said, could have done these things.

Susy Clemens had died in the old Hartford home. She had been well for
a time at Quarry Farm, well and happy, but during the summer of ‘96
she had become restless, nervous, and unlike herself in many ways. Her
health seemed to be gradually failing, and she renewed the old interest
in mental science, always with the approval of her parents. Clemens had
great faith in mind over matter, and Mrs. Clemens also believed that
Susy’s high-strung nature was especially calculated to receive benefit
from a serene and confident mental attitude. From Bombay, in January,
she wrote Mrs. Crane:

I am very glad indeed that Susy has taken up Mental Science, and I do
hope it may do her as much good as she hopes. Last winter we were so
very anxious to have her get hold of it, and even felt at one time that
we must go to America on purpose to have her have the treatment, so it
all seems very fortunate that it should have come about as it has this
winter.

Just how much or how little Susy was helped by this treatment cannot be
known. Like Stevenson, she had “a soul of flame in a body of gauze,” a
body to be guarded through the spirit. She worked continuously at her
singing and undoubtedly overdid herself. Early in the year she went over
to Hartford to pay some good-by visit, remaining most of the time in the
home of Charles Dudley Warner, working hard at her singing. Her health
did not improve, and when Katie Leary went to Hartford to arrange for
their departure she was startled at the change in her.

“Miss Susy; you are sick,” she said. “You must have the doctor come.”

Susy refused at first, but she grew worse and the doctor was sent for.
He thought her case not very serious--the result, he said, of overwork.
He prescribed some soothing remedies, and advised that she be kept very
quiet, away from company, and that she be taken to her own home, which
was but a step away. It was then that the letter was written and the
first cable sent to England. Mrs. Crane was summoned from Elmira, also
Charles Langdon. Mr. Twichell was notified and came down from his summer
place in the Adirondacks.

Susy did not improve. She became rapidly worse, and a few days later
the doctor pronounced her ailment meningitis. This was on the 15th of
August--that hot, terrible August of 1896. Susy’s fever increased and
she wandered through the burning rooms in delirium and pain; then her
sight left her, an effect of the disease. She lay down at last, and
once, when Katie Leary was near her, she put her hands on Katie’s
face and said, “mama.” She did not speak after that, but sank into
unconsciousness, and on the evening of Tuesday, August 18th, the flame
went out forever.

To Twichell Clemens wrote of it:

    Ah, well, Susy died at home. She had that privilege. Her dying
    eyes rested upon no thing that was strange to them, but only upon
    things which they had known & loved always & which had made her
    young years glad; & she had you & Sue & Katie & & John & Ellen.
    This was happy fortune--I am thankful that it was vouchsafed to her.
    If she had died in another house--well, I think I could not have
    borne that. To us our house was not unsentient matter--it had a
    heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes &
    deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived
    in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. We never came home
    from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its
    eloquent welcome--& we could not enter it unmoved. And could we
    now? oh, now, in spirit we should enter it unshod.

A tugboat with Dr. Rice, Mr. Twichell, and other friends of the family
went down the bay to meet the arriving vessel with Mrs. Clemens and
Clara on board. It was night when the ship arrived, and they did not
show themselves until morning; then at first to Clara. There had been
little need to formulate a message--their presence there was enough--and
when a moment later Clara returned to the stateroom her mother looked
into her face and she also knew. Susy already had been taken to Elmira,
and at half past ten that night Mrs. Clemens and Clara arrived there by
the through train--the same train and in the same coach which they had
taken one year and one month before on their journey westward around the
world.

And again Susy was there, not waving her welcome in the glare of the
lights as she had waved her farewell to us thirteen months before, but
lying white and fair in her coffin in the house where she was born.

They buried her with the Langdon relatives and the little brother, and
ordered a headstone with some lines which they had found in Australia:

           Warm summer sun shine kindly here;
           Warm southern wind blow softly here;
           Green sod above lie light, lie light
           Good night, dear heart, good night, good night.
--[These lines at first were generally attributed to Clemens himself.
When this was reported to him he ordered the name of the Australian
poet, Robert Richardson, cut beneath them. The word “southern” in the
original read “northern,” as in Australia, the warm wind is from the
north. Richardson died in England in 1901.]



CXCIV. WINTER IN TEDWORTH SQUARE

Mrs. Clemens, Clara, and Jean, with Katie Leary, sailed for England
without delay. Arriving there, they gave up the house in Guildford, and
in a secluded corner of Chelsea, on the tiny and then almost unknown
Tedworth Square (No. 23), they hid themselves away for the winter. They
did not wish to be visited; they did not wish their whereabouts known
except to a few of their closest friends. They wanted to be alone with
their sorrow, and not a target for curious attention. Perhaps not a
dozen people in London knew their address and the outside world was
ignorant of it altogether. It was through this that a wild report
started that Mark Twain’s family had deserted him--that ill and in
poverty he was laboring alone to pay his debts. This report--exploited
in five-column head-lines by a hyper-hysterical paper of that period
received wide attention.

James Ross Clemens, of the St. Louis branch, a nephew of Frau von
Versen, was in London just then, and wrote at once, through Chatto &
Windus, begging Mark Twain to command his relative’s purse. The reply to
this kind offer was an invitation to tea, and “Young Doctor Jim,” as he
was called, found his famous relative by no means abandoned or in want,
but in pleasant quarters, with his family still loyal. The general
impression survived, however, that Mark Twain was sorely pressed, and
the New York Herald headed a public benefit fund for the payment of his
debts. The Herald subscribed one thousand dollars on its own account,
and Andrew Carnegie followed with another thousand, but the enterprise
was barely under way when Clemens wrote a characteristic letter, in
which he declared that while he would have welcomed the help offered,
being weary of debt, his family did not wish him to accept and so long
as he was able to take care of them through his own efforts.

Meantime he was back into literary harness; a notebook entry for October
24, 1896, says:

“Wrote the fist chapter of the book to-day-’Around the World’.”

He worked at it uninterruptedly, for in work; there was respite, though
his note-books show something of his mental torture, also his spiritual
heresies. His series of mistakes and misfortunes, ending with the death
of Susy, had tended to solidify his attitude of criticism toward things
in general and the human race in particular.

“Man is the only animal that blushes, or that needs to,” was one of
his maxims of this period, and in another place he sets down the myriad
diseases which human flesh is heir to and his contempt for a creature
subject to such afflictions and for a Providence that could invent them.
Even Mrs. Clemens felt the general sorrow of the race. “Poor, poor human
nature,” she wrote once during that long, gloomy winter.

Many of Mark Twain’s notes refer to Susy. In one he says:

“I did not hear her glorious voice at its supremest--that was in
Hartford a month or two before the end.”

Notes of heavy regret most of them are, and self-reproach and the
hopelessness of it all. In one place he records her accomplishment of
speech, adding:

“And I felt like saying ‘you marvelous child,’ but never said it; to my
sorrow I remember it now. But I come of an undemonstrative race.”

He wrote to Twichell:

    But I have this consolation: that dull as I was I always knew enough
    to be proud when she commended me or my work--as proud as if Livy
    had done it herself--& I took it as the accolade from the hand of
    genius. I see now--as Livy always saw--that she had greatness in
    her, & that she herself was dimly conscious of it.

    And now she is dead--& I can never tell her.

And closing a letter to Howells:

    Good-by. Will healing ever come, or life have value again?

    And shall we see Susy? Without doubt! without a shadow of doubt if
    it can furnish opportunity to break our hearts again.

On November 26th, Thanksgiving, occurs this note:

    “We did not celebrate it. Seven years ago Susy gave her play for
    the first time.”

And on Christmas:

    London, 11.30 Xmas morning. The Square & adjacent streets are not
    merely quiet, they are dead. There is not a sound. At intervals a
    Sunday-looking person passes along. The family have been to
    breakfast. We three sat & talked as usual, but the name of the day
    was not mentioned. It was in our minds, but we said nothing.

And a little later:

    Since bad luck struck us it is risky for people to have to do with
    us. Our cook’s sweetheart was healthy. He is rushing for the grave
    now. Emily, one of the maids, has lost the sight of one eye and the
    other is in danger. Wallace carried up coal & blacked the boots two
    months--has suddenly gone to the hospital--pleurisy and a bad case.
    We began to allow ourselves to see a good deal of our friends, the
    Bigelows--straightway their baby sickened & died. Next Wilson got
    his skull fractured.

    January 23, 1897. I wish the Lord would disguise Himself in
    citizen’s clothing & make a personal examination of the sufferings
    of the poor in London. He would be moved & would do something for
    them Himself.



CXCV. “PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC”.

Meantime certain publishing events had occurred. During his long voyage
a number of Mark Twain’s articles had appeared in the magazines, among
them “Mental Telegraphy Again,” in Harpers, and in the North American
Review that scorching reply to Paul Bourget’s reflections upon America.
Clemens could criticize his own nation freely enough, but he would
hardly be patient under the strictures of a Frenchman, especially upon
American women.

There had been book publication also during this period. The Harpers had
issued an edition of ‘Tom Sawyer Abroad’, which included another Tom and
Huck story ‘Tom Sawyer, Detective’, written in Paris, and the contents
of the old White Elephant book.

But there had been a much more important book event. The chapters of
his story of Joan having run their course in Harper’s Magazine had been
issued as a volume.

As already mentioned, Joan had been early recognized as Mark Twain’s
work, and it was now formally acknowledged as such on the title-page. It
is not certain now that the anonymous beginning had been a good thing.
Those who began reading it for its lofty charm, with the first hint of
Mark Twain as the author became fearful of some joke or burlesque. Some
who now promptly hastened to read it as Mark Twain’s, were inclined to
be disappointed at the very lack of these features. When the book itself
appeared the general public, still doubtful as to its merits, gave it a
somewhat dubious reception. The early sales were disappointing.

Nor were the reviewers enthusiastic, as a rule. Perhaps they did not
read it over-carefully, or perhaps they were swayed a good deal by a
sort of general verdict that, in attempting ‘Joan of Arc’, Mark Twain
had gone out of his proper field. Furthermore, there were a number of
Joan books published just then, mainly sober, somber books, in which
Joan was pictured properly enough as a saint, and never as anything
else--never being permitted to smile or enjoy the lighter side of life,
to be a human being, in fact, at all.

But this is just the very wonder of Mark Twain’s Joan. She is a saint;
she is rare, she is exquisite, she is all that is lovely, and she is a
human being besides. Considered from every point of view, Joan of Arc
is Mark Twain’s supreme literary expression, the loftiest, the most
delicate, the most luminous example of his work. It is so from the first
word of its beginning, that wonderful “Translator’s Preface,” to the
last word of the last chapter, where he declares that the figure of Joan
with the martyr’s crown upon her head shall stand for patriotism through
all time.

The idyllic picture of Joan’s childhood with her playmates around the
fairy tree is so rare in its delicacy and reality that any attempt to
recall it here would disturb its bloom. The little poem, “L’Arbre fee de
Bourlemont,” Mark Twain’s own composition, is a perfect note, and that
curiously enough, for in versification he was not likely to be strong.
Joan’s girlhood, the picture of her father’s humble cottage, the singing
there by the wandering soldier of the great song of Roland which stirred
her deepest soul with the love of France, Joan’s heroism among her
playmates, her wisdom, her spiritual ideals-are not these all reverently
and nobly told, and with that touch of tenderness which only Mark Twain
could give? And the story of her voices, and her march, and of her first
appearance before the wavering king. And then the great coronation
scene at Rheims, and the dramatic moment when Joan commands the march on
Paris--the dragging of the hopeless trial, and that last, fearful day
of execution, what can surpass these? Nor must we forget those charming,
brighter moments where Joan is shown just as a human being, laughing
until the tears run at the absurdities of the paladin or the simple home
prattle of her aged father and uncle. Only here and there does one find
a touch--and it is never more than that--of the forbidden thing, the
burlesque note which was so likely to be Mark Twain’s undoing.

It seems incredible to-day that any reader, whatever his preconceived
notions of the writer might have been, could have followed these
chapters without realizing their majesty, and that this tale of Joan was
a book such as had not before been written. Let any one who read it then
and doubted, go back and consider it now. A surprise will await him, and
it will be worth while. He will know the true personality of Joan of Arc
more truly than ever before, and he will love her as the author loved
her, for “the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable child
the ages have produced.”

The tale is matchless in its workmanship. The quaint phrasing of the
old Sieur de Conte is perfectly adapted to the subject-matter, and the
lovely character of the old narrator himself is so perfectly maintained
that we find ourselves all the time as in an atmosphere of consecration,
and feel that somehow we are helping him to weave a garland to lay on
Joan’s tomb. Whatever the tale he tells, he is never more than a step
away. We are within sound of his voice, we can touch his presence; we
ride with him into battle; we laugh with him in the by-play and humors
of warfare; we sit hushed at his side through the long, fearful days of
the deadly trial, and when it is all ended it is to him that we turn to
weep for Joan--with him only would we mingle our tears. It is all bathed
in the atmosphere of romance, but it is the ultimate of realism, too;
not hard, sordid, ugly realism, but noble, spiritual, divine realism,
belonging to no particular class or school--a creation apart. Not all of
Mark Twain’s tales have been convincing, but there is no chapter of his
Joan that we doubt. We believe it all happened--we know that it must
have happened, for our faith in the Sieur de Conte never for an instant
wavers.

Aside from the personality of the book--though, in truth, one never
is aside from it--the tale is a marvel in its pageantry, its splendid
panorama and succession of stirring and stately scenes. The fight before
Orleans, the taking of the Tourelles and of Jargeau, all the movement of
that splendid march to Rheims, there are few better battle-pictures than
these. Howells, always interested mainly in the realism of to-day, in
his review hints at staginess in the action and setting and even in
Joan herself. But Howells himself did not accept his earlier judgment as
final. Five years later he wrote:

“She is indeed realized to the modern sense as few figures of the past
have been realized in fiction.”

As for the action, suppose we consider a brief bit of Joan’s warfare. It
is from the attack on the Tourelles:

    Joan mounted her horse now with her staff about her, and when our
    people saw us coming they raised a great shout, and were at once
    eager for another assault on the boulevard. Joan rode straight to
    the foss where she had received her wound, and, standing there in
    the rain of bolts and arrows, she ordered the paladin to let her
    long standard blow free, and to note when its fringes should touch
    the fortress. Presently he said:

    “It touches.”

    “Now, then,” said Joan to the waiting battalions, “the place is
    yours--enter in! Bugles, sound the assault! Now, then--all
    together--go!”

    And go it was. You never saw anything like it. We swarmed up the
    ladders and over the battlements like a wave--and the place was our
    property. Why, one might live a thousand years and never see so
    gorgeous a thing as that again....

    We were busy and never heard the five cannon-shots fired, but they
    were fired a moment after Joan had ordered the assault; and so,
    while we were hammering and being hammered in the smaller fortress,
    the reserve on the Orleans side poured across the bridge and
    attacked the Tourelles from that side. A fireboat was brought down
    and moored under the drawbridge which connected the Tourelles with
    our boulevard; wherefore, when at last we drove our English ahead of
    us, and they tried to cross that drawbridge and join their friends
    in the Tourelles, the burning timbers gave way under them and
    emptied them in a mass into the river in their heavy armor--and a
    pitiful sight it was to see brave men die such a death as that.

    “God pity them!” said Joan, and wept to see that sorrowful
    spectacle. She said those gentle words and wept those compassionate
    tears, although one of those perishing men had grossly insulted her
    with a coarse name three days before when she had sent him a message
    asking him to surrender. That was their leader, Sir William
    Glasdale, a most valorous knight. He was clothed all in steel; so
    he plunged under the water like a lance, and of course came up no
    more.

    We soon patched a sort of bridge together and threw ourselves
    against the last stronghold of the English power that barred Orleans
    from friends and supplies. Before the sun was quite down Joan’s
    forever memorable day’s work was finished, her banner floated from
    the fortress of the Tourelles, her promise was fulfilled, she had
    raised the siege of Orleans!

England had resented the Yankee, but it welcomed Joan. Andrew Lang
adored it, and some years later contemplated dedicating his own book,
‘The Maid of France’, to Mark Twain.’--[His letter proposing this
dedication, received in 1909, appears to have been put aside and
forgotten by Mr. Clemens, whose memory had not improved with failing
health.]

Brander Matthews ranks Huck Finn before Joan of Arc, but that is
understandable. His literary culture and research enable him, in some
measure, to comprehend the production of Joan; whereas to him Huck is
pure magic. Huck is not altogether magic to those who know the West--the
character of that section and the Mississippi River, especially of
an older time--it is rather inspiration resulting from these existing
things. Joan is a truer literary magic--the reconstruction of a
far-vanished life and time. To reincarnate, as in a living body of
the present, that marvelous child whose life was all that was pure and
exalted and holy, is veritable necromancy and something more. It is the
apotheosis of history.

Throughout his life Joan of Arc had been Mark Twain’s favorite character
in the world’s history. His love for her was a beautiful and a sacred
thing. He adored young maidenhood always and nobility of character,
and he was always the champion of the weak and the oppressed. The
combination of these characteristics made him the ideal historian of an
individuality and of a career like hers. It is fitting that in his old
age (he was nearing sixty when it was finished) he should have written
this marvelously beautiful thing. He could not have written it at an
earlier time. It had taken him all these years to prepare for it; to
become softened, to acquire the delicacy of expression, the refinement
of feeling, necessary to the achievement.

It was the only book of all he had written that Mark Twain considered
worthy of this dedication:

            1870     To MY WIFE        1895
                  OLIVIA LANGDON CLEMENS
                      THIS BOOK

    is tendered on our wedding anniversary in grateful recognition
    of her twenty-five years of valued service as my literary
    adviser and editor.
                                THE AUTHOR

The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was a book not understood in
the beginning, but to-day the public, that always renders justice in
the end, has reversed its earlier verdict. The demand for Joan has
multiplied many fold and it continues to multiply with every year. Its
author lived long enough to see this change and to be comforted by it,
for though the creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed, his
glory in the tale of Joan never died. On his seventy-third birthday,
when all of his important books were far behind him, and he could judge
them without prejudice, he wrote as his final verdict:

                            Nov. 30, 1908

I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books; & it is the best; I know
it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure
afforded me by any of the others: 12 years of preparation & a years of
writing. The others needed no preparation, & got none.

                            MARK TWAIN.



CXCVI. MR. ROGERS AND HELEN KELLER

It was during the winter of ‘96, in London, that Clemens took an active
interest in the education of Helen Keller and enlisted the most valuable
adherent in that cause, that is to say, Henry H. Rogers. It was to Mrs.
Rogers that he wrote, heading his letter:

           For & in behalf
              of Helen Keller,
                  Stone blind & deaf,
                     & formerly dumb.

    DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--Experience has convinced me that when one
    wished to set a hard-worked man at something which he mightn’t
    prefer to be bothered with it is best to move upon him behind his
    wife. If she can’t convince him it isn’t worth while for other
    people to try.

    Mr. Rogers will remember our visit with that astonishing girl at
    Lawrence Hutton’s house when she was fourteen years old. Last July,
    in Boston, when she was 16 she underwent the Harvard examination for
    admission to Radcliffe College. She passed without a single
    condition. She was allowed only the same amount of time that is
    granted to other applicants, & this was shortened in her case by the
    fact that the question-papers had to be read to her. Yet she scored
    an average of 90, as against an average of 78 on the part of the
    other applicants.

    It won’t do for America to allow this marvelous child to retire from
    her studies because of poverty. If she can go on with them she will
    make a fame that will endure in history for centuries. Along her
    special lines she is the most extraordinary product of all the ages.

    There is danger that she must retire from the struggle for a college
    degree for lack of support for herself & for Miss Sullivan (the
    teacher who has been with her from the start--Mr. Rogers will
    remember her). Mrs. Hutton writes to ask me to interest rich
    Englishmen in her case, & I would gladly try, but my secluded life
    will not permit it. I see nobody. Nobody knows my address.
    Nothing but the strictest hiding can enable me to write my book in
    time.

    So I thought of this scheme: Beg you to lay siege to your husband &
    get him to interest himself and Messrs. John D. & William
    Rockefeller & the other Standard Oil chiefs in Helen’s case; get
    them to subscribe an annual aggregate of six or seven hundred or a
    thousand dollars--& agree to continue this for three or four years,
    until she has completed her college course. I’m not trying to limit
    their generosity--indeed no; they may pile that Standard Oil Helen
    Keller College Fund as high as they please; they have my consent.

    Mrs. Hutton’s idea is to raise a permanent fund, the interest upon
    which shall support Helen & her teacher & put them out of the fear
    of want. I sha’n’t say a word against it, but she will find it a
    difficult & disheartening job, & meanwhile what is to become of that
    miraculous girl?

    No, for immediate and sound effectiveness, the thing is for you to
    plead with Mr. Rogers for this hampered wonder of your sex, & send
    him clothed with plenary powers to plead with the other chiefs--they
    have spent mountains of money upon the worthiest benevolences, & I
    think that the same spirit which moved them to put their hands down
    through their hearts into their pockets in those cases will answer.
    “Here!” when its name is called in this one.

    There--I don’t need to apologize to you or to H. H. for this appeal
    that I am making; I know you too well for that:

    Good-by, with love to all of you,
                            S. L. CLEMENS.

The result of this letter was that Mr. Rogers personally took charge of
Helen Keller’s fortunes, and out of his own means made it possible for
her to continue her education and to achieve for herself the enduring
fame which Mark Twain had foreseen.

Mr. Rogers wrote that, by a curious coincidence, a letter had come to
him from Mrs. Hutton on the same morning that Mrs. Rogers had received
hers from Tedworth Square. Clemens sent grateful acknowledgments to Mrs.
Rogers.

    DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--It is superb! And I am beyond measure grateful
    to you both. I knew you would be interested in that wonderful girl,
    & that Mr. Rogers was already interested in her & touched by her; &
    I was sure that if nobody else helped her you two would; but you
    have gone far & away beyond the sum I expected--may your lines fall
    in pleasant places here, & Hereafter for it!

    The Huttons are as glad & grateful as they can be, & I am glad for
    their sakes as well as for Helen’s.

    I want to thank Mr. Rogers for crucifying himself on the same old
    cross between Bliss & Harper; & goodness knows I hope he will come
    to enjoy it above all other dissipations yet, seeing that it has
    about it the elements of stability & permanency. However, at any
    time that he says sign we’re going to do it.

                     Ever sincerely yours,
                                S. L. CLEMENS.



CXCVII. FINISHING THE BOOK OF TRAVEL. One reading the Equator book
to-day, and knowing the circumstances under which it was written, might
be puzzled to reconcile the secluded household and its atmosphere of
sorrow with certain gaieties of the subject matter. The author himself
wondered at it, and to Howells wrote:

    I don’t mean that I am miserable; no-worse than that--indifferent.
    Indifferent to nearly everything but work. I like that; I enjoy it,
    & stick to it. I do it without purpose & without ambition; merely
    for the love of it. Indeed, I am a mud-image; & it puzzles me to
    know what it is in me that writes & has comedy fancies & finds
    pleasure in phrasing them. It is the law of our nature, of course,
    or it wouldn’t happen; the thing in me forgets the presence of the
    mud-image, goes its own way wholly unconscious of it & apparently of
    no kinship with it.

He saw little company. Now and, then a good friend, J.Y.W. MacAlister,
came in for a smoke with him. Once Clemens sent this line:

    You speak a language which I understand. I would like to see you.
    Could you come and smoke some manilas; I would, of course, say dine,
    but my family are hermits & cannot see any one, but I would have a
    fire in my study, & if you came at any time after your dinner that
    might be most convenient for you you would find me & a welcome.

Clemens occasionally went out to dinner, but very privately. He dined
with Bram Stoker, who invited Anthony Hope and one or two others, and
with the Chattos and Mr. Percy Spalding; also with Andrew Lang, who
wrote, “Your old friend, Lord Lome, wants to see you again”; with the
Henry M. Stanleys and Poultney Bigelow, and with Francis H. Skrine, a
government official he had met in India. But in all such affairs he
was protected from strangers and his address was kept a secret from the
public. Finally, the new-found cousin, Dr. Jim Clemens, fell ill, and
the newspapers had it presently that Mark Twain was lying at the point
of death. A reporter ferreted him out and appeared at Tedworth Square
with cabled instructions from his paper. He was a young man, and
innocently enough exhibited his credentials. His orders read:

“If Mark Twain very ill, five hundred words. If dead, send one
thousand.”

Clemens smiled grimly as he handed back the cable.

“You don’t need as much as that,” he said. “Just say the report of my
death has been grossly exaggerated.”

The young man went away quite seriously, and it was not until he was
nearly to his office that he saw the joke. Then, of course, it was
flashed all over the world.

Clemens kept grinding steadily at the book, for it was to be a very
large volume--larger than he had ever written before. To MacAlister,
April 6, 1897, he wrote, replying to some invitation:

    Ah, but I mustn’t stir from my desk before night now when the
    publisher is hurrying me & I am almost through. I am up at work
    now--4 o’clock in the morning-and a few more spurts will pull me
    through. You come down here & smoke; that is better than tempting a
    working-man to strike & go to tea.

    And it would move me too deeply to see Miss Corelli. When I saw her
    last it was on the street in Homburg, & Susy was walking with me.

On April 13th he makes a note-book entry: “I finished my book to-day,”
 and on the 15th he wrote MacAlister, inclosing some bits of manuscript:

    I finished my book yesterday, and the madam edited this stuff out of
    it--on the ground that the first part is not delicate & the last
    part is indelicate. Now, there’s a nice distinction for you--&
    correctly stated, too, & perfectly true.

It may interest the reader to consider briefly the manner in which Mark
Twain’s “editor” dealt with his manuscript, and a few pages of this
particular book remain as examples. That he was not always entirely
tractable, or at least submissive, but that he did yield, and
graciously, is clearly shown.

In one of her comments Mrs. Clemens wrote:

    Page 597. I hate to say it, but it seems to me that you go too
    minutely into particulars in describing the feats of the
    aboriginals. I felt it in the boomerang-throwing.

And Clemens just below has written:

    Boomerang has been furnished with a special train--that is, I’ve
    turned it into “Appendix.” Will that answer?

    Page 1002. I don’t like the “shady-principled cat that has a family
    in every port.”

    Then I’ll modify him just a little.

    Page 1020. 9th line from the top. I think some other word would be
    better than “stench.” You have used that pretty often.

    But can’t I get it in anywhere? You’ve knocked it out every time.
    Out it goes again. And yet “stench” is a noble, good word.

    Page 1038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing a slave
    boy.

    It’s out, and my father is whitewashed.

    Page 1050. 2d line from the bottom. Change breech-clout. It’s a
    word that you love and I abominate. I would take that and “offal”
     out of the language.

    You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy.

    Page 1095. Perhaps you don’t care, but whoever told you that the
    Prince’s green stones were rubies told an untruth. They were superb
    emeralds. Those strings of pearls and emeralds were famous all over
    Bombay.

    All right, I’ll make them emeralds, but it loses force. Green
    rubies is a fresh thing. And besides it was one of the Prince’s own
    staff liars that told me.

That the book was not quite done, even after the triumphant entry of
April 13th, is shown by another note which followed something more than
a month later:

    May 18, 1897. Finished the book again--addition of 30,000 words.

And to MacAlister he wrote:

    I have finished the book at last--and finished it for good this
    time. Now I am ready for dissipation with a good conscience. What
    night will you come down & smoke?

His book finished, Clemens went out rather more freely, and one evening
allowed MacAlister to take him around to the Savage Club. There happened
to be a majority of the club committee present, and on motion Mark Twain
was elected an honorary life member. There were but three others on whom
this distinction had been conferred--Stanley, Nansen, and the Prince of
Wales. When they told Mark Twain this he said:

“Well, it must make the Prince feel mighty fine.”--[In a volume of
Savage Club anecdotes the date of Mark Twain’s election to honorary
membership is given as 1899. Clemens’s notebook gives it in 1897.]

He did not intend to rest; in another entry we find:

    May 23, 1897. Wrote first chapter of above story to-day.

The “above story” is a synopsis of a tale which he tried then and later
in various forms--a tale based on a scientific idea that one may dream
an episode covering a period of years in minute detail in what, by our
reckoning, may be no more than a few brief seconds. In this particular
form of the story a man sits down to write some memories and falls into
a doze. The smell of his cigarette smoke causes him to dream of the
burning of his home, the destruction of his family, and of a long period
of years following. Awakening a few seconds later, and confronted by his
wife and children, he refuses to believe in their reality, maintaining
that this condition, and not the other, is the dream. Clemens tried the
psychological literary experiment in as many as three different ways
during the next two or three years, and each at considerable length; but
he developed none of them to his satisfaction, or at least he brought
none of them to conclusion. Perhaps the most weird of these attempts,
and the most intensely interesting, so long as the verisimilitude is
maintained, is a dream adventure in a drop of water which, through an
incredible human reduction to microbic, even atomic, proportions, has
become a vast tempestuous sea. Mark Twain had the imagination for these
undertakings and the literary workmanship, lacking only a definite plan
for development of his tale--a lack which had brought so many of his
literary ventures to the rocks.



CXCVIII. A SUMMER IN SWITZERLAND

The Queen’s Jubilee came along--June 22, 1897, being the day chosen to
celebrate the sixty-year reign. Clemens had been asked to write about it
for the American papers, and he did so after his own ideas, illustrating
some of his material with pictures of his own selection. The selections
were made from various fashion-plates, which gave him a chance to pick
the kind of a prince or princess or other royal figure that he thought
fitted his description without any handicap upon his imagination. Under
his portrait of Henry V. (a very correctly dressed person in top hat and
overcoat) he wrote:

    In the original the King has a crown on. That is no kind of a thing
    for the King to wear when he has come home on business. He ought to
    wear something he can collect taxes in. You will find this
    representation of Henry V. active, full of feeling, full of
    sublimity. I have pictured him looking out over the battle of
    Agincourt and studying up where to begin.

Mark Twain’s account of the Jubilee probably satisfied most readers; but
James Tufts, then managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner, had a
rather matter-of-fact Englishman on the staff, who, after reading the
report, said:

“Well, Jim Tufts, I hope you are satisfied with that Mark Twain cable.”

“Why, yes,” said Tufts; “aren’t you?”

“I should say not. Just look what he says about the number of soldiers.
He says, ‘I never saw so many soldiers anywhere except on the stage of
a theater.’ Why, Tufts, don’t you know that the soldiers in the theater
are the same old soldiers marching around and around? There aren’t more
than a hundred soldiers in the biggest army ever put on the stage.”

It was decided to vacate the house in Tedworth Square and go to
Switzerland for the summer. Mrs. Crane and Charles Langdon’s daughter,
Julia, joined them early in July, and they set out for Switzerland a few
days later. Just before leaving, Clemens received an offer from Pond
of fifty thousand dollars for one hundred and twenty-five nights on the
platform in America. It was too great a temptation to resist at once,
and they took it under advisement. Clemens was willing to accept, but
Mrs. Clemens opposed the plan. She thought his health no longer equal
to steady travel. She believed that with continued economy they would be
able to manage their problem without this sum. In the end the offer was
declined.

They journeyed to Switzerland by way of Holland and Germany, the general
destination being Lucerne. They did not remain there, however. They
found a pretty little village farther up the lake--Weggis, at the foot
of the Rigi--where, in the Villa Buhlegg, they arranged for the summer
at very moderate rates indeed. Weggis is a beautiful spot, looking
across the blue water to Mount Pilatus, the lake shore dotted with white
villages. Down by the water, but a few yards from the cottage--for it
was scarcely a villa except by courtesy--there was a little inclosure,
and a bench under a large tree, a quiet spot where Clemens often sat
to rest and smoke. The fact is remembered there to-day, and recorded. A
small tablet has engraved upon it “Mark Twain Ruhe.” Farther along
the shore he discovered a neat, white cottage were some kindly
working-people agreed to rent him an upper room for a study. It was a
sunny room with windows looking out upon the lake, and he worked there
steadily. To Twichell he wrote:

This is the charmingest place we have ever lived in for repose and
restfulness, superb scenery whose beauty undergoes a perpetual change
from one miracle to another, yet never runs short of fresh surprises and
new inventions. We shall always come here for the summers if we can.

The others have climbed the Rigi, he says, and he expects to some day if
Twichell will come and climb it with him. They had climbed it together
during that summer vagabondage, nineteen years before.

He was full of enthusiasm over his work. To F. H. Skrine, in London,
he wrote that he had four or five books all going at once, and his
note-book contains two or three pages merely of titles of the stories he
proposed to write.

But of the books begun that summer at Weggis none appears to have been
completed. There still exists a bulky, half-finished manuscript about
Tom and Huck, most of which was doubtless written at this time, and
there is the tale already mentioned, the “dream” story; and another tale
with a plot of intricate psychology and crime; still another with the
burning title of “Hell-Fire Hotchkiss”--a story of Hannibal life--and
some short stories. Clemens appeared to be at this time out of tune with
fiction. Perhaps his long book of travel had disqualified his invention.
He realized that these various literary projects were leading nowhere,
and one after another he dropped them. The fact that proofs of the big
book were coming steadily may also have interfered with his creative
faculty.

As was his habit, Clemens formed the acquaintance of a number of the
native residents, and enjoyed talking to them about their business and
daily affairs. They were usually proud and glad of these attentions,
quick to see the humor of his remarks.

But there was an old watchmaker-an ‘Uhrmacher’ who remained indifferent.
He would answer only in somber monosyllables, and he never smiled.
Clemens at last brought the cheapest kind of a watch for repairs.

“Be very careful of this watch,” he said. “It is a fine one.”

The old man merely glared at him.

“It is not a valuable watch. It is a worthless watch.”

“But I gave six francs for it in Paris.”

“Still, it is a cheap watch,” was the unsmiling answer. Defeat waits
somewhere for every conqueror.

Which recalls another instance, though of a different sort. On one of
his many voyages to America, he was sitting on deck in a steamer-chair
when two little girls stopped before him. One of them said,
hesitatingly:

“Are you Mr. Mark Twain?”

“Why, yes, dear, they call me that.”

“Won’t you please say something funny?”

And for the life of him he couldn’t make the required remark.

In one of his letters to Twichell of that summer, Clemens wrote of the
arrival there of the colored jubilee singers, always favorites of his,
and of his great delight in them.

    We went down to the village hotel & bought our tickets & entered the
    beer-hall, where a crowd of German & Swiss men & women sat grouped
    around tables with their beer-mugs in front of them--self-contained
    & unimpressionable-looking people--an indifferent & unposted &
    disheartening audience--& up at the far end of the room sat the
    jubilees in a row. The singers got up & stood--the talking & glass-
    jingling went on. Then rose & swelled out above those common
    earthly sounds one of those rich chords, the secret of whose make
    only the jubilees possess, & a spell fell upon that house. It was
    fine to see the faces light up with the pleased wonder & surprise of
    it. No one was indifferent any more; & when the singers finished
    the camp was theirs. It was a triumph. It reminded me of Lancelot
    riding in Sir Kay’s armor, astonishing complacent knights who
    thought they had struck a soft thing. The jubilees sang a lot of
    pieces. Arduous & painstaking cultivation has not diminished or
    artificialized their music, but on the contrary--to my surprise--has
    mightily reinforced its eloquence and beauty. Away back in the
    beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap;
    & that early notion is emphasized now. It is entirely beautiful to
    me; & it moves me infinitely more than any other music can. I think
    that in the jubilees & their songs America has produced the
    perfectest flower of the ages; & I wish it were a foreign product,
    so that she would worship it & lavish money on it & go properly
    crazy over it.

    Now, these countries are different: they would do all that if it
    were native. It is true they praise God, but that is merely a
    formality, & nothing in it; they open out their whole hearts to no
    foreigner.

As the first anniversary of Susy’s death drew near the tension became
very great. A gloom settled on the household, a shadow of restraint. On
the morning of the 18th Clemens went early to his study. Somewhat later
Mrs. Clemens put on her hat and wrap, and taking a small bag left the
house. The others saw her go toward the steamer-landing, but made no
inquiries as to her destination. They guessed that she would take the
little boat that touched at the various points along the lake shore.
This she did, in fact, with no particular plan as to where she would
leave it. One of the landing-places seemed quiet and inviting, and there
she went ashore, and taking a quiet room at a small inn spent the day
in reading Susy’s letters. It was evening when she returned, and her
husband, lonely and anxious, was waiting for her at the landing. He
had put in the day writing the beautiful poem, “In Memoriam,” a strain
lofty, tender, and dirge-like-liquidly musical, though irregular in
form.--[Now included in the Uniform Edition.]



CXCIX. WINTER IN VIENNA

They remained two months in Weggis--until toward the end of September;
thence to Vienna, by way of Innsbruck, in the Tyrol, “where the
mountains seem more approachable than in Switzerland.” Clara Clemens
wished to study the piano under Leschetizky, and this would take them
to Austria for the winter. Arriving at Vienna, they settled in the Hotel
Metropole, on the banks of the Danube. Their rooms, a corner suite,
looked out on a pretty green square, the Merzimplatz, and down on the
Franz Josef quay. A little bridge crosses the river there, over which
all kinds of life are continually passing. On pleasant days Clemens
liked to stand on this bridge and watch the interesting phases of
the Austrian capital. The Vienna humorist, Poetzl, quickly formed
his acquaintance, and they sometimes stood there together. Once while
Clemens was making some notes, Poetzl interested the various passers by
asking each one--the errand-boy, the boot-black, the chestnut-vender,
cabmen, and others--to guess who the stranger was and what he wanted.
Most of them recognized him when their attention was called, for the
newspapers had proudly heralded his arrival and his picture was widely
circulated.

Clemens had scarcely arrived in Vienna, in fact, before he was pursued
by photographers, journalists, and autograph-hunters. The Viennese were
his fond admirers, and knowing how the world elsewhere had honored him
they were determined not to be outdone. The ‘Neues Viener Tageblatt’, a
fortnight after his arrival, said:

    It is seldom that a foreign author has found such a hearty reception
    in Vienna as that accorded to Mark Twain, who not only has the
    reputation of being the foremost humorist in the whole civilized.
    world, but one whose personality arouses everywhere a peculiar
    interest on account of the genuine American character which sways
    it.

He was the guest of honor at the Concordia Club soon after his arrival,
and the great ones of Vienna assembled to do him honor. Charlemagne
Tower, then American minister, was also one of the guests. Writers,
diplomats, financiers, municipal officials, everybody in Vienna that was
worth while, was there. Clemens gave them a surprise, for when Ferdinand
Gross, Concordia president, introduced him first in English, then in
German, Mark Twain made his reply wholly in the latter language.

The paper just quoted gives us a hint of the frolic and wassail of that
old ‘Festkneipe’ when it says:

    At 9 o’clock Mark Twain appeared in the salon, and amid a storm of
    applause took his seat at the head of the table. His characteristic
    shaggy and flowing mane of hair adorning a youthful countenance
    attracted the attention at once of all present. After a few formal
    convivial commonplaces the president of the Concordia, Mr. Ferdinand
    Gross, delivered an excellent address in English, which he wound up
    with a few German sentences. Then Mr. Tower was heard in praise of
    his august countryman. In the course of his remarks he said he
    could hardly find words enough to express his delight at the
    presence of the popular American. Then followed the greatest
    attraction of the evening, an impromptu speech by Mark Twain in the
    German language, which it is true he has not fully mastered, but
    which he nevertheless controls sufficiently well to make it
    difficult to detect any harsh foreign accent. He had entitled his
    speech, “Die Schrecken der Deutschen Sprache” (the terrors of the
    German language). At times he would interrupt himself in English
    and ask, with a stuttering smile, “How do you call this word in
    German” or “I only know that in mother-tongue.” The Festkneipe
    lasted far into the morning hours.

It was not long after their arrival in Vienna that the friction among
the unamalgamated Austrian states flamed into a general outbreak in the
Austrian Reichsrath, or Imperial Parliament. We need not consider
just what the trouble was. Any one wishing to know can learn from Mark
Twain’s article on the subject, for it is more clearly pictured there
than elsewhere. It is enough to say here that the difficulty lay mainly
between the Hungarian and German wings of the house; and in the midst
of it Dr. Otto Lecher made his famous speech, which lasted twelve hours
without a break, in order to hold the floor against the opposing forces.
Clemens was in the gallery most of the time while that speech, with
its riotous accompaniment, was in progress.--[“When that house is
legislating you can’t tell it from artillery practice.” From Mark
Twain’s report, “Stirring Times in Austria,” in Literary Essays,]--He
was intensely interested. Nothing would appeal to him more than that,
unless it should be some great astronomic or geologic change. He was
also present somewhat later when a resolution was railroaded through
which gave the chair the right to invoke the aid of the military, and he
was there when the military arrived and took the insurgents in charge.
It was a very great occasion, a “tremendous episode,” he says.

    The memory of it will outlast all the others that exist to-day. In
    the whole history of free parliament the like of it had been seen
    but three times before. It takes imposing place among the world’s
    unforgetable things. I think that in my lifetime I have not twice
    seen abiding history made before my eyes, but I know that I have
    seen it once.

Wild reports were sent to the American press; among them one that Mark
Twain had been hustled out with the others, and that, having waved his
handkerchief and shouted “Hoch die Deutschen!” he had been struck by
an officer of the law. Of course nothing of the kind happened. The
sergeant-at-arms, who came to the gallery where he sat, said to a friend
who suggested that Clemens be allowed to remain:

“Oh, I know him very well. I recognize him by his pictures, and I should
be very glad to let him stay, but I haven’t any choice because of the
strictness of the order.”

Clemens, however, immediately ran across a London Times correspondent,
who showed him the way into the first gallery, which it seems was not
emptied, so he lost none of the exhibit.

Mark Twain’s report of the Austrian troubles, published in Harper’s
Magazine the following March and now included with the Literary Essays,
will keep that episode alive and important as literature when otherwise
it would have been merely embalmed, and dimly remembered, as history.

It was during these exciting political times in Vienna that a
representative of a New York paper wrote, asking for a Mark Twain
interview. Clemens replied, giving him permission to call. When the
reporter arrived Clemens was at work writing in bed, as was so much
his habit. At the doorway the reporter paused, waiting for a summons to
enter. The door was ajar and he heard Mrs. Clemens say:

“Youth, don’t you think it will be a little embarrassing for him, your
being in bed?”

And he heard Mark Twain’s easy, gentle, deliberate voice reply:

“Why, Livy, if you think so, we might have the other bed made up for
him.”

Clemens became a privileged character in Vienna. Official rules were
modified for his benefit. Everything was made easy for him. Once, on
a certain grand occasion, when nobody was permitted to pass beyond a
prescribed line, he was stopped by a guard, when the officer in charge
suddenly rode up:

“Let him pass,” he commanded. “Lieber Gott! Don’t you see it’s Herr Mark
Twain?”

The Clemens apartments at the Metropole were like a court, where with
those of social rank assembled the foremost authors, journalists,
diplomats, painters, philosophers, scientists, of Europe, and therefore
of the world. A sister of the Emperor of Germany lived at the Metropole
that winter and was especially cordial. Mark Twain’s daily movements
were chronicled as if he had been some visiting potentate, and, as
usual, invitations and various special permissions poured in. A Vienna
paper announced:

    He has been feted and dined from morn till eve. The homes of the
    aristocracy are thrown open to him, counts and princes delight to do
    him honor, and foreign audiences hang upon the words that fall from
    his lips, ready to burst out any instant into roars of laughter.

Deaths never came singly in the Clemens family. It was on the 11th of
December, 1897, something more than a year after the death of Susy, that
Orion Clemens died, at the age of seventy-two. Orion had remained the
same to the end, sensitively concerned as to all his brother’s doings,
his fortunes and misfortunes: soaring into the clouds when any good news
came; indignant, eager to lend help and advice in the hour of defeat;
loyal, upright, and generally beloved by those who knew and understood
his gentle nature. He had not been ill, and, in fact, only a few days
before he died had written a fine congratulatory letter on his brother’s
success in accumulating means for the payment of his debts, entering
enthusiastically into some literary plans which Mark Twain then had in
prospect, offering himself for caricature if needed.

I would fit in as a fool character, believing, what the Tennessee
mountaineers predicted, that I would grow up to be a great man and go to
Congress. I did not think it worth the trouble to be a common great man
like Andy Johnson. I wouldn’t give a pinch of snuff, little as I needed
it, to be anybody, less than Napoleon. So when a farmer took my father’s
offer for some chickens under advisement till the next day I said to
myself, “Would Napoleon Bonaparte have taken under advisement till the
next day an offer to sell him some chickens?”

To his last day and hour Orion was the dreamer, always with a new plan.
It was one morning early that he died. He had seated himself at a table
with pencil and paper and was setting down the details of his latest
project when death came to him, kindly enough, in the moment of new
hope.

There came also, just then, news of the death of their old Hartford
butler, George. It saddened them as if it had been a member of the
household. Jean, especially, wept bitterly.



CC. MARK TWAIN PAYS HIS DEBTS

‘Following the Equator’--[In England, More Tramps Abroad.]--had come
from the press in November and had been well received. It was a
large, elaborate subscription volume, more elaborate than artistic
in appearance. Clemens, wishing to make some acknowledgment to his
benefactor, tactfully dedicated it to young Harry Rogers:

“With recognition of what he is, and an apprehension of what he may
become unless he form himself a little more closely upon the model of
the author.”

Following the Equator was Mark Twain’s last book of travel, and it did
not greatly resemble its predecessors. It was graver than the Innocents
Abroad; it was less inclined to cynicism and burlesque than the Tramp.
It was the thoughtful, contemplative observation and philosophizing of
the soul-weary, world-weary pilgrim who has by no means lost interest,
but only his eager, first enthusiasm. It is a gentler book than the
Tramp Abroad, and for the most part a pleasanter one. It is better
history and more informing. Its humor, too, is of a worthier sort, less
likely to be forced and overdone. The holy Hindoo pilgrim’s “itinerary
of salvation” is one of the richest of all Mark Twain’s fancies, and is
about the best thing in the book. The revised philosophies of Pudd’nhead
Wilson, that begin each chapter, have many of them passed into our daily
speech. That some of Mark Twain’s admirers were disappointed with the
new book is very likely, but there were others who could not praise it
enough. James Whitcomb Riley wrote:

DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--For a solid week-night sessions--I have been glorying
in your last book-and if you’ve ever done anything better, stronger, or
of wholesomer uplift I can’t recall it. So here’s my heart and here’s
my hand with all the augmented faith and applause of your proudest
countryman! It’s just a hail I’m sending you across the spaces--not to
call you from your blessed work an instant, but simply to join my voice
in the universal cheer that is steadfastly going up for you.

As gratefully as delightedly,                  Your abiding friend,
                            JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY.

Notwithstanding the belief that the sale of single subscription volumes
had about ended, Bliss did well with the new book. Thirty or forty
thousand copies were placed without much delay, and the accumulated
royalties paid into Mr. Rogers’s hands. The burden of debt had become a
nightmare. Clemens wrote:

Let us begin on those debts. I cannot bear the weight any longer. It
totally unfits me for work.

This was November 10, 1897. December 29th he wrote:

Land, we are glad to see those debts diminishing. For the first time in
my life I am getting more pleasure from paying money out than pulling it
in.

To Howells, January 3d, Clemens wrote that they had “turned the corner,”
 and a month later:

We’ve lived close to the bone and saved every cent we could, & there’s
no undisputed claim now that we can’t cash. There are only two claims
which I dispute & which I mean to look into personally before I pay
them. But they are small. Both together they amount to only $12,500. I
hope you will never get the like of the load saddled onto you that was
saddled onto me 3 years ago. And yet there is such a solid pleasure in
paying the things that I reckon maybe it is worth while to get into that
kind of a hobble after all. Mrs. Clemens gets millions of delight out of
it; & the children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping
from the beginning.

By the end of January, 1898, Mark Twain had accumulated enough money to
make the final payment to his creditors and stand clear of debt. At the
time of his failure he said he had given himself five years in which to
clear himself of the heavy obligation. He had achieved that result in
less than three. The world heralded it as a splendid triumph.

Miss Katharine I. Harrison, Henry Rogers’s secretary, who had been in
charge of the details, wrote in her letter announcing his freedom:

“I wish I could shout it across the water to you so that you would get
it ten days ahead of this letter.”

Miss Harrison’s letter shows that something like thirteen thousand
dollars would remain to his credit after the last accounts were wiped
away.

Clemens had kept his financial progress from the press, but the payment
of the final claims was distinctly a matter of news and the papers made
the most of it. Head-lines shouted it, there were long editorials in
which Mark Twain was heralded as a second Walter Scott, though it was
hardly necessary that he should be compared with anybody; he had been
in that--as in those peculiarities which had invited his disaster--just
himself.

One might suppose now that he had had enough of inventions and
commercial enterprises of every sort that is, one who did not know Mark
Twain might suppose this; but it would not be true. Within a month after
the debts were paid he had negotiated with the great Austrian inventor,
Szczepanik, and his business manager for the American rights of a
wonderful carpet-pattern machine, obtained an option for these rights
at fifteen hundred thousand dollars, and, Sellers-like, was planning to
organize a company with a capital of fifteen hundred million dollars
to control carpet-weaving industries of the world. He records in his
note-book that a certain Mr. Wood, representing the American carpet
interests, called upon him and, in the course of their conversation,
asked him at what price he would sell his option.

    I declined, and got away from the subject. I was afraid he would
    offer me $500,000 for it. I should have been obliged to take it,
    but I was born with a speculative instinct & I did not want that
    temptation put in my way.

He wrote to Mr. Rogers about the great scheme, inviting the Standard Oil
to furnish the capital for it--but it appears not to have borne the test
of Mr. Rogers’s scrutiny, and is heard of no more.

Szczepanik had invented the ‘Fernseher’, or Telelectroscope, the machine
by which one sees at a distance. Clemens would have invested heavily in
this, too, for he had implicit faith in its future, but the ‘Fernseher’
was already controlled for the Paris Exposition; so he could only employ
Szczepanik as literary material, which he did in two instances: “The
Austrian Edison Keeping School Again” and “From the London Times of
1904”--magazine articles published in the Century later in the year. He
was fond of Szczepanik and Szczepanik’s backer, Mr. Kleinburg. In one of
his note-book entries he says:

Szczepanik is not a Paige. He is a gentleman; his backer, Mr. Kleinburg,
is a gentleman, too, yet is not a Clemens--that is to say, he is not an
ass.

Clemens did not always consult his financial adviser, Rogers, any
more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser, Twichell, or his
literary adviser, Howells, when he intended to commit heresies in their
respective provinces. Somewhat later an opportunity came along to buy an
interest in a preparation of skimmed milk, an invalid food by which
the human race was going to be healed of most of its ills. When Clemens
heard that Virchow had recommended this new restorative, the name of
which was plasmon, he promptly provided MacAlister with five thousand
pounds to invest in a company then organizing in London. It should be
added that this particular investment was not an entire loss, for it
paid very good dividends for several years. We shall hear of it again.

For the most part Clemens was content to let Henry Rogers do his
financiering, and as the market was low with an upward incline, Rogers
put the various accumulations into this thing and that, and presently
had some fifty thousand dollars to Mark Twain’s credit, a very
comfortable balance for a man who had been twice that amount in debt
only a few years before. It has been asserted most strenuously, by those
in a position to know least about the matter, that Henry Rogers lent,
and even gave, Mark Twain large sums, and pointed out opportunities
whereby he could make heavily by speculation. No one of these statements
is true. Mr. Rogers neither lent nor gave Mark Twain money for
investment, and he never allowed him to speculate when he could prevent
it. He invested for him wisely, but he never bought for him a share of
stock that he did not have the money in hand to pay for in full-money
belonging to and earned by Clemens himself. What he did give to Mark
Twain was his priceless counsel and time--gifts more precious than
any mere sum of money--boons that Mark Twain could accept without
humiliation. He did accept them and was unceasingly grateful.--[Mark
Twain never lost an opportunity for showing his gratitude to Henry
Rogers. The reader is referred to Appendix T, at the end of the last
volume, for a brief tribute which Clemens prepared in 1902. Mr. Rogers
would not consent to its publication.]



CCI. SOCIAL LIFE IN VIENNA

Clemens, no longer worried about finances and full of ideas and
prospects, was writing now at a great rate, mingling with all sorts of
social events, lecturing for charities, and always in the lime-light.

I have abundant peace of mind again--no sense of burden. Work is become
a pleasure--it is not labor any longer.

He was the lion of the Austrian capital, and it was natural that he
should revel in his new freedom and in the universal tribute. Mrs.
Clemens wrote that they were besieged with callers of every description:

    Such funny combinations are here sometimes: one duke, several
    counts, several writers, several barons, two princes, newspaper
    women, etc. I find so far, without exception, that the high-up
    aristocracy are simple and cordial and agreeable.

When Clemens appeared as a public entertainer all society turned out to
hear him and introductions were sought by persons of the most exclusive
rank. Once a royal introduction led to an adventure. He had been giving
a charity reading in Vienna, and at the end of it was introduced,
with Mrs. Clemens, to her Highness, Countess Bardi, a princess of
the Portuguese royal house by marriage and sister to the Austrian
Archduchess Maria Theresa. They realized that something was required
after such an introduction; that, in fact, they must go within a day or
two and pay their respects by writing their names in the visitors’ book,
kept in a sort of anteroom of the royal establishment. A few days later,
about noon, they drove to the archducal palace, inquired their way to
the royal anteroom, and informed the grandly uniformed portier that they
wished to write their names in the visitors’ book. The portier did
not produce the book, but summoned a man in livery and gold lace and
directed him to take them up-stairs, remarking that her Royal Highness
was out, but would be in presently. They protested that her Royal
Highness was not looking for them, that they were not calling, but had
merely come to sign the visitors’ book, but he said:

“You are Americans, are you not?”

“Yes, we are Americans.”

“Then you are expected. Please go up-stairs.”

Mrs. Clemens said:

“Oh no, we are not expected; there is some mistake. Please let us sign
the book and we will go away.”

But it was no use. He insisted that her Royal Highness would be back in
a very little while; that she had commanded him to say so and that they
must wait. They were shown up-stairs, Clemens going willingly enough,
for he scented an adventure; but Mrs. Clemens was far from happy. They
were taken to a splendid drawing-room, and at the doorway she made her
last stand, refusing to enter. She declared that there was certainly
some mistake, and begged them to let her sign her name in the book and
go, without parleying. It was no use. Their conductor insisted that they
remove their wraps and sit down, which they finally did--Mrs. Clemens
miserable, her husband in a delightful state of anticipation. Writing of
it to Twichell that night he said:

    I was hoping and praying that the Princess would come and catch us
    up there, & that those other Americans who were expected would
    arrive and be taken as impostors by the portier & be shot by the
    sentinels & then it would all go into the papers & be cabled all
    over the world & make an immense stir and be perfectly lovely.

    Livy was in a state of mind; she said it was too theatrically
    ridiculous & that I would never be able to keep my mouth shut; that
    I would be sure to let it out & it would get into the papers, & she
    tried to make me promise.

    “Promise what?” I said.

    “To be quiet about this.”

    “Indeed I won’t; it’s the best thing ever happened. I’ll tell it
    and add to it & I wish Joe & Howells were here to make it perfect; I
    can’t make all the rightful blunders by myself--it takes all three
    of us to do justice to an opportunity like this. I would just like
    to see Howells get down to his work & explain & lie & work his
    futile & inventionless subterfuges when that Princess comes raging
    in here & wanting to know.”

    But Livy could not hear fun--it was not a time to be trying to be
    funny. We were in a most miserable & shameful situation, & it
    --Just then the door spread wide & our Princess & 4 more & 3 little
    Princes flowed in! Our Princess & her sister, the Archduchess Maria
    Theresa (mother to the imperial heir & to the a young girl
    Archduchesses present, & aunt to the 3 little Princes), & we shook
    hands all around & sat down & had a most sociable time for half an
    hour, & by & by it turned out that we were the right ones & had been
    sent for by a messenger who started too late to catch us at the
    hotel. We were invited for a o’clock, but we beat that arrangement
    by an hour & a half.

    Wasn’t it a rattling good comedy situation? Seems a kind of pity we
    were the right ones. It would have been such nuts to see the right
    ones come and get fired out, & we chatting along comfortably &
    nobody suspecting us for impostors.

Mrs. Clemens to Mrs. Crane:

    Of course I know that I should have courtesied to her Imperial
    Majesty & not quite so deep to her Royal Highness, and that Mr.
    Clemens should have kissed their hands; but it was all so unexpected
    that I had no time to prepare, and if I had had I should not have
    been there; I only went in to help Mr. C. with my bad German. When
    our minister’s wife is going to be presented to the Archduchess she
    practises her courtesying beforehand.

They had met royalty in simple American fashion and no disaster had
followed.

We have already made mention of the distinguished visitors who gathered
in the Clemens apartments at the Hotel Metropole. They were of many
nations and ranks. It was the winter in London of twenty-five years
before over again. Only Mark Twain was not the same. Then he had been
unsophisticated, new, not always at his ease; now he was the polished
familiar of courts and embassies--at home equally with poets and
princes, authors and ambassadors and kings. Such famous ones were there
as Vereshchagin, Leschetizky, Mark Hambourg, Dvorak, Lenbach, and Jokai,
with diplomats of many nations. A list of foreign names may mean little
to the American reader, but among them were Neigra, of Italy; Paraty,
of Portugal; Lowenhaupt, of Sweden; and Ghiki, of Rumania. The Queen of
Rumania, Carmen Sylva, a poetess in her own right, was a friend and
warm admirer of Mark Twain. The Princess Metternich, and Madame de
Laschowska, of Poland, were among those who came, and there were Nansen
and his wife, and Campbell-Bannerman, who was afterward British Premier.
Also there was Spiridon, the painter, who made portraits of Clara
Clemens and her father, and other artists and potentates--the list is
too long.

Those were brilliant, notable gatherings and are remembered in Vienna
today. They were not always entirely harmonious, for politics was in
the air and differences of opinion were likely to be pretty freely
expressed.

Clemens and his family, as Americans, did not always have a happy
time of it. It was the eve of the Spanish American War and most of
continental Europe sided with Spain. Austria, in particular, was
friendly to its related nation; and from every side the Clemenses heard
how America was about to take a brutal and unfair advantage of a weaker
nation for the sole purpose of annexing Cuba.

Charles Langdon and his son Jervis happened to arrive in Vienna about
this time, bringing straight from America the comforting assurance that
the war was not one of conquest or annexation, but a righteous defense
of the weak. Mrs. Clemens gave a dinner for them, at which, besides
some American students, were Mark Hambourg, Gabrilowitsch, and the great
Leschetizky himself. Leschetizky, an impetuous and eloquent talker, took
this occasion to inform the American visitors that their country was
only shamming, that Cuba would soon be an American dependency. No one
not born to the language could argue with Leschetizky. Clemens once
wrote of him:

He is a most capable and felicitous talker-was born for an orator, I
think. What life, energy, fire in a man past 70! & how he does play! He
is easily the greatest pianist in the world. He is just as great & just
as capable today as ever he was.

Last Sunday night, at dinner with us, he did all the talking for 3
hours, and everybody was glad to let him. He told his experiences as
a revolutionist 50 years ago in ‘48, & his battle-pictures were
magnificently worded. Poetzl had never met him before. He is a talker
himself & a good one--but he merely sat silent & gazed across the table
at this inspired man, & drank in his words, & let his eyes fill & the
blood come & go in his face & never said a word.

Whatever may have been his doubts in the beginning concerning the Cuban
War, Mark Twain, by the end of May, had made up his mind as to its
justice. When Theodore Stanton invited him to the Decoration Day banquet
to be held in Paris, he replied:

I thank you very much for your invitation and I would accept if I were
foot-free. For I should value the privilege of helping you do honor to
the men who rewelded our broken Union and consecrated their great work
with their lives; and also I should like to be there to do, homage to
our soldiers and sailors of today who are enlisted for another most
righteous war, and utter the hope that they may make short and decisive
work of it and leave Cuba free and fed when they face for home again.
And finally I should like to be present and see you interweave those two
flags which, more than any others, stand for freedom and progress in the
earth-flags which represent two kindred nations, each great and strong
by itself, competent sureties for the peace of the world when they stand
together.

That is to say, the flags of England and America. To an Austrian friend
he emphasized this thought:

The war has brought England and America close together--and to my mind
that is the biggest dividend that any war in this world has ever paid.
If this feeling is ever to grow cold again I do not wish to live to see
it.

And to Twichell, whose son David had enlisted:

You are living your war-days over again in Dave & it must be strong
pleasure mixed with a sauce of apprehension....

I have never enjoyed a war, even in history, as I am enjoying this
one, for this is the worthiest one that was ever fought, so far as my
knowledge goes. It is a worthy thing to fight for one’s own country. It
is another sight finer to fight for another man’s. And I think this is
the first time it has been done.

But it was a sad day for him when he found that the United States really
meant to annex the Philippines, and his indignation flamed up. He said:

“When the United States sent word to Spain that the Cuban atrocities
must end she occupied the highest moral position ever taken by a nation
since the Almighty made the earth. But when she snatched the Philippines
she stained the flag.”



CCII. LITERARY WORK IN VIENNA

One must wonder, with all the social demands upon him, how Clemens could
find time to write as much as he did during those Vienna days. He piled
up a great heap of manuscript of every sort. He wrote Twichell:

    There may be idle people in the world, but I am not one of them.

And to Howells:

    I couldn’t get along without work now. I bury myself in it up to
    the ears. Long hours--8 & 9 on a stretch sometimes. It isn’t all
    for print, by any means, for much of it fails to suit me; 50,000
    words of it in the past year. It was because of the deadness which
    invaded me when Susy died.

He projected articles, stories, critiques, essays, novels,
autobiography, even plays; he covered the whole literary round. Among
these activities are some that represent Mark Twain’s choicest work.
“Concerning the Jews,” which followed the publication of his “Stirring
Times in Austria” (grew out of it, in fact), still remains the best
presentation of the Jewish character and racial situation. Mark Twain
was always an ardent admirer of the Jewish race, and its oppression
naturally invited his sympathy. Once he wrote to Twichell:

The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of
the average Jew--certainly in Europe--is about the difference between a
tadpole’s brain & an archbishop’s. It is a marvelous race; by long odds
the most marvelous race the world has produced, I suppose.

Yet he did not fail to see its faults and to set them down in his
summary of Hebrew character. It was a reply to a letter written to him
by a lawyer, and he replied as a lawyer might, compactly, logically,
categorically, conclusively. The result pleased him. To Mr. Rogers he
wrote:

The Jew article is my “gem of the ocean.” I have taken a world of
pleasure in writing it & doctoring it & fussing at it. Neither Jew
nor Christian will approve of it, but people who are neither Jews nor
Christian will, for they are in a condition to know the truth when they
see it.

Clemens was not given to race distinctions. In his article he says:

I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices, and I think
I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices.
Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is
that a man is a human being, that is enough for me; he can’t be any
worse.

We gather from something that follows that the one race which he bars
is the French, and this, just then, mainly because of the Dreyfus
agitations.

He also states in this article:

I have no special regard for Satan, but I can at least claim that I have
no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way on
account of his not having a fair show.

Clemens indeed always had a friendly feeling toward Satan (at least, as
he conceived him), and just at this time addressed a number of letters
to him concerning affairs in general--cordial, sympathetic, informing
letters enough, though apparently not suited for publication. A good
deal of the work done at this period did not find its way into print.
An interview with Satan; a dream-story concerning a platonic sweetheart,
and some further comment on Austrian politics, are among the condemned
manuscripts.

Mark Twain’s interest in Satan would seem later to have extended to his
relatives, for there are at least three bulky manuscripts in which
he has attempted to set down some episodes in the life of one “Young
Satan,” a nephew, who appears to have visited among the planets and
promoted some astonishing adventures in Austria several centuries ago.
The idea of a mysterious, young, and beautiful stranger who would visit
the earth and perform mighty wonders, was always one which Mark Twain
loved to play with, and a nephew of Satan’s seemed to him properly
qualified to carry out his intention. His idea was that this celestial
visitant was not wicked, but only indifferent to good and evil and
suffering, having no personal knowledge of any of these things. Clemens
tried the experiment in various ways, and portions of the manuscript
are absorbingly interesting, lofty in conception, and rarely worked
out--other portions being merely grotesque, in which the illusion of
reality vanishes.

Among the published work of the Vienna period is an article about a
morality play, the “Master of Palmyra,”--[About play-acting, Forum,
October, 1898.]--by Adolf Wilbrandt, an impressive play presenting
Death, the all-powerful, as the principal part.

The Cosmopolitan Magazine for August published “At the Appetite-Cure,”
 in which Mark Twain, in the guise of humor, set forth a very sound and
sensible idea concerning dietetics, and in October the same magazine
published his first article on “Christian Science and the Book of Mrs.
Eddy.” As we have seen, Clemens had been always deeply interested
in mental healing, and in closing this humorous skit he made due
acknowledgments to the unseen forces which, properly employed, through
the imagination work physical benefits:

“Within the last quarter of a century,” he says, “in America, several
sects of curers have appeared under various names and have done notable
things in the way of healing ailments without the use of medicines.”

Clemens was willing to admit that Mrs. Eddy and her book had benefited
humanity, but he could not resist the fun-making which certain of
her formulas and her phrasing invited. The delightful humor of the
Cosmopolitan article awoke a general laugh, in which even devout
Christian Scientists were inclined to join.--[It was so popular that
John Brisben Walker voluntarily added a check for two hundred dollars
to the eight hundred dollars already paid.]--Nothing that he ever did
exhibits more happily that peculiar literary gift upon which his fame
rests.

But there is another story of this period that will live when most of
those others mentioned are but little remembered. It is the story of
“The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg.” This is a tale that in its own way
takes its place with the half-dozen great English short stories of the
world-with such stories as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” by Poe;
“The Luck of Roaring Camp,” by Harte; “The Man Who Would be King,” by
Kipling; and “The Man Without a Country,” by Hale. As a study of
the human soul, its flimsy pretensions and its pitiful frailties,
it outranks all the rest. In it Mark Twain’s pessimistic philosophy
concerning the “human animal” found a free and moral vent. Whatever his
contempt for a thing, he was always amused at it; and in this tale we
can imagine him a gigantic Pantagruel dangling a ridiculous manikin,
throwing himself back and roaring out his great bursting guffaws at its
pitiful antics. The temptation and the downfall of a whole town was a
colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally and sardonically
worked out.

Human weakness and rotten moral force were never stripped so bare or so
mercilessly jeered at in the marketplace. For once Mark Twain could hug
himself with glee in derision of self-righteousness, knowing that the
world would laugh with him, and that none would be so bold as to gainsay
his mockery. Probably no one but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea
of demoralizing a whole community--of making its “nineteen leading
citizens” ridiculous by leading them into a cheap, glittering
temptation, and having them yield and openly perjure themselves at the
very moment when their boasted incorruptibility was to amaze the world.
And it is all wonderfully done. The mechanism of the story is perfect,
the drama of it is complete. The exposure of the nineteen citizens
in the very sanctity of the church itself, and by the man they have
discredited, completing the carefully prepared revenge of the injured
stranger, is supreme in its artistic triumph. “The Man that Corrupted
Hadleyburg” is one of the mightiest sermons against self-righteousness
ever preached. Its philosophy, that every man is strong until his price
is named; the futility of the prayer not to be led into temptation, when
it is only by resisting temptation that men grow strong--these things
blaze out in a way that makes us fairly blink with the truth of them.

It is Mark Twain’s greatest short story. It is fine that it should be
that, as well as much more than that; for he was no longer essentially a
story-teller. He had become more than ever a moralist and a sage. Having
seen all of the world, and richly enjoyed and deeply suffered at its
hands, he sat now as in a seat of judgment, regarding the passing show
and recording his philosophies.



CCIII. AN IMPERIAL TRAGEDY

For the summer they went to Kaltenleutgeben, just out of Vienna, where
they had the Villa Paulhof, and it was while they were there, September
10, 1898, that the Empress Elizabeth of Austria was assassinated at
Geneva by an Italian vagabond, whose motive seemed to have been to
gain notoriety. The news was brought to them one evening, just at
supper-time, by Countess Wydenbouck-Esterhazy.

Clemens wrote to Twichell:

    That good & unoffending lady, the Empress, is killed by a madman, &
    I am living in the midst of world-history again. The Queen’s
    Jubilee last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, &
    now this murder, which will still be talked of & described & painted
    a thousand years from now. To have a personal friend of the wearer
    of two crowns burst in at the gate in the deep dusk of the evening &
    say, in a voice broken with tears, “My God! the Empress is
    murdered,” & fly toward her home before we can utter a question
    --why, it brings the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it
    & personally interested; it is as if your neighbor Antony should come
    flying & say, “Caesar is butchered--the head of the world is
    fallen!”

Of course there is no talk but of this. The mourning is universal and
genuine, the consternation is stupefying. The Austrian Empire is being
draped with black. Vienna will be a spectacle to see by next Saturday,
when the funeral cortege marches.

Clemens and the others went into Vienna for the funeral ceremonies and
witnessed them from the windows of the new Krantz Hotel, which faces
the Capuchin church where the royal dead lie buried. It was a grandly
impressive occasion, a pageant of uniforms of the allied nations that
made up the Empire of Austria. Clemens wrote of it at considerable
length, and sent the article to Mr. Rogers to offer to the magazines.
Later, however, he recalled it just why is not clear. In one place he
wrote:

Twice the Empress entered Vienna in state; the first time was in 1854,
when she was a bride of seventeen, & when she rode in measureless pomp
through a world of gay flags & decorations down the streets, walled on
both hands with the press of shouting & welcoming subjects; & the second
time was last Wednesday, when she entered the city in her coffin, &
moved down the same streets in the dead of night under waving black
flags, between human walls again, but everywhere was a deep stillness
now & a stillness emphasized rather than broken by the muffled hoofbeats
of the long cavalcade over pavements cushioned with sand, & the low
sobbing of gray-headed women who had witnessed the first entrance,
forty-four years before, when she & they were young & unaware.... She
was so blameless--the Empress; & so beautiful in mind & heart, in
person & spirit; & whether with the crown upon her head, or without it
& nameless, a grace to the human race, almost a justification of its
creation; would be, indeed, but that the animal that struck her down
re-establishes the doubt.

They passed a quiet summer at Kaltenleutgeben. Clemens wrote some
articles, did some translating of German plays, and worked on his
“Gospel,” an elaboration of his old essay on contenting one’s soul
through selfishness, later to be published as ‘What is Man?’ A. C.
Dunham and Rev. Dr. Parker, of Hartford, came to Vienna, and Clemens
found them and brought them out to Kaltenleutgeben and read them
chapters of his doctrines, which, he said, Mrs. Clemens would not let
him print. Dr. Parker and Dunham returned to Hartford and reported Mark
Twain more than ever a philosopher; also that he was the “center of
notability and his house a court.”



CCIV. THE SECOND WINTER IN VIENNA

The Clemens family did not return to the Metropole for the winter, but
went to the new Krantz, already mentioned, where they had a handsome and
commodious suite looking down on the Neuer Markt and on the beautiful
facade of the Capuchin church, with the great cathedral only a step
away. There they passed another brilliant and busy winter. Never in
Europe had they been more comfortably situated; attention had been
never more lavishly paid to them. Their drawing-room was a salon which
acquired the name of the “Second Embassy.” Clemens in his note-book
wrote:

During 8 years now I have filled the position--with some credit, I
trust, of self-appointed ambassador-at-large of the United States of
America--without salary.

Which was a joke; but there was a large grain of truth in it, for Mark
Twain, more than any other American in Europe, was regarded as typically
representing his nation and received more lavish honors.

It had become the fashion to consult him on every question of public
interest, for he was certain to say something worth printing, whether
seriously or otherwise. When the Tsar of Russia proposed the disarmament
of the nations William T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, wrote
for Mark Twain’s opinion. He replied:

DEAR MR. STEADY,--The Tsar is ready to disarm. I am ready to disarm.
Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now.

                                   MARK TWAIN.

He was on a tide of prosperity once more, one that was to continue now
until the end. He no longer had any serious financial qualms. He could
afford to be independent. He refused ten thousand dollars for a tobacco
indorsement, though he liked the tobacco well enough; and he was
aware that even royalty was willing to put a value on its opinions. He
declined ten thousand dollars a year for five years to lend his name as
editor of a humorous periodical, though there was no reason to suppose
that the paper would be otherwise than creditably conducted. He declined
lecture propositions from Pond at the rate of about one a month. He
could get along without these things, he said, and still preserve some
remnants of self-respect. In a letter to Rogers he said:

Pond offers me $10,000 for 10 nights, but I do not feel strongly
tempted. Mrs. Clemens ditto.

Early in 1899 he wrote to Howells that Mrs. Clemens had proved to him
that they owned a house and furniture in Hartford, that his English
and American copyrights paid an income on the equivalent of two hundred
thousand dollars, and that they had one hundred and seven thousand
dollars’ accumulation in the bank.

“I have been out and bought a box of 6c. cigars,” he says; “I was
smoking 4 1/2c. before.”

The things that men are most likely to desire had come to Mark Twain,
and no man was better qualified to rejoice in them. That supreme,
elusive thing which we call happiness might have been his now but for
the tragedy of human bereavement and the torture of human ills. That he
did rejoice--reveled indeed like a boy in his new fortunes, the honors
paid him, and in all that gay Viennese life-there is no doubt. He could
wave aside care and grief and remorse, forget their very existence, it
seemed; but in the end he had only driven them ahead a little way
and they waited by his path. Once, after reciting his occupations and
successes, he wrote:

    All these things might move and interest one. But how, desperately
    more I have been moved to-night by the thought of a little old copy
    in the nursery of ‘At the Back of the North Wind’. Oh, what happy
    days they were when that book was read, and how Susy loved it!...
    Death is so kind, benignant, to whom he loves, but he goes by us
    others & will not look our way.

And to Twichell a few days later:

    A Hartford with no Susy in it--& no Ned Bunce!--It is not the city
    of Hartford, it is the city of Heartbreak.... It seems only a few
    weeks since I saw Susy last--yet that was 1895 & this is 1899....

    My work does not go well to-day. It failed yesterday--& the day
    before & the day before that. And so I have concluded to put the
    MS. in the waste-basket & meddle with some other subject. I was
    trying to write an article advocating the quadrupling of the
    salaries of our ministers & ambassadors, & the devising of an
    official dress for them to wear. It seems an easy theme, yet I
    couldn’t do the thing to my satisfaction. All I got out of it was
    an article on Monaco & Monte Carlo--matters not connected with the
    subject at all. Still, that was something--it’s better than a total
    loss.

He finished the article--“Diplomatic Pay and Clothes”--in which he shows
how absurd it is for America to expect proper representation on the
trifling salaries paid to her foreign ministers, as compared with those
allowed by other nations.

He prepared also a reminiscent article--the old tale of the shipwrecked
Hornet and the magazine article intended as his literary debut a
generation ago. Now and again he worked on some one of the several
unfinished longer tales, but brought none of them to completion. The
German drama interested him. Once he wrote to Mr. Rogers that he had
translated “In Purgatory” and sent it to Charles Frohman, who pronounced
it “all jabber and no play.”

Curious, too, for it tears these Austrians to pieces with laughter. When
I read it, now, it seems entirely silly; but when I see it on the stage
it is exceedingly funny.

He undertook a play for the Burg Theater, a collaboration with a Vienna
journalist, Siegmund Schlesinger. Schlesinger had been successful with
several dramas, and agreed with Clemens to do some plays dealing with
American themes. One of them was to be called “Die Goldgraeberin,” that
is, “The Woman Gold-Miner.” Another, “The Rival Candidates,” was to
present the humors of female suffrage. Schlesinger spoke very little
English, and Clemens always had difficulty in comprehending rapid-fire
German. So the work did not progress very well. By the time they had
completed a few scenes of mining-drama the interest died, and they
good-naturedly agreed that it would be necessary to wait until they
understood each other’s language more perfectly before they could go on
with the project. Frau Kati Schratt, later morganatic wife of Emperor
Franz Josef, but then leading comedienne of the Burg Theater, is said
to have been cast for the leading part in the mining-play; and
Director-General Herr Schlenther, head of the Burg Theater management,
was deeply disappointed. He had never doubted that a play built by
Schlesinger and Mark Twain, with Frau Schratt in the leading role, would
have been a great success.

Clemens continued the subject of Christian Science that winter. He wrote
a number of articles, mainly criticizing Mrs. Eddy and her financial
methods, and for the first time conceived the notion of a book on
the subject. The new hierarchy not only amused but impressed him. He
realized that it was no ephemeral propaganda, that its appeal to human
need was strong, and that its system of organization was masterful and
complete. To Twichell he wrote:

Somehow I continue to feel sure of that cult’s colossal future.... I
am selling my Lourdes stock already & buying Christian Science trust. I
regard it as the Standard Oil of the future.

He laid the article away for the time and, as was his custom, put the
play quite out of his mind and invented a postal-check which would be
far more simple than post-office orders, because one could buy them in
any quantity and denomination and keep them on hand for immediate use,
making them individually payable merely by writing in the name of the
payee. It seems a fine, simple scheme, one that might have been adopted
by the government long ago; but the idea has been advanced in one form
or another several times since then, and still remains at this writing
unadopted. He wrote John Hay about it, remarking at the close that the
government officials would probably not care to buy it as soon as they
found they couldn’t kill Christians with it.

He prepared a lengthy article on the subject, in dialogue form, making
it all very clear and convincing, but for some reason none of the
magazines would take it. Perhaps it seemed too easy, too simple, too
obvious. Great ideas, once developed, are often like that.



CCV. SPEECHES THAT WERE NOT MADE

In a volume of Mark Twain’s collected speeches there is one entitled
“German for the Hungarians--Address at the jubilee Celebration of the
Emancipation of the Hungarian Press, March 26, 1899.” An introductory
paragraph states that the ministers and members of Parliament were
present, and that the subject was the “Ausgleich”--i.e., the arrangement
for the apportionment of the taxes between Hungary and Austria. The
speech as there set down begins:

    Now that we are all here together I think that it will be a good
    idea to arrange the Ausgleich. If you will act for Hungary I shall
    be quite willing to act for Austria, and this is the very time for
    it.

It is an excellent speech, full of good-feeling and good-humor, but it
was never delivered. It is only a speech that Mark Twain intended to
deliver, and permitted to be copied by a representative of the press
before he started for Budapest.

It was a grand dinner, brilliant and inspiring, and when, Mark Twain was
presented to that distinguished company he took a text from something
the introducer had said and became so interested in it that his prepared
speech wholly disappeared from his memory.

I think I will never embarrass myself with a set speech again [he wrote
Twichell]. My memory is old and rickety and cannot stand the strain.
But I had this luck. What I did was to furnish a text for a part of
the splendid speech which was made by the greatest living orator of
the European world--a speech which it was a great delight to listen to,
although I did not understand any word of it, it being in Hungarian. I
was glad I came, it was a great night, & I heard all the great men in
the German tongue.

The family accompanied Clemens to Budapest, and while there met Franz,
son of Louis Kossuth, and dined with him.

I assure you [wrote Mrs. Clemens] that I felt stirred, and I kept saying
to myself “This is Louis Kossuth’s son.” He came to our room one day,
and we had quite a long and a very pleasant talk together. He is a
man one likes immensely. He has a quiet dignity about him that is very
winning. He seems to be a man highly esteemed in Hungary. If I am not
mistaken, the last time I saw the old picture of his father it was
hanging in a room that we turned into a music-room for Susy at the farm.

They were most handsomely treated in Budapest. A large delegation
greeted them on arrival, and a carriage and attendants were placed
continually at their disposal. They remained several days, and Clemens
showed his appreciation by giving a reading for charity.

It was hinted to Mark Twain that spring, that before leaving Vienna, it
would be proper for him to pay his respects to Emperor Franz Josef, who
had expressed a wish to meet him. Clemens promptly complied with the
formalities and the meeting was arranged. He had a warm admiration for
the Austrian Emperor, and naturally prepared himself a little for what
he wanted to say to him. He claimed afterward that he had compacted a
sort of speech into a single German sentence of eighteen words. He did
not make use of it, however. When he arrived at the royal palace and was
presented, the Emperor himself began in such an entirely informal way
that it did no occur to his visitor to deliver his prepared German
sentence. When he returned from the audience he said:

“We got along very well. I proposed to him a plan to exterminate the
human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the air for a period of two
minutes. I said Szczepanik would invent it for him. I think it impressed
him. After a while, in the course of our talk I remembered and told
the Emperor I had prepared and memorized a very good speech but had
forgotten it. He was very agreeable about it. He said a speech wasn’t
necessary. He seemed to be a most kind-hearted emperor, with a great
deal of plain, good, attractive human nature about him. Necessarily he
must have or he couldn’t have unbent to me as he did. I couldn’t unbend
if I were an emperor. I should feel the stiffness of the position. Franz
Josef doesn’t feel it. He is just a natural man, although an emperor. I
was greatly impressed by him, and I liked him exceedingly. His face is
always the face of a pleasant man and he has a fine sense of humor. It
is the Emperor’s personality and the confidence all ranks have in
him that preserve the real political serenity in what has an outside
appearance of being the opposite. He is a man as well as an emperor--an
emperor and a man.”

Clemens and Howells were corresponding with something of the old-time
frequency. The work that Mark Twain was doing--thoughtful work with
serious intent--appealed strongly to Howells. He wrote:

    You are the greatest man of your sort that ever lived, and there is
    no use saying anything else.... You have pervaded your
    century almost more than any other man of letters, if not more; and
    it is astonishing how you keep spreading.... You are my
    “shadow of a great rock in a weary land” more than any other writer.

Clemens, who was reading Howells’s serial, “Their Silver-Wedding
journey,” then running in Harper’s Magazine, responded:

    You are old enough to be a weary man with paling interests, but you
    do not show it; you do your work in the same old, delicate &
    delicious & forceful & searching & perfect way. I don’t know how
    you can--but I suspect. I suspect that to you there is still
    dignity in human life, & that man is not a joke--a poor joke--the
    poorest that was ever contrived. Since I wrote my Bible--[The
    “Gospel,” What is Man?]--(last year), which Mrs. Clemens loathes &
    shudders over & will not listen to the last half nor allow me to
    print any part of it, man is not to me the respect-worthy person he
    was before, & so I have lost my pride in him & can’t write gaily nor
    praisefully about him any more....

    Next morning. I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every
    morning--well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities
    & basenesses & hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization &
    cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of
    the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do
    not despair.

He was not greatly changed. Perhaps he had fewer illusions and less
iridescent ones, and certainly he had more sorrow; but the letters to
Howells do not vary greatly from those written twenty-five years before.
There is even in them a touch of the old pretense as to Mrs. Clemens’s
violence.

I mustn’t stop to play now or I shall never get those helfiard letters
answered. (That is not my spelling. It is Mrs. Clemens’s, I have told
her the right way a thousand times, but it does no good, she never
remembers.)

All through this Vienna period (as during several years before and
after) Henry Rogers was in full charge of Mark Twain’s American affairs.
Clemens wrote him almost daily, and upon every matter, small or large,
that developed, or seemed likely to develop, in his undertakings. The
complications growing out of the type machine and Webster failures were
endless.--[“I hope to goodness I sha’n’t get you into any more jobs such
as the type-setter and Webster business and the Bliss-Harper campaigns
have been. Oh, they were sickeners.” (Clemens to Rogers, November 15,
1898.)]--The disposal of the manuscripts alone was work for a literary
agent. The consideration of proposed literary, dramatic, and financial
schemes must have required not only thought, but time. Yet Mr. Rogers
comfortably and genially took care of all these things and his own
tremendous affairs besides, and apologized sometimes when he felt,
perhaps, that he had wavered a little in his attention. Clemens once
wrote him:

    Oh, dear me, you don’t have to excuse yourself for neglecting me;
    you are entitled to the highest praise for being so limitlessly
    patient and good in bothering with my confused affairs, and pulling
    me out of a hole every little while.

    It makes me lazy, the way that Steel stock is rising. If I were
    lazier--like Rice--nothing could keep me from retiring. But I work
    right along, like a poor person. I shall figure up the rise, as the
    figures come in, and push up my literary prices accordingly, till I
    get my literature up to where nobody can afford it but the family.
    (N. B.--Look here, are you charging storage? I am not going to
    stand that, you know.) Meantime, I note those encouraging illogical
    words of yours about my not worrying because I am to be rich when I
    am 68; why didn’t you have Cheiro make it 90, so that I could have
    plenty of room?

    It would be jolly good if some one should succeed in making a play
    out of “Is He Dead?”--[Clemens himself had attempted to make a play
    out of his story “Is He Dead?” and had forwarded the MS. to Rogers.
    Later he wrote: “Put ‘Is He Dead?’ in the fire. God will bless you.
    I too. I started to convince myself that I could write a play, or
    couldn’t. I’m convinced. Nothing can disturb that conviction.”]
    --From what I gather from dramatists, he will have his hands
    something more than full--but let him struggle, let him struggle.

    Is there some way, honest or otherwise, by which you can get a copy
    of Mayo’s play, “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” for me? There is a capable
    young Austrian here who saw it in New York and wants to translate it
    and see if he can stage it here. I don’t think these people here
    would understand it or take to it, but he thinks it will pay us to
    try.

    A couple of London dramatists want to bargain with me for the right
    to make a high comedy out of the “Million-Pound Note.” Barkis is
    willing.

This is but one of the briefer letters. Most of them were much longer
and of more elaborate requirements. Also they overflowed with the gaiety
of good-fortune and with gratitude. From Vienna in 1899 Clemens wrote:

    Why, it is just splendid! I have nothing to do but sit around and
    watch you set the hen and hatch out those big broods and make my
    living for me. Don’t you wish you had somebody to do the same for
    you?--a magician who can turn steel add copper and Brooklyn gas into
    gold. I mean to raise your wages again--I begin to feel that I can
    afford it.

    I think the hen ought to have a name; she must be called Unberufen.
    That is a German word which is equivalent to it “sh! hush’ don’t let
    the spirits hear you!” The superstition is that if you happen to
    let fall any grateful jubilation over good luck that you’ve had or
    are hoping to have you must shut square off and say “Unberufen!” and
    knock wood. The word drives the evil spirits away; otherwise they
    would divine your joy or your hopes and go to work and spoil your
    game. Set her again--do!

    Oh, look here! You are just like everybody; merely because I am
    literary you think I’m a commercial somnambulist, and am not
    watching you with all that money in your hands. Bless you, I’ve got
    a description of you and a photograph in every police-office in
    Christendom, with the remark appended: “Look out for a handsome,
    tall, slender young man with a gray mustache and courtly manners and
    an address well calculated to deceive, calling himself by the name
    of Smith.” Don’t you try to get away--it won’t work.

From the note-book:

    Midnight. At Miss Bailie’s home for English governesses. Two
    comedies & some songs and ballads. Was asked to speak & did it.
    (And rung in the “Mexican Plug.”)

    A Voice. “The Princess Hohenlohe wishes you to write on her fan.”

    “With pleasure--where is she?”

    “At your elbow.”

    I turned & took the fan & said, “Your Highness’s place is in a fairy
    tale; & by & by I mean to write that tale,” whereat she laughed a
    happy girlish laugh, & we moved through the crowd to get to a
    writing-table--& to get in a strong light so that I could see her
    better. Beautiful little creature, with the dearest friendly ways &
    sincerities & simplicities & sweetnesses--the ideal princess of the
    fairy tales. She is 16 or 17, I judge.

    Mental Telegraphy. Mrs. Clemens was pouring out the coffee this
    morning; I unfolded the Neue Freie Presse, began to read a paragraph
    & said:

    “They’ve found a new way to tell genuine gems from false----”

    “By the Roentgen ray!” she exclaimed.

    That is what I was going to say. She had not seen the paper, &
    there had been no talk about the ray or gems by herself or by me.
    It was a plain case of telegraphy.

    No man that ever lived has ever done a thing to please God
    --primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next.

    The Being who to me is the real God is the one who created this
    majestic universe & rules it. He is the only originator, the only
    originator of thoughts; thoughts suggested from within, not from
    without; the originator of colors & of all their possible
    combinations; of forces & the laws that govern them; of forms &
    shapes of all forms-man has never invented a new one. He is the
    only originator. He made the materials of all things; He made the
    laws by which, & by which only, man may combine them into the
    machines & other things which outside influences suggest to him. He
    made character--man can portray it but not “create” it, for He is
    the only creator.

    He, is the perfect artisan, the perfect artist.



CCVI. A SUMMER IN SWEDEN

A part of the tragedy of their trip around the world had been the
development in Jean Clemens of a malady which time had identified as
epilepsy. The loss of one daughter and the invalidism of another was the
burden which this household had now to bear. Of course they did not
for a moment despair of a cure for the beautiful girl who had been so
cruelly stricken, and they employed any agent that promised relief.

They decided now to go to London, in the hope of obtaining beneficial
treatment. They left Vienna at the end of May, followed to the station
by a great crowd, who loaded their compartment with flowers and lingered
on the platform waving and cheering, some of them in tears, while the
train pulled away. Leschetizky himself was among them, and Wilbrandt,
the author of the Master of Palmyra, and many artists and other
notables, “most of whom,” writes Mrs. Clemens, “we shall probably never
see again in this world.”

Their Vienna sojourn had been one of the most brilliant periods of their
life, as well as one of the saddest. The memory of Susy had been never
absent, and the failing health of Jean was a gathering cloud.

They stopped a day or two at Prague, where they were invited by the
Prince of Thurn and Taxis to visit his castle. It gave them a glimpse
of the country life of the Bohemian nobility which was most interesting.
The Prince’s children were entirely familiar with Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn, which they had read both in English and in the
translation.

They journeyed to London by way of Cologne, arriving by the end of May.
Poultney Bigelow was there, and had recently been treated with great
benefit by osteopathy (then known as the Swedish movements), as
practised by Heinrick Kellgren at Sanna, Sweden. Clemens was all
interest concerning Kellgren’s method and eager to try it for his
daughter’s malady. He believed she could be benefited, and they made
preparation to spend some months at least in Sanna. They remained
several weeks in London, where they were welcomed with hospitality
extraordinary. They had hardly arrived when they were invited by Lord
Salisbury to Hatfield House, and by James Bryce to Portland Place, and
by Canon Wilberforce to Dean’s Yard. A rather amusing incident happened
at one of the luncheon-parties. Canon Wilberforce was there and left
rather early. When Clemens was ready to go there was just one hat
remaining. It was not his, and he suspected, by the initials on the
inside, that it belonged to Canon Wilberforce. However, it fitted him
exactly and he wore it away. That evening he wrote:

                  PRINCE OF WALES HOTEL, DE VERE GARDENS,
                                July,3, 1899.

DEAR CANON WILBERFORCE,--It is 8 P.M. During the past four hours I have
not been able to take anything that did not belong to me; during all
that time I have not been able to stretch a fact beyond the frontiers
of truth try as I might, & meantime, not only my morals have moved the
astonishment of all who have come in contact with me, but my manners
have gained more compliments than they have been accustomed to. This
mystery is causing my family much alarm. It is difficult to account for
it. I find I haven’t my own hat. Have you developed any novelties of
conduct since you left Mr. Murray’s, & have they been of a character to
move the concern of your friends? I think it must be this that has put
me under this happy charm; but, oh dear! I tremble for the other man!

                         Sincerely yours,
                                   S. L. CLEMENS.

Scarcely was this note on its way to Wilberforce when the following one
arrived, having crossed it in transit:

July 3, 1899.

DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--I have been conscious of a vivacity and facility of
expression this afternoon beyond the normal and I have just discovered
the reason!! I have seen the historic signature “Mark Twain” in my hat!!
Doubtless you have been suffering from a corresponding dullness & have
wondered why. I departed precipitately, the hat stood on my umbrella and
was a new Lincoln & Bennett--it fitted me exactly and I did not discover
the mistake till I got in this afternoon. Please forgive me. If you
should be passing this way to-morrow will you look in and change hats?
or shall I send it to the hotel?

                     I am, very sincerely yrs.,
20 Dean’s Yard. BASIL WILBERFORCE.

Clemens was demanded by all the bohemian clubs, the White Friars, the
Vagabonds, the Savage, the Beefsteak, and the Authors. He spoke to them,
and those “Mark Twain Evenings” have become historic occasions in each
of the several institutions that gave him welcome. At the Vagabonds he
told them the watermelon story, and at the White Friars he reviewed
the old days when he had been elected to that society; “days,” he said,
“when all Londoners were talking about nothing else than that they had
discovered Livingstone, and that the lost Sir Roger Tichborne had been
found and they were trying him for it.”

At the Savage Club, too, he recalled old times and old friends, and
particularly that first London visit, his days in the club twenty-seven
years before.

“I was 6 feet 4 in those days,” he said. “Now I am 5 feet 8 1/2 and
daily diminishing in altitude, and the shrinkage of my principles goes
on .... Irving was here then, is here now. Stanley is here, and Joe
Hatton, but Charles Reade is gone and Tom Hood and Harry Lee and Canon
Kingsley. In those days you could have carried Kipling around in a
lunch-basket; now he fills the world. I was young and foolish then; now
I am old and foolisher.”

At the Authors Club he paid a special tribute to Rudyard Kipling,
whose dangerous illness in New York City and whose daughter’s death had
aroused the anxiety and sympathy of the entire American nation. It had
done much to bring England and America closer together, Clemens said.
Then he added that he had been engaged the past eight days compiling a
pun and had brought it there to lay at their feet, not to ask for their
indulgence, but for their applause. It was this:

“Since England and America have been joined in Kipling, may they not be
severed in Twain.”

Hundreds of puns had been made on his pen-name, but this was probably
his first and only attempt, and it still remains the best.

They arrived in Sweden early in July and remained until October. Jean
was certainly benefited by the Kellgren treatment, and they had for
a time the greatest hopes of her complete recovery. Clemens became
enthusiastic over osteopathy, and wrote eloquently to every one,
urging each to try the great new curative which was certain to restore
universal health. He wrote long articles on Kellgren and his science,
largely justified, no doubt, for certainly miraculous benefits were
recorded; though Clemens was not likely to underestimate a thing which
appealed to both his imagination and his reason. Writing to Twichell he
concluded, with his customary optimism over any new benefit:

    Ten years hence no sane man will call a doctor except when the knife
    must be used--& such cases will be rare. The educated physician
    will himself be an osteopath. Dave will become one after he has
    finished his medical training. Young Harmony ought to become one
    now. I do not believe there is any difference between Kellgren’s
    science and osteopathy; but I am sending to America to find out. I
    want osteopathy to prosper; it is common sense & scientific, & cures
    a wider range of ailments than the doctor’s methods can reach.

Twichell was traveling in Europe that summer, and wrote from
Switzerland:

    I seemed ever and anon to see you and me swinging along those
    glorious Alpine woods, staring at the new unfoldings of splendor
    that every turn brought into view-talking, talking, endlessly
    talking the days through-days forever memorable to me. That was
    twenty-one years ago; think of it! We were youngsters then, Mark,
    and how keen our relish of everything was! Well, I can enjoy myself
    now; but not with that zest and rapture. Oh, a lot of items of our
    tramp travel in 1878 that I had long forgotten came back to me as we
    sped through that enchanted region, and if I wasn’t on duty with
    Venice I’d stop and set down some of them, but Venice must be
    attended to. For one thing, there is Howells’s book to be read at
    such intervals as can be snatched from the quick-time march on which
    our rustling leader keeps us. However, in Venice so far we want to
    be gazing pretty steadily from morning till night, and by the grace
    of the gondola we can do it without exhaustion. Really I am drunk
    with Venice.

But Clemens was full of Sweden. The skies there and the sunsets be
thought surpassed any he had ever known. On an evening in September he
wrote:

    DEAR JOE,--I’ve no business in here-I ought to be outside. I shall
    never see another sunset to begin with it this side of heaven.
    Venice? land, what a poor interest that is! This is the place to
    be. I have seen about 60 sunsets here; & a good 40 of them were
    away & beyond anything I had ever imagined before for dainty &
    exquisite & marvelous beauty & infinite change & variety. America?
    Italy? the tropics? They have no notion of what a sunset ought to
    be. And this one--this unspeakable wonder! It discounts all the
    rest. It brings the tears, it is so unutterably beautiful.

Clemens read a book during his stay in Sweden which interested him
deeply. It was the Open Question, by Elizabeth Robbins--a fine study of
life’s sterner aspects. When he had finished he was moved to write the
author this encouraging word:

    DEAR MISS ROBBINS,--A relative of Matthew Arnold lent us your ‘Open
    Question’ the other day, and Mrs. Clemens and I are in your debt. I
    am not able to put in words my feeling about the book--my admiration
    of its depth and truth and wisdom and courage, and the fine and
    great literary art and grace of the setting. At your age you cannot
    have lived the half of the things that are in the book, nor
    personally penetrated to the deeps it deals in, nor covered its wide
    horizons with your very own vision--and so, what is your secret?
    how have you written this miracle? Perhaps one must concede that
    genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old
    experience.

    Well, in any case, I am grateful to you. I have not been so
    enriched by a book for many years, nor so enchanted by one. I seem
    to be using strong language; still, I have weighed it.

                         Sincerely yours,
                                S. L. CLEMENS.



CCVII. 30, WELLINGTON COURT

Clemens himself took the Kellgren treatment and received a good deal of
benefit.

“I have come back in sound condition and braced for work,” he wrote
MacAlister, upon his return to London. “A long, steady, faithful siege
of it, and I begin now in five minutes.”

They had settled in a small apartment at 30, Wellington Court, Albert
Gate, where they could be near the London branch of the Kellgren
institution, and he had a workroom with Chatto & Windus, his publishers.
His work, however, was mainly writing speeches, for he was entertained
constantly, and it seemed impossible for him to escape. His note-book
became a mere jumble of engagements. He did write an article or a story
now and then, one of which, “My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It,”
 was made the important Christmas feature of the ‘New York Sunday
World.’--[Now included in the Hadleyburg volume; “Complete Works.”]

Another article of this time was the “St. Joan of Arc,” which several
years later appeared in Harper’s Magazine. This article was originally
written as the Introduction of the English translation of the official
record of the trials and rehabilitation of Joan, then about to be
elaborately issued. Clemens was greatly pleased at being invited to
prepare the Introduction of this important volume, but a smug person
with pedagogic proclivities was in charge of the copy and proceeded to
edit Mark Twain’s manuscript; to alter its phrasing to conform to his
own ideas of the Queen’s English. Then he had it all nicely typewritten,
and returned it to show how much he had improved it, and to receive
thanks and compliments. He did not receive any thanks. Clemens recorded
a few of the remarks that he made when he saw his edited manuscript:

    I will not deny that my feelings rose to 104 in the shade. “The
    idea! That this long-eared animal this literary kangaroo this
    illiterate hostler with his skull full of axle-grease--this.....”
     But I stopped there, for this was not the Christian spirit.

His would-be editor received a prompt order to return the manuscript,
after which Clemens wrote a letter, some of which will go very well
here.

    DEAR MR. X.,--I have examined the first page of my amended
    Introduction,--& will begin now & jot down some notes upon your
    corrections. If I find any changes which shall not seem to me to be
    improvements I will point out my reasons for thinking so. In this
    way I may chance to be helpful to you, & thus profit you perhaps as
    much as you have desired to profit me.

    First Paragraph. “Jeanne d’Arc.” This is rather cheaply pedantic,
    & is not in very good taste. Joan is not known by that name among
    plain people of our race & tongue. I notice that the name of the
    Deity occurs several times in the brief instalment of the Trials
    which you have favored me with. To be consistent, it will be
    necessary that you strike out “God” & put in “Dieu.” Do not neglect
    this.

    Second Paragraph. Now you have begun on my punctuation. Don’t you
    realize that you ought not to intrude your help in a delicate art
    like that with your limitations? And do you think that you have
    added just the right smear of polish to the closing clause of the
    sentence?

    Third Paragraph. Ditto.

    Fourth Paragraph. Your word “directly” is misleading; it could be
    construed to mean “at once.” Plain clarity is better than ornate
    obscurity. I note your sensitive marginal remark: “Rather unkind to
    French feelings--referring to Moscow.” Indeed I have not been
    concerning myself about French feelings, but only about stating the
    facts. I have said several uncourteous things about the French
    --calling them a “nation of ingrates” in one place--but you have
    been so busy editing commas & semicolons that you overlooked them &
    failed to get scared at them. The next paragraph ends with a slur
    at the French, but I have reasons for thinking you mistook it for a
    compliment. It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like
    yours. You ought to get it out & dance on it.

    That would take some of the rigidity out of it. And you ought to
    use it sometimes; that would help. If you had done this every now &
    then along through life it would not have petrified.

    Fifth Paragraph. Thus far I regard this as your masterpiece! You
    are really perfect in the great art of reducing simple & dignified
    speech to clumsy & vapid commonplace.

    Sixth Paragraph. You have a singularly fine & aristocratic
    disrespect for homely & unpretending English. Every time I use “go
    back” you get out your polisher & slick it up to “return.” “Return”
     is suited only to the drawing-room--it is ducal, & says itself with
    a simper & a smirk.

    Seventh Paragraph. “Permission” is ducal. Ducal and affected.
    “Her” great days were not “over,” they were only half over. Didn’t
    you know that? Haven’t you read anything at all about Joan of Arc?
    The truth is you do not pay any attention; I told you on my very
    first page that the public part of her career lasted two years, &
    you have forgotten it already. You really must get your mind out
    and have it repaired; you see yourself that it is all caked
    together.

    Eighth Paragraph. She “rode away to assault & capture a
    stronghold.” Very well; but you do not tell us whether she
    succeeded or not. You should not worry the reader with
    uncertainties like that. I will remind you once more that clarity
    is a good thing in literature. An apprentice cannot do better than
    keep this useful rule in mind.

    Ninth Paragraph. “Known” history. That word has a polish which is
    too indelicate for me; there doesn’t seem to be any sense in it.
    This would have surprised me last week.

   ... “Breaking a lance” is a knightly & sumptuous phrase, & I
    honor it for its hoary age & for the faithful service it has done in
    the prize-composition of the school-girl, but I have ceased from
    employing it since I got my puberty, & must solemnly object to
    fathering it here. And, besides, it makes me hint that I have
    broken one of those things before in honor of the Maid, an
    intimation not justified by the facts. I did not break any lances
    or other furniture; I only wrote a book about her.

                         Truly yours,
                                MARK TWAIN.

    It cost me something to restrain myself and say these smooth & half-
    flattering things of this immeasurable idiot, but I did it, & have
    never regretted it. For it is higher & nobler to be kind to even a
    shad like him than just.... I could have said hundreds of
    unpleasant things about this tadpole, but I did not even feel them.

Yet, in the end, he seems not to have sent the letter. Writing it had
served every purpose.

An important publishing event of 1899 was the issue by the American
Publishing Company of Mark Twain’s “Complete Works in Uniform Edition.”
 Clemens had looked forward to the day when this should be done, perhaps
feeling that an assembling of his literary family in symmetrical dress
constituted a sort of official recognition of his authorship. Brander
Matthews was selected to write the Introduction and prepared a fine
“Biographical Criticism,” which pleased Clemens, though perhaps he did
not entirely agree with its views. Himself of a different cast of mind,
he nevertheless admired Matthews.

Writing to Twichell he said:

    When you say, “I like Brander Matthews, he impresses me as a man of
    parts & power,” I back you, right up to the hub--I feel the same
    way. And when you say he has earned your gratitude for cuffing me
    for my crimes against the Leather-stockings & the Vicar I ain’t
    making any objection. Dern your gratitude!

    His article is as sound as a nut. Brander knows literature & loves
    it; he can talk about it & keep his temper; he can state his case so
    lucidly & so fairly & so forcibly that you have to agree with him
    even when you don’t agree with him; & he can discover & praise such
    merits as a book has even when they are merely half a dozen diamonds
    scattered through an acre of mud. And so he has a right to be a
    critic.

    To detail just the opposite of the above invoice is to describe me.
    I haven’t any right to criticize books, & I don’t do it except when
    I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books
    madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; &
    therefore I have to stop every time I begin.’--[Once at a dinner
    given to Matthews, Mark Twain made a speech which consisted almost
    entirely of intonations of the name “Brander Matthews” to express
    various shades of human emotion. It would be hopeless, of course,
    to attempt to convey in print any idea of this effort, which, by
    those who heard it, is said to have been a masterpiece of
    vocalization.]

Clemens also introduced the “Uniform Edition” with an Author’s Preface,
the jurisdiction of which, he said, was “restricted to furnishing
reasons for the publication of the collection as a whole.”

    This is not easy to do. Aside from the ordinary commercial reasons
    I find none that I can offer with dignity: I cannot say without
    immodesty that the books have merit; I cannot say without immodesty
    that the public want a “Uniform Edition”; I cannot say without
    immodesty that a “Uniform Edition” will turn the nation toward high
    ideals & elevated thought; I cannot say without immodesty that a
    “Uniform Edition” will eradicate crime, though I think it will. I
    find no reason that I can offer without immodesty except the rather
    poor one that I should like to see a “Uniform Edition” myself. It
    is nothing; a cat could say it about her kittens. Still, I believe
    I will stand upon that. I have to have a Preface & a reason, by law
    of custom, & the reason which I am putting forward is at least
    without offense.



CCVIII. MARK TWAIN AND THE WARS

English troubles in South Africa came to a head that autumn. On the day
when England’s ultimatum to the Boers expired Clemens wrote:

    LONDON, 3.07 P.m., Wednesday, October 11, 1899. The time is up!
    Without a doubt the first shot in the war is being fired to-day in
    South Africa at this moment. Some man had to be the first to fall;
    he has fallen. Whose heart is broken by this murder? For, be he
    Boer or be he Briton, it is murder, & England committed it by the
    hand of Chamberlain & the Cabinet, the lackeys of Cecil Rhodes & his
    Forty Thieves, the South Africa Company.

Mark Twain would naturally sympathize with the Boer--the weaker side,
the man defending his home. He knew that for the sake of human progress
England must conquer and must be upheld, but his heart was all the other
way. In January, 1900, he wrote a characteristic letter to Twichell,
which conveys pretty conclusively his sentiments concerning the two wars
then in progress.

    DEAR JOE,--Apparently we are not proposing to set the Filipinos free
    & give their islands to them; & apparently we are not proposing to
    hang the priests & confiscate their property. If these things are
    so the war out there has no interest for me.

    I have just been examining Chapter LXX of Following the Equator to
    see if the Boer’s old military effectiveness is holding out. It
    reads curiously as if it had been written about the present war.

    I believe that in the next chapter my notion of the Boer was rightly
    conceived. He is popularly called uncivilized; I do not know why.
    Happiness, food, shelter, clothing, wholesome labor, modest &
    rational ambitions, honesty, kindliness, hospitality, love of
    freedom & limitless courage to fight for it, composure & fortitude
    in time of disaster, patience in time of hardship & privation,
    absence of noise & brag in time of victory, contentment with humble
    & peaceful life void of insane excitements--if there is a higher &
    better form of civilization than this I am not aware of it & do not
    know where to look for it. I suppose that we have the habit of
    imagining that a lot of artistic & intellectual & other
    artificialities must be added or it isn’t complete. We & the
    English have these latter; but as we lack the great bulk of those
    others I think the Boer civilization is the best of the two. My
    idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing & full
    of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses, & hypocrisies.

    Provided we could get something better in the place of it. But that
    is not possible perhaps. Poor as it is, it is better than real
    savagery, therefore we must stand by it, extend it, & (in public)
    praise it. And so we must not utter any hurtful word about England
    in these days, nor fail to hope that she will win in this war, for
    her defeat & fall would be an irremediable disaster for the mangy
    human race. Naturally, then, I am for England; but she is
    profoundly in the wrong, Joe, & no (instructed) Englishman doubts
    it. At least that is my belief.

Writing to Howells somewhat later, he calls the conflict in South
Africa, a “sordid and criminal war,” and says that every day he is
writing (in his head) bitter magazine articles against it.

    But I have to stop with that. Even if wrong--& she is wrong England
    must be upheld. He is an enemy of the human race who shall speak
    against her now. Why was the human race created? Or at least why
    wasn’t something creditable created in place of it?... I talk
    the war with both sides--always waiting until the other man
    introduces the topic. Then I say, “My head is with the Briton, but
    my heart & such rags of morals as I have are with the Boer--now we
    will talk, unembarrassed and without prejudice.” And so we discuss
    & have no trouble.

    I notice that God is on both sides in this war; thus history repeats
    itself. But I am the only person who has noticed this; everybody
    here thinks He is playing the game for this side, & for this side
    only.

Clemens wrote one article for anonymous publication in the Times.
But when the manuscript was ready to mail in an envelope stamped and
addressed to Moberly Bell--he reconsidered and withheld it. It still
lies in the envelope with the accompanying letter, which says:

Don’t give me away, whether you print it or not. But I think you ought
to print it and get up a squabble, for the weather is just suitable.



CCIX. PLASMON, AND A NEW MAGAZINE

Clemens was not wholly wedded to osteopathy. The financial interest
which he had taken in the new milk albumen, “a food for invalids,”
 tended to divide his faith and make him uncertain as to which was to be
the chief panacea for all ills--osteopathy or plasmon.

MacAlister, who was deeply interested in the plasmon fortunes, was
anxious to get the product adopted by the army. He believed, if he could
get an interview with the Medical Director-General, he could convince
him of its merits. Discussing the matter with Clemens, the latter said:

“MacAlister, you are going at it from the wrong end. You can’t go direct
to that man, a perfect stranger, and convince him of anything. Who is
his nearest friend?”

MacAlister knew a man on terms of social intimacy with the official.

Clemens said, “That is the man to speak to the Director-General.”

“But I don’t know him, either,” said MacAlister.

“Very good. Do you know any one who does know him?”

“Yes, I know his most intimate friend.”

“Then he is the man for you to approach. Convince him that plasmon is
what the army needs, that the military hospitals are suffering for
it. Let him understand that what you want is to get this to the
Director-General, and in due time it will get to him in the proper way.
You’ll see.”

This proved to be a true prophecy. It was only a little while until the
British army had experimented with plasmon and adopted it. MacAlister
reported the success of the scheme to Clemens, and out of it grew
the story entitled, “Two Little Tales,” published in November of the
following year (1901) in the Century Magazine. Perhaps the reader will
remember that in the “Two Little Tales” the Emperor is very ill and the
lowest of all his subjects knows a certain remedy, but he cannot seek
the Emperor direct, so he wisely approaches him through a series of
progressive stages--finally reaching and curing his stricken Majesty.

Clemens had the courage of his investments. He adopted plasmon as his
own daily food, and induced various members of the family to take it in
its more palatable forms, one of these being a preparation of chocolate.
He kept the reading-table by his bed well stocked with a variety of the
products and invited various callers to try a complimentary sample lot.
It was really an excellent and harmless diet, and both the company and
its patients would seem to have prospered--perhaps are prospering still.

There was another business opportunity came along just at this time. S.
S. McClure was in England with a proposition for starting a new magazine
whose complexion was to be peculiarly American, with Mark Twain as
its editor. The magazine was to be called ‘The Universal’, and by the
proposition Clemens was to receive a tenth interest in it for his
first year’s work, and an added twentieth interest for each of the two
succeeding years, with a guarantee that his shares should not earn him
less than five thousand dollars the first year, with a proportionate
increase as his holdings grew.

The scheme appealed to Clemens, it being understood in the beginning
that he was to give very little time to the work, with the privilege of
doing it at his home, wherever that might happen to be. He wrote of
the matter to Mr. Rogers, explaining in detail, and Rogers replied,
approving the plan. Mr. Rogers said he knew that he [Rogers] would have
to do most of the work in editing the magazine, and further added:

    One thing I shall insist upon, however, if I have anything to do
    with the matter, and it is this: that when you have made up your
    mind on the subject you will stick to it. I have not found in your
    composition that element of stubbornness which is a constant source
    of embarrassment to me in all friendly and social ways, but which,
    when applied to certain lines of business, brings in the dollar and
    fifty-cent pieces. If you accept the position, of course that means
    that you have to come to this country. If you do, the yachting will
    be a success.

There was considerable correspondence with McClure over the new
periodical. In one letter Clemens set forth his general views of the
matter quite clearly:

    Let us not deceive any one, nor allow any one to deceive himself, if
    it can be prevented. This is not to be comic magazine. It is to be
    simply a good, clean, wholesome collection of well-written &
    enticing literary products, like the other magazines of its class;
    not setting itself to please but one of man’s moods, but all of
    them. It will not play but one kind of music, but all kinds. I
    should not be able to edit a comic periodical satisfactorily, for
    lack of interest in the work. I value humor highly, & am
    constitutionally fond of it, but I should not like it as a steady
    diet. For its own best interests, humor should take its outings in
    grave company; its cheerful dress gets heightened color from the
    proximity of sober hues. For me to edit a comic magazine would be
    an incongruity & out of character, for of the twenty-three books
    which I have written eighteen do not deal in humor as their chiefs
    feature, but are half & half admixtures of fun & seriousness. I
    think I have seldom deliberately set out to be humorous, but have
    nearly always allowed the humor to drop in or stay out, according to
    its fancy. Although I have many times been asked to write something
    humorous for an editor or a publisher I have had wisdom enough to
    decline; a person could hardly be humorous with the other man
    watching him like that. I have never tried to write a humorous
    lecture; I have only tried to write serious ones--it is the only way
    not to succeed.

    I shall write for this magazine every time the spirit moves me; but
    I look for my largest entertainment in editing. I have been edited
    by all kinds of people for more than thirty-eight years; there has
    always been somebody in authority over my manuscript & privileged to
    improve it; this has fatigued me a good deal, & I have often longed
    to move up from the dock to the bench & rest myself and fatigue
    others. My opportunity is come, but I hope I shall not abuse it
    overmuch. I mean to do my best to make a good magazine; I mean to
    do my whole duty, & not shirk any part of it. There are plenty of
    distinguished artists, novelists, poets, story-tellers,
    philosophers, scientists, explorers, fighters, hunters, followers of
    the sea, & seekers of adventure; & with these to do the hard & the
    valuable part of the work with the pen & the pencil it will be
    comfort & joy to me to walk the quarter-deck & superintend.

Meanwhile McClure’s enthusiasm had had time to adjust itself to certain
existing facts. Something more than a month later he wrote from America
at considerable length, setting forth the various editorial duties and
laying stress upon the feature of intimate physical contact with the
magazine. He went into the matter of the printing schedule, the various
kinds of paper used, the advertising pages, illustrations--into all the
detail, indeed, which a practical managing editor must compass in his
daily rounds. It was pretty evident that Clemens would not be able to
go sailing about on Mr. Rogers’s yacht or live at will in London or New
York or Vienna or Elmira, but that he would be more or less harnessed to
a revolving chair at an editorial desk, the thing which of all fates he
would be most likely to dread The scheme appears to have died there--the
correspondence to have closed.

Somewhat of the inducement in the McClure scheme had been the thought in
Clemens’s mind that it would bring him back to America. In a letter
to Mr. Rogers (January 8, 1900) he said, “I am tired to death of this
everlasting exile.” Mrs. Clemens often wrote that he was restlessly
impatient to return. They were, in fact, constantly discussing the
practicability of returning to their own country now and opening the
Hartford home. Clemens was ready to do that or to fall in with any
plan that would bring him across the water and settle him somewhere
permanently. He was tired of the wandering life they had been leading.
Besides the long trip of ‘95 and ‘96 they had moved two or three times
a year regularly since leaving Hartford, nine years before. It seemed to
him that they were always packing and unpacking.

“The poor man is willing to live anywhere if we will only let him ‘stay
put,” wrote Mrs. Clemens, but he did want to settle in his own land.
Mrs. Clemens, too, was weary with wandering, but the Hartford home no
longer held any attraction for her. There had been a time when her every
letter dwelt on their hope of returning to it. Now the thought filled
her with dread. To her sister she wrote:

Do you think we can live through the first going into the house in
Hartford? I feel if we had gotten through the first three months all
might be well, but consider the first night.

The thought of the responsibility of that great house--the taking up
again of the old life-disheartened her, too. She had added years and she
had not gained in health or strength.

    When I was comparatively young I found the burden of that house very
    great. I don’t think I was ever fitted for housekeeping. I dislike
    the practical part of it so much. I hate it when the servants don’t
    do well, and I hate the correcting them.

    Yet no one ever had better discipline in her domestic affairs or
    ever commanded more devoted service. Her strength of character and
    the proportions of her achievement show large when we consider this
    confession.

They planned to return in the spring, but postponed the date for
sailing. Jean was still under Kellgren’s treatment, and, though a cure
had been promised her, progress was discouragingly slow. They began to
look about for summer quarters in or near London.



CCX. LONDON SOCIAL AFFAIRS

All this time Clemens had been tossing on the London social tide. There
was a call for him everywhere. No distinguished visitor of whatever
profession or rank but must meet Mark Twain. The King of Sweden was
among his royal conquests of that season.

He was more happy with men of his own kind. He was often with Moberly
Bell, editor of the Times; E. A. Abbey, the painter; Sir Henry Lucy, of
Punch (Toby, M.P.); James Bryce, and Herbert Gladstone; and there were
a number of brilliant Irishmen who were his special delight. Once with
Mrs. Clemens he dined with the author of his old favorite, ‘European
Morals’, William E. H. Lecky. Lady Gregory was there and Sir Dennis
Fitz-Patrick; who had been Governor-General at Lahore when they were
in India, and a number of other Irish ladies and gentlemen. It was a
memorable evening. To Twichell Clemens wrote:

    Joe, do you know the Irish gentleman & the Irish lady, the Scotch
    gentleman & the Scotch lady? These are darlings, every one. Night
    before last it was all Irish--24. One would have to travel far to
    match their ease & sociability & animation & sparkle & absence of
    shyness & self-consciousness. It was American in these fine
    qualities. This was at Mr. Lecky’s. He is Irish, you know. Last
    night it was Irish again, at Lady Gregory’s. Lord Roberts is Irish,
    & Sir William Butler, & Kitchener, I think, & a disproportion of the
    other prominent generals are of Irish & Scotch breed keeping up the
    traditions of Wellington & Sir Colin Campbell, of the Mutiny. You
    will have noticed that in S. A., as in the Mutiny, it is usually the
    Irish & Scotch that are placed in the forefront of the battle....
    Sir William Butler said, “the Celt is the spearhead of the British
    lance.”

He mentions the news from the African war, which had been favorable to
England, and what a change had come over everything in consequence. The
dinner-parties had been lodges of sorrow and depressing. Now everybody
was smiling again. In a note-book entry of this time he wrote:

    Relief of Mafeking (May 18, 1900). The news came at 9.17 P.M.
    Before 10 all London was in the streets, gone mad with joy. By then
    the news was all over the American continent.

Clemens had been talking copyright a good deal in London, and
introducing it into his speeches. Finally, one day he was summoned
before a committee of the House of Lords to explain his views. His old
idea that the product of a man’s brain is his property in perpetuity
and not for any term of years had not changed, and they permitted him
to dilate on this (to them) curious doctrine. The committee consisted of
Lords Monkswell, Knutsford, Avebury, Farrar, and Thwing. When they asked
for his views he said:

“In my opinion the copyright laws of England and America need only
the removal of the forty-two-year limit and the return to perpetual
copyright to be perfect. I consider that at least one of the reasons
advanced in justification of limited copyright is fallacious--namely,
the one which makes a distinction between an author’s property and real
estate, and pretends that the two are not created, produced, or acquired
in the same way, thus warranting a different treatment of the two by
law.”

Continuing, he dwelt on the ancient doctrine that there was no property
in an idea, showing how the far greater proportion of all property
consisted of nothing more than elaborated ideas--the steamship,
locomotive, telephone, the vast buildings in the world, how all of
these had been constructed upon a basic idea precisely as a book is
constructed, and were property only as a book is property, and therefore
rightly subject to the same laws. He was carefully and searchingly
examined by that shrewd committee. He kept them entertained and
interested and left them in good-nature, even if not entirely converted.
The papers printed his remarks, and London found them amusing.

A few days after the copyright session, Clemens, responding to the
toast, “Literature,” at the Royal Literary Fund Banquet, made London
laugh again, and early in June he was at the Savoy Hotel welcoming Sir
Henry Irving back to England after one of his successful American tours.

On the Fourth of July (1900) Clemens dined with the Lord Chief-Justice,
and later attended an American banquet at the Hotel Cecil. He arrived
late, when a number of the guests were already going. They insisted,
however, that he make a speech, which he did, and considered the evening
ended. It was not quite over. A sequel to his “Luck” story, published
nine years before, suddenly developed.

To go back a little, the reader may recall that “Luck” was a story which
Twichell had told him as being supposedly true. The hero of it was a
military officer who had risen to the highest rank through what at
least seemed to be sheer luck, including a number of fortunate blunders.
Clemens thought the story improbable, but wrote it and laid it away for
several years, offering it at last in the general house-cleaning which
took place after the first collapse of the machine. It was published
in Harper’s Magazine for August, 1891, and something less than a year
later, in Rome, an English gentleman--a new acquaintance--said to him:

“Mr. Clemens, shall you go to England?”

“Very likely.”

“Shall you take your tomahawk with you?”

“Why--yes, if it shall seem best.”

“Well, it will. Be advised. Take it with you.”

“Why?”

“Because of that sketch of yours entitled ‘Luck.’ That sketch is current
in England, and you will surely need your tomahawk.”

“What makes you think so?”

“I think so because the hero of the sketch will naturally want your
scalp, and will probably apply for it. Be advised. Take your tomahawk
along.”

“Why, even with it I sha’n’t stand any chance, because I sha’n’t know
him when he applies, and he will have my scalp before I know what his
errand is.”

“Come, do you mean to say that you don’t know who the hero of that
sketch is?”

“Indeed I haven’t any idea who the hero of the sketch is. Who is it?”

His informant hesitated a moment, then named a name of world-wide
military significance.

As Mask Twain finished his Fourth of July speech at the Cecil and
started to sit down a splendidly uniformed and decorated personage at
his side said:

“Mr. Clemens, I have been wanting to know you a long time,” and he was
looking down into the face of the hero of “Luck.”

“I was caught unprepared,” he said in his notes of it. “I didn’t sit
down--I fell down. I didn’t have my tomahawk, and I didn’t know what
would happen. But he was, composed, and pretty soon I got composed and
we had a good, friendly time. If he had ever heard of that sketch of
mine he did not manifest it in any way, and at twelve, midnight, I took
my scalp home intact.”



CCXI. DOLLIS HILL AND HOME

It was early in July, 1900, that they removed to Dollis Hill House, a
beautiful old residence surrounded by trees on a peaceful hilltop, just
outside of London. It was literally within a stone’s-throw of the city
limits, yet it was quite rural, for the city had not overgrown it then,
and it retained all its pastoral features--a pond with lily-pads, the
spreading oaks, the wide spaces of grassy lawn. Gladstone, an intimate
friend of the owner, had made it a favorite retreat at one period of
his life, and the place to-day is converted into a public garden called
Gladstone Park. The old English diplomat used to drive out and sit in
the shade of the trees and read and talk and translate Homer, and pace
the lawn as he planned diplomacy, and, in effect, govern the English
empire from that retired spot.

Clemens, in some memoranda made at the moment, doubts if Gladstone was
always at peace in his mind in this retirement.

“Was he always really tranquil within,” he says, “or was he only
externally so--for effect? We cannot know; we only know that his rustic
bench under his favorite oak has no bark on its arms. Facts like this
speak louder than words.”

The red-brick residential wave of London was still some distance away in
1900. Clemens says:

    The rolling sea of green grass still stretches away on every hand,
    splotches with shadows of spreading oaks in whose black coolness
    flocks of sheep lie peacefully dreaming. Dreaming of what? That
    they are in London, the metropolis of the world, Post-office
    District, N. W.? Indeed no. They are not aware of it. I am aware
    of it, but that is all. It is not possible to realize it. For
    there is no suggestion of city here; it is country, pure & simple,
    & as still & reposeful as is the bottom of the sea.

They all loved Dollis Hill. Mrs. Clemens wrote as if she would like to
remain forever in that secluded spot.

    It is simply divinely beautiful & peaceful;... the great old
    trees are beyond everything. I believe nowhere in the world do you
    find such trees as in England.... Jean has a hammock swung
    between two such great trees, & on the other side of a little pond,
    which is full of white & yellow pond-lilies, there is tall grass &
    trees & Clara & Jean go there in the afternoons, spread down a rug
    on the grass in the shade & read & sleep.

They all spent most of their time outdoors at Dollis Hill under those
spreading trees.

Clemens to Twichell in midsummer wrote:

    I am the only person who is ever in the house in the daytime, but I
    am working & deep in the luxury of it. But there is one tremendous
    defect. Livy is all so enchanted with the place & so in love with
    it that she doesn’t know how she is going to tear herself away from
    it.

Much company came to them at Dollis Hill. Friends drove out from London,
and friends from America came often, among them--the Sages, Prof.
Willard Fiske, and Brander Matthews with his family. Such callers were
served with tea and refreshment on the lawn, and lingered, talking and
talking, while the sun got lower and the shadows lengthened, reluctant
to leave that idyllic spot.

“Dollis Hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I ever
occupied,” he wrote when the summer was about over.

But there was still a greater attraction than Dollis Hill. Toward the
end of summer they willingly left that paradise, for they had decided at
last to make that home-returning voyage which had invited them so long.
They were all eager enough to go--Clemens more eager than the rest,
though he felt a certain sadness, too, in leaving the tranquil spot
which in a brief summer they had so learned to love.

Writing to W. H. Helm, a London newspaper man who had spent pleasant
hours with him chatting in the shade, he said:

   ... The packing & fussing & arranging have begun, for the
    removal to America &, by consequence, the peace of life is marred &
    its contents & satisfactions are departing. There is not much
    choice between a removal & a funeral; in fact, a removal is a
    funeral, substantially, & I am tired of attending them.

They closed Dollis Hill, spent a few days at Brown’s Hotel, and sailed
for America, on the Minnehaha, October 6, 1900, bidding, as Clemens
believed, and hoped, a permanent good-by to foreign travel. They reached
New York on the 15th, triumphantly welcomed after their long nine years
of wandering. How glad Mark Twain was to get home may be judged from his
remark to one of the many reporters who greeted him.

    “If I ever get ashore I am going to break both of my legs so I
    can’t, get away again.”



VOLUME III, Part 1: 1900-1907



CCXII. THE RETURN OF THE CONQUEROR

It would be hard to exaggerate the stir which the newspapers and the
public generally made over the homecoming of Mark Twain. He had left
America, staggering under heavy obligation and set out on a pilgrimage
of redemption. At the moment when this Mecca, was in view a great sorrow
had befallen him and, stirred a world-wide and soul-deep tide of human
sympathy. Then there had followed such ovation as has seldom been
conferred upon a private citizen, and now approaching old age, still
in the fullness of his mental vigor, he had returned to his native soil
with the prestige of these honors upon him and the vast added glory of
having made his financial fight single-handed-and won.

He was heralded literally as a conquering hero. Every paper in the land
had an editorial telling the story of his debts, his sorrow, and his
triumphs.

“He had behaved like Walter Scott,” says Howells, “as millions rejoiced
to know who had not known how Walter Scott had behaved till they knew it
was like Clemens.”

Howells acknowledges that he had some doubts as to the permanency of the
vast acclaim of the American public, remembering, or perhaps assuming, a
national fickleness. Says Howells:

    He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more largely
    imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this that
    inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider
    “the state of polite learning” among us, “You mustn’t expect people
    to keep it up here as they do in England.” But it appeared that his
    countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in
    honor of him past all precedent.

Clemens went to the Earlington Hotel and began search for a furnished
house in New York. They would not return to Hartford--at least not yet.
The associations there were still too sad, and they immediately became
more so. Five days after Mark Twain’s return to America, his old friend
and co-worker, Charles Dudley Warner, died. Clemens went to Hartford
to act as a pall-bearer and while there looked into the old home. To
Sylvester Baxter, of Boston, who had been present, he wrote a few days
later:

    It was a great pleasure to me to renew the other days with you, &
    there was a pathetic pleasure in seeing Hartford & the house again;
    but I realized that if we ever enter the house again to live our
    hearts will break. I am not sure that we shall ever be strong
    enough to endure that strain.

Even if the surroundings had been less sorrowful it is not likely that
Clemens would have returned to Hartford at this time. He had become
a world-character, a dweller in capitals. Everywhere he moved a world
revolved about him. Such a figure in Germany would live naturally in
Berlin; in England London; in France, Paris; in Austria, Vienna; in
America his headquarters could only be New York.

Clemens empowered certain of his friends to find a home for him, and
Mr. Frank N. Doubleday discovered an attractive and handsomely furnished
residence at 14 West Tenth Street, which was promptly approved.
Doubleday, who was going to Boston, left orders with the agent to draw
the lease and take it up to the new tenant for signature. To Clemens he
said:

“The house is as good as yours. All you’ve got to do is to sign the
lease. You can consider it all settled.”

When Doubleday returned from Boston a few days later the agent called
on him and complained that he couldn’t find Mark Twain anywhere. It was
reported at his hotel that he had gone and left no address. Doubleday
was mystified; then, reflecting, he had an inspiration. He walked over
to 14 West Tenth Street and found what he had suspected--Mark Twain had
moved in. He had convinced the caretaker that everything was all right
and he was quite at home. Doubleday said:

“Why, you haven’t executed the lease yet.”

“No,” said Clemens, “but you said the house was as good as mine,” to
which Doubleday agreed, but suggested that they go up to the real-estate
office and give the agent notice that he was in possession of the
premises.

Doubleday’s troubles were not quite over, however. Clemens began to find
defects in his new home and assumed to hold Doubleday responsible for
them. He sent a daily postal card complaining of the windows, furnace,
the range, the water-whatever he thought might lend interest to
Doubleday’s life. As a matter of fact, he was pleased with the place. To
MacAlister he wrote:

    We were very lucky to get this big house furnished. There was not
    another one in town procurable that would answer us, but this one is
    all right-space enough in it for several families, the rooms all
    old-fashioned, great size.

The house at 14 West Tenth Street became suddenly one of the most
conspicuous residences in New York. The papers immediately made its
appearance familiar. Many people passed down that usually quiet street,
stopping to observe or point out where Mark Twain lived. There was a
constant procession of callers of every kind. Many were friends, old
and new, but there was a multitude of strangers. Hundreds came merely to
express their appreciation of his work, hoping for a personal word or a
hand-shake or an autograph; but there were other hundreds who came
with this thing and that thing--axes to grind--and there were newspaper
reporters to ask his opinion on politics, or polygamy, or woman’s
suffrage; on heaven and hell and happiness; on the latest novel; on
the war in Africa, the troubles in China; on anything under the sun,
important or unimportant, interesting or inane, concerning which one
might possibly hold an opinion. He was unfailing “copy” if they could
but get a word with him. Anything that he might choose to say upon
any subject whatever was seized upon and magnified and printed with
head-lines. Sometimes opinions were invented for him. If he let fall a
few words they were multiplied into a column interview.

“That reporter worked a miracle equal to the loaves and fishes,” he said
of one such performance.

Many men would have become annoyed and irritable as these things
continued; but Mark Twain was greater than that. Eventually he employed
a secretary to stand between him and the wash of the tide, as a sort of
breakwater; but he seldom lost his temper no matter what was the request
which was laid before him, for he recognized underneath it the great
tribute of a great nation.

Of course his literary valuation would be affected by the noise of the
general applause. Magazines and syndicates besought him for manuscripts.
He was offered fifty cents and even a dollar a word for whatever he
might give them. He felt a child-like gratification in these evidences
of his market advancement, but he was not demoralized by them. He
confined his work to a few magazines, and in November concluded an
arrangement with the new management of Harper & Brothers, by which that
firm was to have the exclusive serial privilege of whatever he might
write at a fixed rate of twenty cents per word--a rate increased to
thirty cents by a later contract, which also provided an increased
royalty for the publication of his books.

The United States, as a nation, does not confer any special honors upon
private citizens. We do not have decorations and titles, even
though there are times when it seems that such things might be not
inappropriately conferred. Certain of the newspapers, more lavish in
their enthusiasm than others, were inclined to propose, as one paper
phrased it, “Some peculiar recognition--something that should appeal
to Samuel L. Clemens, the man, rather than to Mark Twain, the literate.
Just what form this recognition should take is doubtful, for the case
has no exact precedent.”

Perhaps the paper thought that Mark Twain was entitled--as he himself
once humorously suggested-to the “thanks of Congress” for having come
home alive and out of debt, but it is just as well that nothing of the
sort was ever seriously considered. The thanks of the public at large
contained more substance, and was a tribute much more to his mind. The
paper above quoted ended by suggesting a very large dinner and memorial
of welcome as being more in keeping with the republican idea and the
American expression of good-will.

But this was an unneeded suggestion. If he had eaten all the dinners
proposed he would not have lived to enjoy his public honors a month. As
it was, he accepted many more dinners than he could eat, and presently
fell into the habit of arriving when the banqueting was about over and
the after-dinner speaking about to begin. Even so the strain told on
him.

“His friends saw that he was wearing himself out,” says Howells, and
perhaps this was true, for he grew thin and pale and contracted a
hacking cough. He did not spare himself as often as he should have done.
Once to Richard Watson Gilder he sent this line of regrets:

    In bed with a chest cold and other company--Wednesday.
    DEAR GILDER,--I can’t. If I were a well man I could explain with
    this pencil, but in the cir---ces I will leave it all to your
    imagination.

    Was it Grady who killed himself trying to do all the dining and
    speeching?

    No, old man, no, no!    Ever yours,  MARK.

He became again the guest of honor at the Lotos Club, which had dined
him so lavishly seven years before, just previous to his financial
collapse. That former dinner had been a distinguished occasion, but
never before had the Lotos Club been so brimming with eager hospitality
as on the second great occasion. In closing his introductory speech
President Frank Lawrence said, “We hail him as one who has borne great
burdens with manliness and courage, who has emerged from great struggles
victorious,” and the assembled diners roared out their applause. Clemens
in his reply said:

    Your president has referred to certain burdens which I was weighted
    with. I am glad he did, as it gives me an opportunity which I
    wanted--to speak of those debts. You all knew what he meant when he
    referred to it, & of the poor bankrupt firm of C. L. Webster & Co.
    No one has said a word about those creditors. There were ninety-six
    creditors in all, & not by a finger’s weight did ninety-five out of
    the ninety-six add to the burden of that time. They treated me
    well; they treated me handsomely. I never knew I owed them
    anything; not a sign came from them.

It was like him to make that public acknowledgment. He could not let
an unfair impression remain that any man or any set of men had laid an
unnecessary burden upon him-his sense of justice would not consent to
it. He also spoke on that occasion of certain national changes.

    How many things have happened in the seven years I have been away
    from home! We have fought a righteous war, and a righteous war is a
    rare thing in history. We have turned aside from our own comfort
    and seen to it that freedom should exist, not only within our own
    gates, but in our own neighborhood. We have set Cuba free and
    placed her among the galaxy of free nations of the world. We
    started out to set those poor Filipinos free, but why that righteous
    plan miscarried perhaps I shall never know. We have also been
    making a creditable showing in China, and that is more than all the
    other powers can say. The “Yellow Terror” is threatening the world,
    but no matter what happens the United States says that it has had no
    part in it.

    Since I have been away we have been nursing free silver. We have
    watched by its cradle, we have done our best to raise that child,
    but every time it seemed to be getting along nicely along came some
    pestiferous Republican and gave it the measles or something. I fear
    we will never raise that child.

    We’ve done more than that. We elected a President four years ago.
    We’ve found fault and criticized him, and here a day or two ago we
    go and elect him for another four years, with votes enough to spare
    to do it over again.

One club followed another in honoring Mark Twain--the Aldine, the St.
Nicholas, the Press clubs, and other associations and societies. His
old friends were at these dinners--Howells, Aldrich, Depew, Rogers,
ex-Speaker Reed--and they praised him and gibed him to his and their
hearts’ content.

It was a political year, and he generally had something to say on
matters municipal, national, or international; and he spoke out more and
more freely, as with each opportunity he warmed more righteously to his
subject.

At the dinner given to him by the St. Nicholas Club he said, with deep
irony:

    Gentlemen, you have here the best municipal government in the world,
    and the most fragrant and the purest. The very angels of heaven
    envy you and wish they had a government like it up there. You got
    it by your noble fidelity to civic duty; by the stern and ever
    watchful exercise of the great powers lodged in you as lovers and
    guardians of your city; by your manly refusal to sit inert when base
    men would have invaded her high places and possessed them; by your
    instant retaliation when any insult was offered you in her person,
    or any assault was made upon her fair fame. It is you who have made
    this government what it is, it is you who have made it the envy and
    despair of the other capitals of the world--and God bless you for
    it, gentlemen, God bless you! And when you get to heaven at last
    they’ll say with joy, “Oh, there they come, the representatives of
    the perfectest citizenship in the universe show them the archangel’s
    box and turn on the limelight!”

Those hearers who in former years had been indifferent to Mark Twain’s
more serious purpose began to realize that, whatever he may have been
formerly, he was by no means now a mere fun-maker, but a man of deep
and grave convictions, able to give them the fullest and most forcible
expression. He still might make them laugh, but he also made them think,
and he stirred them to a truer gospel of patriotism. He did not preach
a patriotism that meant a boisterous cheering of the Stars and Stripes
right or wrong, but a patriotism that proposed to keep the Stars and
Stripes clean and worth shouting for. In an article, perhaps it was a
speech, begun at this time he wrote:

    We teach the boys to atrophy their independence. We teach them to
    take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest
    crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter
    --exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been
    taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion
    and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, & so here in our
    democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most
    foreign to it & out of place--the delivery of our political
    conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the
    Russian plan.

Howells tells of discussing these vital matters with him in “an upper
room, looking south over a quiet, open space of back yards where,” he
says, “we fought our battles in behalf of the Filipinos and Boers, and
he carried on his campaign against the missionaries in China.”

Howells at the time expressed an amused fear that Mark Twain’s
countrymen, who in former years had expected him to be merely a
humorist, should now, in the light of his wider acceptance abroad,
demand that he be mainly serious.

But the American people were quite ready to accept him in any of his
phases, fully realizing that whatever his philosophy or doctrine it
would have somewhat of the humorous form, and whatever his humor, there
would somewhere be wisdom in it. He had in reality changed little; for a
generation he had thought the sort of things which he now, with advanced
years and a different audience, felt warranted in uttering openly. The
man who in ‘64 had written against corruption in San Francisco, who a
few years later had defended the emigrant Chinese against persecution,
who at the meetings of the Monday Evening Club had denounced hypocrisy
in politics, morals, and national issues, did not need to change to be
able to speak out against similar abuses now. And a newer generation
as willing to herald Mark Twain as a sage as well as a humorist, and on
occasion to quite overlook the absence of the cap and bells.



CCXIII. MARK TWAIN--GENERAL SPOKESMAN

Clemens did not confine his speeches altogether to matters of reform.
At a dinner given by the Nineteenth Century Club in November, 1900,
he spoke on the “Disappearance of Literature,” and at the close of the
discussion of that subject, referring to Milton and Scott, he said:

    Professor Winchester also said something about there being no modern
    epics like “Paradise Lost.” I guess he’s right. He talked as if he
    was pretty familiar with that piece of literary work, and nobody
    would suppose that he never had read it. I don’t believe any of you
    have ever read “Paradise Lost,” and you don’t want to. That’s
    something that you just want to take on trust. It’s a classic, just
    as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a
    classic--something that everybody wants to have read and nobody
    wants to read.

    Professor Trent also had a good deal to say about the disappearance
    of literature. He said that Scott would outlive all his critics.
    I guess that’s true. That fact of the business is you’ve got to be
    one of two ages to appreciate Scott. When you’re eighteen you can
    read Ivanhoe, and you want to wait until you’re ninety to read some
    of the rest. It takes a pretty well-regulated abstemious critic to
    live ninety years.

But a few days later he was back again in the forefront of reform,
preaching at the Berkeley Lyceum against foreign occupation in China. It
was there that he declared himself a Boxer.

    Why should not China be free from the foreigners, who are only
    making trouble on her soil? If they would only all go home what a
    pleasant place China would be for the Chinese! We do not allow
    Chinamen to come here, and I say, in all seriousness, that it would
    be a graceful thing to let China decide who shall go there.

    China never wanted foreigners any more than foreigners wanted
    Chinamen, and on this question I am with the Boxers every time. The
    Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the
    countries of other people. I wish him success. We drive the
    Chinaman out of our country; the Boxer believes in driving us out of
    his country. I am a Boxer, too, on those terms.

Introducing Winston Churchill, of England, at a dinner some weeks later,
he explained how generous England and America had been in not requiring
fancy rates for “extinguished missionaries” in China as Germany had
done. Germany had required territory and cash, he said, in payment for
her missionaries, while the United States and England had been willing
to settle for produce--firecrackers and tea.

The Churchill introduction would seem to have been his last speech for
the year 1900, and he expected it, with one exception, to be the last
for a long time. He realized that he was tired and that the strain
upon him made any other sort of work out of the question. Writing to
MacAlister at the end of the year, he said, “I seem to have made many
speeches, but it is not so. It is not more than ten, I think.” Still, a
respectable number in the space of two months, considering that each was
carefully written and committed to memory, and all amid crushing social
pressure. Again to MacAlister:

    I declined 7 banquets yesterday (which is double the daily average)
    & answered 29 letters. I have slaved at my mail every day since we
    arrived in mid-October, but Jean is learning to typewrite &
    presently I’ll dictate & thereby save some scraps of time.

He added that after January 4th he did not intend to speak again for a
year--that he would not speak then only that the matter concerned the
reform of city government.

The occasion of January 4, 1901, was a rather important one. It was
a meeting of the City Club, then engaged in the crusade for municipal
reform. Wheeler H. Peckham presided, and Bishop Potter made the opening
address. It all seems like ancient history now, and perhaps is not very
vital any more; but the movement was making a great stir then, and Mark
Twain’s declaration that he believed forty-nine men out of fifty were
honest, and that the forty-nine only needed to organize to disqualify
the fiftieth man (always organized for crime), was quoted as a sort of
slogan for reform.

Clemens was not permitted to keep his resolution that he wouldn’t speak
again that year. He had become a sort of general spokesman on public
matters, and demands were made upon him which could not be denied. He
declined a Yale alumni dinner, but he could not refuse to preside at the
Lincoln Birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall, February 11th, where he
must introduce Watterson as the speaker of the evening.

“Think of it!” he wrote Twichell. “Two old rebels functioning there:
I as president and Watterson as orator of the day! Things have changed
somewhat in these forty years, thank God!”

The Watterson introduction is one of the choicest of Mark Twain’s
speeches--a pure and perfect example of simple eloquence, worthy of
the occasion which gave it utterance, worthy in spite of its playful
paragraphs (or even because of them, for Lincoln would have loved them),
to become the matrix of that imperishable Gettysburg phrase with which
he makes his climax. He opened by dwelling for a moment on Colonel
Watterson as a soldier, journalist, orator, statesman, and patriot; then
he said:

    It is a curious circumstance that without collusion of any kind, but
    merely in obedience to a strange and pleasant and dramatic freak of
    destiny, he and I, kinsmen by blood--[Colonel Watterson’s forebears
    had intermarried with the Lamptons.]--for we are that--and one-time
    rebels--for we were that--should be chosen out of a million
    surviving quondam rebels to come here and bare our heads in
    reverence and love of that noble soul whom 40 years ago we tried
    with all our hearts and all our strength to defeat and dispossess
    --Abraham Lincoln! Is the Rebellion ended and forgotten? Are the
    Blue and the Gray one to-day? By authority of this sign we may
    answer yes; there was a Rebellion--that incident is closed.

    I was born and reared in a slave State, my father was a slaveowner;
    and in the Civil War I was a second lieutenant in the Confederate
    service. For a while. This second cousin of mine, Colonel
    Watterson, the orator of this present occasion, was born and reared
    in a slave State, was a colonel in the Confederate service, and
    rendered me such assistance as he could in my self-appointed great
    task of annihilating the Federal armies and breaking up the Union.
    I laid my plans with wisdom and foresight, and if Colonel Watterson
    had obeyed my orders I should have succeeded in my giant
    undertaking. It was my intention to drive General Grant into the
    Pacific--if I could get transportation--and I told Colonel Watterson
    to surround the Eastern armies and wait till I came. But he was
    insubordinate, and stood upon a punctilio of military etiquette; he
    refused to take orders from a second lieutenant--and the Union was
    saved. This is the first time that this secret has been revealed.
    Until now no one outside the family has known the facts. But there
    they stand: Watterson saved the Union. Yet to this day that man
    gets no pension. Those were great days, splendid days. What an
    uprising it was! For the hearts of the whole nation, North and
    South, were in the war. We of the South were not ashamed; for, like
    the men of the North, we were fighting for ‘flags we loved; and when
    men fight for these things, and under these convictions, with
    nothing sordid to tarnish their cause, that cause is holy, the blood
    spilt for it is sacred, the life that is laid down for it is
    consecrated. To-day we no longer regret the result, to-day we are
    glad it came out as it did, but we are not ashamed that we did our
    endeavor; we did our bravest best, against despairing odds, for the
    cause which was precious to us and which our consciences approved;
    and we are proud--and you are proud--the kindred blood in your veins
    answers when I say it--you are proud of the record we made in those
    mighty collisions in the fields.

    What an uprising it was! We did not have to supplicate for soldiers
    on either side. “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred
    thousand strong!” That was the music North and South. The very
    choicest young blood and brawn and brain rose up from Maine to the
    Gulf and flocked to the standards--just as men always do when in
    their eyes their cause is great and fine and their hearts are in it;
    just as men flocked to the Crusades, sacrificing all they possessed
    to the cause, and entering cheerfully upon hardships which we cannot
    even imagine in this age, and upon toilsome and wasting journeys
    which in our time would be the equivalent of circumnavigating the
    globe five times over.

    North and South we put our hearts into that colossal struggle, and
    out of it came the blessed fulfilment of the prophecy of the
    immortal Gettysburg speech which said: “We here highly resolve that
    these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God,
    shall have a new birth of freedom; and that a government of the
    people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the
    earth.”

    We are here to honor the birthday of the greatest citizen, and the
    noblest and the best, after Washington, that this land or any other
    has yet produced. The old wounds are healed, you and we are
    brothers again; you testify it by honoring two of us, once soldiers
    of the Lost Cause, and foes of your great and good leader--with the
    privilege of assisting here; and we testify it by laying our honest
    homage at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, and in forgetting that you of
    the North and we of the South were ever enemies, and remembering
    only that we are now indistinguishably fused together and nameable
    by one common great name--Americans!



CCXIV. MARK TWAIN AND THE MISSIONARIES

Mark Twain had really begun his crusade for reform soon after his
arrival in America in a practical hand-to-hand manner. His housekeeper,
Katie Leary, one night employed a cabman to drive her from the Grand
Central Station to the house at 14 West Tenth Street. No contract
had been made as to price, and when she arrived there the cabman’s
extortionate charge was refused. He persisted in it, and she sent into
the house for her employer. Of all men, Mark Twain was the last one
to countenance an extortion. He reasoned with the man kindly enough
at first; when the driver at last became abusive Clemens demanded his
number, which was at first refused. In the end he paid the legal fare,
and in the morning entered a formal complaint, something altogether
unexpected, for the American public is accustomed to suffering almost
any sort of imposition to avoid trouble and publicity.

In some notes which Clemens had made in London four years earlier he
wrote:

    If you call a policeman to settle the dispute you can depend on one
    thing--he will decide it against you every time. And so will the
    New York policeman. In London if you carry your case into court the
    man that is entitled to win it will win it. In New York--but no one
    carries a cab case into court there. It is my impression that it is
    now more than thirty years since any one has carried a cab case into
    court there.

Nevertheless, he was promptly on hand when the case was called to
sustain the charge and to read the cabdrivers’ union and the public in
general a lesson in good-citizenship. At the end of the hearing, to a
representative of the union he said:

“This is not a matter of sentiment, my dear sir. It is simply practical
business. You cannot imagine that I am making money wasting an hour
or two of my time prosecuting a case in which I can have no personal
interest whatever. I am doing this just as any citizen should do. He
has no choice. He has a distinct duty. He is a non-classified policeman.
Every citizen is, a policeman, and it is his duty to assist the police
and the magistracy in every way he can, and give his time, if necessary,
to do so. Here is a man who is a perfectly natural product of an
infamous system in this city--a charge upon the lax patriotism in this
city of New York that this thing can exist. You have encouraged him,
in every way you know how to overcharge. He is not the criminal here
at all. The criminal is the citizen of New York and the absence of
patriotism. I am not here to avenge myself on him. I have no quarrel
with him. My quarrel is with the citizens of New York, who have
encouraged him, and who created him by encouraging him to overcharge in
this way.”

The driver’s license was suspended. The case made a stir in the
newspapers, and it is not likely that any one incident ever contributed
more to cab-driving morals in New York City.

But Clemens had larger matters than this in prospect. His many speeches
on municipal and national abuses he felt were more or less ephemeral.
He proposed now to write himself down more substantially and for a wider
hearing. The human race was behaving very badly: unspeakable corruption
was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in South Africa;
the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; Leopold of Belgium
was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the Congo, and the allied
powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering the Chinese. In his
letters he had more than once boiled over touching these matters, and
for New-Year’s Eve, 1900, had written:

      A GREETING FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

    I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning,
    bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-
    Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul
    full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of
    pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking-
    glass.--[Prepared for Red Cross Society watch-meeting, which was
    postponed until March. Clemens recalled his “Greeting” for that
    reason and for one other, which he expressed thus: “The list of
    greeters thus far issued by you contains only vague generalities and
    one definite name--mine: ‘Some kings and queens and Mark Twain.’ Now
    I am not enjoying this sparkling solitude and distinction. It makes
    me feel like a circus-poster in a graveyard.”]

This was a sort of preliminary. Then, restraining himself no longer,
he embodied his sentiments in an article for the North American Review
entitled, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” There was crying need for
some one to speak the right word. He was about the only one who could
do it and be certain of a universal audience. He took as his text some
Christmas Eve clippings from the New York Tribune and Sun which he had
been saving for this purpose. The Tribune clipping said:

    Christmas will dawn in the United States over a people full of hope
    and aspiration and good cheer. Such a condition means contentment
    and happiness. The carping grumbler who may here and there go forth
    will find few to listen to him. The majority will wonder what is
    the matter with him, and pass on.

A Sun clipping depicted the “terrible offenses against humanity
committed in the name of politics in some of the most notorious East
Side districts “--the unmissionaried, unpoliced darker New York. The Sun
declared that they could not be pictured even verbally. But it suggested
enough to make the reader shudder at the hideous depths of vice in the
sections named. Another clipping from the same paper reported the
“Rev. Mr. Ament, of the American Board of Foreign Missions,” as having
collected indemnities for Boxer damages in China at the rate of three
hundred taels for each murder, “full payment for all destroyed property
belonging to Christians, and national fines amounting to thirteen times
the indemnity.” It quoted Mr. Ament as saying that the money so obtained
was used for the propagation of the Gospel, and that the amount so
collected was moderate when compared with the amount secured by the
Catholics, who had demanded, in addition to money, life for life, that
is to say, “head for head”--in one district six hundred and eighty heads
having been so collected.

The despatch made Mr. Ament say a great deal more than this, but the
gist here is enough. Mark Twain, of course, was fiercely stirred.
The missionary idea had seldom appealed to him, and coupled with this
business of bloodshed, it was less attractive than usual. He printed the
clippings in full, one following the other; then he said:

    By happy luck we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve--just
    the time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and
    enthusiasm. Our spirits soar and we find we can even make jokes;
    taels I win, heads you lose.

He went on to score Ament, to compare the missionary policy in China
to that of the Pawnee Indians, and to propose for him a
monument--subscriptions to be sent to the American Board. He denounced
the national policies in Africa, China, and the Philippines, and showed
by the reports and by the private letters of soldiers home, how cruel
and barbarous and fiendish had been the warfare made by those whose
avowed purpose was to carry the blessed light of civilization and Gospel
“to the benighted native”--how in very truth these priceless blessings
had been handed on the point of a bayonet to the “Person Sitting in
Darkness.”

Mark Twain never wrote anything more scorching, more penetrating in its
sarcasm, more fearful in its revelation of injustice and hypocrisy, than
his article “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” He put aquafortis on
all the raw places, and when it was finished he himself doubted the
wisdom of printing it. Howells, however, agreed that it should be
published, and “it ought to be illustrated by Dan Beard,” he added,
“with such pictures as he made for the Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,
but you’d better hang yourself afterward.”

Meeting Beard a few days later, Clemens mentioned the matter and said:

“So if you make the pictures, you hang with me.”

But pictures were not required. It was published in the North American
Review for February, 1901, as the opening article; after which the
cyclone. Two storms moving in opposite directions produce a cyclone,
and the storms immediately developed; one all for Mark Twain and his
principles, the other all against him. Every paper in England and
America commented on it editorially, with bitter denunciations or with
eager praise, according to their lights and convictions.

At 14 West Tenth Street letters, newspaper clippings, documents
poured in by the bushel--laudations, vituperations, denunciations,
vindications; no such tumult ever occurred in a peaceful literary home.
It was really as if he had thrown a great missile into the human hive,
one-half of which regarded it as a ball of honey and the remainder as a
cobblestone. Whatever other effect it may have had, it left no thinking
person unawakened.

Clemens reveled in it. W. A. Rogers, in Harper’s Weekly, caricatured
him as Tom Sawyer in a snow fort, assailed by the shower of snowballs,
“having the time of his life.” Another artist, Fred Lewis, pictured him
as Huck Finn with a gun.

The American Board was naturally disturbed. The Ament clipping which
Clemens had used had been public property for more than a month--its
authenticity never denied; but it was immediately denied now, and the
cable kept hot with inquiries.

The Rev. Judson Smith, one of the board, took up the defense of Dr.
Ament, declaring him to be one who had suffered for the cause, and asked
Mark Twain, whose “brilliant article,” he said, “would produce an effect
quite beyond the reach of plain argument,” not to do an innocent man
an injustice. Clemens in the same paper replied that such was not his
intent, that Mr. Ament in his report had simply arraigned himself.

Then it suddenly developed that the cable report had “grossly
exaggerated” the amount of Mr. Ament’s collections. Instead of thirteen
times the indemnity it should have read “one and a third times” the
indemnity; whereupon, in another open letter, the board demanded
retraction and apology. Clemens would not fail to make the apology--at
least he would explain. It was precisely the kind of thing that would
appeal to him--the delicate moral difference between a demand thirteen
times as great as it should be and a demand that was only one and a
third times the correct amount. “To My Missionary Critics,” in the North
American Review for April (1901), was his formal and somewhat lengthy
reply.

“I have no prejudice against apologies,” he wrote. “I trust I shall
never withhold one when it is due.”

He then proceeded to make out his case categorically. Touching the
exaggerated indemnity, he said:

To Dr. Smith the “thirteen-fold-extra” clearly stood for “theft and
extortion,” and he was right, distinctly right, indisputably right.
He manifestly thinks that when it got scaled away down to a mere
“one-third” a little thing like that was some other than “theft and
extortion.” Why, only the board knows!

I will try to explain this difficult problem so that the board can get
an idea of it. If a pauper owes me a dollar and I catch him unprotected
and make him pay me fourteen dollars thirteen of it is “theft and
extortion.” If I make him pay only one dollar thirty-three and a third
cents the thirty-three and a third cents are “theft and extortion,” just
the same.

I will put it in another way still simpler. If a man owes me one
dog--any kind of a dog, the breed is of no consequence--and I--but let
it go; the board would never understand it. It can’t understand these
involved and difficult things.

He offered some further illustrations, including the “Tale of a King and
His Treasure” and another tale entitled “The Watermelons.”

    I have it now. Many years ago, when I was studying for the gallows,
    I had a dear comrade, a youth who was not in my line, but still a
    scrupulously good fellow though devious. He was preparing to
    qualify for a place on the board, for there was going to be a
    vacancy by superannuation in about five years. This was down South,
    in the slavery days. It was the nature of the negro then, as now,
    to steal watermelons. They stole three of the melons of an adoptive
    brother of mine, the only good ones he had. I suspected three of a
    neighbor’s negroes, but there was no proof, and, besides, the
    watermelons in those negroes’ private patches were all green and
    small and not up to indemnity standard. But in the private patches
    of three other negroes there was a number of competent melons. I
    consulted with my comrade, the understudy of the board. He said
    that if I would approve his arrangements he would arrange. I said,
    “Consider me the board; I approve; arrange.” So he took a gun and
    went and collected three large melons for my brother-on-the-
    halfshell, and one over. I was greatly pleased and asked:

    “Who gets the extra one?”
     “Widows and orphans.”

    “A good idea, too. Why didn’t you take thirteen?”

    “It would have been wrong; a crime, in fact-theft and extortion.”

    “What is the one-third extra--the odd melon--the same?”

    It caused him to reflect. But there was no result.

    The justice of the peace was a stern man. On the trial he found
    fault with the scheme and required us to explain upon what we based
    our strange conduct--as he called it. The understudy said:

    “On the custom of the niggers. They all do it.”--[The point had
    been made by the board that it was the Chinese custom to make the
    inhabitants of a village responsible for individual crimes; and
    custom, likewise, to collect a third in excess of the damage, such
    surplus having been applied to the support of widows and orphans of
    the slain converts.]

    The justice forgot his dignity and descended to sarcasm.

    “Custom of the niggers! Are our morals so inadequate that we have
    to borrow of niggers?”

    Then he said to the jury: “Three melons were owing; they were
    collected from persons not proven to owe them: this is theft; they
    were collected by compulsion: this is extortion. A melon was added
    for the widows and orphans. It was owed by no one. It is another
    theft, another extortion. Return it whence it came, with the
    others. It is not permissible here to apply to any purpose goods
    dishonestly obtained; not even to the feeding of widows and orphans,
    for this would be to put a shame upon charity and dishonor it.”

    He said it in open court, before everybody, and to me it did not
    seem very kind.

It was in the midst of the tumult that Clemens, perhaps feeling the need
of sacred melody, wrote to Andrew Carnegie:

DEAR SIR & FRIEND,--You seem to be in prosperity. Could you lend an
admirer $1.50 to buy a hymn-book with? God will bless you. I feel it; I
know it.

N. B.--If there should be other applications, this one not to count.

Yours, MARK.

P. S.-Don’t send the hymn-book; send the money; I want to make the
selection myself.

Carnegie answered:

    Nothing less than a two-dollar & a half hymn-book gilt will do for
    you. Your place in the choir (celestial) demands that & you shall
    have it.

    There’s a new Gospel of Saint Mark in the North American which I
    like better than anything I’ve read for many a day.

    I am willing to borrow a thousand dollars to distribute that sacred
    message in proper form, & if the author don’t object may I send that
    sum, when I can raise it, to the Anti-Imperialist League, Boston, to
    which I am a contributor, the only missionary work I am responsible
    for.

    Just tell me you are willing & many thousands of the holy little
    missals will go forth. This inimitable satire is to become a
    classic. I count among my privileges in life that I know you, the
    author.

Perhaps a few more of the letters invited by Mark Twain’s criticism
of missionary work in China may still be of interest to the reader:
Frederick T. Cook, of the Hospital Saturday and Sunday Association,
wrote: “I hail you as the Voltaire of America. It is a noble
distinction. God bless you and see that you weary not in well-doing in
this noblest, sublimest of crusades.”

Ministers were by no means all against him. The associate pastor of the
Every-day Church, in Boston, sent this line: “I want to thank you for
your matchless article in the current North American. It must make
converts of well-nigh all who read it.”

But a Boston school-teacher was angry. “I have been reading the North
American,” she wrote, “and I am filled with shame and remorse that I
have dreamed of asking you to come to Boston to talk to the teachers.”

On the outside of the envelope Clemens made this pencil note:

“Now, I suppose I offended that young lady by having an opinion of my
own, instead of waiting and copying hers. I never thought. I suppose
she must be as much as twenty-five, and probably the only patriot in the
country.”

A critic with a sense of humor asked: “Please excuse seeming
impertinence, but were you ever adjudged insane? Be honest. How much
money does the devil give you for arraigning Christianity and missionary
causes?”

But there were more of the better sort. Edward S. Martin, in a grateful
letter, said: “How gratifying it is to feel that we have a man among us
who understands the rarity of the plain truth, and who delights to utter
it, and has the gift of doing so without cant and with not too much
seriousness.”

Sir Hiram Maxim wrote: “I give you my candid opinion that what you have
done is of very great value to the civilization of the world. There
is no man living whose words carry greater weight than your own, as no
one’s writings are so eagerly sought after by all classes.”

Clemens himself in his note-book set down this aphorism:

“Do right and you will be conspicuous.”



CCXV. SUMMER AT “THE LAIR”

In June Clemens took the family to Saranac Lake, to Ampersand. They
occupied a log cabin which he called “The Lair,” on the south shore,
near the water’s edge, a remote and beautiful place where, as had
happened before, they were so comfortable and satisfied that they hoped
to return another summer. There were swimming and boating and long walks
in the woods; the worry and noise of the world were far away. They gave
little enough attention to the mails. They took only a weekly paper, and
were likely to allow it to lie in the postoffice uncalled for. Clemens,
especially, loved the place, and wrote to Twichell:

    I am on the front porch (lower one-main deck) of our little bijou of
    a dwelling-house. The lake edge (Lower Saranac) is so nearly under
    me that I can’t see the shore, but only the water, small-poxed with
    rain splashes--for there is a heavy down pour. It is charmingly
    like sitting snuggled up on a ship’s deck with the stretching sea
    all around but very much more satisfactory, for at sea a rainstorm
    is depressing, while here of course the effect engendered is just a
    deep sense of comfort & contentment. The heavy forest shuts us
    solidly in on three sides--there are no neighbors. There are
    beautiful little tan-colored impudent squirrels about. They take
    tea 5 P.M. (not invited) at the table in the woods where Jean does
    my typewriting, & one of them has been brave enough to sit upon
    Jean’s knee with his tail curved over his back & munch his food.
    They come to dinner 7 P.M. on the front porch (not invited), but
    Clara drives them away. It is an occupation which requires some
    industry & attention to business. They all have the one name
    --Blennerhasset, from Burr’s friend--& none of them answers to it
    except when hungry.

Clemens could work at “The Lair,” often writing in shady seclusions
along the shore, and he finished there the two-part serial,--[
Published in Harper’s Magazine for January and February, 1902.]--“The
Double-Barrelled Detective Story,” intended originally as a burlesque on
Sherlock Holmes. It did not altogether fulfil its purpose, and is hardly
to be ranked as one of Mark Twain’s successes. It contains, however, one
paragraph at least by which it is likely to be remembered, a hoax--his
last one--on the reader. It runs as follows:

    It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and
    laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and
    flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature
    for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops
    and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their
    purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the
    slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable
    deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the
    empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing;
    everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God.

The warm light and luxury of this paragraph are factitious. The
careful reader will, note that its various accessories are ridiculously
associated, and only the most careless reader will accept the oesophagus
as a bird. But it disturbed a great many admirers, and numerous letters
of inquiry came wanting to know what it was all about. Some suspected
the joke and taunted him with it; one such correspondent wrote:

    MY DEAR MARK TWAIN,--Reading your “Double-Barrelled Detective Story”
     in the January Harper’s late one night I came to the paragraph where
    you so beautifully describe “a crisp and spicy morning in early
    October.” I read along down the paragraph, conscious only of its
    woozy sound, until I brought up with a start against your oesophagus
    in the empty sky. Then I read the paragraph again. Oh, Mark Twain!
    Mark Twain! How could you do it? Put a trap like that into the
    midst of a tragical story? Do serenity and peace brood over you
    after you have done such a thing?

    Who lit the lilacs, and which end up do they hang? When did larches
    begin to flame, and who set out the pomegranates in that canyon?
    What are deciduous flowers, and do they always “bloom in the fall,
    tra la”?

    I have been making myself obnoxious to various people by demanding
    their opinion of that paragraph without telling them the name of the
    author. They say, “Very well done.” “The alliteration is so
    pretty.” “What’s an oesophagus, a bird?” “What’s it all mean,
    anyway?” I tell them it means Mark Twain, and that an oesophagus is
    a kind of swallow. Am I right? Or is it a gull? Or a gullet?

    Hereafter if you must write such things won’t you please be so kind
    as to label them?
                     Very sincerely yours,
                                ALLETTA F. DEAN.

Mark Twain to Miss Dean:

    Don’t you give that oesophagus away again or I’ll never trust you
    with another privacy!

So many wrote, that Clemens finally felt called upon to make
public confession, and as one searching letter had been mailed from
Springfield, Massachusetts, he made his reply through the Republican of
that city. After some opening comment he said:

    I published a short story lately & it was in that that I put the
    oesophagus. I will say privately that I expected it to bother some
    people--in fact, that was the intention--but the harvest has been
    larger than I was calculating upon. The oesophagus has gathered in
    the guilty and the innocent alike, whereas I was only fishing for
    the innocent--the innocent and confiding.

He quoted a letter from a schoolmaster in the Philippines who thought
the passage beautiful with the exception of the curious creature which
“slept upon motionless wings.” Said Clemens:

    Do you notice? Nothing in the paragraph disturbed him but that one
    word. It shows that that paragraph was most ably constructed for
    the deception it was intended to put upon the reader. It was my
    intention that it should read plausibly, and it is now plain that it
    does; it was my intention that it should be emotional and touching,
    and you see yourself that it fetched this public instructor. Alas!
    if I had but left that one treacherous word out I should have
    scored, scored everywhere, and the paragraph would have slidden
    through every reader’s sensibilities like oil and left not a
    suspicion behind.

    The other sample inquiry is from a professor in a New England
    university. It contains one naughty word (which I cannot bear to
    suppress), but he is not in the theological department, so it is no
    harm:

    “DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--‘Far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus
    slept upon motionless wing.’

    “It is not often I get a chance to read much periodical literature,
    but I have just gone through at this belated period, with much
    gratification and edification, your ‘Double-Barrelled Detective
    Story.’

    “But what in hell is an oesophagus? I keep one myself, but it never
    sleeps in the air or anywhere else. My profession is to deal with
    words, and oesophagus interested me the moment I lighted upon it.
    But, as a companion of my youth used to say, ‘I’ll be eternally,
    co-eternally cussed’ if I can make it out. Is it a joke or am I an
    ignoramus?”

    Between you and me, I was almost ashamed of having fooled that man,
    but for pride’s sake I was not going to say so. I wrote and told
    him it was a joke--and that is what I am now saying to my
    Springfield inquirer. And I told him to carefully read the whole
    paragraph and he would find not a vestige of sense in any detail of
    it. This also I recommend to my Springfield inquirer.

    I have confessed. I am sorry--partially. I will not do so any
    more--for the present. Don’t ask me any more questions; let the
    oesophagus have a rest--on his same old motionless wing.

He wrote Twichell that the story had been a six-day ‘tour de force’,
twenty-five thousand words, and he adds:

    How long it takes a literary seed to sprout sometimes! This seed was
    planted in your house many years ago when you sent me to bed with a
    book not heard of by me until then--Sherlock Holmes....
    I’ve done a grist of writing here this summer, but not for
    publication soon, if ever. I did write two satisfactory articles
    for early print, but I’ve burned one of them & have buried the other
    in my large box of posthumous stuff. I’ve got stacks of literary
    remains piled up there.

Early in August Clemens went with H. H. Rogers in his yacht Kanawha on
a cruise to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Rogers had made up a party,
including ex-Speaker Reed, Dr. Rice, and Col. A. G. Paine. Young Harry
Rogers also made one of the party. Clemens kept a log of the cruise,
certain entries of which convey something of its spirit. On the 11th, at
Yarmouth, he wrote:

    Fog-bound. The garrison went ashore. Officers visited the yacht in
    the evening & said an anvil had been missed. Mr. Rogers paid for
    the anvil.

    August 13th. There is a fine picture-gallery here; the sheriff
    photographed the garrison, with the exception of Harry (Rogers) and
    Mr. Clemens.

    August 14th. Upon complaint of Mr. Reed another dog was procured.
    He said he had been a sailor all his life, and considered it
    dangerous to trust a ship to a dog-watch with only one dog in it.

    Poker, for a change.

    August 15th. To Rockland, Maine, in the afternoon, arriving about 6
    P.M. In the night Dr. Rice baited the anchor with his winnings &
    caught a whale 90 feet long. He said so himself. It is thought
    that if there had been another witness like Dr. Rice the whale would
    have been longer.

    August 16th. We could have had a happy time in Bath but for the
    interruptions caused by people who wanted Mr. Reed to explain votes
    of the olden time or give back the money. Mr. Rogers recouped them.

    Another anvil missed. The descendant of Captain Kidd is the only
    person who does not blush for these incidents. Harry and Mr.
    Clemens blush continually. It is believed that if the rest of the
    garrison were like these two the yacht would be welcome everywhere
    instead of being quarantined by the police in all the ports. Mr.
    Clemens & Harry have attracted a great deal of attention, & men have
    expressed a resolve to turn over a new leaf & copy after them from
    this out.

    Evening. Judge Cohen came over from another yacht to pay his
    respects to Harry and Mr. Clemens, he having heard of their
    reputation from the clergy of these coasts. He was invited by the
    gang to play poker apparently as a courtesy & in a spirit of seeming
    hospitality, he not knowing them & taking it all at par. Mr. Rogers
    lent him clothes to go home in.

    August 17th. The Reformed Statesman growling and complaining again
    --not in a frank, straightforward way, but talking at the Commodore,
    while letting on to be talking to himself. This time he was
    dissatisfied about the anchor watch; said it was out of date,
    untrustworthy, & for real efficiency didn’t begin with the
    Waterbury, & was going on to reiterate, as usual, that he had been a
    pilot all his life & blamed if he ever saw, etc., etc., etc.

    But he was not allowed to finish. We put him ashore at Portland.

That is to say, Reed landed at Portland, the rest of the party returning
with the yacht.

“We had a noble good time in the yacht,” Clemens wrote Twichell on their
return. “We caught a Chinee missionary and drowned him.”

Twichell had been invited to make one of the party, and this letter was
to make him feel sorry he had not accepted.



CCXVI. RIVERDALE--A YALE DEGREE

The Clemens household did not return to 14 West Tenth Street. They spent
a week in Elmira at the end of September, and after a brief stop in New
York took up their residence on the northern metropolitan boundary, at
Riverdale-on-the-Hudson, in the old Appleton home. They had permanently
concluded not to return to Hartford. They had put the property there
into an agent’s hands for sale. Mrs. Clemens never felt that she had the
strength to enter the house again.

They had selected the Riverdale place with due consideration. They
decided that they must have easy access to the New York center, but they
wished also to have the advantage of space and spreading lawn and trees,
large rooms, and light. The Appleton homestead provided these things. It
was a house built in the first third of the last century by one of the
Morris family, so long prominent in New York history. On passing into
the Appleton ownership it had been enlarged and beautified and named
“Holbrook Hall.” It overlooked the Hudson and the Palisades. It had
associations: the Roosevelt family had once lived there, Huxley, Darwin,
Tyndall, and others of their intellectual rank had been entertained
there during its occupation by the first Appleton, the founder of the
publishing firm. The great hall of the added wing was its chief feature.
Clemens once remembered:

“We drifted from room to room on our tour of inspection, always with a
growing doubt as to whether we wanted that house or not; but at last,
when we arrived in a dining-room that was 60 feet long, 30 feet wide,
and had two great fireplaces in it, that settled it.”

There were pleasant neighbors at Riverdale, and had it not been for the
illnesses that seemed always ready to seize upon that household the home
there might have been ideal. They loved the place presently, so much so
that they contemplated buying it, but decided that it was too costly.
They began to prospect for other places along the Hudson shore. They
were anxious to have a home again--one that they could call their own.

Among the many pleasant neighbors at Riverdale were the Dodges, the
Quincy Adamses, and the Rev. Mr. Carstensen, a liberal-minded minister
with whom Clemens easily affiliated. Clemens and Carstensen visited back
and forth and exchanged views. Once Mr. Carstensen told him that he was
going to town to dine with a party which included the Reverend Gottheil,
a Catholic bishop, an Indian Buddhist, and a Chinese scholar of the
Confucian faith, after which they were all going to a Yiddish theater.
Clemens said:

“Well, there’s only one more thing you need to make the party
complete--that is, either Satan or me.”

Howells often came to Riverdale. He was living in a New York apartment,
and it was handy and made an easy and pleasant outing for him. He says:

“I began to see them again on something like the sweet old terms. They
lived far more unpretentiously than they used, and I think with a notion
of economy, which they had never very successfully practised. I recall
that at the end of a certain year in Hartford, when they had been saving
and paying cash for everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their
avowed experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills they had at
New-Year’s; he hastened to say that a horse-car would not have held
them. At Riverdale they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night
when I drove up to their handsome old mansion in the station carryall,
which was crusted with mud, as from the going down of the Deluge after
transporting Noah and his family from the Ark to whatever point they
decided to settle provisionally. But the good talk, the rich talk, the
talk that could never suffer poverty of mind or soul was there, and we
jubilantly found ourselves again in our middle youth.”

Both Howells and Clemens were made doctors of letters by Yale that year
and went over in October to receive their degrees. It was Mark Twain’s
second Yale degree, and it was the highest rank that an American
institution of learning could confer.

Twichell wrote:

I want you to understand, old fellow, that it will be in its intention
the highest public compliment, and emphatically so in your case, for it
will be tendered you by a corporation of gentlemen, the majority of whom
do not at all agree with the views on important questions which you
have lately promulgated in speech and in writing, and with which you are
identified to the public mind. They grant, of course, your right to hold
and express those views, though for themselves they don’t like ‘em;
but in awarding you the proposed laurel they will make no count of that
whatever. Their action will appropriately signify simply and solely
their estimate of your merit and rank as a man of letters, and so, as I
say, the compliment of it will be of the pure, unadulterated quality.

Howells was not especially eager to go, and tried to conspire with
Clemens to arrange some excuse which would keep them at home.

I remember with satisfaction [he wrote] our joint success in keeping
away from the Concord Centennial in 1875, and I have been thinking we
might help each other in this matter of the Yale Anniversary. What are
your plans for getting left, or shall you trust to inspiration?

Their plans did not avail. Both Howells and Clemens went to New Haven to
receive their honors.

When they had returned, Howells wrote formally, as became the new rank:

    DEAR SIR,--I have long been an admirer of your complete works,
    several of which I have read, and I am with you shoulder to shoulder
    in the cause of foreign missions. I would respectfully request a
    personal interview, and if you will appoint some day and hour most
    inconvenient to you I will call at your baronial hall. I cannot
    doubt, from the account of your courtesy given me by the Twelve
    Apostles, who once visited you in your Hartford home and were
    mistaken for a syndicate of lightning-rod men, that our meeting will
    be mutually agreeable.

                     Yours truly,
                            W. D. HOWELLS.
    DR. CLEMENS.



CCXVII. MARK TWAIN IN POLITICS

There was a campaign for the mayoralty of New York City that fall, with
Seth Low on the Fusion ticket against Edward M. Shepard as the Tammany
candidate. Mark Twain entered the arena to try to defeat Tammany Hall.
He wrote and he spoke in favor of clean city government and police
reform. He was savagely in earnest and openly denounced the clan of
Croker, individually and collectively. He joined a society called ‘The
Acorns’; and on the 17th of October, at a dinner given by the order
at the Waldorf-Astoria, delivered a fierce arraignment, in which he
characterized Croker as the Warren Hastings of New York. His speech
was really a set of extracts from Edmund Burke’s great impeachment of
Hastings, substituting always the name of Croker, and paralleling his
career with that of the ancient boss of the East India Company.

It was not a humorous speech. It was too denunciatory for that. It
probably contained less comic phrasing than any former effort. There is
hardly even a suggestion of humor from beginning to end. It concluded
with this paraphrase of Burke’s impeachment:

    I impeach Richard Croker of high crimes and misdemeanors. I impeach
    him in the name of the people, whose trust he has betrayed.

    I impeach him in the name of all the people of America, whose
    national character he has dishonored.

    I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of
    justice which he has violated.

    I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has
    cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every
    age, rank, situation, and condition of life.

The Acorn speech was greatly relied upon for damage to the Tammany
ranks, and hundreds of thousands of copies of it were printed and
circulated.--[The “Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany” speech had
originally been written as an article for the North American Review.]

Clemens was really heart and soul in the campaign. He even joined a
procession that marched up Broadway, and he made a speech to a great
assemblage at Broadway and Leonard Street, when, as he said, he had been
sick abed two days and, according to the doctor, should be in bed then.

    But I would not stay at home for a nursery disease, and that’s what
    I’ve got. Now, don’t let this leak out all over town, but I’ve been
    doing some indiscreet eating--that’s all. It wasn’t drinking. If
    it had been I shouldn’t have said anything about it.

    I ate a banana. I bought it just to clinch the Italian vote for
    fusion, but I got hold of a Tammany banana by mistake. Just one
    little nub of it on the end was nice and white. That was the
    Shepard end. The other nine-tenths were rotten. Now that little
    white end won’t make the rest of the banana good. The nine-tenths
    will make that little nub rotten, too.

    We must get rid of the whole banana, and our Acorn Society is going
    to do its share, for it is pledged to nothing but the support of
    good government all over the United States. We will elect the
    President next time.

    It won’t be I, for I have ruined my chances by joining the Acorns,
    and there can be no office-holders among us.

There was a movement which Clemens early nipped in the bud--to name a
political party after him.

“I should be far from willing to have a political party named after me,”
 he wrote, “and I would not be willing to belong to a party which allowed
its members to have political aspirations or push friends forward for
political preferment.”

In other words, he was a knight-errant; his sole purpose for being in
politics at all--something he always detested--was to do what he could
for the betterment of his people.

He had his reward, for when Election Day came, and the returns were in,
the Fusion ticket had triumphed and Tammany had fallen. Clemens received
his share of the credit. One paper celebrated him in verse:

              Who killed Croker?
              I, said Mark Twain,
              I killed Croker,
              I, the jolly joker!

Among Samuel Clemens’s literary remains there is an outline plan for
a “Casting-Vote party,” whose main object was “to compel the two great
parties to nominate their best man always.” It was to be an organization
of an infinite number of clubs throughout the nation, no member of
which should seek or accept a nomination for office in any political
appointment, but in each case should cast its vote as a unit for the
candidate of one of the two great political parties, requiring that the
man be of clean record and honest purpose.

    From constable up to President [runs his final clause] there is no
    office for which the two great parties cannot furnish able, clean,
    and acceptable men. Whenever the balance of power shall be lodged
    in a permanent third party, with no candidate of its own and no
    function but to cast its whole vote for the best man put forward by
    the Republicans and Democrats, these two parties will select the
    best man they have in their ranks. Good and clean government will
    follow, let its party complexion be what it may, and the country
    will be quite content.

It was a Utopian idea, very likely, as human nature is made; full of
that native optimism which was always overflowing and drowning his
gloomier logic. Clearly he forgot his despair of humanity when he
formulated that document, and there is a world of unselfish hope in
these closing lines:

    If in the hands of men who regard their citizenship as a high trust
    this scheme shall fail upon trial a better must be sought, a better
    must be invented; for it cannot be well or safe to let the present
    political conditions continue indefinitely. They can be improved,
    and American citizenship should arouse up from its disheartenment
    and see that it is done.

Had this document been put into type and circulated it might have
founded a true Mark Twain party.

Clemens made not many more speeches that autumn, closing the year at
last with the “Founder’s Night” speech at The Players, the short address
which, ending on the stroke of midnight, dedicates each passing year
to the memory of Edwin Booth, and pledges each new year in a loving-cup
passed in his honor.



CCXVIII. NEW INTERESTS AND INVESTMENTS

The spirit which a year earlier had prompted Mark Twain to prepare his
“Salutation from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century” inspired him
now to conceive the “Stupendous International Procession,” a gruesome
pageant described in a document (unpublished) of twenty-two typewritten
pages which begin:

                THE STUPENDOUS PROCESSION

    At the appointed hour it moved across the world in following order:

                  The Twentieth Century

    A fair young creature, drunk and disorderly, borne in the arms of
    Satan. Banner with motto, “Get What You Can, Keep What You Get.”

    Guard of Honor--Monarchs, Presidents, Tammany Bosses, Burglars, Land
    Thieves, Convicts, etc., appropriately clothed and bearing the
    symbols of their several trades.

                      Christendom

    A majestic matron in flowing robes drenched with blood. On her head
    a golden crown of thorns; impaled on its spines the bleeding heads
    of patriots who died for their countries Boers, Boxers, Filipinos;
    in one hand a slung-shot, in the other a Bible, open at the text “Do
    unto others,” etc. Protruding from pocket bottle labeled “We bring
    you the blessings of civilization.” Necklace-handcuffs and a
    burglar’s jimmy.
    Supporters--At one elbow Slaughter, at the other Hypocrisy.
    Banner with motto--“Love Your Neighbor’s Goods as Yourself.”
     Ensign--The Black Flag.
    Guard of Honor--Missionaries and German, French, Russian, and
    British soldiers laden with loot.

And so on, with a section for each nation of the earth, headed each by
the black flag, each bearing horrid emblems, instruments of torture,
mutilated prisoners, broken hearts, floats piled with bloody corpses. At
the end of all, banners inscribed:

       “All White Men are Born Free and Equal.”

          “Christ died to make men holy,
           Christ died to make men free.”

with the American flag furled and draped in crepe, and the shade of
Lincoln towering vast and dim toward the sky, brooding with sorrowful
aspect over the far-reaching pageant. With much more of the same sort.
It is a fearful document, too fearful, we may believe, for Mrs. Clemens
ever to consent to its publication.

Advancing years did little toward destroying Mark Twain’s interest in
human affairs. At no time in his life was he more variously concerned
and employed than in his sixty-seventh year--matters social, literary,
political, religious, financial, scientific. He was always alive, young,
actively cultivating or devising interests--valuable and otherwise,
though never less than important to him.

He had plenty of money again, for one thing, and he liked to find
dazzlingly new ways for investing it. As in the old days, he was always
putting “twenty-five or forty thousand dollars,” as he said, into
something that promised multiplied returns. Howells tells how he found
him looking wonderfully well, and when he asked the name of his elixir
he learned that it was plasmon.

    I did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the
    investments which he had made from “the substance of things hoped
    for,” and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. But after
    paying off the creditors of his late publishing firm he had to do
    something with his money, and it was not his fault if he did not
    make a fortune out of plasmon.

It was just at this period (the beginning of 1902) that he was promoting
with his capital and enthusiasm the plasmon interests in America,
investing in it one of the “usual amounts,” promising to make Howells
over again body and soul with the life-giving albuminate. Once he wrote
him explicit instructions:

    Yes--take it as a medicine--there is nothing better, nothing surer
    of desired results. If you wish to be elaborate--which isn’t
    necessary--put a couple of heaping teaspoonfuls of the powder in an
    inch of milk & stir until it is a paste; put in some more milk and
    stir the paste to a thin gruel; then fill up the glass and drink.

    Or, stir it into your soup.

    Or, into your oatmeal.

    Or, use any method you like, so’s you get it down--that is the only
    essential.

He put another “usual sum” about this time in a patent cash register
which was acknowledged to be “a promise rather than a performance,” and
remains so until this day.

He capitalized a patent spiral hat-pin, warranted to hold the hat on in
any weather, and he had a number of the pins handsomely made to present
to visitors of the sex naturally requiring that sort of adornment
and protection. It was a pretty and ingenious device and apparently
effective enough, though it failed to secure his invested thousands.

He invested a lesser sum in shares of the Booklover’s Library, which was
going to revolutionize the reading world, and which at least paid a
few dividends. Even the old Tennessee land will-o’-the-wisp-long since
repudiated and forgotten--when it appeared again in the form of a
possible equity in some overlooked fragment, kindled a gentle interest,
and was added to his list of ventures.

He made one substantial investment at this period. They became more and
more in love with the Hudson environment, its beauty and its easy
access to New York. Their house was what they liked it to be--a
gathering--place for friends and the world’s notables, who could reach
it easily and quickly from New York. They had a steady procession of
company when Mrs. Clemens’s health would permit, and during a single
week in the early part of this year entertained guests at no less than
seventeen out of their twenty-one meals, and for three out of the seven
nights--not an unusual week. Their plan for buying a home on the Hudson
ended with the purchase of what was known as Hillcrest, or the Casey
place, at Tarrytown, overlooking that beautiful stretch of river, the
Tappan Zee, close to the Washington Irving home. The beauty of its
outlook and surroundings appealed to them all. The house was handsome
and finely placed, and they planned to make certain changes that would
adapt it to their needs. The price, which was less than fifty thousand
dollars, made it an attractive purchase; and without doubt it would have
made them a suitable and happy home had it been written in the future
that they should so inherit it.

Clemens was writing pretty steadily these days. The human race was
furnishing him with ever so many inspiring subjects, and he found time
to touch more or less on most of them. He wreaked his indignation
upon the things which exasperated him often--even usually--without the
expectation of print; and he delivered himself even more inclusively
at such times as he walked the floor between the luncheon or dinner
courses, amplifying on the poverty of an invention that had produced
mankind as a supreme handiwork. In a letter to Howells he wrote:

Your comments on that idiot’s “Ideals” letter reminds me that I preached
a good sermon to my family yesterday on his particular layer of the
human race, that grotesquest of all the inventions of the Creator. It
was a good sermon, but coldly received, & it seemed best not to try to
take up a collection.

He once told Howells, with the wild joy of his boyish heart, how Mrs.
Clemens found some compensation, when kept to her room by illness, in
the reflection that now she would not hear so much about the “damned
human race.”

Yet he was always the first man to champion that race, and the more
unpromising the specimen the surer it was of his protection, and he
never invited, never expected gratitude.

One wonders how he found time to do all the things that he did. Besides
his legitimate literary labors and his preachments, he was always
writing letters to this one and that, long letters on a variety of
subjects, carefully and picturesquely phrased, and to people of every
sort. He even formed a curious society, whose members were young
girls--one in each country of the earth. They were supposed to write
to him at intervals on some subject likely to be of mutual interest,
to which letters he agreed to reply. He furnished each member with a
typewritten copy of the constitution and by-laws of the juggernaut Club,
as he called it, and he apprised each of her election, usually after
this fashion:

    I have a club--a private club, which is all my own. I appoint the
    members myself, & they can’t help themselves, because I don’t allow
    them to vote on their own appointment & I don’t allow them to
    resign! They are all friends whom I have never seen (save one), but
    who have written friendly letters to me. By the laws of my club
    there can be only one member in each country, & there can be no male
    member but myself. Some day I may admit males, but I don’t know
    --they are capricious & inharmonious, & their ways provoke me a good
    deal. It is a matter, which the club shall decide. I have made
    four appointments in the past three or four months: You as a member
    for Scotland--oh, this good while! a young citizeness of Joan of
    Arc’s home region as a member for France; a Mohammedan girl as
    member for Bengal; & a dear & bright young niece of mine as member
    for the United States--for I do not represent a country myself, but
    am merely member-at-large for the human race. You must not try to
    resign, for the laws of the club do not allow that. You must
    console yourself by remembering that you are in the best company;
    that nobody knows of your membership except yourself; that no member
    knows another’s name, but only her country; that no taxes are levied
    and no meetings held (but how dearly I should like to attend one!).
    One of my members is a princess of a royal house, another is the
    daughter of a village bookseller on the continent of Europe, for the
    only qualification for membership is intellect & the spirit of good-
    will; other distinctions, hereditary or acquired, do not count. May
    I send you the constitution & laws of the club? I shall be so glad
    if I may.

It was just one of his many fancies, and most of the active memberships
would not long be maintained; though some continued faithful in their
reports, as he did in his replies, to the end.

One of the more fantastic of his conceptions was a plan to advertise for
ante-mortem obituaries of himself--in order, as he said, that he might
look them over and enjoy them and make certain corrections in the matter
of detail. Some of them he thought might be appropriate to read from the
platform.

    I will correct them--not the facts, but the verdicts--striking out
    such clauses as could have a deleterious influence on the other
    side, and replacing them with clauses of a more judicious character.

He was much taken with the new idea, and his request for such
obituaries, with an offer of a prize for the best--a portrait of himself
drawn by his own hand--really appeared in Harper’s Weekly later in
the year. Naturally he got a shower of responses--serious, playful,
burlesque. Some of them were quite worth while.

The obvious “Death loves a shining Mark” was of course numerously
duplicated, and some varied it “Death loves an Easy Mark,” and there was
“Mark, the perfect man.”

The two that follow gave him especial pleasure.

                OBITUARY FOR “MARK TWAIN”

    Worthy of his portrait, a place on his monument, as well as a place
    among his “perennial-consolation heirlooms”:

              “Got up; washed; went to bed.”

    The subject’s own words (see Innocents Abroad). Can’t go back on
    your own words, Mark Twain. There’s nothing “to strike out”;
    nothing “to replace.” What more could be said of any one?

    “Got up!”--Think of the fullness of meaning! The possibilities of
    life, its achievements--physical, intellectual, spiritual. Got up
    to the top!--the climax of human aspiration on earth!

    “Washed”--Every whit clean; purified--body, soul, thoughts,
    purposes.

    “Went to bed”--Work all done--to rest, to sleep. The culmination of
    the day well spent!

    God looks after the awakening.

                         Mrs. S. A. OREN-HAYNES.

    Mark Twain was the only man who ever lived, so far as we know, whose
    lies were so innocent, and withal so helpful, as to make them worth
    more than a whole lot of fossilized priests’ eternal truths.

                         D. H. KENNER.



CCXIX. YACHTING AND THEOLOGY

Clemens made fewer speeches during the Riverdale period. He was as
frequently demanded, but he had a better excuse for refusing, especially
the evening functions. He attended a good many luncheons with friendly
spirits like Howells, Matthews, James L. Ford, and Hamlin Garland. At
the end of February he came down to the Mayor’s dinner given to Prince
Henry of Prussia, but he did not speak. Clemens used to say afterward
that he had not been asked to speak, and that it was probably because of
his supposed breach of etiquette at the Kaiser’s dinner in Berlin; but
the fact that Prince Henry sought him out, and was most cordially and
humanly attentive during a considerable portion of the evening, is
against the supposition.

Clemens attended a Yale alumni dinner that winter and incidentally
visited Twichell in Hartford. The old question of moral responsibility
came up and Twichell lent his visitor a copy of Jonathan Edwards’s
‘Freedom of the Will’ for train perusal. Clemens found it absorbing.
Later he wrote Twichell his views.

    DEAR JOE,--(After compliments.)--[Meaning “What a good time you gave
    me; what a happiness it was to be under your roof again,” etc. See
    opening sentence of all translations of letters passing between Lord
    Roberts and Indian princes and rulers.]--From Bridgeport to New
    York, thence to home, & continuously until near midnight I wallowed
    & reeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immensely
    refreshed & fine at ten this morning, but with a strange & haunting
    sense of having been on a three days’ tear with a drunken lunatic.
    It is years since I have known these sensations. All through the
    book is the glare of a resplendent intellect gone mad--a marvelous
    spectacle. No, not all through the book--the drunk does not come
    on till the last third, where what I take to be Calvinism & its God
    begins to show up & shine red & hideous in the glow from the fires
    of hell, their only right and proper adornment.

    Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Armenian position) that the
    man (or his soul or his will) never creates an impulse itself, but
    is moved to action by an impulse back of it. That’s sound!

    Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses
    the one which for the moment is most pleasing to ITSELF. Perfectly
    correct! An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane.

    Up to that point he could have written Chapters III & IV of my
    suppressed Gospel. But there we seem to separate. He seems to
    concede the indisputable & unshaken dominion of Motive & Necessity
    (call them what he may, these are exterior forces & not under the
    man’s authority, guidance, or even suggestion); then he suddenly
    flies the logical track & (to all seeming) makes the man & not those
    exterior forces responsible to God for the man’s thoughts, words, &
    acts. It is frank insanity.

    I think that when he concedes the autocratic dominion of Motive and
    Necessity he grants a third position of mine--that a man’s mind is a
    mere machine--an automatic machine--which is handled entirely from
    the outside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing; not
    an ounce of its fuel, & not so much as a bare suggestion to that
    exterior engineer as to what the machine shall do nor how it shall
    do it nor when.

    After that concession it was time for him to get alarmed & shirk
    --for he was pointed straight for the only rational & possible next
    station on that piece of road--the irresponsibility of man to God.

    And so he shirked. Shirked, and arrived at this handsome result:

    Man is commanded to do so & so.

    It has been ordained from the beginning of time that some men
    sha’n’t & others can’t.

    These are to blame: let them be damned.

    I enjoy the Colonel very much, & shall enjoy the rest of him with an
    obscene delight.

    Joe, the whole tribe shout love to you & yours!
                                       MARK.

Clemens was moved to set down some theology of his own, and did so in
a manuscript which he entitled, “If I Could Be There.” It is in the
dialogue form he often adopted for polemic writing. It is a colloquy
between the Master of the Universe and a Stranger. It begins: I. If
I could be there, hidden under the steps of the throne, I should hear
conversations like this:

A STRANGER. Lord, there is one who needs to be punished, and has been
overlooked. It is in the record. I have found it.

LORD. By searching?

S. Yes, Lord.

L. Who is it? What is it?

S. A man.

L. Proceed.

S. He died in sin. Sin committed by his great-grandfather.

L. When was this?

S. Eleven million years ago.

L. Do you know what a microbe is?

S. Yes, Lord. It is a creature too small to be detected by my eye.

L. He commits depredations upon your blood?

S. Yes, Lord.

L. I give you leave to subject him to a billion years of misery for this
offense. Go! Work your will upon him.

S. But, Lord, I have nothing against him; I am indifferent to him.

L. Why?

S. He is so infinitely small and contemptible. I am to him as is a
mountain-range to a grain of sand.

L. What am I to man?

S. (Silent.)

L. Am I not, to a man, as is a billion solar systems to a grain of sand?

S. It is true, Lord.

L. Some microbes are larger than others. Does man regard the difference?

S. No, Lord. To him there is no difference of consequence. To him they
are all microbes, all infinitely little and equally inconsequential.

L. To me there is no difference of consequence between a man & a
microbe. Man looks down upon the speck at his feet called a microbe
from an altitude of a thousand miles, so to speak, and regards him with
indifference; I look down upon the specks called a man and a microbe
from an altitude of a billion leagues, so to speak, and to me they are
of a size. To me both are inconsequential. Man kills the microbes when
he can?

S. Yes, Lord.

L. Then what? Does he keep him in mind years and years and go on
contriving miseries for him?

S. No, Lord.

L. Does he forget him?

S. Yes, Lord.

L. Why?

S. He cares nothing more about him.

L. Employs himself with more important matters?

S. Yes, Lord.

L. Apparently man is quite a rational and dignified person, and can
divorce his mind from uninteresting trivialities. Why does he affront
me with the fancy that I interest Myself in trivialities--like men
and microbes? II. L. Is it true the human race thinks the universe was
created for its convenience?

S. Yes, Lord.

L. The human race is modest. Speaking as a member of it, what do you
think the other animals are for?

S. To furnish food and labor for man.

L. What is the sea for?

S. To furnish food for man. Fishes.

L. And the air?

S. To furnish sustenance for man. Birds and breath.

L. How many men are there?

S. Fifteen hundred millions.

L. (Referring to notes.) Take your pencil and set down some statistics.
In a healthy man’s lower intestine 28,000,000 microbes are born daily
and die daily. In the rest of a man’s body 122,000,000 microbes are born
daily and die daily. The two sums aggregate-what?

S. About 150,000,000.

L. In ten days the aggregate reaches what?

S. Fifteen hundred millions.

L. It is for one person. What would it be for the whole human
population?

S. Alas, Lord, it is beyond the power of figures to set down that
multitude. It is billions of billions multiplied by billions of
billions, and these multiplied again and again by billions of billions.
The figures would stretch across the universe and hang over into space
on both sides.

L. To what intent are these uncountable microbes introduced into the
human race?

S. That they may eat.

L. Now then, according to man’s own reasoning, what is man for?

S. Alas-alas!

L. What is he for?

S. To-to-furnish food for microbes.

L. Manifestly. A child could see it. Now then, with this common-sense
light to aid your perceptions, what are the air, the land, and the ocean
for?

S. To furnish food for man so that he may nourish, support, and multiply
and replenish the microbes.

L. Manifestly. Does one build a boarding-house for the sake of the
boarding-house itself or for the sake of the boarders?

S. Certainly for the sake of the boarders.

L. Man’s a boarding-house.

S. I perceive it, Lord.

L. He is a boarding-house. He was never intended for anything else. If
he had had less vanity and a clearer insight into the great truths that
lie embedded in statistics he would have found it out early. As concerns
the man who has gone unpunished eleven million years, is it your belief
that in life he did his duty by his microbes?

S. Undoubtedly, Lord. He could not help it.

L. Then why punish him? He had no other duty to perform.

Whatever else may be said of this kind of doctrine, it is at least
original and has a conclusive sound. Mark Twain had very little use for
orthodoxy and conservatism. When it was announced that Dr. Jacques Loeb,
of the University of California, had demonstrated the creation of life
by chemical agencies he was deeply interested. When a newspaper writer
commented that a “consensus of opinion among biologists” would probably
rate Dr. Loeb as a man of lively imagination rather than an inerrant
investigator of natural phenomena, he felt called to chaff the consensus
idea.

    I wish I could be as young as that again. Although I seem so old
    now I was once as young as that. I remember, as if it were but
    thirty or forty years ago, how a paralyzing consensus of opinion
    accumulated from experts a-setting around about brother experts who
    had patiently and laboriously cold-chiseled their way into one or
    another of nature’s safe-deposit vaults and were reporting that they
    had found something valuable was plenty for me. It settled it.

    But it isn’t so now-no. Because in the drift of the years I by and
    by found out that a Consensus examines a new thing with its feelings
    rather oftener than with its mind.

    There was that primitive steam-engine-ages back, in Greek times: a
    Consensus made fun of it. There was the Marquis of Worcester’s
    steam-engine 250 years ago: a Consensus made fun of it. There was
    Fulton’s steamboat of a century ago: a French Consensus, including
    the great Napoleon, made fun of it. There was Priestley, with his
    oxygen: a Consensus scoffed at him, mobbed him, burned him out,
    banished him. While a Consensus was proving, by statistics and
    things, that a steamship could not cross the Atlantic, a steamship
    did it.

And so on through a dozen pages or more of lively satire, ending with an
extract from Adam’s Diary.

    Then there was a Consensus about it. It was the very first one. It
    sat six days and nights. It was then delivered of the verdict that
    a world could not be made out of nothing; that such small things as
    sun and moon and stars might, maybe, but it would take years and
    years if there was considerable many of them. Then the Consensus
    got up and looked out of the window, and there was the whole outfit,
    spinning and sparkling in space! You never saw such a disappointed
    lot.
                                        ADAM.

He was writing much at this time, mainly for his own amusement, though
now and then he offered one of his reflections for print. That beautiful
fairy tale, “The Five Boons of Life,” of which the most precious is
“Death,” was written at this period. Maeterlinck’s lovely story of the
bee interested him; he wrote about that. Somebody proposed a Martyrs’
Day; he wrote a paper ridiculing the suggestion. In his note-book, too,
there is a memorandum for a love-story of the Quarternary Epoch which
would begin, “On a soft October afternoon 2,000,000 years ago.” John
Fiske’s Discovery of America, Volume I, he said, was to furnish the
animals and scenery, civilization and conversation to be the same as
to-day; but apparently this idea was carried no further. He ranged
through every subject from protoplasm to infinity, exalting, condemning,
ridiculing, explaining; his brain was always busy--a dynamo that rested
neither night nor day.

In April Clemens received notice of another yachting trip on the
Kanawha, which this time would sail for the Bahama and West India
islands. The guests were to be about the same.--[The invited ones of
the party were Hon. T. B. Reed, A. G. Paine, Laurence Hutton, Dr. C. C.
Rice, W. T. Foote, and S. L. Clemens. “Owners of the yacht,” Mr. Rogers
called them, signing himself as “Their Guest.”]

He sent this telegram:

H. H. ROGERS, Fairhaven, Mass.

Can’t get away this week. I have company here from tonight till
middle of next week. Will Kanawha be sailing after that & can I go as
Sunday-school superintendent at half rate? Answer and prepay.

DR. CLEMENS.

The sailing date was conveniently arranged and there followed a happy
cruise among those balmy islands. Mark Twain was particularly fond
of “Tom” Reed, who had been known as “Czar” Reed in Congress, but was
delightfully human in his personal life. They argued politics a good
deal, and Reed, with all his training and intimate practical knowledge
of the subject, confessed that he “couldn’t argue with a man like that.”

“Do you believe the things you say?” he asked once, in his thin,
falsetto voice.

“Yes,” said Clemens. “Some of them.”

“Well, you want to look out. If you go on this way, by and by you’ll get
to believing nearly everything you say.”

Draw poker appears to have been their favorite diversion. Clemens in his
notes reports that off the coast of Florida Reed won twenty-three pots
in succession. It was said afterward that they made no stops at any
harbor; that when the chief officer approached the poker-table and told
them they were about to enter some important port he received peremptory
orders to “sail on and not interrupt the game.” This, however, may be
regarded as more or less founded on fiction.



CCXX. MARK TWAIN AND THE PHILIPPINES

Among the completed manuscripts of the early part of 1902 was a North
American Review article (published in April)--“Does the Race of Man
Love a Lord?”--a most interesting treatise on snobbery as a universal
weakness. There were also some papers on the Philippine situation. In
one of these Clemens wrote:

    We have bought some islands from a party who did not own them; with
    real smartness and a good counterfeit of disinterested friendliness
    we coaxed a confiding weak nation into a trap and closed it upon
    them; we went back on an honored guest of the Stars and Stripes when
    we had no further use for him and chased him to the mountains; we
    are as indisputably in possession of a wide-spreading archipelago as
    if it were our property; we have pacified some thousands of the
    islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their
    villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors;
    furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable
    patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent
    Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have
    acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves
    of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our
    protecting flag over that swag.

    And so, by these Providences of God--the phrase is the government’s,
    not mine--we are a World Power; and are glad and proud, and have a
    back seat in the family. With tacks in it. At least we are letting
    on to be glad and proud; it is the best way. Indeed, it is the only
    way. We must maintain our dignity, for people are looking. We are
    a World Power; we cannot get out of it now, and we must make the
    best of it.

And again he wrote:

    I am not finding fault with this use of our flag, for in order not
    to seem eccentric I have swung around now and joined the nation in
    the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. I was not properly
    reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be
    sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts lest it
    suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the Philippines to
    float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed it was
    polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so. But I stand
    corrected. I concede and acknowledge that it was only the
    government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. Let us
    compromise on that. I am glad to have it that way. For our flag
    could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it
    is different with the administration.

But a much more conspicuous comment on the Philippine policy was the
so-called “Defense of General Funston” for what Funston himself referred
to as a “dirty Irish trick”; that is to say, deception in the capture of
Aguinaldo. Clemens, who found it hard enough to reconcile himself
to-any form of warfare, was especially bitter concerning this particular
campaign. The article appeared in the North American Review for May,
1902, and stirred up a good deal of a storm. He wrote much more on the
subject--very much more--but it is still unpublished.



CCXXI. THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

One day in April, 1902, Samuel Clemens received the following letter
from the president of the University of Missouri:

MY DEAR MR. CLEMENS, Although you received the degree of doctor of
literature last fall from Yale, and have had other honors conferred upon
you by other great universities, we want to adopt you here as a son of
the University of Missouri. In asking your permission to confer upon you
the degree of LL.D. the University of Missouri does not aim to confer an
honor upon you so much as to show her appreciation of you. The rules of
the University forbid us to confer the degree upon any one in absentia.
I hope very much that you can so arrange your plans as to be with us on
the fourth day of next June, when we shall hold our Annual Commencement.

                     Very truly yours,
                            R. H. JESSE.

Clemens had not expected to make another trip to the West, but a
proffered honor such as this from one’s native State was not a thing to
be declined.

It was at the end of May when he arrived in St. Louis, and he was met at
the train there by his old river instructor and friend, Horace Bixby--as
fresh, wiry, and capable as he had been forty-five years before.

“I have become an old man. You are still thirty-five,” Clemens said.

They went to the Planters Hotel, and the news presently got around that
Mark Twain was there. There followed a sort of reception in the hotel
lobby, after which Bixby took him across to the rooms of the Pilots
Association, where the rivermen gathered in force to celebrate his
return. A few of his old comrades were still alive, among them Beck
Jolly. The same afternoon he took the train for Hannibal.

It was a busy five days that he had in Hannibal. High-school
commencement day came first. He attended, and willingly, or at
least patiently, sat through the various recitals and orations and
orchestrations, dreaming and remembering, no doubt, other high-school
commencements of more than half a century before, seeing in some of
those young people the boys and girls he had known in that vanished
time. A few friends of his youth were still there, but they were among
the audience now, and no longer fresh and looking into the future. Their
heads were white, and, like him, they were looking down the recorded
years. Laura Hawkins was there and Helen Kercheval (Mrs. Frazer and Mrs.
Garth now), and there were others, but they were few and scattering.

He was added to the program, and he made himself as one of the
graduates, and told them some things of the young people of that earlier
time that brought their laughter and their tears.

He was asked to distribute the diplomas, and he undertook the work in
his own way. He took an armful of them and said to the graduates:

“Take one. Pick out a good one. Don’t take two, but be sure you get a
good one.”

So each took one “unsight and unseen” aid made the more exact
distributions among themselves later.

Next morning it was Saturday--he visited the old home on Hill Street,
and stood in the doorway all dressed in white while a battalion of
photographers made pictures of “this return of the native” to the
threshold of his youth.

“It all seems so small to me,” he said, as he looked through the house;
“a boy’s home is a big place to him. I suppose if I should come back
again ten years from now it would be the size of a birdhouse.”

He went through the rooms and up-stairs where he had slept and looked
out the window down in the back yard where, nearly sixty years before,
Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Joe Harper, and the rest--that is to say, Tom
Blankenship, John Briggs, Will Pitts, and the Bowen boys--set out on
their nightly escapades. Of that lightsome band Will Pitts and John
Briggs still remained, with half a dozen others--schoolmates of the less
adventurous sort. Buck Brown, who had been his rival in the spelling
contests, was still there, and John Robards, who had worn golden curls
and the medal for good conduct, and Ed Pierce. And while these were
assembled in a little group on the pavement outside the home a small old
man came up and put out his hand, and it was Jimmy MacDaniel, to whom
so long before, sitting on the river-bank and eating gingerbread, he had
first told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats.

They put him into a carriage, drove him far and wide, and showed the
hills and resorts and rendezvous of Tom Sawyer and his marauding band.

He was entertained that evening by the Labinnah Club (whose name was
achieved by a backward spelling of Hannibal), where he found most of the
survivors of his youth. The news report of that occasion states that he
was introduced by Father McLoughlin, and that he “responded in a very
humorous and touchingly pathetic way, breaking down in tears at the
conclusion. Commenting on his boyhood days and referring to his mother
was too much for the great humorist. Before him as he spoke were sitting
seven of his boyhood friends.”

On Sunday morning Col. John Robards escorted him to the various churches
and Sunday-schools. They were all new churches to Samuel Clemens, but he
pretended not to recognize this fact. In each one he was asked to speak
a few words, and he began by saying how good it was to be back in the
old home Sunday-school again, which as a boy he had always so loved, and
he would go on and point out the very place he had sat, and his escort
hardly knew whether or not to enjoy the proceedings. At one place he
told a moral story. He said:

Little boys and girls, I want to tell you a story which illustrates the
value of perseverance--of sticking to your work, as it were. It is
a story very proper for a Sunday-school. When I was a little boy in
Hannibal I used to play a good deal up here on Holliday’s Hill, which of
course you all know. John Briggs and I played up there. I don’t suppose
there are any little boys as good as we were then, but of course that
is not to be expected. Little boys in those days were ‘most always good
little boys, because those were the good old times when everything was
better than it is now, but never mind that. Well, once upon a time, on
Holliday’s Hill, they were blasting out rock, and a man was drilling for
a blast. He sat there and drilled and drilled and drilled perseveringly
until he had a hole down deep enough for the blast. Then he put in the
powder and tamped and tamped it down, but maybe he tamped it a little
too hard, for the blast went off and he went up into the air, and we
watched him. He went up higher and higher and got smaller and smaller.
First he looked as big as a child, then as big as a dog, then as big as
a kitten, then as big as a bird, and finally he went out of sight. John
Briggs was with me, and we watched the place where he went out of sight,
and by and by we saw him coming down first as big as a bird, then as big
as a kitten, then as big as a dog, then as big as a child, and then he
was a man again, and landed right in his seat and went to drilling just
persevering, you see, and sticking to his work. Little boys and girls,
that’s the secret of success, just like that poor but honest workman on
Holliday’s Hill. Of course you won’t always be appreciated. He wasn’t.
His employer was a hard man, and on Saturday night when he paid him he
docked him fifteen minutes for the time he was up in the air--but never
mind, he had his reward.

He told all this in his solemn, grave way, though the Sunday-school was
in a storm of enjoyment when he finished. There still remains a doubt in
Hannibal as to its perfect suitability, but there is no doubt as to its
acceptability.

That Sunday afternoon, with John Briggs, he walked over Holliday’s
Hill--the Cardiff Hill of Tom Sawyer. It was jest such a Sunday as that
one when they had so nearly demolished the negro driver and had damaged
a cooper-shop. They calculated that nearly three thousand Sundays had
passed since then, and now here they were once more, two old men
with the hills still fresh and green, the river still sweeping by and
rippling in the sun. Standing there together and looking across to
the low-lying Illinois shore, and to the green islands where they had
played, and to Lover’s Leap on the south, the man who had been Sam
Clemens said:

“John, that is one of the loveliest sights I ever saw. Down there by
the island is the place we used to swim, and yonder is where a man was
drowned, and there’s where the steamboat sank. Down there on Lover’s
Leap is where the Millerites put on their robes one night to go to
heaven. None of them went that night, but I suppose most of them have
gone now.”

John Briggs said:

“Sam, do you remember the day we stole the peaches from old man Price
and one of his bow-legged niggers came after us with the dogs, and how
we made up our minds that we’d catch that nigger and drown him?”

They came to the place where they had pried out the great rock that had
so nearly brought them to grief. Sam Clemens said:

“John, if we had killed that man we’d have had a dead nigger on our
hands without a cent to pay for him.”

And so they talked on of this thing and that, and by and by they drove
along the river, and Sam Clemens pointed out the place where he swam it
and was taken with a cramp on the return swim, and believed for a while
that his career was about to close.

“Once, near the shore, I thought I would let down,” he said, “but was
afraid to, knowing that if the water was deep I was a goner, but finally
my knees struck the sand and I crawled out. That was the closest call I
ever had.”

They drove by the place where the haunted house had stood. They drank
from a well they had always known, and from the bucket as they had
always drunk, talking and always talking, fondling lovingly and
lingeringly that most beautiful of all our possessions, the past.

“Sam,” said John, when they parted, “this is probably the last time
we shall meet on this earth. God bless you. Perhaps somewhere we shall
renew our friendship.”

“John,” was the answer, “this day has been worth thousands of dollars
to me. We were like brothers once, and I feel that we are the same now.
Good-by, John. I’ll try to meet you--somewhere.”



CCXXII. A PROPHET HONORED IN HIS COUNTRY

Clemens left next day for Columbia. Committees met him at Rensselaer,
Monroe City, Clapper, Stoutsville, Paris, Madison, Moberly--at every
station along the line of his travel. At each place crowds were gathered
when the train pulled in, to cheer and wave and to present him with
flowers. Sometimes he spoke a few words; but oftener his eyes were full
of tears--his voice would not come.

There is something essentially dramatic in official recognition by one’s
native State--the return of the lad who has set out unknown to battle
with life, and who, having conquered, is invited back to be crowned.
No other honor, however great and spectacular, is quite like that, for
there is in it a pathos and a completeness that are elemental and stir
emotions as old as life itself.

It was on the 4th of June, 1902, that Mark Twain received his doctor
of laws degree from the State University at Columbia, Missouri. James
Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, and Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Secretary
of the Interior, were among those similarly honored. Mark Twain was
naturally the chief attraction. Dressed in his Yale scholastic gown he
led the procession of graduating students, and, as in Hannibal, awarded
them their diplomas. The regular exercises were made purposely brief in
order that some time might be allowed for the conferring of the degrees.
This ceremony was a peculiarly impressive one. Gardner Lathrop read a
brief statement introducing “America’s foremost author and best-loved
citizen, Samuel Langhorne Clemens--Mark Twain.”

Clemens rose, stepped out to the center of the stage, and paused. He
seemed to be in doubt as to whether he should make a speech or simply
express his thanks and retire. Suddenly, and without a signal, the great
audience rose as one man and stood in silence at his feet. He bowed,
but he could not speak. Then that vast assembly began a peculiar chant,
spelling out slowly the word Missouri, with a pause between each
letter. It was dramatic; it was tremendous in its impressiveness. He had
recovered himself when they finished. He said he didn’t know whether he
was expected to make a speech or not. They did not leave him in doubt.
They cheered and demanded a speech, a speech, and he made them one--one
of the speeches he could make best, full of quaint phrasing, happy
humor, gentle and dramatic pathos. He closed by telling the watermelon
story for its “moral effect.”

He was the guest of E. W. Stevens in Columbia, and a dinner was given in
his honor. They would have liked to keep him longer, but he was due in
St. Louis again to join in the dedication of the grounds, where was to
be held a World’s Fair, to celebrate the Louisiana Purchase. Another
ceremony he attended was the christening of the St. Louis harbor-boat,
or rather the rechristening, for it had been decided to change its name
from the St. Louis--[Originally the Elon G. Smith, built in 1873.]--to
the Mark Twain. A short trip was made on it for the ceremony. Governor
Francis and Mayor Wells were of the party, and Count and Countess
Rochambeau and Marquis de Lafayette, with the rest of the French group
that had come over for the dedication of the World’s Fair grounds.

Mark Twain himself was invited to pilot the harbor boat, and so returned
for the last time to his old place at the wheel. They all collected in
the pilot-house behind him, feeling that it was a memorable occasion.
They were going along well enough when he saw a little ripple running
out from the shore across the bow. In the old days he could have told
whether it indicated a bar there or was only caused by the wind, but he
could not be sure any more. Turning to the pilot languidly, he said: “I
feel a little tired. I guess you had better take the wheel.”

Luncheon was served aboard, and Mayor Wells made the christening speech;
then the Countess Rochambeau took a bottle of champagne from the hand of
Governor Francis and smashed it on the deck, saying, “I christen thee,
good boat, Mark Twain.” So it was, the Mississippi joined in according
him honors. In his speech of reply he paid tribute to those illustrious
visitors from France and recounted something of the story of French
exploration along that great river.

“The name of La Salle will last as long as the river itself,” he said;
“will last until commerce is dead. We have allowed the commerce of the
river to die, but it was to accommodate the railroads, and we must be
grateful.”

Carriages were waiting for them when the boat landed in the afternoon,
and the party got in and were driven to a house which had been
identified as Eugene Field’s birthplace. A bronze tablet recording this
fact had been installed, and this was to be the unveiling. The place
was not in an inviting quarter of the town. It stood in what is known as
Walsh’s Row--was fashionable enough once, perhaps, but long since fallen
into disrepute. Ragged children played in the doorways, and thirsty
lodgers were making trips with tin pails to convenient bar-rooms.
A curious nondescript audience assembled around the little group of
dedicators, wondering what it was all about. The tablet was concealed
by the American flag, which could be easily pulled away by an attached
cord. Governor Francis spoke a few words, to the effect that they had
gathered here to unveil a tablet to an American poet, and that it was
fitting that Mark Twain should do this. They removed their hats, and
Clemens, his white hair blowing in the wind, said:

“My friends; we are here with reverence and respect to commemorate and
enshrine in memory the house where was born a man who, by his life,
made bright the lives of all who knew him, and by his literary efforts
cheered the thoughts of thousands who never knew him. I take pleasure in
unveiling the tablet of Eugene Field.”

The flag fell and the bronze inscription was revealed. By this time
the crowd, generally, had recognized who it was that was speaking. A
working-man proposed three cheers for Mark Twain, and they were
heartily given. Then the little party drove away, while the neighborhood
collected to regard the old house with a new interest.

It was reported to Clemens later that there was some dispute as to the
identity of the Field birthplace. He said:

“Never mind. It is of no real consequence whether it is his birthplace
or not. A rose in any other garden will bloom as sweet.”



CCXXIII. AT YORK HARBOR

They decided to spend the summer at York Harbor, Maine. They engaged a
cottage, there, and about the end of June Mr. Rogers brought his yacht
Kanawha to their water-front at Riverdale, and in perfect weather took
them to Maine by sea. They landed at York Harbor and took possession of
their cottage, The Pines, one of their many attractive summer lodges.
Howells, at Kittery Point, was not far away, and everything promised a
happy summer.

Mrs. Clemens wrote to Mrs. Crane:

    We are in the midst of pines. They come up right about us, and the
    house is so high and the roots of the trees are so far below the
    veranda that we are right in the branches. We drove over to call on
    Mr. and Mrs. Howells. The drive was most beautiful, and never in my
    life have I seen such a variety of wild flowers in so short a space.

Howells tells us of the wide, low cottage in a pine grove overlooking
York River, and how he used to sit with Clemens that summer at a corner
of the veranda farthest away from Mrs. Clemens’s window, where they
could read their manuscripts to each other, and tell their stories and
laugh their hearts out without disturbing her.

Clemens, as was his habit, had taken a work-room in a separate cottage
“in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman and a boatman”:

    There was a table where he could write, and a bed where he could lie
    down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of
    those constructive tricks that people’s memories indulge in, he read
    me the first chapters of an admirable story. The scene was laid in
    a Missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood;
    but often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having written
    any such story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope the MS.
    will yet be found.

Howells did not dream it; but in one way his memory misled him. The
story was one which Clemens had heard in Hannibal, and he doubtless
related it in his vivid way. Howells, writing at a later time, quite
naturally included it among the several manuscripts which Clemens read
aloud to him. Clemens may have intended to write the tale, may even have
begun it, though this is unlikely. The incidents were too well known and
too notorious in his old home for fiction.

Among the stories that Clemens did show, or read, to Howells that summer
was “The Belated Passport,” a strong, intensely interesting story with
what Howells in a letter calls a “goat’s tail ending,” perhaps meaning
that it stopped with a brief and sudden shake--with a joke, in fact,
altogether unimportant, and on the whole disappointing to the reader.
A far more notable literary work of that summer grew out of a true
incident which Howells related to Clemens as they sat chatting together
on the veranda overlooking the river one summer afternoon. It was a
pathetic episode in the life of some former occupants of The Pines--the
tale of a double illness in the household, where a righteous deception
was carried on during several weeks for the benefit of a life that
was about to slip away. Out of this grew the story, “Was it Heaven? or
Hell?” a heartbreaking history which probes the very depths of the
human soul. Next to “Hadleyburg,” it is Mark Twain’s greatest fictional
sermon.

Clemens that summer wrote, or rather finished, his most pretentious
poem. One day at Riverdale, when Mrs. Clemens had been with him on the
lawn, they had remembered together the time when their family of little
folks had filled their lives so full, conjuring up dream-like glimpses
of them in the years of play and short frocks and hair-plaits down their
backs. It was pathetic, heart-wringing fancying; and later in the day
Clemens conceived and began the poem which now he brought to conclusion.
It was built on the idea of a mother who imagines her dead child still
living, and describes to any listener the pictures of her fancy. It is
an impressive piece of work; but the author, for some reason, did not
offer it for publication.--[This poem was completed on the anniversary
of Susy’s death and is of considerable length. Some selections from it
will be found under Appendix U, at the end of this work.]

Mrs. Clemens, whose health earlier in the year had been delicate, became
very seriously ill at York Harbor. Howells writes:

At first she had been about the house, and there was one gentle
afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that was the
last time I spoke with her. After that it was really a question of how
soonest and easiest she could be got back to Riverdale.

She had seemed to be in fairly good health and spirits for several weeks
after the arrival at York. Then, early in August, there came a great
celebration of some municipal anniversary, and for two or three days
there were processions, mass-meetings, and so on by day, with fireworks
at night. Mrs. Clemens, always young in spirit, was greatly interested.
She went about more than her strength warranted, seeing and hearing and
enjoying all that was going on. She was finally persuaded to forego the
remaining ceremonies and rest quietly on the pleasant veranda at home;
but she had overtaxed herself and a collapse was inevitable. Howells and
two friends called one afternoon, and a friend of the Queen of Rumania,
a Madame Hartwig, who had brought from that gracious sovereign a letter
which closed in this simple and modest fashion:

    I beg your pardon for being a bore to one I so deeply love and
    admire, to whom I owe days and days of forgetfulness of self and
    troubles, and the intensest of all joys-hero-worship! People don’t
    always realize what a happiness that is! God bless you for every
    beautiful thought you poured into my tired heart, and for every
    smile on a weary way.                CARMEN SYLVA.

This was the occasion mentioned by Howells when Mrs. Clemens made tea
for them in the parlor for the last time. Her social life may be said to
have ended that afternoon. Next morning the break came. Clemens, in his
notebook for that day, writes:

Tuesday, August 12, 1902. At 7 A.M. Livy taken violently ill. Telephoned
and Dr. Lambert was here in 1/2 hour. She could not breathe-was likely
to stifle. Also she had severe palpitation. She believed she was dying.
I also believed it.

Nurses were summoned, and Mrs. Crane and others came from Elmira. Clara
Clemens took charge of the household and matters generally, and the
patient was secluded and guarded from every disturbing influence.
Clemens slipped about with warnings of silence. A visitor found notices
in Mark Twain’s writing pinned to the trees near Mrs. Clemens’s window
warning the birds not to sing too loudly.

The patient rallied, but she remained very much debilitated. On
September 3d the note-book says:

    Always Mr. Rogers keeps his yacht Kanawha in commission & ready to
    fly here and take us to Riverdale on telegraphic notice.

But Mrs. Clemens was unable to return by sea. When it was decided at
last, in October, that she could be removed to Riverdale, Clemens and
Howells went to Boston and engaged an invalid car to make the journey
from York Harbor to Riverdale without change. Howells tells us that
Clemens gave his strictest personal attention to the arrangement of
these details, and that they absorbed him.

    There was no particular of the business which he did not scrutinize
    and master.... With the inertness that grows upon an aging
    man he had been used to delegate more and more things, but of that
    thing I perceived that he would not delegate the least detail.

They made the journey on the 16th, in nine and a half hours. With the
exception of the natural weariness due to such a trip, the invalid was
apparently no worse on their arrival. The stout English butler carried
her to her room. It would be many months before she would leave it
again. In one of his memoranda Clemens wrote:

    Our dear prisoner is where she is through overwork-day & night
    devotion to the children & me. We did not know how to value it. We
    know now.

And in a notation, on a letter praising him for what he had done for the
world’s enjoyment, and for his splendid triumph over debt, he said:

    Livy never gets her share of these applauses, but it is because the
    people do not know. Yet she is entitled to the lion’s share.

He wrote Twichell at the end of October:

    Livy drags along drearily. It must be hard times for that turbulent
    spirit. It will be a long time before she is on her feet again. It
    is a most pathetic case. I wish I could transfer it to myself.
    Between ripping & raging & smoking & reading I could get a good deal
    of holiday out of it. Clara runs the house smoothly & capitally.

Heavy as was the cloud of illness, he could not help pestering Twichell
a little about a recent mishap--a sprained shoulder:

    I should like to know how & where it happened. In the pulpit, as
    like as not, otherwise you would not be taking so much pains to
    conceal it. This is not a malicious suggestion, & not a personally
    invented one: you told me yourself once that you threw artificial
    power & impressiveness in your sermons where needed by “banging the
    Bible”--(your own words). You have reached a time of life when it
    is not wise to take these risks. You would better jump around. We
    all have to change our methods as the infirmities of age creep upon
    us. Jumping around will be impressive now, whereas before you were
    gray it would have excited remark.

Mrs. Clemens seemed to improve as the weeks passed, and they had great
hopes of her complete recovery. Clemens took up some work--a new
Huck Finn story, inspired by his trip to Hannibal. It was to have two
parts--Huck and Tom in youth, and then their return in old age. He did
some chapters quite in the old vein, and wrote to Howells of his plan.
Howells answered:

    It is a great lay-out: what I shall enjoy most will be the return of
    the old fellows to the scene and their tall lying. There is a
    matchless chance there. I suppose you will put in plenty of pegs in
    this prefatory part.

But the new story did not reach completion. Huck and Tom would not come
back, even to go over the old scenes.



CCXXIV. THE SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY DINNER

It was on the evening of the 27th of November, 1902, I at the
Metropolitan Club, New York City, that Col. George Harvey, president
of the Harper Company, gave Mark Twain a dinner in celebration of his
sixty-seventh birthday. The actual date fell three days later; but that
would bring it on Sunday, and to give it on Saturday night would be
more than likely to carry it into Sabbath morning, and so the 27th was
chosen. Colonel Harvey himself presided, and Howells led the speakers
with a poem, “A Double-Barreled Sonnet to Mark Twain,” which closed:

       Still, to have everything beyond cavil right,
       We will dine with you here till Sunday night.

Thomas Brackett Reed followed with what proved to be the last speech he
would ever make, as it was also one of his best. All the speakers did
well that night, and they included some of the country’s foremost in
oratory: Chauncey Depew, St. Clair McKelway, Hamilton Mabie, and Wayne
MacVeagh. Dr. Henry van Dyke and John Kendrick Bangs read poems. The
chairman constantly kept the occasion from becoming too serious by
maintaining an attitude of “thinking ambassador” for the guest of the
evening, gently pushing Clemens back in his seat when he attempted to
rise and expressing for him an opinion of each of the various tributes.

“The limit has been reached,” he announced at the close of Dr. van
Dyke’s poem. “More that is better could not be said. Gentlemen, Mr.
Clemens.”

It is seldom that Mark Twain has made a better after-dinner speech than
he delivered then. He was surrounded by some of the best minds of the
nation, men assembled to do him honor. They expected much of him--to
Mark Twain always an inspiring circumstance. He was greeted with cheers
and hand-clapping that came volley after volley, and seemed never ready
to end. When it had died away at last he stood waiting a little in the
stillness for his voice; then he said, “I think I ought to be allowed to
talk as long as I want to,” and again the storm broke.

It is a speech not easy to abridge--a finished and perfect piece of
after-dinner eloquence,--[The “Sixty-seventh Birthday Speech” entire is
included in the volume Mark Twain’s Speeches.]--full of humorous stories
and moving references to old friends--to Hay; and Reed, and Twichell,
and Howells, and Rogers, the friends he had known so long and loved so
well. He told of his recent trip to his boyhood home, and how he had
stood with John Briggs on Holliday’s Hill and they had pointed out
the haunts of their youth. Then at the end he paid a tribute to the
companion of his home, who could not be there to share his evening’s
triumph. This peroration--a beautiful heart-offering to her and to those
that had shared in long friendship--demands admission:

    Now, there is one invisible guest here. A part of me is not
    present; the larger part, the better part, is yonder at her home;
    that is my wife, and she has a good many personal friends here, and
    I think it won’t distress any one of them to know that, although she
    is going to be confined to her bed for many months to come from that
    nervous prostration, there is not any danger and she is coming along
    very well--and I think it quite appropriate that I should speak of
    her. I knew her for the first time just in the same year that I
    first knew John Hay and Tom Reed and Mr. Twichell--thirty-six years
    ago--and she has been the best friend I have ever had, and that is
    saying a good deal--she has reared me--she and Twichell together
    --and what I am I owe to them. Twichell--why, it is such a pleasure
    to look upon Twichell’s face! For five and twenty years I was under
    the Rev. Mr. Twichell’s tuition, I was in his pastorate occupying a
    pew in his church and held him in due reverence. That man is full
    of all the graces that go to make a person companionable and
    beloved; and wherever Twichell goes to start a church the people
    flock there to buy the land; they find real estate goes up all
    around the spot, and the envious and the thoughtful always try to
    get Twichell to move to their neighborhood and start a church; and
    wherever you see him go you can go and buy land there with
    confidence, feeling sure that there will be a double price for you
    before very long.

    I have tried to do good in this world, and it is marvelous in how
    many different ways I have done good, and it is comfortable to
    reflect--now, there’s Mr. Rogers--just out of the affection I bear
    that man many a time I have given him points in finance that he had
    never thought of--and if he could lay aside envy, prejudice, and
    superstition, and utilize those ideas in his business, it would make
    a difference in his bank-account.

    Well, I liked the poetry. I liked all the speeches and the poetry,
    too. I liked Dr. van Dyke’s poem. I wish I could return thanks in
    proper measure to you, gentlemen, who have spoken and violated your
    feelings to pay me compliments; some were merited and some you
    overlooked, it is true; and Colonel Harvey did slander every one of
    you, and put things into my mouth that I never said, never thought
    of at all.

    And now my wife and I, out of our single heart, return you our
    deepest and most grateful thanks, and--yesterday was her birthday.

The sixty-seventh birthday dinner was widely celebrated by the press,
and newspaper men generally took occasion to pay brilliant compliments
to Mark Twain. Arthur Brisbane wrote editorially:

    For more than a generation he has been the Messiah of a genuine
    gladness and joy to the millions of three continents.

It was little more than a week later that one of the old friends he
had mentioned, Thomas Brackett Reed, apparently well and strong that
birthday evening, passed from the things of this world. Clemens felt his
death keenly, and in a “good-by” which he wrote for Harper’s Weekly he
said:

    His was a nature which invited affection--compelled it, in fact--and
    met it half-way. Hence, he was “Tom” to the most of his friends and
    to half of the nation....

    I cannot remember back to a time when he was not “Tom” Reed to me,
    nor to a time when he could have been offended at being so addressed
    by me. I cannot remember back to a time when I could let him alone
    in an after-dinner speech if he was present, nor to a time when he
    did not take my extravagance concerning him and misstatements about
    him in good part, nor yet to a time when he did not pay them back
    with usury when his turn came. The last speech he made was at my
    birthday dinner at the end of November, when naturally I was his
    text; my last word to him was in a letter the next day; a day later
    I was illustrating a fantastic article on art with his portrait
    among others--a portrait now to be laid reverently away among the
    jests that begin in humor and end in pathos. These things happened
    only eight days ago, and now he is gone from us, and the nation is
    speaking of him as one who was. It seems incredible, impossible.
    Such a man, such a friend, seems to us a permanent possession; his
    vanishing from our midst is unthinkable, as was the vanishing of the
    Campanile, that had stood for a thousand years and was turned to
    dust in a moment.

The appreciation closes:

    I have only wished to say how fine and beautiful was his life and
    character, and to take him by the hand and say good-by, as to a
    fortunate friend who has done well his work and gees a pleasant
    journey.



CCXXV. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CONTROVERSIES

The North American Review for December (1902) contained an instalment
of the Christian Science series which Mark Twain had written in Vienna
several years before. He had renewed his interest in the doctrine, and
his admiration for Mrs. Eddy’s peculiar abilities and his antagonism
toward her had augmented in the mean time. Howells refers to the “mighty
moment when Clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction
of Christian Science, which superstition nobody, and he least of all,
expected to destroy”:

    He believed that as a religious machine the Christian Science Church
    was as perfect as the Roman Church, and destined to be more
    formidable in its control of the minds of men....

    An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not.
    only his admiration for the masterly policy of the Christian Science
    hierarchy, but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers
    to be tried on his friends and family if they wished it. He had a
    tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the
    newer sorts of scienticians, but he seemed to base his faith in them
    largely upon the failure of the regulars, rather than upon their own
    successes, which also he believed in. He was recurrently, but not
    insistently, desirous that you should try their strange magics when
    you were going to try the familiar medicines.

Clemens never had any quarrel with the theory of Christian Science or
mental healing, or with any of the empiric practices. He acknowledged
good in all of them, and he welcomed most of them in preference to
materia medica. It is true that his animosity for the founder of the
Christian Science cult sometimes seems to lap over and fringe the
religion itself; but this is apparent rather than real. Furthermore,
he frequently expressed a deep obligation which humanity owed to the
founder of the faith, in that she had organized a healing element
ignorantly and indifferently employed hitherto. His quarrel with Mrs.
Eddy lay in the belief that she herself, as he expressed it, was “a very
unsound Christian Scientist.”

    I believe she has a serious malady--self-edification--and that it
    will be well to have one of the experts demonstrate over her. [But
    he added]: Closely examined, painstakingly studied, she is easily
    the most interesting person on the planet, and in several ways as
    easily the most extraordinary woman that was ever born upon it.

Necessarily, the forces of Christian Science were aroused by these
articles, and there were various replies, among them, one by the founder
herself, a moderate rejoinder in her usual literary form.

    “Mrs. Eddy in Error,” in the North American Review for April, 1903,
    completed what Clemens had to say on the matter for this time.

He was putting together a book on the subject, comprised of his various
published papers and some added chapters. It would not be a large
volume, and he offered to let his Christian Science opponents share it
with him, stating their side of the case. Mr. William D. McCrackan, one
of the church’s chief advocates, was among those invited to participate.
McCrackan and Clemens, from having begun as enemies, had become
quite friendly, and had discussed their differences face to face at
considerable length. Early in the controversy Clemens one night wrote
McCrackan a pretty savage letter. He threw it on the hall table for
mailing, but later got out of bed and slipped down-stairs to get it. It
was too late--the letters had been gathered up and mailed. Next evening
a truly Christian note came from McCrackan, returning the hasty letter,
which he said he was sure the writer would wish to recall. Their
friendship began there. For some reason, however, the collaborated
volume did not materialize. In the end, publication was delayed a
number of years, by which time Clemens’s active interest was a good
deal modified, though the practice itself never failed to invite his
attention.

Howells refers to his anti-Christian Science rages, which began with
the postponement of the book, and these Clemens vented at the time
in another manuscript entitled, “Eddypus,” an imaginary history of a
thousand years hence, when Eddyism should rule the world. By that day
its founder would have become a deity, and the calendar would be changed
to accord with her birth. It was not publishable matter, and really
never intended as such. It was just one of the things which Mark Twain
wrote to relieve mental pressure.



CCXXVI. “WAS IT HEAVEN? OR HELL?”

The Christmas number of Harper’s Magazine for 1902 contained the story,
“Was it Heaven? or Hell?” and it immediately brought a flood of letters
to its author from grateful readers on both sides of the ocean. An
Englishman wrote: “I want to thank you for writing so pathetic and so
profoundly true a story”; and an American declared it to be the best
short story ever written. Another letter said:

    I have learned to love those maiden liars--love and weep over them
    --then put them beside Dante’s Beatrice in Paradise.

There were plenty of such letters; but there was one of a different
sort. It was a letter from a man who had but recently gone through
almost precisely the experience narrated in the tale. His dead daughter
had even borne the same name--Helen. She had died of typhus while her
mother was prostrated with the same malady, and the deception had been
maintained in precisely the same way, even to the fictitiously written
letters. Clemens replied to this letter, acknowledging the striking
nature of the coincidence it related, and added that, had he invented
the story, he would have believed it a case of mental telegraphy.

    I was merely telling a true story just as it had been told to me by
    one who well knew the mother and the daughter & all the beautiful &
    pathetic details. I was living in the house where it had happened,
    three years before, & I put it on paper at once while it was fresh
    in my mind, & its pathos still straining at my heartstrings.

Clemens did not guess that the coincidences were not yet complete, that
within a month the drama of the tale would be enacted in his own home.
In his note-book, under the date of December 24(1902), he wrote:

    Jean was hit with a chill: Clara was completing her watch in her
    mother’s room and there was no one able to force Jean to go to bed.
    As a result she is pretty ill to-day-fever & high temperature.

Three days later he added:

    It was pneumonia. For 5 days jean’s temperature ranged between 103
    & 104 2/5, till this morning, when it got down to 101. She looks
    like an escaped survivor of a forest fire. For 6 days now my story
    in the Christmas Harper’s “Was it Heaven? or Hell?”--has been
    enacted in this household. Every day Clara & the nurses have lied
    about Jean to her mother, describing the fine times she is having
    outdoors in the winter sports.

That proved a hard, trying winter in the Clemens home, and the burden
of it fell chiefly, indeed almost entirely, upon Clara Clemens. Mrs.
Clemens became still more frail, and no other member of the family, not
even her husband, was allowed to see her for longer than the briefest
interval. Yet the patient was all the more anxious to know the news, and
daily it had to be prepared--chiefly invented--for her comfort. In
an account which Clemens once set down of the “Siege and Season of
Unveracity,” as he called it, he said:

    Clara stood a daily watch of three or four hours, and hers was a
    hard office indeed. Daily she sealed up in her heart a dozen
    dangerous truths, and thus saved her mother’s life and hope and
    happiness with holy lies. She had never told her mother a lie in
    her life before, and I may almost say that she never told her a
    truth afterward. It was fortunate for us all that Clara’s
    reputation for truthfulness was so well established in her mother’s
    mind. It was our daily protection from disaster. The mother never
    doubted Clara’s word. Clara could tell her large improbabilities
    without exciting any suspicion, whereas if I tried to market even a
    small and simple one the case would have been different. I was
    never able to get a reputation like Clara’s. Mrs. Clemens
    questioned Clara every day concerning Jean’s health, spirits,
    clothes, employments, and amusements, and how she was enjoying
    herself; and Clara furnished the information right along in minute
    detail--every word of it false, of course. Every day she had to
    tell how Jean dressed, and in time she got so tired of using Jean’s
    existing clothes over and over again, and trying to get new effects
    out of them, that finally, as a relief to her hard-worked invention,
    she got to adding imaginary clothes to Jean’s wardrobe, and probably
    would have doubled it and trebled it if a warning note in her
    mother’s comments had not admonished her that she was spending more
    money on these spectral gowns and things than the family income
    justified.

Some portions of detailed accounts of Clara’s busy days of this period,
as written at the time by Clemens to Twichell and to Mrs. Crane, are
eminently worth preserving. To Mrs. Crane:

    Clara does not go to her Monday lesson in New York today [her mother
    having seemed not so well through the night], but forgets that fact
    and enters her mother’s room (where she has no business to be)
    toward train-time dressed in a wrapper.

    LIVY. Why, Clara, aren’t you going to your lesson?
    CLARA (almost caught). Yes.
    L. In that costume?
    CL. Oh no.
    L. Well, you can’t make your train; it’s impossible.
    CL. I know, but I’m going to take the other one.
    L. Indeed that won’t do--you’ll be ever so much too late for
    your lesson.
    CL. No, the lesson-time has been put an hour later.
    L. (satisfied, then suddenly). But, Clara, that train and the late
    lesson together will make you late to Mrs. Hapgood’s luncheon.
    CL. No, the train leaves fifteen minutes earlier than it used to.
    L. (satisfied). Tell Mrs. Hapgood, etc., etc., etc. (which Clara
    promises to do). Clara, dear, after the luncheon--I hate to put
    this on you--but could you do two or three little shopping-errands
    for me?
    CL. Oh, it won’t trouble me a bit-I can do it. (Takes a list of
    the things she is to buy-a list which she will presently hand to
    another.)

    At 3 or 4 P.M. Clara takes the things brought from New York,
    studies over her part a little, then goes to her mother’s room.

    LIVY. It’s very good of you, dear. Of course, if I had known it
    was going to be so snowy and drizzly and sloppy I wouldn’t have
    asked you to buy them. Did you get wet?
    CL. Oh, nothing to hurt.
    L. You took a cab both ways?
    CL. Not from the station to the lesson-the weather was good enough
    till that was over.
    L. Well, now, tell me everything Mrs. Hapgood said.

    Clara tells her a long yarn-avoiding novelties and surprises and
    anything likely to inspire questions difficult to answer; and of
    course detailing the menu, for if it had been the feeding of the
    5,000 Livy would have insisted on knowing what kind of bread it was
    and how the fishes were served. By and by, while talking of
    something else:

    LIVY. Clams!--in the end of December. Are you sure it was clams?
    CL. I didn’t say cl---I meant Blue Points.
    L. (tranquilized). It seemed odd. What is Jean doing?
    CL. She said she was going to do a little typewriting.
    L. Has she been out to-day?
    CL. Only a moment, right after luncheon. She was determined to go
    out again, but----
    L. How did you know she was out?
    CL. (saving herself in time). Katie told me. She was determined
    to go out again in the rain and snow, but I persuaded her to stay
    in.
    L. (with moving and grateful admiration). Clara, you are
    wonderful! the wise watch you keep over Jean, and the influence you
    have over her; it’s so lovely of you, and I tied here and can’t take
    care of her myself. (And she goes on with these undeserved praises
    till Clara is expiring with shame.)

To Twichell:

    I am to see Livy a moment every afternoon until she has another bad
    night; and I stand in dread, for with all my practice I realize that
    in a sudden emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar, whereas a fine
    alert and capable emergency liar is the only sort that is worth
    anything in a sick-chamber.

    Now, Joe, just see what reputation can do. All Clara’s life she has
    told Livy the truth and now the reward comes; Clara lies to her
    three and a half hours every day, and Livy takes it all at par,
    whereas even when I tell her a truth it isn’t worth much without
    corroboration....

    Soon my brief visit is due. I’ve just been up listening at Livy’s
    door.

    5 P.M. A great disappointment. I was sitting outside Livy’s door
    waiting. Clara came out a minute ago and said L ivy is not so well,
    and the nurse can’t let me see her to-day.

That pathetic drama was to continue in some degree for many a long
month. All that winter and spring Mrs. Clemens kept but a frail hold on
life. Clemens wrote little, and refused invitations everywhere he could.
He spent his time largely in waiting for the two-minute period each day
when he could stand at the bed-foot and say a few words to the invalid,
and he confined his writing mainly to the comforting, affectionate
messages which he was allowed to push under her door. He was always
waiting there long before the moment he was permitted to enter. Her
illness and her helplessness made manifest what Howells has fittingly
characterized as his “beautiful and tender loyalty to her, which was the
most moving quality of his most faithful soul.”



CCXXVII. THE SECOND RIVERDALE WINTER

Most of Mark Twain’s stories have been dramatized at one time or
another, and with more or less success. He had two plays going that
winter, one of them the little “Death Disk,” which--in story form
had appeared a year before in Harper’s Magazine. It was put on at the
Carnegie Lyceum with considerable effect, but it was not of sufficient
importance to warrant a long continuance.

Another play of that year was a dramatization of Huckleberry Finn, by
Lee Arthur. This was played with a good deal of success in Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and elsewhere, the receipts ranging from three hundred
to twenty-one hundred dollars per night, according to the weather and
locality. Why the play was discontinued is not altogether apparent;
certainly many a dramatic enterprise has gone further, faring worse.

Huck in book form also had been having adventures a little earlier, in
being tabooed on account of his morals by certain librarians of Denver
and Omaha. It was years since Huck had been in trouble of that sort, and
he acquired a good deal of newspaper notoriety in consequence.

Certain entries in Mark Twain’s note-book reveal somewhat of his life
and thought at this period. We find such entries as this:

    Saturday, January 3, 1903. The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity,
    ostentation, arrogance, tyranny.

    Sunday, January 4, 1903. The offspring of poverty: Greed,
    sordidness, envy, hate, malice, cruelty, meanness, lying, shirking,
    cheating, stealing, murder.

    Monday, February 2, 1903. 33d wedding anniversary. I was allowed
    to see Livy 5 minutes this morning in honor of the day. She makes
    but little progress toward recovery, still there is certainly some,
    we are sure.

    Sunday, March 1, 1903. We may not doubt that society in heaven
    consists mainly of undesirable persons.

    Thursday, March 19, 1903. Susy’s birthday. She would be 31 now.

The family illnesses, which presently included an allotment for himself,
his old bronchitis, made him rage more than ever at the imperfections
of the species which could be subject to such a variety of ills. Once he
wrote:

    Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

And again:

    Adam, man’s benefactor--he gave him all that he has ever received
    that was worth having--death.

The Riverdale home was in reality little more than a hospital that
spring. Jean had scarcely recovered her physical strength when she was
attacked by measles, and Clara also fell a victim to the infection.
Fortunately Mrs. Clemens’s health had somewhat improved.

It was during this period that Clemens formulated his eclectic
therapeutic doctrine. Writing to Twichell April 4, 1903, he said:

    Livy does make a little progress these past 3 or 4 days, progress
    which is visible to even the untrained eye. The physicians are
    doing good work for her, but my notion is, that no art of healing is
    the best for all ills. I should distribute the ailments around:
    surgery cases to the surgeon; lupus to the actinic-ray specialist;
    nervous prostration to the Christian Scientist; most ills to the
    allopath & the homeopath; & (in my own particular case) rheumatism,
    gout, & bronchial attack to the osteopathist.

He had plenty of time to think and to read during those weeks of
confinement, and to rage, and to write when he felt the need of that
expression, though he appears to have completed not much for print
beyond his reply to Mrs. Eddy, already mentioned, and his burlesque,
“Instructions in Art,” with pictures by himself, published in the
Metropolitan for April and May.

Howells called his attention to some military outrages in the
Philippines, citing a case where a certain lieutenant had tortured one
of his men, a mild offender, to death out of pure deviltry, and had been
tried but not punished for his fiendish crime.--[The torture to death
of Private Edward C. Richter, an American soldier, by orders of a
commissioned officer of the United States army on the night of February
7, 1902. Private Richter was bound and gagged and the gag held in his
mouth by means of a club while ice-water was slowly poured into his
face, a dipper full at a time, for two hours and a half, until life
became extinct.]

Clemens undertook to give expression to his feelings on this subject,
but he boiled so when he touched pen to paper to write of it that it was
simply impossible for him to say anything within the bounds of print.
Then his only relief was to rise and walk the floor, and curse out his
fury at the race that had produced such a specimen.

Mrs. Clemens, who perhaps got some drift or the echo of these tempests,
now and then sent him a little admonitory, affectionate note.

Among the books that Clemens read, or tried to read, during his
confinement were certain of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. He had never
been able to admire Scott, and determined now to try to understand this
author’s popularity and his standing with the critics; but after wading
through the first volume of one novel, and beginning another one, he
concluded to apply to one who could speak as having authority. He wrote
to Brander Matthews:

    DEAR BRANDER,--I haven’t been out of my bed for 4 weeks, but-well, I
    have been reading a good deal, & it occurs to me to ask you to sit
    down, some time or other when you have 8 or 9 months to spare, & jot
    me down a certain few literary particulars for my help & elevation.
    Your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you
    can make Columbian lectures out of the results & do your students a
    good turn.

    1. Are there in Sir Walter’s novels passages done in good English
    --English which is neither slovenly nor involved?

    2. Are there passages whose English is not poor & thin &
    commonplace, but is of a quality above that?

    3. Are there passages which burn with real fire--not punk, fox-
    fire, make-believe?
    4. Has he heroes & heroines who are not cads and cadesses?

    5. Has he personages whose acts & talk correspond with their
    characters as described by him?

    6. Has he heroes & heroines whom the reader admires--admires and
    knows why?

    7. Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages
    that are humorous?

    8. Does he ever chain the reader’s interest & make him reluctant to
    lay the book down?

    9. Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from
    admiring the placid flood & flow of his own dilution, ceases from
    being artificial, & is for a time, long or short, recognizably
    sincere & in earnest?

    10. Did he know how to write English, & didn’t do it because he
    didn’t want to?

    11. Did he use the right word only when he couldn’t think of
    another one, or did he run so much to wrong words because he didn’t
    know the right one when he saw it?

    12. Can you read him and keep your respect for him? Of course a
    person could in his day--an era of sentimentality & sloppy
    romantics--but land! can a body do it to-day?

    Brander, I lie here dying; slowly dying, under the blight of Sir
    Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, & as far as
    Chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, & I can no longer hold my head up or
    take my nourishment. Lord, it’s all so juvenile! so artificial, so
    shoddy; & such wax figures & skeletons & specters. Interest? Why,
    it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these
    milk-&-water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of invention! Not
    poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons
    for them. Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges
    for a situation--elaborates & elaborates & elaborates till, if you
    live to get to it, you don’t believe in it when it happens.

    I can’t find the rest of Rob Roy, I, can’t stand any more Mannering
    --I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, & not quit this
    great study rashly....

    My, I wish I could see you & Leigh Hunt!

    Sincerely yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.

But a few days later he experienced a revelation. It came when he
perseveringly attacked still a third work of Scott--Quentin Durward.
Hastily he wrote to Matthews again:

I’m still in bed, but the days have lost their dullness since I broke
into Sir Walter & lost my temper. I finished Guy Mannering that curious,
curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows gibbering around a single
flesh-&-blood being--Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the
very refuse of the romance artist’s stage properties--finished it & took
up Quentin Durward & finished that.

It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living; it was like
withdrawing from the infant class in the college of journalism to sit
under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.

I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?--[This letter, enveloped, addressed,
and stamped, was evidently mislaid. It was found and mailed seven years
later, June, 1910 message from the dead.]

Among other books which he read that winter and spring was Helen
Keller’s ‘The Story of My Life’, then recently published. That he
finished it in a mood of sweet gentleness we gather from a long, lovely
letter which he wrote her--a letter in which he said:

I am charmed with your book--enchanted. You are a wonderful creature,
the most wonderful in the world--you and your other half together--Miss
Sullivan, I mean--for it took the pair of you to make a complete &
perfect whole. How she stands out in her letters! her brilliancy,
penetration, originality, wisdom, character, & the fine literary
competencies of her pen--they are all there.

When reading and writing failed as diversion, Mark Twain often turned
to mathematics. With no special talent for accuracy in the matter of
figures, he had a curious fondness for calculations, scientific and
financial, and he used to cover pages, ciphering at one thing and
another, arriving pretty inevitably at the wrong results. When the
problem was financial, and had to do with his own fortunes, his figures
were as likely as not to leave him in a state of panic. The expenditures
were naturally heavy that spring; and one night, when he had nothing
better to do, he figured the relative proportion to his income. The
result showed that they were headed straight for financial ruin. He
put in the rest of the night fearfully rolling and tossing, and
reconstructing his figures that grew always worse, and next morning
summoned Jean and Clara and petrified them with the announcement that
the cost of living was one hundred and twenty-five per cent. more than
the money-supply.

Writing to MacAlister three days later he said:

    It was a mistake. When I came down in the morning, a gray and aged
    wreck, I found that in some unaccountable way (unaccountable to a
    business man, but not to me) I had multiplied the totals by two. By
    God, I dropped seventy-five years on the floor where I stood!

    Do you know it affected me as one is affected when one wakes out of
    a hideous dream & finds it was only a dream. It was a great comfort
    & satisfaction to me to call the daughters to a private meeting of
    the board again. Certainly there is a blistering & awful reality
    about a well-arranged unreality. It is quite within the
    possibilities that two or three nights like that of mine would drive
    a man to suicide. He would refuse to examine the figures, they
    would revolt him so, & he would go to his death unaware that there
    was nothing serious about them. I cannot get that night out of my
    head, it was so vivid, so real, so ghastly: In any other year of
    these thirty-three the relief would have been simple: go where you
    can, cut your cloth to fit your income. You can’t do that when your
    wife can’t be moved, even from one room to the next.

    The doctor & a specialist met in conspiracy five days ago, & in
    their belief she will by and by come out of this as good as new,
    substantially. They ordered her to Italy for next winter--which
    seems to indicate that by autumn she will be able to undertake the
    voyage. So Clara is writing to a Florence friend to take a look
    around among the villas for us in the regions near that city.



CCXXVIII. PROFFERED HONORS

Mark Twain had been at home well on toward three years; but his
popularity showed no signs of diminishing. So far from having waned,
it had surged to a higher point than ever before. His crusade against
public and private abuses had stirred readers, and had set them to
thinking; the news of illness in his household; a report that he was
contemplating another residence abroad--these things moved deeply the
public heart, and a tide of letters flowed in, letters of every sort--of
sympathy, of love, or hearty endorsement, whatever his attitude of
reform.

When a writer in a New York newspaper said, “Let us go outside the
realm of practical politics next time in choosing our candidates for the
Presidency,” and asked, “Who is our ablest and most conspicuous private
citizen?” another editorial writer, Joseph Hollister, replied that Mark
Twain was “the greatest man of his day in private life, and entitled to
the fullest measure of recognition.”

But Clemens was without political ambitions. He knew the way of such
things too well. When Hollister sent him the editorial he replied only
with a word of thanks, and did not, even in jest, encourage that tiny
seed of a Presidential boom. One would like to publish many of the
beautiful letters received during this period, for they are beautiful,
most of them, however illiterate in form, however discouraging in
length--beautiful in that they overflow with the writers’ sincerity and
gratitude.

So many of them came from children, usually without the hope of a reply,
some signed only with initials, that the writers might not be open to
the suspicion of being seekers for his autograph. Almost more than any
other reward, Mark Twain valued this love of the children.

A department in the St. Nicholas Magazine offered a prize for a
caricature drawing of some well-known man. There were one or two of
certain prominent politicians and capitalists, and there was literally
a wheelbarrow load of Mark Twain. When he was informed of this he wrote:
“No tribute could have pleased me more than that--the friendship of the
children.”

Tributes came to him in many forms. In his native State it was proposed
to form a Mark Twain Association, with headquarters at Hannibal, with
the immediate purpose of having a week set apart at the St. Louis
World’s Fair, to be called the Mark Twain week, with a special Mark
Twain day, on which a national literary convention would be held. But
when his consent was asked, and his co-operation invited, he wrote
characteristically:

It is indeed a high compliment which you offer me, in naming an
association after me and in proposing the setting apart of a Mark Twain
day at the great St. Louis Fair, but such compliments are not proper
for the living; they are proper and safe for the dead only. I value the
impulse which moves you to tender me these honors. I value it as highly
as any one can, and am grateful for it, but I should stand in a sort of
terror of the honors themselves. So long as we remain alive we are
not safe from doing things which, however righteously and honorably
intended, can wreck our repute and extinguish our friendships.

I hope that no society will be named for me while I am still alive, for
I might at some time or other do something which would cause its members
to regret having done me that honor. After I shall have joined the dead
I shall follow the custom of those people, and be guilty of no conduct
that can wound any friend; but until that time shall come I shall be a
doubtful quantity, like the rest of our race.

The committee, still hoping for his consent, again appealed to him. But
again he wrote:

While I am deeply touched by the desire of my friends of Hannibal to
confer these great honors upon me I must still forbear to accept them.
Spontaneous and unpremeditated honors, like those which came to me at
Hannibal, Columbia, St. Louis, and at the village stations all down the
line, are beyond all price and are a treasure for life in the memory,
for they are a free gift out of the heart and they come without
solicitation; but I am a Missourian, and so I shrink from distinctions
which have to be arranged beforehand and with my privity, for I then
become a party to my own exalting. I am humanly fond of honors that
happen, but chary of those that come by canvass and intention.

Somewhat later he suggested a different feature for the fair; one that
was not practical, perhaps, but which certainly would have aroused
interest--that is to say, an old-fashioned six-day steamboat-race from
New Orleans to St. Louis, with the old-fashioned accessories, such as
torch-baskets, forecastle crowds of negro singers, with a negro on the
safety-valve. In his letter to President Francis he said:

As to particulars, I think that the race should be a genuine
reproduction of the old-time race, not just an imitation of it, and that
it should cover the whole course. I think the boats should begin the
trip at New Orleans, and side by side (not an interval between), and end
it at North St. Louis, a mile or two above the Big Mound.

In a subsequent letter to Governor Francis he wrote:

It has been a dear wish of mine to exhibit myself at the great Fair &
get a prize, but circumstances beyond my control have interfered....

I suppose you will get a prize, because you have created the most
prodigious Fair the planet has ever seen. Very well, you have indeed
earned it, and with it the gratitude of the State and the nation.

Newspaper men used every inducement to get interviews from him. They
invited him to name a price for any time he could give them, long or
short. One reporter offered him five hundred dollars for a two-hour
talk. Another proposed to pay him one hundred dollars a week for a
quarter of a day each week, allowing him to discuss any subject he
pleased. One wrote asking him two questions: the first, “Your favorite
method of escaping from Indians”; the second, “Your favorite method of
escaping capture by the Indians when they were in pursuit of you.” They
inquired as to his favorite copy-book maxim; as to what he considered
most important to a young man’s success; his definition of a gentleman.
They wished to know his plan for the settlement of labor troubles. But
they did not awaken his interest, or his cupidity. To one applicant he
wrote:

No, there are temptations against which we are fire-proof. Your
proposition is one which comes to me with considerable frequency, but it
never tempts me. The price isn’t the objection; you offer plenty. It
is the nature of the work that is the objection--a kind of work which I
could not do well enough to satisfy me. To multiply the price by twenty
would not enable me to do the work to my satisfaction, & by consequence
would make no impression upon me.

Once he allowed himself to be interviewed for the Herald, when from Mr.
Rogers’s yacht he had watched Sir Thomas Lipton’s Shamrock go down
to defeat; but this was a subject which appealed to him--a kind of
hotweather subject--and he could be as light-minded about it as he
chose.



CCXXXIX. THE LAST SUMMER AT ELMIRA

The Clemenses were preparing to take up residence in Florence, Italy.
The Hartford house had been sold in May, ending forever the association
with the city that had so long been a part of their lives. The Tarrytown
place, which they had never occupied, they also agreed to sell, for
it was the belief now that Mrs. Clemens’s health would never greatly
prosper there. Howells says, or at least implies, that they expected
their removal to Florence to be final. He tells us, too, of one sunny
afternoon when he and Clemens sat on the grass before the mansion
at Riverdale, after Mrs. Clemens had somewhat improved, and how they
“looked up toward a balcony where by and by that lovely presence made
itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. A hand frailly
waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling
tenderly.” It was a greeting to Howells the last he would ever receive
from her.

Mrs. Clemens was able to make a trip to Elmira by the end of June, and
on the 1st of July Mr. Rogers brought Clemens and his wife down the
river on his yacht to the Lackawanna pier, and they reached Quarry
Farm that evening. She improved in the quietude and restfulness of that
beloved place. Three weeks later Clemens wrote to Twichell:

Livy is coming along: eats well, sleeps some, is mostly very gay, not
very often depressed; spends all day on the porch, sleeps there a part
of the night; makes excursions in carriage & in wheel-chair; &, in the
matter of superintending everything & everybody, has resumed business at
the old stand.

During three peaceful months she spent most of her days reclining on the
wide veranda, surrounded by those dearest to her, and looking out on the
dreamlike landscape--the long, grassy slope, the drowsy city, and the
distant hills--getting strength for the far journey by sea. Clemens
did some writing, occupying the old octagonal study--shut in now and
overgrown with vines--where during the thirty years since it was built
so many of his stories had been written. ‘A Dog’s Tale’--that pathetic
anti-vivisection story--appears to have been the last manuscript ever
completed in the spot consecrated by Huck and Tom, and by Tom Canty the
Pauper and the little wandering Prince.

It was October 5th when they left Elmira. Two days earlier Clemens had
written in his note-book:

    Today I placed flowers on Susy’s grave--for the last time probably
    --& read words:

       “Good-night, dear heart, good-night.”

They did not return to Riverdale, but went to the Hotel Grosvenor
for the intervening weeks. They had engaged passage for Italy on the
Princess Irene, which would sail on the 24th. It was during the period
of their waiting that Clemens concluded his final Harper contract. On
that day, in his note-book, he wrote:

                      THE PROPHECY

In 1895 Cheiro the palmist examined my hand & said that in my 68th year
(1903) I would become suddenly rich. I was a bankrupt & $94,000 in debt
at the time through the failure of Charles L. Webster & Co. Two years
later--in London--Cheiro repeated this long-distance prediction, &
added that the riches would come from a quite unexpected source. I am
superstitious. I kept the prediction in mind & often thought of it. When
at last it came true, October 22, 1903, there was but a month & 9 days
to spare.

The contract signed that day concentrates all my books in Harper’s
hands & now at last they are valuable; in fact they are a fortune. They
guarantee me $25,000 a year for 5 years, and they will yield twice as
much as that.--[In earlier note-books and letters Clemens more than once
refers to this prophecy and wonders if it is to be realized. The Harper
contract, which brought all of his books into the hands of one publisher
(negotiated for him by Mr. Rogers), proved, in fact, a fortune. The
books yielded always more than the guarantee; sometimes twice that
amount, as he had foreseen.]

During the conclusion of this contract Clemens made frequent visits to
Fairhaven on the Kanawha. Joe Goodman came from the Pacific to pay him
a good-by visit during this period. Goodman had translated the Mayan
inscriptions, and his work had received official recognition and
publication by the British Museum. It was a fine achievement for a man
in later life and Clemens admired it immensely. Goodman and Clemens
enjoyed each other in the old way at quiet resorts where they could talk
over the old tales. Another visitor of that summer was the son of an
old friend, a Hannibal printer named Daulton. Young Daulton came with
manuscripts seeking a hearing of the magazine editors, so Clemens wrote
a letter which would insure that favor: INTRODUCING MR. GEO. DAULTON:

TO GILDER, ALDEN, HARVEY, McCLURE, WALKER, PAGE, BOK, COLLIER, and
such other members of the sacred guild as privilege me to call them
friends-these:

Although I have no personal knowledge of the bearer of this, I have what
is better: He comes recommended to me by his own father--a thing not
likely to happen in any of your families, I reckon. I ask you, as a
favor to me, to waive prejudice & superstition for this once & examine
his work with an eye to its literary merit, instead of to the chastity
of its spelling. I wish to God you cared less for that particular.

I set (or sat) type alongside of his father, in Hannibal, more than 50
years ago, when none but the pure in heart were in that business. A true
man he was; and if I can be of any service to his son--and to you at the
same time, let me hope--I am here heartily to try.

Yours by the sanctions of time & deserving,

              Sincerely,
                            S. L. CLEMENS.

Among the kindly words which came to Mark Twain before leaving America
was this one which Rudyard Kipling had written to his publisher, Frank
Doubleday:

    I love to think of the great and godlike Clemens. He is the biggest
    man you have on your side of the water by a damn sight, and don’t
    you forget it. Cervantes was a relation of his.

It curiously happened that Clemens at the same moment was writing to
Doubleday about Kipling:

    I have been reading “The Bell Buoy” and “The Old Man” over and over
    again-my custom with Kipling’s work--and saving up the rest for
    other leisurely and luxurious meals. A bell-buoy is a deeply
    impressive fellow-being. In these many recent trips up and down the
    Sound in the Kanawha he has talked to me nightly sometimes in his
    pathetic and melancholy way, sometimes with his strenuous and urgent
    note, and I got his meaning--now I have his words! No one but
    Kipling could do this strong and vivid thing. Some day I hope to
    hear the poem chanted or sung-with the bell-buoy breaking in out of
    the distance.

    P. S.--Your letter has arrived. It makes me proud and glad--what
    Kipling says. I hope Fate will fetch him to Florence while we are
    there. I would rather see him than any other man.



CCXXX. THE RETURN TO FLORENCE

From the note-book:

    Saturday, October 24, 1903. Sailed in the Princess Irene for Genoa
    at 11. Flowers & fruit from Mrs. Rogers & Mrs. Coe. We have with
    us Katie Leary (in our domestic service 23 years) & Miss Margaret
    Sherry (trained nurse).

Two days later he wrote:

    Heavy storm all night. Only 3 stewardesses. Ours served 60 meals
    in rooms this morning.

On the 27th:

    Livy is enduring the voyage marvelously well. As well as Clara &
    Jean, I think, & far better than the trained nurse.

    She has been out on deck an hour.

    November 2. Due at Gibraltar 10 days from New York. 3 days to
    Naples, then 2 day to Genoa.
    At supper the band played “Cavalleria Rusticana,” which is forever
    associated in my mind with Susy. I love it better than any other,
    but it breaks my heart.

It was the “Intermezzo” he referred to, which had been Susy’s favorite
music, and whenever he heard it he remembered always one particular
opera-night long ago, and Susy’s face rose before him.

They were in Naples on the 5th; thence to Genoa, and to Florence, where
presently they were installed in the Villa Reale di Quarto, a fine old
Italian palace built by Cosimo more than four centuries ago. In later
times it has been occupied and altered by royal families of Wurtemberg
and Russia. Now it was the property of the Countess Massiglia, from whom
Clemens had leased it.

They had hoped to secure the Villa Papiniano, under Fiesole, near
Professor Fiske, but negotiations for it had fallen through. The Villa
Quarto, as it is usually called, was a more pretentious place and as
beautifully located, standing as it does in an ancient garden looking
out over Florence toward Vallombrosa and the Chianti hills. Yet now in
the retrospect, it seems hardly to have been the retreat for an invalid.
Its garden was supernaturally beautiful, all that one expects that
a garden of Italy should be--such a garden as Maxfield Parrish
might dream; but its beauty was that which comes of antiquity--the
accumulation of dead years. Its funereal cypresses, its crumbling walls
and arches, its clinging ivy and moldering marbles, and a clock
that long ago forgot the hours, gave it a mortuary look. In a way it
suggested Arnold Bocklin’s “Todteninsel,” and it might well have served
as the allegorical setting for a gateway to the bourne of silence.

The house itself, one of the most picturesque of the old Florentine
suburban palaces, was historically interesting, rather than cheerful.
The rooms, in number more than sixty, though richly furnished, were vast
and barnlike, and there were numbers of them wholly unused and never
entered. There was a dearth of the modern improvements which Americans
have learned to regard as a necessity, and the plumbing, such as it was,
was not always in order. The place was approached by narrow streets,
along which the more uninviting aspects of Italy were not infrequent.
Youth and health and romance might easily have reveled in the place; but
it seems now not to have been the best choice for that frail invalid, to
whom cheer and brightness and freshness and the lovelier things of hope
meant always so much.--[Villa Quarto has recently been purchased by
Signor P. de Ritter Lahony, and thoroughly restored and refreshed
and beautified without the sacrifice of any of its romantic
features.]--Neither was the climate of Florence all that they had
hoped for. Their former sunny winter had misled them. Tradition to the
contrary, Italy--or at least Tuscany--is not one perpetual dream of
sunlight. It is apt to be damp and cloudy; it is likely to be cold.
Writing to MacAlister, Clemens said:

Florentine sunshine? Bless you, there isn’t any. We have heavy fogs
every morning & rain all day. This house is not merely large, it is
vast--therefore I think it must always lack the home feeling.

His dissatisfaction in it began thus early, and it grew as one thing
after another went wrong. With it all, however, Mrs. Clemens seemed
to gain a little, and was glad to see company--a reasonable amount of
company--to brighten her surroundings.

Clemens began to work and wrote a story or two, and those lively
articles about the Italian language.

To Twichell he reported progress:

    I have a handsome success in one way here. I left New York under a
    sort of half-promise to furnish to the Harper magazines 30,000 words
    this year. Magazining is difficult work because every third page
    represents two pages that you have put in the fire (you are nearly
    sure to start wrong twice), & so when you have finished an article &
    are willing to let it go to print it represents only 10 cents a word
    instead of 30.

    But this time I had the curious (& unprecedented) luck to start
    right in each case. I turned out 37,000 words in 25 working days; &
    the reason I think I started right every time is, that not only have
    I approved and accepted the several articles, but the court of last
    resort (Livy) has done the same.

    On many of the between-days I did some work, but only of an idle &
    not necessarily necessary sort, since it will not see print until I
    am dead. I shall continue this (an hour per day), but the rest of
    the year I expect to put in on a couple of long books (half-
    completed ones). No more magazine work hanging over my head.

    This secluded & silent solitude, this clean, soft air, & this
    enchanting view of Florence, the great valley & snow-mountains that
    frame it, are the right conditions for work. They are a persistent
    inspiration. To-day is very lovely; when the afternoon arrives
    there will be a new picture every hour till dark, & each of them
    divine--or progressing from divine to diviner & divinest. On this
    (second) floor Clara’s room commands the finest; she keeps a window
    ten feet high wide open all the time & frames it in that. I go in
    from time to time every day & trade sass for a look. The central
    detail is a distant & stately snow-hump that rises above & behind
    black-forested hills, & its sloping vast buttresses, velvety & sun-
    polished, with purple shadows between, make the sort of picture we
    knew that time we walked in Switzerland in the days of our youth.

From this letter, which is of January 7, 1904, we gather that the
weather had greatly improved, and with it Mrs. Clemens’s health,
notwithstanding she had an alarming attack in December. One of the
stories he had finished was “The $30,000 Bequest.” The work mentioned,
which would not see print until after his death, was a continuation of
those autobiographical chapters which for years he had been setting down
as the mood seized him.

He experimented with dictation, which he had tried long before with
Redpath, and for a time now found it quite to his liking. He dictated
some of his copyright memories, and some anecdotes and episodes; but his
amanuensis wrote only longhand, which perhaps hampered him, for he tired
of it by and by and the dictations were discontinued.

Among these notes there is one elaborate description of the Villa di
Quarto, dictated at the end of the winter, by which time we are not
surprised to find he had become much attached to the place. The
Italian spring was in the air, and it was his habit to grow fond of his
surroundings. Some atmospheric paragraphs of these impressions invite us
here:

    We are in the extreme south end of the house, if there is any such
    thing as a south end to a house, whose orientation cannot be
    determined by me, because I am incompetent in all cases where an
    object does not point directly north & south. This one slants
    across between, & is therefore a confusion. This little private
    parlor is in one of the two corners of what I call the south end of
    the house. The sun rises in such a way that all the morning it is
    pouring its light through the 33 glass doors or windows which pierce
    the side of the house which looks upon the terrace & garden; the
    rest of the day the light floods this south end of the house, as I
    call it; at noon the sun is directly above Florence yonder in the
    distance in the plain, directly across those architectural features
    which have been so familiar to the world in pictures for some
    centuries, the Duomo, the Campanile, the Tomb of the Medici, & the
    beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; in this position it begins
    to reveal the secrets of the delicious blue mountains that circle
    around into the west, for its light discovers, uncovers, & exposes a
    white snowstorm of villas & cities that you cannot train yourself to
    have confidence in, they appear & disappear so mysteriously, as if
    they might not be villas & cities at all, but the ghosts of perished
    ones of the remote & dim Etruscan times; & late in the afternoon the
    sun sets down behind those mountains somewhere, at no particular
    time & at no particular place, so far as I can see.

Again at the end of March he wrote:

    Now that we have lived in this house four and a half months my
    prejudices have fallen away one by one & the place has become very
    homelike to me. Under certain conditions I should like to go on
    living in it indefinitely. I should wish the Countess to move out
    of Italy, out of Europe, out of the planet. I should want her
    bonded to retire to her place in the next world & inform me which of
    the two it was, so that I could arrange for my own hereafter.

Complications with their landlady had begun early, and in time, next
to Mrs. Clemens’s health, to which it bore such an intimate and vital
relation, the indifference of the Countess Massiglia to their needs
became the supreme and absorbing concern of life at the villa, and led
to continued and almost continuous house-hunting.

Days when the weather permitted, Clemens drove over the hills looking
for a villa which he could lease or buy--one with conveniences and just
the right elevation and surroundings. There were plenty of villas;
but some of them were badly situated as to altitude or view; some were
falling to decay, and the search was rather a discouraging one. Still
it was not abandoned, and the reports of these excursions furnished new
interest and new hope always to the invalid at home.

“Even if we find it,” he wrote Howells, “I am afraid it will be months
before we can move Mrs. Clemens. Of course it will. But it comforts us
to let on that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep
hope alive in her.”

She had her bad days and her good days, days when it was believed she
had passed the turning-point and was traveling the way to recovery; but
the good days were always a little less hopeful, the bad days a little
more discouraging. On February 22d Clemens wrote in his note-book:

At midnight Livy’s pulse went to 192 & there was a collapse. Great
alarm. Subcutaneous injection of brandy saved her.

And to MacAlister toward the end of March:

We are having quite perfect weather now & are hoping that it will bring
effects for Mrs. Clemens.

But a few days later he added that he was watching the driving rain
through the windows, and that it was bad weather for the invalid. “But
it will not last,” he said.

The invalid improved then, and there was a concert in Florence at which
Clara Clemens sang. Clemens in his note-book says:

    April 8. Clara’s concert was a triumph. Livy woke up & sent for
    her to tell her all about it, near midnight.

But a day or two later she was worse again--then better. The hearts
in that household were as pendulums, swinging always between hope and
despair.

One familiar with the Clemens history might well have been filled with
forebodings. Already in January a member of the family, Mollie Clemens,
Orion’s wife, died, news which was kept from Mrs. Clemens, as was the
death of Aldrich’s son, and that of Sir Henry M. Stanley, both of which
occurred that spring.

Indeed, death harvested freely that year among the Clemens friendships.
Clemens wrote Twichell:

    Yours has just this moment arrived-just as I was finishing a note to
    poor Lady Stanley. I believe the last country-house visit we paid
    in England was to Stanley’s. Lord! how my friends & acquaintances
    fall about me now in my gray-headed days! Vereshchagin, Mommsen,
    Dvorak, Lenbach, & Jokai, all so recently, & now Stanley. I have
    known Stanley 37 years. Goodness, who is there I haven’t known?



CCXXXI. THE CLOSE OF A BEAUTIFUL LIFE

In one of his notes near the end of April Clemens writes that once more,
as at Riverdale, he has been excluded from Mrs. Clemens’s room except
for the briefest moment at a time. But on May 12th, to R. W. Gilder, he
reported:

    For two days now we have not been anxious about Mrs. Clemens
    (unberufen). After 20 months of bedridden solitude & bodily misery
    she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid, shrunken shadow, & looks
    bright & young & pretty. She remains what she always was, the most
    wonderful creature of fortitude, patience, endurance, and
    recuperative power that ever was. But ah, dear! it won’t last;
    this fiendish malady will play new treacheries upon her, and I shall
    go back to my prayers again--unutterable from any pulpit!

    May 13, A.M. I have just paid one of my pair of permitted 2-minute
    visits per day to the sick-room. And found what I have learned to
    expect--retrogression.

There was a day when she was brought out on the terrace in a wheel-chair
to see the wonder of the early Italian summer. She had been a prisoner
so long that she was almost overcome with the delight of it all--the
more so, perhaps, in the feeling that she might so soon be leaving it.

It was on Sunday, the 5th of June, that the end came. Clemens and Jean
had driven out to make some calls, and had stopped at a villa, which
promised to fulfil most of the requirements. They came home full of
enthusiasm concerning it, and Clemens, in his mind, had decided on the
purchase. In the corridor Clara said:

“She is better to-day than she has been for three months.”

Then quickly, under her breath, “Unberufen,” which the others, too,
added hastily--superstitiously.

Mrs. Clemens was, in fact, bright and cheerful, and anxious to hear all
about the new property which was to become their home. She urged him to
sit by her during the dinner-hour and tell her the details; but once,
when the sense of her frailties came upon her, she said they must not
mind if she could not go very soon, but be content where they were. He
remained from half past seven until eight--a forbidden privilege, but
permitted because she was so animated, feeling so well. Their talk
was as it had been in the old days, and once during it he reproached
himself, as he had so often done, and asked forgiveness for the tears he
had brought into her life. When he was summoned to go at last he chided
himself for remaining so long; but she said there was no harm, and
kissed him, saying: “You will come back,” and he answered, “Yes, to say
good night,” meaning at half past nine, as was the permitted custom.
He stood a moment at the door throwing kisses to her, and she returning
them, her face bright with smiles.

He was so hopeful and happy that it amounted to exaltation. He went to
his room at first, then he was moved to do a thing which he had seldom
done since Susy died. He went to the piano up-stairs and sang the
old jubilee songs that Susy had liked to hear him sing. Jean came
in presently, listening. She had not done this before, that he could
remember. He sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “My Lord He Calls Me.”
 He noticed Jean then and stopped, but she asked him to go on.

Mrs. Clemens, in her room, heard the distant music, and said to her
attendant:

“He is singing a good-night carol to me.”

The music ceased presently, and then a moment later she asked to be
lifted up. Almost in that instant life slipped away without a sound.

Clemens, coming to say good night, saw a little group about her bed,
Clara and Jean standing as if dazed. He went and bent over and looked
into her face, surprised that she did not greet him. He did not suspect
what had happened until he heard one of the daughters ask:

“Katie, is it true? Oh, Katie, is it true?”

He realized then that she was gone.

In his note-book that night he wrote:

    At a quarter past 9 this evening she that was the life of my life
    passed to the relief & the peace of death after as months of unjust
    & unearned suffering. I first saw her near 37 years ago, & now I
    have looked upon her face for the last time. Oh, so unexpected!...
    I was full of remorse for things done & said in these 34 years of
    married life that hurt Livy’s heart.

He envied her lying there, so free from it all, with the great peace
upon her face. He wrote to Howells and to Twichell, and to Mrs. Crane,
those nearest and dearest ones. To Twichell he said:

    How sweet she was in death, how young, how beautiful, how like her
    dear girlish self of thirty years ago, not a gray hair showing!
    This rejuvenescence was noticeable within two hours after her death;
    & when I went down again (2.30) it was complete. In all that night
    & all that day she never noticed my caressing hand--it seemed
    strange.

To Howells he recalled the closing scene:

    I bent over her & looked in her face & I think I spoke--I was
    surprised & troubled that she did not notice me. Then we understood
    & our hearts broke. How poor we are to-day!

    But how thankful I am that her persecutions are ended! I would not
    call her back if I could.

    To-day, treasured in her worn, old Testament, I found a dear &
    gentle letter from you dated Far Rockaway, September 13, 1896, about
    our poor Susy’s death. I am tired & old; I wish I were with Livy.

And in a few days:

It would break Livy’s heart to see Clara. We excuse ourself from all
the friends that call--though, of course, only intimates come.
Intimates--but they are not the old, old friends, the friends of the
old, old times when we laughed. Shall we ever laugh again? If I could
only see a dog that I knew in the old times & could put my arms around
his neck and tell him all, everything, & ease my heart!



CCXXXII. THE SAD JOURNEY HOME

A tidal wave of sympathy poured in. Noble and commoner, friend and
stranger--humanity of every station--sent their messages of condolence
to the friend of mankind. The cablegrams came first--bundles of them
from every corner of the world--then the letters, a steady inflow.
Howells, Twichell, Aldrich--those oldest friends who had themselves
learned the meaning of grief--spoke such few and futile words as the
language can supply to allay a heart’s mourning, each recalling the
rarity and beauty of the life that had slipped away. Twichell and his
wife wrote:

DEAR, DEAR MARK,--There is nothing we can say. What is there to say?
But here we are--with you all every hour and every minute--filled with
unutterable thoughts; unutterable affection for the dead and for the
living.                            HARMONY AND JOE.

Howells in his letter said:

She hallowed what she touched far beyond priests.... What are you going
to do, you poor soul?

A hundred letters crowd in for expression here, but must be denied--not,
however, the beam of hope out of Helen Keller’s illumined night:

    Do try to reach through grief and feel the pressure of her hand, as
    I reach through darkness and feel the smile on my friends’ lips and
    the light in their eyes though mine are closed.

They were adrift again without plans for the future. They would return
to America to lay Mrs. Clemens to rest by Susy and little Langdon, but
beyond that they could not see. Then they remembered a quiet spot in
Massachusetts, Tyringham, near Lee, where the Gilders lived, and so, on
June 7th, he wrote:

    DEAR GILDER FAMILY,--I have been worrying and worrying to know what
    to do; at last I went to the girls with an idea--to ask the Gilders
    to get us shelter near their summer home. It was the first time
    they have not shaken their heads. So to-morrow I will cable to you
    and shall hope to be in time.

    An hour ago the best heart that ever beat for me and mine was
    carried silent out of this house, and I am as one who wanders and
    has lost his way. She who is gone was our head, she was our hands.
    We are now trying to make plans--we: we who have never made a plan
    before, nor ever needed to. If she could speak to us she would make
    it all simple and easy with a word, & our perplexities would vanish
    away. If she had known she was near to death she would have told us
    where to go and what to do, but she was not suspecting, neither were
    we. She was all our riches and she is gone; she was our breath, she
    was our life, and now we are nothing.

    We send you our love-and with it the love of you that was in her
    heart when she died.
                            S. L. CLEMENS.

They arranged to sail on the Prince Oscar on the 29th of June. There
was an earlier steamer, but it was the Princess Irene, which had brought
them, and they felt they would not make the return voyage on that
vessel. During the period of waiting a curious thing happened. Clemens
one day got up in a chair in his room on the second floor to pull down
the high window-sash. It did not move easily and his hand slipped. It
was only by the merest chance that he saved himself from falling to the
ground far below. He mentions this in his note-book, and once, speaking
of it to Frederick Duneka, he said:

“Had I fallen it would probably have killed me, and in my bereaved
circumstances the world would have been convinced that it was suicide.
It was one of those curious coincidences which are always happening and
being misunderstood.”

The homeward voyage and its sorrowful conclusion are pathetically
conveyed in his notes:

    June 29, 1904. Sailed last night at 10. The bugle-call to
    breakfast. I recognized the notes and was distressed. When I heard
    them last Livy heard them with me; now they fall upon her ear
    unheeded.

    In my life there have been 68 Junes--but how vague & colorless 67 of
    them are contrasted with the deep blackness of this one!

    July 1, 1904. I cannot reproduce Livy’s face in my mind’s eye--I
    was never in my life able to reproduce a face. It is a curious
    infirmity--& now at last I realize it is a calamity.

    July 2, 1904. In these 34 years we have made many voyages together,
    Livy dear--& now we are making our last; you down below & lonely; I
    above with the crowd & lonely.

    July 3, 1904. Ship-time, 8 A.M. In 13 hours & a quarter it will be
    4 weeks since Livy died.

    Thirty-one years ago we made our first voyage together--& this is
    our last one in company. Susy was a year old then. She died at 24
    & had been in her grave 8 years.

    July 10, 1904. To-night it will be 5 weeks. But to me it remains
    yesterday--as it has from the first. But this funeral march--how
    sad & long it is!

    Two days more will end the second stage of it.

    July 14, 1904 (ELMIRA). Funeral private in the house of Livy’s
    young maidenhood. Where she stood as a bride 34 years ago there her
    coffin rested; & over it the same voice that had made her a wife
    then committed her departed spirit to God now.

It was Joseph Twichell who rendered that last service. Mr. Beecher was
long since dead. It was a simple, touching utterance, closing with this
tender word of farewell:

    Robert Browning, when he was nearing the end of his earthly days,
    said that death was the thing that we did not believe in. Nor do we
    believe in it. We who journeyed through the bygone years in
    companionship with the bright spirit now withdrawn are growing old.
    The way behind is long; the way before is short. The end cannot be
    far off. But what of that? Can we not say, each one:

       “So long that power hath blessed me, sure it still
                   Will lead me on;
        O’er moor and fen; o’er crag and torrent, till
                   The night is gone;
         And with the morn, their angel faces smile,
        Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!”

    And so good-by. Good-by, dear heart! Strong, tender, and true.
    Good-by until for us the morning break and these shadows fly away.

Dr. Eastman, who had succeeded Mr. Beecher, closed the service with a
prayer, and so the last office we can render in this life for those we
love was finished.

Clemens ordered that a simple marker should be placed at the grave,
bearing, besides the name, the record of birth and death, followed by
the German line:

            ‘Gott sei dir gnadig, O meine Wonne’!



CCXXXIII. BEGINNING ANOTHER HOME

There was an extra cottage on the Gilder place at Tyringham, and
this they occupied for the rest of that sad summer. Clemens, in his
note-book, has preserved some of its aspects and incidents.

July 24, 1904. Rain--rain--rain. Cold. We built a fire in my room. Then
clawed the logs out & threw water, remembering there was a brood of
swallows in the chimney. The tragedy was averted.

July 31. LEE, MASSACHUSETTS (BERKSHIRE HILLS). Last night the
young people out on a moonlight ride. Trolley frightened Jean’s
horse--collision--horse killed. Rodman Gilder picked Jean up,
unconscious; she was taken to the doctor, per the car. Face, nose, side,
back contused; tendon of left ankle broken.

August 10. NEW YORK. Clam here sick--never well since June 5. Jean is at
the summer home in the Berkshire Hills crippled.

The next entry records the third death in the Clemens family within
a period of eight months--that of Mrs. Moffett, who had been Pamela
Clemens. Clemens writes:

    September 1. Died at Greenwich, Connecticut, my sister, Pamela
    Moffett, aged about 73.

    Death dates this year January 14, June 5, September 1.

That fall they took a house in New York City, on the corner of Ninth
Street and Fifth Avenue, No. 21, remaining for a time at the Grosvenor
while the new home was being set in order. The home furniture was
brought from Hartford, unwrapped, and established in the light of
strange environment. Clemens wrote:

We have not seen it for thirteen years. Katie Leary, our old
housekeeper, who has been in our service more than twenty-four years,
cried when she told me about it to-day. She said, “I had forgotten it
was so beautiful, and it brought Mrs. Clemens right back to me--in that
old time when she was so young and lovely.”

Clara Clemens had not recovered from the strain of her mother’s long
illness and the shock of her death, and she was ordered into retirement
with the care of a trained nurse. The life at 21 Fifth Avenue,
therefore, began with only two remaining members of the broken
family--Clemens and Jean.

Clemens had undertaken to divert himself with work at Tyringham, though
without much success. He was not well; he was restless and disturbed;
his heart bleak with a great loneliness. He prepared an article on
Copyright for the ‘North American Review’,--[Published Jan., 7905. A
dialogue presentation of copyright conditions, addressed to Thorwald
Stolberg, Register of Copyrights, Washington, D. C. One of the best
of Mark Twain’s papers on the subject.]--and he began, or at least
contemplated, that beautiful fancy, ‘Eve’s Diary’, which in the widest
and most reverential sense, from the first word to the last, conveys
his love, his worship, and his tenderness for the one he had laid away.
Adam’s single comment at the end, “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden,”
 was his own comment, and is perhaps the most tenderly beautiful line
he ever wrote. These two books, Adam’s Diary and Eve’s--amusing and
sometimes absurd as they are, and so far removed from the literal--are
as autobiographic as anything he has done, and one of them as lovely in
its truth. Like the first Maker of men, Mark Twain created Adam in his
own image; and his rare Eve is no less the companion with whom, half
a lifetime before, he had begun the marriage journey. Only here the
likeness ceases. No Serpent ever entered their Eden. And they never left
it; it traveled with them so long as they remained together.

In the Christmas Harper for 1904 was published “Saint Joan of Arc”--the
same being the Joan introduction prepared in London five years before.
Joan’s proposed beatification had stirred a new interest in the martyred
girl, and this most beautiful article became a sort of key-note of the
public heart. Those who read it were likely to go back and read the
Recollections, and a new appreciation grew for that masterpiece. In his
later and wider acceptance by his own land, and by the world at large,
the book came to be regarded with a fresh understanding. Letters
came from scores of readers, as if it were a newly issued volume. A
distinguished educator wrote:

    I would rather have written your history of Joan of Arc than any
    other piece of literature in any language.

And this sentiment grew. The demand for the book increased, and has
continued to increase, steadily and rapidly. In the long and last
analysis the good must prevail. A day will come when there will be as
many readers of Joan as of any other of Mark Twain’s works.

[The growing appreciation of Joan is shown by the report of sales for
the three years following 1904. The sales for that year in America were
1,726; for 1905, 2,445 for 1906, 5,381; for 1907, 6,574. At this point
it passed Pudd’nhead Wilson, the Yankee, The Gilded Age, Life on the
Mississippi, overtook the Tramp Abroad, and more than doubled The
American Claimant. Only The Innocents Abroad, Huckleberry Finn, Tom
Sawyer, and Roughing It still ranged ahead of it, in the order named.]



CCXXXIV. LIFE AT 21 FIFTH AVENUE

The house at 21 Fifth Avenue, built by the architect who had designed
Grace Church, had a distinctly ecclesiastical suggestion about its
windows, and was of fine and stately proportions within. It was a proper
residence for a venerable author and a sage, and with the handsome
Hartford furnishings distributed through it, made a distinctly suitable
setting for Mark Twain. But it was lonely for him. It lacked soul. He
added, presently, a great AEolian Orchestrelle, with a variety of music
for his different moods. He believed that he would play it himself when
he needed the comfort of harmony, and that Jean, who had not received
musical training, or his secretary could also play to him. He had a
passion for music, or at least for melody and stately rhythmic measures,
though his ear was not attuned to what are termed the more classical
compositions. For Wagner, for instance, he cared little, though in a
letter to Mrs. Crane he said:

Certainly nothing in the world is so solemn and impressive and so
divinely beautiful as “Tannhauser.” It ought to be used as a religious
service.

Beethoven’s sonatas and symphonies also moved him deeply. Once, writing
to Jean, he asked:

What is your favorite piece of music, dear? Mine is Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony. I have found that out within a day or two.

It was the majestic movement and melodies of the second part that he
found most satisfying; but he oftener inclined to the still tenderer
themes of Chopin’s nocturnes and one of Schubert’s impromptus, while
the “Lorelei” and the “Erlking” and the Scottish airs never wearied him.
Music thus became a chief consolation during these lonely days--rich
organ harmonies that filled the emptiness of his heart and beguiled
from dull, material surroundings back into worlds and dreams that he had
known and laid away.

He went out very little that winter--usually to the homes of old and
intimate friends. Once he attended a small dinner given him by George
Smalley at the Metropolitan Club; but it was a private affair, with only
good friends present. Still, it formed the beginning of his return to
social life, and it was not in his nature to retire from the brightness
of human society, or to submerge himself in mourning. As the months wore
on he appeared here and there, and took on something of his old-time
habit. Then his annual bronchitis appeared, and he was confined a good
deal to his home, where he wrote or planned new reforms and enterprises.

The improvement of railway service, through which fewer persons should
be maimed and destroyed each year, interested him. He estimated that
the railroads and electric lines killed and wounded more than all of the
wars combined, and he accumulated statistics and prepared articles on
the subject, though he appears to have offered little of such matter for
publication. Once, however, when his sympathy was awakened by the victim
of a frightful trolley and train collision in Newark, New Jersey, he
wrote a letter which promptly found its way into print.

    DEAR MISS MADELINE, Your good & admiring & affectionate brother has
    told me of your sorrowful share in the trolley disaster which
    brought unaccustomed tears to millions of eyes & fierce resentment
    against those whose criminal indifference to their responsibilities
    caused it, & the reminder has brought back to me a pang out of that
    bygone time. I wish I could take you sound & whole out of your bed
    & break the legs of those officials & put them in it--to stay there.
    For in my spirit I am merciful, and would not break their necks &
    backs also, as some would who have no feeling.

    It is your brother who permits me to write this line--& so it is not
    an intrusion, you see.

    May you get well-& soon!
                     Sincerely yours,
                                S. L. CLEMENS.

A very little later he was writing another letter on a similar subject
to St. Clair McKelway, who had narrowly escaped injury in a railway
accident.

    DEAR McKELWAY, Your innumerable friends are grateful, most grateful.

    As I understand the telegrams, the engineers of your train had never
    seen a locomotive before.... The government’s official
    report, showing that our railways killed twelve hundred persons last
    year & injured sixty thousand, convinces me that under present
    conditions one Providence is not enough properly & efficiently to
    take care of our railroad business. But it is characteristically
    American--always trying to get along short-handed & save wages.

A massacre of Jews in Moscow renewed his animosity for semi-barbaric
Russia. Asked for a Christmas sentiment, he wrote:

    It is my warm & world-embracing Christmas hope that all of us that
    deserve it may finally be gathered together in a heaven of rest &
    peace, & the others permitted to retire into the clutches of Satan,
    or the Emperor of Russia, according to preference--if they have a
    preference.

An article, “The Tsar’s Soliloquy,” written at this time, was published
in the North American Review for March (1905). He wrote much more, but
most of the other matter he put aside. On a subject like that he always
discarded three times as much as he published, and it was usually about
three times as terrific as that which found its way into type. “The
Soliloquy,” however, is severe enough. It represents the Tsar as
contemplating himself without his clothes, and reflecting on what a poor
human specimen he presents:

    Is it this that 140,000,000 Russians kiss the dust before and
    worship?--manifestly not! No one could worship this spectacle which
    is Me. Then who is it, what is it, that they worship? Privately,
    none knows better than I: it is my clothes! Without my clothes I
    should be as destitute of authority as any other naked person. No
    one could tell me from a parson and barber tutor. Then who is the
    real Emperor of Russia! My clothes! There is no other.

The emperor continues this fancy, and reflects on the fierce cruelties
that are done in his name. It was a withering satire on Russian
imperialism, and it stirred a wide response. This encouraged Clemens to
something even more pretentious and effective in the same line. He wrote
“King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” the reflections of the fiendish sovereign
who had maimed and slaughtered fifteen millions of African subjects in
his greed--gentle, harmless blacks-men, women, and little children whom
he had butchered and mutilated in his Congo rubber-fields. Seldom in the
history of the world have there been such atrocious practices as those
of King Leopold in the Congo, and Clemens spared nothing in his picture
of them. The article was regarded as not quite suitable for magazine
publication, and it was given to the Congo Reform Association and issued
as a booklet for distribution, with no return to the author, who would
gladly have written a hundred times as much if he could have saved that
unhappy race and have sent Leopold to the electric chair.--[The book was
price-marked twenty-five cents, but the returns from such as were sold
went to the cause. Thousands of them were distributed free. The Congo, a
domain four times as large as the German empire, had been made the
ward of Belgium at a convention in Berlin by the agreement of fourteen
nations, America and thirteen European states. Leopold promptly seized
the country for his personal advantage and the nations apparently found
themselves powerless to depose him. No more terrible blunder was ever
committed by an assemblage of civilized people.]

Various plans and movements were undertaken for Congo reform, and
Clemens worked and wrote letters and gave his voice and his influence
and exhausted his rage, at last, as one after another of the
half-organized and altogether futile undertakings showed no results. His
interest did not die, but it became inactive. Eventually he declared: “I
have said all I can say on that terrible subject. I am heart and soul in
any movement that will rescue the Congo and hang Leopold, but I cannot
write any more.”

His fires were likely to burn themselves out, they raged so fiercely.
His final paragraph on the subject was a proposed epitaph for Leopold
when time should have claimed him. It ran:

    Here under this gilded tomb lies rotting the body of one the smell
    of whose name will still offend the nostrils of men ages upon ages
    after all the Caesars and Washingtons & Napoleons shall have ceased
    to be praised or blamed & been forgotten--Leopold of Belgium.

Clemens had not yet lost interest in the American policy in the
Philippines, and in his letters to Twichell he did not hesitate to
criticize the President’s attitude in this and related matters. Once, in
a moment of irritation, he wrote:

    DEAR JOE,--I knew I had in me somewhere a definite feeling about the
    President. If I could only find the words to define it with! Here
    they are, to a hair--from Leonard Jerome:

    “For twenty years I have loved Roosevelt the man, and hated
    Roosevelt the statesman and politician.”

    It’s mighty good. Every time in twenty-five years that I have met
    Roosevelt the man a wave of welcome has streaked through me with the
    hand-grip; but whenever (as a rule) I meet Roosevelt the statesman &
    politician I find him destitute of morals & not respect-worthy. It
    is plain that where his political self & party self are concerned he
    has nothing resembling a conscience; that under those inspirations
    he is naively indifferent to the restraints of duty & even unaware
    of them; ready to kick the Constitution into the back yard whenever
    it gets in his way....

    But Roosevelt is excusable--I recognize it & (ought to) concede it.
    We are all insane, each in his own way, & with insanity goes
    irresponsibility. Theodore the man is sane; in fairness we ought to
    keep in mind that Theodore, as statesman & politician, is insane &
    irresponsible.

He wrote a great deal more from time to time on this subject; but
that is the gist of his conclusions, and whether justified by time, or
otherwise, it expresses today the deduction of a very large number
of people. It is set down here, because it is a part of Mark Twain’s
history, and also because a little while after his death there happened
to creep into print an incomplete and misleading note (since often
reprinted), which he once made in a moment of anger, when he was in
a less judicial frame of mind. It seems proper that a man’s honest
sentiments should be recorded concerning the nation’s servants.

Clemens wrote an article at this period which he called the “War
Prayer.” It pictured the young recruits about to march away for war--the
excitement and the celebration--the drum-beat and the heart-beat of
patriotism--the final assembly in the church where the minister utters
that tremendous invocation:

           God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest,
           Thunder, Thy clarion, and lightning, Thy sword!

and the “long prayer” for victory to the nation’s armies. As the prayer
closes a white-robed stranger enters, moves up the aisle, and takes the
preacher’s place; then, after some moments of impressive silence, he
begins:

    “I come from the Throne-bearing a message from Almighty God!....
    He has heard the prayer of His servant, your shepherd, & will grant
    it if such shall be your desire after I His messenger shall have
    explained to you its import--that is to say its full import. For it
    is like unto many of the prayers of men in that it asks for more
    than he who utters it is aware of--except he pause & think.

    “God’s servant & yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused & taken
    thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two--one uttered, the other
    not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all
    supplications, the spoken & the unspoken....

    “You have heard your servant’s prayer--the uttered part of it. I am
    commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it--that
    part which the pastor--and also you in your hearts--fervently
    prayed, silently. And ignorantly & unthinkingly? God grant that it
    was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our
    God!’ That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is
    completed into those pregnant words.

    “Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken
    part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

       “O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go
       forth to battle--be Thou near them! With them--in spirit--we
       also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to
       smite the foe.

       “O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody
       shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields
       with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the
       thunder of the guns with the wounded, writhing in pain; help us
       to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help
       us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with
       unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their
       little children to wander unfriended through wastes of their
       desolated land in rags & hunger & thirst, sport of the sun-
       flames of summer & the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit,
       worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave &
       denied it--for our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord, blast their
       hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage,
       make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain
       the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask of
       one who is the Spirit of love & who is the ever-faithful refuge
       & friend of all that are sore beset, & seek His aid with humble
       & contrite hearts. Grant our prayer, O Lord; & Thine shall be
       the praise & honor & glory now & ever, Amen.”

       (After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it,
       speak!--the messenger of the Most High waits.”

             ...............

       It was believed, afterward, that the man was a lunatic, because
       there was no sense in what he said.

To Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the “War Prayer,”
 stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had
told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege.

“Still you--are going to publish it, are you not?”

Clemens, pacing up and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers,
shook his head.

“No,” he said, “I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men
can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.”

He did not care to invite the public verdict that he was a lunatic, or
even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions and traditions
and conclusions of mankind. To Twichell he wrote, playfully but
sincerely:

Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For seven
years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought
to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other difficult
duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one. Yes, even I
am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.
We are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in the
world--though I have a reason to think I am the only one whose blacklist
runs so light. Sometimes I feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude.

It was his Gospel he referred to as his unpublished book, his doctrine
of Selfishness, and of Man the irresponsible Machine. To Twichell he
pretended to favor war, which he declared, to his mind, was one of the
very best methods known of diminishing the human race.

What a life it is!--this one! Everything we try to do, somebody intrudes
& obstructs it. After years of thought & labor I have arrived within
one little bit of a step of perfecting my invention for exhausting the
oxygen in the globe’s air during a stretch of two minutes, & of course
along comes an obstructor who is inventing something to protect human
life. Damn such a world anyway.

He generally wrote Twichell when he had things to say that were outside
of the pale of print. He was sure of an attentive audience of one,
and the audience, whether it agreed with him or not, would at least
understand him and be honored by his confidence. In one letter of that
year he said:

I have written you to-day, not to do you a service, but to do myself
one. There was bile in me. I had to empty it or lose my day to-morrow.
If I tried to empty it into the North American Review--oh, well, I
couldn’t afford the risk. No, the certainty! The certainty that I
wouldn’t be satisfied with the result; so I would burn it, & try again
to-morrow; burn that and try again the next day. It happens so nearly
every time. I have a family to support, & I can’t afford this kind of
dissipation. Last winter when I was sick I wrote a magazine article
three times before I got it to suit me. I Put $500 worth of work on it
every day for ten days, & at last when I got it to suit me it contained
but 3,000 words-$900. I burned it & said I would reform.

And I have reformed. I have to work my bile off whenever it gets to
where I can’t stand it, but I can work it off on you economically,
because I don’t have to make it suit me. It may not suit you, but that
isn’t any matter; I’m not writing it for that. I have used you as an
equilibrium--restorer more than once in my time, & shall continue,
I guess. I would like to use Mr. Rogers, & he is plenty good-natured
enough, but it wouldn’t be fair to keep him rescuing me from
my leather-headed business snarls & make him read interminable
bile-irruptions besides; I can’t use Howells, he is busy & old & lazy,
& won’t stand it; I dasn’t use Clara, there’s things I have to say which
she wouldn’t put up with--a very dear little ashcat, but has claws. And
so--you’re It.

    [See the preface to the “Autobiography of Mark Twain”: ‘I am writing
    from the grave. On these terms only can a man be approximately
    frank. He cannot be straitly and unqualifiedly frank either in the
    grave or out of it.’ D.W.]



CCXXXV. A SUMMER IN NEW HAMPSHIRE

He took for the summer a house at Dublin, New Hampshire, the home of
Henry Copley Greene, Lone Tree Hill, on the Monadnock slope. It was in a
lovely locality, and for neighbors there were artists, literary people,
and those of kindred pursuits, among them a number of old friends.
Colonel Higginson had a place near by, and Abbott H. Thayer, the
painter, and George de Forest Brush, and the Raphael Pumpelly family,
and many more.

Colonel Higginson wrote Clemens a letter of welcome as soon as the news
got out that he was going to Dublin; and Clemens, answering, said:

    I early learned that you would be my neighbor in the summer & I
    rejoiced, recognizing in you & your family a large asset. I hope
    for frequent intercourse between the two households. I shall have
    my youngest daughter with me. The other one will go from the rest-
    cure in this city to the rest-cure in Norfolk, Connecticut; & we
    shall not see her before autumn. We have not seen her since the
    middle of October.

    Jean, the younger daughter, went to Dublin & saw the house & came
    back charmed with it. I know the Thayers of old--manifestly there
    is no lack of attractions up there. Mrs. Thayer and I were
    shipmates in a wild excursion perilously near 40 years ago.

    Aldrich was here half an hour ago, like a breeze from over the
    fields, with the fragrance still upon his spirit. I am tired
    wanting for that man to get old.

They went to Dublin in May, and became at once a part of the summer
colony which congregated there. There was much going to and fro
among the different houses, pleasant afternoons in the woods,
mountain-climbing for Jean, and everywhere a spirit of fine,
unpretentious comradeship.

The Copley Greene house was romantically situated, with a charming
outlook. Clemens wrote to Twichell:

    We like it here in the mountains, in the shadows of Monadnock. It
    is a woody solitude. We have no near neighbors. We have neighbors
    and I can see their houses scattered in the forest distances, for we
    live on a hill. I am astonished to find that I have known 8 of
    these 14 neighbors a long time; 10 years is the shortest; then seven
    beginning with 25 years & running up to 37 years’ friendship. It is
    the most remarkable thing I ever heard of.

This letter was written in July, and he states in it that he has
turned out one hundred thousand words of a large manuscript.. It was
a fantastic tale entitled “3,000 Years among the Microbes,” a sort of
scientific revel--or revelry--the autobiography of a microbe that
had been once a man, and through a failure in a biological experiment
transformed into a cholera germ when the experimenter was trying to
turn him into a bird. His habitat was the person of a disreputable
tramp named Blitzowski, a human continent of vast areas, with seething
microbic nations and fantastic life problems. It was a satire, of
course--Gulliver’s Lilliput outdone--a sort of scientific, socialistic,
mathematical jamboree.

He tired of it before it reached completion, though not before it had
attained the proportions of a book of size. As a whole it would hardly
have added to his reputation, though it is not without fine and humorous
passages, and certainly not without interest. Its chief mission was to
divert him mentally that summer during, those days and nights when he
would otherwise have been alone and brooding upon his loneliness.--[For
extracts from “3,000 Years among the Microbes” see Appendix V, at the
end of this work.] MARK TWAIN’S SUGGESTED TITLE-PAGE FOR HIS MICROBE
BOOK:

                      3000 YEARS
                   AMONG THE MICROBES

                     By a Microbe

                      WITH NOTES
                  added by the same Hand
                   7000 years later

               Translated from the Original
                      Microbic
                         by

                      Mark Twain

His inability to reproduce faces in his mind’s eye he mourned as an
increasing calamity. Photographs were lifeless things, and when he tried
to conjure up the faces of his dead they seemed to drift farther out
of reach; but now and then kindly sleep brought to him something out of
that treasure-house where all our realities are kept for us fresh and
fair, perhaps for a day when we may claim them again. Once he wrote to
Mrs. Crane:

    SUSY DEAR,--I have had a lovely dream. Livy, dressed in black, was
    sitting up in my bed (here) at my right & looking as young & sweet
    as she used to when she was in health. She said, “What is the name
    of your sweet sister?” I said, “Pamela.” “Oh yes, that is it, I
    thought it was--(naming a name which has escaped me) won’t you write
    it down for me?” I reached eagerly for a pen & pad, laid my hands
    upon both, then said to myself, “It is only a dream,” and turned
    back sorrowfully & there she was still. The conviction flamed
    through me that our lamented disaster was a dream, & this a reality.
    I said, “How blessed it is, how blessed it is, it was all a dream,
    only a dream!” She only smiled and did not ask what dream I meant,
    which surprised me. She leaned her head against mine & kept saying,
    “I was perfectly sure it was a dream; I never would have believed it
    wasn’t.” I think she said several things, but if so they are gone
    from my memory. I woke & did not know I had been dreaming. She was
    gone. I wondered how she could go without my knowing it, but I did
    not spend any thought upon that. I was too busy thinking of how
    vivid & real was the dream that we had lost her, & how unspeakably
    blessed it was to find that it was not true & that she was still
    ours & with us.

He had the orchestrelle moved to Dublin, although it was no small
undertaking, for he needed the solace of its harmonies; and so the days
passed along, and he grew stronger in body and courage as his grief
drifted farther behind him. Sometimes, in the afternoon or in the
evening; when the neighbors had come in for a little while, he would
walk up and down and talk in his old, marvelous way of all the things
on land and sea, of the past and of the future, “Of Providence,
foreknowledge, will, and fate,” of the friends he had known and of the
things he had done, of the sorrow and absurdities of the world.

It was the same old scintillating, incomparable talk of which Howells
once said:

“We shall never know its like again. When he dies it will die with him.”

It was during the summer at Dublin that Clemens and Rogers together made
up a philanthropic ruse on Twichell. Twichell, through his own prodigal
charities, had fallen into debt, a fact which Rogers knew. Rogers was
a man who concealed his philanthropies when he could, and he performed
many of them of which the world will never know: In this case he said:

“Clemens, I want to help Twichell out of his financial difficulty. I
will supply the money and you will do the giving. Twichell must think it
comes from you.”

Clemens agreed to this on the condition that he be permitted to leave a
record of the matter for his children, so that he would not appear in
a false light to them, and that Twichell should learn the truth of the
gift, sooner or later. So the deed was done, and Twichell and his wife
lavished their thanks upon Clemens, who, with his wife, had more than
once been their benefactors, making the deception easy enough now.
Clemens writhed under these letters of gratitude, and forwarded them
to Clara in Norfolk, and later to Rogers himself. He pretended to take
great pleasure in this part of the conspiracy, but it was not an unmixed
delight. To Rogers he wrote:

    I wanted her [Clara] to see what a generous father she’s got. I
    didn’t tell her it was you, but by and by I want to tell her, when I
    have your consent; then I shall want her to remember the letters. I
    want a record there, for my Life when I am dead, & must be able to
    furnish the facts about the Relief-of-Lucknow-Twichell in case I
    fall suddenly, before I get those facts with your consent, before
    the Twichells themselves.

    I read those letters with immense pride! I recognized that I had
    scored one good deed for sure on my halo account. I haven’t had
    anything that tasted so good since the stolen watermelon.

    P. S.-I am hurrying them off to you because I dasn’t read them
    again! I should blush to my heels to fill up with this unearned
    gratitude again, pouring out of the thankful hearts of those poor
    swindled people who do not suspect you, but honestly believe I gave
    that money.

Mr. Rogers hastily replied:

    MY DEAR CLEMENS,--The letters are lovely. Don’t breathe. They are
    so happy! It would be a crime to let them think that you have in
    any way deceived them. I can keep still. You must. I am sending
    you all traces of the crime, so that you may look innocent and tell
    the truth, as you usually do when you think you can escape
    detection. Don’t get rattled.

    Seriously. You have done a kindness. You are proud of it, I know.
    You have made your friends happy, and you ought to be so glad as to
    cheerfully accept reproof from your conscience. Joe Wadsworth and I
    once stole a goose and gave it to a poor widow as a Christmas
    present. No crime in that. I always put my counterfeit money on
    the plate. “The passer of the sasser” always smiles at me and I get
    credit for doing generous things. But seriously again, if you do
    feel a little uncomfortable wait until I see you before you tell
    anybody. Avoid cultivating misery. I am trying to loaf ten solid
    days. We do hope to see you soon.

The secret was kept, and the matter presently (and characteristically)
passed out of Clemens’s mind altogether. He never remembered to tell
Twichell, and it is revealed here, according to his wish.

The Russian-Japanese war was in progress that summer, and its settlement
occurred in August. The terms of it did not please Mark Twain. When a
newspaper correspondent asked him for an expression of opinion on the
subject he wrote:

    Russia was on the highroad to emancipation from an insane and
    intolerable slavery. I was hoping there would be no peace until
    Russian liberty was safe. I think that this was a holy war, in the
    best and noblest sense of that abused term, and that no war was ever
    charged with a higher mission.

    I think there can be no doubt that that mission is now defeated and
    Russia’s chain riveted; this time to stay. I think the Tsar will
    now withdraw the small humanities that have been forced from him,
    and resume his medieval barbarisms with a relieved spirit and an
    immeasurable joy. I think Russian liberty has had its last chance
    and has lost it.

    I think nothing has been gained by the peace that is remotely
    comparable to what has been sacrificed by it. One more battle would
    have abolished the waiting chains of billions upon billions of
    unborn Russians, and I wish it could have been fought. I hope I am
    mistaken, yet in all sincerity I believe that this peace is entitled
    to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history.

It was the wisest public utterance on the subject--the deep, resonant
note of truth sounding amid a clamor of foolish joy-bells. It was the
message of a seer--the prophecy of a sage who sees with the clairvoyance
of knowledge and human understanding. Clemens, a few days later, was
invited by Colonel Harvey to dine with Baron Rosen and M. Sergius Witte;
but an attack of his old malady--rheumatism--prevented his acceptance.
His telegram of declination apparently pleased the Russian officials,
for Witte asked permission to publish it, and declared that he was going
to take it home to show to the Tsar. It was as follows:

To COLONEL HARVEY,--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more
than glad of this opportunity to meet the illustrious magicians who came
here equipped with nothing but a pen, & with it have divided the
honors of the war with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty
centuries history will not get done in admiring these men who attempted
what the world regarded as the impossible & achieved it.

MARK TWAIN.

But this was a modified form. His original draft would perhaps have been
less gratifying to that Russian embassy. It read:

    To COLONEL HARVEY,--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more
    than glad of this opportunity to meet those illustrious magicians
    who with the pen have annulled, obliterated, & abolished every high
    achievement of the Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a
    tremendous war into a gay & blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in
    all respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I taking
    third place, as becomes one who was not born to modesty, but by
    diligence & hard work is acquiring it.
                                       MARK.

There was still another form, brief and expressive:

DEAR COLONEL,--No, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge of sorrow
send for me. MARK.

Clemens’s war sentiment was given the widest newspaper circulation, and
brought him many letters, most of them applauding his words. Charles
Francis Adams wrote him:

    It attracted my attention because it so exactly expresses the views
    I have myself all along entertained.

And this was the gist of most of the expressed sentiments which came to
him.

Clemens wrote a number of things that summer, among them a little essay
entitled, “The Privilege of the Grave”--that is to say, free speech. He
was looking forward, he said, to the time when he should inherit that
privilege, when some of the things he had said, written and laid away,
could be published without damage to his friends or family. An article
entitled, “Interpreting the Deity,” he counted as among the things to
be uttered when he had entered into that last great privilege. It is an
article on the reading of signs and auguries in all ages to discover the
intentions of the Almighty, with historical examples of God’s judgments
and vindications. Here is a fair specimen. It refers to the chronicle of
Henry Huntington:

    All through this book Henry exhibits his familiarity with the
    intentions of God and with the reasons for the intentions.
    Sometimes very often, in fact--the act follows the intention after
    such a wide interval of time that one wonders how Henry could fit
    one act out of a hundred to one intention, and get the thing right
    every time, when there was such abundant choice among acts and
    intentions. Sometimes a man offends the Deity with a crime, and is
    punished for it thirty years later; meantime he has committed a
    million other crimes: no matter, Henry can pick out the one that
    brought the worms. Worms were generally used in those days for the
    slaying of particularly wicked people. This has gone out now, but
    in the old times it was a favorite. It always indicated a case of
    “wrath.” For instance:

    “The just God avenging Robert Fitzhildebrand’s perfidity, a worm
    grew in his vitals which, gradually gnawing its way through his
    intestines, fattened on the abandoned man till, tortured with
    excruciating sufferings and venting himself in bitter moans, he was
    by a fitting punishment brought to his end” (p. 400).

    It was probably an alligator, but we cannot tell; we only know it
    was a particular breed, and only used to convey wrath. Some
    authorities think it was an ichthyosaurus, but there is much doubt.

The entire article is in this amusing, satirical strain, and might
well enough be printed to-day. It is not altogether clear why it was
withheld, even then.

He finished his Eve’s Diary that summer, and wrote a story which was
originally planned to oblige Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske, to aid her in a
crusade against bullfighting in Spain. Mrs. Fiske wrote him that she had
read his dog story, written against the cruelties of vivisection,
and urged him to do something to save the horses that, after faithful
service, were sacrificed in the bull-ring. Her letter closed:

    I have lain awake nights very often wondering if I dare ask you to
    write a story of an old horse that is finally given over to the
    bull-ring. The story you would write would do more good than all
    the laws we are trying to have made and enforced for the prevention
    of cruelty to animals in Spain. We would translate and circulate
    the story in that country. I have wondered if you would ever write
    it.

    With most devoted homage,
                         Sincerely yours,
                                MINNIE MADDERN FISKE.

Clemens promptly replied:

DEAR MRS. FISKE, I shall certainly write the story. But I may not get
it to suit me, in which case it will go in the fire. Later I will try it
again--& yet again--& again. I am used to this. It has taken me
twelve years to write a short story--the shortest one I ever wrote, I
think.--[Probably “The Death Disk:”]--So do not be discouraged; I will
stick to this one in the same way.

                  Sincerely yours,
                                   S. L. CLEMENS.

It was an inspiring subject, and he began work on it immediately. Within
a month from the time he received Mrs. Fiske’s letter he had written
that pathetic, heartbreaking little story, “A Horse’s Tale,” and sent it
to Harper’s Magazine for illustration. In a letter written to Mr. Duneka
at the time, he tells of his interest in the narrative, and adds:

    This strong interest is natural, for the heroine is my small
    daughter Susy, whom we lost. It was not intentional--it was a good
    while before I found it out, so I am sending you her picture to use
    --& to reproduce with photographic exactness the unsurpassable
    expression & all. May you find an artist who has lost an idol.

He explains how he had put in a good deal of work, with his secretary,
on the orchestrelle to get the bugle-calls.

    We are to do these theatricals this evening with a couple of
    neighbors for audience, and then pass the hat.

It is not one of Mark Twain’s greatest stories, but its pathos brings
the tears, and no one can read it without indignation toward the custom
which it was intended to oppose. When it was published, a year later,
Mrs. Fiske sent him her grateful acknowledgments, and asked permission
to have it printed for pamphlet circulation m Spain.

A number of more or less notable things happened in this, Mark
Twain’s seventieth year. There was some kind of a reunion going on in
California, and he was variously invited to attend. Robert Fulton, of
Nevada, was appointed a committee of one to invite him to Reno for a
great celebration which was to be held there. Clemens replied that he
remembered, as if it were but yesterday, when he had disembarked from
the Overland stage in front of the Ormsby Hotel, in Carson City, and
told how he would like to accept the invitation.

If I were a few years younger I would accept it, and promptly, and I
would go. I would let somebody else do the oration, but as for me I
would talk--just talk. I would renew my youth; and talk--and talk--and
talk--and have the time of my life! I would march the unforgotten and
unforgetable antiques by, and name their names, and give them reverent
hail and farewell as they passed--Goodman, McCarthy, Gillis, Curry,
Baldwin, Winters, Howard, Nye, Stewart, Neely Johnson, Hal Clayton,
North, Root--and my brother, upon whom be peace!--and then the
desperadoes, who made life a joy, and the “slaughter-house,” a precious
possession: Sam Brown, Farmer Pete, Bill Mayfield, Six-fingered Jake,
Jack Williams, and the rest of the crimson discipleship, and so on, and
so on. Believe me, I would start a resurrection it would do you more
good to look at than the next one will, if you go on the way you are
going now.

Those were the days!--those old ones. They will come no more; youth will
come no more. They were so full to the brim with the wine of life; there
have been no others like them. It chokes me up to think of them. Would
you like me to come out there and cry? It would not beseem my white
head.

Good-by. I drink to you all. Have a good time-and take an old man’s
blessing.

In reply to another invitation from H. H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, he
wrote that his wandering days were over, and that it was his purpose to
sit by the fire for the rest of his “remnant of life.”

    A man who, like me, is going to strike 70 on the 30th of next
    November has no business to be flitting around the way Howells does
    --that shameless old fictitious butterfly. (But if he comes don’t
    tell him I said it, for it would hurt him & I wouldn’t brush a flake
    of powder from his wing for anything. I only say it in envy of his
    indestructible youth anyway. Howells will be 88 in October.)

And it was either then or on a similar occasion that he replied after
this fashion:

    I have done more for San Francisco than any other of its old
    residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully
    300,000. I could have done more--I could have gone earlier--it was
    suggested.

Which, by the way, is a perfect example of Mark Twain’s humorous manner,
the delicately timed pause, and the afterthought. Most humorists would
have been contented to end with the statement, “I could have gone
earlier.” Only Mark Twain could have added that final exquisite
touch--“it was suggested.”



CCXXXVI. AT PIER 70

Mark Twain was nearing seventy, the scriptural limitation of life, and
the returns were coming in. Some one of the old group was dying all the
time. The roll-call returned only a scattering answer. Of his oldest
friends, Charles Henry Webb, John Hay, and Sir Henry Irving, all died
that year. When Hay died Clemens gave this message to the press:

    I am deeply grieved, & I mourn with the nation this loss which is
    irreparable. My friendship with Mr. Hay & my admiration of him
    endured 38 years without impairment.

It was only a little earlier that he had written Hay an anonymous
letter, a copy of which he preserved. It here follows:

    DEAR & HONORED SIR,--I never hear any one speak of you & of your
    long roll of illustrious services in other than terms of pride &
    praise--& out of the heart. I think I am right in believing you to
    be the only man in the civil service of the country the cleanness of
    whose motives is never questioned by any citizen, & whose acts
    proceed always upon a broad & high plane, never by accident or
    pressure of circumstance upon a narrow or low one. There are
    majorities that are proud of more than one of the nation’s great
    servants, but I believe, & I think I know, that you are the only one
    of whom the entire nation is proud. Proud & thankful.

    Name & address are lacking here, & for a purpose: to leave you no
    chance to make my words a burden to you and a reproach to me, who
    would lighten your burdens if I could, not add to them.

Irving died in October, and Clemens ordered a wreath for his funeral. To
MacAlister he wrote:

    I profoundly grieve over Irving’s death. It is another reminder.
    My section of the procession has but a little way to go. I could
    not be very sorry if I tried.

Mark Twain, nearing seventy, felt that there was not much left for him
to celebrate; and when Colonel Harvey proposed a birthday gathering
in his honor, Clemens suggested a bohemian assembly over beer and
sandwiches in some snug place, with Howells, Henry Rogers, Twichell, Dr.
Rice, Dr. Edward Quintard, Augustus Thomas, and such other kindred
souls as were still left to answer the call. But Harvey had something
different in view: something more splendid even than the sixty-seventh
birthday feast, more pretentious, indeed, than any former literary
gathering. He felt that the attainment of seventy years by America’s
most distinguished man of letters and private citizen was a circumstance
which could not be moderately or even modestly observed. The date
was set five days later than the actual birthday--that is to say, on
December 5th, in order that it might not conflict with the various
Thanksgiving holidays and occasions. Delmonico’s great room was chosen
for the celebration of it, and invitations were sent out to practically
every writer of any distinction in America, and to many abroad. Of these
nearly two hundred accepted, while such as could not come sent pathetic
regrets.

What an occasion it was! The flower of American literature gathered
to do honor to its chief. The whole atmosphere of the place seemed
permeated with his presence, and when Colonel Harvey presented William
Dean Howells, and when Howells had read another double-barreled sonnet,
and introduced the guest of the evening with the words, “I will not say,
‘O King, live forever,’ but, ‘O King, live as long as you like!’” and
Mark Twain rose, his snow-white hair gleaming above that brilliant
assembly, it seemed that a world was speaking out in a voice of applause
and welcome. With a great tumult the throng rose, a billow of life,
the white handkerchiefs flying foam-like on its crest. Those who had
gathered there realized that it was a mighty moment, not only in his
life but in theirs. They were there to see this supreme embodiment of
the American spirit as he scaled the mountain-top. He, too, realized the
drama of that moment--the marvel of it--and he must have flashed a swift
panoramic view backward over the long way he had come, to stand, as he
had himself once expressed it, “for a single, splendid moment on the
Alps of fame outlined against the sun.” He must have remembered; for
when he came to speak he went back to the very beginning, to his very
first banquet, as he called it, when, as he said, “I hadn’t any hair; I
hadn’t any teeth; I hadn’t any clothes.” He sketched the meagerness
of that little hamlet which had seen his birth, sketched it playfully,
delightfully, so that his hearers laughed and shouted; but there was
always a tenderness under it all, and often the tears were not far
beneath the surface. He told of his habits of life, how he had attained
seventy years by simply sticking to a scheme of living which would kill
anybody else; how he smoked constantly, loathed exercise, and had no
other regularity of habits. Then, at last, he reached that wonderful,
unforgetable close:

    Threescore years and ten!

    It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe no
    active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-
    expired man, to use Kipling’s military phrase: You have served your
    term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become
    an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions
    are not for you, nor any bugle-call but “lights out.” You pay the
    time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer--and
    without prejudice--for they are not legally collectable.

    The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so
    many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave
    you will never need it again. If you shrink at thought of night,
    and winter, and the late homecomings from the banquet and the lights
    and laughter through the deserted streets--a desolation which would
    not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends
    are sleeping and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them,
    but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never
    disturb them more--if you shrink at the thought of these things you
    need only reply, “Your invitation honors me and pleases me because
    you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy,
    and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read
    my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and
    that when you in your turn shall arrive at Pier 70 you may step
    aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your
    course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.”

The tears that had been lying in wait were not restrained now. If there
were any present who did not let them flow without shame, who did not
shout their applause from throats choked with sobs, the writer of these
lines failed to see them or to hear of them. There was not one who was
ashamed to pay the great tribute of tears.

Many of his old friends, one after another, rose to tell their love
for him--Brander Matthews, Cable, Kate Douglas Riggs, Gilder, Carnegie,
Bangs, Bacheller--they kept it up far into the next morning. No other
arrival at Pier 70 ever awoke a grander welcome.



CCXXXVII. AFTERMATH

The announcement of the seventieth birthday dinner had precipitated a
perfect avalanche of letters, which continued to flow in until the news
accounts of it precipitated another avalanche. The carriers’ bags were
stuffed with greetings that came from every part of the world, from
every class of humanity. They were all full of love and tender wishes. A
card signed only with initials said: “God bless your old sweet soul for
having lived.”

Aldrich, who could not attend the dinner, declared that all through the
evening he had been listening in his mind to a murmur of voices in the
hall at Delmonico’s. A group of English authors in London combined in a
cable of congratulations. Anstey, Alfred Austin, Balfour, Barrie, Bryce,
Chesterton, Dobson, Doyle, Gosse, Hardy, Hope, Jacobs, Kipling, Lang,
Parker, Tenniel, Watson, and Zangwill were among the signatures.

Helen Keller wrote:

    And you are seventy years old? Or is the report exaggerated, like
    that of your death? I remember, when I saw you last, at the house
    of dear Mr. Hutton, in Princeton, you said:

    “If a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight he knows too much.
    If he is an optimist after he is forty-eight he knows too little.”

    Now we know you are an optimist, and nobody would dare to accuse one
    on the “seven-terraced summit” of knowing little. So probably you
    are not seventy after all, but only forty-seven!

Helen Keller was right. Mark Twain was not a pessimist in his heart, but
only by premeditation. It was his observation and his logic that led him
to write those things that, even in their bitterness, somehow conveyed
that spirit of human sympathy which is so closely linked to hope. To
Miss Keller he wrote:

“Oh, thank you for your lovely words!”

He was given another birthday celebration that month--this time by the
Society of Illustrators. Dan Beard, president, was also toast-master;
and as he presented Mark Twain there was a trumpet-note, and a lovely
girl, costumed as Joan of Arc, entered and, approaching him, presented
him with a laurel wreath. It was planned and carried out as a surprise
to him, and he hardly knew for the moment whether it was a vision or a
reality. He was deeply affected, so much so that for several moments he
could not find his voice to make any acknowledgments.

Clemens was more than ever sought now, and he responded when the cause
was a worthy one. He spoke for the benefit of the Russian sufferers at
the Casino on December 18th. Madame Sarah Bernhardt was also there, and
spoke in French. He followed her, declaring that it seemed a sort of
cruelty to inflict upon an audience our rude English after hearing that
divine speech flowing in that lucid Gallic tongue.

    It has always been a marvel to me--that French language; it has
    always been a puzzle to me. How beautiful that language is! How
    expressive it seems to be! How full of grace it is!

    And when it comes from lips like those, how eloquent and how limpid
    it is! And, oh, I am always deceived--I always think I am going to
    understand it.

    It is such a delight to me, such a delight to me, to meet Madame
    Bernhardt, and laugh hand to hand and heart to heart with her. I
    have seen her play, as we all have, and, oh, that is divine; but I
    have always wanted to know Madame Bernhardt herself--her fiery self.
    I have wanted to know that beautiful character.

    Why, she is the youngest person I ever saw, except myself--for I
    always feel young when I come in the presence of young people.

And truly, at seventy, Mark Twain was young, his manner, his movement,
his point of view-these were all, and always, young.

A number of palmists about that time examined impressions of his hand
without knowledge as to the owner, and they all agreed that it was the
hand of a man with the characteristics of youth, with inspiration, and
enthusiasm, and sympathy--a lover of justice and of the sublime. They
all agreed, too, that he was a deep philosopher, though, alas! they
likewise agreed that he lacked the sense of humor, which is not as
surprising as it sounds, for with Mark Twain humor was never mere
fun-making nor the love of it; rather it was the flower of his
philosophy--its bloom and fragrance.

When the fanfare and drum-beat of his birthday honors had passed by, and
a moment of calm had followed, Mark Twain set down some reflections on
the new estate he had achieved. The little paper, which forms a perfect
pendant to the “Seventieth Birthday Speech,” here follows:

                    OLD AGE

    I think it likely that people who have not been here will be
    interested to know what it is like. I arrived on the thirtieth of
    November, fresh from carefree & frivolous 69, & was disappointed.

    There is nothing novel about it, nothing striking, nothing to thrill
    you & make your eye glitter & your tongue cry out, “Oh, it is
    wonderful, perfectly wonderful!” Yes, it is disappointing. You
    say, “Is this it?--this? after all this talk and fuss of a thousand
    generations of travelers who have crossed this frontier & looked
    about them & told what they saw & felt? Why, it looks just like
    69.”

    And that is true. Also it is natural, for you have not come by the
    fast express; you have been lagging & dragging across the world’s
    continents behind oxen; when that is your pace one country melts
    into the next one so gradually that you are not able to notice the
    change; 70 looks like 69; 69 looked like 68; 68 looked like 67--& so
    on back & back to the beginning. If you climb to a summit & look
    back--ah, then you see!

    Down that far-reaching perspective you can make out each country &
    climate that you crossed, all the way up from the hot equator to the
    ice-summit where you are perched. You can make out where Infancy
    verged into Boyhood; Boyhood into down-lipped Youth; Youth into
    bearded, indefinite Young-Manhood; indefinite Young-Manhood into
    definite Manhood; definite Manhood, with large, aggressive
    ambitions, into sobered & heedful Husbandhood & Fatherhood; these
    into troubled & foreboding Age, with graying hair; this into Old
    Age, white-headed, the temple empty, the idols broken, the
    worshipers in their graves, nothing left but You, a remnant, a
    tradition, belated fag-end of a foolish dream, a dream that was so
    ingeniously dreamed that it seemed real all the time; nothing left
    but You, center of a snowy desolation, perched on the ice-summit,
    gazing out over the stages of that long trek & asking Yourself,
    “Would you do it again if you had the chance?”



CCXXXVIII. THE WRITER MEETS MARK TWAIN

We have reached a point in this history where the narrative becomes
mainly personal, and where, at the risk of inviting the charge of
egotism, the form of the telling must change.

It was at the end of 1901 that I first met Mark Twain--at The Players
Club on the night when he made the Founder’s Address mentioned in an
earlier chapter.

I was not able to arrive in time for the address, but as I reached the
head of the stairs I saw him sitting on the couch at the dining-room
entrance, talking earnestly to some one, who, as I remember it, did not
enter into my consciousness at all. I saw only that crown of white hair,
that familiar profile, and heard the slow modulations of his measured
speech. I was surprised to see how frail and old he looked. From his
pictures I had conceived him different. I did not realize that it was a
temporary condition due to a period of poor health and a succession of
social demands. I have no idea how long I stood there watching him.
He had been my literary idol from childhood, as he had been of so many
others; more than that, for the personality in his work had made him
nothing less than a hero to his readers.

He rose presently to go, and came directly toward me. A year before I
had done what new writers were always doing--I had sent him a book I had
written, and he had done what he was always doing--acknowledged it with
a kindly letter. I made my thanks now an excuse for addressing him. It
warmed me to hear him say that he remembered the book, though at the
time I confess I thought it doubtful. Then he was gone; but the mind and
ear had photographed those vivid first impressions that remain always
clear.

It was the following spring that I saw him again--at an afternoon
gathering, and the memory of that occasion is chiefly important because
I met Mrs. Clemens there for the only time, and like all who met her,
however briefly, felt the gentleness and beauty of her spirit. I think
I spoke with her at two or three different moments during the afternoon,
and on each occasion was impressed with that feeling of acquaintanceship
which we immediately experience with those rare beings whose souls are
wells of human sympathy and free from guile. Bret Harte had just died,
and during the afternoon Mr. Clemens asked me to obtain for him some
item concerning the obsequies.

It was more than three years before I saw him again. Meantime, a sort of
acquaintance had progressed. I had been engaged in writing the life of
Thomas Nast, the cartoonist, and I had found among the material a number
of letters to Nast from Mark Twain. I was naturally anxious to use those
fine characteristic letters, and I wrote him for his consent. He wished
to see the letters, and the permission that followed was kindness
itself. His admiration of Nast was very great.

It was proper, under the circumstances, to send him a copy of the book
when it appeared; but that was 1904, his year of sorrow and absence, and
the matter was postponed. Then came the great night of his seventieth
birthday dinner, with an opportunity to thank him in person for the use
of the letters. There was only a brief exchange of words, and it was the
next day, I think, that I sent him a copy of the book. It did not occur
to me that I should hear of it again.

We step back a moment here. Something more than a year earlier, through
a misunderstanding, Mark Twain’s long association with The Players had
been severed. It was a sorrow to him, and a still greater sorrow to the
club. There was a movement among what is generally known’ as the “Round
Table Group”--because its members have long had a habit of lunching at
a large, round table in a certain window--to bring him back again. David
Munro, associate editor of the North American Review--“David,” a man
well loved of men--and Robert Reid, the painter, prepared this simple
document:

                             TO
                         MARK TWAIN
                            from
                        THE CLANSMEN

                  Will ye no come back again?
                  Will ye no come back again?
                  Better lo’ed ye canna be,
                  Will ye no come back again?

It was signed by Munro and by Reid and about thirty others, and it
touched Mark Twain deeply. The lines had always moved him. He wrote:

    TO ROBT. REID & THE OTHERS--

    WELL-BELOVED,--Surely those lovely verses went to Prince Charlie’s
    heart, if he had one, & certainly they have gone to mine. I shall
    be glad & proud to come back again after such a moving & beautiful
    compliment as this from comrades whom I have loved so long. I hope
    you can poll the necessary vote; I know you will try, at any rate.
    It will be many months before I can foregather with you, for this
    black border is not perfunctory, not a convention; it symbolizes the
    loss of one whose memory is the only thing I worship.

    It is not necessary for me to thank you--& words could not deliver
    what I feel, anyway. I will put the contents of your envelope in
    the small casket where I keep the things which have become sacred to
    me.
                         S. L. C.

So the matter was temporarily held in abeyance until he should return to
social life. At the completion of his seventieth year the club had taken
action, and Mark Twain had been brought back, not in the regular order
of things, but as an honorary life member without dues or duties. There
was only one other member of this class, Sir Henry Irving.

The Players, as a club, does not give dinners. Whatever is done in that
way is done by one or more of the members in the private dining-room,
where there is a single large table that holds twenty-five, even thirty
when expanded to its limit. That room and that table have mingled with
much distinguished entertainment, also with history. Henry James made
his first after-dinner speech there, for one thing--at least he claimed
it was his first, though this is by the way.

A letter came to me which said that those who had signed the plea for
the Prince’s return were going to welcome him in the private dining-room
on the 5th of January. It was not an invitation, but a gracious
privilege. I was in New York a day or two in advance of the date, and
I think David Munro was the first person I met at The Players. As he
greeted me his eyes were eager with something he knew I would wish to
hear. He had been delegated to propose the dinner to Mark Twain, and had
found him propped up in bed, and noticed on the table near him a copy of
the Nast book. I suspect that Munro had led him to speak of it, and that
the result had lost nothing filtered through that radiant benevolence of
his.

The night of January 5, 1906, remains a memory apart from other dinners.
Brander Matthews presided, and Gilder was there, and Frank Millet and
Willard Metcalf and Robert Reid, and a score of others; some of them are
dead now, David Munro among them. It so happened that my seat was nearly
facing the guest of the evening, who, by custom of The Players, is
placed at the side and not at the end of the long table. He was no
longer frail and thin, as when I had first met him. He had a robust,
rested look; his complexion had the tints of a miniature painting. Lit
by the glow of the shaded candles, relieved against the dusk richness of
the walls, he made a picture of striking beauty. One could not take
his eyes from it, and to one guest at least it stirred the farthest
memories. I suddenly saw the interior of a farm-house sitting-room in
the Middle West, where I had first heard uttered the name of Mark Twain,
and where night after night a group gathered around the evening lamp
to hear the tale of the first pilgrimage, which, to a boy of eight, had
seemed only a wonderful poem and fairy tale. To Charles Harvey Genung,
who sat next to me, I whispered something of this, and how, during the
thirty-six years since then, no other human being to me had meant quite
what Mark Twain had meant--in literature, in life, in the ineffable
thing which means more than either, and which we call “inspiration,” for
lack of a truer word. Now here he was, just across the table. It was the
fairy tale come true.

Genung said:

“You should write his life.”

His remark seemed a pleasant courtesy, and was put aside as such. When
he persisted I attributed it to the general bloom of the occasion, and a
little to the wine, maybe, for the dinner was in its sweetest stage just
then--that happy, early stage when the first glass of champagne, or the
second, has proved its quality. He urged, in support of his idea, the
word that Munro had brought concerning the Nast book, but nothing of
what he said kindled any spark of hope. I could not but believe that
some one with a larger equipment of experience, personal friendship, and
abilities had already been selected for the task. By and by the speaking
began--delightful, intimate speaking in that restricted circle--and the
matter went out of my mind.

When the dinner had ended, and we were drifting about the table in
general talk, I found an opportunity to say a word to the guest of
the evening about his Joan of Arc, which I had recently re-read. To my
happiness, he detained me while he told me the long-ago incident which
had led to his interest, not only in the martyred girl, but in all
literature. I think we broke up soon after, and descended to the lower
rooms. At any rate, I presently found the faithful Charles Genung
privately reasserting to me the proposition that I should undertake the
biography of Mark Twain. Perhaps it was the brief sympathy established
by the name of Joan of Arc, perhaps it was only Genung’s insistent
purpose--his faith, if I may be permitted the word. Whatever it was,
there came an impulse, in the instant of bidding good-by to our guest of
honor, which prompted me to say:

“May I call to see you, Mr. Clemens, some day?”

And something--dating from the primal atom, I suppose--prompted him to
answer:

“Yes, come soon.”

This was on Wednesday night, or rather on Thursday morning, for it was
past midnight, and a day later I made an appointment with his secretary
to call on Saturday.

I can say truly that I set out with no more than the barest hope of
success, and wondering if I should have the courage, when I saw him,
even to suggest the thought in my mind. I know I did not have the
courage to confide in Genung that I had made the appointment--I was so
sure it would fail. I arrived at 21 Fifth Avenue and was shown into that
long library and drawing-room combined, and found a curious and deep
interest in the books and ornaments along the shelves as I waited. Then
I was summoned, and I remember ascending the stairs, wondering why I had
come on so futile an errand, and trying to think of an excuse to offer
for having come at all.

He was propped up in bed--in that stately bed-sitting, as was his habit,
with his pillows placed at the foot, so that he might have always before
him the rich, carved beauty of its headboard. He was delving through a
copy of Huckleberry Finn, in search of a paragraph concerning which
some random correspondent had asked explanation. He was commenting
unfavorably on this correspondent and on miscellaneous letter-writing in
general. He pushed the cigars toward me, and the talk of these matters
ran along and blended into others more or less personal. By and by I
told him what so many thousands had told him before: what he had
meant to me, recalling the childhood impressions of that large,
black-and-gilt-covered book with its wonderful pictures and
adventures--the Mediterranean pilgrimage. Very likely it bored him--he
had heard it so often--and he was willing enough, I dare say, to let me
change the subject and thank him for the kindly word which David Munro
had brought. I do not remember what he said then, but I suddenly found
myself suggesting that out of his encouragement had grown a hope--though
certainly it was something less--that I might some day undertake a book
about himself. I expected the chapter to end at this point, and his
silence which followed seemed long and ominous.

He said, at last, that at various times through his life he had been
preparing some autobiographical matter, but that he had tired of the
undertaking, and had put it aside. He added that he had hoped his
daughters would one day collect his letters; but that a biography--a
detailed story of personality and performance, of success and
failure--was of course another matter, and that for such a work no
arrangement had been made. He may have added one or two other general
remarks; then, turning those piercing agate-blue eyes directly upon me,
he said:

“When would you like to begin?”

There was a dresser with a large mirror behind him. I happened to catch
my reflection in it, and I vividly recollect saying to it mentally:
“This is not true; it is only one of many similar dreams.” But even in a
dream one must answer, and I said:

“Whenever you like. I can begin now.”

He was always eager in any new undertaking.

“Very good,” he said. “The sooner, then, the better. Let’s begin while
we are in the humor. The longer you postpone a thing of this kind the
less likely you are ever to get at it.”

This was on Saturday, as I have stated. I mentioned that my family was
still in the country, and that it would require a day or two to get
established in the city. I asked if Tuesday, January 9th, would be too
soon to begin. He agreed that Tuesday would do, and inquired something
about my plan of work. Of course I had formed nothing definite, but I
said that in similar undertakings a part of the work had been done with
a stenographer, who had made the notes while I prompted the subject to
recall a procession of incidents and episodes, to be supplemented with
every variety of material obtainable--letters and other documentary
accumulations. Then he said:

“I think I should enjoy dictating to a stenographer, with some one to
prompt me and to act as audience. The room adjoining this was fitted up
for my study. My manuscripts and notes and private books and many of my
letters are there, and there are a trunkful or two of such things in the
attic. I seldom use the room myself. I do my writing and reading in bed.
I will turn that room over to you for this work. Whatever you need will
be brought to you. We can have the dictation here in the morning, and
you can put in the rest of the day to suit yourself. You can have a key
and come and go as you please.”

That was always his way. He did nothing by halves; nothing without
unquestioning confidence and prodigality. He got up and showed me the
lovely luxury of the study, with its treasures of material. I did not
believe it true yet. It had all the atmosphere of a dream, and I have no
distinct recollection of how I came away. When I returned to The Players
and found Charles Harvey Genung there, and told him about it, it is
quite certain that he perjured himself when he professed to believe it
true and pretended that he was not surprised.



CCXXXIX. WORKING WITH MARK TWAIN

On Tuesday, January 9, 1906, I was on hand with a capable
stenographer--Miss Josephine Hobby, who had successively, and
successfully, held secretarial positions with Charles Dudley Warner and
Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, and was therefore peculiarly qualified for the
work in hand.

Clemens, meantime, had been revolving our plans and adding some
features of his own. He proposed to double the value and interest of our
employment by letting his dictations continue the form of those earlier
autobiographical chapters, begun with Redpath in 1885, and continued
later in Vienna and at the Villa Quarto. He said he did not think he
could follow a definite chronological program; that he would like
to wander about, picking up this point and that, as memory or fancy
prompted, without any particular biographical order. It was his purpose,
he declared, that his dictations should not be published until he had
been dead a hundred years or more--a prospect which seemed to give him
an especial gratification.--[As early as October, 1900, he had proposed
to Harper & Brothers a contract for publishing his personal memoirs at
the expiration of one hundred years from date; and letters covering the
details were exchanged with Mr. Rogers. The document, however, was not
completed.]

He wished to pay the stenographer, and to own these memoranda, he said,
allowing me free access to them for any material I might find valuable.
I could also suggest subjects for dictation, and ask particulars of any
special episode or period. I believe this covered the whole arrangement,
which did not require more than five minutes, and we set to work without
further prologue.

I ought to state that he was in bed when we arrived, and that he
remained there during almost all of these earlier dictations, clad in
a handsome silk dressing-gown of rich Persian pattern, propped against
great snowy pillows. He loved this loose luxury and ease, and found
it conducive to thought. On the little table beside him, where lay his
cigars, papers, pipes, and various knickknacks, shone a reading-lamp,
making more brilliant the rich coloring of his complexion and the gleam
of his shining hair. There was daylight, too, but it was north light,
and the winter days were dull. Also the walls of the room were a deep,
unreflecting red, and his eyes were getting old. The outlines of that
vast bed blending into the luxuriant background, the whole focusing
to the striking central figure, remain in my mind to-day--a picture of
classic value.

He dictated that morning some matters connected with the history of the
Comstock mine; then he drifted back to his childhood, returning again
to the more modern period, and closed, I think, with some comments on
current affairs. It was absorbingly interesting; his quaint, unhurried
fashion of speech, the unconscious movement of his hands, the play of
his features as his fancies and phrases passed in mental review and
were accepted or waved aside. We were watching one of the great literary
creators of his time in the very process of his architecture. We
constituted about the most select audience in the world enjoying what
was, likely enough, its most remarkable entertainment. When he turned
at last and inquired the time we were all amazed that two hours and more
had slipped away.

“And how much I have enjoyed it!” he said. “It is the ideal plan for
this kind of work. Narrative writing is always disappointing. The moment
you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the personal
relation, which contains the very essence of interest. With shorthand
dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table--always a
most inspiring place. I expect to dictate all the rest of my life, if
you good people are willing to come and listen to it.”

The dictations thus begun continued steadily from week to week, and
always with increasing charm. We never knew what he was going to talk
about, and it was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning;
then he went drifting among episodes, incidents, and periods in his
irresponsible fashion; the fashion of table-conversation, as he said,
the methodless method of the human mind. It was always delightful, and
always amusing, tragic, or instructive, and it was likely to be one
of these at one instant, and another the next. I felt myself the most
fortunate biographer in the world, as undoubtedly I was, though not just
in the way that I first imagined.

It was not for several weeks that I began to realize that these
marvelous reminiscences bore only an atmospheric relation to history;
that they were aspects of biography rather than its veritable narrative,
and built largely--sometimes wholly--from an imagination that, with age,
had dominated memory, creating details, even reversing them, yet with a
perfect sincerity of purpose on the part of the narrator to set down the
literal and unvarnished truth. It was his constant effort to be frank
and faithful to fact, to record, to confess, and to condemn without
stint. If you wanted to know the worst of Mark Twain you had only to
ask him for it. He would give it, to the last syllable--worse than
the worst, for his imagination would magnify it and adorn it with new
iniquities, and if he gave it again, or a dozen times, he would improve
upon it each time, until the thread of history was almost impossible to
trace through the marvel of that fabric; and he would do the same for
another person just as willingly. Those vividly real personalities
that he marched and countermarched before us were the most convincing
creatures in the world; the most entertaining, the most excruciatingly
humorous, or wicked, or tragic; but, alas, they were not always safe to
include in a record that must bear a certain semblance to history. They
often disagreed in their performance, and even in their characters,
with the documents in the next room, as I learned by and by when those
records, disentangled, began to rebuild the structure of the years.

His gift of dramatization had been exercised too long to be
discarded now. The things he told of Mrs. Clemens and of Susy were
true--marvelously and beautifully true, in spirit and in aspect--and the
actual detail of these mattered little in such a record. The rest was
history only as ‘Roughing It’ is history, or the ‘Tramp Abroad’; that
is to say, it was fictional history, with fact as a starting-point. In
a prefatory note to these volumes we have quoted Mark Twain’s own lovely
and whimsical admission, made once when he realized his deviations:

“When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or
not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.”

At another time he paraphrased one of Josh Billings’s sayings in the
remark: “It isn’t so astonishing, the number of things that I can
remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.”

I do not wish to say, by any means, that his so-called autobiography is
a mere fairy tale. It is far from that. It is amazingly truthful in
the character-picture it represents of the man himself. It is only not
reliable--and it is sometimes even unjust--as detailed history.
Yet, curiously enough, there were occasional chapters that were
photographically exact, and fitted precisely with the more positive,
if less picturesque, materials. It is also true that such chapters were
likely to be episodes intrinsically so perfect as to not require the
touch of art.

In the talks which we usually had, when the dictations were ended and
Miss Hobby had gone, I gathered much that was of still greater value.
Imagination was temporarily dispossessed, as it were, and, whether
expounding some theory or summarizing some event, he cared little
for literary effect, and only for the idea and the moment immediately
present.

It was at such times that he allowed me to make those inquiries we had
planned in the beginning, and which apparently had little place in the
dictations themselves. Sometimes I led him to speak of the genesis of
his various books, how he had come to write them, and I think there was
not a single case where later I did not find his memory of these matters
almost exactly in accord with the letters of the moment, written to
Howells or Twichell, or to some member of his family. Such reminiscence
was usually followed by some vigorous burst of human philosophy, often
too vigorous for print, too human, but as dazzling as a search-light in
its revelation.

It was during this earlier association that he propounded, one day, his
theory of circumstance, already set down, that inevitable sequence of
cause and effect, beginning with the first act of the primal atom. He
had been dictating that morning his story of the clairvoyant dream
which preceded his brother’s death, and the talk of foreknowledge had
continued. I said one might logically conclude from such a circumstance
that the future was a fixed quantity.

“As absolutely fixed as the past,” he said; and added the remark already
quoted.--[Chap. lxxv] A little later he continued:

“Even the Almighty Himself cannot check or change that sequence of
events once it is started. It is a fixed quantity, and a part of
the scheme is a mental condition during certain moments usually of
sleep--when the mind may reach out and grasp some of the acts which are
still to come.”

It was a new angle to me--a line of logic so simple and so utterly
convincing that I have remained unshaken in it to this day. I have never
been able to find any answer to it, nor any one who could even attempt
to show that the first act of the first created atom did not strike the
key-note of eternity.

At another time, speaking of the idea that God works through man, he
burst out:

“Yes, of course, just about as much as a man works through his
microbes!”

He had a startling way of putting things like that, and it left not much
to say.

I was at this period interested a good deal in mental healing, and had
been treated for neurasthenia with gratifying results. Like most of the
world, I had assumed, from his published articles, that he condemned
Christian Science and its related practices out of hand. When I
confessed, rather reluctantly, one day, the benefit I had received, he
surprised me by answering:

“Of course you have been benefited. Christian Science is humanity’s
boon. Mother Eddy deserves a place in the Trinity as much as any member
of it. She has organized and made available a healing principle that for
two thousand years has never been employed, except as the merest kind of
guesswork. She is the benefactor of the age.”

It seemed strange, at the time, to hear him speak in this way concerning
a practice of which he was generally regarded as the chief public
antagonist. It was another angle of his many-sided character.



CCXL. THE DEFINITION OF A GENTLEMAN

That was a busy winter for him socially. He was constantly demanded for
this thing and that--for public gatherings, dinners--everywhere he was
a central figure. Once he presided at a Valentine dinner given by some
Players to David Munro. He had never presided at a dinner before, he
said, and he did it in his own way, which certainly was a taking one,
suitable to that carefree company and occasion--a real Scotch occasion,
with the Munro tartan everywhere, the table banked with heather, and a
wild piper marching up and down in the anteroom, blowing savage airs in
honor of Scotland’s gentlest son.

An important meeting of that winter was at Carnegie Hall--a great
gathering which had assembled for the purpose of aiding Booker T.
Washington in his work for the welfare of his race. The stage and the
auditorium were thronged with notables. Joseph H. Choate and Mark Twain
presided, and both spoke; also Robert C. Ogden and Booker T. Washington
himself. It was all fine and interesting. Choate’s address was ably
given, and Mark Twain was at his best. He talked of politics and of
morals--public and private--how the average American citizen was true to
his Christian principles three hundred and sixty-three days in the year,
and how on the other two days of the year he left those principles at
home and went to the tax-office and the voting-booths, and did his best
to damage and undo his whole year’s faithful and righteous work.

    I used to be an honest man, but I am crumbling--no, I have crumbled.
    When they assessed me at $75,000 a fortnight ago I went out and
    tried to borrow the money and couldn’t. Then when I found they were
    letting a whole crowd of millionaires live in New York at a third of
    the price they were charging me I was hurt, I was indignant, and
    said, this is the last feather. I am not going to run this town all
    by myself. In that moment--in that memorable moment, I began to
    crumble. In fifteen minutes the disintegration was complete. In
    fifteen minutes I was become just a mere moral sand-pile, and I
    lifted up my hand, along with those seasoned and experienced
    deacons, and swore off every rag of personal property I’ve got in
    the world.

I had never heard him address a miscellaneous audience. It was marvelous
to see how he convulsed it, and silenced it, and controlled it at will.
He did not undertake any special pleading for the negro cause; he only
prepared the way with cheerfulness.

Clemens and Choate joined forces again, a few weeks later, at a great
public meeting assembled in aid of the adult blind. Helen Keller was to
be present, but she had fallen ill through overwork. She sent to Clemens
one of her beautiful letters, in which she said:

    I should be happy if I could have spelled into my hand the words as
    they fall from your lips, and receive, even as it is uttered, the
    eloquence of our newest ambassador to the blind.

Clemens, dictating the following morning, told of his first meeting with
Helen Keller at a little gathering in Lawrence Hutton’s home, when
she was about the age of fourteen. It was an incident that invited no
elaboration, and probably received none.

    Henry Rogers and I went together. The company had all assembled and
    had been waiting a while. The wonderful child arrived now with her
    about equally wonderful teacher, Miss Sullivan, and seemed quite
    well to recognize the character of her surroundings. She said, “Oh,
    the books, the books, so many, many books. How lovely!”

    The guests were brought one after another. As she shook hands with
    each she took her hand away and laid her fingers lightly against
    Miss Sullivan’s lips, who spoke against them the person’s name.

    Mr. Howells seated himself by Helen on the sofa, and she put her
    fingers against his lips and he told her a story of considerable
    length, and you could see each detail of it pass into her mind and
    strike fire there and throw the flash of it into her face.

    After a couple of hours spent very pleasantly some one asked if
    Helen would remember the feel of the hands of the company after this
    considerable interval of time and be able to discriminate the hands
    and name the possessors of them. Miss Sullivan said, “Oh, she will
    have no difficulty about that.” So the company filed past, shook
    hands in turn, and with each hand-shake Helen greeted the owner of
    the hand pleasantly and spoke the name that belonged to it without
    hesitation.

    By and by the assemblage proceeded to the dining-room and sat down
    to the luncheon. I had to go away before it was over, and as I
    passed by Helen I patted her lightly on the head and passed on.
    Miss Sullivan called to me and said, “Stop, Mr. Clemens, Helen is
    distressed because she did not recognize your hand. Won’t you come
    back and do that again?” I went back and patted her lightly on the
    head, and she said at once, “Oh, it’s Mr. Clemens.”

    Perhaps some one can explain this miracle, but I have never been
    able to do it. Could she feel the wrinkles in my hand through her
    hair? Some one else must answer this.

It was three years following this dictation that the mystery received a
very simple and rather amusing solution. Helen had come to pay a visit
to Mark Twain’s Connecticut home, Stormfield, then but just completed.
He had met her, meantime, but it had not occurred to him before to ask
her how she had recognized him that morning at Hutton’s, in what had
seemed such a marvelous way. She remembered, and with a smile said:

“I smelled you.” Which, after all, did not make the incident seem much
less marvelous.

On one of the mornings after Miss Hobby had gone Clemens said:

“A very curious thing has happened--a very large-sized-joke.” He was
shaving at the time, and this information came in brief and broken
relays, suited to a performance of that sort. The reader may perhaps
imagine the effect without further indication of it.

“I was going on a yachting trip once, with Henry Rogers, when a reporter
stopped me with the statement that Mrs. Astor had said that there had
never been a gentleman in the White House, and he wanted me to give him
my definition of a gentleman. I didn’t give him my definition; but he
printed it, just the same, in the afternoon paper. I was angry at first,
and wanted to bring a damage suit. When I came to read the definition it
was a satisfactory one, and I let it go. Now to-day comes a letter and
a telegram from a man who has made a will in Missouri, leaving ten
thousand dollars to provide tablets for various libraries in the State,
on which shall be inscribed Mark Twain’s definition of a gentleman. He
hasn’t got the definition--he has only heard of it, and he wants me to
tell him in which one of my books or speeches he can find it. I couldn’t
think, when I read that letter, what in the nation the man meant, but
shaving somehow has a tendency to release thought, and just now it all
came to me.”

It was a situation full of amusing possibilities; but he reached no
conclusion in the matter. Another telegram was brought in just then,
which gave a sadder aspect to his thought, for it said that his old
coachman, Patrick McAleer, who had begun in the Clemens service with the
bride and groom of thirty-six years before, was very low, and could
not survive more than a few days. This led him to speak of Patrick,
his noble and faithful nature, and how he always claimed to be in their
service, even during their long intervals of absence abroad. Clemens
gave orders that everything possible should be done for Patrick’s
comfort. When the end came, a few days later, he traveled to Hartford
to lay flowers on Patrick’s bier, and to serve, with Patrick’s
friends--neighbor coachmen and John O’Neill, the gardener--as
pall-bearer, taking his allotted place without distinction or favor.

It was the following Sunday, at the Majestic Theater, in New York, that
Mark Twain spoke to the Young Men’s Christian Association. For several
reasons it proved an unusual meeting. A large number of free tickets had
been given out, far more than the place would hold; and, further, it
had been announced that when the ticket-holders had been seated the
admission would be free to the public. The subject chosen for the talk
was “Reminiscences.”

When we arrived the streets were packed from side to side for a
considerable distance and a riot was in progress. A great crowd had
swarmed about the place, and the officials, instead of throwing the
doors wide and letting the theater fill up, regardless of tickets, had
locked them. As a result there was a shouting, surging human mass that
presently dashed itself against the entrance. Windows and doors gave
way, and there followed a wild struggle for entrance. A moment later the
house was packed solid. A detachment of police had now arrived, and in
time cleared the street. It was said that amid the tumult some had lost
their footing and had been trampled and injured, but of this we did
not learn until later. We had been taken somehow to a side entrance
and smuggled into boxes.--[The paper next morning bore the head-lines:
“10,000 Stampeded at the Mark Twain Meeting. Well-dressed Men and Women
Clubbed by Police at Majestic Theater.” In this account the paper stated
that the crowd had collected an hour before the time for opening; that
nothing of the kind had been anticipated and no police preparation had
been made.]

It was peaceful enough in the theater until Mark Twain appeared on the
stage. He was wildly greeted, and when he said, slowly and seriously,
“I thank you for this signal recognition of merit,” there was a still
noisier outburst. In the quiet that followed he began his memories, and
went wandering along from one anecdote to another in the manner of his
daily dictations.

At last it seemed to occur to him, in view of the character of his
audience, that he ought to close with something in the nature of counsel
suited to young men.

    It is from experiences such as mine [he said] that we get our
    education of life. We string them into jewels or into tinware, as
    we may choose. I have received recently several letters asking for
    counsel or advice, the principal request being for some incident
    that may prove helpful to the young. It is my mission to teach, and
    I am always glad to furnish something. There have been a lot of
    incidents in my career to help me along--sometimes they helped me
    along faster than I wanted to go.

He took some papers from his pocket and started to unfold one of them;
then, as if remembering, he asked how long he had been talking. The
answer came, “Thirty-five minutes.” He made as if to leave the stage,
but the audience commanded him to go on.

“All right,” he said, “I can stand more of my own talk than any one I
ever knew.” Opening one of the papers, a telegram, he read:

“In which one of your works can we find the definition of a gentleman?”
 Then he added:

    I have not answered that telegram. I couldn’t. I never wrote any
    such definition, though it seems to me that if a man has just,
    merciful, and kindly instincts he would be a gentleman, for he would
    need nothing else in this world.

He opened a letter. “From Howells,” he said.

    My old friend, William Dean Howells--Howells, the head of American
    literature. No one is able to stand with him. He is an old, old
    friend of mine, and he writes me, “To-morrow I shall be sixty-nine
    years old.” Why, I am surprised at Howells writing so. I have
    known him myself longer than that. I am sorry to see a man trying
    to appear so young. Let’s see. Howells says now, “I see you have
    been burying Patrick. I suppose he was old, too.”

The house became very still. Most of them had read an account of
Mark Twain’s journey to Hartford and his last service to his faithful
servitor. The speaker’s next words were not much above a whisper, but
every syllable was distinct.

    No, he was never old-Patrick. He came to us thirty-six years ago.
    He was our coachman from the day that I drove my young bride to our
    new home. He was a young Irishman, slender, tall, lithe, honest,
    truthful, and he never changed in all his life. He really was with
    us but twenty-five years, for he did not go with us to Europe; but
    he never regarded that a separation. As the children grew up he was
    their guide. He was all honor, honesty, and affection. He was with
    us in New Hampshire last summer, and his hair was just as black, his
    eyes were just as blue, his form just as straight, and his heart
    just as good as on the day we first met. In all the long years
    Patrick never made a mistake. He never needed an order; he never
    received a command. He knew. I have been asked for my idea of an
    ideal gentleman, and I give it to you--Patrick McAleer.

It was the sort of thing that no one but Mark Twain has quite been able
to do, and it was just that recognized quality behind it that had made
crowds jam the street and stampede the entrance to be in his presence-to
see him and to hear his voice.



CCXLI. GORKY, HOWELLS, AND MARK TWAIN

Clemens was now fairly back again in the wash of banquets and
speech-making that had claimed him on his return from England, five
years before. He made no less than a dozen speeches altogether that
winter, and he was continually at some feasting or other, where he
was sure to be called upon for remarks. He fell out of the habit of
preparing his addresses, relying upon the inspiration of the moment,
merely following the procedure of his daily dictations, which had
doubtless given him confidence for this departure from his earlier
method. There was seldom an afternoon or an evening that he was not
required, and seldom a morning that the papers did not have some report
of his doings. Once more, and in a larger fashion than ever, he had
become “the belle of New York.” But he was something further. An
editorial in the Evening Mail said:

    Mark Twain, in his “last and best of life for which the first was
    made,” seems to be advancing rapidly to a position which makes him a
    kind of joint Aristides, Solon, and Themistocles of the American
    metropolis--an Aristides for justness and boldness as well as
    incessancy of opinion, a Solon for wisdom and cogency, and a
    Themistocles for the democracy of his views and the popularity of
    his person.

    Things have reached the point where, if Mark Twain is not at a
    public meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of
    his inimitable letters of advice and encouragement. If he deigns to
    make a public appearance there is a throng at the doors which
    overtaxes the energy and ability of the police. We must be glad
    that we have a public commentator like Mark Twain always at hand and
    his wit and wisdom continually on tap. His sound, breezy
    Mississippi Valley Americanism is a corrective to all sorts of
    snobbery. He cultivates respect for human rights by always making
    sure that he has his own.

He talked one afternoon to the Barnard girls, and another afternoon to
the Women’s University Club, illustrating his talk with what purported
to be moral tales. He spoke at a dinner given to City Tax Commissioner
Mr. Charles Putzel; and when he was introduced there as the man who had
said, “When in doubt tell the truth,” he replied that he had invented
that maxim for others, but that when in doubt himself, he used more
sagacity.

The speeches he made kept his hearers always in good humor; but he made
them think, too, for there was always substance and sound reason and
searching satire in the body of what he said.

It was natural that there should be reporters calling frequently at Mark
Twain’s home, and now and then the place became a veritable storm-center
of news. Such a moment arrived when it became known that a public
library in Brooklyn had banished Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer from the
children’s room, presided over by a young woman of rather severe morals.
The incident had begun in November of the previous year. One of the
librarians, Asa Don Dickinson, who had vigorously voted against the
decree, wrote privately of the matter. Clemens had replied:

    DEAR SIR,--I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote Tom
    Sawyer & Huck Finn for adults exclusively, & it always distresses me
    when I find that boys & girls have been allowed access to them. The
    mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.
    I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an
    unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young
    life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an
    unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do
    that and ever draw a clean, sweet breath again this side of the
    grave. Ask that young lady--she will tell you so.

    Most honestly do I wish that I could say a softening word or two in
    defense of Huck’s character since you wish it, but really, in my
    opinion, it is no better than those of Solomon, David, & the rest of
    the sacred brotherhood.

    If there is an unexpurgated in the Children’s Department, won’t you
    please help that young woman remove Tom & Huck from that
    questionable companionship?

                  Sincerely yours,
                                S. L. CLEMENS.

    I shall not show your letter to any one-it is safe with me.

Mr. Dickinson naturally kept this letter from the public, though he read
it aloud to the assembled librarians, and the fact of its existence
and its character eventually leaked out.--[It has been supplied to the
writer by Mr. Dickinson, and is published here with his consent.]--One
of the librarians who had heard it mentioned it at a theater-party in
hearing of an unrealized newspaper man. This was near the end of the
following March.

The “tip” was sufficient. Telephone-bells began to jingle, and groups
of newspaper men gathered simultaneously on Mr. Dickinson’s and on Mark
Twain’s door-steps. At a 21 Fifth Avenue you could hardly get in or out,
for stepping on them. The evening papers surmised details, and Huck and
Tom had a perfectly fresh crop of advertising, not only in America, but
in distant lands. Dickinson wrote Clemens that he would not give out the
letter without his authority, and Clemens replied:

    Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove! The newspaper boys want
    that letter--don’t you let them get hold of it. They say you refuse
    to allow them to see it without my consent. Keep on refusing, and
    I’ll take care of this end of the line.

In a recent letter to the writer Mr. Dickinson states that Mark Twain’s
solicitude was for the librarian, whom he was unwilling to involve in
difficulties with his official superiors, and he adds:

    There may be some doubt as to whether Mark Twain was or was not a
    religious man, for there are many definitions of the word religion.
    He was certainly a hater of conventions, had no patience with
    sanctimony and bibliolatry, and was perhaps irreverent. But any one
    who reads carefully the description of the conflict in Huck’s soul,
    in regard to the betrayal of Jim, will credit the creator of the
    scene with deep and true moral feeling.

The reporters thinned out in the course of a few days when no result was
forthcoming; but they were all back again presently when the Maxim Gorky
fiasco came along. The distinguished revolutionist, Tchaykoffsky, as
a sort of advance agent for Gorky, had already called upon Clemens to
enlist his sympathy in their mission, which was to secure funds in
the cause of Russian emancipation. Clemens gave his sympathy, and now
promised his aid, though he did not hesitate to discourage the mission.
He said that American enthusiasm in such matters stopped well above
their pockets, and that this revolutionary errand would fail. Howells,
too, was of this opinion. In his account of the episode he says:

    I told a valued friend of his and mine that I did not believe he
    could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and I think now I set the
    figure too high.

Clemens’s interest, however, grew. He attended a dinner given to Gorky
at the “A Club,” No. 3 Fifth Avenue, and introduced Gorky to the diners.
Also he wrote a letter to be read by Tchaykoffsky at a meeting held at
the Grand Central Palace, where three thousand people gathered to hear
this great revolutionist recite the story of Russia’s wrongs. The letter
ran:

    DEAR MR. TCHAYKOFFSKY,--My sympathies are with the Russian
    revolution, of course. It goes without saying. I hope it will
    succeed, and now that I have talked with you I take heart to believe
    it will. Government by falsified promises, by lies, by treachery,
    and by the butcher-knife, for the aggrandizement of a single family
    of drones and its idle and vicious kin has been borne quite long
    enough in Russia, I should think. And it is to be hoped that the
    roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end
    to it and set up the republic in its place. Some of us, even the
    white-headed, may live to see the blessed day when tsars and grand
    dukes will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven.
           Most sincerely yours,
                            MARK TWAIN.

Clemens and Howells called on Gorky and agreed to figure prominently
in a literary dinner to be given in his honor. The movement was really
assuming considerable proportions, when suddenly something happened
which caused it to flatten permanently, and rather ridiculously.

Arriving at 21 Fifth Avenue, one afternoon, I met Howells coming out. I
thought he had an unhappy, hunted look. I went up to the study, and on
opening the door I found the atmosphere semi-opaque with cigar smoke,
and Clemens among the drifting blue wreaths and layers, pacing up
and down rather fiercely. He turned, inquiringly, as I entered. I had
clipped a cartoon from a morning paper, which pictured him as upsetting
the Tsar’s throne--the kind of thing he was likely to enjoy. I said:

“Here is something perhaps you may wish to see, Mr. Clemens.”

He shook his head violently.

“No, I can’t see anything now,” and in another moment had disappeared
into his own room. Something extraordinary had happened. I wondered if,
after all their lifelong friendship, he and Howells had quarreled. I was
naturally curious, but it was not a good time to investigate. By and by
I went down on the street, where the newsboys were calling extras. When
I had bought one, and glanced at the first page, I knew. Gorky had been
expelled from his hotel for having brought to America, as his wife,
a woman not so recognized by the American laws. Madame Andreieva, a
Russian actress, was a leader in the cause of freedom, and by Russian
custom her relation with Gorky was recognized and respected; but it was
not sufficiently orthodox for American conventions, and it was certainly
unfortunate that an apostle of high purpose should come handicapped in
that way. Apparently the news had already reached Howells and Clemens,
and they had been feverishly discussing what was best to do about the
dinner.

Within a day or two Gorky and Madame Andreieva were evicted from a
procession of hotels, and of course the papers rang with the head-lines.
An army of reporters was chasing Clemens and Howells. The Russian
revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more intimate
domestic interest. Howells came again, the reporters following and
standing guard at the door below. In ‘My Mark Twain’ he says:

    That was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured
    ourselves in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then
    “blowing a cone off,” as the telegraphic phrase was. The roof of
    the great market in Naples had just broken in under its load of
    ashes and cinders, and crushed hundreds of people; and we asked each
    other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure
    would have been far less terrific than it was with us in Fifth
    Avenue. The forbidden butler came up with a message that there were
    some gentlemen below who wanted to see Clemens.

    “How many?” he demanded.

    “Five,” the butler faltered.

    “Reporters?”

    The butler feigned uncertainty.

    “What would you do?” he asked me.

    “I wouldn’t see them,” I said, and then Clemens went directly down
    to them. How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot
    say, but I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which
    was harmless enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in
    radiant satisfaction with having seen them.

It is not quite clear at this time just what word was sent to Gorky but
the matter must have been settled that night, for Clemens was in a fine
humor next morning. It was before dictation time, and he came drifting
into the study and began at once to speak of the dinner and the
impossibility of its being given now. Then he said:

“American public opinion is a delicate fabric. It shrivels like the webs
of morning at the lightest touch.”

Later in the day he made this memorandum:

    Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly
    transgressed custom brings sure punishment. The penalty may be
    unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be
    inflicted just the same. Certainly, then, there can be but one wise
    thing for a visiting stranger to do--find out what the country’s
    customs are and refrain from offending against them.

    The efforts which have been made in Gorky’s justification are
    entitled to all respect because of the magnanimity of the motive
    back of them, but I think that the ink was wasted. Custom is
    custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts,
    seasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle
    winds have upon Gibraltar.--[To Dan Beard he said, “Gorky made an
    awful mistake, Dan. He might as well have come over here in his
    shirt-tail.”]

The Gorky disturbance had hardly begun to subside when there came
another upheaval that snuffed it out completely. On the afternoon of the
18th of April I heard, at The Players, a wandering telephonic rumor that
a great earthquake was going on in San Francisco. Half an hour later,
perhaps, I met Clemens coming out of No. 21. He asked:

“Have you heard the news about San Francisco?”

I said I had heard a rumor of an earthquake; and had seen an extra with
big scare-heads; but I supposed the matter was exaggerated.

“No,” he said, “I am afraid it isn’t. We have just had a telephone
message that it is even worse than at first reported. A great fire is
consuming the city. Come along to the news-stand and we’ll see if there
is a later edition.”

We walked to Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street and got some fresh extras.
The news was indeed worse, than at first reported. San Francisco was
going to destruction. Clemens was moved deeply, and began to recall
this old friend and that whose lives and property might be in danger. He
spoke of Joe Goodman and the Gillis families, and pictured conditions in
the perishing city.



CCXLII. MARK TWAIN’S GOOD-BY TO THE PLATFORM

It was on April 19, 1906, the day following the great earthquake, that
Mark Twain gave a “Farewell Lecture” at Carnegie Hall for the benefit
of the Robert Fulton Memorial Association. Some weeks earlier Gen.
Frederick D. Grant, its president, had proposed to pay one thousand
dollars for a Mark Twain lecture; but Clemens’ had replied that he was
permanently out of the field, and would never again address any audience
that had to pay to hear him.

“I always expect to talk as long as I can get people to listen to me,”
 he sand, “but I never again expect to charge for it.” Later came one
of his inspirations, and he wrote: “I will lecture for one thousand
dollars, on one condition: that it will be understood to be my farewell
lecture, and that I may contribute the thousand dollars to the Fulton
Association.”

It was a suggestion not to be discouraged, and the bills and notices,
“Mark Twain’s Farewell Lecture,” were published without delay.

I first heard of the matter one afternoon when General Grant had called.
Clemens came into the study where I was working; he often wandered
in and out-sometimes without a word, sometimes to relieve himself
concerning things in general. But this time he suddenly chilled me by
saying:

“I’m going to deliver my farewell lecture, and I want you to appear on
the stage and help me.”

I feebly expressed my pleasure at the prospect. Then he said:

“I am going to lecture on Fulton--on the story of his achievements. It
will be a burlesque, of course, and I am going to pretend to forget my
facts, and I want you to sit there in a chair. Now and then, when I seem
to get stuck, I’ll lean over and pretend to ask you some thing, and I
want you to pretend to prompt me. You don’t need to laugh, or to pretend
to be assisting in the performance any more than just that.” HANDBILL OF
MARK TWAIN’S “FAREWELL LECTURE”:

                      MARK TWAIN

             Will Deliver His Farewell Lecture


                    CARNEGIE HALL.

                    APRIL 19TH, 1906

                   FOR THE BENEFIT OF

             Robert Fulton Memorial Association

             MILITARY ORGANIZATION OLD GUARD IN
             FULL DRESS UNIFORM WILL BE PRESENT

                MUSIC BY OLD GUARD BAND

           TICKETS AND BOXES ON SALE AT CARNEGIE HALL
                  AND WALDORF-ASTORIA

               SEATS $1.50, $1.00, 50 CENTS

It was not likely that I should laugh. I had a sinking feeling in the
cardiac region which does not go with mirth. It did not for the moment
occur to me that the stage would be filled with eminent citizens and
vice-presidents, and I had a vision of myself sitting there alone in
the chair in that wide emptiness, with the chief performer directing
attention to me every other moment or so, for perhaps an hour. Let
me hurry on to say that it did not happen. I dare say he realized
my unfitness for the work, and the far greater appropriateness of
conferring the honor on General Grant, for in the end he gave him the
assignment, to my immeasurable relief.

It was a magnificent occasion. That spacious hall was hung with bunting,
the stage was banked and festooned with decoration of every sort.
General Grant, surrounded by his splendidly uniformed staff, sat in the
foreground, and behind was ranged a levee of foremost citizens of the
republic. The band played “America” as Mark Twain entered, and the great
audience rose and roared out its welcome. Some of those who knew him
best had hoped that on this occasion of his last lecture he would tell
of that first appearance in San Francisco, forty years before, when his
fortunes had hung in the balance. Perhaps he did not think of it, and no
one had had the courage to suggest it. At all events, he did a different
thing. He began by making a strong plea for the smitten city where the
flames were still raging, urging prompt help for those who had lost not
only their homes, but the last shred of their belongings and their
means of livelihood. Then followed his farcical history of Fulton, with
General Grant to make the responses, and presently he drifted into
the kind of lecture he had given so often in his long trip around the
world-retelling the tales which had won him fortune and friends in many
lands.

I do not know whether the entertainment was long or short. I think
few took account of time. To a letter of inquiry as to how long the
entertainment would last, he had replied:

    I cannot say for sure. It is my custom to keep on talking till I
    get the audience cowed. Sometimes it takes an hour and fifteen
    minutes, sometimes I can do it in an hour.

There was no indication at any time that the audience was cowed. The
house was packed, and the applause was so recurrent and continuous that
often his voice was lost to those in its remoter corners. It did not
matter. The tales were familiar to his hearers; merely to see Mark
Twain, in his old age and in that splendid setting, relating them was
enough. The audience realized that it was witnessing the close of a
heroic chapter in a unique career.



CCXLIII. AN INVESTMENT IN REDDING

Many of the less important happenings seem worth remembering now. Among
them was the sale, at the Nast auction, of the Mark Twain letters,
already mentioned. The fact that these letters brought higher prices
than any others offered in this sale was gratifying. Roosevelt, Grant,
and even Lincoln items were sold; but the Mark Twain letters led the
list. One of them sold for forty-three dollars, which was said to be
the highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man. It was the
letter written in 1877, quoted earlier in this work, in which Clemens
proposed the lecture tour to Nast. None of the Clemens-Nast letters
brought less than twenty-seven dollars, and some of them were very
brief. It was a new measurement of public sentiment. Clemens, when he
heard of it, said:

“I can’t rise to General Grant’s lofty place in the estimation of this
country; but it is a deep satisfaction to me to know that when it comes
to letter-writing he can’t sit in the front seat along with me. That
forty-three-dollar letter ought to be worth as much as eighty-six
dollars after I’m dead.”

A perpetual string of callers came to 21 Fifth Avenue, and it kept
the secretary busy explaining to most of them why Mark Twain could not
entertain their propositions, or listen to their complaints, or allow
them to express in person their views on public questions. He did see
a great many of what might be called the milder type persons who were
evidently sincere and not too heavily freighted with eloquence. Of these
there came one day a very gentle-spoken woman who had promised that she
would stay but a moment, and say no more than a few words, if only she
might sit face to face with the great man. It was in the morning hour
before the dictations, and he received her, quite correctly clad in his
beautiful dressing-robe and propped against his pillows. She kept her
contract to the letter; but when she rose to go she said, in a voice of
deepest reverence:

“May I kiss your hand?”

It was a delicate situation, and might easily have been made ludicrous.
Denial would have hurt her. As it was, he lifted his hand, a small,
exquisite hand it was, with the gentle dignity and poise of a king, and
she touched her lips to it with what was certainly adoration. Then, as
she went, she said:

“How God must love you!”

“I hope so,” he said, softly, and he did not even smile; but after she
had gone he could not help saying, in a quaint, half-pathetic voice “I
guess she hasn’t heard of our strained relations.”

Sitting in that royal bed, clad in that rich fashion, he easily conveyed
the impression of royalty, and watching him through those marvelous
mornings he seemed never less than a king, as indeed he was--the king of
a realm without national boundaries. Some of those nearest to him fell
naturally into the habit of referring to him as “the King,” and in
time the title crept out of the immediate household and was taken up by
others who loved him.

He had been more than once photographed in his bed; but it was by those
who had come and gone in a brief time, with little chance to study his
natural attitudes. I had acquired some knowledge of the camera, and I
obtained his permission to let me photograph him--a permission he seldom
denied to any one. We had no dictations on Saturdays, and I took
the pictures on one of these holiday mornings. He was so patient and
tractable, and so natural in every attitude, that it was a delight to
make the negatives. I was afraid he would become impatient, and made
fewer exposures than I might otherwise have done. I think he expected
very little from this amateur performance; but, by that happy element
of accident which plays so large a part in photographic success, the
results were better than I had hoped for. When I brought him the prints,
a few days later, he expressed pleasure and asked, “Why didn’t you make
more?”

Among them was one in an attitude which had grown so familiar to us,
that of leaning over to get his pipe from the smoking-table, and this
seemed to give him particular satisfaction. It being a holiday, he
had not donned his dressing-gown, which on the whole was well for the
photographic result. He spoke of other pictures that had been made
of him, especially denouncing one photograph, taken some twenty years
before by Sarony, a picture, as he said, of a gorilla in an overcoat,
which the papers and magazines had insisted on using ever since.

“Sarony was as enthusiastic about wild animals as he was about
photography, and when Du Chaillu brought over the first gorilla he sent
for me to look at it and see if our genealogy was straight. I said it
was, and Sarony was so excited that I had recognized the resemblance
between us, that he wanted to make it more complete, so he borrowed my
overcoat and put it on the gorilla and photographed it, and spread
that picture out over the world as mine. It turns up every week in some
newspaper or magazine; but it’s not my favorite; I have tried to get it
suppressed.”

Mark Twain made his first investment in Redding that spring. I had
located there the autumn before, and bought a vacant old house, with
a few acres of land, at what seemed a modest price. I was naturally
enthusiastic over the bargain, and the beauty and salubrity of the
situation. His interest was aroused, and when he learned that there was
a place adjoining, equally reasonable and perhaps even more attractive,
he suggested immediately that I buy it for him; and he wanted to write
a check then for the purchase price, for fear the opportunity might
be lost. I think there was then no purpose in his mind of building a
country home; but he foresaw that such a site, at no great distance from
New York, would become more valuable, and he had plenty of idle means.
The purchase was made without difficulty--a tract of seventy-five acres,
to which presently was added another tract of one hundred and ten acres,
and subsequently still other parcels of land, to complete the ownership
of the hilltop, for it was not long until he had conceived the idea of a
home. He was getting weary of the heavy pressure of city life. He craved
the retirement of solitude--one not too far from the maelstrom, so that
he might mingle with it now and then when he chose. The country home
would not be begun for another year yet, but the purpose of it was
already in the air. No one of the family had at this time seen the
location.



CCXLIV. TRAITS AND PHILOSOPHIES

I brought to the dictation one morning the Omar Khayyam card which
Twichell had written him so long ago; I had found it among the letters.
It furnished him a subject for that morning. He said:

    How strange there was a time when I had never heard of Omar Khayyam!
    When that card arrived I had already read the dozen quatrains or so
    in the morning paper, and was still steeped in the ecstasy of
    delight which they occasioned. No poem had ever given me so much
    pleasure before, and none has given me so much pleasure since. It
    is the only poem I have ever carried about with me. It has not been
    from under my hand all these years.

He had no general fondness for poetry; but many poems appealed to him,
and on occasion he liked to read them aloud. Once, during the dictation,
some verses were sent up by a young authoress who was waiting below for
his verdict. The lines pictured a phase of negro life, and she wished to
know if he thought them worthy of being read at some Tuskegee ceremony.
He did not fancy the idea of attending to the matter just then and said:

“Tell her she can read it. She has my permission. She may commit any
crime she wishes in my name.”

It was urged that the verses were of high merit and the author a very
charming young lady.

“I’m very glad,” he said, “and I am glad the Lord made her; I hope
He will make some more just like her. I don’t always approve of His
handiwork, but in this case I do.”

Then suddenly he added:

“Well, let me see it--no time like the present to get rid of these
things.”

He took the manuscript and gave such a rendition of those really fine
verses as I believe could not be improved upon. We were held breathless
by his dramatic fervor and power. He returned a message to that young
aspirant that must have made her heart sing. When the dictation had
ended that day, I mentioned his dramatic gift.

“Yes,” he said, “it is a gift, I suppose, like spelling and punctuation
and smoking. I seem to have inherited all those.” Continuing, he spoke
of inherited traits in general.

“There was Paige,” he said; “an ignorant man who could not make a
machine himself that would stand up, nor draw the working plans for
one; but he invented the eighteen thousand details of the most wonderful
machine the world has ever known. He watched over the expert draftsmen,
and superintended the building of that marvel. Pratt & Whitney built
it; but it was Paige’s machine, nevertheless--the child of his marvelous
gift. We don’t create any of our traits; we inherit all of them. They
have come down to us from what we impudently call the lower animals.
Man is the last expression, and combines every attribute of the animal
tribes that preceded him. One or two conspicuous traits distinguish each
family of animals from the others, and those one or two traits are found
in every member of each family, and are so prominent as to eternally and
unchangeably establish the character of that branch of the animal world.
In these cases we concede that the several temperaments constitute a law
of God, a command of God, and that whatsoever is done in obedience to
that law is blameless. Man, in his evolution, inherited the whole sum of
these numerous traits, and with each trait its share of the law of God.
He widely differs from them in this: that he possesses not a single
characteristic that is equally prominent in each member of his race. You
can say the housefly is limitlessly brave, and in saying it you describe
the whole house-fly tribe; you can say the rabbit is limitlessly timid,
and by the phrase you describe the whole rabbit tribe; you can say the
spider and the tiger are limitlessly murderous, and by that phrase you
describe the whole spider and tiger tribes; you can say the lamb is
limitlessly innocent and sweet and gentle, and by that phrase you
describe all the lambs. There is hardly a creature that you cannot
definitely and satisfactorily describe by one single trait--except
man. Men are not all cowards like the rabbit, nor all brave like the
house-fly, nor all sweet and innocent and gentle like the lamb, nor all
murderous like the spider and the tiger and the wasp, nor all thieves
like the fox and the bluejay, nor all vain like the peacock, nor all
frisky like the monkey. These things are all in him somewhere, and
they develop according to the proportion of each he received in his
allotment: We describe a man by his vicious traits and condemn him; or
by his fine traits and gifts, and praise him and accord him high merit
for their possession. It is comical. He did not invent these things;
he did not stock himself with them. God conferred them upon him in the
first instant of creation. They constitute the law, and he could not
escape obedience to the decree any more than Paige could have built the
type-setter he invented, or the Pratt & Whitney machinists could have
invented the machine which they built.”

He liked to stride up and down, smoking as he talked, and generally his
words were slowly measured, with varying pauses between them. He halted
in the midst of his march, and without a suggestion of a smile added:

“What an amusing creature the human being is!”

It is absolutely impossible, of course, to preserve the atmosphere and
personality of such talks as this--the delicacies of his speech and
manner which carried an ineffable charm. It was difficult, indeed, to
record the substance. I did not know shorthand, and I should not have
taken notes at such times in any case; but I had trained myself in
similar work to preserve, with a fair degree of accuracy, the form of
phrase, and to some extent its wording, if I could get hold of
pencil and paper soon enough afterward. In time I acquired a sort of
phonographic faculty; though it always seemed to me that the bouquet,
the subtleness of speech, was lacking in the result. Sometimes, indeed,
he would dictate next morning the substance of these experimental
reflections; or I would find among his papers memoranda and fragmentary
manuscripts where he had set them down himself, either before or after
he had tried them verbally. In these cases I have not hesitated to amend
my notes where it seemed to lend reality to his utterance, though, even
so, there is always lacking--and must be--the wonder of his personality.



CCXLV. IN THE DAY’S ROUND

A number of dictations of this period were about Susy, her childhood,
and the biography she had written of him, most of which he included in
his chapters. More than once after such dictations he reproached himself
bitterly for the misfortunes of his house. He consoled himself a little
by saying that Susy had died at the right time, in the flower of youth
and happiness; but he blamed himself for the lack of those things which
might have made her childhood still more bright. Once he spoke of the
biography she had begun, and added:

“Oh, I wish I had paid more attention to that little girl’s work! If I
had only encouraged her now and then, what it would have meant to her,
and what a beautiful thing it would have been to have had her story
of me told in her own way, year after year! If I had shown her that I
cared, she might have gone on with it. We are always too busy for our
children; we never give them the time nor the interest they deserve.
We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift-our personal
association, which means so much to them-we give grudgingly and throw
it away on those who care for it so little.” Then, after a moment of
silence: “But we are repaid for it at last. There comes a time when we
want their company and their interest. We want it more than anything
in the world, and we are likely to be starved for it, just as they were
starved so long ago. There is no appreciation of my books that is so
precious to me as appreciation from my children. Theirs is the praise we
want, and the praise we are least likely to get.”

His moods of remorse seemed to overwhelm him at times. He spoke of
Henry’s death and little Langdon’s, and charged himself with both.
He declared that for years he had filled Mrs. Clemens’s life with
privations, that the sorrow of Susy’s death had hastened her own end.
How darkly he painted it! One saw the jester, who for forty years had
been making the world laugh, performing always before a background of
tragedy.

But such moods were evanescent. He was oftener gay than somber. One
morning before we settled down to work he related with apparent joy how
he had made a failure of story-telling at a party the night before. An
artist had told him a yarn, he said, which he had considered the most
amusing thing in the world. But he had not been satisfied with it, and
had attempted to improve on it at the party. He had told it with what
he considered the nicest elaboration of detail and artistic effect, and
when he had concluded and expected applause, only a sickening silence
had followed.

“A crowd like that can make a good deal of silence when they combine,”
 he said, “and it probably lasted as long as ten seconds, because it
seemed an hour and a half. Then a lady said, with evident feeling,
‘Lord, how pathetic!’ For a moment I was stupefied. Then the fountains
of my great deeps were broken up, and I rained laughter for forty
days and forty nights during as much as three minutes. By that time
I realized it was my fault. I had overdone the thing. I started in to
deceive them with elaborate burlesque pathos, in order to magnify the
humorous explosion at the end; but I had constructed such a fog of
pathos that when I got to the humor you couldn’t find it.”

He was likely to begin the morning with some such incident which perhaps
he did not think worth while to include in his dictations, and sometimes
he interrupted his dictations to relate something aside, or to outline
some plan or scheme which his thought had suggested.

Once, when he was telling of a magazine he had proposed to start, the
Back Number, which was, to contain reprints of exciting events from
history--newspaper gleanings--eye-witness narrations, which he said
never lost their freshness of interest--he suddenly interrupted himself
to propose that we start such a magazine in the near future--he to be
its publisher and I its editor. I think I assented, and the dictation
proceeded, but the scheme disappeared permanently.

He usually had a number of clippings or slips among the many books on
the bed beside him from which he proposed to dictate each day, but
he seldom could find the one most needed. Once, after a feverishly
impatient search for a few moments, he invited Miss Hobby to leave the
room temporarily, so, as he said, that he might swear. He got up and we
began to explore the bed, his profanity increasing amazingly with each
moment. It was an enormously large bed, and he began to disparage the
size of it.

“One could lose a dog in this bed,” he declared.

Finally I suggested that he turn over the clipping which he had in his
hand. He did so, and it proved to be the one he wanted. Its discovery
was followed by a period of explosions, only half suppressed as to
volume. Then he said:

“There ought to be a room in this house to swear in. It’s dangerous to
have to repress an emotion like that.”

A moment later, when Miss Hobby returned, he was serene and happy again.
He was usually gentle during the dictations, and patient with those
around him--remarkably so, I thought, as a rule. But there were moments
that involved risk. He had requested me to interrupt his dictation
at any time that I found him repeating or contradicting himself, or
misstating some fact known to me. At first I hesitated to do this, and
cautiously mentioned the matter when he had finished. Then he was likely
to say:

“Why didn’t you stop me? Why did you let me go on making a jackass of
myself when you could have saved me?”

So then I used to take the risk of getting struck by lightning, and
nearly always stopped him at the time. But if it happened that I upset
his thought the thunderbolt was apt to fly. He would say:

“Now you’ve knocked everything out of my head.”

Then, of course, I would apologize and say I was sorry, which would
rectify matters, though half an hour later it might happen again. I
became lightning-proof at last; also I learned better to select the
psychological moment for the correction.

There was a humorous complexion to the dictations which perhaps I have
not conveyed to the reader at all; humor was his natural breath and
life, and was not wholly absent in his most somber intervals.

But poetry was there as well. His presence was full of it: the grandeur
of his figure; the grace of his movement; the music of his measured
speech. Sometimes there were long pauses when he was wandering in
distant valleys of thought and did not speak at all. At such times he
had a habit of folding and refolding the sleeve of his dressing-gown
around his wrist, regarding it intently, as it seemed. His hands were so
fair and shapely; the palms and finger-tips as pink as those of a child.
Then when he spoke he was likely to fling back his great, white mane,
his eyes half closed yet showing a gleam of fire between the lids, his
clenched fist lifted, or his index-finger pointing, to give force and
meaning to his words. I cannot recall the picture too often, or remind
myself too frequently how precious it was to be there, and to see him
and to hear him. I do not know why I have not said before that he
smoked continually during these dictations--probably as an aid to
thought--though he smoked at most other times, for that matter. His
cigars were of that delicious fragrance which characterizes domestic
tobacco; but I had learned early to take refuge in another brand when he
offered me one. They were black and strong and inexpensive, and it was
only his early training in the printing-office and on the river that had
seasoned him to tobacco of that temper. Rich, admiring friends used to
send him quantities of expensive imported cigars; but he seldom touched
them, and they crumbled away or were smoked by visitors. Once, to a
minister who proposed to send him something very special, he wrote:

    I should accept your hospitable offer at once but for the fact that
    I couldn’t do it and remain honest. That is to say, if I allowed
    you to send me what you believed to be good cigars it would
    distinctly mean that I meant to smoke them, whereas I should do
    nothing of the kind. I know a good cigar better than you do, for I
    have had 60 years’ experience.

    No, that is not what I mean; I mean I know a bad cigar better than
    anybody else. I judge by the price only; if it costs above 5 cents
    I know it to be either foreign or half foreign & unsmokable--by me.
    I have many boxes of Havana cigars, of all prices from 20 cents
    apiece up to $1.66 apiece; I bought none of them, they were all
    presents; they are an accumulation of several years. I have never
    smoked one of them & never shall; I work them off on the visitor.
    You shall have a chance when you come.

He smoked a pipe a good deal, and he preferred it to be old and violent;
and once, when he had bought a new, expensive English brier-root he
regarded it doubtfully for a time, and then handed it over to me,
saying:

“I’d like to have you smoke that a year or two, and when it gets so you
can’t stand it, maybe it will suit me.”

I am happy to add that subsequently he presented me with the pipe
altogether, for it apparently never seemed to get qualified for his
taste, perhaps because the tobacco used was too mild.

One day, after the dictation, word was brought up that a newspaper man
was down-stairs who wished to see him concerning a report that Chauncey
Depew was to resign his Senatorial seat and Mark Twain was to be
nominated in his place. The fancy of this appealed to him, and the
reporter was allowed to come up. He was a young man, and seemed rather
nervous, and did not wish to state where the report had originated. His
chief anxiety was apparently to have Mark Twain’s comment on the matter.
Clemens said very little at the time. He did not wish to be a Senator;
he was too busy just now dictating biography, and added that he didn’t
think he would care for the job, anyway. When the reporter was gone,
however, certain humorous possibilities developed. The Senatorship
would be a stepping-stone to the Presidency, and with the combination
of humorist, socialist, and peace-patriot in the Presidential chair the
nation could expect an interesting time. Nothing further came of the
matter. There was no such report. The young newspaper man had invented
the whole idea to get a “story” out of Mark Twain. The item as printed
next day invited a good deal of comment, and Collier’s Weekly made it
a text for an editorial on his mental vigor and general fitness for the
place.

If it happened that he had no particular engagement for the afternoon,
he liked to walk out, especially when the pleasant weather came.
Sometimes we walked up Fifth Avenue, and I must admit that for a good
while I could not get rid of a feeling of self-consciousness, for most
people turned to look, though I was fully aware that I did not in the
least come into their scope of vision. They saw only Mark Twain. The
feeling was a more comfortably one at The Players, where we sometimes
went for luncheon, for the acquaintance there and the democracy of that
institution had a tendency to eliminate contrasts and incongruities. We
sat at the Round Table among those good fellows who were always so glad
to welcome him.

Once we went to the “Music Master,” that tender play of Charles Klein’s,
given by that matchless interpreter, David Warfield. Clemens was
fascinated, and said more than once:

“It is as permanent as ‘Rip Van Winkle.’ Warfield, like Jefferson, can
go on playing it all his life.”

We went behind when it was over, and I could see that Warfield glowed
with Mark Twain’s unstinted approval. Later, when I saw him at The
Players, he declared that no former compliment had ever made him so
happy.

There were some billiard games going on between the champions Hoppe
and Sutton, at the Madison Square Garden, and Clemens, with his eager
fondness for the sport, was anxious to attend them. He did not like to
go anywhere alone, and one evening he invited me to accompany him.
Just as he stepped into the auditorium there was a vigorous round of
applause. The players stopped, somewhat puzzled, for no especially
brilliant shot had been made. Then they caught the figure of Mark
Twain and realized that the game, for the moment, was not the chief
attraction. The audience applauded again, and waved their handkerchiefs.
Such a tribute is not often paid to a private citizen.

Clemens had a great admiration for the young champion Hoppe, which the
billiardist’s extreme youth and brilliancy invited, and he watched his
game with intense eagerness. When it was over the referee said a
few words and invited Mark Twain to speak. He rose and told them a
story-probably invented on the instant. He said:

    “Once in Nevada I dropped into a billiard-room casually, and picked
    up a cue and began to knock the balls around. The proprietor, who
    was a red-haired man, with such hair as I have never seen anywhere
    except on a torch, asked me if I would like to play. I said, ‘Yes.’
    He said, ‘Knock the balls around a little and let me see how you can
    shoot.’ So I knocked them around, and thought I was doing pretty
    well, when he said, ‘That’s all right; I’ll play you left-handed.’
    It hurt my pride, but I played him. We banked for the shot and he
    won it. Then he commenced to play, and I commenced to chalk my cue
    to get ready to play, and he went on playing, and I went on chalking
    my cue; and he played and I chalked all through that game. When he
    had run his string out I said:

    “That’s wonderful! perfectly wonderful! If you can play that way
    left-handed what could you do right-handed?’

    “‘Couldn’t do anything,’ he said. ‘I’m a left-handed man.’”

How it delighted them! I think it was the last speech of any sort he
made that season. A week or two later he went to Dublin, New Hampshire,
for the summer--this time to the Upton House, which had been engaged a
year before, the Copley Greene place being now occupied by its owner.



CCXLVI. THE SECOND SUMMER AT DUBLIN

The Upton House stands on the edge of a beautiful beech forest some
two or three miles from Dublin, just under Monadnock--a good way up the
slope. It is a handsome, roomy frame-house, and had a long colonnaded
veranda overlooking one of the most beautiful landscape visions on the
planet: lake, forest, hill, and a far range of blue mountains--all the
handiwork of God is there. I had seen these things in paintings, but
I had not dreamed that such a view really existed. The immediate
foreground was a grassy slope, with ancient, blooming apple-trees; and
just at the right hand Monadnock rose, superb and lofty, sloping down to
the panorama below that stretched away, taking on an ever deeper blue,
until it reached that remote range on which the sky rested and the world
seemed to end. It was a masterpiece of the Greater Mind, and of the
highest order, perhaps, for it had in it nothing of the touch of man. A
church spire glinted here and there, but there was never a bit of field,
or stone wall, or cultivated land. It was lonely; it was unfriendly; it
cared nothing whatever for humankind; it was as if God, after creating
all the world, had wrought His masterwork here, and had been so
engrossed with the beauty of it that He had forgotten to give it a soul.
In a sense this was true, for He had not made the place suitable for the
habitation of men. It lacked the human touch; the human interest, and I
could never quite believe in its reality.

The time of arrival heightened this first impression. It was mid-May and
the lilacs were prodigally in bloom; but the bright sunlight was chill
and unnatural, and there was a west wind that laid the grass flat and
moaned through the house, and continued as steadily as if it must never
stop from year’s end to year’s end. It seemed a spectral land, a place
of supernatural beauty. Warm, still, languorous days would come, but
that first feeling of unreality would remain permanent. I believe Jean
Clemens was the only one who ever really loved the place. Something
about it appealed to her elemental side and blended with her melancholy
moods. She dressed always in white, and she was tall and pale and
classically beautiful, and she was often silent, like a spirit. She had
a little retreat for herself farther up the mountain-side, and spent
most of her days there wood-carving, which was her chief diversion.

Clara Clemens did not come to the place at all. She was not yet strong,
and went to Norfolk, Connecticut, where she could still be in quiet
retirement and have her physician’s care. Miss Hobby came, and on the
21st of May the dictations were resumed. We began in his bedroom, as
before, but the feeling there was depressing--the absence of the great
carved bed and other furnishings, which had been so much a part of the
picture, was felt by all of us. Nothing of the old luxury and richness
was there. It was a summer-furnished place, handsome but with the
customary bareness. At the end of this first session he dressed in his
snowy flannels, which he had adopted in the place of linen for summer
wear, and we descended to the veranda and looked out over that wide,
wonderful expanse of scenery.

“I think I shall like it,” he said, “when I get acquainted with it, and
get it classified and labeled, and I think we’ll do our dictating out
here hereafter. It ought to be an inspiring place.”

So the dictations were transferred to the long veranda, and he was
generally ready for them, a white figure pacing up and down before
that panoramic background. During the earlier, cooler weeks he usually
continued walking with measured step during the dictations, pausing now
and then to look across the far-lying horizon. When it stormed we moved
into the great living-room, where at one end there was a fireplace with
blazing logs, and at the other the orchestrelle, which had once
more been freighted up those mountain heights for the comfort of its
harmonies. Sometimes, when the wind and rain were beating outside, and
he was striding up and down the long room within, with only the blurred
shapes of mountains and trees outlined through the trailing rain, the
feeling of the unreality became so strong that it was hard to believe
that somewhere down below, beyond the rain and the woods, there was a
literal world--a commonplace world, where the ordinary things of life
were going on in the usual way. When the dictation finished early, there
would be music--the music that he loved most--Beethoven’s symphonies,
or the Schubert impromptu, or the sonata by Chopin.--[Schubert, Op.
142, No. 2; Chopin, Op. 37, No. 2.]--It is easy to understand that this
carried one a remove farther from the customary things of life. It was a
setting far out of the usual, though it became that unique white figure
and his occupation. In my notes, made from day to day, I find that I
have set down more than once an impression of the curious unreality of
the place and its surroundings, which would show that it was not a mere
passing fancy.

I had lodgings in the village, and drove out mornings for the
dictations, but often came out again afoot on pleasant afternoons; for
he was not much occupied with social matters, and there was opportunity
for quiet, informing interviews. There was a woods path to the Upton
place, and it was a walk through a fairyland. A part of the way was
through such a growth of beech timber as I have never seen elsewhere:
tall, straight, mottled trees with an undergrowth of laurel, the
sunlight sifting through; one found it easy to expect there storybook
ladies, wearing crowns and green mantles, riding on white palfreys. Then
came a more open way, an abandoned grass-grown road full of sunlight and
perfume; and this led to a dim, religious place, a natural cathedral,
where the columns were stately pine-trees branching and meeting at the
top: a veritable temple in which it always seemed that music was about
to play. You crossed a brook and climbed a little hill, and pushed
through a hedge into a place more open, and the house stood there among
the trees.

The days drifted along, one a good deal like another, except, as the
summer deepened, the weather became warmer, the foliage changed, a
drowsy haze gathered along the valleys and on the mountain-side. He
sat more often now in a large rocking-chair, and generally seemed to be
looking through half-dosed lids toward the Monadnock heights, that were
always changing in aspect-in color and in form--as cloud shapes drifted
by or gathered in those lofty hollows. White and yellow butterflies
hovered over the grass, and there were some curious, large black
ants--the largest I have ever seen and quite harmless--that would slip
in and out of the cracks on the veranda floor, wholly undisturbed by us.
Now and then a light flutter of wind would come murmuring up from the
trees below, and when the apple-bloom was falling there would be a whirl
of white and pink petals that seemed a cloud of smaller butterflies.

On June 1st I find in my note-book this entry:

    Warm and pleasant. The dictation about Grant continues; a great
    privilege to hear this foremost man, of letters review his
    associations with that foremost man of arms. He remained seated
    today, dressed in white as usual, a large yellow pansy in his
    buttonhole, his white hair ruffled by the breeze. He wears his worn
    morocco slippers with black hose; sits in the rocker, smoking and
    looking out over the hazy hills, delivering his sentences with a
    measured accuracy that seldom calls for change. He is speaking just
    now of a Grant dinner which he attended where Depew spoke. One is
    impressed with the thought that we are looking at and listening to
    the war-worn veteran of a thousand dinners--the honored guest of
    many; an honored figure of all. Earlier, when he had been
    chastising some old offender, he added, “However, he’s dead, and I
    forgive him.” Then, after a moment’s reflection, “No; strike that
    last sentence out.” When we laughed, he added, “We can’t forgive
    him yet.”

A few days later--it was June 4th, the day before the second anniversary
of the death of Mrs. Clemens--we found him at first in excellent humor
from the long dictation of the day before. Then his mind reverted to the
tragedy of the season, and he began trying to tell of it. It was hard
work. He walked back and forth in the soft sunlight, saying almost
nothing. He gave it up at last, remarking, “We will not work to-morrow.”
 So we went away.

He did not dictate on the 5th or the 6th, but on the 7th he resumed the
story of Mrs. Clemens’s last days at Florence. The weather had changed:
the sunlight and warmth had all gone; a chill, penetrating mist was on
the mountains; Monadnock was blotted out. We expected him to go to the
fire, but evidently he could not bear being shut in with that subject in
his mind. A black cape was brought out and thrown about his shoulders,
which seemed to fit exactly into the somberness of the picture. For two
hours or more we sat there in the gloom and chill, while he paced up
and down, detailing as graphically as might be that final chapter in the
life of the woman he had loved.

It is hardly necessary to say that beyond the dictation Clemens did very
little literary work during these months. He had brought his “manuscript
trunk” as usual, thinking, perhaps, to finish the “microbe” story and
other of the uncompleted things; but the dictation gave him sufficient
mental exercise, and he did no more than look over his “stock in trade,”
 as he called it, and incorporate a few of the finished manuscripts into
“autobiography.” Among these were the notes of his trip down the Rhone,
made in 1891, and the old Stormfield story, which he had been treasuring
and suppressing so long. He wrote Howells in June:

    The dictating goes lazily and pleasantly on. With intervals. I
    find that I’ve been at it, off & on, nearly two hours for 155 days
    since January 9. To be exact, I’ve dictated 75 hours in 80 days &
    loafed 75 days. I’ve added 60,000 words in the month that I’ve been
    here; which indicates that I’ve dictated during 20 days of that
    time--40 hours, at an average of 1,500 words an hour. It’s a
    plenty, & I’m satisfied.

    There’s a good deal of “fat.” I’ve dictated (from January 9)
    210,000 words, & the “fat” adds about 50,000 more.

    The “fat” is old pigeonholed things of the years gone by which I or
    editors didn’t das’t to print. For instance, I am dumping in the
    little old book which I read to you in Hartford about 30 years ago &
    which you said “publish & ask Dean Stanley to furnish an
    introduction; he’ll do it” (Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven).
    It reads quite to suit me without altering a word now that it isn’t
    to see print until I am dead.

    To-morrow I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs &
    assigns burned alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D.
    2006--which I judge they won’t. There’ll be lots of such chapters
    if I live 3 or 4 years longer. The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a
    stir when it comes out. I shall be hovering around taking notice,
    along with other dead pals. You are invited.

The chapter which was to invite death at the stake for his successors
was naturally one of religious heresies a violent attack on the
orthodox, scriptural God, but really an expression of the highest
reverence for the God which, as he said, had created the earth and sky
and the music of the constellations. Mark Twain once expressed himself
concerning reverence and the lack of it:

“I was never consciously and purposely irreverent in my life, yet
one person or another is always charging me with a lack of reverence.
Reverence for what--for whom? Who is to decide what ought to command my
reverence--my neighbor or I? I think I ought to do the electing myself.
The Mohammedan reveres Mohammed--it is his privilege; the Christian
doesn’t--apparently that is his privilege; the account is square enough.
They haven’t any right to complain of the other, yet they do complain
of each other, and that is where the unfairness comes in. Each says that
the other is irreverent, and both are mistaken, for manifestly you can’t
have reverence for a thing that doesn’t command it. If you could do that
you could digest what you haven’t eaten, and do other miracles and get a
reputation.”

He was not reading many books at this time--he was inclined rather to be
lazy, as he said, and to loaf during the afternoons; but I remember that
he read aloud ‘After the Wedding’ and ‘The Mother’--those two beautiful
word-pictures by Howells--which he declared sounded the depths of
humanity with a deep-sea lead. Also he read a book by William Allen
White, ‘In Our Town’, a collection of tales that he found most
admirable. I think he took the trouble to send White a personal,
hand-written letter concerning them, although, with the habit of
dictation, he had begun, as he said, to “loathe the use of the pen.”

There were usually some sort of mild social affairs going on in the
neighborhood, luncheons and afternoon gatherings like those of the
previous year, though he seems to have attended fewer of them, for
he did not often leave the house. Once, at least, he assisted in an
afternoon entertainment at the Dublin Club, where he introduced his
invention of the art of making an impromptu speech, and was assisted in
its demonstration by George de Forest Brush and Joseph Lindon Smith,
to the very great amusement of a crowd of summer visitors. The “art”
 consisted mainly of having on hand a few reliable anecdotes and a set
formula which would lead directly to them from any given subject.

Twice or more he collected the children of the neighborhood for charades
and rehearsed them, and took part in the performance, as in the Hartford
days. Sometimes he drove out or took an extended walk. But these things
were seldom.

Now and then during the summer he made a trip to New York of a
semi-business nature, usually going by the way of Fairhaven, where
he would visit for a few days, journeying the rest of the way in Mr.
Rogers’s yacht. Once they made a cruise of considerable length to Bar
Harbor and elsewhere. Here is an amusing letter which he wrote to Mrs.
Rogers after such a visit:

    DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--In packing my things in your house yesterday
    morning I inadvertently put in some articles that was laying around,
    I thinking about theology & not noticing, the way this family does
    in similar circumstances like these. Two books, Mr. Rogers’ brown
    slippers, & a ham. I thought it was ourn, it looks like one we used
    to have. I am very sorry it happened, but it sha’n’t occur again &
    don’t you worry. He will temper the wind to the shorn lamb & I will
    send some of the things back anyway if there is some that won’t
    keep.



CCXLVI. DUBLIN, CONTINUED

In time Mark Twain became very lonely in Dublin. After the brilliant
winter the contrast was too great. He was not yet ready for exile. In
one of his dictations he said:

    The skies are enchantingly blue. The world is a dazzle of sunshine.
    Monadnock is closer to us than usual by several hundred yards. The
    vast extent of spreading valley is intensely green--the lakes as
    intensely blue. And there is a new horizon, a remoter one than we
    have known before, for beyond the mighty half-circle of hazy
    mountains that form the usual frame of the picture rise certain
    shadowy great domes that are unfamiliar to our eyes....

    But there is a defect--only one, but it is a defect which almost
    entitles it to be spelled with a capital D. This is the defect of
    loneliness. We have not a single neighbor who is a neighbor.
    Nobody lives within two miles of us except Franklin MacVeagh, and he
    is the farthest off of any, because he is in Europe....

    I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them. I am
    existing, broken-hearted, in a Garden of Eden.... The Garden of
    Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude. I know that the advent
    of the serpent was a welcome change--anything for society....

    I never rose to the full appreciation of the utter solitude of this
    place until a symbol of it--a compact and visible allegory of it
    --furnished me the lacking lift three days ago. I was standing alone
    on this veranda, in the late afternoon, mourning over the stillness,
    the far-spreading, beautiful desolation, and the absence of visible
    life, when a couple of shapely and graceful deer came sauntering
    across the grounds and stopped, and at their leisure impudently
    looked me over, as if they had an idea of buying me as bric-a-brac.
    Then they seemed to conclude that they could do better for less
    money elsewhere, and they sauntered indolently away and disappeared
    among the trees. It sized up this solitude. It is so complete, so
    perfect, that even the wild animals are satisfied with it. Those
    dainty creatures were not in the least degree afraid of me.

This was no more than a mood--though real enough while it
lasted--somber, and in its way regal. It was the loneliness of a
king--King Lear. Yet he returned gladly enough to solitude after each
absence.

It was just before one of his departures that I made another set of
pictures of him, this time on the colonnaded veranda, where his figure
had become so familiar. He had determined to have his hair cut when
he reached New York, and I was anxious to get the pictures before this
happened. When the proofs came seven of them--he arranged them as a
series to illustrate what he called “The Progress of a Moral Purpose.”
 He ordered a number of sets of this series, and he wrote a legend on
each photograph, numbering them from 1 to 7, laying each set in a sheet
of letter-paper which formed a sort of wrapper, on which was written:

    This series of q photographs registers with scientific precision,
    stage by stage, the progress of a moral purpose through the
    mind of the human race’s Oldest Friend.        S. L. C.

He added a personal inscription, and sent one to each of his more
intimate friends. One of the pictures amused him more than the others,
because during the exposure a little kitten, unnoticed, had walked into
it, and paused near his foot. He had never outgrown his love for cats,
and he had rented this kitten and two others for the summer from a
neighbor. He didn’t wish to own them, he said, for then he would have
to leave them behind uncared for, so he preferred to rent them and pay
sufficiently to insure their subsequent care. These kittens he called
Sackcloth and Ashes--Ashes being the joint name of the two that looked
exactly alike, and so did not need distinctive titles. Their gambols
always amused him. He would stop any time in the midst of dictation to
enjoy them. Once, as he was about to enter the screen-door that led into
the hall, two of the kittens ran up in front of him and stood waiting.
With grave politeness he opened the door, made a low bow, and stepped
back and said: “Walk in, gentlemen. I always give precedence to
royalty.” And the kittens marched in, tails in air. All summer long
they played up and down the wide veranda, or chased grasshoppers and
butterflies down the clover slope. It was a never-ending amusement to
him to see them jump into the air after some insect, miss it and tumble
back, and afterward jump up, with a surprised expression and a look of
disappointment and disgust. I remember once, when he was walking up and
down discussing some very serious subject--and one of the kittens was
lying on the veranda asleep--a butterfly came drifting along three feet
or so above the floor. The kitten must have got a glimpse of the insect
out of the corner of its eye, and perhaps did not altogether realize
its action. At all events, it suddenly shot straight up into the air,
exactly like a bounding rubber ball, missed the butterfly, fell back on
the porch floor with considerable force and with much surprise. Then it
sprang to its feet, and, after spitting furiously once or twice, bounded
away. Clemens had seen the performance, and it completely took his
subject out of his mind. He laughed extravagantly, and evidently cared
more for that moment’s entertainment than for many philosophies.

In that remote solitude there was one important advantage--there was no
procession of human beings with axes to grind, and few curious callers.
Occasionally an automobile would find its way out there and make a
circuit of the drive, but this happened too seldom to annoy him. Even
newspaper men rarely made the long trip from Boston or New York to
secure his opinions, and when they came it was by permission and
appointment. Newspaper telegrams arrived now and then, asking for a
sentiment on some public condition or event, and these he generally
answered willingly enough. When the British Premier, Campbell-Bannerman,
celebrated his seventieth birthday, the London Tribune and the New York
Herald requested a tribute. He furnished it, for Bannerman was a very
old friend. He had known him first at Marienbad in ‘91, and in Vienna
in ‘98, in daily intercourse, when they had lived at the same hotel. His
tribute ran:

To HIS EXCELLENCY THE BRITISH PREMIER,--Congratulations, not
condolences. Before seventy we are merely respected, at best, and we
have to behave all the time, or we lose that asset; but after seventy
we are respected, esteemed, admired, revered, and don’t have to behave
unless we want to. When I first knew you, Honored Sir, one of us was
hardly even respected.                                   MARK TWAIN.

He had some misgivings concerning the telegram after it had gone, but he
did not recall it.

Clemens became the victim of a very clever hoax that summer. One day a
friend gave him two examples of the most deliciously illiterate letters,
supposed to have been written by a woman who had contributed certain
articles of clothing to the San Francisco sufferers, and later wished
to recall them because of the protests of her household. He was so sure
that the letters were genuine that he included them in his dictations,
after reading them aloud with great effect. To tell the truth, they did
seem the least bit too well done, too literary in their illiteracy; but
his natural optimism refused to admit of any suspicion, and a little
later he incorporated one of the Jennie Allen letters in a speech which
he made at a Press Club dinner in New York on the subject of simplified
spelling--offering it as an example of language with phonetic brevity
exercising its supreme function, the direct conveyance of ideas.
The letters, in the end, proved to be the clever work of Miss Grace
Donworth, who has since published them serially and in book form.
Clemens was not at all offended or disturbed by the exposure. He even
agreed to aid the young author in securing a publisher, and wrote to
Miss Stockbridge, through whom he had originally received the documents:

    DEAR MISS STOCKBRIDGE (if she really exists),

    257 Benefit Street (if there is any such place):

    Yes, I should like a copy of that other letter. This whole fake is
    delightful; & I tremble with fear that you are a fake yourself &
    that I am your guileless prey. (But never mind, it isn’t any
    matter.)

    Now as to publication----

He set forth his views and promised his assistance when enough of the
letters should be completed.

Clemens allowed his name to be included with the list of spelling
reformers, but he never employed any of the reforms in his letters or
writing. His interest was mainly theoretical, and when he wrote or spoke
on the subject his remarks were not likely to be testimonials in its
favor. His own theory was that the alphabet needed reform, first of all,
so that each letter or character should have one sound, and one sound
only; and he offered as a solution of this an adaptation of shorthand.
He wrote and dictated in favor of this idea to the end of his life. Once
he said:

“Our alphabet is pure insanity. It can hardly spell any large word in
the English language with any degree of certainty. Its sillinesses are
quite beyond enumeration. English orthography may need reforming and
simplifying, but the English alphabet needs it a good many times as
much.”

He would naturally favor simplicity in anything. I remember him reading,
as an example of beautiful English, The Death of King Arthur, by Sir
Thomas Malory, and his verdict:

“That is one of the most beautiful things ever written in English, and
written when we had no vocabulary.”

“A vocabulary, then, is sometimes a handicap?”

“It is indeed.”

Still I think it was never a handicap with him, but rather the plumage
of flight. Sometimes, when just the right word did not come, he would
turn his head a little at different angles, as if looking about him for
the precise term. He would find it directly, and it was invariably the
word needed. Most writers employ, now and again, phrases that do not
sharply present the idea--that blur the picture like a poor opera-glass.
Mark Twain’s English always focused exactly.



CCXLVIII. “WHAT IS MAN?” AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Clemens decided to publish anonymously, or, rather, to print privately,
the Gospel, which he had written in Vienna some eight years before and
added to from time to time. He arranged with Frank Doubleday to take
charge of the matter, and the De Vinne Press was engaged to do the
work. The book was copyrighted in the name of J. W. Bothwell, the
superintendent of the De Vinne company, and two hundred and fifty
numbered copies were printed on hand-made paper, to be gradually
distributed to intimate friends.--[In an introductory word (dated
February, 1905) the author states that the studies for these papers had
been made twenty-five or twenty-seven years before. He probably referred
to the Monday Evening Club essay, “What Is Happiness?” (February,
1883). See chap. cxli.]--A number of the books were sent to newspaper
reviewers, and so effectually had he concealed the personality of his
work that no critic seems to have suspected the book’s authorship. It
was not over-favorably received. It was generally characterized as a
clever, and even brilliant, expose of philosophies which were no
longer startlingly new. The supremacy of self-interest and “man the
irresponsible machine” are the main features of ‘What Is Man’ and
both of these and all the rest are comprehended in his wider and more
absolute doctrine of that inevitable life-sequence which began with the
first created spark. There can be no training of the ideals, “upward and
still upward,” no selfishness and unselfishness, no atom of voluntary
effort within the boundaries of that conclusion. Once admitting the
postulate, that existence is merely a sequence of cause and effect
beginning with the primal atom, and we have a theory that must stand or
fall as a whole. We cannot say that man is a creature of circumstance
and then leave him free to select his circumstance, even in the minutest
fractional degree. It was selected for him with his disposition; in that
first instant of created life. Clemens himself repeatedly emphasized
this doctrine, and once, when it was suggested to him that it seemed to
“surround every thing, like the sky,” he answered:

“Yes, like the sky; you can’t break through anywhere.”

Colonel Harvey came to Dublin that summer and persuaded Clemens to let
him print some selections from the dictations in the new volume of
the North American Review, which he proposed to issue fortnightly. The
matter was discussed a good deal, and it was believed that one hundred
thousand words could be selected which would be usable forthwith, as
well as in that long-deferred period for which it was planned. Colonel
Harvey agreed to take a copy of the dictated matter and make the
selections himself, and this plan was carried out. It may be said
that most of the chapters were delightful enough; though, had it been
possible to edit them with the more positive documents as a guide,
certain complications might have been avoided. It does not matter now,
and it was not a matter of very wide import then.

The payment of these chapters netted Clemens thirty thousand dollars--a
comfortable sum, which he promptly proposed to spend in building on
the property at Redding. He engaged John Mead Howells to prepare some
preliminary plans.

Clara Clemens, at Norfolk, was written to of the matter.

A little later I joined her in Redding, and she was the first of the
family to see that beautiful hilltop. She was well pleased with the
situation, and that day selected the spot where the house should stand.
Clemens wrote Howells that he proposed to call it “Autobiography House,”
 as it was to be built out of the Review money, and he said:

“If you will build on my farm and live there it will set Mrs. Howells’s
health up for sure. Come and I’ll sell you the site for twenty-five
dollars. John will tell you it is a choice place.”

The unusual summer was near its close. In my notebook, under date of
September 16th, appears this entry:

    Windy in valleys but not cold. This veranda is protected. It is
    peaceful here and perfect, but we are at the summer’s end.

This is my last entry, and the dictations must have ceased a few
days later. I do not remember the date of the return to New York, and
apparently I made no record of it; but I do not think it could have been
later than the 20th. It had been four months since the day of arrival,
a long, marvelous summer such as I would hardly know again. When I think
of that time I shall always hear the ceaseless slippered, shuffling
walk, and see the white figure with its rocking, rolling movement
passing up and down the long gallery, with that preternaturally
beautiful landscape behind, and I shall hear his deliberate
speech--always deliberate, save at rare intervals; always impressive,
whatever the subject might be; whether recalling some old absurdity of
youth, or denouncing orthodox creeds, or detailing the shortcomings of
human-kind.



CCXLIX. BILLIARDS

The return to New York marked the beginning of a new era in my relations
with Mark Twain. I have not meant to convey up to this time that there
was between us anything resembling a personal friendship. Our relations
were friendly, certainly, but they were relations of convenience
and mainly of a business, or at least of a literary nature. He was
twenty-six years my senior, and the discrepancy of experience and
attainments was not measurable. With such conditions friendship must
be a deliberate growth; something there must be to bridge the dividing
gulf. Truth requires the confession that, in this case, the bridge took
a very solid, material form, it being, in fact, nothing less than a
billiard-table.--[Clemens had been without a billiard-table since 1891,
the old one having been disposed of on the departure from Hartford.]

It was a present from Mrs. Henry H. Rogers, and had been intended for
his Christmas; but when he heard of it he could not wait, and suggested
delicately that if he had it “right now” he could begin using it sooner.
So he went one day with Mr. Rogers to the Balke-Collender Company, and
they selected a handsome combination table suitable to all games--the
best that money could buy. He was greatly excited over the prospect,
and his former bedroom was carefully measured, to be certain that it
was large enough for billiard purposes. Then his bed was moved into the
study, and the bookcases and certain appropriate pictures were placed
and hung in the billiard-room to give it the proper feeling.

The billiard-table arrived and was put in place, the brilliant green
cloth in contrast with the rich red wallpaper and the bookbindings and
pictures making the room wonderfully handsome and inviting.

Meantime, Clemens, with one of his sudden impulses, had conceived the
notion of spending the winter in Egypt, on the Nile. He had gone so far,
within a few hours after the idea developed, as to plan the time of his
departure, and to partially engage a traveling secretary, so that he
might continue his dictations. He was quite full of the idea just at the
moment when the billiard table was being installed. He had sent for a
book on the subject--the letters of Lady Duff-Gordon, whose daughter,
Janet Ross, had become a dear friend in Florence during the Viviani
days. He spoke of this new purpose on the morning when we renewed the
New York dictations, a month or more following the return from Dublin.
When the dictation ended he said:

“Have you any special place to lunch to-day?”

I replied that I had not.

“Lunch here,” he said, “and we’ll try the new billiard-table.”

I said what was eminently true--that I could not play--that I had never
played more “than a few games of pool, and those very long ago.

“No matter,” he answered; “the poorer you play, the better I shall like
it.”

So I remained for luncheon and we began, November 2d, the first game
ever played on the Christmas table. We played the English game, in which
caroms and pockets both count. I had a beginner’s luck, on the whole,
and I remember it as a riotous, rollicking game, the beginning of a
closer understanding between us--of a distinct epoch in our association.
When it was ended he said:

“I’m not going to Egypt. There was a man here yesterday afternoon who
said it was bad for bronchitis, and, besides, it’s too far away from
this billiard-table.”

He suggested that I come back in the evening and play some more. I
did so, and the game lasted until after midnight. He gave me odds, of
course, and my “nigger luck,” as he called it, continued. It kept him
sweating and swearing feverishly to win. Finally, once I made a great
fluke--a carom, followed by most of the balls falling into the pockets.

“Well,” he said, “when you pick up that cue this damn table drips at
every pore.”

After that the morning dictations became a secondary interest. Like
a boy, he was looking forward to the afternoon of play, and it never
seemed to come quick enough to suit him. I remained regularly for
luncheon, and he was inclined to cut the courses short, that he might
the sooner get up-stairs to the billiard-room. His earlier habit of
not eating in the middle of the day continued; but he would get up and
dress, and walk about the dining-room in his old fashion, talking that
marvelous, marvelous talk which I was always trying to remember, and
with only fractional success at best. To him it was only a method of
killing time. I remember once, when he had been discussing with great
earnestness the Japanese question, he suddenly noticed that the luncheon
was about ending, and he said:

“Now we’ll proceed to more serious matters--it’s your--shot.” And he was
quite serious, for the green cloth and the rolling balls afforded him a
much larger interest.

To the donor of his new possession Clemens wrote:

    DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--The billiard-table is better than the doctors.
    I have a billiardist on the premises, & walk not less than ten miles
    every day with the cue in my hand. And the walking is not the whole
    of the exercise, nor the most health giving part of it, I think.
    Through the multitude of the positions and attitudes it brings into
    play every muscle in the body & exercises them all.

    The games begin right after luncheons, daily, & continue until
    midnight, with 2 hours’ intermission for dinner & music. And so it
    is 9 hours’ exercise per day & 10 or 12 on Sunday. Yesterday & last
    night it was 12--& I slept until 8 this morning without waking. The
    billiard-table as a Sabbath-breaker can beat any coal-breaker in
    Pennsylvania & give it 30 in the game. If Mr. Rogers will take to
    daily billiards he can do without the doctors & the massageur, I
    think.

    We are really going to build a house on my farm, an hour & a half
    from New York. It is decided.

    With love & many thanks.
                                S. L. C.

Naturally enough, with continued practice I improved my game, and he
reduced my odds accordingly. He was willing to be beaten, but not too
often. Like any other boy, he preferred to have the balance in his
favor. We set down a record of the games, and he went to bed happier if
the tally-sheet showed him winner.

It was natural, too, that an intimacy of association and of personal
interest should grow under such conditions--to me a precious boon--and
I wish here to record my own boundless gratitude to Mrs. Rogers for her
gift, which, whatever it meant to him, meant so much more to me. The
disparity of ages no longer existed; other discrepancies no longer
mattered. The pleasant land of play is a democracy where such things do
not count.

To recall all the humors and interesting happenings of those early
billiard-days would be to fill a large volume. I can preserve no more
than a few characteristic phases.

He was not an even-tempered player. When the balls were perverse in
their movements and his aim unsteady, he was likely to become short with
his opponent--critical and even fault-finding. Then presently a reaction
would set in, and he would be seized with remorse. He would become
unnecessarily gentle and kindly--even attentive--placing the balls as
I knocked them into the pockets, hurrying from one end of the table to
render this service, endeavoring to show in every way except by actual
confession in words that he was sorry for what seemed to him, no doubt,
an unworthy display of temper, unjustified irritation.

Naturally, this was a mood that I enjoyed less than that which had
induced it. I did not wish him to humble himself; I was willing that
he should be severe, even harsh, if he felt so inclined; his age, his
position, his genius entitled him to special privileges; yet I am
glad, as I remember it now, that the other side revealed itself, for it
completes the sum of his great humanity.

Indeed, he was always not only human, but superhuman; not only a man,
but superman. Nor does this term apply only to his psychology. In
no other human being have I ever seen such physical endurance. I was
comparatively a young man, and by no means an invalid; but many a time,
far in the night, when I was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was
still as fresh and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment of
beginning. He smoked and smoked continually, and followed the endless
track around the billiard-table with the light step of youth. At three
or four o’clock in the morning he would urge just one more game, and
would taunt me for my weariness. I can truthfully testify that
never until the last year of his life did he willingly lay down the
billiard-cue, or show the least suggestion of fatigue.

He played always at high pressure. Now and then, in periods of
adversity, he would fly into a perfect passion with things in general.
But, in the end, it was a sham battle, and he saw the uselessness and
humor of it, even in the moment of his climax. Once, when he found it
impossible to make any of his favorite shots, he became more and
more restive, the lightning became vividly picturesque as the clouds
blackened. Finally, with a regular thunder-blast, he seized the cue with
both hands and literally mowed the balls across the table, landing one
or two of them on the floor. I do not recall his exact remarks during
the performance; I was chiefly concerned in getting out of the way, and
those sublime utterances were lost. I gathered up the balls and we
went on playing as if nothing had happened, only he was very gentle and
sweet, like the sun on the meadows after the storm has passed by. After
a little he said:

“This is a most amusing game. When you play badly it amuses me, and when
I play badly and lose my temper it certainly must amuse you.”

His enjoyment of his opponent’s perplexities was very keen. When he
had left the balls in some unfortunate position which made it almost
impossible for me to score he would laugh boisterously. I used to affect
to be injured and disturbed by this ridicule. Once, when he had made
the conditions unusually hard for me, and was enjoying the situation
accordingly, I was tempted to remark:

“Whenever I see you laugh at a thing like that I always doubt your sense
of humor.” Which seemed to add to his amusement.

Sometimes, when the balls were badly placed for me, he would offer
ostensible advice, suggesting that I should shoot here and there--shots
that were possible, perhaps, but not promising. Often I would follow his
advice, and then when I failed to score his amusement broke out afresh.

Other billiardists came from time to time: Colonel Harvey, Mr. Duneka,
and Major Leigh, of the Harper Company, and Peter Finley Dunne (Mr.
Dooley); but they were handicapped by their business affairs, and were
not dependable for daily and protracted sessions. Any number of his
friends were willing, even eager, to come for his entertainment; but the
percentage of them who could and would devote a number of hours each day
to being beaten at billiards and enjoy the operation dwindled down to
a single individual. Even I could not have done it--could not have
afforded it, however much I might have enjoyed the diversion--had it not
been contributory to my work. To me the association was invaluable; it
drew from him a thousand long-forgotten incidents; it invited a stream
of picturesque comments and philosophies; it furnished the most intimate
insight into his character.

He was not always glad to see promiscuous callers, even some one that he
might have met pleasantly elsewhere. One afternoon a young man whom he
had casually invited to “drop in some day in town” happened to call in
the midst of a very close series of afternoon games. It would all have
been well enough if the visitor had been content to sit quietly on the
couch and “bet on the game,” as Clemens suggested, after the greetings
were over; but he was a very young man, and he felt the necessity of
being entertaining. He insisted on walking about the room and getting in
the way, and on talking about the Mark Twain books he had read, and
the people he had met from time to time who had known Mark Twain on the
river, or on the Pacific coast, or elsewhere. I knew how fatal it
was for him to talk to Clemens during his play, especially concerning
matters most of which had been laid away. I trembled for our visitor.
If I could have got his ear privately I should have said: “For
heaven’s sake sit down and keep still or go away! There’s going to be
a combination of earthquake and cyclone and avalanche if you keep this
thing up.”

I did what I could. I looked at my watch every other minute. At last, in
desperation, I suggested that I retire from the game and let the visitor
have my cue. I suppose I thought this would eliminate an element of
danger. He declined on the ground that he seldom played, and continued
his deadly visit. I have never been in an atmosphere so fraught with
danger. I did not know how the game stood, and I played mechanically and
forgot to count the score. Clemens’s face was grim and set and savage.
He no longer ventured even a word. By and by I noticed that he was
getting white, and I said, privately, “Now, this young man’s hour has
come.”

It was certainly by the mercy of God just then that the visitor said:

“I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go. I’d like to stay longer, but I’ve got an
engagement for dinner.”

I don’t remember how he got out, but I know that tons lifted as the door
closed behind him. Clemens made his shot, then very softly said:

“If he had stayed another five minutes I should have offered him
twenty-five cents to go.”

But a moment later he glared at me.

“Why in nation did you offer him your cue?”

“Wasn’t that the courteous thing to do?” I asked.

“No!” he ripped out. “The courteous and proper thing would have been to
strike him dead. Did you want to saddle that disaster upon us for life?”

He was blowing off steam, and I knew it and encouraged it. My impulse
was to lie down on the couch and shout with hysterical laughter, but I
suspected that would be indiscreet. He made some further comment on
the propriety of offering a visitor a cue, and suddenly began to sing a
travesty of an old hymn:

         “How tedious are they
           Who their sovereign obey,”

and so loudly that I said:

“Aren’t you afraid he’ll hear you and come back?” Whereupon he pretended
alarm and sang under his breath, and for the rest of the evening was in
boundless good-humor.

I have recalled this incident merely as a sample of things that were
likely to happen at any time in his company, and to show the difficulty
one might find in fitting himself to his varying moods. He was not to
be learned in a day, or a week, or a month; some of those who knew him
longest did not learn him at all.

We celebrated his seventy-first birthday by playing billiards all day.
He invented a new game for the occasion; inventing rules for it with
almost every shot.

It happened that no member of the family was at home on this birthday.
Ill health had banished every one, even the secretary. Flowers,
telegrams, and congratulations came, and there was a string of callers;
but he saw no one beyond some intimate friends--the Gilders--late in the
afternoon. When they had gone we went down to dinner. We were entirely
alone, and I felt the great honor of being his only guest on such an
occasion. Once between the courses, when he rose, as usual, to walk
about, he wandered into the drawing-room, and seating himself at the
orchestrelle began to play the beautiful flower-song from “Faust.” It
was a thing I had not seen him do before, and I never saw him do it
again. When he came back to the table he said:

“Speaking of companions of the long ago, after fifty years they become
only shadows and might as well be in the grave. Only those whom one has
really loved mean anything at all. Of my playmates I recall John Briggs,
John Garth, and Laura Hawkins--just those three; the rest I buried long
ago, and memory cannot even find their graves.”

He was in his loveliest humor all that day and evening; and that night,
when he stopped playing, he said:

“I have never had a pleasanter day at this game.”

I answered, “I hope ten years from to-night we shall still be playing
it.”

“Yes,” he said, “still playing the best game on earth.”



CCL. PHILOSOPHY AND PESSIMISM

In a letter to MacAlister, written at this time, he said:

    The doctors banished Jean to the country 5 weeks ago; they banished
    my secretary to the country for a fortnight last Saturday; they
    banished Clara to the country for a fortnight last Monday....
    They banished me to Bermuda to sail next Wednesday, but I struck and
    sha’n’t go. My complaint is permanent bronchitis & is one of the
    very best assets I’ve got, for it excuses me from every public
    function this winter--& all other winters that may come.

If he had bronchitis when this letter was written, it must have been of
a very mild form, for it did not interfere with billiard games, which
were more protracted and strenuous than at almost any other period.
I conclude, therefore, that it was a convenient bronchitis, useful on
occasion.

For a full ten days we were alone in the big house with the servants.
It was a holiday most of the time. We hurried through the mail in the
morning and the telephone calls; then, while I answered such letters as
required attention, he dictated for an hour or so to Miss Hobby, after
which, billiards for the rest of the day and evening. When callers were
reported by the butler, I went down and got rid of them. Clara Clemens,
before her departure, had pinned up a sign, “NO BILLIARDS AFTER 10
P.M.,” which still hung on the wall, but it was outlawed. Clemens
occasionally planned excursions to Bermuda and other places; but,
remembering the billiard-table, which he could not handily take along,
he abandoned these projects. He was a boy whose parents had been called
away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time.

There were likely to be irritations in his morning’s mail, and more
often he did not wish to see it until it had been pretty carefully
sifted. So many people wrote who wanted things, so many others who made
the claim of more or less distant acquaintanceship the excuse for long
and trivial letters.

“I have stirred up three generations,” he said; “first the grandparents,
then the children, and now the grandchildren; the great-grandchildren
will begin to arrive soon.”

His mail was always large; but often it did not look interesting. One
could tell from the envelope and the superscription something of the
contents. Going over one assortment he burst out:

“Look at them! Look how trivial they are! Every envelope looks as if it
contained a trivial human soul.”

Many letters were filled with fulsome praise and compliment, usually of
one pattern. He was sated with such things, and seldom found it possible
to bear more than a line or two of them. Yet a fresh, well-expressed
note of appreciation always pleased him.

“I can live for two months on a good compliment,” he once said. Certain
persistent correspondents, too self-centered to realize their lack
of consideration, or the futility of their purpose, followed him
relentlessly. Of one such he remarked:

“That woman intends to pursue me to the grave. I wish something could be
done to appease her.”

And again:

“Everybody in the world who wants something--something of no interest to
me--writes to me to get it.”

These morning sessions were likely to be of great interest. Once a
letter spoke of the desirability of being an optimist. “That word
perfectly disgusts me,” he said, and his features materialized the
disgust, “just as that other word, pessimist, does; and the idea that
one can, by any effort of will, be one or the other, any more than he
can change the color of his hair. The reason why a man is a pessimist or
an optimist is not because he wants to be, but because he was born so;
and this man [a minister of the Gospel who was going to explain life to
him] is going to tell me why he isn’t a pessimist. Oh, he’ll do it, but
he won’t tell the truth; he won’t make it short enough.”

Yet he was always patient with any one who came with spiritual messages,
theological arguments, and consolations. He might have said to them:
“Oh, dear friends, those things of which you speak are the toys that
long ago I played with and set aside.” He could have said it and spoken
the truth; but I believe he did not even think it. He listened to any
one for whom he had respect, and was grateful for any effort in his
behalf. One morning he read aloud a lecture given in London by George
Bernard Shaw on religion, commenting as he read. He said:

“This letter is a frank breath of expression [and his comments were
equally frank]. There is no such thing as morality; it is not immoral
for the tiger to eat the wolf, or the wolf the cat, or the cat the bird,
and so on down; that is their business. There is always enough for each
one to live on. It is not immoral for one nation to seize another nation
by force of arms, or for one man to seize another man’s property or life
if he is strong enough and wants to take it. It is not immoral to create
the human species--with or without ceremony; nature intended exactly
these things.”

At one place in the lecture Shaw had said: “No one of good sense can
accept any creed to-day without reservation.”

“Certainly not,” commented Clemens; “the reservation is that he is a
d--d fool to accept it at all.”

He was in one of his somber moods that morning. I had received a print
of a large picture of Thomas Nast--the last one taken. The face had a
pathetic expression which told the tragedy of his last years. Clemens
looked at the picture several moments without speaking. Then he broke
out:

“Why can’t a man die when he’s had his tragedy? I ought to have died
long ago.” And somewhat later: “Once Twichell heard me cussing the human
race, and he said, ‘Why, Mark, you are the last person in the world to
do that--one selected and set apart as you are.’ I said ‘Joe, you don’t
know what you are talking about. I am not cussing altogether about my
own little troubles. Any one can stand his own misfortunes; but when
I read in the papers all about the rascalities and outrages going on I
realize what a creature the human animal is. Don’t you care more about
the wretchedness of others than anything that happens to you?’ Joe said
he did, and shut up.”

It occurred to me to suggest that he should not read the daily papers.
“No difference,” he said. “I read books printed two hundred years ago,
and they hurt just the same.”

“Those people are all dead and gone,” I objected.

“They hurt just the same,” he maintained.

I sometimes thought of his inner consciousness as a pool darkened by
his tragedies, its glassy surface, when calm, reflecting all the joy and
sunlight and merriment of the world, but easily--so easily--troubled and
stirred even to violence. Once following the dictation, when I came to
the billiard-room he was shooting the balls about the table, apparently
much depressed. He said:

“I have been thinking it out--if I live two years more I will put an end
to it all. I will kill myself.”

“You have much to live for----”

“But I am so tired of the eternal round,” he interrupted; “so tired.”
 And I knew he meant that he was ill of the great loneliness that had
come to him that day in Florence, and would never pass away.

I referred to the pressure of social demands in the city, and the relief
he would find in his country home. He shook his head.

“The country home I need,” he said, fiercely, “is a cemetery.”

Yet the mood changed quickly enough when the play began. He was gay and
hilarious presently, full of the humors and complexities of the game. H.
H. Rogers came in with a good deal of frequency, seldom making very long
calls, but never seeming to have that air of being hurried which one
might expect to find in a man whose day was only twenty-four hours long,
and whose interests were so vast and innumerable. He would come in where
we were playing, and sit down and watch the game, or perhaps would
pick up a book and read, exchanging a remark now and then. More often,
however, he sat in the bedroom, for his visits were likely to be in the
morning. They were seldom business calls, or if they were, the business
was quickly settled, and then followed gossip, humorous incident, or
perhaps Clemens would read aloud something he had written. But once,
after greetings, he began:

“Well, Rogers, I don’t know what you think of it, but I think I have had
about enough of this world, and I wish I were out of it.”

Mr. Rogers replied, “I don’t say much about it, but that expresses my
view.”

This from the foremost man of letters and one of the foremost financiers
of the time was impressive. Each at the mountain-top of his career, they
agreed that the journey was not worth while--that what the world had
still to give was not attractive enough to tempt them to prevent a
desire to experiment with the next stage. One could remember a thousand
poor and obscure men who were perfectly willing to go on struggling
and starving, postponing the day of settlement as long as possible; but
perhaps, when one has had all the world has to give, when there are no
new worlds in sight to conquer, one has a different feeling.

Well, the realization lay not so far ahead for either of them, though at
that moment they both seemed full of life and vigor--full of youth. One
could not imagine the day when for them it would all be over.



CCLI. A LOBBYING EXPEDITION

Clara Clemens came home now and then to see how matters were
progressing, and very properly, for Clemens was likely to become
involved in social intricacies which required a directing hand. The
daughter inherited no little of the father’s characteristics of thought
and phrase, and it was always a delight to see them together when one
could be just out of range of the crossfire. I remember soon after her
return, when she was making some searching inquiries concerning the
billiard-room sign, and other suggested or instituted reforms, he said:

“Oh well, never mind, it doesn’t matter. I’m boss in this house.”

She replied, quickly: “Oh no, you’re not. You’re merely owner. I’m the
captain--the commander-in-chief.”

One night at dinner she mentioned the possibility of going abroad that
year. During several previous summers she had planned to visit Vienna to
see her old music-master, Leschetizky, once more before his death. She
said:

“Leschetizky is getting so old. If I don’t go soon I’m afraid I sha’n’t
be in time for his funeral.”

“Yes,” said her father, thoughtfully, “you keep rushing over to
Leschetizky’s funeral, and you’ll miss mine.”

He had made one or two social engagements without careful reflection,
and the situation would require some delicacy of adjustment. During a
moment between the courses, when he left the table and was taking his
exercise in the farther room, she made some remark which suggested a
doubt of her father’s gift for social management. I said:

“Oh, well, he is a king, you know, and a king can do no wrong.”

“Yes, I know,” she answered. “The king can do no wrong; but he frightens
me almost to death, sometimes, he comes so near it.”

He came back and began to comment rather critically on some recent
performance of Roosevelt’s, which had stirred up a good deal of
newspaper amusement--it was the Storer matter and those indiscreet
letters which Roosevelt had written relative to the ambassadorship
which Storer so much desired. Miss Clemens was inclined to defend
the President, and spoke with considerable enthusiasm concerning his
elements of popularity, which had won him such extraordinary admiration.

“Certainly he is popular,” Clemens admitted, “and with the best of
reasons. If the twelve apostles should call at the White House, he would
say, ‘Come in, come in! I am delighted to see you. I’ve been watching
your progress, and I admired it very much.’ Then if Satan should come,
he would slap him on the shoulder and say, ‘Why, Satan, how do you do?
I am so glad to meet you. I’ve read all your works and enjoyed every one
of them.’ Anybody could be popular with a gift like that.”

It was that evening or the next, perhaps, that he said to her:

“Ben [one of his pet names for her], now that you are here to run the
ranch, Paine and I are going to Washington on a vacation. You don’t seem
to admire our society much, anyhow.”

There were still other reasons for the Washington expedition. There was
an important bill up for the extension of the book royalty period, and
the forces of copyright were going down in a body to use every possible
means to get the measure through.

Clemens, during Cleveland’s first administration, some nineteen years
before, had accompanied such an expedition, and through S. S. (“Sunset”)
Cox had obtained the “privileges of the floor” of the House, which
had enabled him to canvass the members individually. Cox assured the
doorkeeper that Clemens had received the thanks of Congress for national
literary service, and was therefore entitled to that privilege. This was
not strictly true; but regulations were not very severe in those
days, and the ruse had been regarded as a good joke, which had yielded
excellent results. Clemens had a similar scheme in mind now, and
believed that his friendship with Speaker Cannon--“Uncle Joe”--would
obtain for him a similar privilege. The Copyright Association working in
its regular way was very well, he said, but he felt he could do more as
an individual than by acting merely as a unit of that body.

“I canvassed the entire House personally that other time,” he said. “Cox
introduced me to the Democrats, and John D. Long, afterward Secretary
of the Navy, introduced me to the Republicans. I had a darling time
converting those members, and I’d like to try the experiment again.”

I should have mentioned earlier, perhaps, that at this time he had begun
to wear white clothing regularly, regardless of the weather and season.
On the return from Dublin he had said:

“I can’t bear to put on black clothes again. I wish I could wear white
all winter. I should prefer, of course, to wear colors, beautiful
rainbow hues, such as the women have monopolized. Their clothing makes
a great opera audience an enchanting spectacle, a delight to the eye and
to the spirit--a garden of Eden for charm and color.

“The men, clothed in odious black, are scattered here and there over the
garden like so many charred stumps. If we are going to be gay in spirit,
why be clad in funeral garments? I should like to dress in a loose and
flowing costume made all of silks and velvets resplendent with stunning
dyes, and so would every man I have ever known; but none of us dares
to venture it. If I should appear on Fifth Avenue on a Sunday morning
clothed as I would like to be clothed the churches would all be vacant
and the congregation would come tagging after me. They would scoff, of
course, but they would envy me, too. When I put on black it reminds me
of my funerals. I could be satisfied with white all the year round.”

It was not long after this that he said:

“I have made up my mind not to wear black any more, but white, and let
the critics say what they will.”

So his tailor was sent for, and six creamy flannel and serge suits were
ordered, made with the short coats, which he preferred, with a gray suit
or two for travel, and he did not wear black again, except for evening
dress and on special occasions. It was a gratifying change, and though
the newspapers made much of it, there was no one who was not gladdened
by the beauty of his garments and their general harmony with his person.
He had never worn anything so appropriate or so impressive.

This departure of costume came along a week or two before the Washington
trip, and when his bags were being packed for the excursion he was
somewhat in doubt as to the propriety of bursting upon Washington in
December in that snowy plumage. I ventured:

“This is a lobbying expedition of a peculiar kind, and does not seem to
invite any half-way measures. I should vote in favor of the white suit.”

I think Miss Clemens was for it, too. She must have been or the vote
wouldn’t have carried, though it was clear he strongly favored the idea.
At all events, the white suits came along.

We were off the following afternoon: Howells, Robert Underwood Johnson,
one of the Appletons, one of the Putnams, George Bowker, and others were
on the train. On the trip down in the dining-car there was a discussion
concerning the copyrighting of ideas, which finally resolved itself into
the possibility of originating a new one. Clemens said:

“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take
a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We
give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on
turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same
old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”

We put up at the Willard, and in the morning drove over to the
Congressional Library, where the copyright hearing was in progress.
There was a joint committee of the two Houses seated round a long table
at work, and a number of spectators more or less interested in the bill,
mainly, it would seem, men concerned with the protection of mechanical
music-rolls. The fact that this feature was mixed up with literature was
not viewed with favor by most of the writers. Clemens referred to the
musical contingent as “those hand-organ men who ought to have a bill of
their own.”

I should mention that early that morning Clemens had written this letter
to Speaker Cannon:

December 7, 1906.

DEAR UNCLE JOSEPH,--Please get me the thanks of the Congress--not next
week, but right away. It is very necessary. Do accomplish this for
your affectionate old friend right away; by persuasion, if you can; by
violence, if you must, for it is imperatively necessary that I get on
the floor for two or three hours and talk to the members, man by man,
in behalf of the support, encouragement, and protection of one of the
nation’s most valuable assets and industries--its literature. I have
arguments with me, also a barrel with liquid in it.

Give me a chance. Get me the thanks of Congress. Don’t wait for
others--there isn’t time. I have stayed away and let Congress alone
for seventy-one years and I am entitled to thanks. Congress knows it
perfectly well, and I have long felt hurt that this quite proper and
earned expression of gratitude has been merely felt by the House and
never publicly uttered. Send me an order on the Sergeant-at-Arms quick.
When shall I come?              With love and a benediction;
                                   MARK TWAIN.

We went over to the Capitol now to deliver to “Uncle Joe” this
characteristic letter. We had picked up Clemens’s nephew, Samuel E.
Moffett, at the Library, and he came along and led the way to the
Speaker’s room. Arriving there, Clemens laid off his dark overcoat and
stood there, all in white, certainly a startling figure among those
clerks, newspaper men, and incidental politicians. He had been noticed
as he entered the Capitol, and a number of reporters had followed close
behind. Within less than a minute word was being passed through the
corridors that Mark Twain was at the Capitol in his white suit. The
privileged ones began to gather, and a crowd assembled in the hall
outside.

Speaker Cannon was not present at the moment; but a little later he
“billowed” in--which seems to be the word to express it--he came with
such a rush and tide of life. After greetings, Clemens produced the
letter and read it to him solemnly, as if he were presenting a petition.
Uncle Joe listened quite seriously, his head bowed a little, as if it
were really a petition, as in fact it was. He smiled, but he said, quite
seriously:

“That is a request that ought to be granted; but the time has gone by
when I am permitted any such liberties. Tom Reed, when he was Speaker,
inaugurated a strict precedent excluding all outsiders from the use of
the floor of the House.”

“I got in the other time,” Clemens insisted.

“Yes,” said Uncle Joe; “but that ain’t now. Sunset Cox could let you in,
but I can’t. They’d hang me.” He reflected a moment, and added: “I’ll
tell you what I’ll do: I’ve got a private room down-stairs that I never
use. It’s all fitted up with table and desk, stationery, chinaware, and
cutlery; you could keep house there, if you wanted to. I’ll let you
have it as long as you want to stay here, and I’ll give you my private
servant, Neal, who’s been here all his life and knows every official,
every Senator and Representative, and they all know him. He’ll bring you
whatever you want, and you can send in messages by him. You can have the
members brought down singly or in bunches, and convert them as much
as you please. I’d give you a key to the room, only I haven’t got one
myself. I never can get in when I want to, but Neal can get in, and
he’ll unlock it for you. You can have the room, and you can have Neal.
Now, will that do you?”

Clemens said it would. It was, in fact, an offer without precedent.
Probably never in the history of the country had a Speaker given up his
private room to lobbyists. We went in to see the House open, and then
went down with Neal and took possession of the room. The reporters had
promptly seized upon the letter, and they now got hold of its author,
led him to their own quarters, and, gathering around him, fired
questions at him, and kept their note-books busy. He made a great
figure, all in white there among them, and they didn’t fail to realize
the value of it as “copy.” He talked about copyright, and about his
white clothes, and about a silk hat which Howells wore.

Back in the Speaker’s room, at last, he began laying out the campaign,
which would begin next day. By and by he said:

“Look here! I believe I’ve got to speak over there in that
committee-room to-day or to-morrow. I ought to know just when it is.”

I had not heard of this before, and offered to go over and see about it,
which I did at once. I hurried back faster than I had gone.

“Mr. Clemens, you are to speak in half an hour, and the room is crowded
full; people waiting to hear you.”

“The devil!” he said. “Well, all right; I’ll just lie down here a few
minutes and then we’ll go over. Take paper and pencil and make a few
headings.”

There was a couch in the room. He lay down while I sat at the table with
a pencil, making headings now and then, as he suggested, and presently
he rose and, shoving the notes into his pocket, was ready. It was half
past three when we entered the committee-room, which was packed with
people and rather dimly lighted, for it was gloomy outside. Herbert
Putnam, the librarian, led us to seats among the literary group, and
Clemens, removing his overcoat, stood in that dim room clad as in white
armor. There was a perceptible stir. Howells, startled for a moment,
whispered:

“What in the world did he wear that white suit for?” though in his heart
he admired it as much as the others.

I don’t remember who was speaking when we came in, but he was saying
nothing important. Whoever it was, he was followed by Dr. Edward Everett
Hale, whose age always commanded respect, and whose words always invited
interest. Then it was Mark Twain’s turn. He did not stand by his chair,
as the others had done, but walked over to the Speaker’s table, and,
turning, faced his audience. I have never seen a more impressive sight
than that snow-white figure in that dim-lit, crowded room. He never
touched his notes; he didn’t even remember them. He began in that even,
quiet, deliberate voice of his the most even, the most quiet, the most
deliberate voice in the world--and, without a break or a hesitation for
a word, he delivered a copyright argument, full of humor and serious
reasoning, such a speech as no one in that room, I suppose, had ever
heard. Certainly it was a fine and dramatic bit of impromptu pleading.
The weary committee, which had been tortured all day with dull,
statistical arguments made by the mechanical device fiends, and
dreary platitudes unloaded by men whose chief ambition was to shine as
copyright champions, suddenly realized that they were being rewarded
for the long waiting. They began to brighten and freshen, and uplift and
smile, like flowers that have been wilted by a drought when comes the
refreshing shower that means renewed life and vigor. Every listener was
as if standing on tiptoe. When the last sentence was spoken the applause
came like an explosion.--[Howells in his book My Mark Twain speaks of
Clemens’s white clothing as “an inspiration which few men would have had
the courage to act upon.” He adds: “The first time I saw him wear it was
at the authors’ hearing before the Congressional Committee on Copyright
in Washington. Nothing could have been more dramatic than the gesture
with which he flung off his long, loose overcoat and stood forth
in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head. It was a
magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup; but the magnificent speech
which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable farrago of nonsense
about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis of all copyright
legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity.”]

There came a universal rush of men and women to get near enough for a
word and to shake his hand. But he was anxious to get away. We drove
to the Willard and talked and smoked, and got ready for dinner. He was
elated, and said the occasion required full-dress. We started down at
last, fronted and frocked like penguins.

I did not realize then the fullness of his love for theatrical effect.
I supposed he would want to go down with as little ostentation as
possible, so took him by the elevator which enters the dining-room
without passing through the long corridor known as “Peacock Alley,”
 because of its being a favorite place for handsomely dressed
fashionables of the national capital. When we reached the entrance of
the dining-room he said:

“Isn’t there another entrance to this place?”

I said there was, but that it was very conspicuous. We should have to go
down the long corridor.

“Oh, well,” he said, “I don’t mind that. Let’s go back and try it over.”

So we went back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel,
and came down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine, stately flight
of steps--a really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into
“Peacock Alley.” To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to
do. It is like descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal
landing-place where Cleopatra’s barge might lie. I confess that I was
somewhat nervous at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that
I was powerfully protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white
ties, white-silk waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight.

Of course he was seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and
the passage along the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now
that this gave the dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with
proper appetite for his dinner. I did not again make the mistake of
taking him around to the more secluded elevator. I aided and abetted him
every evening in making that spectacular descent of the royal stairway,
and in running that fair and frivolous gantlet the length of “Peacock
Alley.” The dinner was a continuous reception. No sooner was he seated
than this Congressman and that Senator came over to shake hands with
Mark Twain. Governor Francis of Missouri also came. Eventually Howells
drifted in, and Clemens reviewed the day, its humors and successes. Back
in the rooms at last he summed up the progress thus far--smoked, laughed
over “Uncle Joe’s” surrender to the “copyright bandits,” and turned in
for the night.

We were at the Capitol headquarters in Speaker Cannon’s private room
about eleven o’clock next morning. Clemens was not in the best
humor because I had allowed him to oversleep. He was inclined to be
discouraged at the prospect, and did not believe many of the members
would come down to see him. He expressed a wish for some person of
influence and wide acquaintance, and walked up and down, smoking
gloomily. I slipped out and found the Speaker’s colored body-guard,
Neal, and suggested that Mr. Clemens was ready now to receive the
members.

That was enough. They began to arrive immediately. John Sharp Williams
came first, then Boutell, from Illinois, Littlefield, of Maine,
and after them a perfect procession, including all the leading
lights--Dalzell, Champ Clark, McCall--one hundred and eighty or so in
all during the next three or four hours.

Neal announced each name at the door, and in turn I announced it to
Clemens when the press was not too great. He had provided boxes of
cigars, and the room was presently blue with smoke, Clemens in his white
suit in the midst of it, surrounded by those darker figures--shaking
hands, dealing out copyright gospel and anecdotes--happy and wonderfully
excited. There were chairs, but usually there was only standing room.
He was on his feet for several hours and talked continually; but when
at last it was over, and Champ Clark, who I believe remained longest and
was most enthusiastic in the movement, had bade him good-by, he declared
that he was not a particle tired, and added:

“I believe if our bill could be presented now it would pass.”

He was highly elated, and pronounced everything a perfect success. Neal,
who was largely responsible for the triumph, received a ten-dollar bill.

We drove to the hotel and dined that night with the Dodges, who had
been neighbors at Riverdale. Later, the usual crowd of admirers gathered
around him, among them I remember the minister from Costa Rica, the
Italian minister, and others of the diplomatic service, most of whom he
had known during his European residence. Some one told of traveling
in India and China, and how a certain Hindu “god” who had exchanged
autographs with Mark Twain during his sojourn there was familiar with
only two other American names--George Washington and Chicago; while
the King of Siam had read but three English books--the Bible, Bryce’s
American Commonwealth, and The Innocents Abroad.

We were at Thomas Nelson Page’s for dinner next evening--a wonderfully
beautiful home, full of art treasures. A number of guests had been
invited. Clemens naturally led the dinner-talk, which eventually drifted
to reading. He told of Mrs. Clemens’s embarrassment when Stepniak had
visited them and talked books, and asked her what her husband thought of
Balzac, Thackeray, and the others. She had been obliged to say that he
had not read them.

“‘How interesting!’ said Stepniak. But it wasn’t interesting to Mrs.
Clemens. It was torture.”

He was light-spirited and gay; but recalling Mrs. Clemens saddened him,
perhaps, for he was silent as we drove to the hotel, and after he was in
bed he said, with a weary despair which even the words do not convey:

“If I had been there a minute earlier, it is possible--it is possible
that she might have died in my arms. Sometimes I think that perhaps
there was an instant--a single instant--when she realized that she was
dying and that I was not there.”

In New York I had once brought him a print of the superb “Adams
Memorial,” by Saint-Gaudens--the bronze woman who sits in the still
court in the Rock Creek Cemetery at Washington.

On the morning following the Page dinner at breakfast, he said:

“Engage a carriage and we will drive out and see the Saint-Gaudens
bronze.”

It was a bleak, dull December day, and as we walked down through the
avenues of the dead there was a presence of realized sorrow that seemed
exactly suited to such a visit. We entered the little inclosure of
cedars where sits the dark figure which is art’s supreme expression of
the great human mystery of life and death. Instinctively we removed our
hats, and neither spoke until after we had come away. Then:

“What does he call it?” he asked.

I did not know, though I had heard applied to it that great line of
Shakespeare’s--“the rest is silence.”

“But that figure is not silent,” he said.

And later, as we were driving home:

“It is in deep meditation on sorrowful things.”

When we returned to New York he had the little print framed, and kept it
always on his mantelpiece.



CCLII. THEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION

From the Washington trip dates a period of still closer association with
Mark Twain. On the way to New York he suggested that I take up residence
in his house--a privilege which I had no wish to refuse. There was room
going to waste, he said, and it would be handier for the early and late
billiard sessions. So, after that, most of the days and nights I was
there.

Looking back on that time now, I see pretty vividly three quite distinct
pictures. One of them, the rich, red interior of the billiard-room with
the brilliant, green square in the center, on which the gay balls are
rolling, and bending over it that luminous white figure in the instant
of play. Then there is the long, lighted drawing-room with the same
figure stretched on a couch in the corner, drowsily smoking, while the
rich organ tones fill the place summoning for him scenes and faces which
others do not see. This was the hour between dinner and billiards--the
hour which he found most restful of the day. Sometimes he rose, walking
the length of the parlors, his step timed to the music and his thought.
Of medium height, he gave the impression of being tall-his head thrown
up, and like a lion’s, rather large for his body. But oftener he lay
among the cushions, the light flooding his white hair and dress and
heightening his brilliant coloring.

The third picture is that of the dinner-table--always beautifully laid,
and always a shrine of wisdom when he was there. He did not always talk;
but it was his habit to do so, and memory holds the clearer vision of
him when, with eyes and face alive with interest, he presented some
new angle of thought in fresh picturesqueness of speech. These are the
pictures that have remained to me out of the days spent under his roof,
and they will not fade while memory lasts.

Of Mark Twain’s table philosophies it seems proper to make rather
extended record. They were usually unpremeditated, and they presented
the man as he was, and thought. I preserved as much of them as I could,
and have verified phrase and idea, when possible, from his own notes and
other unprinted writings.

This dinner-table talk naturally varied in character from that of the
billiard-room. The latter was likely to be anecdotal and personal; the
former was more often philosophical and commentative, ranging through
a great variety of subjects scientific, political, sociological, and
religious. His talk was often of infinity--the forces of creation--and
it was likely to be satire of the orthodox conceptions, intermingled
with heresies of his own devising.

Once, after a period of general silence, he said:

“No one who thinks can imagine the universe made by chance. It is too
nicely assembled and regulated. There is, of course, a great Master
Mind, but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness.”

It was objected, by one of those present, that as the Infinite Mind
suggested perfect harmony, sorrow and suffering were defects which that
Mind must feel and eventually regulate.

“Yes,” he said, “not a sparrow falls but He is noticing, if that is
what you mean; but the human conception of it is that God is sitting up
nights worrying over the individuals of this infinitesimal race.”

Then he recalled a fancy which I have since found among his memoranda.
In this note he had written:

    The suns & planets that form the constellations of a billion billion
    solar systems & go pouring, a tossing flood of shining globes,
    through the viewless arteries of space are the blood-corpuscles in
    the veins of God; & the nations are the microbes that swarm and
    wiggle & brag in each, & think God can tell them apart at that
    distance & has nothing better to do than try. This--the
    entertainment of an eternity. Who so poor in his ambitions as to
    consent to be God on those terms? Blasphemy? No, it is not
    blasphemy. If God is as vast as that, He is above blasphemy; if He
    is as little as that, He is beneath it.

“The Bible,” he said, “reveals the character of its God with minute
exactness. It is a portrait of a man, if one can imagine a man with evil
impulses far beyond the human limit. In the Old Testament He is pictured
as unjust, ungenerous, pitiless, and revengeful, punishing innocent
children for the misdeeds of their parents; punishing unoffending people
for the sins of their rulers, even descending to bloody vengeance upon
harmless calves and sheep as punishment for puny trespasses committed
by their proprietors. It is the most damnatory biography that ever found
its way into print. Its beginning is merely childish. Adam is forbidden
to eat the fruit of a certain tree, and gravely informed that if he
disobeys he shall die. How could that impress Adam? He could have no
idea of what death meant. He had never seen a dead thing. He had never
heard of one. If he had been told that if he ate the apples he would be
turned into a meridian of longitude that threat would have meant just
as much as the other one. The watery intellect that invented that notion
could be depended on to go on and decree that all of Adam’s descendants
down to the latest day should be punished for that nursery trespass in
the beginning.

“There is a curious poverty of invention in Bibles. Most of the great
races each have one, and they all show this striking defect. Each
pretends to originality, without possessing any. Each of them borrows
from the other, confiscates old stage properties, puts them forth as
fresh and new inspirations from on high. We borrowed the Golden Rule
from Confucius, after it had seen service for centuries, and copyrighted
it without a blush. We went back to Babylon for the Deluge, and are
as proud of it and as satisfied with it as if it had been worth the
trouble; whereas we know now that Noah’s flood never happened, and
couldn’t have happened--not in that way. The flood is a favorite with
Bible-makers. Another favorite with the founders of religions is the
Immaculate Conception. It had been worn threadbare; but we adopted it as
a new idea. It was old in Egypt several thousand years before Christ was
born. The Hindus prized it ages ago. The Egyptians adopted it even for
some of their kings. The Romans borrowed the idea from Greece. We got it
straight from heaven by way of Rome. We are still charmed with it.”

He would continue in this strain, rising occasionally and walking about
the room. Once, considering the character of God--the Bible God-he said:

“We haven’t been satisfied with God’s character as it is given in the
Old Testament; we have amended it. We have called Him a God of mercy and
love and morals. He didn’t have a single one of those qualities in the
beginning. He didn’t hesitate to send the plagues on Egypt, the most
fiendish punishments that could be devised--not for the king, but for
his innocent subjects, the women and the little children, and then only
to exhibit His power just to show off--and He kept hardening Pharaoh’s
heart so that He could send some further ingenuity of torture, new
rivers of blood, and swarms of vermin and new pestilences, merely to
exhibit samples of His workmanship. Now and then, during the forty
years’ wandering, Moses persuaded Him to be a little more lenient with
the Israelites, which would show that Moses was the better character of
the two. That Old Testament God never had an inspiration of His own.”

He referred to the larger conception of God, that Infinite Mind which
had projected the universe. He said:

“In some details that Old Bible God is probably a more correct picture
than our conception of that Incomparable One that created the universe
and flung upon its horizonless ocean of space those giant suns, whose
signal-lights are so remote that we only catch their flash when it has
been a myriad of years on its way. For that Supreme One is not a God of
pity or mercy--not as we recognize these qualities. Think of a God
of mercy who would create the typhus germ, or the house-fly, or the
centipede, or the rattlesnake, yet these are all His handiwork. They are
a part of the Infinite plan. The minister is careful to explain that all
these tribulations are sent for a good purpose; but he hires a doctor to
destroy the fever germ, and he kills the rattlesnake when he doesn’t run
from it, and he sets paper with molasses on it for the house-fly.

“Two things are quite certain: one is that God, the limitless God,
manufactured those things, for no man could have done it. The man has
never lived who could create even the humblest of God’s creatures. The
other conclusion is that God has no special consideration for man’s
welfare or comfort, or He wouldn’t have created those things to disturb
and destroy him. The human conception of pity and morality must
be entirely unknown to that Infinite God, as much unknown as the
conceptions of a microbe to man, or at least as little regarded.

“If God ever contemplates those qualities in man He probably admires
them, as we always admire the thing which we do not possess ourselves;
probably a little grain of pity in a man or a little atom of mercy would
look as big to Him as a constellation. He could create a constellation
with a thought; but He has been all the measureless ages, and He has
never acquired those qualities that we have named--pity and mercy
and morality. He goes on destroying a whole island of people with an
earthquake, or a whole cityful with a plague, when we punish a man in
the electric chair for merely killing the poorest of our race. The human
being needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists
have done it already; but most of them don’t dare to say so.”

He pointed out that the moral idea was undergoing constant change; that
what was considered justifiable in an earlier day was regarded as highly
immoral now. He pointed out that even the Decalogue made no reference to
lying, except in the matter of bearing false witness against a neighbor.
Also, that there was a commandment against covetousness, though
covetousness to-day was the basis of all commerce: The general
conclusion being that the morals of the Lord had been the morals of
the beginning; the morals of the first-created man, the morals of the
troglodyte, the morals of necessity; and that the morals of mankind
had kept pace with necessity, whereas those of the Lord had remained
unchanged. It is hardly necessary to say that no one ever undertook to
contradict any statements of this sort from him. In the first place,
there was no desire to do so; and in the second place, any one
attempting it would have cut a puny figure with his less substantial
arguments and his less vigorous phrase. It was the part of wisdom and
immeasurably the part of happiness to be silent and listen.

On another evening he began:

“The mental evolution of the species proceeds apparently by regular
progress side by side with the physical development until it comes to
man, then there is a long, unexplained gulf. Somewhere man acquired
an asset which sets him immeasurably apart from the other animals--his
imagination. Out of it he created for himself a conscience, and clothes,
and immodesty, and a hereafter, and a soul. I wonder where he got that
asset. It almost makes one agree with Alfred Russel Wallace that the
world and the universe were created just for his benefit, that he is the
chief love and delight of God. Wallace says that the whole universe was
made to take care of and to keep steady this little floating mote in
the center of it, which we call the world. It looks like a good deal of
trouble for such a small result; but it’s dangerous to dispute with a
learned astronomer like Wallace. Still, I don’t think we ought to
decide too soon about it--not until the returns are all in. There is the
geological evidence, for instance. Even after the universe was
created, it took a long time to prepare the world for man. Some of
the scientists, ciphering out the evidence furnished by geology, have
arrived at the conviction that the world is prodigiously old. Lord
Kelvin doesn’t agree with them. He says that it isn’t more than a
hundred million years old, and he thinks the human race has inhabited
it about thirty thousand years of that time. Even so, it was 99,970,000
years getting ready, impatient as the Creator doubtless was to see man
and admire him. That was because God first had to make the oyster.
You can’t make an oyster out of nothing, nor you can’t do it in a day.
You’ve got to start with a vast variety of invertebrates, belemnites,
trilobites, jebusites, amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them
into soak in a primary sea and observe and wait what will happen.
Some of them will turn out a disappointment; the belemnites and the
amalekites and such will be failures, and they will die out and become
extinct in the course of the nineteen million years covered by the
experiment; but all is not lost, for the amalekites will develop
gradually into encrinites and stalactites and blatherskites, and one
thing and another, as the mighty ages creep on and the periods pile
their lofty crags in the primordial seas, and at last the first grand
stage in the preparation of the world for man stands completed; the
oyster is done. Now an oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than
a man has, so it is probable this one jumped to the conclusion that the
nineteen million years was a preparation for him. That would be just
like an oyster, and, anyway, this one could not know at that early date
that he was only an incident in a scheme, and that there was some more
to the scheme yet.

“The oyster being finished, the next step in the preparation of the
world for man was fish. So the old Silurian seas were opened up to
breed the fish in. It took twenty million years to make the fish and to
fossilize him so we’d have the evidence later.

“Then, the Paleozoic limit having been reached, it was necessary to
start a new age to make the reptiles. Man would have to have some
reptiles--not to eat, but to develop himself from. Thirty million years
were required for the reptiles, and out of such material as was left
were made those stupendous saurians that used to prowl about the steamy
world in remote ages, with their snaky heads forty feet in the air and
their sixty feet of body and tail racing and thrashing after them. They
are all gone now, every one of them; just a few fossil remnants of them
left on this far-flung fringe of time.

“It took all those years to get one of those creatures properly
constructed to proceed to the next step. Then came the pterodactyl,
who thought all that preparation all those millions of years had been
intended to produce him, for there wasn’t anything too foolish for
a pterodactyl to imagine. I suppose he did attract a good deal of
attention, for even the least observant could see that there was the
making of a bird in him, also the making of a mammal, in the course
of time. You can’t say too much for the picturesqueness of the
pterodactyl--he was the triumph of his period. He wore wings and had
teeth, and was a starchy-looking creature. But the progression went
right along.

“During the next thirty million years the bird arrived, and the
kangaroo, and by and by the mastodon, and the giant sloth, and the Irish
elk, and the old Silurian ass, and some people thought that man was
about due. But that was a mistake, for the next thing they knew there
came a great ice-sheet, and those creatures all escaped across the
Bering Strait and wandered around in Asia and died, all except a few to
carry on the preparation with. There were six of those glacial periods,
with two million years or so between each. They chased those poor
orphans up and down the earth, from weather to weather, from tropic
temperature to fifty degrees below. They never knew what kind of weather
was going to turn up next, and if they settled any place the whole
continent suddenly sank from under them, and they had to make a scramble
for dry land. Sometimes a volcano would turn itself loose just as they
got located. They led that uncertain, strenuous existence for about
twenty-five million years, always wondering what was going to happen
next, never suspecting that it was just a preparation for man, who had
to be done just so or there wouldn’t be any proper or harmonious place
for him when he arrived, and then at last the monkey came, and everybody
could see at a glance that man wasn’t far off now, and that was true
enough. The monkey went on developing for close upon five million years,
and then he turned into a man--to all appearances.

“It does look like a lot of fuss and trouble to go through to build
anything, especially a human being, and nowhere along the way is there
any evidence of where he picked up that final asset--his imagination.
It makes him different from the others--not any better, but certainly
different. Those earlier animals didn’t have it, and the monkey hasn’t
it or he wouldn’t be so cheerful.”

    [Paine records Twain’s thoughts in that magnificent essay: “Was the
    World Made for Man” published long after his death in the group of
    essays under the title “Letters from the Earth.” There are minor
    additions in the published version: “coal to fry the fish”; and
    the remnants of life being chased from pole to pole “without a dry
    rag on them,”; and the “coat of paint” on top of the bulb on top
    the Eiffel Tower representing “man’s portion of this world’s
    history.”  Ed.]

He often held forth on the shortcomings of the human race--always a
favorite subject--the incompetencies and imperfections of this
final creation, in spite of, or because of, his great attribute--the
imagination. Once (this was in the billiard-room) I started him by
saying that whatever the conditions in other planets, there seemed no
reason why life should not develop in each, adapted as perfectly to
prevailing conditions as man is suited to conditions here. He said:

“Is it your idea, then, that man is perfectly adapted to the conditions
of this planet?”

I began to qualify, rather weakly; but what I said did not matter. He
was off on his favorite theme.

“Man adapted to the earth?” he said. “Why, he can’t sleep out-of-doors
without freezing to death or getting the rheumatism or the malaria; he
can’t keep his nose under water over a minute without being drowned; he
can’t climb a tree without falling out and breaking his neck. Why, he’s
the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures that inhabit this
earth. He has got to be coddled and housed and swathed and bandaged and
up holstered to be able to live at all. He is a rickety sort of a
thing, anyway you take him, a regular British Museum of infirmities and
inferiorities. He is always under going repairs. A machine that is as
unreliable as he is would have no market. The higher animals get
their teeth without pain or inconvenience. The original cave man, the
troglodyte, may have got his that way. But now they come through months
and months of cruel torture, and at a time of life when he is least able
to bear it. As soon as he gets them they must all be pulled out again,
for they were of no value in the first place, not worth the loss of a
night’s rest. The second set will answer for a while; but he will never
get a set that can be depended on until the dentist makes one. The
animals are not much troubled that way. In a wild state, a natural
state, they have few diseases; their main one is old age. But man starts
in as a child and lives on diseases to the end as a regular diet. He
has mumps, measles, whooping-cough, croup, tonsilitis, diphtheria,
scarlet-fever, as a matter of course. Afterward, as he goes along, his
life continues to be threatened at every turn by colds, coughs, asthma,
bronchitis, quinsy, consumption, yellow-fever, blindness, influenza,
carbuncles, pneumonia, softening of the brain, diseases of the heart and
bones, and a thousand other maladies of one sort and another. He’s just
a basketful of festering, pestilent corruption, provided for the support
and entertainment of microbes. Look at the workmanship of him in some
of its particulars. What are his tonsils for? They perform no useful
function; they have no value. They are but a trap for tonsilitis and
quinsy. And what is the appendix for? It has no value. Its sole interest
is to lie and wait for stray grape-seeds and breed trouble. What is
his beard for? It is just a nuisance. All nations persecute it with the
razor. Nature, however, always keeps him supplied with it, instead
of putting it on his head, where it ought to be. You seldom see a man
bald-headed on his chin, but on his head. A man wants to keep his
hair. It is a graceful ornament, a comfort, the best of all protections
against weather, and he prizes it above emeralds and rubies, and Nature
half the time puts it on so it won’t stay.

“Man’s sight and smell and hearing are all inferior. If he were suited
to the conditions he could smell an enemy; he could hear him; he could
see him, just as the animals can detect their enemies. The robin hears
the earthworm burrowing his course under the ground; the bloodhound
follows a scent that is two days old. Man isn’t even handsome,
as compared with the birds; and as for style, look at the Bengal
tiger--that ideal of grace, physical perfection, and majesty. Think of
the lion and the tiger and the leopard, and then think of man--that
poor thing!--the animal of the wig, the ear-trumpet, the glass eye,
the porcelain teeth, the wooden leg, the trepanned skull, the silver
wind-pipe--a creature that is mended and patched all over from top to
bottom. If he can’t get renewals of his bric-a-brac in the next world
what will he look like? He has just that one stupendous superiority--his
imagination, his intellect. It makes him supreme--the higher animals
can’t match him there. It’s very curious.”

A letter which he wrote to J. Howard Moore concerning his book The
Universal Kinship was of this period, and seems to belong here.

    DEAR MR. MOORE, The book has furnished me several days of deep
    pleasure & satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same
    time, since it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished
    opinions & reflections & resentments by doing it lucidly & fervently
    & irascibly for me.

    There is one thing that always puzzles me: as inheritors of the
    mentality of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance
    by a thousand grades; but in the matter of the morals which they
    left us we have gone backward as many grades. That evolution is
    strange & to me unaccountable & unnatural. Necessarily we started
    equipped with their perfect and blemishless morals; now we are
    wholly destitute; we have no real morals, but only artificial ones
    --morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural
    & healthy instincts. Yes, we are a sufficiently comical invention,
    we humans.

              Sincerely yours,
                                S. L. CLEMENS.



CCLIII. AN EVENING WITH HELEN KELLER

I recall two pleasant social events of that winter: one a little party
given at the Clemenses’ home on New-Year’s Eve, with charades and
story-telling and music. It was the music feature of this party that was
distinctive; it was supplied by wire through an invention known as
the telharmonium which, it was believed, would revolutionize musical
entertainment in such places as hotels, and to some extent in private
houses. The music came over the regular telephone wire, and was
delivered through a series of horns or megaphones--similar to those
used for phonographs--the playing being done, meanwhile, by skilled
performers at the central station. Just why the telharmonium has not
made good its promises of popularity I do not know. Clemens was
filled with enthusiasm over the idea. He made a speech a little before
midnight, in which he told how he had generally been enthusiastic
about inventions which had turned out more or less well in about equal
proportions. He did not dwell on the failures, but he told how he had
been the first to use a typewriter for manuscript work; how he had been
one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen; how he had installed the
first telephone ever used in a private house, and how the audience now
would have a demonstration of the first telharmonium music so employed.
It was just about the stroke of midnight when he finished, and a moment
later the horns began to play chimes and “Auld Lang Syne” and “America.”

The other pleasant evening referred to was a little company given in
honor of Helen Keller. It was fascinating to watch her, and to realize
with what a store of knowledge she had lighted the black silence of her
physical life. To see Mark Twain and Helen Keller together was something
not easily to be forgotten. When Mrs. Macy (who, as Miss Sullivan, had
led her so marvelously out of the shadows) communicated his words to
her with what seemed a lightning touch of the fingers her face radiated
every shade of his meaning-humorous, serious, pathetic. Helen visited
the various objects in the room, and seemed to enjoy them more than the
usual observer of these things, and certainly in greater detail.
Her sensitive fingers spread over articles of bric-a-brac, and the
exclamations she uttered were always fitting, showing that she somehow
visualized each thing in all its particulars. There was a bronze cat of
handsome workmanship and happy expression, and when she had run those
all--seeing fingers of hers over it she said: “It is smiling.”



CCLIV. BILLIARD-ROOM NOTES

The billiard games went along pretty steadily that winter. My
play improved, and Clemens found it necessary to eliminate my odds
altogether, and to change the game frequently in order to keep me in
subjection. Frequently there were long and apparently violent arguments
over the legitimacy of some particular shot or play--arguments to us
quite as enjoyable as the rest of the game. Sometimes he would count a
shot which was clearly out of the legal limits, and then it was always
a delight to him to have a mock-serious discussion over the matter of
conscience, and whether or not his conscience was in its usual state of
repair. It would always end by him saying: “I don’t wish even to seem to
do anything which can invite suspicion. I refuse to count that shot,” or
something of like nature. Sometimes when I had let a questionable
play pass without comment, he would watch anxiously until I had made
a similar one and then insist on my scoring it to square accounts. His
conscience was always repairing itself.

He had experimented, a great many years before, with what was in the
nature of a trick on some unsuspecting player. It consisted in turning
out twelve pool-balls on the table with one cue ball, and asking his
guest how many caroms he thought he could make with all those twelve
balls to play on. He had learned that the average player would seldom
make more than thirty-one counts, and usually, before this number was
reached, he would miss through some careless play or get himself into a
position where he couldn’t play at all. The thing looked absurdly easy.
It looked as if one could go on playing all day long, and the victim was
usually eager to bet that he could make fifty or perhaps a hundred;
but for more than an hour I tried it patiently, and seldom succeeded in
scoring more than fifteen or twenty without missing. Long after the play
itself ceased to be amusing to me, he insisted on my going on and trying
it some more, and he would throw himself back and roar with laughter,
the tears streaming down his cheeks, to see me work and fume and fail.

It was very soon after that that Peter Dunne (“Mr. Dooley”) came
down for luncheon, and after several games of the usual sort, Clemens
quietly--as if the idea had just occurred to him--rolled out the twelve
balls and asked Dunne how, many caroms he thought he could make without
a miss. Dunne said he thought he could make a thousand. Clemens quite
indifferently said that he didn’t believe he could make fifty. Dunne
offered to bet five dollars that he could, and the wager was made. Dunne
scored about twenty-five the first time and missed; then he insisted on
betting five dollars again, and his defeats continued until Clemens
had twenty-five dollars of Dunne’s money, and Dunne was sweating and
swearing, and Mark Twain rocking with delight. Dunne went away still
unsatisfied, promising that he would come back and try it again.
Perhaps he practised in his absence, for when he returned he had learned
something. He won his twenty-five dollars back, and I think something
more added. Mark Twain was still ahead, for Dunne furnished him with a
good five hundred dollars’ worth of amusement.

Clemens never cared to talk and never wished to be talked to when the
game was actually in progress. If there was anything to be said on
either side, he would stop and rest his cue on the floor, or sit down on
the couch, until the matter was concluded. Such interruptions happened
pretty frequently, and many of the bits of personal comment and incident
scattered along through this work are the result of those brief rests.
Some shot, or situation, or word would strike back through the past and
awaken a note long silent, and I generally kept a pad and pencil on the
window-sill with the score-sheet, and later, during his play, I would
scrawl some reminder that would be precious by and by.

On one of these I find a memorandum of what he called his three
recurrent dreams. All of us have such things, but his seem worth
remembering.

“There is never a month passes,” he said, “that I do not dream of being
in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn
a living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about
those days; but there’s always something sickening about the thought
that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I
am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell
whether it is Selma bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night.

“Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to
the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am
always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to
be funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only
making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they
commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing
there in the semidarkness talking to an empty house.

“My other dream is of being at a brilliant gathering in my
night-garments. People don’t seem to notice me there at first, and then
pretty soon somebody points me out, and they all begin to look at me
suspiciously, and I can see that they are wondering who I am and why
I am there in that costume. Then it occurs to me that I can fix it by
making myself known. I take hold of some man and whisper to him, ‘I am
Mark Twain’; but that does not improve it, for immediately I can hear
him whispering to the others, ‘He says he is Mark Twain,’ and they all
look at me a good deal more suspiciously than before, and I can see
that they don’t believe it, and that it was a mistake to make that
confession. Sometimes, in that dream, I am dressed like a tramp instead
of being in my night-clothes; but it all ends about the same--they go
away and leave me standing there, ashamed. I generally enjoy my dreams,
but not those three, and they are the ones I have oftenest.”

Quite often some curious episode of the world’s history would flash upon
him--something amusing, or coarse, or tragic, and he would bring the
game to a standstill and recount it with wonderful accuracy as to date
and circumstance. He had a natural passion for historic events and a
gift for mentally fixing them, but his memory in other ways was seldom
reliable. He was likely to forget the names even of those he knew best
and saw oftenest, and the small details of life seldom registered at
all.

He had his breakfast served in his room, and once, on a slip of paper,
he wrote, for his own reminder:

The accuracy of your forgetfulness is absolute--it seems never to fail.
I prepare to pour my coffee so it can cool while I shave--and I always
forget to pour it.

Yet, very curiously, he would sometimes single out a minute detail,
something every one else had overlooked, and days or even weeks
afterward would recall it vividly, and not always at an opportune
moment. Perhaps this also was a part of his old pilot-training. Once
Clara Clemens remarked:

“It always amazes me the things that father does and does not remember.
Some little trifle that nobody else would notice, and you are hoping
that he didn’t, will suddenly come back to him just when you least
expect it or care for it.”

My note-book contains the entry:

    February 11, 1907. He said to-day:

    “A blindfolded chess-player can remember every play and discuss the
    game afterward, while we can’t remember from one shot to the next.”

    I mentioned his old pilot-memory as an example of what he could do
    if he wished.

    “Yes,” he answered, “those are special memories; a pilot will tell
    you the number of feet in every crossing at any time, but he can’t
    remember what he had for breakfast.”

    “How long did you keep your pilot-memory?” I asked.

    “Not long; it faded out right away, but the training served me, for
    when I went to report on a paper a year or two later I never had to
    make any notes.”

    “I suppose you still remember some of the river?”

    “Not much. Hat Island, Helena and here and there a place; but that
    is about all.”



CCLV. FURTHER PERSONALITIES

Like every person living, Mark Twain had some peculiar and petty
economies. Such things in great men are noticeable. He lived
extravagantly. His household expenses at the time amounted to more
than fifty dollars a day. In the matter of food, the choicest, and
most expensive the market could furnish was always served in lavish
abundance. He had the best and highest-priced servants, ample as to
number. His clothes he bought generously; he gave without stint to
his children; his gratuities were always liberal. He never questioned
pecuniary outgoes--seldom worried as to the state of his bank-account
so long as there was plenty. He smoked cheap cigars because he preferred
their flavor. Yet he had his economies. I have seen him, before leaving
a room, go around and carefully lower the gas-jets, to provide against
that waste. I have known him to examine into the cost of a cab, and
object to an apparent overcharge of a few cents.

It seemed that his idea of economy might be expressed in these words: He
abhorred extortion and visible waste.

Furthermore, he had exact ideas as to ownership. One evening, while
we were playing billiards, I noticed a five-cent piece on the floor. I
picked it up, saying:

“Here is five cents; I don’t know whose it is.”

He regarded the coin rather seriously, I thought, and said:

“I don’t know, either.”

I laid it on the top of the book-shelves which ran around the room. The
play went on, and I forgot the circumstance. When the game ended that
night I went into his room with him, as usual, for a good-night word. As
he took his change and keys from the pocket of his trousers, he looked
the assortment over and said:

“That five-cent piece you found was mine.”

I brought it to him at once, and he took it solemnly, laid it with the
rest of his change, and neither of us referred to it again. It may have
been one of his jokes, but I think it more likely that he remembered
having had a five-cent piece, probably reserved for car fare, and that
it was missing.

More than once, in Washington, he had said:

“Draw plenty of money for incidental expenses. Don’t bother to keep
account of them.”

So it was not miserliness; it was just a peculiarity, a curious
attention to a trifling detail.

He had a fondness for riding on the then newly completed Subway, which
he called the Underground. Sometimes he would say:

“I’ll pay your fare on the Underground if you want to take a ride with
me.” And he always insisted on paying the fare, and once when I rode
far up-town with him to a place where he was going to luncheon, and had
taken him to the door, he turned and said, gravely:

“Here is five cents to pay your way home.” And I took it in the same
spirit in which it had been offered. It was probably this trait which
caused some one occasionally to claim that Mark Twain was close in
money matters. Perhaps there may have been times in his life when he was
parsimonious; but, if so, I must believe that it was when he was sorely
pressed and exercising the natural instinct of self-preservation. He
wished to receive the full value (who does not?) of his labors and
properties. He took a childish delight in piling up money; but it became
greed only when he believed some one with whom he had dealings was
trying to get an unfair division of profits. Then it became something
besides greed. It became an indignation that amounted to malevolence. I
was concerned in a number of dealings with Mark Twain, and at a period
in his life when human traits are supposed to become exaggerated, which
is to say old age, and if he had any natural tendency to be unfair, or
small, or greedy in his money dealings I think I should have seen it.
Personally, I found him liberal to excess, and I never observed in him
anything less than generosity to those who were fair with him.

Once that winter, when a letter came from Steve Gillis saying that he
was an invalid now, and would have plenty of time to read Sam’s books if
he owned them, Clemens ordered an expensive set from his publishers, and
did what meant to him even more than the cost in money--he autographed
each of those twenty-five volumes. Then he sent them, charges paid, to
that far Californian retreat. It was hardly the act of a stingy man.

He had the human fondness for a compliment when it was genuine and from
an authoritative source, and I remember how pleased he was that winter
with Prof. William Lyon Phelps’s widely published opinion, which ranked
Mark Twain as the greatest American novelist, and declared that his
fame would outlive any American of his time. Phelps had placed him above
Holmes, Howells, James, and even Hawthorne. He had declared him to
be more American than any of these--more American even than Whitman.
Professor Phelps’s position in Yale College gave this opinion a certain
official weight; but I think the fact of Phelps himself being a writer
of great force, with an American freshness of style, gave it a still
greater value.

Among the pleasant things that winter was a meeting with Eugene F.
Ware, of Kansas, with whose penname--“Ironquill”--Clemens had long been
familiar.

Ware was a breezy Western genius of the finest type. If he had abandoned
law for poetry, there is no telling how far his fame might have reached.
There was in his work that same spirit of Americanism and humor and
humanity that is found in Mark Twain’s writings, and he had the added
faculty of rhyme and rhythm, which would have set him in a place apart.
I had known Ware personally during a period of Western residence, and
later, when he was Commissioner of Pensions under Roosevelt. I usually
saw him when he came to New York, and it was a great pleasure now to
bring together the two men whose work I so admired. They met at a small
private luncheon at The Players, and Peter Dunne was there, and Robert
Collier, and it was such an afternoon as Howells has told of when he and
Aldrich and Bret Harte and those others talked until the day faded into
twilight, and twilight deepened into evening. Clemens had put in most of
the day before reading Ware’s book of poems, ‘The Rhymes of Ironquill’,
and had declared his work to rank with the very greatest of American
poetry--I think he called it the most truly American in flavor. I
remember that at the luncheon he noted Ware’s big, splendid physique and
his Western liberties of syntax with a curious intentness. I believe he
regarded him as being nearer his own type in mind and expression than
any one he had met before.

Among Ware’s poems he had been especially impressed with the “Fables,”
 and with some verses entitled “Whist,” which, though rather more
optimistic, conformed to his own philosophy. They have a distinctly
“Western” feeling.

                       WHIST
        Hour after hour the cards were fairly shuffled,
           And fairly dealt, and still I got no hand;
         The morning came; but I, with mind unruffled,
            Did simply say, “I do not understand.”
          Life is a game of whist. From unseen sources
        The cards are shuffled, and the hands are dealt.
         Blind are our efforts to control the forces
        That, though unseen, are no less strongly felt.
         I do not like the way the cards are shuffled,
         But still I like the game and want to play;
       And through the long, long night will I, unruffled,
           Play what I get, until the break of day.



VOLUME III, Part 2: 1907-1910



CCLVI. HONORS FROM OXFORD

Clemens made a brief trip to Bermuda during the winter, taking Twichell
along; their first return to the island since the trip when they had
promised to come back so soon-nearly thirty years before. They had been
comparatively young men then. They were old now, but they found the
green island as fresh and full of bloom as ever. They did not find their
old landlady; they could not even remember her name at first, and
then Twichell recalled that it was the same as an author of certain
schoolbooks in his youth, and Clemens promptly said, “Kirkham’s
Grammar.” Kirkham was truly the name, and they went to find her; but she
was dead, and the daughter, who had been a young girl in that earlier
time, reigned in her stead and entertained the successors of her
mother’s guests. They walked and drove about the island, and it was like
taking up again a long-discontinued book and reading another chapter of
the same tale. It gave Mark Twain a fresh interest in Bermuda, one which
he did not allow to fade again.

Later in the year (March, 1907) I also made a journey; it having been
agreed that I should take a trip to the Mississippi and to the Pacific
coast to see those old friends of Mark Twain’s who were so rapidly
passing away. John Briggs was still alive, and other Hannibal
schoolmates; also Joe Goodman and Steve Gillis, and a few more of the
early pioneers--all eminently worth seeing in the matter of such work
as I had in hand. The billiard games would be interrupted; but whatever
reluctance to the plan there may have been on that account was put aside
in view of prospective benefits. Clemens, in fact, seemed to derive joy
from the thought that he was commissioning a kind of personal emissary
to his old comrades, and provided me with a letter of credentials.

It was a long, successful trip that I made, and it was undertaken none
too soon. John Briggs, a gentle-hearted man, was already entering
the valley of the shadow as he talked to me by his fire one memorable
afternoon, and reviewed the pranks of those days along the river and in
the cave and on Holliday’s Hill. I think it was six weeks later that he
died; and there were others of that scattering procession who did not
reach the end of the year. Joe Goodman, still full of vigor (in 1912),
journeyed with me to the green and dreamy solitudes of Jackass Hill to
see Steve and Jim Gillis, and that was an unforgetable Sunday when Steve
Gillis, an invalid, but with the fire still in his eyes and speech, sat
up on his couch in his little cabin in that Arcadian stillness and told
old tales and adventures. When I left he said:

“Tell Sam I’m going to die pretty soon, but that I love him; that I’ve
loved him all my life, and I’ll love him till I die. This is the last
word I’ll ever send to him.” Jim Gillis, down in Sonora, was already
lying at the point of death, and so for him the visit was too late,
though he was able to receive a message from his ancient mining partner,
and to send back a parting word.

I returned by way of New Orleans and the Mississippi River, for I wished
to follow that abandoned water highway, and to visit its presiding
genius, Horace Bixby,--[He died August 2, 1912, at the age of
86]--still alive and in service as pilot of the government snagboat, his
headquarters at St. Louis.

Coming up the river on one of the old passenger steam boats that still
exist, I noticed in a paper which came aboard that Mark Twain was to
receive from Oxford University the literary doctor’s degree. There had
been no hint of this when I came away, and it seemed rather too sudden
and too good to be true. That the little barefoot lad that had played
along the river-banks at Hannibal, and received such meager advantages
in the way of schooling--whose highest ambition had been to pilot such
a craft as this one--was about to be crowned by the world’s greatest
institution of learning, to receive the highest recognition for
achievement in the world of letters, was a thing which would not be
likely to happen outside of a fairy tale.

Returning to New York, I ran out to Tuxedo, where he had taken a home
for the summer (for it was already May), and walking along the shaded
paths of that beautiful suburban park, he told me what he knew of the
Oxford matter.

Moberly Bell, of the London Times, had been over in April, and soon
after his return to England there had come word of the proposed honor.
Clemens privately and openly (to Bell) attributed it largely to his
influence. He wrote to him:

    DEAR MR. BELL,--Your hand is in it & you have my best thanks.
    Although I wouldn’t cross an ocean again for the price of the ship
    that carried me I am glad to do it for an Oxford degree. I shall
    plan to sail for England a shade before the middle of June, so that
    I can have a few days in London before the 26th.

A day or two later, when the time for sailing had been arranged, he
overtook his letter with a cable:

    I perceive your hand in it. You have my best thanks. Sail on
    Minneapolis June 8th. Due in Southampton ten days later.

Clemens said that his first word of the matter had been a newspaper
cablegram, and that he had been doubtful concerning it until a cablegram
to himself had confirmed it.

“I never expected to cross the water again,” he said; “but I would be
willing to journey to Mars for that Oxford degree.”

He put the matter aside then, and fell to talking of Jim Gillis and
the others I had visited, dwelling especially on Gillis’s astonishing
faculty for improvising romances, recalling how he had stood with his
back to the fire weaving his endless, grotesque yarns, with no other
guide than his fancy. It was a long, happy walk we had, though rather
a sad one in its memories; and he seemed that day, in a sense, to close
the gate of those early scenes behind him, for he seldom referred to
them afterward.

He was back at 21 Fifth Avenue presently, arranging for his voyage.
Meantime, cable invitations of every sort were pouring in, from this and
that society and dignitary; invitations to dinners and ceremonials, and
what not, and it was clear enough that his English sojourn was to be a
busy one. He had hoped to avoid this, and began by declining all but
two invitations--a dinner-party given by Ambassador Whitelaw Reid and a
luncheon proposed by the “Pilgrims.” But it became clear that this would
not do. England was not going to confer its greatest collegiate honor
without being permitted to pay its wider and more popular tribute.

Clemens engaged a special secretary for the trip--Mr. Ralph W. Ashcroft,
a young Englishman familiar with London life. They sailed on the 8th of
June, by a curious coincidence exactly forty years from the day he had
sailed on the Quaker City to win his great fame. I went with him to the
ship. His first elation had passed by this time, and he seemed a little
sad, remembering, I think, the wife who would have enjoyed this honor
with him but could not share it now.



CCLVII. A TRUE ENGLISH WELCOME

Mark Twain’s trip across the Atlantic would seem to have been a pleasant
one. The Minneapolis is a fine, big ship, and there was plenty of
company. Prof. Archibald Henderson, Bernard Shaw’s biographer, was
aboard;--[Professor Henderson has since then published a volume on
Mark Twain-an interesting commentary on his writings--mainly from the
sociological point of view.]--also President Patton, of the Princeton
Theological Seminary; a well-known cartoonist, Richards, and some very
attractive young people--school-girls in particular, such as all through
his life had appealed to Mark Twain. Indeed, in his later life they made
a stronger appeal than ever. The years had robbed him of his own little
flock, and always he was trying to replace them. Once he said:

“During those years after my wife’s death I was washing about on a
forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making in high and holy causes, and
these things furnished me intellectual cheer, and entertainment; but
they got at my heart for an evening only, then left it dry and dusty.
I had reached the grandfather stage of life without grandchildren, so I
began to adopt some.”

He adopted several on that journey to England and on the return voyage,
and he kept on adopting others during the rest of his life. These
companionships became one of the happiest aspects of his final days, as
we shall see by and by.

There were entertainments on the ship, one of them given for the benefit
of the Seamen’s Orphanage. One of his adopted granddaughters--“Charley”
 he called her--played a violin solo and Clemens made a speech. Later
his autographs were sold at auction. Dr. Patton was auctioneer, and one
autographed postal card brought twenty-five dollars, which is perhaps
the record price for a single Mark Twain signature. He wore his white
suit on this occasion, and in the course of his speech referred to it.
He told first of the many defects in his behavior, and how members of
his household had always tried to keep him straight. The children, he
said, had fallen into the habit of calling it “dusting papa off.” Then
he went on:

    When my daughter came to see me off last Saturday at the boat she
    slipped a note in my hand and said, “Read it when you get aboard the
    ship.” I didn’t think of it again until day before yesterday, and
    it was a “dusting off.” And if I carry out all the instructions
    that I got there I shall be more celebrated in England for my
    behavior than for anything else. I got instructions how to act on
    every occasion. She underscored “Now, don’t you wear white clothes
    on ship or on shore until you get back,” and I intended to obey. I
    have been used to obeying my family all my life, but I wore the
    white clothes to-night because the trunk that has the dark clothes
    in it is in the cellar. I am not apologizing for the white clothes;
    I am only apologizing to my daughter for not obeying her.

He received a great welcome when the ship arrived at Tilbury. A throng
of rapid-fire reporters and photographers immediately surrounded him,
and when he left the ship the stevedores gave him a round of cheers. It
was the beginning of that almost unheard-of demonstration of affection
and honor which never for a moment ceased, but augmented from day to day
during the four weeks of his English sojourn.

In a dictation following his return, Mark Twain said:

    Who began it? The very people of all people in the world whom I
    would have chosen: a hundred men of my own class--grimy sons of
    labor, the real builders of empires and civilizations, the
    stevedores! They stood in a body on the dock and charged their
    masculine lungs, and gave me a welcome which went to the marrow of
    me.

J. Y. W. MacAlister was at the St. Pancras railway station to meet him,
and among others on the platform was Bernard Shaw, who had come down
to meet Professor Henderson. Clemens and Shaw were presented, and met
eagerly, for each greatly admired the other. A throng gathered. Mark
Twain was extricated at last, and hurried away to his apartments at
Brown’s Hotel, “a placid, subdued, homelike, old-fashioned English inn,”
 he called it, “well known to me years ago, a blessed retreat of a sort
now rare in England, and becoming rarer every year.”

But Brown’s was not placid and subdued during his stay. The London
newspapers declared that Mark Twain’s arrival had turned Brown’s not
only into a royal court, but a post-office--that the procession of
visitors and the bundles of mail fully warranted this statement. It
was, in fact, an experience which surpassed in general magnitude and
magnificence anything he had hitherto known. His former London visits,
beginning with that of 1872, had been distinguished by high attentions,
but all of them combined could not equal this. When England decides to
get up an ovation, her people are not to be outdone even by the lavish
Americans. An assistant secretary had to be engaged immediately, and it
sometimes required from sixteen to twenty hours a day for two skilled
and busy men to receive callers and reduce the pile of correspondence.

A pile of invitations had already accumulated, and others flowed in.
Lady Stanley, widow of Henry M. Stanley, wrote:

    You know I want to see you and join right hand to right hand. I
    must see your dear face again.... You will have no peace,
    rest, or leisure during your stay in London, and you will end by
    hating human beings. Let me come before you feel that way.

Mary Cholmondeley, the author of Red Pottage, niece of that lovable
Reginald Cholmondeley, and herself an old friend, sent greetings and
urgent invitations. Archdeacon Wilberforce wrote:

    I have just been preaching about your indictment of that scoundrel
    king of the Belgians and telling my people to buy the book. I am
    only a humble item among the very many who offer you a cordial
    welcome in England, but we long to see you again, and I should like
    to change hats with you again. Do you remember?

The Athenaeum, the Garrick, and a dozen other London clubs had
anticipated his arrival with cards of honorary membership for the period
of his stay. Every leading photographer had put in a claim for sittings.
It was such a reception as Charles Dickens had received in America in
1842, and again in 1867. A London paper likened it to Voltaire’s return
to Paris in 1778, when France went mad over him. There is simply no
limit to English affection and, hospitality once aroused. Clemens wrote:

    Surely such weeks as this must be very rare in this world: I had
    seen nothing like them before; I shall see nothing approaching them
    again!

Sir Thomas Lipton and Bram Stoker, old friends, were among the first to
present themselves, and there was no break in the line of callers.

Clemens’s resolutions for secluding himself were swept away. On the
very next morning following his arrival he breakfasted with J. Henniker
Heaton, father of International Penny Postage, at the Bath Club, just
across Dover Street from Brown’s. He lunched at the Ritz with Marjorie
Bowen and Miss Bisland. In the afternoon he sat for photographs at
Barnett’s, and made one or two calls. He could no more resist these
things than a debutante in her first season.

He was breakfasting again with Heaton next morning; lunching with “Toby,
M.P.,” and Mrs. Lucy; and having tea with Lady Stanley in the afternoon,
and being elaborately dined next day at Dorchester House by Ambassador
and Mrs. Reid. These were all old and tried friends. He was not a
stranger among them, he said; he was at home. Alfred Austin, Conan
Doyle, Anthony Hope, Alma Tadema, E. A. Abbey, Edmund Goss, George
Smalley, Sir Norman Lockyer, Henry W. Lucy, Sidney Brooks, and Bram
Stoker were among those at Dorchester House--all old comrades, as were
many of the other guests.

“I knew fully half of those present,” he said afterward.

Mark Twain’s bursting upon London society naturally was made the most
of by the London papers, and all his movements were tabulated and
elaborated, and when there was any opportunity for humor in the
situation it was not left unimproved. The celebrated Ascot racing-cup
was stolen just at the time of his arrival, and the papers suggestively
mingled their head-lines, “Mark Twain Arrives: Ascot Cup Stolen,” and
kept the joke going in one form or another. Certain state jewels and
other regalia also disappeared during his stay, and the news of these
burglaries was reported in suspicious juxtaposition with the news of
Mark Twain’s doings.

English reporters adopted American habits for the occasion, and invented
or embellished when the demand for a new sensation was urgent. Once,
when following the custom of the place, he descended the hotel elevator
in a perfectly proper and heavy brown bath robe, and stepped across
narrow Dover Street to the Bath Club, the papers flamed next day with
the story that Mark Twain had wandered about the lobby of Brown’s
and promenaded Dover Street in a sky-blue bath robe attracting wide
attention.

Clara Clemens, across the ocean, was naturally a trifle disturbed by
such reports, and cabled this delicate “dusting off”:

“Much worried. Remember proprieties.”

To which he answered:

“They all pattern after me,” a reply to the last degree characteristic.

It was on the fourth day after his arrival, June 22d, that he attended
the King’s garden-party at Windsor Castle. There were eighty-five
hundred guests at the King’s party, and if we may judge from the London
newspapers, Mark Twain was quite as much a figure in that great throng
as any member of the royal family. His presentation to the King and
the Queen is set down as an especially notable incident, and their
conversation is quite fully given. Clemens himself reported:

    His Majesty was very courteous. In the course of the conversation
    I reminded him of an episode of fifteen years ago, when I had the
    honor to walk a mile with him when he was taking the waters at
    Homburg, in Germany. I said that I had often told about that
    episode, and that whenever I was the historian I made good history
    of it and it was worth listening to, but that it had found its way
    into print once or twice in unauthentic ways and was badly damaged
    thereby. I said I should like to go on repeating this history, but
    that I should be quite fair and reasonably honest, and while I
    should probably never tell it twice in the same way I should at
    least never allow it to deteriorate in my hands. His Majesty
    intimated his willingness that I should continue to disseminate that
    piece of history; and he added a compliment, saying that he knew
    good and sound history would not suffer at my hands, and that if
    this good and sound history needed any improvement beyond the facts
    he would trust me to furnish that improvement.

    I think it is not an exaggeration to say that the Queen looked as
    young and beautiful as she did thirty-five years ago when I saw her
    first. I did not say this to her, because I learned long ago never
    to say the obvious thing, but leave the obvious thing to commonplace
    and inexperienced people to say. That she still looked to me as
    young and beautiful as she did thirty-five years ago is good
    evidence that ten thousand people have already noticed this and have
    mentioned it to her. I could have said it and spoken the truth, but
    I was too wise for that. I kept the remark unuttered and saved her
    Majesty the vexation of hearing it the ten-thousand-and-oneth time.

    All that report about my proposal to buy Windsor Castle and its
    grounds was a false rumor. I started it myself.

    One newspaper said I patted his Majesty on the shoulder--an
    impertinence of which I was not guilty; I was reared in the most
    exclusive circles of Missouri and I know how to behave. The King
    rested his hand upon my arm a moment or two while we were chatting,
    but he did it of his own accord. The newspaper which said I talked
    with her Majesty with my hat on spoke the truth, but my reasons for
    doing it were good and sufficient--in fact unassailable. Rain was
    threatening, the temperature had cooled, and the Queen said, “Please
    put your hat on, Mr. Clemens.” I begged her pardon and excused
    myself from doing it. After a moment or two she said, “Mr. Clemens,
    put your hat on”--with a slight emphasis on the word “on” “I can’t
    allow you to catch cold here.” When a beautiful queen commands it
    is a pleasure to obey, and this time I obeyed--but I had already
    disobeyed once, which is more than a subject would have felt
    justified in doing; and so it is true, as charged; I did talk with
    the Queen of England with my hat on, but it wasn’t fair in the
    newspaper man to charge it upon me as an impoliteness, since there
    were reasons for it which he could not know of.

Nearly all the members of the British royal family were there, and there
were foreign visitors which included the King of Siam and a party of
India princes in their gorgeous court costumes, which Clemens admired
openly and said he would like to wear himself.

The English papers spoke of it as one of the largest and most
distinguished parties ever given at Windsor. Clemens attended it in
company with Mr. and Mrs. J. Henniker Heaton, and when it was over Sir
Thomas Lipton joined them and motored with them back to Brown’s.

He was at Archdeacon Wilberforce’s next day, where a curious
circumstance developed. When he arrived Wilberforce said to him, in an
undertone:

“Come into my library. I have something to show you.”

In the library Clemens was presented to a Mr. Pole, a plain-looking man,
suggesting in dress and appearance the English tradesman. Wilberforce
said:

“Mr. Pole, show to Mr. Clemens what you have brought here.”

Mr. Pole unrolled a long strip of white linen and brought to view
at last a curious, saucer-looking vessel of silver, very ancient in
appearance, and cunningly overlaid with green glass. The archdeacon took
it and handed it to Clemens as some precious jewel. Clemens said:

“What is it?”

Wilberforce impressively answered:

“It is the Holy Grail.”

Clemens naturally started with surprise.

“You may well start,” said Wilberforce; “but it’s the truth. That is the
Holy Grail.”

Then he gave this explanation: Mr. Pole, a grain merchant of Bristol,
had developed some sort of clairvoyant power, or at all events he had
dreamed several times with great vividness the location of the true
Grail. Another dreamer, a Dr. Goodchild, of Bath, was mixed up in the
matter, and between them this peculiar vessel, which was not a cup, or a
goblet, or any of the traditional things, had been discovered. Mr. Pole
seemed a man of integrity, and it was clear that the churchman believed
the discovery to be genuine and authentic. Of course there could be no
positive proof. It was a thing that must be taken on trust. That the
vessel itself was wholly different from anything that the generations
had conceived, and was apparently of very ancient make, was opposed to
the natural suggestion of fraud.

Clemens, to whom the whole idea of the Holy Grail was simply a
poetic legend and myth, had the feeling that he had suddenly been
transmigrated, like his own Connecticut Yankee, back into the Arthurian
days; but he made no question, suggested no doubt. Whatever it was, it
was to them the materialization of a symbol of faith which ranked only
second to the cross itself, and he handled it reverently and felt the
honor of having been one of the first permitted to see the relic. In a
subsequent dictation he said:

    I am glad I have lived to see that half-hour--that astonishing half-
    hour. In its way it stands alone in my life’s experience. In the
    belief of two persons present this was the very vessel which was
    brought by night and secretly delivered to Nicodemus, nearly
    nineteen centuries ago, after the Creator of the universe had
    delivered up His life on the cross for the redemption of the human
    race; the very cup which the stainless Sir Galahad had sought with
    knightly devotion in far fields of peril and adventure in Arthur’s
    time, fourteen hundred years ago; the same cup which princely
    knights of other bygone ages had laid down their lives in long and
    patient efforts to find, and had passed from life disappointed--and
    here it was at last, dug up by a grain-broker at no cost of blood or
    travel, and apparently no purity required of him above the average
    purity of the twentieth-century dealer in cereal futures; not even a
    stately name required--no Sir Galahad, no Sir Bors de Ganis, no Sir
    Lancelot of the Lake--nothing but a mere Mr. Pole.--[From the New
    York Sun somewhat later: “Mr. Pole communicated the discovery to a
    dignitary of the Church of England, who summoned a number of eminent
    persons, including psychologists, to see and discuss it. Forty
    attended, including some peers with ecclesiastical interests,
    Ambassador Whitelaw Reid, Professor Crookas, and ministers of
    various religious bodies, including the Rev. R. J. Campbell. They
    heard Mr. Pole’s story with deep attention, but he could not prove
    the genuineness of the relic.”]

Clemens saw Mr. and Mrs. Rogers at Claridge’s Hotel that evening;
lunched with his old friends Sir Norman and Lady Lockyer next day;
took tea with T. P. O’Connor at the House of Commons, and on the day
following, which was June a 5th, he was the guest of honor at one of the
most elaborate occasions of his visit--a luncheon given by the Pilgrims
at the Savoy Hotel. It would be impossible to set down here a report
of the doings, or even a list of the guests, of that gathering. The
Pilgrims is a club with branches on both sides of the ocean, and Mark
Twain, on either side, was a favorite associate. At this luncheon the
picture on the bill of fare represented him as a robed pilgrim, with a
great pen for his staff, turning his back on the Mississippi River and
being led along his literary way by a huge jumping frog, to which he is
attached by a string. On a guest-card was printed:

    Pilot of many Pilgrims since the shout
    “Mark Twain!”--that serves you for a deathless sign
    --On Mississippi’s waterway rang out
    Over the plummet’s line--
    Still where the countless ripples laugh above
    The blue of halcyon seas long may you keep
    Your course unbroken, buoyed upon a love
    Ten thousand fathoms deep!

                       --O. S. [OWEN SEAMAN].

Augustine Birrell made the speech of introduction, closing with this
paragraph:

    Mark Twain is a man whom Englishmen and Americans do well to honor.
    He is a true consolidator of nations. His delightful humor is of
    the kind which dissipates and destroys national prejudices. His
    truth and his honor--his love of truth and his love of honor
    --overflow all boundaries. He has made the world better by his
    presence, and we rejoice to see him here. Long may he live to reap
    a plentiful harvest of hearty honest human affection.

The toast was drunk standing. Then Clemens rose and made a speech which
delighted all England. In his introduction Mr. Birrell had happened
to say, “How I came here I will not ask!” Clemens remembered this, and
looking down into Mr. Birrell’s wine-glass, which was apparently unused,
he said:

“Mr. Birrell doesn’t know how he got here. But he will be able to get
away all right--he has not drunk anything since he came.”

He told stories about Howells and Twichell, and how Darwin had gone to
sleep reading his books, and then he came down to personal things and
company, and told them how, on the day of his arrival, he had been
shocked to read on a great placard, “Mark Twain Arrives: Ascot Cup
Stolen.”

    No doubt many a person was misled by those sentences joined together
    in that unkind way. I have no doubt my character has suffered from
    it. I suppose I ought to defend my character, but how can I defend
    it? I can say here and now that anybody can see by my face that I
    am sincere--that I speak the truth, and that I have never seen that
    Cup. I have not got the Cup, I did not have a chance to get it. I
    have always had a good character in that way. I have hardly ever
    stolen anything, and if I did steal anything I had discretion enough
    to know about the value of it first. I do not steal things that are
    likely to get myself into trouble. I do not think any of us do
    that. I know we all take things--that is to be expected; but really
    I have never taken anything, certainly in England, that amounts to
    any great thing. I do confess that when I was here seven years ago
    I stole a hat--but that did not amount to anything. It was not a
    good hat it was only a clergyman’s hat, anyway. I was at a
    luncheon-party and Archdeacon Wilberforce was there also. I dare say
    he is archdeacon now--he was a canon then--and he was serving in the
    Westminster Battery, if that is the proper term. I do not know, as
    you mix military and ecclesiastical things together so much.

He recounted the incident of the exchanged hats; then he spoke of graver
things. He closed:

    I cannot always be cheerful, and I cannot always be chaffing. I
    must sometimes lay the cap and bells aside and recognize that I am
    of the human race. I have my cares and griefs, and I therefore
    noticed what Mr. Birrell said--I was so glad to hear him say it
    --something that was in the nature of these verses here at the top
    of the program:

           He lit our life with shafts of sun
           And vanquished pain.
           Thus two great nations stand as one
           In honoring Twain.

I am very glad to have those verses. I am very glad and very grateful
for what Mr. Birrell said in that connection. I have received since
I have been here, in this one week, hundreds of letters from all
conditions of people in England, men, women, and children, and there
is compliment, praise, and, above all, and better than all, there is in
them a note of affection.

Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection--that is the last
and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by
character or achievement, and I am very grateful to have that reward.
All these letters make me feel that here in England, as in America, when
I stand under the English or the American flag I am not a stranger, I am
not an alien, but at home.



CCLVIII. DOCTOR OF LITERATURE, OXFORD

He left, immediately following the Pilgrim luncheon, with Hon. Robert
P. Porter, of the London Times, for Oxford, to remain his guest there
during the various ceremonies. The encenia--the ceremony of conferring
the degrees--occurred at the Sheldonian Theater the following morning,
June 26, 1907.

It was a memorable affair. Among those who were to receive degrees that
morning besides Samuel Clemens were: Prince Arthur of Connaught; Prime
Minister Campbell-Bannerman; Whitelaw Reid; Rudyard Kipling; Sidney Lee;
Sidney Colvin; Lord Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of Ireland; Sir Norman
Lockyer; Auguste Rodin, the sculptor; Saint-Saens, and Gen. William
Booth, of the Salvation Army-something more than thirty, in all, of the
world’s distinguished citizens.

The candidates assembled at Magdalen College, and led by Lord Curzon,
the Chancellor, and clad in their academic plumage, filed in radiant
procession to the Sheldonian Theater, a group of men such as the world
seldom sees collected together. The London Standard said of it:

    So brilliant and so interesting was the list of those who had been
    selected by Oxford University on Convocation to receive degrees,
    ‘honoris causa’, in this first year of Lord Curzon’s chancellorship,
    that it is small wonder that the Sheldonian Theater was besieged
    today at an early hour.

    Shortly after 11 o’clock the organ started playing the strains of
    “God Save the King,” and at once a great volume of sound arose as
    the anthem was taken up by the undergraduates and the rest of the
    assemblage. Every one stood up as, headed by the mace of office,
    the procession slowly filed into the theater, under the leadership
    of Lord Curzon, in all the glory of his robes of office, the long
    black gown heavily embroidered with gold, the gold-tasseled mortar-
    board, and the medals on his breast forming an admirable setting,
    thoroughly in keeping with the dignity and bearing of the late
    Viceroy of India. Following him came the members of Convocation, a
    goodly number consisting of doctors of divinity, whose robes of
    scarlet and black enhanced the brilliance of the scene. Robes of
    salmon and scarlet-which proclaim the wearer to be a doctor of civil
    law--were also seen in numbers, while here and there was a gown of
    gray and scarlet, emblematic of the doctorate of science or of
    letters.

The encenia is an impressive occasion; but it is not a silent one. There
is a splendid dignity about it; but there goes with it all a sort of
Greek chorus of hilarity, the time-honored prerogative of the Oxford
undergraduate, who insists on having his joke and his merriment at
the expense of those honored guests. The degrees of doctor of law were
conferred first. Prince Arthur was treated with proper dignity by the
gallery; but when Whitelaw Reid stepped forth a voice shouted,
“Where’s your Star-spangled Banner?” and when England’s Prime
Minister-Campbell-Bannerman--came forward some one shouted, “What about
the House of Lords?” and so they kept it up, cheering and chaffing,
until General Booth was introduced as the “Passionate advocate of the
dregs of the people, leader of the submerged tenth,” and “general of the
Salvation Army,” when the place broke into a perfect storm of applause,
a storm that a few minutes later became, according to the Daily News,
“a veritable cyclone,” for Mark Twain, clad in his robe of scarlet and
gray, had been summoned forward to receive the highest academic honors
which the world has to give. The undergraduates went wild then. There
was such a mingling of yells and calls and questions, such as, “Have you
brought the jumping Frog with you?” “Where is the Ascot Cup?” “Where
are the rest of the Innocents?” that it seemed as if it would not
be possible to present him at all; but, finally, Chancellor Curzon
addressed him (in Latin), “Most amiable and charming sir, you shake the
sides of the whole world with your merriment,” and the great degree was
conferred. If only Tom Sawyer could have seen him then! If only Olivia
Clemens could have sat among those who gave him welcome! But life is not
like that. There is always an incompleteness somewhere, and the shadow
across the path.

Rudyard Kipling followed--another supreme favorite, who was hailed with
the chorus, “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” and then came Saint-Satins.
The prize poems and essays followed, and then the procession of newly
created doctors left the theater with Lord Curzon at their head. So it
was all over-that for which, as he said, he would have made the journey
to Mars. The world had nothing more to give him now except that which he
had already long possessed-its honor and its love.

The newly made doctors were to be the guests of Lord Curzon at All Souls
College for luncheon. As they left the theater (according to Sidney
Lee):

    The people in the streets singled out Mark Twain, formed a vast and
    cheering body-guard around him and escorted him to the college
    gates. But before and after the lunch it was Mark Twain again whom
    everybody seemed most of all to want to meet. The Maharajah of
    Bikanir, for instance, finding himself seated at lunch next to Mrs.
    Riggs (Kate Douglas Wiggin), and hearing that she knew Mark Twain,
    asked her to present him a ceremony duly performed later on the
    quadrangle. At the garden-party given the same afternoon in the
    beautiful grounds of St. John’s, where the indefatigable Mark put
    in an appearance, it was just the same--every one pressed forward
    for an exchange of greetings and a hand-shake. On the following
    day, when the Oxford pageant took place, it was even more so. “Mark
    Twain’s Pageant,” it was called by one of the papers.--[There was a
    dinner that evening at one of the colleges where, through mistaken
    information, Clemens wore black evening dress when he should have
    worn his scarlet gown. “When I arrived,” he said, “the place was
    just a conflagration--a kind of human prairie-fire. I looked as out
    of place as a Presbyterian in hell.”]

Clemens remained the guest of Robert Porter, whose house was besieged
with those desiring a glimpse of their new doctor of letters. If he went
on the streets he was instantly recognized by some newsboy or cabman or
butcher-boy, and the word ran along like a cry of fire, while the crowds
assembled.

At a luncheon which the Porters gave him the proprietor of the
catering establishment garbed himself as a waiter in order to have the
distinction of serving Mark Twain, and declared it to have been the
greatest moment of his life. This gentleman--for he was no less than
that--was a man well-read, and his tribute was not inspired by mere
snobbery. Clemens, learning of the situation, later withdrew from the
drawing-room for a talk with him.

“I found,” he said, “that he knew about ten or fifteen times as much
about my books as I knew about them myself.”

Mark Twain viewed the Oxford pageant from a box with Rudyard Kipling and
Lord Curzon, and as they sat there some one passed up a folded slip of
paper, on the outside of which was written, “Not true.” Opening it, they
read:

       East is East and West is West,
       And never the Twain shall meet,

         --a quotation from Kipling.

They saw the panorama of history file by, a wonderful spectacle which
made Oxford a veritable dream of the Middle Ages. The lanes and streets
and meadows were thronged with such costumes as Oxford had seen in
its long history. History was realized in a manner which no one could
appreciate more fully than Mark Twain.

“I was particularly anxious to see this pageant,” he said, “so that
I could get ideas for my funeral procession, which I am planning on a
large scale.”

He was not disappointed; it was a realization to him of all the gorgeous
spectacles that his soul had dreamed from youth up.

He easily recognized the great characters of history as they passed by,
and he was recognized by them in turn; for they waved to him and bowed
and sometimes called his name, and when he went down out of his box,
by and by, Henry VIII. shook hands with him, a monarch he had always
detested, though he was full of friendship for him now; and Charles I.
took off his broad, velvet-plumed hat when they met, and Henry II.
and Rosamond and Queen Elizabeth all saluted him--ghosts of the dead
centuries.



CCLIX. LONDON SOCIAL HONORS

We may not detail all the story of that English visit; even the path of
glory leads to monotony at last. We may only mention a few more of the
great honors paid to our unofficial ambassador to the world: among them
a dinner given to members of the Savage Club by the Lord Mayor of London
at the Mansion House, also a dinner given by the American Society at
the Hotel Cecil in honor of the Fourth of July. Clemens was the guest of
honor, and responded to the toast given by Ambassador Reid, “The Day we
Celebrate.” He made an amusing and not altogether unserious reference to
the American habit of exploding enthusiasm in dangerous fireworks.

To English colonists he gave credit for having established American
independence, and closed:

    We have, however, one Fourth of July which is absolutely our own,
    and that is the memorable proclamation issued forty years ago by
    that great American to whom Sir Mortimer Durand paid that just and
    beautiful tribute--Abraham Lincoln: a proclamation which not only
    set the black slave free, but set his white owner free also. The
    owner was set free from that burden and offense, that sad condition
    of things where he was in so many instances a master and owner of
    slaves when he did not want to be. That proclamation set them all
    free. But even in this matter England led the way, for she had set
    her slaves free thirty years before, and we but followed her
    example. We always follow her example, whether it is good or bad.
    And it was an English judge, a century ago, that issued that other
    great proclamation, and established that great principle, that when
    a slave, let him belong to whom he may, and let him come whence he
    may, sets his foot upon English soil his fetters, by that act, fall
    away and he is a free man before the world!

    It is true, then, that all our Fourths of July, and we have five of
    them, England gave to us, except that one that I have mentioned--the
    Emancipation Proclamation; and let us not forget that we owe this
    debt to her. Let us be able to say to old England, this great-
    hearted, venerable old mother of the race, you gave us our Fourths
    of July, that we love and that we honor and revere; you gave us the
    Declaration of Independence, which is the charter of our rights;
    you, the venerable Mother of Liberties, the Champion and Protector
    of Anglo-Saxon Freedom--you gave us these things, and we do most
    honestly thank you for them.

It was at this dinner that he characteristically confessed, at last, to
having stolen the Ascot Cup.

He lunched one day with Bernard Shaw, and the two discussed the
philosophies in which they were mutually interested. Shaw regarded
Clemens as a sociologist before all else, and gave it out with great
frankness that America had produced just two great geniuses--Edgar Allan
Poe and Mark Twain. Later Shaw wrote him a note, in which he said:

I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works
as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts
of Voltaire. I tell you so because I am the author of a play in which
a priest says, “Telling the truth’s the funniest joke in the world,” a
piece of wisdom which you helped to teach me.

Clemens saw a great deal of Moberly Bell. The two lunched and dined
privately together when there was opportunity, and often met at the
public gatherings.

The bare memorandum of the week following July Fourth will convey
something of Mark Twain’s London activities:

    Friday, July 5. Dined with Lord and Lady Portsmouth.

    Saturday, July 6. Breakfasted at Lord Avebury’s. Lord Kelvin, Sir
    Charles Lyell, and Sir Archibald Geikie were there. Sat 22 times
    for photos, 16 at Histed’s. Savage Club dinner in the evening.
    White suit. Ascot Cup.

    Sunday, July 7. Called on Lady Langattock and others. Lunched with
    Sir Norman Lockyer.

    Monday, July 8. Lunched with Plasmon directors at Bath Club. Dined
    privately at C. F. Moberly Bell’s.

    Tuesday, July 9. Lunched at the House with Sir Benjamin Stone.
    Balfour and Komura were the other guests of honor. Punch dinner in
    the evening. Joy Agnew and the cartoon.

    Wednesday, July 10. Went to Liverpool with Tay Pay. Attended
    banquet in the Town Hall in the evening.

    Thursday, July 11. Returned to London with Tay Pay. Calls in the
    afternoon.

The Savage Club would inevitably want to entertain him on its own
account, and their dinner of July 6th was a handsome, affair. He felt
at home with the Savages, and put on white for the only time publicly
in England. He made them one of his reminiscent speeches, recalling his
association with them on his first visit to London, thirty-seven years
before. Then he said:

    That is a long time ago, and as I had come into a very strange land,
    and was with friends, as I could see, that has always remained in my
    mind as a peculiarly blessed evening, since it brought me into
    contact with men of my own kind and my own feelings. I am glad to
    be here, and to see you all, because it is very likely that I shall
    not see you again. I have been received, as you know, in the most
    delightfully generous way in England ever since I came here. It
    keeps me choked up all the time. Everybody is so generous, and they
    do seem to give you such a hearty welcome. Nobody in the world can
    appreciate it higher than I do.

The club gave him a surprise in the course of the evening. A note was
sent to him accompanied by a parcel, which, when opened, proved to
contain a gilded plaster replica of the Ascot Gold Cup. The note said:

    Dere Mark, i return the Cup. You couldn’t keep your mouth shut
    about it. ‘Tis 2 pretty 2 melt, as you want me 2; nest time I work
    a pinch ile have a pard who don’t make after-dinner speeches.

There was a postcript which said: “I changed the acorn atop for another
nut with my knife.” The acorn was, in fact, replaced by a well-modeled
head of Mark Twain.

So, after all, the Ascot Cup would be one of the trophies which he would
bear home with him across the Atlantic.

Probably the most valued of his London honors was the dinner given
to him by the staff of Punch. Punch had already saluted him with
a front-page cartoon by Bernard Partridge, a picture in which the
presiding genius of that paper, Mr. Punch himself, presents him with a
glass of the patronymic beverage with the words, “Sir, I honor myself
by drinking your health. Long life to you--and happiness--and perpetual
youth!”

Mr. Agnew, chief editor; Linley Sambourne, Francis Burnand, Henry Lucy,
and others of the staff welcomed him at the Punch offices at 10 Bouverie
Street, in the historic Punch dining-room where Thackeray had sat, and
Douglas Jerrold, and so many of the great departed. Mark Twain was
the first foreign visitor to be so honored--in fifty years the first
stranger to sit at the sacred board--a mighty distinction. In the course
of the dinner they gave him a pretty surprise, when little joy Agnew
presented him with the original drawing of Partridge’s cartoon.

Nothing could have appealed to him more, and the Punch dinner, with its
associations and that dainty presentation, remained apart in his memory
from all other feastings.

Clemens had intended to return early in July, but so much was happening
that he postponed his sailing until the 13th. Before leaving America, he
had declined a dinner offered by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool.

Repeatedly urged to let Liverpool share in his visit, he had
reconsidered now, and on the day following the Punch dinner, on July
10th, they carried him, with T. P. O’Connor (Tay Pay) in the Prince
of Wales’s special coach to Liverpool, to be guest of honor at the
reception and banquet which Lord Mayor Japp tendered him at the Town
Hall. Clemens was too tired to be present while the courses were being
served, but arrived rested and fresh to respond to his toast. Perhaps
because it was his farewell speech in England, he made that night
the most effective address of his four weeks’ visit--one of the most
effective of his whole career: He began by some light reference to
the Ascot Cup and the Dublin Jewels and the State Regalia, and other
disappearances that had been laid to his charge, to amuse his hearers,
and spoke at greater length than usual, and with even greater variety.
Then laying all levity aside, he told them, like the Queen of Sheba, all
that was in his heart.

   ... Home is dear to us all, and now I am departing to my own
    home beyond the ocean. Oxford has conferred upon me the highest
    honor that has ever fallen to my share of this life’s prizes. It is
    the very one I would have chosen, as outranking all and any others,
    the one more precious to me than any and all others within the gift
    of man or state. During my four weeks’ sojourn in England I have
    had another lofty honor, a continuous honor, an honor which has
    flowed serenely along, without halt or obstruction, through all
    these twenty-six days, a most moving and pulse-stirring honor--the
    heartfelt grip of the hand, and the welcome that does not descend
    from the pale-gray matter of the brain, but rushes up with the red
    blood from the heart. It makes me proud and sometimes it makes me
    humble, too. Many and many a year ago I gathered an incident from
    Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. It was like this: There was a
    presumptuous little self-important skipper in a coasting sloop
    engaged in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade, and he was
    always hailing every ship that came in sight. He did it just to
    hear himself talk and to air his small grandeur. One day a majestic
    Indiaman came plowing by with course on course of canvas towering
    into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with sailors, her hull
    burdened to the Plimsoll line with a rich freightage of precious
    spices, lading the breezes with gracious and mysterious odors of the
    Orient. It was a noble spectacle, a sublime spectacle! Of course
    the little skipper popped into the shrouds and squeaked out a hail,
    “Ship ahoy! What ship is that? And whence and whither?” In a deep
    and thunderous bass the answer came back through the speaking-
    trumpet, “The Begum, of Bengal--142 days out from Canton--homeward
    bound! What ship is that?” Well, it just crushed that poor little
    creature’s vanity flat, and he squeaked back most humbly, “Only the
    Mary Ann, fourteen hours out from Boston, bound for Kittery Point
    --with nothing to speak of!” Oh, what an eloquent word that “only,”
     to express the depths of his humbleness! That is just my case.
    During just one hour in the twenty-four--not more--I pause and
    reflect in the stillness of the night with the echoes of your
    English welcome still lingering in my ears, and then I am humble.
    Then I am properly meek, and for that little while I am only the
    Mary Ann, fourteen hours out, cargoed with vegetables and tinware;
    but during all the other twenty-three hours my vain self-complacency
    rides high on the white crests of your approval, and then I am a
    stately Indiaman, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas and
    laden with the kindest words that have ever been vouchsafed to any
    wandering alien in this world, I think; then my twenty-six fortunate
    days on this old mother soil seem to be multiplied by six, and I am
    the Begum, of Bengal, 142 days out from Canton--homeward bound!

He returned to London, and with one of his young acquaintances,
an American--he called her Francesca--paid many calls. It took the
dreariness out of that social function to perform it in that way. With a
list of the calls they were to make they drove forth each day to cancel
the social debt. They paid calls in every walk of life. His young
companion was privileged to see the inside of London homes of almost
every class, for he showed no partiality; he went to the homes of
the poor and the rich alike. One day they visited the home of an
old bookkeeper whom he had known in 1872 as a clerk in a large
establishment, earning a salary of perhaps a pound a week, who now had
risen mightily, for he had become head bookkeeper in that establishment
on a salary of six pounds a week, and thought it great prosperity and
fortune for his old age.

He sailed on July 13th for home, besought to the last moment by a crowd
of autograph-seekers and reporters and photographers, and a multitude
who only wished to see him and to shout and wave good-by. He was sailing
away from them for the last time. They hoped he would make a speech, but
that would not have been possible. To the reporters he gave a farewell
message: “It has been the most enjoyable holiday I have ever had, and I
am sorry the end of it has come. I have met a hundred, old friends, and
I have made a hundred new ones. It is a good kind of riches to have;
there is none better, I think.” And the London Tribune declared that
“the ship that bore him away had difficulty in getting clear, so thickly
was the water strewn with the bay-leaves of his triumph. For Mark Twain
has triumphed, and in his all-too-brief stay of a month has done more
for the cause of the world’s peace than will be accomplished by the
Hague Conference. He has made the world laugh again.”

His ship was the Minnetonka, and there were some little folks aboard
to be adopted as grandchildren. On July 5th, in a fog, the Minnetonka
collided with the bark Sterling, and narrowly escaped sinking her. On
the whole, however, the homeward way was clear, and the vessel reached
New York nearly a day in advance of their schedule. Some ceremonies
of welcome had been prepared for him; but they were upset by the early
arrival, so that when he descended the gang-plank to his native soil
only a few who had received special information were there to greet him.
But perhaps he did not notice it. He seldom took account of the absence
of such things. By early afternoon, however, the papers rang with the
announcement that Mark Twain was home again.

It is a sorrow to me that I was not at the dock to welcome him. I had
been visiting in Elmira, and timed my return for the evening of the a
2d, to be on hand the following morning, when the ship was due. When
I saw the announcement that he had already arrived I called a greeting
over the telephone, and was told to come down and play billiards. I
confess I went with a certain degree of awe, for one could not but be
overwhelmed with the echoes of the great splendor he had so recently
achieved, and I prepared to sit a good way off in silence, and hear
something of the tale of this returning conqueror; but when I arrived he
was already in the billiard-room knocking the balls about--his coat off,
for it was a hot night. As I entered he said:

“Get your cue. I have been inventing a new game.” And I think there were
scarcely ten words exchanged before we were at it. The pageant was over;
the curtain was rung down. Business was resumed at the old stand.



CCLX. MATTERS PSYCHIC AND OTHERWISE

He returned to Tuxedo and took up his dictations, and mingled freely
with the social life; but the contrast between his recent London
experience and his semi-retirement must have been very great. When I
visited him now and then, he seemed to me lonely--not especially for
companionship, but rather for the life that lay behind him--the great
career which in a sense now had been completed since he had touched
its highest point. There was no billiard-table at Tuxedo, and he spoke
expectantly of getting back to town and the games there, also of the
new home which was then building in Redding, and which would have a
billiard-room where we could assemble daily--my own habitation being not
far away. Various diversions were planned for Redding; among them was
discussed a possible school of philosophy, such as Hawthorne and Emerson
and Alcott had established at Concord.

He spoke quite freely of his English experiences, but usually of the
more amusing phases. He almost never referred to the honors that had
been paid to him, yet he must have thought of them sometimes, and
cherished them, for it had been the greatest national tribute ever paid
to a private citizen; he must have known that in his heart. He spoke
amusingly of his visit to Marie Corelli, in Stratford, and of the Holy
Grail incident, ending the latter by questioning--in words at least--all
psychic manifestations. I said to him:

“But remember your own dream, Mr. Clemens, which presaged the death of
your brother.”

He answered: “I ask nobody to believe that it ever happened. To me it is
true; but it has no logical right to be true, and I do not expect belief
in it.” Which I thought a peculiar point of view, but on the whole
characteristic.

He was invited to be a special guest at the Jamestown Exposition on
Fulton Day, in September, and Mr. Rogers lent him his yacht in which
to make the trip. It was a break in the summer’s monotonies, and the
Jamestown honors must have reminded him of those in London. When he
entered the auditorium where the services were to be held there was a
demonstration which lasted more than five minutes. Every person in the
hall rose and cheered, waving handkerchiefs and umbrellas. He made
them a brief, amusing talk on Fulton and other matters, then introduced
Admiral Harrington, who delivered a masterly address and was followed
by Martin W. Littleton, the real orator of the day. Littleton acquitted
himself so notably that Mark Twain conceived for him a deep admiration,
and the two men quickly became friends. They saw each other often
during the remainder of the Jamestown stay, and Clemens, learning that
Littleton lived just across Ninth Street from him in New York, invited
him to come over when he had an evening to spare and join the billiard
games.

So it happened, somewhat later, when every one was back in town, Mr. and
Mrs. Littleton frequently came over for billiards, and the games became
three-handed with an audience--very pleasant games played in that way.
Clemens sometimes set himself up as umpire, and became critic and gave
advice, while Littleton and I played. He had a favorite shot that he
frequently used himself and was always wanting us to try, which was to
drive the ball to the cushion at the beginning of the shot.

He played it with a good deal of success, and achieved unexpected
results with it. He was even inspired to write a poem on the subject.

              “CUSHION FIRST”

       When all your days are dark with doubt,
       And dying hope is at its worst;
       When all life’s balls are scattered wide,
       With not a shot in sight, to left or right,
       Don’t give it up;
       Advance your cue and shut your eyes,
       And take the cushion first.

The Harry Thaw trial was in progress just then, and Littleton was Thaw’s
chief attorney. It was most interesting to hear from him direct the
day’s proceedings and his views of the situation and of Thaw.

Littleton and billiards recall a curious thing which happened one
afternoon. I had been absent the evening before, and Littleton had been
over. It was after luncheon now, and Clemens and I began preparing for
the customary games. We were playing then a game with four balls, two
white and two red. I began by placing the red balls on the table, and
then went around looking in the pockets for the two white cue-balls.
When I had made the round of the table I had found but one white ball. I
thought I must have overlooked the other, and made the round again. Then
I said:

“There is one white ball missing.”

Clemens, to satisfy himself, also made the round of the pockets, and
said:

“It was here last night.” He felt in the pockets of the little
white-silk coat which he usually wore, thinking that he might
unconsciously have placed it there at the end of the last game, but his
coat pockets were empty.

He said: “I’ll bet Littleton carried that ball home with him.”

Then I suggested that near the end of the game it might have jumped off
the table, and I looked carefully under the furniture and in the various
corners, but without success. There was another set of balls, and out
of it I selected a white one for our play, and the game began. It went
along in the usual way, the balls constantly falling into the pockets,
and as constantly being replaced on the table. This had continued for
perhaps half an hour, there being no pocket that had not been frequently
occupied and emptied during that time; but then it happened that Clemens
reached into the middle pocket, and taking out a white ball laid it in
place, whereupon we made the discovery that three white balls lay upon
the table. The one just taken from the pocket was the missing ball. We
looked at each other, both at first too astonished to say anything at
all. No one had been in the room since we began to play, and at no time
during the play had there been more than two white balls in evidence,
though the pockets had been emptied at the end of each shot. The pocket
from which the missing ball had been taken had been filled and emptied
again and again. Then Clemens said:

“We must be dreaming.”

We stopped the game for a while to discuss it, but we could devise no
material explanation. I suggested the kobold--that mischievous invisible
which is supposed to play pranks by carrying off such things as pencils,
letters, and the like, and suddenly restoring them almost before one’s
eyes. Clemens, who, in spite of his material logic, was always a mystic
at heart, said:

“But that, so far as I know, has never happened to more than one
person at a time, and has been explained by a sort of temporary mental
blindness. This thing has happened to two of us, and there can be no
question as to the positive absence of the object.”

“How about dematerialization?”

“Yes, if one of us were a medium that might be considered an
explanation.”

He went on to recall that Sir Alfred Russel Wallace had written of such
things, and cited instances which Wallace had recorded. In the end he
said:

“Well, it happened, that’s all we can say, and nobody can ever convince
me that it didn’t.”

We went on playing, and the ball remained solid and substantial ever
after, so far as I know.

I am reminded of two more or less related incidents of this period.
Clemens was, one morning, dictating something about his Christian Union
article concerning Mrs. Clemens’s government of children, published in
1885. I had discovered no copy of it among the materials, and he was
wishing very much that he could see one. Somewhat later, as he was
walking down Fifth Avenue, the thought of this article and his desire
for it suddenly entered his mind. Reaching the corner of Forty-second
Street, he stopped a moment to let a jam of vehicles pass. As he did
so a stranger crossed the street, noticed him, and came dodging his way
through the blockade and thrust some clippings into his hand.

“Mr. Clemens,” he said, “you don’t know me, but here is something you
may wish to have. I have been saving them for more than twenty years,
and this morning it occurred to me to send them to you. I was going to
mail them from my office, but now I will give them to you,” and with a
word or two he disappeared. The clippings were from the Christian Union
of 1885, and were the much-desired article. Clemens regarded it as a
remarkable case of mental telegraphy.

“Or, if it wasn’t that,” he said, “it was a most remarkable
coincidence.”

The other circumstance has been thought amusing. I had gone to Redding
for a few days, and while there, one afternoon about five o’clock, fell
over a coal-scuttle and scarified myself a good deal between the ankle
and the knee. I mention the hour because it seems important. Next
morning I received a note, prompted by Mr. Clemens, in which he said:

Tell Paine I am sorry he fell and skinned his shin at five o’clock
yesterday afternoon.

I was naturally astonished, and immediately wrote:

I did fall and skin my shin at five o’clock yesterday afternoon, but how
did you find it out?

I followed the letter in person next day, and learned that at the same
hour on the same afternoon Clemens himself had fallen up the front steps
and, as he said, peeled off from his “starboard shin a ribbon of skin
three inches long.” The disaster was still uppermost in his mind at the
time of writing, and the suggestion of my own mishap had flashed out for
no particular reason.

Clemens was always having his fortune told, in one way or another,
being superstitious, as he readily confessed, though at times professing
little faith in these prognostics. Once when a clairvoyant, of whom he
had never even heard, and whom he had reason to believe was ignorant of
his family history, told him more about it than he knew himself,
besides reading a list of names from a piece of paper which Clemens
had concealed in his vest pocket he came home deeply impressed. The
clairvoyant added that he would probably live to a great age and die in
a foreign land--a prophecy which did not comfort him.



CCLXI. MINOR EVENTS AND DIVERSIONS

Mark Twain was deeply interested during the autumn of 1907 in the
Children’s Theater of the Jewish Educational Alliance, on the lower East
Side--a most worthy institution which ought to have survived. A Miss
Alice M. Herts, who developed and directed it, gave her strength and
health to build up an institution through which the interest of the
children could be diverted from less fortunate amusements. She had
interested a great body of Jewish children in the plays of Shakespeare,
and of more modern dramatists, and these they had performed from time
to time with great success. The admission fee to the performance was ten
cents, and the theater was always crowded with other children--certainly
a better diversion for them than the amusements of the street, though of
course, as a business enterprise, the theater could not pay. It required
patrons. Miss Herts obtained permission to play “The Prince and the
Pauper,” and Mark Twain agreed to become a sort of chief patron in using
his influence to bring together an audience who might be willing to
assist financially in this worthy work.

“The Prince and the Pauper” evening turned out a distinguished affair.
On the night of November 19, 1907, the hall of the Educational Alliance
was crowded with such an audience as perhaps never before assembled on
the East Side; the finance and the fashion of New York were there. It
was a gala night for the little East Side performers. Behind the curtain
they whispered to each other that they were to play before queens. The
performance they gave was an astonishing one. So fully did they
enter into the spirit of Tom Canty’s rise to royalty that they seemed
absolutely to forget that they were lowly-born children of the Ghetto.
They had become little princesses and lords and maids-in-waiting, and
they moved through their pretty tinsel parts as if all their ornaments
were gems and their raiment cloth of gold. There was no hesitation,
no awkwardness of speech or gesture, and they rose really to sublime
heights in the barn scene where the little Prince is in the hands of the
mob. Never in the history of the stage has there been assembled a mob
more wonderful than that. These children knew mobs! A mob to them was
a daily sight, and their reproduction of it was a thing to startle you
with its realism. Never was it absurd; never was there a single note of
artificiality in it. It was Hogarthian in its bigness.

Both Mark Twain and Miss Herts made brief addresses, and the audience
shouted approval of their words. It seems a pity that such a project as
that must fail, and I do not know why it happened. Wealthy men and women
manifested an interest; but there was some hitch somewhere, and the
Children’s Theater exists to-day only as history.--[In a letter to a
Mrs. Amelia Dunne Hookway, who had conducted some children’s plays at
the Howland School, Chicago, Mark Twain once wrote: “If I were going to
begin life over again I would have a children’s theater and watch it,
and work for it, and see it grow and blossom and bear its rich moral and
intellectual fruitage; and I should get more pleasure and a saner and
healthier profit out of my vocation than I should ever be able to get
out of any other, constituted as I am. Yes, you are easily the most
fortunate of women, I think.”]

It was at a dinner at The Players--a small, private dinner given by Mr.
George C. Riggs-that I saw Edward L. Burlingame and Mark Twain for the
only time together. They had often met during the forty-two years that
had passed since their long-ago Sandwich Island friendship; but only
incidentally, for Mr. Burlingame cared not much for great public
occasions, and as editor of Scribner’s Magazine he had been somewhat out
of the line of Mark Twain’s literary doings.

Howells was there, and Gen. Stewart L. Woodford, and David Bispham, John
Finley, Evan Shipman, Nicholas Biddle, and David Munro. Clemens told
that night, for the first time, the story of General Miles and the
three-dollar dog, inventing it, I believe, as he went along, though for
the moment it certainly did sound like history. He told it often after
that, and it has been included in his book of speeches.

Later, in the cab, he said:

“That was a mighty good dinner. Riggs knows how to do that sort of
thing. I enjoyed it ever so much. Now we’ll go home and play billiards.”

We began about eleven o’clock, and played until after midnight. I
happened to be too strong for him, and he swore amazingly. He vowed that
it was not a gentleman’s game at all, that Riggs’s wine had demoralized
the play. But at the end, when we were putting up the cues, he said:

“Well, those were good games. There is nothing like billiards after
all.”

We did not play billiards on his birthday that year. He went to the
theater in the afternoon; and it happened that, with Jesse Lynch
Williams, I attended the same performance--the “Toy-Maker of
Nuremberg”--written by Austin Strong. It proved to be a charming play,
and I could see that Clemens was enjoying it. He sat in a box next to
the stage, and the actors clearly were doing their very prettiest for
his benefit.

When later I mentioned having seen him at the play, he spoke freely of
his pleasure in it.

“It is a fine, delicate piece of work,” he said. “I wish I could do such
things as that.”

“I believe you are too literary for play-writing.”

“Yes, no doubt. There was never any question with the managers about my
plays. They always said they wouldn’t act. Howells has come pretty near
to something once or twice. I judge the trouble is that the literary man
is thinking of the style and quality of the thing, while the playwright
thinks only of how it will play. One is thinking of how it will sound,
the other of how it will look.”

“I suppose,” I said, “the literary man should have a collaborator with
a genius for stage mechanism. John Luther Long’s exquisite plays would
hardly have been successful without David Belasco to stage them. Belasco
cannot write a play himself, but in the matter of acting construction
his genius is supreme.”

“Yes, so it is; it was Belasco who made it possible to play ‘The Prince
and the Pauper’--a collection of literary garbage before he got hold of
it.”

Clemens attended few public functions now. He was beset with
invitations, but he declined most of them. He told the dog story one
night to the Pleiades Club, assembled at the Brevoort; but that was only
a step away, and we went in after the dining was ended and came away
before the exercises were concluded.

He also spoke at a banquet given to Andrew Carnegie--Saint Andrew, as
he called him--by the Engineers Club, and had his usual fun at the chief
guest’s expense.

    I have been chief guest at a good many banquets myself, and I know
    what brother Andrew is feeling like now. He has been receiving
    compliments and nothing but compliments, but he knows that there is
    another side to him that needs censure.

    I am going to vary the complimentary monotony. While we have all
    been listening to the complimentary talk Mr. Carnegie’s face has
    scintillated with fictitious innocence. You’d think he never
    committed a crime in his life. But he has.

    Look at his pestiferous simplified spelling. Imagine the calamity
    on two sides of the ocean when he foisted his simplified spelling on
    the whole human race. We’ve got it all now so that nobody could
    spell....

    If Mr. Carnegie had left spelling alone we wouldn’t have had any
    spots on the sun, or any San Francisco quake, or any business
    depression.

    There, I trust he feels better now and that he has enjoyed my abuse
    more than he did his compliments. And now that I think I have him
    smoothed down and feeling comfortable I just want to say one thing
    more--that his simplified spelling is all right enough, but, like
    chastity, you can carry it too far.

As he was about to go, Carnegie called his attention to the beautiful
souvenir bronze and gold-plated goblets that stood at each guest’s
plate. Carnegie said:

“The club had those especially made at Tiffany’s for this occasion. They
cost ten dollars apiece.”

Clemens sand: “Is that so? Well, I only meant to take my own; but if
that’s the case I’ll load my cab with them.”

We made an attempt to reform on the matter of billiards. The continued
strain of late hours was doing neither of us any particular good. More
than once I journeyed into the country on one errand and another, mainly
for rest; but a card saying that he was lonely and upset, for lack of
his evening games, quickly brought me back again. It was my wish only to
serve him; it was a privilege and an honor to give him happiness.

Billiards, however, was not his only recreation just then. He walked out
a good deal, and especially of a pleasant Sunday morning he liked the
stroll up Fifth Avenue. Sometimes we went as high as Carnegie’s, on
Ninety-second Street, and rode home on top of the electric stage--always
one of Mark Twain’s favorite diversions.

From that high seat he liked to look down on the panorama of the
streets, and in that free, open air he could smoke without interference.
Oftener, however, we turned at Fifty-ninth Street, walking both ways.

When it was pleasant we sometimes sat on a bench in Central Park; and
once he must have left a handkerchief there, for a few days later one of
his handkerchiefs came to him accompanied by a note. Its finder, a Mr.
Lockwood, received a reward, for Mark Twain wrote him:

    There is more rejoicing in this house over that one handkerchief
    that was lost and is found again than over the ninety and nine that
    never went to the wash at all. Heaven will reward you, I know it
    will.

On Sunday mornings the return walk would be timed for about the hour
that the churches would be dismissed. On the first Sunday morning we had
started a little early, and I thoughtlessly suggested, when we reached
Fifty-ninth Street, that if we returned at once we would avoid the
throng. He said, quietly:

“I like the throng.”

So we rested in the Plaza Hotel until the appointed hour. Men and
women noticed him, and came over to shake his hand. The gigantic man in
uniform; in charge of the carriages at the door, came in for a word. He
had opened carriages for Mr. Clemens at the Twenty-third Street station,
and now wanted to claim that honor. I think he received the most cordial
welcome of any one who came. I am sure he did. It was Mark Twain’s way
to warm to the man of the lower social rank. He was never too busy,
never too preoccupied, to grasp the hand of such a man; to listen to
his story, and to say just the words that would make that man happy
remembering them.

We left the Plaza Hotel and presently were amid the throng of outpouring
congregations. Of course he was the object on which every passing eye
turned; the presence to which every hat was lifted. I realized that this
open and eagerly paid homage of the multitude was still dear to him,
not in any small and petty way, but as the tribute of a nation, the
expression of that affection which in his London and Liverpool speeches
he had declared to be the last and final and most precious reward that
any man can win, whether by character or achievement. It was his final
harvest, and he had the courage to claim it--the aftermath of all his
years of honorable labor and noble living.



CCLXII. FROM MARK TWAIN’s MAIL. If the reader has any curiosity as
to some of the less usual letters which a man of wide public note may
inspire, perhaps he will find a certain interest in a few selected from
the thousands which yearly came to Mark Twain.

For one thing, he was constantly receiving prescriptions and remedies
whenever the papers reported one of his bronchial or rheumatic attacks.
It is hardly necessary to quote examples of these, but only a form of
his occasional reply, which was likely to be in this wise:

    DEAR SIR [or MADAM],--I try every remedy sent to me. I am now on
    No. 87. Yours is 2,653. I am looking forward to its beneficial
    results.

Of course a large number of the nostrums and palliatives offered were
preparations made by the wildest and longest-haired medical cranks. One
of these sent an advertisement of a certain Elixir of Life, which was
guaranteed to cure everything--to “wash and cleanse the human molecules,
and so restore youth and preserve life everlasting.”

Anonymous letters are not usually popular or to be encouraged, but Mark
Twain had an especial weakness for compliments that came in that way.
They were not mercenary compliments. The writer had nothing to gain.
Two such letters follow--both written in England just at the time of his
return.

    MARK TWAIN.

    DEAR SIR,--Please accept a poor widow’s good-by and kindest wishes.
    I have had some of your books sent to me; have enjoyed them very
    much--only wish I could afford to buy some.

    I should very much like to have seen you. I have many photos of you
    which I have cut from several papers which I read. I have one where
    you are writing in bed, which I cut from the Daily News. Like
    myself, you believe in lots of sleep and rest. I am 70 and I find I
    need plenty. Please forgive the liberty I have taken in writing to
    you. If I can’t come to your funeral may we meet beyond the river.

    May God guard you, is the wish of a lonely old widow.
                  Yours sincerely,

The other letter also tells its own story:

    DEAR, KIND MARK TWAIN,--For years I have wanted to write and thank
    you for the comfort you were to me once, only I never quite knew
    where you were, and besides I did not want to bother you; but to-day
    I was told by some one who saw you going into the lift at the Savoy
    that you looked sad and I thought it might cheer you a little tiny
    bit to hear how you kept a poor lonely girl from ruining her eyes
    with crying every night for long months.

    Ten years ago I had to leave home and earn my living as a governess
    and Fate sent me to spend a winter with a very dull old country
    family in the depths of Staffordshire. According to the genial
    English custom, after my five charges had gone to bed, I took my
    evening meal alone in the school-room, where “Henry Tudor had supped
    the night before Bosworth,” and there I had to stay without a soul
    to speak to till I went to bed. At first I used to cry every night,
    but a friend sent me a copy of your Huckleberry Finn and I never
    cried any more. I kept him handy under the copy-books and maps, and
    when Henry Tudor commenced to stretch out his chilly hands toward me
    I grabbed my dear Huck and he never once failed me; I opened him at
    random and in two minutes I was in another world. That’s why I am
    so grateful to you and so fond of you, and I thought you might like
    to know; for it is yourself that has the kind heart, as is easily
    seen from the way you wrote about the poor old nigger. I am a
    stenographer now and live at home, but I shall never forget how you
    helped me. God bless you and spare you long to those you are dear
    to.

A letter which came to him soon after his return from England contained
a clipping which reported the good work done by Christian missionaries
in the Congo, especially among natives afflicted by the terrible
sleeping sickness. The letter itself consisted merely of a line, which
said:

    Won’t you give your friends, the missionaries, a good mark for this?

The writer’s name was signed, and Mark Twain answered:

    In China the missionaries are not wanted, & so they ought to be
    decent & go away. But I have not heard that in the Congo the
    missionary servants of God are unwelcome to the native.

    Evidently those missionaries axe pitying, compassionate, kind. How
    it would improve God to take a lesson from them! He invented &
    distributed the germ of that awful disease among those helpless,
    poor savages, & now He sits with His elbows on the balusters & looks
    down & enjoys this wanton crime. Confidently, & between you & me
    --well, never mind, I might get struck by lightning if I said it.

    Those are good and kindly men, those missionaries, but they are a
    measureless satire upon their Master.

To which the writer answered:

    O wicked Mr. Clemens! I have to ask Saint Joan of Arc to pray for
    you; then one of these days, when we all stand before the Golden
    Gates and we no longer “see through a glass darkly and know only in
    part,” there will be a struggle at the heavenly portals between Joan
    of Arc and St. Peter, but your blessed Joan will conquer and she’ll
    lead Mr. Clemens through the gates of pearl and apologize and plead
    for him.

Of the letters that irritated him, perhaps the following is as fair a
sample as any, and it has additional interest in its sequel.

    DEAR SIR,--I have written a book--naturally--which fact, however,
    since I am not your enemy, need give you no occasion to rejoice.
    Nor need you grieve, though I am sending you a copy. If I knew of
    any way of compelling you to read it I would do so, but unless the
    first few pages have that effect I can do nothing. Try the first
    few pages. I have done a great deal more than that with your books,
    so perhaps you owe me some thing--say ten pages. If after that
    attempt you put it aside I shall be sorry--for you.

    I am afraid that the above looks flippant--but think of the
    twitterings of the soul of him who brings in his hand an unbidden
    book, written by himself. To such a one much is due in the way of
    indulgence. Will you remember that? Have you forgotten early
    twitterings of your own?

In a memorandum made on this letter Mark Twain wrote:

    Another one of those peculiarly depressing letters--a letter cast in
    artificially humorous form, whilst no art could make the subject
    humorous--to me.

Commenting further, he said:

    As I have remarked before about one thousand times the coat of arms
    of the human race ought to consist of a man with an ax on his
    shoulder proceeding toward a grindstone, or it ought to represent
    the several members of the human race holding out the hat to one
    another; for we are all beggars, each in his own way. One beggar is
    too proud to beg for pennies, but will beg for an introduction into
    society; another does not care for society, but he wants a
    postmastership; another will inveigle a lawyer into conversation and
    then sponge on him for free advice. The man who wouldn’t do any of
    these things will beg for the Presidency. Each admires his own
    dignity and greatly guards it, but in his opinion the others haven’t
    any.

    Mendicancy is a matter of taste and temperament, no doubt, but no
    human being is without some form of it. I know my own form, you
    know yours. Let us conceal them from view and abuse the others.
    There is no man so poor but what at intervals some man comes to him
    with an ax to grind. By and by the ax’s aspect becomes familiar to
    the proprietor of the grindstone. He perceives that it is the same
    old ax. If you are a governor you know that the stranger wants an
    office. The first time he arrives you are deceived; he pours out
    such noble praises of you and your political record that you are
    moved to tears; there’s a lump in your throat and you are thankful
    that you have lived for this happiness. Then the stranger discloses
    his ax, and you are ashamed of yourself and your race. Six
    repetitions will cure you. After that you interrupt the compliments
    and say, “Yes, yes, that’s all right; never mind about that. What
    is it you want?”

    But you and I are in the business ourselves. Every now and then we
    carry our ax to somebody and ask a whet. I don’t carry mine to
    strangers--I draw the line there; perhaps that is your way. This is
    bound to set us up on a high and holy pinnacle and make us look down
    in cold rebuke on persons who carry their axes to strangers.

    I do not know how to answer that stranger’s letter. I wish he had
    spared me. Never mind about him--I am thinking about myself. I
    wish he had spared me. The book has not arrived yet; but no matter,
    I am prejudiced against it.

It was a few days later that he added:

    I wrote to that man. I fell back upon the old Overworked, polite
    lie, and thanked him for his book and said I was promising myself
    the pleasure of reading it. Of course that set me free; I was not
    obliged to read it now at all, and, being free, my prejudice was
    gone, and as soon as the book came I opened it to see what it was
    like. I was not able to put it down until I had finished. It was
    an embarrassing thing to have to write to that man and confess that
    fact, but I had to do it. That first letter was merely a lie. Do
    you think I wrote the second one to give that man pleasure? Well, I
    did, but it was second-hand pleasure. I wrote it first to give
    myself comfort, to make myself forget the original lie.

Mark Twain’s interest was once aroused by the following:

    DEAR SIR,--I have had more or less of your works on my shelves for
    years, and believe I have practically a complete set now. This is
    nothing unusual, of course, but I presume it will seem to you
    unusual for any one to keep books constantly in sight which the
    owner regrets ever having read.

    Every time my glance rests on the books I do regret having read
    them, and do not hesitate to tell you so to your face, and care not
    who may know my feelings. You, who must be kept busy attending to
    your correspondence, will probably pay little or no attention to
    this small fraction of it, yet my reasons, I believe, are sound and
    are probably shared by more people than you are aware of.

    Probably you will not read far enough through this to see who has
    signed it, but if you do, and care to know why I wish I had left
    your work unread, I will tell you as briefly as possible if you will
    ask me.
                            GEORGE B. LAUDER.

Clemens did not answer the letter, but put it in his pocket, perhaps
intending to do so, and a few days later, in Boston, when a reporter
called, he happened to remember it. The reporter asked permission to
print the queer document, and it appeared in his Mark Twain interview
next morning. A few days later the writer of it sent a second letter,
this time explaining:

    MY DEAR SIR,--I saw in to-day’s paper a copy of the letter which I
    wrote you October 26th.

    I have read and re-read your works until I can almost recall some of
    them word for word. My familiarity with them is a constant source
    of pleasure which I would not have missed, and therefore the regret
    which I have expressed is more than offset by thankfulness.

    Believe me, the regret which I feel for having read your works is
    entirely due to the unalterable fact that I can never again have the
    pleasure of reading them for the first time.

                  Your sincere admirer,
                            GEORGE B. LADDER.

Mark Twain promptly replied this time:

    DEAR SIR, You fooled me completely; I didn’t divine what the letter
    was concealing, neither did the newspaper men, so you are a very
    competent deceiver.
                     Truly yours,
                                S. L. CLEMENS.

It was about the end of 1907 that the new St. Louis Harbor boat, was
completed. The editor of the St. Louis Republic reported that it has
been christened “Mark Twain,” and asked for a word of comment. Clemens
sent this line:

    May my namesake follow in my righteous footsteps, then neither of us
    will need any fire insurance.



CCLXIII. SOME LITERARY LUNCHEONS

Howells, in his book, refers to the Human Race Luncheon Club, which
Clemens once organized for the particular purpose of damning the species
in concert. It was to consist, beside Clemens himself, of Howells,
Colonel Harvey, and Peter Dunne; but it somehow never happened that even
this small membership could be assembled while the idea was still fresh,
and therefore potent.

Out of it, however, grew a number of those private social gatherings
which Clemens so dearly loved--small luncheons and dinners given at his
own table. The first of these came along toward the end of 1907, when
Howells was planning to spend the winter in Italy.

“Howells is going away,” he said, “and I should like to give him a
stag-party. We’ll enlarge the Human Race Club for the occasion.”

So Howells, Colonel Harvey, Martin Littleton, Augustus Thomas, Robert
Porter, and Paderewski were invited. Paderewski was unable to come, and
seven in all assembled.

Howells was first to arrive.

“Here comes Howells,” Clemens said. “Old Howells a thousand years old.”

But Howells didn’t look it. His face was full of good-nature and
apparent health, and he was by no means venerable, either in speech or
action. Thomas, Porter, Littleton, and Harvey drifted in. Cocktails were
served and luncheon was announced.

Claude, the butler, had prepared the table with fine artistry--its
center a mass of roses. There was to be no woman in the
neighborhood--Clemens announced this fact as a sort of warrant for
general freedom of expression.

Thomas’s play, “The Witching Hour,” was then at the height of its great
acceptance, and the talk naturally began there. Thomas told something of
the difficulty which he found in being able to convince a manager that
it would succeed, and declared it to be his own favorite work. I believe
there was no dissenting opinion as to its artistic value, or concerning
its purpose and psychology, though these had been the stumbling-blocks
from a managerial point of view.

When the subject was concluded, and there had come a lull, Colonel
Harvey, who was seated at Clemens’s left, said:

“Uncle Mark”--he often called him that--“Major Leigh handed me a report
of the year’s sales just as I was leaving. It shows your royalty returns
this year to be very close to fifty thousand dollars. I don’t believe
there is another such return from old books on record.”

This was said in an undertone, to Clemens only, but was overheard by one
or two of those who sat nearest. Clemens was not unwilling to repeat it
for the benefit of all, and did so. Howells said:

“A statement like that arouses my basest passions. The books are no
good; it’s just the advertising they get.”

Clemens said: “Yes, my contract compels the publisher to advertise. It
costs them two hundred dollars every time they leave the advertisement
out of the magazines.”

“And three hundred every time we put it in,” said Harvey. “We often
debate whether it is more profitable to put in the advertisement or to
leave it out.”

The talk switched back to plays and acting. Thomas recalled an
incident of Beerbohm Tree’s performance of “Hamlet.” W. S. Gilbert, of
light-opera celebrity, was present at a performance, and when the play
ended Mrs. Tree hurried over to him and said:

“Oh, Mr. Gilbert, what did you think of Mr. Tree’s rendition of Hamlet?”
 “Remarkable,” said Gilbert. “Funny without being vulgar.”

It was with such idle tales and talk-play that the afternoon passed.
Not much of it all is left to me, but I remember Howells saying, “Did it
ever occur to you that the newspapers abolished hell? Well, they did--it
was never done by the church. There was a consensus of newspaper opinion
that the old hell with its lake of fire and brimstone was an antiquated
institution; in fact a dead letter.” And again, “I was coming down
Broadway last night, and I stopped to look at one of the street-venders
selling those little toy fighting roosters. It was a bleak, desolate
evening; nobody was buying anything, and as he pulled the string and
kept those little roosters dancing and fighting his remarks grew more
and more cheerless and sardonic.

“‘Japanese game chickens,’ he said; ‘pretty toys, amuse the children
with their antics. Child of three can operate it. Take them home for
Christmas. Chicken-fight at your own fireside.’ I tried to catch his eye
to show him that I understood his desolation and sorrow, but it was no
use. He went on dancing his toy chickens, and saying, over and over,
‘Chicken-fight at your own fireside.’”

The luncheon over, we wandered back into the drawing-room, and presently
all left but Colonel Harvey. Clemens and the Colonel went up to the
billiard-room and engaged in a game of cushion caroms, at twenty-five
cents a game. I was umpire and stakeholder, and it was a most
interesting occupation, for the series was close and a very cheerful
one. It ended the day much to Mark Twain’s satisfaction, for he was
oftenest winner. That evening he said:

“We will repeat that luncheon; we ought to repeat it once a month.
Howells will be gone, but we must have the others. We cannot have a
thing like that too often.”

There was, in fact, a second stag-luncheon very soon after, at which
George Riggs was present and that rare Irish musician, Denis O’Sullivan.
It was another choice afternoon, with a mystical quality which came of
the music made by O’Sullivan on some Hindu reeds-pipes of Pan. But we
shall have more of O’Sullivan presently--all too little, for his days
were few and fleeting.

Howells could not get away just yet. Colonel Harvey, who, like James
Osgood, would not fail to find excuse for entertainment, chartered two
drawing-room cars, and with Mrs. Harvey took a party of fifty-five or
sixty congenial men and women to Lakewood for a good-by luncheon to
Howells. It was a day borrowed from June, warm and beautiful.

The trip down was a sort of reception. Most of the guests were
acquainted, but many of them did not often meet. There was constant
visiting back and forth the full length of the two coaches. Denis
O’Sullivan was among the guests. He looked in the bloom of health, and
he had his pipes and played his mystic airs; then he brought out the
tin-whistle of Ireland, and blew such rollicking melodies as capering
fairies invented a long time ago. This was on the train going down.

There was a brief program following the light-hearted feasting--an
informal program fitting to that sunny day. It opened with some
recitations by Miss Kitty Cheatham; then Colonel Harvey introduced
Howells, with mention of his coming journey. As a rule, Howells does not
enjoy speaking. He is willing to read an address on occasion, but he has
owned that the prospect of talking without his notes terrifies him.
This time, however, there was no reluctance, though he had prepared no
speech. He was among friends. He looked even happy when he got on his
feet, and he spoke like a happy man. He talked about Mark Twain. It
was all delicate, delicious chaffing which showed Howells at his very
best--all too short for his listeners.

Clemens, replying, returned the chaff, and rambled amusingly among
his fancies, closing with a few beautiful words of “Godspeed and safe
return” to his old comrade and friend.

Then once more came Denis and his pipes. No one will ever forget his
part of the program. The little samples we had heard on the train were
expanded and multiplied and elaborated in a way that fairly swept his
listeners out of themselves into that land where perhaps Denis himself
wanders playing now; for a month later, strong and lusty and beautiful
as he seemed that day, he suddenly vanished from among us and his reeds
were silent. It never occurred to us then that Denis could die; and as
he finished each melody and song there was a shout for a repetition,
and I think we could have sat there and let the days and years slip away
unheeded, for time is banished by music like that, and one wonders if it
might not even divert death.

It was dark when we crossed the river homeward; the myriad lights from
heaven-climbing windows made an enchanted city in the sky. The evening,
like the day, was warm, and some of the party left the ferry-cabin to
lean over and watch the magic spectacle, the like of which is not to be
found elsewhere on the earth.



CCLXIV. “CAPTAIN STORMFIELD” IN PRINT

During the forty years or so that had elapsed since the publication
of the “Gates Ajar” and the perpetration of Mark Twain’s intended
burlesque, built on Captain Ned Wakeman’s dream, the Christian religion
in its more orthodox aspects had undergone some large modifications. It
was no longer regarded as dangerous to speak lightly of hell, or even
to suggest that the golden streets and jeweled architecture of the sky
might be regarded as symbols of hope rather than exhibits of actual
bullion and lapidary construction. Clemens re-read his extravaganza,
Captain Stormfields Visit to Heaven, gave it a modernizing touch here
and there, and handed it to his publishers, who must have agreed that
it was no longer dangerous, for it was promptly accepted and appeared in
the December and January numbers (1907-8) of Harper’s Magazine, and was
also issued as a small book. If there were any readers who still found
it blasphemous, or even irreverent, they did not say so; the letters
that came--and they were a good many--expressed enjoyment and approval,
also (some of them) a good deal of satisfaction that Mark Twain “had
returned to his earlier form.”

The publication of this story recalled to Clemens’s mind another heresy
somewhat similar which he had written during the winter of 1891 and 1892
in Berlin. This was a dream of his own, in which he had set out on a
train with the evangelist Sam Jones and the Archbishop of Canterbury
for the other world. He had noticed that his ticket was to a different
destination than the Archbishop’s, and so, when the prelate nodded
and finally went to sleep, he changed the tickets in their hats with
disturbing results. Clemens thought a good deal of this fancy when he
wrote it, and when Mrs. Clemens had refused to allow it to be printed he
had laboriously translated it into German, with some idea of publishing
it surreptitiously; but his conscience had been too much for him. He had
confessed, and even the German version had been suppressed.

Clemens often allowed his fancy to play with the idea of the orthodox
heaven, its curiosities of architecture, and its employments of
continuous prayer, psalm-singing, and harpistry.

“What a childish notion it was,” he said, “and how curious that only
a little while ago human beings were so willing to accept such fragile
evidences about a place of so much importance. If we should find
somewhere to-day an ancient book containing an account of a beautiful
and blooming tropical Paradise secreted in the center of eternal
icebergs--an account written by men who did not even claim to have seen
it themselves--no geographical society on earth would take any stock in
that book, yet that account would be quite as authentic as any we have
of heaven. If God has such a place prepared for us, and really wanted us
to know it, He could have found some better way than a book so liable
to alterations and misinterpretation. God has had no trouble to prove
to man the laws of the constellations and the construction of the world,
and such things as that, none of which agree with His so-called book. As
to a hereafter, we have not the slightest evidence that there is any--no
evidence that appeals to logic and reason. I have never seen what to me
seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life.”

Then, after a long pause, he added:

“And yet--I am strongly inclined to expect one.”



CCLXV. LOTOS CLUB HONORS

It was on January 11, 1908, that Mark Twain was given his last great
banquet by the Lotos Club. The club was about to move again, into
splendid new quarters, and it wished to entertain him once more in its
old rooms.

He wore white, and amid the throng of black-clad men was like a white
moth among a horde of beetles. The room fairly swarmed with them, and
they seemed likely to overwhelm him.

President Lawrence was toast-master of the evening, and he ended his
customary address by introducing Robert Porter, who had been Mark
Twain’s host at Oxford. Porter told something of the great Oxford week,
and ended by introducing Mark Twain. It had been expected that Clemens
would tell of his London experiences. Instead of doing this, he said he
had started a new kind of collection, a collection of compliments. He
had picked up a number of valuable ones abroad and some at home. He
read selections from them, and kept the company going with cheers and
merriment until just before the close of his speech. Then he repeated,
in his most impressive manner, that stately conclusion of his Liverpool
speech, and the room became still and the eyes of his hearers grew dim.
It may have been even more moving than when originally given, for now
the closing words, “homeward bound,” had only the deeper meaning.

Dr. John MacArthur followed with a speech that was as good a sermon as
any he ever delivered, and closed it by saying:

“I do not want men to prepare for heaven, but to prepare to remain on
earth, and it is such men as Mark Twain who make other men not fit to
die, but fit to live.”

Andrew Carnegie also spoke, and Colonel Harvey, and as the speaking
ended Robert Porter stepped up behind Clemens and threw over his
shoulders the scarlet Oxford robe which had been surreptitiously
brought, and placed the mortar-board cap upon his head, while the diners
vociferated their approval. Clemens was quite calm.

“I like this,” he said, when the noise had subsided. “I like its
splendid color. I would dress that way all the time, if I dared.”

In the cab going home I mentioned the success of his speech, how well it
had been received.

“Yes,” he said; “but then I have the advantage of knowing now that I
am likely to be favorably received, whatever I say. I know that my
audiences are warm and responseful. It is an immense advantage to feel
that. There are cold places in almost every speech, and if your audience
notices them and becomes cool, you get a chill yourself in those zones,
and it is hard to warm up again. Perhaps there haven’t been so many
lately; but I have been acquainted with them more than once.” And then I
could not help remembering that deadly Whittier birthday speech of more
than thirty years before--that bleak, arctic experience from beginning
to end.

“We have just time for four games,” he said, as we reached the
billiard-room; but there was no sign of stopping when the four games
were over. We were winning alternately, and neither noted the time. I
was leaving by an early train, and was willing to play all night. The
milk-wagons were rattling outside when he said:

“Well, perhaps we’d better quit now. It seems pretty early, though.” I
looked at my watch. It was quarter to four, and we said good night.



CCLXVI. A WINTER IN BERMUDA

Edmund Clarence Stedman died suddenly at his desk, January 18, 1908, and
Clemens, in response to telegrams, sent this message:

I do not wish to talk about it. He was a valued friend from days that
date back thirty-five years. His loss stuns me and unfits me to speak.

He recalled the New England dinners which he used to attend, and where
he had often met Stedman.

“Those were great affairs,” he said. “They began early, and they ended
early. I used to go down from Hartford with the feeling that it wasn’t
an all-night supper, and that it was going to be an enjoyable time.
Choate and Depew and Stedman were in their prime then--we were all young
men together. Their speeches were always worth listening to. Stedman was
a prominent figure there. There don’t seem to be any such men now--or
any such occasions.”

Stedman was one of the last of the old literary group. Aldrich had died
the year before. Howells and Clemens were the lingering “last leaves.”

Clemens gave some further luncheon entertainments to his friends, and
added the feature of “doe” luncheons--pretty affairs where, with Clara
Clemens as hostess, were entertained a group of brilliant women, such
as Mrs. Kate Douglas Riggs, Geraldine Farrax, Mrs. Robert Collier, Mrs.
Frank Doubleday, and others. I cannot report those luncheons, for I was
not present, and the drift of the proceedings came to me later in too
fragmentary a form to be used as history; but I gathered from Clemens
himself that he had done all of the talking, and I think they must have
been very pleasant afternoons. Among the acknowledgments that followed
one of these affairs is this characteristic word-play from Mrs. Riggs:

    N. B.--A lady who is invited to and attends a doe luncheon is, of
    course, a doe. The question is, if she attends two doe luncheons in
    succession is she a doe-doe? If so is she extinct and can never
    attend a third?

Luncheons and billiards, however, failed to give sufficient brightness
to the dull winter days, or to insure him against an impending bronchial
attack, and toward the end of January he sailed away to Bermuda, where
skies were bluer and roadsides gay with bloom. His sojourn was brief
this time, but long enough to cure him, he said, and he came back full
of happiness. He had been driving about over the island with a newly
adopted granddaughter, little Margaret Blackmer, whom he had met one
morning in the hotel dining-room. A part of his dictated story will
convey here this pretty experience.

    My first day in Bermuda paid a dividend--in fact a double dividend:
    it broke the back of my cold and it added a jewel to my collection.
    As I entered the breakfast-room the first object I saw in that
    spacious and far-reaching place was a little girl seated solitary at
    a table for two. I bent down over her and patted her cheek and
    said:

    “I don’t seem to remember your name; what is it?”

    By the sparkle in her brown eyes it amused her. She said:

    “Why, you’ve never known it, Mr. Clemens, because you’ve never seen
    me before.”

    “Why, that is true, now that I come to think; it certainly is true,
    and it must be one of the reasons why I have forgotten your name.
    But I remember it now perfectly--it’s Mary.”

    She was amused again; amused beyond smiling; amused to a chuckle,
    and she said:

    “Oh no, it isn’t; it’s Margaret.”

    I feigned to be ashamed of my mistake and said:

    “Ah, well, I couldn’t have made that mistake a few years ago; but I
    am old, and one of age’s earliest infirmities is a damaged memory;
    but I am clearer now--clearer-headed--it all comes back to me just
    as if it were yesterday. It’s Margaret Holcomb.”

    She was surprised into a laugh this time, the rippling laugh that a
    happy brook makes when it breaks out of the shade into the sunshine,
    and she said:

    “Oh, you are wrong again; you don’t get anything right. It isn’t
    Holcomb, it’s Blackmer.”

    I was ashamed again, and confessed it; then:

    “How old are you, dear?”

    “Twelve; New-Year’s. Twelve and a month.”

    We were close comrades-inseparables, in fact-for eight days. Every
    day we made pedestrian excursions--called them that anyway, and
    honestly they were intended for that, and that is what they would
    have been but for the persistent intrusion of a gray and grave and
    rough-coated donkey by the name of Maud. Maud was four feet long;
    she was mounted on four slender little stilts, and had ears that
    doubled her altitude when she stood them up straight. Her tender
    was a little bit of a cart with seat room for two in it, and you
    could fall out of it without knowing it, it was so close to the
    ground. This battery was in command of a nice, grave, dignified,
    gentlefaced little black boy whose age was about twelve, and whose
    name, for some reason or other, was Reginald. Reginald and Maud--I
    shall not easily forget those names, nor the combination they stood
    for. The trips going and coming were five or six miles, and it
    generally took us three hours to make it. This was because Maud set
    the pace. Whenever she detected an ascending grade she respected
    it; she stopped and said with her ears:

    “This is getting unsatisfactory. We will camp here.”

    The whole idea of these excursions was that Margaret and I should
    employ them for the gathering of strength, by walking, yet we were
    oftener in the cart than out of it. She drove and I superintended.
    In the course of the first excursions I found a beautiful little
    shell on the beach at Spanish Point; its hinge was old and dry, and
    the two halves came apart in my hand. I gave one of them to
    Margaret and said:

    “Now dear, sometime or other in the future I shall run across you
    somewhere, and it may turn out that it is not you at all, but will
    be some girl that only resembles you. I shall be saying to myself
    ‘I know that this is a Margaret by the look of her, but I don’t know
    for sure whether this is my Margaret or somebody else’s’; but, no
    matter, I can soon find out, for I shall take my half shell out of
    my pocket and say, ‘I think you are my Margaret, but I am not
    certain; if you are my Margaret you can produce the other half of
    this shell.’”

    Next morning when I entered the breakfast-room and saw the child I
    approached and scanned her searchingly all over, then said, sadly:

    “No, I am mistaken; it looks like my Margaret,--but it isn’t, and I
    am so sorry. I shall go away and cry now.”

    Her eyes danced triumphantly, and she cried out:

    “No, you don’t have to. There!” and she fetched out the identifying
    shell.

    I was beside myself with gratitude and joyful surprise, and revealed
    it from every pore. The child could not have enjoyed this thrilling
    little drama more if we had been playing it on the stage. Many
    times afterward she played the chief part herself, pretending to be
    in doubt as to my identity and challenging me to produce my half of
    the shell. She was always hoping to catch me without it, but I
    always defeated that game--wherefore she came to recognize at last
    that I was not only old, but very smart.

Sometimes, when they were not walking or driving, they sat on the
veranda, and he prepared history-lessons for little Margaret by making
grotesque figures on cards with numerous legs and arms and other
fantastic symbols end features to fix the length of some king’s reign.
For William the Conqueror, for instance, who reigned twenty-one years,
he drew a figure of eleven legs and ten arms. It was the proper method
of impressing facts upon the mind of a child. It carried him back to
those days at Elmira when he had arranged for his own little girls the
game of kings. A Miss Wallace, a friend of Margaret’s, and usually one
of the pedestrian party, has written a dainty book of those Bermudian
days.--[Mark Twain and the Happy Islands, by Elizabeth Wallace.]

Miss Wallace says:

    Margaret felt for him the deep affection that children have for an
    older person who understands them and treats them with respect. Mr.
    Clemens never talked down to her, but considered her opinions with a
    sweet dignity.

There were some pretty sequels to the shell incident. After Mark Twain
had returned to New York, and Margaret was there, she called one day
with her mother, and sent up her card. He sent back word, saying:

    “I seem to remember the name; but if this is really the person whom
    I think it is she can identify herself by a certain shell I once
    gave her, of which I have the other half. If the two halves fit, I
    shall know that this is the same little Margaret that I remember.”

The message went down, and the other half of the shell was promptly sent
up. Mark Twain had the two half-shells incised firmly in gold, and one
of these he wore on his watch-fob, and sent the other to Margaret.

He afterward corresponded with Margaret, and once wrote her:

    I’m already making mistakes. When I was in New York, six weeks ago,
    I was on a corner of Fifth Avenue and I saw a small girl--not a big
    one--start across from the opposite corner, and I exclaimed to
    myself joyfully, “That is certainly my Margaret!” so I rushed to
    meet her. But as she came nearer I began to doubt, and said to
    myself, “It’s a Margaret--that is plain enough--but I’m afraid it is
    somebody else’s.” So when I was passing her I held my shell so she
    couldn’t help but see it. Dear, she only glanced at it and passed
    on! I wondered if she could have overlooked it. It seemed best to
    find out; so I turned and followed and caught up with her, and said,
    deferentially; “Dear Miss, I already know your first name by the
    look of you, but would you mind telling me your other one?” She was
    vexed and said pretty sharply, “It’s Douglas, if you’re so anxious
    to know. I know your name by your looks, and I’d advise you to shut
    yourself up with your pen and ink and write some more rubbish. I am
    surprised that they allow you to run’ at large. You are likely to
    get run over by a baby-carriage any time. Run along now and don’t
    let the cows bite you.”

    What an idea! There aren’t any cows in Fifth Avenue. But I didn’t
    smile; I didn’t let on to perceive how uncultured she was. She was
    from the country, of course, and didn’t know what a comical blunder.
    she was making.

Mr. Rogers’s health was very poor that winter, and Clemens urged him to
try Bermuda, and offered to go back with him; so they sailed away to
the summer island, and though Margaret was gone, there was other
entertaining company--other granddaughters to be adopted, and new
friends and old friends, and diversions of many sorts. Mr. Rogers’s
son-in-law, William Evarts Benjamin, came down and joined the little
group. It was one of Mark Twain’s real holidays. Mr. Rogers’s health
improved rapidly, and Mark Twain was in fine trim. To Mrs. Rogers, at
the end of the first week, he wrote:

    DEAR MRS. ROGERS, He is getting along splendidly! This was the very
    place for him. He enjoys himself & is as quarrelsome as a cat.

    But he will get a backset if Benjamin goes home. Benjamin is the
    brightest man in these regions, & the best company. Bright? He is
    much more than that, he is brilliant. He keeps the crowd intensely
    alive.

    With love & all good wishes.
                            S. L. C.

Mark Twain and Henry Rogers were much together and much observed. They
were often referred to as “the King” and “the Rajah,” and it was always
a question whether it was “the King” who took care of “the Rajah,”
 or vice versa. There was generally a group to gather around them, and
Clemens was sure of an attentive audience, whether he wanted to air his
philosophies, his views of the human race, or to read aloud from the
verses of Kipling.

“I am not fond of all poetry,” he would say; “but there’s something in
Kipling that appeals to me. I guess he’s just about my level.”

Miss Wallace recalls certain Kipling readings in his room, when his
friends gathered to listen.

    On those Kipling evenings the ‘mise-en-scene’ was a striking one.
    The bare hotel room, the pine woodwork and pine furniture, loose
    windows which rattled in the sea-wind. Once in a while a gust of
    asthmatic music from the spiritless orchestra downstairs came up the
    hallway. Yellow, unprotected gas-lights burned uncertainly, and
    Mark Twain in the midst of this lay on his bed (there was no couch)
    still in his white serge suit, with the light from the jet shining
    down on the crown of his silver hair, making it gleam and glisten
    like frosted threads.

In one hand he held his book, in the other he had his pipe, which he
used principally to gesture with in the most dramatic passages.

Margaret’s small successors became the earliest members of the Angel
Fish Club, which Clemens concluded to organize after a visit to the
spectacular Bermuda aquarium. The pretty angel-fish suggested youth and
feminine beauty to him, and his adopted granddaughters became angel-fish
to him from that time forward. He bought little enamel angel-fish pins,
and carried a number of them with him most of the time, so that he could
create membership on short notice. It was just another of the harmless
and happy diversions of his gentler side. He was always fond of youth
and freshness. He regarded the decrepitude of old age as an unnecessary
part of life. Often he said:

“If I had been helping the Almighty when, He created man, I would have
had Him begin at the other end, and start human beings with old age. How
much better it would have been to start old and have all the bitterness
and blindness of age in the beginning! One would not mind then if he
were looking forward to a joyful youth. Think of the joyous prospect
of growing young instead of old! Think of looking forward to eighteen
instead of eighty! Yes, the Almighty made a poor job of it. I wish He
had invited my assistance.”

To one of the angel fish he wrote, just after his return:

    I miss you, dear. I miss Bermuda, too, but not so much as I miss
    you; for you were rare, and occasional and select, and Ltd.; whereas
    Bermuda’s charms and, graciousnesses were free and common and
    unrestricted--like the rain, you know, which falls upon the just and
    the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if I were
    superintending the rain’s affairs. No, I would rain softly and
    sweetly upon the just, but whenever I caught a sample of the unjust
    outdoors I would drown him.



CCLXVII. VIEWS AND ADDRESSES

    [As I am beginning this chapter, April 16, 1912, the news comes of
    the loss, on her first trip, of the great White Star Line steamer
    Titanic, with the destruction of many passengers, among whom are
    Frank D. Millet, William T. Stead, Isadore Straus, John Jacob Astor,
    and other distinguished men. They died as heroes, remaining with
    the ship in order that the women and children might be saved.

    It was the kind of death Frank Millet would have wished to die.
    He was always a soldier--a knight. He has appeared from time to
    time in these pages, for he was a dear friend of the Clemens
    household. One of America’s foremost painters; at the time of his
    death he was head of the American Academy of Arts in Rome.]

Mark Twain made a number of addresses during the spring of 1908. He
spoke at the Cartoonists’ dinner, very soon after his return from
Bermuda; he spoke at the Booksellers’ banquet, expressing his debt of
obligation to those who had published and sold his books; he delivered
a fine address at the dinner given by the British Schools and University
Club at Delmonico’s, May 25th, in honor of Queen Victoria’s birthday.
In that speech he paid high tribute to the Queen for her attitude toward
America, during the crisis of the Civil Wax, and to her royal consort,
Prince Albert.

    What she did for us in America in our time of storm and stress we
    shall not forget, and whenever we call it to mind we shall always
    gratefully remember the wise and righteous mind that guided her in
    it and sustained and supported her--Prince Albert’s. We need not
    talk any idle talk here to-night about either possible or impossible
    war between two countries; there will be no war while we remain sane
    and the son of Victoria and Albert sits upon the throne. In
    conclusion, I believe I may justly claim to utter the voice of my
    country in saying that we hold him in deep honor, and also in
    cordially wishing him a long life and a happy reign.

But perhaps his most impressive appearance was at the dedication of the
great City College (May 14, 1908), where President John Finley, who had
been struggling along with insufficient room, was to have space at last
for his freer and fuller educational undertakings. A great number of
honored scholars, statesmen, and diplomats assembled on the college
campus, a spacious open court surrounded by stately college architecture
of medieval design. These distinguished guests were clad in their
academic robes, and the procession could not have been widely different
from that one at Oxford of a year before. But there was something rather
fearsome about it, too. A kind of scaffolding had been reared in the
center of the campus for the ceremonies; and when those grave men in
their robes of state stood grouped upon it the picture was strikingly
suggestive of one of George Cruikshank’s drawings of an execution scene
at the Tower of London. Many of the robes were black--these would be the
priests--and the few scarlet ones would be the cardinals who might have
assembled for some royal martyrdom. There was a bright May sunlight over
it all, one of those still, cool brightnesses which served to heighten
the weird effect. I am sure that others felt it besides myself, for
everybody seemed wordless and awed, even at times when there was no
occasion for silence. There was something of another age about the whole
setting, to say the least.

We left the place in a motor-car, a crowd of boys following after. As
Clemens got in they gathered around the car and gave the college yell,
ending with “Twain! Twain! Twain!” and added three cheers for Tom
Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Pudd’nhead Wilson. They called for a speech, but
he only said a few words in apology for not granting their request. He
made a speech to them that night at the Waldorf--where he proposed for
the City College a chair of citizenship, an idea which met with hearty
applause.

In the same address he referred to the “God Trust” motto on the coins,
and spoke approvingly of the President’s order for its removal.

    We do not trust in God, in the important matters of life, and not
    even a minister of the Gospel will take any coin for a cent more
    than its accepted value because of that motto. If cholera should
    ever reach these shores we should probably pray to be delivered from
    the plague, but we would put our main trust in the Board of Health.

Next morning, commenting on the report of this speech, he said:

“If only the reporters would not try to improve on what I say. They seem
to miss the fact that the very art of saying a thing effectively is in
its delicacy, and as they can’t reproduce the manner and intonation
in type they make it emphatic and clumsy in trying to convey it to the
reader.”

I pleaded that the reporters were often young men, eager, and unmellowed
in their sense of literary art.

“Yes,” he agreed, “they are so afraid their readers won’t see my good
points that they set up red flags to mark them and beat a gong. They
mean well, but I wish they wouldn’t do it.”

He referred to the portion of his speech concerning the motto on the
coins. He had freely expressed similar sentiments on other public
occasions, and he had received a letter criticizing him for saying that
we do not really trust in God in any financial matter.

“I wanted to answer it,” he said; “but I destroyed it. It didn’t seem
worth noticing.”

I asked how the motto had originated.

“About 1853 some idiot in Congress wanted to announce to the world that
this was a religious nation, and proposed putting it there, and no other
Congressman had courage enough to oppose it, of course. It took courage
in those days to do a thing like that; but I think the same thing would
happen to-day.”

“Still the country has become broader. It took a brave man before the
Civil War to confess he had read the ‘Age of Reason’.”

“So it did, and yet that seems a mild book now. I read it first when I
was a cub pilot, read it with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its
fearlessness and wonderful power. I read it again a year or two ago,
for some reason, and was amazed to see how tame it had become. It seemed
that Paine was apologizing everywhere for hurting the feelings of the
reader.”

He drifted, naturally, into a discussion of the Knickerbocker Trust
Company’s suspension, which had tied up some fifty-five thousand dollars
of his capital, and wondered how many were trusting in God for the
return of these imperiled sums. Clemens himself, at this time, did not
expect to come out whole from that disaster. He had said very little
when the news came, though it meant that his immediate fortunes were
locked up, and it came near stopping the building activities at Redding.
It was only the smaller things of life that irritated him. He often met
large calamities with a serenity which almost resembled indifference.
In the Knickerbocker situation he even found humor as time passed, and
wrote a number of gay letters, some of which found their way into print.

It should be added that in the end there was no loss to any of the
Knickerbocker depositors.



CCLXVIII. REDDING

The building of the new home at Redding had been going steadily forward
for something more than a year. John Mead Howells had made the plans;
W. W. Sunderland and his son Philip, of Danbury, Connecticut, were the
builders, and in the absence of Miss Clemens, then on a concert
tour, Mark Twain’s secretary, Miss I. V. Lyon, had superintended the
furnishing.

“Innocence at Home,” as the place was originally named, was to be ready
for its occupant in June, with every detail in place, as he desired. He
had never visited Redding; he had scarcely even glanced at the plans or
discussed any of the decorations of the new home. He had required only
that there should be one great living-room for the orchestrelle, and
another big room for the billiard-table, with plenty of accommodations
for guests. He had required that the billiard-room be red, for something
in his nature answered to the warm luxury of that color, particularly
in moments of diversion. Besides, his other billiard-rooms had been
red, and such association may not be lightly disregarded. His one other
requirement was that the place should be complete.

“I don’t want to see it,” he said, “until the cat is purring on the
hearth.”

Howells says:

“He had grown so weary of change, and so indifferent to it, that he was
without interest.”

But it was rather, I think, that he was afraid of losing interest by
becoming wearied with details which were likely to exasperate him; also,
he wanted the dramatic surprise of walking into a home that had been
conjured into existence as with a word.

It was expected that the move would be made early in the month; but
there were delays, and it was not until the 18th of June that he took
possession.

The plan, at this time, was only to use the Redding place as a summer
residence, and the Fifth Avenue house was not dismantled. A few days
before the 18th the servants, with one exception, were taken up to the
new house, Clemens and myself remaining in the loneliness of No. 21,
attending to the letters in the morning and playing billiards the rest
of the time, waiting for the appointed day and train. It was really a
pleasant three days. He invented a new game, and we were riotous and
laughed as loudly as we pleased. I think he talked very little of the
new home which he was so soon to see. It was referred to no oftener than
once or twice a day, and then I believe only in connection with certain
of the billiard-room arrangements. I have wondered since what picture of
it he could have had in his mind, for he had never seen a photograph.
He had a general idea that it was built upon a hill, and that its
architecture was of the Italian villa order. I confess I had moments of
anxiety, for I had selected the land for him, and had been more or less
accessory otherwise. I did not really worry, for I knew how beautiful
and peaceful it all was; also something of his taste and needs.

It had been a dry spring, and country roads were dusty, so that those
who were responsible had been praying for rain, to be followed by a
pleasant day for his arrival. Both petitions were granted; June 18th
would fall on Thursday, and Monday night there came a good, thorough,
and refreshing shower that washed the vegetation clean and laid the
dust. The morning of the 18th was bright and sunny and cool. Clemens was
up and shaved by six o’clock in order to be in time, though the train
did not leave until four in the afternoon--an express newly timed to
stop at Redding--its first trip scheduled for the day of Mark Twain’s
arrival.

We were still playing billiards when word was brought up that the cab
was waiting. My daughter, Louise, whose school on Long Island had closed
that day, was with us. Clemens wore his white flannels and a Panama hat,
and at the station a group quickly collected, reporters and others,
to interview him and speed him to his new home. He was cordial and
talkative, and quite evidently full of pleasant anticipation. A reporter
or two and a special photographer came along, to be present at his
arrival.

The new, quick train, the green, flying landscape, with glimpses of the
Sound and white sails, the hillsides and clear streams becoming rapidly
steeper and dearer as we turned northward: all seemed to gratify
him, and when he spoke at all it was approvingly. The hour and a half
required to cover the sixty miles of distance seemed very short. As the
train slowed down for the Redding station, he said:

“We’ll leave this box of candy”--he had bought a large box on the
way--“those colored porters sometimes like candy, and we can get some
more.”

He drew out a great handful of silver.

“Give them something--give everybody liberally that does any service.”

There was a sort of open-air reception in waiting. Redding had
recognized the occasion as historic. A varied assemblage of vehicles
festooned with flowers had gathered to offer a gallant country welcome.

It was now a little before six o’clock of that long June day, still and
dreamlike; and to the people assembled there may have been something
which was not quite reality in the scene. There was a tendency to be
very still. They nodded, waved their hands to him, smiled, and looked
their fill; but a spell lay upon them, and they did not cheer. It would
have been a pity if they had done so. A noise, and the illusion would
have been shattered.

His carriage led away on the three-mile drive to the house on the
hilltop, and the floral turnout fell in behind. No first impression of
a fair land could have come at a sweeter time. Hillsides were green,
fields were white with daisies, dog-wood and laurel shone among the
trees. And over all was the blue sky, and everywhere the fragrance of
June.

He was very quiet as we drove along. Once with gentle humor, looking
over a white daisy field, he said:

“That is buckwheat. I always recognize buckwheat when I see it. I wish
I knew as much about other things as I know about buckwheat. It seems
to be very plentiful here; it even grows by the roadside.” And a little
later: “This is the kind of a road I like; a good country road through
the woods.”

The water was flowing over the mill-dam where the road crosses the
Saugatuck, and he expressed approval of that clear, picturesque little
river, one of those charming Connecticut streams. A little farther on
a brook cascaded down the hillside, and he compared it with some of the
tiny streams of Switzerland, I believe the Giessbach. The lane that led
to the new home opened just above, and as he entered the leafy way he
said, “This is just the kind of a lane I like,” thus completing his
acceptance of everything but the house and the location.

The last of the procession had dropped away at the entrance of the lane,
and he was alone with those who had most anxiety for his verdict. They
had not long to wait. As the carriage ascended higher to the open view
he looked away, across the Saugatuck Valley to the nestling village and
church-spire and farm-houses, and to the distant hills, and declared the
land to be a good land and beautiful--a spot to satisfy one’s soul. Then
came the house--simple and severe in its architecture--an Italian villa,
such as he had known in Florence, adapted now to American climate and
needs. The scars of building had not all healed yet, but close to the
house waved green grass and blooming flowers that might have been there
always. Neither did the house itself look new. The soft, gray stucco had
taken on a tone that melted into the sky and foliage of its background.
At the entrance his domestic staff waited to greet him, and then he
stepped across the threshold into the wide hall and stood in his own
home for the first time in seventeen years. It was an anxious moment,
and no one spoke immediately. But presently his eye had taken in the
satisfying harmony of the place and followed on through the wide doors
that led to the dining-room--on through the open French windows to an
enchanting vista of tree-tops and distant farmside and blue hills. He
said, very gently:

“How beautiful it all is? I did not think it could be as beautiful as
this.”

He was taken through the rooms; the great living-room at one end of
the hall--a room on the walls of which there was no picture, but only
color-harmony--and at the other end of the hall, the splendid, glowing
billiard-room, where hung all the pictures in which he took delight.
Then to the floor above, with its spacious apartments and a continuation
of color--welcome and concord, the windows open to the pleasant evening
hills. When he had seen it all--the natural Italian garden below the
terraces; the loggia, whose arches framed landscape vistas and formed a
rare picture-gallery; when he had completed the round and stood in
the billiard-room--his especial domain--once more he said, as a final
verdict:

“It is a perfect house--perfect, so far as I can see, in every detail.
It might have been here always.”

He was at home there from that moment--absolutely, marvelously at home,
for he fitted the setting perfectly, and there was not a hitch or flaw
in his adaptation. To see him over the billiard-table, five minutes
later, one could easily fancy that Mark Twain, as well as the house, had
“been there always.” Only the presence of his daughters was needed now
to complete his satisfaction in everything.

There were guests that first evening--a small home dinner-party--and so
perfect were the appointments and service, that one not knowing would
scarcely have imagined it to be the first dinner served in that lovely
room. A little later; at the foot of the garden of bay and cedar,
neighbors, inspired by Dan Beard, who had recently located near by, set
off some fireworks. Clemens stepped out on the terrace and saw rockets
climbing through the summer sky to announce his arrival.

“I wonder why they all go to so much trouble for me,” he said, softly.
“I never go to any trouble for anybody”--a statement which all who heard
it, and all his multitude of readers in every land, stood ready to deny.

That first evening closed with billiards--boisterous, triumphant
billiards--and when with midnight the day ended and the cues were set in
the rack, there was none to say that Mark Twain’s first day in his new
home had not been a happy one.



CCLXIX. FIRST DAYS AT STORMFIELD

I went up next afternoon, for I knew how he dreaded loneliness. We
played billiards for a time, then set out for a walk, following the long
drive to the leafy lane that led to my own property. Presently he said:

“In one way I am sorry I did not see this place sooner. I never want to
leave it again. If I had known it was so beautiful I should have vacated
the house in town and moved up here permanently.”

I suggested that he could still do so, if he chose, and he entered
immediately into the idea. By and by we turned down a deserted road,
grassy and beautiful, that ran along his land. At one side was a slope
facing the west, and dotted with the slender, cypress-like cedars of New
England. He had asked if that were part of his land, and on being told
it was he said:

“I would like Howells to have a house there. We must try to give that to
Howells.”

At the foot of the hill we came to a brook and followed it into a
meadow. I told him that I had often caught fine trout there, and that
soon I would bring in some for breakfast. He answered:

“Yes, I should like that. I don’t care to catch them any more myself. I
like them very hot.”

We passed through some woods and came out near my own ancient little
house. He noticed it and said:

“The man who built that had some memory of Greece in his mind when he
put on that little porch with those columns.”

My second daughter, Frances, was coming from a distant school on the
evening train, and the carriage was starting just then to bring her. I
suggested that perhaps he would find it pleasant to make the drive.

“Yes,” he agreed, “I should enjoy that.”

So I took the reins, and he picked up little Joy, who came running out
just then, and climbed into the back seat. It was another beautiful
evening, and he was in a talkative humor. Joy pointed out a small turtle
in the road, and he said:

“That is a wild turtle. Do you think you could teach it arithmetic?”

Joy was uncertain.

“Well,” he went on, “you ought to get an arithmetic--a little ten-cent
arithmetic--and teach that turtle.”

We passed some swampy woods, rather dim and junglelike.

“Those,” he said, “are elephant woods.”

But Joy answered:

“They are fairy woods. The fairies are there, but you can’t see them
because they wear magic cloaks.”

He said: “I wish I had one of those magic cloaks, sometimes. I had one
once, but it is worn out now.”

Joy looked at him reverently, as one who had once been the owner of a
piece of fairyland.

It was a sweet drive to and from the village. There are none too many
such evenings in a lifetime. Colonel Harvey’s little daughter, Dorothy,
came up a day or two later, and with my daughter Louise spent the first
week with him in the new home. They were created “Angel-Fishes”--the
first in the new aquarium; that is to say, the billiard-room, where
he followed out the idea by hanging a row of colored prints of Bermuda
fishes in a sort of frieze around the walls. Each visiting member was
required to select one as her particular patron fish and he wrote her
name upon it. It was his delight to gather his juvenile guests in
this room and teach them the science of billiard angles; but it was so
difficult to resist taking the cue and making plays himself that he was
required to stand on a little platform and give instruction just out of
reach. His snowy flannels and gleaming white hair, against those rich
red walls, with those small, summer-clad players, made a pretty picture.

The place did not retain its original name. He declared that it would
always be “Innocence at Home” to the angel-fish visitors, but that the
title didn’t remain continuously appropriate. The money which he had
derived from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven had been used to
build the loggia wing, and he considered the name of “Stormfield” as
a substitute. When, presently, the summer storms gathered on that
rock-bound, open hill, with its wide reaches of vine and shrub-wild,
fierce storms that bent the birch and cedar, and strained at the bay and
huckleberry, with lightning and turbulent wind and thunder, followed
by the charging rain--the name seemed to become peculiarly appropriate.
Standing with his head bared to the tumult, his white hair tossing in
the blast, and looking out upon the wide splendor of the spectacle, he
rechristened the place, and “Stormfield” it became and remained.

The last day of Mark Twain’s first week in Redding, June 25th, was
saddened by the news of the death of Grover Cleveland at his home in
Princeton, New Jersey. Clemens had always been an ardent Cleveland
admirer, and to Mrs. Cleveland now he sent this word of condolence--

    Your husband was a man I knew and loved and honored for twenty-five
    years. I mourn with you.

And once during the evening he said:

“He was one of our two or three real Presidents. There is none to take
his place.”



CCLXX. THE ALDRICH MEMORIAL. At the end of June came the dedication at
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, of the Thomas Bailey Aldrich Memorial
Museum, which the poet’s wife had established there in the old Aldrich
homestead. It was hot weather. We were obliged to take a rather poor
train from South Norwalk, and Clemens was silent and gloomy most of the
way to Boston. Once there, however, lodged in a cool and comfortable
hotel, matters improved. He had brought along for reading the old copy
of Sir Thomas Malory’s Arthur Tales, and after dinner he took off
his clothes and climbed into bed and sat up and read aloud from those
stately legends, with comments that I wish I could remember now, only
stopping at last when overpowered with sleep.

We went on a special train to Portsmouth next morning through the summer
heat, and assembled, with those who were to speak, in the back
portion of the opera-house, behind the scenes: Clemens was genial and
good-natured with all the discomfort of it; and he liked to fancy,
with Howells, who had come over from Kittery Point, how Aldrich must
be amused at the whole circumstance if he could see them punishing
themselves to do honor to his memory. Richard Watson Gilder was there,
and Hamilton Mabie; also Governor Floyd of New Hampshire; Colonel
Higginson, Robert Bridges, and other distinguished men. We got to the
more open atmosphere of the stage presently, and the exercises began.
Clemens was last on the program.

The others had all said handsome, serious things, and Clemens himself
had mentally prepared something of the sort; but when his turn came, and
he rose to speak, a sudden reaction must have set in, for he delivered
an address that certainly would have delighted Aldrich living, and must
have delighted him dead, if he could hear it. It was full of the most
charming humor, delicate, refreshing, and spontaneous. The audience,
that had been maintaining a proper gravity throughout, showed its
appreciation in ripples of merriment that grew presently into genuine
waves of laughter. He spoke out his regret for having worn black
clothes. It was a mistake, he said, to consider this a solemn
time--Aldrich would not have wished it to be so considered. He had been
a man who loved humor and brightness and wit, and had helped to make
life merry and delightful. Certainly, if he could know, he would not
wish this dedication of his own home to be a lugubrious, smileless
occasion. Outside, when the services were ended, the venerable juvenile
writer, J. T. Trowbridge, came up to Clemens with extended hand. Clemens
said: “Trowbridge, are you still alive? You must be a thousand years
old. Why, I listened to your stories while I was being rocked in the
cradle.” Trowbridge said:

“Mark, there’s some mistake. My earliest infant smile was wakened with
one of your jokes.”

They stood side by side against a fence in the blazing sun and were
photographed--an interesting picture.

We returned to Boston that evening. Clemens did not wish to hurry in
the summer heat, and we remained another day quietly sight-seeing, and
driving around and around Commonwealth Avenue in a victoria in the cool
of the evening. Once, remembering Aldrich, he said:

“I was just planning Tom Sawyer when he was beginning the ‘Story of a
Bad Boy’. When I heard that he was writing that I thought of giving up
mine, but Aldrich insisted that it would be a foolish thing to do. He
thought my Missouri boy could not by any chance conflict with his boy of
New England, and of course he was right.”

He spoke of how great literary minds usually came along in company. He
said:

“Now and then, on the stream of time, small gobs of that thing which
we call genius drift down, and a few of these lodge at some particular
point, and others collect about them and make a sort of intellectual
island--a towhead, as they say on the river--such an accumulation of
intellect we call a group, or school, and name it.

“Thirty years ago there was the Cambridge group. Now there’s been still
another, which included Aldrich and Howells and Stedman and Cable. It
will soon be gone. I suppose they will have to name it by and by.”

He pointed out houses here and there of people he had known and visited
in other days. The driver was very anxious to go farther, to other
and more distinguished sights. Clemens mildly but firmly refused any
variation of the program, and so we kept on driving around and around
the shaded loop of Beacon Street until dusk fell and the lights began to
twinkle among the trees.



CCLXXI. DEATH OF “SAM” MOFFETT

Clemens’ next absence from Redding came on August 1, 1908, when the
sudden and shocking news was received of the drowning of his nephew,
Samuel E. Moffett, in the surf of the Jersey shore. Moffett was his
nearest male relative, and a man of fine intellect and talents. He was
superior in those qualities which men love--he was large-minded and
large-hearted, and of noble ideals. With much of the same sense of humor
which had made his uncle’s fame, he had what was really an abnormal
faculty of acquiring and retaining encyclopedic data. Once as a child
he had visited Hartford when Clemens was laboring over his history game.
The boy was much interested, and asked permission to help. His uncle
willingly consented, and referred him to the library for his facts. But
he did not need to consult the books; he already had English history
stored away, and knew where to find every detail of it. At the time
of his death Moffett held an important editorial position on Collier’s
Weekly.

Clemens was fond and proud of his nephew. Returning from the funeral, he
was much depressed, and a day or two later became really ill. He was
in bed for a few days, resting, he said, after the intense heat of the
journey. Then he was about again and proposed billiards as a diversion.
We were all alone one very still, warm August afternoon playing, when he
suddenly said:

“I feel a little dizzy; I will sit down a moment.”

I brought him a glass of water and he seemed to recover, but when he
rose and started to play I thought he had a dazed look. He said:

“I have lost my memory. I don’t know which is my ball. I don’t know what
game we are playing.”

But immediately this condition passed, and we thought little of it,
considering it merely a phase of biliousness due to his recent journey.
I have been told since, by eminent practitioners, that it was the first
indication of a more serious malady.

He became apparently quite himself again and showed his usual
vigor-light of step and movement, able to skip up and down stairs as
heretofore. In a letter to Mrs. Crane, August 12th, he spoke of recent
happenings:

    DEAR AUNT SUE,--It was a most moving, a most heartbreaking sight,
    the spectacle of that stunned & crushed & inconsolable family. I
    came back here in bad shape, & had a bilious collapse, but I am all
    right again, though the doctor from New York has given peremptory
    orders that I am not to stir from here before frost. O fortunate
    Sam Moffett! fortunate Livy Clemens! doubly fortunate Susy! Those
    swords go through & through my heart, but there is never a moment
    that I am not glad, for the sake of the dead, that they have
    escaped.

    How Livy would love this place! How her very soul would steep
    itself thankfully in this peace, this tranquillity, this deep
    stillness, this dreamy expanse of woodsy hill & valley! You must
    come, Aunt Sue, & stay with us a real good visit. Since June 26 we
    have had 21 guests, & they have all liked it and said they would
    come again.

To Howells, on the same day, he wrote:

    Won’t you & Mrs. Howells & Mildred come & give us as many days as
    you can spare & examine John’s triumph? It is the most satisfactory
    house I am acquainted with, & the most satisfactorily situated..
   .. I have dismissed my stenographer, & have entered upon a
    holiday whose other end is the cemetery.



CCLXXII. STORMFIELD ADVENTURES

Clemens had fully decided, by this time, to live the year round in the
retirement at Stormfield, and the house at 21 Fifth Avenue was being
dismantled. He had also, as he said, given up his dictations for the
time, at least, after continuing them, with more or less regularity,
for a period of two and a half years, during which he had piled up about
half a million words of comment and reminiscence. His general idea
had been to add portions of this matter to his earlier books as the
copyrights expired, to give them new life and interest, and he felt that
he had plenty now for any such purpose.

He gave his time mainly to his guests, his billiards, and his reading,
though of course he could not keep from writing on this subject and that
as the fancy moved him, and a drawer in one of his dressers began to
accumulate fresh though usually fragmentary manuscripts... He read the
daily paper, but he no longer took the keen, restless interest in public
affairs. New York politics did not concern him any more, and national
politics not much. When the Evening Post wrote him concerning the
advisability of renominating Governor Hughes he replied:

    If you had asked me two months ago my answer would have been prompt
    & loud & strong: yes, I want Governor Hughes renominated. But it is
    too late, & my mouth is closed. I have become a citizen & taxpayer
    of Connecticut, & could not now, without impertinence, meddle in
    matters which are none of my business. I could not do it with
    impertinence without trespassing on the monopoly of another.

Howells speaks of Mark Twain’s “absolute content” with his new home, and
these are the proper words’ to express it. He was like a storm-beaten
ship that had drifted at last into a serene South Sea haven.

The days began and ended in tranquillity. There were no special morning
regulations: One could have his breakfast at any time and at almost
any place. He could have it in bed if he liked, or in the loggia or
livingroom, or billiard-room. He might even have it in the diningroom,
or on the terrace, just outside. Guests--there were usually
guests--might suit their convenience in this matter--also as to the
forenoons. The afternoon brought games--that is, billiards, provided
the guest knew billiards, otherwise hearts. Those two games were his
safety-valves, and while there were no printed requirements relating to
them the unwritten code of Stormfield provided that guests, of whatever
age or previous faith, should engage in one or both of these diversions.

Clemens, who usually spent his forenoon in bed with his reading and
his letters, came to the green table of skill and chance eager for
the onset; if the fates were kindly, he approved of them openly. If
not--well, the fates were old enough to know better, and, as heretofore,
had to take the consequences. Sometimes, when the weather was fine and
there were no games (this was likely to be on Sunday afternoons), there
were drives among the hills and along the Saugatuck through the Bedding
Glen.

The cat was always “purring on the hearth” at Stormfield--several
cats--for Mark Twain’s fondness for this clean, intelligent domestic
animal remained, to the end, one of his happiest characteristics. There
were never too many cats at Stormfield, and the “hearth” included the
entire house, even the billiard-table. When, as was likely to happen at
any time during the game, the kittens Sinbad, or Danbury, or Billiards
would decide to hop up and play with the balls, or sit in the pockets
and grab at them as they went by, the game simply added this element
of chance, and the uninvited player was not disturbed. The cats really
owned Stormfield; any one could tell that from their deportment. Mark
Twain held the title deeds; but it was Danbury and Sinbad and the others
that possessed the premises. They occupied any portion of the house or
its furnishings at will, and they never failed to attract attention.
Mark Twain might be preoccupied and indifferent to the comings and
goings of other members of the household; but no matter what he was
doing, let Danbury appear in the offing and he was observed and greeted
with due deference, and complimented and made comfortable. Clemens would
arise from the table and carry certain choice food out on the terrace
to Tammany, and be satisfied with almost no acknowledgment by way of
appreciation. One could not imagine any home of Mark Twain where the
cats were not supreme. In the evening, as at 21 Fifth Avenue, there was
music--the stately measures of the orchestrelle--while Mark Twain smoked
and mingled unusual speculation with long, long backward dreams.

It was three months from the day of arrival in Redding that some guests
came to Stormfield without invitation--two burglars, who were carrying
off some bundles of silver when they were discovered. Claude, the
butler, fired a pistol after them to hasten their departure, and
Clemens, wakened by the shots, thought the family was opening champagne
and went to sleep again.

It was far in the night; but neighbor H. A. Lounsbury and Deputy-Sheriff
Banks were notified, and by morning the thieves were captured, though
only after a pretty desperate encounter, during which the officer
received a bullet-wound. Lounsbury and a Stormfield guest had tracked
them in the dark with a lantern to Bethel, a distance of some seven
miles. The thieves, also their pursuers, had boarded the train there.
Sheriff Banks was waiting at the West Redding station when the train
came down, and there the capture was made. It was a remarkably prompt
and shrewd piece of work. Clemens gave credit for its success chiefly
to Lounsbury, whose talents in many fields always impressed him. The
thieves were taken to the Redding Town Hall for a preliminary healing.
Subsequently they received severe sentences.

Clemens tacked this notice on his front door:

                       NOTICE

                   TO THE NEXT BURGLAR

    There is nothing but plated ware in this house now and henceforth.

    You will find it in that brass thing in the dining-room over in the
    corner by the basket of kittens.

    If you want the basket put the kittens in the brass thing. Do not
    make a noise--it disturbs the family.

    You will find rubbers in the front hall by that thing which has the
    umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think they call it, or pergola, or
    something like that.

    Please close the door when you go away!

                  Very truly yours,
                                S. L. CLEMENS.



CCLXXIII. STORMFIELD PHILOSOPHIES

Now came the tranquil days of the Connecticut autumn. The change of
the landscape colors was a constant delight to Mark Twain. There
were several large windows in his room, and he called them his
picture-gallery. The window-panes were small, and each formed a separate
picture of its own that was changing almost hourly. The red tones that
began to run through the foliage; the red berry bushes; the fading
grass, and the little touches of sparkling frost that came every now and
then at early morning; the background of distant blue hills and changing
skies-these things gave his gallery a multitude of variation that no
art-museums could furnish. He loved it all, and he loved to walk out
in it, pacing up and down the terrace, or the long path that led to
the pergola at the foot of a natural garden. If a friend came, he was
willing to walk much farther; and we often descended the hill in
one direction or another, though usually going toward the “gorge,”
 a romantic spot where a clear brook found its way through a deep and
rather dangerous-looking chasm. Once he was persuaded to descend into
this fairy-like place, for it was well worth exploring; but his footing
was no longer sure and he did not go far.

He liked better to sit on the grass-grown, rocky arch above and look
down into it, and let his talk follow his mood. He liked to contemplate
the geology of his surroundings, the record of the ageless periods of
construction required to build the world. The marvels of science always
appealed to him. He reveled in the thought of the almost limitless
stretches of time, the millions upon millions of years that had been
required for this stratum and that--he liked to amaze himself with the
sounding figures. I remember him expressing a wish to see the Grand
Canon of Arizona, where, on perpendicular walls six thousand feet high,
the long story of geological creation is written. I had stopped there
during my Western trip of the previous year, and I told him something
of its wonders. I urged him to see them for himself, offering to go with
him. He said:

“I should enjoy that; but the railroad journey is so far and I should
have no peace. The papers would get hold of it, and I would have to make
speeches and be interviewed, and I never want to do any of those things
again.”

I suggested that the railroads would probably be glad to place a private
car at his service, so that he might travel in comfort; but he shook his
head.

“That would only make me more conspicuous.”

“How about a disguise?”

“Yes,” he said, “I might put on a red wig and false whiskers and change
my name, but I couldn’t disguise my drawling speech and they’d find me
out.”

It was amusing, but it was rather sad, too. His fame had deprived him of
valued privileges.

He talked of many things during these little excursions. Once he told
how he had successively advised his nephew, Moffett, in the matter of
obtaining a desirable position. Moffett had wanted to become a reporter.
Clemens devised a characteristic scheme. He said:

“I will get you a place on any newspaper you may select if you promise
faithfully to follow out my instructions.”

The applicant agreed, eagerly enough. Clemens said:

“Go to the newspaper of your choice. Say that you are idle and want
work, that you are pining for work--longing for it, and that you ask
no wages, and will support yourself. All that you ask is work. That
you will do anything, sweep, fill the inkstands, mucilage-bottles, run
errands, and be generally useful. You must never ask for wages. You
must wait until the offer of wages comes to you. You must work just as
faithfully and just as eagerly as if you were being paid for it. Then
see what happens.”

The scheme had worked perfectly. Young Moffett had followed his
instructions to the letter. By and by he attracted attention. He was
employed in a variety of ways that earned him the gratitude and the
confidence of the office. In obedience to further instructions, he began
to make short, brief, unadorned notices of small news matters that came
under his eye and laid them on the city editor’s desk. No pay was asked;
none was expected. Occasionally one of the items was used. Then, of
course, it happened, as it must sooner or later at a busy time, that
he was given a small news assignment. There was no trouble about his
progress after that. He had won the confidence of the management and
shown that he was not afraid to work.

The plan had been variously tried since, Clemens said, and he could not
remember any case in which it had failed. The idea may have grown out
of his own pilot apprenticeship on the river, when cub pilots not only
received no salary, but paid for the privilege of learning.

Clemens discussed public matters less often than formerly, but they were
not altogether out of his mind. He thought our republic was in a fair
way to become a monarchy--that the signs were already evident. He
referred to the letter which he had written so long ago in Boston, with
its amusing fancy of the Archbishop of Dublin and his Grace of Ponkapog,
and declared that, after all, it contained something of prophecy.--[See
chap. xcvii; also Appendix M.]--He would not live to see the actual
monarchy, he said, but it was coming.

“I’m not expecting it in my time nor in my children’s time, though it
may be sooner than we think. There are two special reasons for it and
one condition. The first reason is, that it is in the nature of man
to want a definite something to love, honor, reverently look up to and
obey; a God and King, for example. The second reason is, that while
little republics have lasted long, protected by their poverty and
insignificance, great ones have not. And the condition is, vast power
and wealth, which breed commercial and political corruptions, and incite
public favorites to dangerous ambitions.”

He repeated what I had heard him say before, that in one sense we
already had a monarchy; that is to say, a ruling public and political
aristocracy which could create a Presidential succession. He did not say
these things bitterly now, but reflectively and rather indifferently.

He was inclined to speak unhopefully of the international plans for
universal peace, which were being agitated rather persistently.

“The gospel of peace,” he said, “is always making a deal of noise,
always rejoicing in its progress but always neglecting to furnish
statistics. There are no peaceful nations now. All Christendom is a
soldier-camp. The poor have been taxed in some nations to the starvation
point to support the giant armaments which Christian governments
have built up, each to protect itself from the rest of the Christian
brotherhood, and incidentally to snatch any scrap of real estate
left exposed by a weaker owner. King Leopold II. of Belgium, the most
intensely Christian monarch, except Alexander VI., that has escaped hell
thus far, has stolen an entire kingdom in Africa, and in fourteen years
of Christian endeavor there has reduced the population from thirty
millions to fifteen by murder and mutilation and overwork, confiscating
the labor of the helpless natives, and giving them nothing in return
but salvation and a home in heaven, furnished at the last moment by the
Christian priest.

“Within the last generation each Christian power has turned the bulk
of its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more and more
effective ways of killing Christians, and, incidentally, a pagan now and
then; and the surest way to get rich quickly in Christ’s earthly kingdom
is to invent a kind of gun that can kill more Christians at one shot
than any other existing kind. All the Christian nations are at it. The
more advanced they are, the bigger and more destructive engines of war
they create.”

Once, speaking of battles great and small, and how important even a
small battle must seem to a soldier who had fought in no other, he said:

“To him it is a mighty achievement, an achievement with a big A, when
to a wax-worn veteran it would be a mere incident. For instance, to the
soldier of one battle, San Juan Hill was an Achievement with an A as big
as the Pyramids of Cheops; whereas, if Napoleon had fought it, he would
have set it down on his cuff at the time to keep from forgetting it
had happened. But that is all natural and human enough. We are all like
that.”

The curiosities and absurdities of religious superstitions never failed
to furnish him with themes more or less amusing. I remember one Sunday,
when he walked down to have luncheon at my house, he sat under the shade
and fell to talking of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, which he said
could not have happened.

“Tacitus makes no mention of it,” he said, “and he would hardly have
overlooked a sweeping order like that, issued by a petty ruler like
Herod. Just consider a little king of a corner of the Roman Empire
ordering the slaughter of the first-born of a lot of Roman subjects.
Why, the Emperor would have reached out that long arm of his and
dismissed Herod. That tradition is probably about as authentic as those
connected with a number of old bridges in Europe which are said to
have been built by Satan. The inhabitants used to go to Satan to build
bridges for them, promising him the soul of the first one that crossed
the bridge; then, when Satan had the bridge done, they would send over a
rooster or a jackass--a cheap jackass; that was for Satan, and of course
they could fool him that way every time. Satan must have been pretty
simple, even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn’t have led
Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall
down and worship him. That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because
Christ, as the Son of God, already owned the world; and, besides, what
Satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of Palestine. It is just as
if some one should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the Standard
Oil Company, with a gallon of kerosene.”

He often spoke of the unseen forces of creation, the immutable laws
that hold the planet in exact course and bring the years and the seasons
always exactly on schedule time. “The Great Law” was a phrase often
on his lips. The exquisite foliage, the cloud shapes, the varieties of
color everywhere: these were for him outward manifestations of the
Great Law, whose principle I understood to be unity--exact relations
throughout all nature; and in this I failed to find any suggestion
of pessimism, but only of justice. Once he wrote on a card for
preservation:

    From everlasting to everlasting, this is the law: the sum of wrong &
    misery shall always keep exact step with the sum of human
    blessedness.

    No “civilization,” no “advance,” has ever modified these proportions
    by even the shadow of a shade, nor ever can, while our race endures.



CCLXIV. CITIZEN AND FARMER

The procession of guests at Stormfield continued pretty steadily.
Clemens kept a book in which visitors set down their names and the
dates of arrival and departure, and when they failed to attend to these
matters he diligently did it himself after they were gone.

Members of the Harper Company came up with their wives; “angel-fish”
 swam in and out of the aquarium; Bermuda friends came to see the new
home; Robert Collier, the publisher, and his wife--“Mrs. Sally,” as
Clemens liked to call her--paid their visits; Lord Northcliffe, who was
visiting America, came with Colonel Harvey, and was so impressed
with the architecture of Stormfield that he adopted its plans for a
country-place he was about to build in Newfoundland. Helen Keller, with
Mr. and Mrs. Macy, came up for a week-end visit. Mrs. Crane came over
from Elmira; and, behold! one day came the long-ago sweetheart of his
childhood, little Laura Hawkins--Laura Frazer now, widowed and in the
seventies, with a granddaughter already a young lady quite grown up.

That Mark Twain was not wearying of the new conditions we may gather
from a letter written to Mrs. Rogers in October:

    I’ve grown young in these months of dissipation here. And I have
    left off drinking--it isn’t necessary now. Society & theology are
    sufficient for me.

To Helen Allen, a Bermuda “Angel-Fish,” he wrote:

    We have good times here in this soundless solitude on the hilltop.
    The moment I saw the house I was glad I built it, & now I am gladder
    & gladder all the time. I was not dreaming of living here except in
    the summer-time--that was before I saw this region & the house, you
    see--but that is all changed now; I shall stay here winter & summer
    both & not go back to New York at all. My child, it’s as tranquil &
    contenting as Bermuda. You will be very welcome here, dear.

He interested himself in the affairs and in the people of Redding. Not
long after his arrival he had gathered in all the inhabitants of the
country-side, neighbors of every quality, for closer acquaintance,
and threw open to them for inspection every part of the new house. He
appointed Mrs. Lounsbury, whose acquaintance was very wide; a sort of
committee on reception, and stood at the entrance with her to welcome
each visitor in person.

It was a sort of gala day, and the rooms and the grounds were filled
with the visitors. In the dining-room there were generous refreshments.
Again, not long afterward, he issued a special invitation to all of
those-architects, builders, and workmen who had taken any part, however
great or small, in the building of his home. Mr. and Mrs. Littleton were
visiting Stormfield at this time, and both Clemens and Littleton spoke
to these assembled guests from the terrace, and made them feel that
their efforts had been worth while.

Presently the idea developed to establish something that would be of
benefit to his neighbors, especially to those who did not have access to
much reading-matter. He had been for years flooded with books by authors
and publishers, and there was a heavy surplus at his home in the city.
When these began to arrive he had a large number of volumes set aside as
the nucleus of a public library. An unused chapel not far away--it could
be seen from one of his windows--was obtained for the purpose; officers
were elected; a librarian was appointed, and so the Mark Twain Library
of Redding was duly established. Clemens himself was elected its
first president, with the resident physician, Dr. Ernest H. Smith,
vice-president, and another resident, William E. Grumman, librarian.
On the afternoon of its opening the president made a brief address. He
said:

    I am here to speak a few instructive words to my fellow-farmers.
    I suppose you are all farmers: I am going to put in a crop next
    year, when I have been here long enough and know how. I couldn’t
    make a turnip stay on a tree now after I had grown it. I like to
    talk. It would take more than the Redding air to make me keep
    still, and I like to instruct people. It’s noble to be good, and
    it’s nobler to teach others to be good, and less trouble. I am glad
    to help this library. We get our morals from books. I didn’t get
    mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books
    --theoretically at least. Mr. Beard or Mr. Adams will give some
    land, and by and by we are going to have a building of our own.

This statement was news to both Mr. Beard and Mr. Adams and an
inspiration of the moment; but Mr. Theodore Adams, who owned a most
desirable site, did in fact promptly resolve to donate it for library
purposes. Clemens continued:

    I am going to help build that library with contributions from my
    visitors. Every male guest who comes to my house will have to
    contribute a dollar or go away without his baggage.

    --[A characteristic notice to guests requiring them to contribute a
    dollar to the Library Building Fund was later placed on the
    billiard-room mantel at Stormfield with good results.]--If those
    burglars that broke into my house recently had done that they would
    have been happier now, or if they’d have broken into this library
    they would have read a few books and led a better life. Now they
    are in jail, and if they keep on they will go to Congress. When a
    person starts downhill you can never tell where he’s going to stop.
    I am sorry for those burglars. They got nothing that they wanted
    and scared away most of my servants. Now we are putting in a
    burglar-alarm instead of a dog. Some advised the dog, but it costs
    even more to entertain a dog than a burglar. I am having the ground
    electrified, so that for a mile around any one who puts his foot
    across the line sets off an alarm that will be heard in Europe. Now
    I will introduce the real president to you, a man whom you know
    already--Dr. Smith.

So a new and important benefit was conferred upon the community, and
there was a feeling that Redding, besides having a literary colony, was
to be literary in fact.

It might have been mentioned earlier that Redding already had literary
associations when Mark Twain arrived. As far back as Revolutionary days
Joel Barlow, a poet of distinction, and once Minister to France, had
been a resident of Redding, and there were still Barlow descendants in
the township.

William Edgar Grumman, the librarian, had written the story of Redding’s
share in the Revolutionary War--no small share, for Gen. Israel Putnam’s
army had been quartered there during at least one long, trying winter.
Charles Burr Todd, of one of the oldest Redding families, himself--still
a resident, was also the author of a Redding history.

Of literary folk not native to Redding, Dora Reed Goodale and her sister
Elaine, the wife of Dr. Charles A. Eastman, had, long been residents of
Redding Center; Jeanette L. Gilder and Ida M. Tarbell had summer homes
on Redding Ridge; Dan Beard, as already mentioned, owned a place
near the banks of the Saugatuck, while Kate V. St. Maur, also two of
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s granddaughters had recently located adjoining the
Stormfield lands. By which it will be seen that Redding was in no way
unsuitable as a home for Mark Twain.



CCLXV. A MANTEL AND A BABY ELEPHANT

Mark Twain was the receiver of two notable presents that year. The
first of these, a mantel from Hawaii, presented to him by the Hawaiian
Promotion Committee, was set in place in the billiard-room on the
morning of his seventy-third birthday. This committee had written,
proposing to build for his new home either a mantel or a chair, as
he might prefer, the same to be carved from the native woods. Clemens
decided on a billiard-room mantel, and John Howells forwarded the proper
measurements. So, in due time, the mantel arrived, a beautiful piece of
work and in fine condition, with the Hawaiian word, “Aloha,” one of
the sweetest forms of greeting in any tongue, carved as its central
ornament.

To the donors of the gift Clemens wrote:

    The beautiful mantel was put in its place an hour ago, & its
    friendly “Aloha” was the first uttered greeting received on my 73d
    birthday. It is rich in color, rich in quality, & rich in
    decoration; therefore it exactly harmonized with the taste for such
    things which was born in me & which I have seldom been able to
    indulge to my content. It will be a great pleasure to me, daily
    renewed, to have under my eye this lovely reminder of the loveliest
    fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean, & I beg to thank
    the committee for providing me that pleasure.

To F. N. Otremba, who had carved the mantel, he sent this word:

    I am grateful to you for the valued compliment to me in the labor of
    heart and hand and brain which you have put upon it. It is worthy
    of the choicest place in the house and it has it.

It was the second beautiful mantel in Stormfield--the Hartford library
mantel, removed when that house was sold, having been installed in the
Stormfield living-room.

Altogether the seventy-third birthday was a pleasant one. Clemens, in
the morning, drove down to see the library lot which Mr. Theodore Adams
had presented, and the rest of the day there were fine, close billiard
games, during which he was in the gentlest and happiest moods. He
recalled the games of two years before, and as we stopped playing I
said:

“I hope a year from now we shall be here, still playing the great game.”

And he answered, as then:

“Yes, it is a great game--the best game on earth.” And he held out his
hand and thanked me for coming, as he never failed to do when we parted,
though it always hurt me a little, for the debt was so largely mine.

Mark Twain’s second present came at Christmas-time. About ten days
earlier, a letter came from Robert J. Collier, saying that he had
bought a baby elephant which he intended to present to Mark Twain as a
Christmas gift. He added that it would be sent as soon as he could get a
car for it, and the loan of a keeper from Barnum & Bailey’s headquarters
at Bridgeport.

The news created a disturbance in Stormfield. One could not refuse,
discourteously and abruptly, a costly present like that; but it seemed a
disaster to accept it. An elephant would require a roomy and warm place,
also a variety of attention which Stormfield was not prepared to supply.
The telephone was set going and certain timid excuses were offered by
the secretary. There was no good place to put an elephant in Stormfield,
but Mr. Collier said, quite confidently:

“Oh, put him in the garage.”

“But there’s no heat in the garage.”

“Well, put him in the loggia, then. That’s closed in, isn’t it, for the
winter? Plenty of sunlight--just the place for a young elephant.”

“But we play cards in the loggia. We use it for a sort of sun-parlor.”

“But that wouldn’t matter. He’s a kindly, playful little thing. He’ll be
just like a kitten. I’ll send the man up to look over the place and tell
you just how to take care of him, and I’ll send up several bales of hay
in advance. It isn’t a large elephant, you know: just a little one--a
regular plaything.”

There was nothing further to be done; only to wait and dread until the
Christmas present’s arrival.

A few days before Christmas ten bales of hay arrived and several bushels
of carrots. This store of provender aroused no enthusiasm at Stormfield.
It would seem there was no escape now.

On Christmas morning Mr. Lounsbury telephoned up that there was a man at
the station who said he was an elephant-trainer from Barnum & Bailey’s,
sent by Mr. Collier to look at the elephant’s quarters and get him
settled when he should arrive. Orders were given to bring the man over.
The day of doom was at hand.

But Lounsbury’s detective instinct came once more into play. He had seen
a good many elephant-trainers at Bridgeport, and he thought this one had
a doubtful look.

“Where is the elephant?” he asked, as they drove along.

“He will arrive at noon.”

“Where are you going to put him?”

“In the loggia.”

“How big is he?”

“About the size of a cow.”

“How long have you been with Barnum and Bailey?”

“Six years.”

“Then you must know some friends of mine” (naming two that had no
existence until that moment).

“Oh yes, indeed. I know them well.”

Lounsbury didn’t say any more just then, but he had a feeling that
perhaps the dread at Stormfield had grown unnecessarily large. Something
told him that this man seemed rather more like a butler, or a valet,
than an elephant-trainer. They drove to Stormfield, and the trainer
looked over the place. It would do perfectly, he said. He gave a few
instructions as to the care of this new household feature, and was
driven back to the station to bring it.

Lounsbury came back by and by, bringing the elephant but not the
trainer. It didn’t need a trainer. It was a beautiful specimen, with
soft, smooth coat and handsome trappings, perfectly quiet, well-behaved
and small--suited to the loggia, as Collier had said--for it was only
two feet long and beautifully made of cloth and cotton--one of the
forest toy elephants ever seen anywhere.

It was a good joke, such as Mark Twain loved--a carefully prepared,
harmless bit of foolery. He wrote Robert Collier, threatening him
with all sorts of revenge, declaring that the elephant was devastating
Stormfield.

“To send an elephant in a trance, under pretense that it was dead or
stuffed!” he said. “The animal came to life, as you knew it would, and
began to observe Christmas, and we now have no furniture left and
no servants and no visitors, no friends, no photographs, no
burglars--nothing but the elephant. Be kind, be merciful, be generous;
take him away and send us what is left of the earthquake.”

Collier wrote that he thought it unkind of him to look a gift-elephant
in the trunk. And with such chaffing and gaiety the year came to an end.



CCLXXVI. SHAKESPEARE-BACON TALK

When the bad weather came there was not much company at Stormfield,
and I went up regularly each afternoon, for it was lonely on that bleak
hill, and after his forenoon of reading or writing he craved diversion.
My own home was a little more than a half mile away, and I enjoyed the
walk, whatever the weather. I usually managed to arrive about three
o’clock. He would watch from his high windows until he saw me raise the
hilltop, and he would be at the door when I arrived, so that there might
be no delay in getting at the games. Or, if it happened that he wished
to show me something in his room, I would hear his rich voice sounding
down the stair. Once, when I arrived, I heard him calling, and going
up I found him highly pleased with the arrangement of two pictures on a
chair, placed so that the glasses of them reflected the sunlight on the
ceiling. He said:

“They seem to catch the reflection of the sky and the winter colors.
Sometimes the hues are wonderfully iridescent.”

He pointed to a bunch of wild red berries on the mantel with the sun on
them.

“How beautifully they light up!” he said; “some of them in the sunlight,
some still in the shadow.”

He walked to the window and stood looking out on the somber fields.

“The lights and colors are always changing there,” he said. “I never
tire of it.”

To see him then so full of the interest and delight of the moment, one
might easily believe he had never known tragedy and shipwreck. More
than any one I ever knew, he lived in the present. Most of us are either
dreaming of the past or anticipating the future--forever beating the
dirge of yesterday or the tattoo of to-morrow. Mark Twain’s step was
timed to the march of the moment. There were days when he recalled the
past and grieved over it, and when he speculated concerning the future;
but his greater interest was always of the now, and of the particular
locality where he found it. The thing which caught his fancy, however
slight or however important, possessed him fully for the time, even if
never afterward.

He was especially interested that winter in the Shakespeare-Bacon
problem. He had long been unable to believe that the actor-manager from
Stratford had written those great plays, and now a book just published,
‘The Shakespeare Problem Restated’, by George Greenwood, and another one
in press, ‘Some Characteristic Signatures of Francis Bacon’, by William
Stone Booth, had added the last touch of conviction that Francis Bacon,
and Bacon only, had written the Shakespeare dramas. I was ardently
opposed to this idea. The romance of the boy, Will Shakespeare, who had
come up to London and began, by holding horses outside of the theater,
and ended by winning the proudest place in the world of letters,
was something I did not wish to let perish. I produced all the stock
testimony--Ben Jonson’s sonnet, the internal evidence of the plays
themselves, the actors who had published them--but he refused to accept
any of it. He declared that there was not a single proof to show that
Shakespeare had written one of them.

“Is there any evidence that he didn’t?” I asked.

“There’s evidence that he couldn’t,” he said. “It required a man with
the fullest legal equipment to have written them. When you have
read Greenwood’s book you will see how untenable is any argument for
Shakespeare’s authorship.”

I was willing to concede something, and offered a compromise.

“Perhaps,” I said, “Shakespeare was the Belasoo of that day--the
managerial genius, unable to write plays himself, but with the supreme
gift of making effective drama from the plays of others. In that case it
is not unlikely that the plays would be known as Shakespeare’s. Even
in this day John Luther Long’s ‘Madam Butterfly’ is sometimes called
Belasco’s play; though it is doubtful if Belasco ever wrote a line of
it.”

He considered this view, but not very favorably. The Booth book was at
this time a secret, and he had not told me anything concerning it;
but he had it in his mind when he said, with an air of the greatest
conviction:

“I know that Shakespeare did not write those plays, and I have reason to
believe he did not touch the text in any way.”

“How can you be so positive?” I asked.

He replied:

“I have private knowledge from a source that cannot be questioned.”

I now suspected that he was joking, and asked if he had been consulting
a spiritual medium; but he was clearly in earnest.

“It is the great discovery of the age,” he said, quite seriously. “The
world will soon ring with it. I wish I could tell you about it, but I
have passed my word. You will not have long to wait.”

I was going to sail for the Mediterranean in February, and I asked if it
would be likely that I would know this great secret before I sailed. He
thought not; but he said that more than likely the startling news would
be given to the world while I was on the water, and it might come to me
on the ship by wireless. I confess I was amazed and intensely curious by
this time. I conjectured the discovery of some document--some Bacon
or Shakespeare private paper which dispelled all the mystery of the
authorship. I hinted that he might write me a letter which I could open
on the ship; but he was firm in his refusal. He had passed his word, he
repeated, and the news might not be given out as soon as that; but he
assured me more than once that wherever I might be, in whatever remote
locality, it would come by cable, and the world would quake with it. I
was tempted to give up my trip, to be with him at Stormfield at the time
of the upheaval.

Naturally the Shakespeare theme was uppermost during the remaining days
that we were together. He had engaged another stenographer, and was now
dictating, forenoons, his own views on the subject--views coordinated
with those of Mr. Greenwood, whom he liberally quoted, but embellished
and decorated in his own gay manner. These were chapters for his
autobiography, he said, and I think he had then no intention of making
a book of them. I could not quite see why he should take all this
argumentary trouble if he had, as he said, positive evidence that Bacon,
and not Shakespeare, had written the plays. I thought the whole matter
very curious.

The Shakespeare interest had diverging by-paths. One evening, when we
were alone at dinner, he said:

“There is only one other illustrious man in history about whom there is
so little known,” and he added, “Jesus Christ.”

He reviewed the statements of the Gospels concerning Christ, though he
declared them to be mainly traditional and of no value. I agreed that
they contained confusing statements, and inflicted more or less with
justice and reason; but I said I thought there was truth in them, too.

“Why do you think so?” he asked.

“Because they contain matters that are self-evident--things eternally
and essentially just.”

“Then you make your own Bible?”

“Yes, from those materials combined with human reason.”

“Then it does not matter where the truth, as you call it, comes from?”

I admitted that the source did not matter; that truth from Shakespeare,
Epictetus, or Aristotle was quite as valuable as from the Scriptures. We
were on common ground now. He mentioned Marcus Aurelius, the Stoics, and
their blameless lives. I, still pursuing the thought of Jesus, asked:

“Do you not think it strange that in that day when Christ came,
admitting that there was a Christ, such a character could have come
at all--in the time of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, when all was
ceremony and unbelief?”

“I remember,” he said, “the Sadducees didn’t believe in hell. He brought
them one.”

“Nor the resurrection. He brought them that, also.”

He did not admit that there had been a Christ with the character and
mission related by the Gospels.

“It is all a myth,” he said. “There have been Saviours in every age of
the world. It is all just a fairy tale, like the idea of Santa Claus.”

“But,” I argued, “even the spirit of Christmas is real when it is
genuine. Suppose that we admit there was no physical Saviour--that it is
only an idea--a spiritual embodiment which humanity has made for
itself and is willing to improve upon as its own spirituality improves,
wouldn’t that make it worthy?”

“But then the fairy story of the atonement dissolves, and with it
crumbles the very foundations of any established church. You can create
your own Testament, your own Scripture, and your own Christ, but you’ve
got to give up your atonement.”

“As related to the crucifixion, yes, and good riddance to it; but the
death of the old order and the growth of spirituality comes to a sort of
atonement, doesn’t it?”

He said:

“A conclusion like that has about as much to do with the Gospels and
Christianity as Shakespeare had to do with Bacon’s plays. You are
preaching a doctrine that would have sent a man to the stake a few
centuries ago. I have preached that in my own Gospel.”

I remembered then, and realized that, by my own clumsy ladder, I had
merely mounted from dogma, and superstition to his platform of training
the ideals to a higher contentment of soul.



CCLXXVII. “IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?”

I set out on my long journey with much reluctance. However, a series of
guests with various diversions had been planned, and it seemed a
good time to go. Clemens gave me letters of introduction, and bade me
Godspeed. It would be near the end of April before I should see him
again.

Now and then on the ship, and in the course of my travels, I remembered
the great news I was to hear concerning Shakespeare. In Cairo, at
Shepheard’s, I looked eagerly through English newspapers, expecting any
moment to come upon great head-lines; but I was always disappointed.
Even on the return voyage there was no one I could find who had heard
any particular Shakespeare news.

Arriving in New York, I found that Clemens himself had published his
Shakespeare dictations in a little volume of his own, entitled, ‘Is
Shakespeare Dead?’ The title certainly suggested spiritistic matters,
and I got a volume at Harpers’, and read it going up on the train,
hoping to find somewhere in it a solution of the great mystery. But it
was only matter I had already known; the secret was still unrevealed.

At Redding I lost not much time in getting up to Stormfield. There had
been changes in my absence. Clara Clemens had returned from her travels,
and Jean, whose health seemed improved, was coming home to be her
father’s secretary. He was greatly pleased with these things, and
declared he was going to have a home once more with his children about
him.

He was quite alone that day, and we walked up and down the great
living-room for an hour, perhaps, while he discussed his new plans. For
one thing, he had incorporated his pen-name, Mark Twain, in order
that the protection of his copyrights and the conduct of his literary
business in general should not require his personal attention. He seemed
to find a relief in this, as he always did in dismissing any kind of
responsibility. When we went in for billiards I spoke of his book, which
I had read on the way up, and of the great Shakespearian secret which
was to astonish the world. Then he told me that the matter had been
delayed, but that he was no longer required to suppress it; that the
revelation was in the form of a book--a book which revealed conclusively
to any one who would take the trouble to follow the directions that the
acrostic name of Francis Bacon in a great variety of forms ran through
many--probably through all of the so-called Shakespeare plays. He said
it was far and away beyond anything of the kind ever published; that
Ignatius Donnelly and others had merely glimpsed the truth, but that the
author of this book, William Stone Booth, had demonstrated, beyond any
doubt or question, that the Bacon signatures were there. The book would
be issued in a few days, he said. He had seen a set of proofs of it, and
while it had not been published in the best way to clearly demonstrate
its great revelation, it must settle the matter with every reasoning
mind. He confessed that his faculties had been more or less defeated in,
attempting to follow the ciphers, and he complained bitterly that the
evidence had not been set forth so that he who merely skims a book might
grasp it.

He had failed on the acrostics at first; but more recently he had
understood the rule, and had been able to work out several Bacon
signatures. He complimented me by saying that he felt sure that when the
book came I would have no trouble with it.

Without going further with this matter, I may say here that the book
arrived presently, and between us we did work out a considerable number
of the claimed acrostics by following the rules laid down. It was
certainly an interesting if not wholly convincing occupation, and it
would be a difficult task for any one to prove that the ciphers are not
there. Just why this pretentious volume created so little agitation it
would be hard to say. Certainly it did not cause any great upheaval in
the literary world, and the name of William Shakespeare still continues
to be printed on the title-page of those marvelous dramas so long
associated with his name.

Mark Twain’s own book on the subject--‘Is Shakespeare Dead?’--found a
wide acceptance, and probably convinced as many readers. It contained
no new arguments; but it gave a convincing touch to the old ones, and
it was certainly readable.--[Mark Twain had the fullest conviction as
to the Bacon authorship of the Shakespeare plays. One evening, with
Mr. Edward Loomis, we attended a fine performance of “Romeo and Juliet”
 given by Sothern and Marlowe. At the close of one splendid scene he
said, quite earnestly, “That is about the best play that Lord Bacon ever
wrote.”]

Among the visitors who had come to Stormfield was Howells. Clemens had
called a meeting of the Human Race Club, but only Howells was able to
attend. We will let him tell of his visit:

    We got on very well without the absentees, after finding them in the
    wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have with
    him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old
    ferment of subjects. Many things had been discussed and put away
    for good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other,
    who were so differently parts of it. He showed his absolute content
    with his house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it
    was my son who designed it. The architect had been so fortunate as
    to be able to plan it where a natural avenue of savins, the close-
    knit, slender, cypress-like cedars of New England, led away from the
    rear of the villa to the little level of a pergola, meant some day
    to be wreathed and roofed with vines. But in the early spring days
    all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the Northern
    winter. It opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and
    meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the
    last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. We walked up and
    down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and
    talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for
    the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now
    we were far past turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk together
    across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where
    the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses;
    and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the
    shards of ice. Clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to
    give himself elbowroom, and showed me the lot he was going to have
    me build on. The next day we came again with the geologist he had
    asked up to Stormfield to analyze its rocks. Truly he loved the
    place....

    My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his
    part and on mine. Every morning before I dressed I heard him
    sounding my name through the house for the fun of it and I know for
    the fondness, and if I looked out of my door there he was in his
    long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his
    great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the
    hope of frolic with some one. The last morning a soft sugar-snow
    had fallen and was falling, and I drove through it down to the
    station in the carriage which had been given him by his wife’s
    father when they were first married, and had been kept all those
    intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use.--[This
    carriage--a finely built coup--had been presented to Mrs. Crane when
    the Hartford house was closed. When Stormfield was built she
    returned it to its original owner.]--Its springs had not grown
    yielding with time, it had rather the stiffness and severity of age;
    but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the
    negro “spiritual” which I heard him sing with such fervor when those
    wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward.

Howells’s visit resulted in a new inspiration. Clemens started to write
him one night when he could not sleep, and had been reading the volume
of letters of James Russell Lowell. Then, next morning, he was seized
with the notion of writing a series of letters to such friends as
Howells, Twichell, and Rogers--letters not to be mailed, but to be laid
away for some future public. He wrote two of these immediately--to
Howells and to Twichell. The Howells letter (or letters, for it was
really double) is both pathetic and amusing. The first part ran:

    3 in the morning, April 17, 1909.

    My pen has gone dry and the ink is out of reach. Howells, did you
    write me day-before-day-before yesterday or did I dream it? In my
    mind’s eye I most vividly see your hand-write on a square blue
    envelope in the mail-pile. I have hunted the house over, but there
    is no such letter. Was it an illusion?

    I am reading Lowell’s letters & smoking. I woke an hour ago & am
    reading to keep from wasting the time. On page 305, Vol. I, I have
    just margined a note:

    “Young friend! I like that! You ought to see him now.”

    It seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young. It
    was a brick out of a blue sky, & knocked me groggy for a moment. Ah
    me, the pathos of it is that we were young then. And he--why, so
    was he, but he didn’t know it. He didn’t even know it 9 years
    later, when we saw him approaching and you warned me, saying:

    “Don’t say anything about age--he has just turned 50 & thinks he is
    old, & broods over it.”

    Well, Clara did sing! And you wrote her a dear letter.

    Time to go to sleep.

                     Yours ever,
                                MARK

The second letter, begun at 10 A.M., outlines the plan by which he is
to write on the subject uppermost in his mind without restraint, knowing
that the letter is not to be mailed.

   ...The scheme furnishes a definite target for each letter, & you
    can choose the target that’s going to be the most sympathetic for
    what you are hungering & thirsting to say at that particular moment.
    And you can talk with a quite unallowable frankness & freedom
    because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire
    with theology you’ll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn’t be an
    inspiration; you’ll write it to Twichell, because it will make him
    writhe and squirm & break the furniture. When you are on fire with
    a good thing that’s indecent you won’t waste it on Twichell; you’ll
    save it for Howells, who will love it. As he will never see it you
    can make it really indecenter than he could stand; & so no harm is
    done, yet a vast advantage is gained.

The letter was not finished, and the scheme perished there. The Twichell
letter concerned missionaries, and added nothing to what he had already
said on the subject.

He wrote no letter to Mr. Rogers--perhaps never wrote to him again.



CCLXXVIII. THE DEATH OF HENRY ROGERS

Clemens, a little before my return, had been on a trip to Norfolk,
Virginia, to attend the opening ceremonies of the Virginia Railway.
He had made a speech on that occasion, in which he had paid a public
tribute to Henry Rogers, and told something of his personal obligation
to the financier.

He began by telling what Mr. Rogers had done for Helen Keller, whom he
called “the most marvelous person of her sex that has existed on this
earth since Joan of Arc.” Then he said:

    That is not all Mr. Rogers has done, but you never see that side of
    his character because it is never protruding; but he lends a helping
    hand daily out of that generous heart of his. You never hear of it.
    He is supposed to be a moon which has one side dark and the other
    bright. But the other side, though you don’t see it, is not dark;
    it is bright, and its rays penetrate, and others do see it who are
    not God.
    I would take this opportunity to tell something that I have never
    been allowed to tell by Mr. Rogers, either by my mouth or in print,
    and if I don’t look at him I can tell it now.

    In 1894, when the publishing company of Charles L. Webster, of which
    I was financial agent, failed, it left me heavily in debt. If you
    will remember what commerce was at that time you will recall that
    you could not sell anything, and could not buy anything, and I was
    on my back; my books were not worth anything at all, and I could not
    give away my copyrights. Mr. Rogers had long-enough vision ahead to
    say, “Your books have supported you before, and after the panic is
    over they will support you again,” and that was a correct
    proposition. He saved my copyrights, and saved me from financial
    ruin. He it was who arranged with my creditors to allow me to roam
    the face of the earth and persecute the nations thereof with
    lectures, promising at the end of four years I would pay dollar for
    dollar. That arrangement was made, otherwise I would now be living
    out-of-doors under an umbrella, and a borrowed one at that.

    You see his white mustache and his hair trying to get white (he is
    always trying to look like me--I don’t blame him for that). These
    are only emblematic of his character, and that is all. I say,
    without exception, hair and all, he is the whitest man I have ever
    known.

This had been early in April. Something more than a month later
Clemens was making a business trip to New York to see Mr. Rogers. I was
telephoned early to go up and look over some matters with him before
he started. I do not remember why I was not to go along that day, for
I usually made such trips with him. I think it was planned that Miss
Clemens, who was in the city, was to meet him at the Grand Central
Station. At all events, she did meet him there, with the news that
during the night Mr. Rogers had suddenly died. This was May 20, 1909.
The news had already come to the house, and I had lost no time in
preparations to follow by the next train. I joined him at the Grosvenor
Hotel, on Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. He was upset and deeply
troubled by the loss of his stanch adviser and friend. He had a helpless
look, and he said his friends were dying away from him and leaving him
adrift.

“And how I hate to do anything,” he added, “that requires the least
modicum of intelligence!”

We remained at the Grosvenor for Mr. Rogers’s funeral. Clemens served
as one of the pall-bearers, but he did not feel equal to the trip to
Fairhaven. He wanted to be very quiet, he said. He could not undertake
to travel that distance among those whom he knew so well, and with whom
he must of necessity join in conversation; so we remained in the hotel
apartment, reading and saying very little until bedtime. Once he asked
me to write a letter to Jean: “Say, ‘Your father says every little
while, “How glad I am that Jean is at home again!”’ for that is true and
I think of it all the time.”

But by and by, after a long period of silence, he said:

“Mr. Rogers is under the ground now.”

And so passed out of earthly affairs the man who had contributed so
largely to the comfort of Mark Twain’s old age. He was a man of fine
sensibilities and generous impulses; withal a keen sense of humor.

One Christmas, when he presented Mark Twain with a watch and a
match-case, he wrote:

    MY DEAR CLEMENS,--For many years your friends have been complaining
    of your use of tobacco, both as to quantity and quality. Complaints
    are now coming in of your use of time. Most of your friends think
    that you are using your supply somewhat lavishly, but the chief
    complaint is in regard to the quality.

    I have been appealed to in the mean time, and have concluded that it
    is impossible to get the right kind of time from a blacking-box.

    Therefore, I take the liberty of sending you herewith a machine that
    will furnish only the best. Please use it with the kind wishes of
                     Yours truly,
                                H. H. ROGERS.

    P. S.--Complaint has also been made in regard to the furrows you
    make in your trousers in scratching matches. You will find a furrow
    on the bottom of the article inclosed. Please use it. Compliments
    of the season to the family.

He was a man too busy to write many letters, but when he did write (to
Clemens at least) they were always playful and unhurried. One reading
them would not find it easy to believe that the writer was a man on
whose shoulders lay the burdens of stupendous finance-burdens so heavy
that at last he was crushed beneath their weight.



CCLXXIX. AN EXTENSION OF COPYRIGHT

One of the pleasant things that came to Mark Twain that year was the
passage of a copyright bill, which added to the royalty period an
extension of fourteen years. Champ Clark had been largely instrumental
in the success of this measure, and had been fighting for it steadily
since Mark Twain’s visit to Washington in 1906. Following that visit,
Clark wrote:

   ... It [the original bill] would never pass because the bill
    had literature and music all mixed together. Being a Missourian of
    course it would give me great pleasure to be of service to you.
    What I want to say is this: you have prepared a simple bill relating
    only to the copyright of books; send it to me and I will try to have
    it passed.

Clemens replied that he might have something more to say on the
copyright question by and by--that he had in hand a dialogue--[Similar
to the “Open Letter to the Register of Copyrights,” North American
Review, January, 1905.]--which would instruct Congress, but this he did
not complete. Meantime a simple bill was proposed and early in 1909 it
became a law. In June Clark wrote:

    DR. SAMUEL L. CLEMENS,
    Stormfield, Redding, Conn.

    MY DEAR DOCTOR,--I am gradually becoming myself again, after a
    period of exhaustion that almost approximated prostration. After a
    long lecture tour last summer I went immediately into a hard
    campaign; as soon as the election was over, and I had recovered my
    disposition, I came here and went into those tariff hearings, which
    began shortly after breakfast each day, and sometimes lasted until
    midnight. Listening patiently and meekly, withal, to the lying of
    tariff barons for many days and nights was followed by the work of
    the long session; that was followed by a hot campaign to take Uncle
    Joe’s rules away from him; on the heels of that “Campaign that
    Failed” came the tariff fight in the House. I am now getting time
    to breathe regularly and I am writing to ask you if the copyright
    law is acceptable to you. If it is not acceptable to you I want to
    ask you to write and tell me how it should be changed and I will
    give my best endeavors to the work. I believe that your ideas and
    wishes in the matter constitute the best guide we have as to what
    should be done in the case.
              Your friend,
                            CHAMP CLARK.

To this Clemens replied:

                     STORMFIELD, REDDING, CONN, June 5, 1909.

    DEAR CHAMP CLARK,--Is the new copyright law acceptable to me?
    Emphatically yes! Clark, it is the only sane & clearly defined &
    just & righteous copyright law that has ever existed in the United
    States. Whosoever will compare it with its predecessors will have
    no trouble in arriving at that decision.

    The bill which was before the committee two years ago when I was
    down there was the most stupefying jumble of conflicting &
    apparently irreconcilable interests that was ever seen; and we all
    said “the case is hopeless, absolutely hopeless--out of this chaos
    nothing can be built.” But we were in error; out of that chaotic
    mass this excellent bill has been constructed, the warring interests
    have been reconciled, and the result is as comely and substantial a
    legislative edifice as lifts its domes and towers and protective
    lightning-rods out of the statute book I think. When I think of
    that other bill, which even the Deity couldn’t understand, and of
    this one, which even I can understand, I take off my hat to the man
    or men who devised this one. Was it R. U. Johnson? Was it the
    Authors’ League? Was it both together? I don’t know, but I take
    off my hat, anyway. Johnson has written a valuable article about
    the new law--I inclose it.

    At last--at last and for the first time in copyright history--we are
    ahead of England! Ahead of her in two ways: by length of time and
    by fairness to all interests concerned. Does this sound like
    shouting? Then I must modify it: all we possessed of copyright
    justice before the 4th of last March we owed to England’s
    initiative.
                     Truly yours,
                                S. L. CLEMENS.

Clemens had prepared what was the final word an the subject of copyright
just before this bill was passed--a petition for a law which he believed
would regulate the whole matter. It was a generous, even if a somewhat
Utopian, plan, eminently characteristic of its author. The new
fourteen-year extension, with the prospect of more, made this or any
other compromise seem inadvisable.--[The reader may consider this last
copyright document by Mark Twain under Appendix N, at the end of this
volume.]



CCLXXX. A WARNING

Clemens had promised to go to Baltimore for the graduation of
“Francesca” of his London visit in 1907--and to make a short address to
her class.

It was the eighth of June when we set out on this journey,--[The reader
may remember that it was the 8th of June, 1867, that Mark Twain sailed
for the Holy Land. It was the 8th of June, 1907, that he sailed for
England to take his Oxford degree. This 8th of June, 1909, was at least
slightly connected with both events, for he was keeping an engagement
made with Francesca in London, and my notes show that he discussed, on
the way to the station, some incidents of his Holy Land trip and
his attitude at that time toward Christian traditions. As he rarely
mentioned the Quaker City trip, the coincidence seems rather curious.
It is most unlikely that Clemens himself in any way associated the
two dates.]--but the day was rather bleak and there was a chilly rain.
Clemens had a number of errands to do in New York, and we drove from one
place to another, attending to them. Finally, in the afternoon, the rain
ceased, and while I was arranging some matters for him he concluded to
take a ride on the top of a Fifth Avenue stage. It was fine and pleasant
when he started, but the weather thickened again and when he returned
he complained that he had felt a little chilly. He seemed in fine
condition, however, next morning and was in good spirits all the way
to Baltimore. Chauncey Depew was on the train and they met in the
dining-car--the last time, I think, they ever saw each other. He was
tired when we reached the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore and did not wish
to see the newspaper men. It happened that the reporters had a special
purpose in coming just at this time, for it had suddenly developed
that in his Shakespeare book, through an oversight, due to haste in
publication, full credit had not been given to Mr. Greenwood for the
long extracts quoted from his work. The sensational head-lines in a
morning paper, “Is Mark Twain a Plagiarist?” had naturally prompted the
newspaper men to see what he would have to say on the subject. It was a
simple matter, easily explained, and Clemens himself was less disturbed
about it than anybody. He felt no sense of guilt, he said; and the fact
that he had been stealing and caught at it would give Mr. Greenwood’s
book far more advertising than if he had given him the full credit which
he had intended. He found a good deal of amusement in the situation,
his only worry being that Clara and Jean would see the paper and be
troubled.

He had taken off his clothes and was lying down, reading. After a little
he got up and began walking up and down the room. Presently he stopped
and, facing me, placed his hand upon his breast. He said:

“I think I must have caught a little cold yesterday on that Fifth Avenue
stage. I have a curious pain in my breast.”

I suggested that he lie down again and I would fill his hot-water bag.
The pain passed away presently, and he seemed to be dozing. I stepped
into the next room and busied myself with some writing. By and by I
heard him stirring again and went in where he was. He was walking
up and down and began talking of some recent ethnological
discoveries--something relating to prehistoric man.

“What a fine boy that prehistoric man must have been,” he said--“the
very first one! Think of the gaudy style of him, how he must have lorded
it over those other creatures, walking on his hind legs, waving his
arms, practising and getting ready for the pulpit.”

The fancy amused him, but presently he paused in his walk and again put
his hand on his breast, saying:

“That pain has come back. It’s a curious, sickening, deadly kind of
pain. I never had anything just like it.”

It seemed to me that his face had become rather gray. I said:

“Where is it, exactly, Mr. Clemens?”

He laid his hand in the center of his breast and said:

“It is here, and it is very peculiar indeed.”

Remotely in my mind occurred the thought that he had located his heart,
and the “peculiar deadly pain” he had mentioned seemed ominous. I
suggested, however, that it was probably some rheumatic touch, and this
opinion seemed warranted when, a few moments later, the hot water had
again relieved it. This time the pain had apparently gone to stay, for
it did not return while we were in Baltimore. It was the first positive
manifestation of the angina which eventually would take him from us.

The weather was pleasant in Baltimore, and his visit to St. Timothy’s
School and his address there were the kind of diversions that meant most
to him. The flock of girls, all in their pretty commencement dresses,
assembled and rejoicing at his playfully given advice: not to smoke--to
excess; not to drink--to excess; not to marry--to excess; he standing
there in a garb as white as their own--it made a rare picture--a sweet
memory--and it was the last time he ever gave advice from the platform
to any one.

Edward S. Martin also spoke to the school, and then there was a great
feasting in the big assembly-hall.

It was on the lawn that a reporter approached him with the news of the
death of Edward Everett Hale--another of the old group. Clemens said
thoughtfully, after a moment:

“I had the greatest respect and esteem for Edward Everett Hale, the
greatest admiration for his work. I am as grieved to hear of his death
as I can ever be to hear of the death of any friend, though my grief is
always tempered with the satisfaction of knowing that for the one that
goes, the hard, bitter struggle of life is ended.”

We were leaving the Belvedere next morning, and when the subject of
breakfast came up for discussion he said:

“That was the most delicious Baltimore fried chicken we had yesterday
morning. I think we’ll just repeat that order. It reminds me of John
Quarles’s farm.”

We had been having our meals served in the rooms, but we had breakfast
that morning down in the diningroom, and “Francesca” and her mother were
there.

As he stood on the railway platform waiting for the train, he told me
how once, fifty-five years before, as a boy of eighteen, he had changed
cars there for Washington and had barely caught his train--the crowd
yelling at him as he ran.

We remained overnight in New York, and that evening, at the Grosvenor,
he read aloud a poem of his own which I had not seen before. He had
brought it along with some intention of reading it at St. Timothy’s, he
said, but had not found the occasion suitable.

“I wrote it a long time ago in Paris. I’d been reading aloud to Mrs.
Clemens and Susy--in ‘93, I think--about Lord Clive and Warren Hastings,
from Macaulay--how great they were and how far they fell. Then I took
an imaginary case--that of some old demented man mumbling of his former
state. I described him, and repeated some of his mumblings. Susy and
Mrs. Clemens said, ‘Write it’--so I did, by and by, and this is it. I
call it ‘The Derelict.’”

He read in his effective manner that fine poem, the opening stanza of
which follows:

           You sneer, you ships that pass me by,
           Your snow-pure canvas towering proud!
           You traders base!--why, once such fry
           Paid reverence, when like a cloud
           Storm-swept I drove along,
           My Admiral at post, his pennon blue
           Faint in the wilderness of sky, my long
           Yards bristling with my gallant crew,
           My ports flung wide, my guns displayed,
           My tall spars hid in bellying sail!
           --You struck your topsails then, and made
           Obeisance--now your manners fail.

He had employed rhyme with more facility than was usual for him, and the
figure and phrasing were full of vigor.

“It is strong and fine,” I said, when he had finished.

“Yes,” he assented. “It seems so as I read it now. It is so long since
I have seen it that it is like reading another man’s work. I should call
it good, I believe.”

He put the manuscript in his bag and walked up and down the floor
talking.

“There is no figure for the human being like the ship,” he said; “no
such figure for the storm-beaten human drift as the derelict--such
men as Clive and Hastings could only be imagined as derelicts adrift,
helpless, tossed by every wind and tide.”

We returned to Redding next day. On the train going home he fell to
talking of books and authors, mainly of the things he had never been
able to read.

“When I take up one of Jane Austen’s books,” he said, “such as Pride
and Prejudice, I feel like a barkeeper entering the kingdom of heaven. I
know, what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not
find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.”

He recalled again how Stepniak had come to Hartford, and how humiliated
Mrs. Clemens had been to confess that her husband was not familiar with
the writings of Thackeray and others.

“I don’t know anything about anything,” he said, mournfully, “and never
did. My brother used to try to get me to read Dickens, long ago. I
couldn’t do it--I was ashamed; but I couldn’t do it. Yes, I have read
The Tale of Two Cities, and could do it again. I have read it a good
many times; but I never could stand Meredith and most of the other
celebrities.”

By and by he handed me the Saturday Times Review, saying:

“Here is a fine poem, a great poem, I think. I can stand that.”

It was “The Palatine (in the ‘Dark Ages’),” by Willa Sibert Cather,
reprinted from McClure’s. The reader will understand better than I can
express why these lofty opening stanzas appealed to Mark Twain:

                      THE PALATINE

              “Have you been with the King to Rome,
              Brother, big brother?”
               “I’ve been there and I’ve come home,
              Back to your play, little brother.”

              “Oh, how high is Caesar’s house,
              Brother, big brother?”
               “Goats about the doorways browse;
              Night-hawks nest in the burnt roof-tree,
              Home of the wild bird and home of the bee.
              A thousand chambers of marble lie
              Wide to the sun and the wind and the sky.
              Poppies we find amongst our wheat
              Grow on Caesar’s banquet seat.
              Cattle crop and neatherds drowse
              On the floors of Caesar’s house.”

              “But what has become of Caesar’s gold,
              Brother, big brother?”
               “The times are bad and the world is old
              --Who knows the where of the Caesar’s gold?
              Night comes black on the Caesar’s hill;
              The wells are deep and the tales are ill.
              Fireflies gleam in the damp and mold,
              All that is left of the Caesar’s gold.
              Back to your play, little brother.”

Farther along in our journey he handed me the paper again, pointing to
these lines of Kipling:

           How is it not good for the Christian’s health
           To hurry the Aryan brown,
           For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles,
           And he weareth the Christian down;
           And the end of the fight is a tombstone white
           And the name of the late deceased:
           And the epitaph drear: “A fool lies here
           Who tried to hustle the East.”

“I could stand any amount of that,” he said, and presently: “Life is too
long and too short. Too long for the weariness of it; too short for the
work to be done. At the very most, the average mind can only master a
few languages and a little history.”

I said: “Still, we need not worry. If death ends all it does not matter;
and if life is eternal there will be time enough.”

“Yes,” he assented, rather grimly, “that optimism of yours is always
ready to turn hell’s back yard into a playground.”

I said that, old as I was, I had taken up the study of French, and
mentioned Bayard Taylor’s having begun Greek at fifty, expecting to need
it in heaven.

Clemens said, reflectively: “Yes--but you see that was Greek.”



CCLXXXI. THE LAST SUMMER AT STORMFIELD

I was at Stormfield pretty constantly during the rest of that year. At
first I went up only for the day; but later, when his health did not
improve, and when he expressed a wish for companionship evenings, I
remained most of the nights as well. Our rooms were separated only by
a bath-room; and as neither of us was much given to sleep, there was
likely to be talk or reading aloud at almost any hour when both were
awake. In the very early morning I would usually slip in, softly,
sometimes to find him propped up against his pillows sound asleep, his
glasses on, the reading-lamp blazing away as it usually did, day or
night; but as often as not he was awake, and would have some new plan
or idea of which he was eager to be delivered, and there was always
interest, and nearly always amusement in it, even if it happened to be
three in the morning or earlier.

Sometimes, when he thought it time for me to be stirring, he would call
softly, but loudly enough for me to hear if awake; and I would go in,
and we would settle again problems of life and death and science, or,
rather, he would settle them while I dropped in a remark here and there,
merely to hold the matter a little longer in solution.

The pains in his breast came back, and with a good deal of frequency as
the summer advanced; also, they became more severe. Dr. Edward Quintard
came up from New York, and did not hesitate to say that the trouble
proceeded chiefly from the heart, and counseled diminished smoking, with
less active exercise, advising particularly against Clemens’s lifetime
habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs.

There was no prohibition as to billiards, however, or leisurely walking,
and we played pretty steadily through those peaceful summer days,
and often took a walk down into the meadows or perhaps in the other
direction, when it was not too warm or windy. Once we went as far as
the river, and I showed him a part of his land he had not seen before--a
beautiful cedar hillside, remote and secluded, a place of enchantment.
On the way I pointed out a little corner of land which earlier he had
given me to straighten our division line. I told him I was going to
build a study on it, and call it “Markland.” He thought it an admirable
building-site, and I think he was pleased with the name. Later he said:

“If you had a place for that extra billiard-table of mine [the Rogers
table, which had been left in New York] I would turn it over to you.”

I replied that I could adapt the size of my proposed study to fit a
billiard-table, and he said:

“Now that will be very good. Then, when I want exercise, I can walk down
and play billiards with you, and when you want exercise you can walk up
and play billiards with me. You must build that study.”

So it was we planned, and by and by Mr. Lounsbury had undertaken the
work.

During the walks Clemens rested a good deal. There were the New England
hills to climb, and then he found that he tired easily, and that
weariness sometimes brought on the pain. As I remember now, I think how
bravely he bore it. It must have been a deadly, sickening, numbing pain,
for I have seen it crumple him, and his face become colorless while his
hand dug at his breast; but he never complained, he never bewailed, and
at billiards he would persist in going on and playing in his turn, even
while he was bowed with the anguish of the attack.

We had found that a glass of very hot water relieved it, and we kept
always a thermos bottle or two filled and ready. At the first hint from
him I would pour out a glass and another, and sometimes the relief came
quickly; but there were times, and alas! they came oftener, when that
deadly gripping did not soon release him. Yet there would come a week or
a fortnight when he was apparently perfectly well, and at such times
we dismissed the thought of any heart malady, and attributed the whole
trouble to acute indigestion, from which he had always suffered more or
less.

We were alone together most of the time. He did not appear to care for
company that summer. Clara Clemens had a concert tour in prospect, and
her father, eager for her success, encouraged her to devote a large
part of her time to study. For Jean, who was in love with every form
of outdoor and animal life, he had established headquarters in a vacant
farm-house on one corner of the estate, where she had collected some
stock and poultry, and was over-flowingly happy. Ossip Gabrilowitsch
was a guest in the house a good portion of the summer, but had been
invalided through severe surgical operations, and for a long time rarely
appeared, even at meal-times. So it came about that there could hardly
have been a closer daily companionship than was ours during this the
last year of Mark Twain’s life. For me, of course, nothing can ever be
like it again in this world. One is not likely to associate twice with a
being from another star.



CCLXXXII. PERSONAL MEMORANDA

In the notes I made of this period I caught a little drift of
personality and utterance, and I do not know better how to preserve
these things than to give them here as nearly as may be in the sequence
and in the forth in which they were set down.

One of the first of these entries occurs in June, when Clemens was
rereading with great interest and relish Andrew D. White’s Science and
Theology, which he called a lovely book.--[‘A History of the Warfare of
Science with Theology in Christendom’.]

    June 21. A peaceful afternoon, and we walked farther than usual,
    resting at last in the shade of a tree in the lane that leads to
    Jean’s farm-house. I picked a dandelion-ball, with some remark
    about its being one of the evidences of the intelligent principle in
    nature--the seeds winged for a wider distribution.

    “Yes,” he said, “those are the great evidences; no one who reasons
    can doubt them.”

    And presently he added:

    “That is a most amusing book of White’s. When you read it you see
    how those old theologians never reasoned at all. White tells of an
    old bishop who figured out that God created the world in an instant
    on a certain day in October exactly so many years before Christ, and
    proved it. And I knew a preacher myself once who declared that the
    fossils in the rocks proved nothing as to the age of the world. He
    said that God could create the rocks with those fossils in them for
    ornaments if He wanted to. Why, it takes twenty years to build a
    little island in the Mississippi River, and that man actually
    believed that God created the whole world and all that’s in it in
    six days. White tells of another bishop who gave two new reasons
    for thunder; one being that God wanted to show the world His power,
    and another that He wished to frighten sinners to repent. Now
    consider the proportions of that conception, even in the pettiest
    way you can think of it. Consider the idea of God thinking of all
    that. Consider the President of the United States wanting to
    impress the flies and fleas and mosquitoes, getting up on the dome
    of the Capitol and beating a bass-drum and setting off red fire.”

He followed the theme a little further, then we made our way slowly back
up the long hill, he holding to my arm, and resting here and there, but
arriving at the house seemingly fresh and ready for billiards.

    June 23. I came up this morning with a basket of strawberries. He
    was walking up and down, looking like an ancient Roman. He said:

    “Consider the case of Elsie Sigel--[Granddaughter of Gen. Franz
    Sigel. She was mysteriously murdered while engaged in settlement
    work among the Chinese.]--what a ghastly ending to any life!”

    Then turning upon me fiercely, he continued:

    “Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not a single life
    that was ever lived that was worth living. Not a single child ever
    begotten that the begetting of it was not a crime. Suppose a
    community of people to be living on the slope of a volcano, directly
    under the crater and in the path of lava-flow; that volcano has been
    breaking out right along for ages and is certain to break out again.
    They do not know when it will break out, but they know it will do
    it--that much can be counted on. Suppose those people go to a
    community in a far neighborhood and say, ‘We’d like to change places
    with you. Come take our homes and let us have yours.’ Those people
    would say, ‘Never mind, we are not interested in your country. We
    know what has happened there, and what will happen again.’ We don’t
    care to live under the blow that is likely to fall at any moment;
    and yet every time we bring a child into the world we are bringing
    it to a country, to a community gathered under the crater of a
    volcano, knowing that sooner or later death will come, and that
    before death there will be catastrophes infinitely worse. Formerly
    it was much worse than now, for before the ministers abolished hell
    a man knew, when he was begetting a child, that he was begetting a
    soul that had only one chance in a hundred of escaping the eternal
    fires of damnation. He knew that in all probability that child
    would be brought to damnation--one of the ninety-nine black sheep.
    But since hell has been abolished death has become more welcome.
    I wrote a fairy story once. It was published somewhere. I don’t
    remember just what it was now, but the substance of it was that a
    fairy gave a man the customary wishes. I was interested in seeing
    what he would take. First he chose wealth and went away with it,
    but it did not bring him happiness. Then he came back for the
    second selection, and chose fame, and that did not bring happiness
    either. Finally he went to the fairy and chose death, and the fairy
    said, in substance, ‘If you hadn’t been a fool you’d have chosen
    that in the first place.’

    “The papers called me a pessimist for writing that story.
    Pessimist--the man who isn’t a pessimist is a d---d fool.”

But this was one of his savage humors, stirred by tragic circumstance.
Under date of July 5th I find this happier entry:

    We have invented a new game, three-ball carom billiards, each player
    continuing until he has made five, counting the number of his shots
    as in golf, the one who finishes in the fewer shots wins. It is a
    game we play with almost exactly equal skill, and he is highly
    pleased with it. He said this afternoon:

    “I have never enjoyed billiards as I do now. I look forward to it
    every afternoon as my reward at the end of a good day’s work.”--[His
    work at this time was an article on Marjorie Fleming, the “wonder
    child,” whose quaint writings and brief little life had been
    published to the world by Dr. John Brown. Clemens always adored the
    thought of Marjorie, and in this article one can see that she ranked
    almost next to Joan of Arc in his affections.]

We went out in the loggia by and by and Clemens read aloud from a book
which Professor Zubelin left here a few days ago--‘The Religion of a
Democrat’. Something in it must have suggested to Clemens his favorite
science, for presently he said:

    “I have been reading an old astronomy; it speaks of the perfect line
    of curvature of the earth in spite of mountains and abysses, and I
    have imagined a man three hundred thousand miles high picking up a
    ball like the earth and looking at it and holding it in his hand.
    It would be about like a billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it
    over in his hand and rub it with his thumb, and where he rubbed over
    the mountain ranges he might say, ‘There seems to be some slight
    roughness here, but I can’t detect it with my eye; it seems
    perfectly smooth to look at.’ The Himalayas to him, the highest
    peak, would be one-sixty-thousandth of his height, or about the one-
    thousandth part of an inch as compared with the average man.”

I spoke of having somewhere read of some very tiny satellites, one as
small, perhaps, as six miles in diameter, yet a genuine world.

“Could a man live on a world so small as that?” I asked.

    “Oh yes,” he said. “The gravitation that holds it together would
    hold him on, and he would always seem upright, the same as here.
    His horizon would be smaller, but even if he were six feet tall he
    would only have one foot for each mile of that world’s diameter, so
    you see he would be little enough, even for a world that he could
    walk around in half a day.”

He talked astronomy a great deal--marvel astronomy. He had no real
knowledge of the subject, and I had none of any kind, which made its
ungraspable facts all the more thrilling. He was always thrown into a
sort of ecstasy by the unthinkable distances of space--the supreme drama
of the universe. The fact that Alpha Centauri was twenty-five trillions
of miles away--two hundred and fifty thousand times the distance of our
own remote sun, and that our solar system was traveling, as a whole,
toward the bright star Vega, in the constellation of Lyra, at the rate
of forty-four miles a second, yet would be thousands upon thousands of
years reaching its destination, fairly enraptured him.

The astronomical light-year--that is to say, the distance which light
travels in a year--was one of the things which he loved to contemplate;
but he declared that no two authorities ever figured it alike, and that
he was going to figure it for himself. I came in one morning, to find
that he had covered several sheets of paper with almost interminable
rows of ciphers, and with a result, to him at least, entirely
satisfactory. I am quite certain that he was prouder of those figures
and their enormous aggregate than if he had just completed an immortal
tale; and when he added that the nearest fixed star--Alpha Centauri--was
between four and five light-years distant from the earth, and that
there was no possible way to think that distance in miles or even any
calculable fraction of it, his glasses shone and his hair was roached up
as with the stimulation of these stupendous facts.

By and by he said:

“I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year,
and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment
of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s comet. The Almighty has said,
no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in
together, they must go out together.’ Oh! I am looking forward to that.”
 And a little later he added:

“I’ve got some kind of a heart disease, and Quintard won’t tell me
whether it is the kind that carries a man off in an instant or keeps
him lingering along and suffering for twenty years or so. I was in hopes
that Quintard would tell me that I was likely to drop dead any minute;
but he didn’t. He only told me that my blood-pressure was too strong. He
didn’t give me any schedule; but I expect to go with Halley’s comet.”

I seem to have omitted making any entries for a few days; but among his
notes I find this entry, which seems to refer to some discussion of a
favorite philosophy, and has a special interest of its own:

    July 14, 1909. Yesterday’s dispute resumed, I still maintaining
    that, whereas we can think, we generally don’t do it. Don’t do it,
    & don’t have to do it: we are automatic machines which act
    unconsciously. From morning till sleeping-time, all day long. All
    day long our machinery is doing things from habit & instinct, &
    without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9
    thinking apparatus. This reminded me of something: thirty years
    ago, in Hartford, the billiard-room was my study, & I wrote my
    letters there the first thing every morning. My table lay two
    points off the starboard bow of the billiard-table, & the door of
    exit and entrance bore northeast&-by-east-half-east from that
    position, consequently you could see the door across the length of
    the billiard-table, but you couldn’t see the floor by the said
    table. I found I was always forgetting to ask intruders to carry my
    letters down-stairs for the mail, so I concluded to lay them on the
    floor by the door; then the intruder would have to walk over them, &
    that would indicate to him what they were there for. Did it? No,
    it didn’t. He was a machine, & had habits. Habits take precedence
    of thought.

    Now consider this: a stamped & addressed letter lying on the floor
    --lying aggressively & conspicuously on the floor--is an unusual
    spectacle; so unusual a spectacle that you would think an intruder
    couldn’t see it there without immediately divining that it was not
    there by accident, but had been deliberately placed there & for a
    definite purpose. Very well--it may surprise you to learn that that
    most simple & most natural & obvious thought would never occur to
    any intruder on this planet, whether he be fool, half-fool, or the
    most brilliant of thinkers. For he is always an automatic machine &
    has habits, & his habits will act before his thinking apparatus can
    get a chance to exert its powers. My scheme failed because every
    human being has the habit of picking up any apparently misplaced
    thing & placing it where it won’t be stepped on.

    My first intruder was George. He went and came without saying
    anything. Presently I found the letters neatly piled up on the
    billiard-table. I was astonished. I put them on the floor again.
    The next intruder piled them on the billiard-table without a word.
    I was profoundly moved, profoundly interested. So I set the trap
    again. Also again, & again, & yet again--all day long. I caught
    every member of the family, & every servant; also I caught the three
    finest intellects in the town. In every instance old, time-worn
    automatic habit got in its work so promptly that the thinking
    apparatus never got a chance.

I do not remember this particular discussion, but I do distinctly recall
being one of those whose intelligence was not sufficient to prevent my
picking up the letter he had thrown on the floor in front of his bed,
and being properly classified for doing it.

Clemens no longer kept note-books, as in an earlier time, but set down
innumerable memoranda-comments, stray reminders, and the like--on small
pads, and bunches of these tiny sheets accumulated on his table and
about his room. I gathered up many of them then and afterward, and a few
of these characteristic bits may be offered here.

                         KNEE

It is at our mother’s knee that we acquire our noblest & truest &
highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.

                       JEHOVAH

He is all-good. He made man for hell or hell for man, one or the
other--take your choice. He made it hard to get into heaven and easy to
get into hell. He commended man to multiply & replenish-what? Hell.

                MODESTY ANTEDATES CLOTHES

& will be resumed when clothes are no more. [The latter part of this
aphorism is erased and underneath it he adds:]

                      MODESTY DIED

when clothes were born.

                      MODESTY DIED
when false modesty was born.

                       HISTORY

A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must
enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able
to see it.

                       MORALS

are not the important thing--nor enlightenment--nor civilization. A man
can do absolutely well without them, but he can’t do without something
to eat. The supremest thing is the needs of the body, not of the mind &
spirit.

                      SUGGESTION

There is conscious suggestion & there is unconscious suggestion--both
come from outside--whence all ideas come.


                       DUELS

I think I could wipe out a dishonor by crippling the other man, but I
don’t see how I could do it by letting him cripple me.

I have no feeling of animosity toward people who do not believe as I do;
I merely do not respect ‘em. In some serious matters (relig.) I would
have them burnt.

I am old now and once was a sinner. I often think of it with a kind of
soft regret. I trust my days are numbered. I would not have that detail
overlooked.

She was always a girl, she was always young because her heart was young;
& I was young because she lived in my heart & preserved its youth from
decay.

He often busied himself working out more extensively some of the ideas
that came to him--moral ideas, he called them. One fancy which he
followed in several forms (some of them not within the privilege of
print) was that of an inquisitive little girl, Bessie, who pursues her
mother with difficult questionings.--[Under Appendix w, at the end of
this volume, the reader will find one of the “Bessie” dialogues.]--He
read these aloud as he finished them, and it is certain that they lacked
neither logic nor humor.

Sometimes he went to a big drawer in his dresser, where he kept his
finished manuscripts, and took them out and looked over them, and read
parts of them aloud, and talked of the plans he had had for them, and
how one idea after another had been followed for a time and had failed
to satisfy him in the end.

Two fiction schemes that had always possessed him he had been unable
to bring to any conclusion. Both of these have been mentioned in former
chapters; one being the notion of a long period of dream-existence
during a brief moment of sleep, and the other being the story of a
mysterious visitant from another realm. He had experimented with each of
these ideas in no less than three forms, and there was fine writing and
dramatic narrative in all; but his literary architecture had somehow
fallen short of his conception. “The Mysterious Stranger” in one of its
forms I thought might be satisfactorily concluded, and he admitted that
he could probably end it without much labor. He discussed something of
his plans, and later I found the notes for its conclusion. But I suppose
he was beyond the place where he could take up those old threads, though
he contemplated, fondly enough, the possibility, and recalled how he had
read at least one form of the dream tale to Howells, who had urged him
to complete it.



CCLXXXIII. ASTRONOMY AND DREAMS

August 5, 1909. This morning I noticed on a chair a copy of Flaubert’s
Salammbo which I recently lent him. I asked if he liked it.

“No,” he said, “I didn’t like any of it.”

“But you read it?”

“Yes, I read every line of it.”

“You admitted its literary art?”

“Well, it’s like this: If I should go to the Chicago stockyards and they
should kill a beef and cut it up and the blood should splash all over
everything, and then they should take me to another pen and kill another
beef and the blood should splash over everything again, and so on to pen
after pen, I should care for it about as much as I do for that book.”

“But those were bloody days, and you care very much for that period in
history.”

“Yes, that is so. But when I read Tacitus and know that I am reading
history I can accept it as such and supply the imaginary details and
enjoy it, but this thing is such a continuous procession of blood and
slaughter and stench it worries me. It has great art--I can see that.
That scene of the crucified lions and the death canon and the tent scene
are marvelous, but I wouldn’t read that book again without a salary.”

August 16. He is reading Suetonius, which he already knows by heart--so
full of the cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome.

This afternoon he began talking about Claudius.

“They called Claudius a lunatic,” he said, “but just see what nice
fancies he had. He would go to the arena between times and have captives
and wild beasts brought out and turned in together for his special
enjoyment. Sometimes when there were no captives on hand he would say,
‘Well, never mind; bring out a carpenter.’ Carpentering around the arena
wasn’t a popular job in those days. He went visiting once to a province
and thought it would be pleasant to see how they disposed of criminals
and captives in their crude, old-fashioned way, but there was no
executioner on hand. No matter; the Emperor of Rome was in no hurry--he
would wait. So he sat down and stayed there until an executioner came.”

I said, “How do you account for the changed attitude toward these
things? We are filled with pity to-day at the thought of torture and
suffering.”

“Ah! but that is because we have drifted that way and exercised the
quality of compassion. Relax a muscle and it soon loses its vigor; relax
that quality and in two generations--in one generation--we should be
gloating over the spectacle of blood and torture just the same. Why, I
read somewhere a letter written just before the Lisbon catastrophe in
1755 about a scene on the public square of Lisbon: A lot of stakes
with the fagots piled for burning and heretics chained for burning. The
square was crowded with men and women and children, and when those fires
were lighted, and the heretics began to shriek and writhe, those men and
women and children laughed so they were fairly beside themselves with
the enjoyment of the scene. The Greeks don’t seem to have done these
things. I suppose that indicates earlier advancement in compassion.”

Colonel Harvey and Mr. Duneka came up to spend the night. Mr. Clemens
had one of his seizures during the evening. They come oftener and last
longer. One last night continued for an hour and a half. I slept there.

September 7. To-day news of the North Pole discovered by Peary. Five
days ago the same discovery was reported by Cook. Clemens’s comment:
“It’s the greatest joke of the ages.” But a moment later he referred to
the stupendous fact of Arcturus being fifty thousand times as big as the
sun.

September 21. This morning he told me, with great glee, the dream he had
had just before wakening. He said:

    “I was in an automobile going slowly, with ‘a little girl beside me,
    and some uniformed person walking along by us. I said, ‘I’ll get
    out and walk, too’; but the officer replied, ‘This is only one of
    the smallest of our fleet.’

    “Then I noticed that the automobile had no front, and there were two
    cannons mounted where the front should be. I noticed, too, that we
    were traveling very low, almost down on the ground. Presently we
    got to the bottom of a hill and started up another, and I found
    myself walking ahead of the ‘mobile. I turned around to look for
    the little girl, and instead of her I found a kitten capering beside
    me, and when we reached the top of the hill we were looking out over
    a most barren and desolate waste of sand-heaps without a speck of
    vegetation anywhere, and the kitten said, ‘This view beggars all
    admiration.’ Then all at once we were in a great group of people
    and I undertook to repeat to them the kitten’s remark, but when I
    tried to do it the words were so touching that I broke down and
    cried, and all the group cried, too, over the kitten’s moving
    remark.”

    The joy with which he told this absurd sleep fancy made it supremely
    ridiculous and we laughed until tears really came.

One morning he said: “I was awake a good deal in the night, and I tried
to think of interesting things. I got to working out geological periods,
trying to think of some way to comprehend them, and then astronomical
periods. Of course it’s impossible, but I thought of a plan that seemed
to mean something to me. I remembered that Neptune is two billion eight
hundred million miles away. That, of course, is incomprehensible, but
then there is the nearest fixed star with its twenty-five trillion
miles--twenty-five trillion--or nearly a thousand times as far, and then
I took this book and counted the lines on a page and I found that there
was an average of thirty-two lines to the page and two hundred and forty
pages, and I figured out that, counting the distance to Neptune as
one line, there were still not enough lines in the book by nearly two
thousand to reach the nearest fixed star, and somehow that gave me a
sort of dim idea of the vastness of the distance and kind of a journey
into space.”

Later I figured out another method of comprehending a little of that
great distance by estimating the existence of the human race at thirty
thousand years (Lord Kelvin’s figures) and the average generation to
have been thirty-three years with a world population of 1,500,000,000
souls. I assumed the nearest fixed star to be the first station in
Paradise and the first soul to have started thirty thousand years ago.
Traveling at the rate of about thirty miles a second, it would just now
be arriving in Alpha Centauri with all the rest of that buried multitude
stringing out behind at an average distance of twenty miles apart.

Few things gave him more pleasure than the contemplation of such figures
as these. We made occasional business trips to New York, and during one
of them visited the Museum of Natural History to look at the brontosaur
and the meteorites and the astronomical model in the entrance hall. To
him these were the most fascinating things in the world. He contemplated
the meteorites and the brontosaur, and lost himself in strange and
marvelous imaginings concerning the far reaches of time and space whence
they had come down to us.

Mark Twain lived curiously apart from the actualities of life. Dwelling
mainly among his philosophies and speculations, he observed vaguely,
or minutely, what went on about him; but in either case the fact took a
place, not in the actual world, but in a world within his consciousness,
or subconsciousness, a place where facts were likely to assume new and
altogether different relations from those they had borne in the physical
occurrence. It not infrequently happened, therefore, when he recounted
some incident, even the most recent, that history took on fresh and
startling forms. More than once I have known him to relate an occurrence
of the day before with a reality of circumstance that carried absolute
conviction, when the details themselves were precisely reversed. If his
attention were called to the discrepancy, his face would take on a blank
look, as of one suddenly aroused from dreamland, to be followed by an
almost childish interest in your revelation and ready acknowledgment of
his mistake. I do not think such mistakes humiliated him; but they often
surprised and, I think, amused him.

Insubstantial and deceptive as was this inner world of his, to him it
must have been much more real than the world of flitting physical shapes
about him. He would fix you keenly with his attention, but you realized,
at last, that he was placing you and seeing you not as a part of the
material landscape, but as an item of his own inner world--a world in
which philosophies and morals stood upright--a very good world indeed,
but certainly a topsy-turvy world when viewed with the eye of mere
literal scrutiny. And this was, mainly, of course, because the routine
of life did not appeal to him. Even members of his household did not
always stir his consciousness.

He knew they were there; he could call them by name; he relied upon
them; but his knowledge of them always suggested the knowledge that
Mount Everest might have of the forests and caves and boulders upon its
slopes, useful, perhaps, but hardly necessary to the giant’s existence,
and in no important matter a part of its greater life.



CCLXXXIV. A LIBRARY CONCERT

In a letter which Clemens wrote to Miss Wallace at this time, he tells
of a concert given at Stormfield on September 21st for the benefit of
the new Redding Library. Gabrilowitsch had so far recovered that he was
up and about and able to play. David Bispham, the great barytone, always
genial and generous, agreed to take part, and Clara Clemens, already
accustomed to public singing, was to join in the program. The letter to
Miss Wallace supplies the rest of the history.

    We had a grand time here yesterday. Concert in aid of the little
    library.

                     TEAM

              Gabrilowitsch, pianist.
              David Bispham, vocalist.
              Clara Clemens, ditto.
              Mark Twain, introduces of team.

    Detachments and squads and groups and singles came from everywhere
    --Danbury, New Haven, Norwalk, Redding, Redding Ridge, Ridgefield,
    and even from New York: some in 60-h.p. motor-cars, some in
    buggies and carriages, and a swarm of farmer-young-folk on foot
    from miles around--525 altogether.

    If we hadn’t stopped the sale of tickets a day and a half before the
    performance we should have been swamped. We jammed 160 into the
    library (not quite all had seats), we filled the loggia, the dining-
    room, the hall, clear into the billiard-room, the stairs, and the
    brick-paved square outside the dining-room door.

    The artists were received with a great welcome, and it woke them up,
    and I tell you they performed to the Queen’s taste! The program was
    an hour and three-quarters long and the encores added a half-hour to
    it. The enthusiasm of the house was hair-lifting. They all stayed
    an hour after the close to shake hands and congratulate.

    We had no dollar seats except in the library, but we accumulated
    $372 for the Building Fund. We had tea at half past six for a
    dozen--the Hawthornes, Jeannette Gilder, and her niece, etc.; and
    after 8-o’clock dinner we had a private concert and a ball in the
    bare-stripped library until 10; nobody present but the team and Mr.
    and Mrs. Paine and Jean and her dog. And me. Bispham did “Danny
    Deever” and the “Erlkonig” in his majestic, great organ-tones and
    artillery, and Gabrilowitsch played the accompaniments as they were
    never played before, I do suppose.

There is not much to add to that account. Clemens, introducing the
performers, was the gay feature of the occasion. He spoke of the great
reputation of Bispham and Gabrilowitsch; then he said:

“My daughter is not as famous as these gentlemen, but she is ever so
much better-looking.”

The music of the evening that followed, with Gabrilowitsch at the piano
and David Bispham to sing, was something not likely ever to be repeated.
Bispham sang the “Erlkonig” and “Killiecrankie” and the “Grenadiers” and
several other songs. He spoke of having sung Wagner’s arrangement of the
“Grenadiers” at the composer’s home following his death, and how none of
the family had heard it before.

There followed dancing, and Jean Clemens, fine and handsome, apparently
full of life and health, danced down that great living-room as
care-free as if there was no shadow upon her life. And the evening was
distinguished in another way, for before it ended Clara Clemens had
promised Ossip Gabrilowitsch to become his wife.



CCLXXXV. A WEDDING AT STORMFIELD

The wedding of Ossip Gabrilowitsch and Clara Clemens was not delayed.
Gabrilowitsch had signed for a concert tour in Europe, and unless the
marriage took place forthwith it must be postponed many months. It
followed, therefore, fifteen days after the engagement. They were busy
days. Clemens, enormously excited and pleased over the prospect of the
first wedding in his family, personally attended to the selection of
those who were to have announcement-cards, employing a stenographer to
make the list.

October 6th was a perfect wedding-day. It was one of those quiet, lovely
fall days when the whole world seems at peace. Claude, the butler, with
his usual skill in such matters, had decorated the great living-room
with gay autumn foliage and flowers, brought in mainly from the woods
and fields. They blended perfectly with the warm tones of the walls and
furnishings, and I do not remember ever having seen a more beautiful
room. Only relatives and a few of the nearest friends were invited to
the ceremony. The Twichells came over a day ahead, for Twichell, who
had assisted in the marriage rites between Samuel Clemens and Olivia
Langdon, was to perform that ceremony for their daughter now. A
fellow-student of the bride and groom when they had been pupils of
Leschetizky, in Vienna--Miss Ethel Newcomb--was at the piano and played
softly the Wedding March from “Taunhauser.” Jean Clemens was the only
bridesmaid, and she was stately and classically beautiful, with a proud
dignity in her office. Jervis Langdon, the bride’s cousin and childhood
playmate, acted as best man, and Clemens, of course, gave the bride
away. By request he wore his scarlet Oxford gown over his snowy
flannels, and was splendid beyond words. I do not write of the
appearance of the bride and groom, for brides and grooms are always
handsome and always happy, and certainly these were no exception. It was
all so soon over, the feasting ended, and the principals whirling away
into the future. I have a picture in my mind of them seated together in
the automobile, with Richard Watson Gilder standing on the step for
a last good-by, and before them a wide expanse of autumn foliage and
distant hills. I remember Gilder’s voice saying, when the car was on the
turn, and they were waving back to us:

          “Over the hills and far away,
           Beyond the utmost purple rim,
           Beyond the night, beyond the day,
           Through all the world she followed him.”

The matter of the wedding had been kept from the newspapers until the
eve of the wedding, when the Associated Press had been notified. A
representative was there; but Clemens had characteristically interviewed
himself on the subject, and it was only necessary to hand the reporter
a typewritten copy. Replying to the question (put to himself), “Are you
pleased with the marriage?” he answered:

    Yes, fully as much as any marriage could please me or any other
    father. There are two or three solemn things in life and a happy
    marriage is one of them, for the terrors of life are all to come.
    I am glad of this marriage, and Mrs. Clemens would be glad, for she
    always had a warm affection for Gabrilowitsch.

There was another wedding at Stormfield on the following afternoon--an
imitation wedding. Little Joy came up with me, and wished she could
stand in just the spot where she had seen the bride stand, and she
expressed a wish that she could get married like that. Clemens said:

“Frankness is a jewel; only the young can afford it.”

Then he happened to remember a ridiculous boy-doll--a white-haired
creature with red coat and green trousers, a souvenir imitation of
himself from one of the Rogerses’ Christmas trees. He knew where it was,
and he got it out. Then he said:

“Now, Joy, we will have another wedding. This is Mr. Colonel Williams,
and you are to become his wedded wife.”

So Joy stood up very gravely and Clemens performed the ceremony, and
I gave the bride away, and Joy to him became Mrs. Colonel Williams
thereafter, and entered happily into her new estate.



CCLXXXVI. AUTUMN DAYS

A harvest of letters followed the wedding: a general congratulatory
expression, mingled with admiration, affection, and good-will. In his
interview Clemens had referred to the pain in his breast; and many
begged him to deny that there was anything serious the matter with
him, urging him to try this relief or that, pathetically eager for his
continued life and health. They cited the comfort he had brought to
world-weary humanity and his unfailing stand for human justice as
reasons why he should live. Such letters could not fail to cheer him.

A letter of this period, from John Bigelow, gave him a pleasure of its
own. Clemens had written Bigelow, apropos of some adverse expression on
the tariff:

    Thank you for any hard word you can say about the tariff. I guess
    the government that robs its own people earns the future it is
    preparing for itself.

Bigelow was just then declining an invitation to the annual dinner of
the Chamber of Commerce. In sending his regrets he said:

    The sentiment I would propose if I dared to be present would be the
    words of Mark Twain, the statesman:

    “The government that robs its own people earns the future it is
    preparing for itself.”

Now to Clemens himself he wrote:

    Rochefoucault never said a cleverer thing, nor Dr. Franklin a wiser
    one.... Be careful, or the Demos will be running you for
    President when you are not on your guard.

    Yours more than ever,
                     JOHN BIGELOW.

Among the tributes that came, was a sermon by the Rev. Fred Window
Adams, of Schenectady, New York, with Mark Twain as its subject. Mr.
Adams chose for his text, “Take Mark and bring him with thee; for he is
profitable for the ministry,” and he placed the two Marks, St. Mark and
Mark Twain, side by side as ministers to humanity, and characterized
him as “a fearless knight of righteousness.” A few weeks later Mr. Adams
himself came to Stormfield, and, like all open-minded ministers of the
Gospel, he found that he could get on very well indeed with Mark Twain.

In spite of the good-will and the good wishes Clemens’s malady did not
improve. As the days grew chillier he found that he must remain closer
indoors. The cold air seemed to bring on the pains, and they were
gradually becoming more severe; then, too, he did not follow the
doctor’s orders in the matter of smoking, nor altogether as to exercise.

To Miss Wallace he wrote:

I can’t walk, I can’t drive, I’m not down-stairs much, and I don’t see
company, but I drink barrels of water to keep the pain quiet; I read,
and read, and read, and smoke, and smoke, and smoke all the time (as
formerly), and it’s a contented and comfortable life.

But this was not altogether accurate as to details. He did come
down-stairs many times daily, and he persisted in billiards regardless
of the paroxysms. We found, too, that the seizures were induced by
mental agitation. One night he read aloud to Jean and myself the first
chapter of an article, “The Turning-Point in My Life,” which he was
preparing for Harper’s Bazar. He had begun it with one of his impossible
burlesque fancies, and he felt our attitude of disappointment even
before any word had been said. Suddenly he rose, and laying his hand
on his breast said, “I must lie down,” and started toward the stair.
I supported him to his room and hurriedly poured out the hot water. He
drank it and dropped back on the bed.

“Don’t speak to me,” he said; “don’t make me talk.”

Jean came in, and we sat there several moments in silence. I think we
both wondered if this might not be the end; but presently he spoke of
his own accord, declaring he was better, and ready for billiards.

We played for at least an hour afterward, and he seemed no worse for
the attack. It is a curious malady--that angina; even the doctors are
acquainted with its manifestations, rather than its cause. Clemens’s
general habits of body and mind were probably not such as to delay its
progress; furthermore, there had befallen him that year one of those
misfortunes which his confiding nature peculiarly invited--a betrayal
of trust by those in whom it had been boundlessly placed--and it seems
likely that the resulting humiliation aggravated his complaint. The
writing of a detailed history of this episode afforded him occupation
and a certain amusement, but probably did not contribute to his health.
One day he sent for his attorney, Mr. Charles T. Lark, and made some
final revisions in his will.--[Mark Twain’s estate, later appraised at
something more than $600,000 was left in the hands of trustees for
his daughters. The trustees were Edward E. Loomis, Jervis Langdon, and
Zoheth S. Freeman. The direction of his literary affairs was left to his
daughter Clara and the writer of this history.]

To see him you would never have suspected that he was ill. He was in
good flesh, and his movement was as airy and his eye as bright and his
face as full of bloom as at any time during the period I had known him;
also, he was as light-hearted and full of ideas and plans, and he was
even gentler--having grown mellow with age and retirement, like good
wine.

And of course he would find amusement in his condition. He said:

“I have always pretended to be sick to escape visitors; now, for the
first time, I have got a genuine excuse. It makes me feel so honest.”

And once, when Jean reported a caller in the livingroom, he said:

“Jean, I can’t see her. Tell her I am likely to drop dead any minute and
it would be most embarrassing.”

But he did see her, for it was a poet--Angela Morgan--and he read her
poem, “God’s Man,” aloud with great feeling, and later he sold it for
her to Collier’s Weekly.

He still had violent rages now and then, remembering some of the most
notable of his mistakes; and once, after denouncing himself, rather
inclusively, as an idiot, he said:

“I wish to God the lightning would strike me; but I’ve wished that
fifty thousand times and never got anything out of it yet. I have missed
several good chances. Mrs. Clemens was afraid of lightning, and would
never let me bare my head to the storm.”

The element of humor was never lacking, and the rages became less
violent and less frequent.

I was at Stormfield steadily now, and there was a regular routine of
afternoon sessions of billiards or reading, in which we were generally
alone; for Jean, occupied with her farming and her secretary labors,
seldom appeared except at meal-times. Occasionally she joined in the
billiard games; but it was difficult learning and her interest was not
great. She would have made a fine player, for she had a natural talent
for games, as she had for languages, and she could have mastered the
science of angles as she had mastered tennis and French and German and
Italian. She had naturally a fine intellect, with many of her father’s
characteristics, and a tender heart that made every dumb creature her
friend.

Katie Leary, who had been Jean’s nurse, once told how, as a little
child, Jean had not been particularly interested in a picture of the
Lisbon earthquake, where the people were being swallowed up; but
on looking at the next page, which showed a number of animals being
overwhelmed, she had said:

“Poor things!”

Katie said:

“Why, you didn’t say that about the people!”

But Jean answered:

“Oh, they could speak.”

One night at the dinner-table her father was saying how difficult it
must be for a man who had led a busy life to give up the habit of work.

“That is why the Rogerses kill themselves,” he said. “They would rather
kill themselves in the old treadmill than stop and try to kill time.
They have forgotten how to rest. They know nothing but to keep on till
they drop.”

I told of something I had read not long before. It was about an aged
lion that had broken loose from his cage at Coney Island. He had not
offered to hurt any one; but after wandering about a little, rather
aimlessly, he had come to a picket-fence, and a moment later began
pacing up and down in front of it, just the length of his cage. They had
come and led him back to his prison without trouble, and he had rushed
eagerly into it. I noticed that Jean was listening anxiously, and when I
finished she said:

“Is that a true story?”

She had forgotten altogether the point in illustration. She was
concerned only with the poor old beast that had found no joy in his
liberty.

Among the letters that Clemens wrote just then was one to Miss Wallace,
in which he described the glory of the fall colors as seen from his
windows.

    The autumn splendors passed you by? What a pity! I wish you had
    been here. It was beyond words! It was heaven & hell & sunset &
    rainbows & the aurora all fused into one divine harmony, & you
    couldn’t look at it and keep the tears back.

    Such a singing together, & such a whispering together, & such a
    snuggling together of cozy, soft colors, & such kissing & caressing,
    & such pretty blushing when the sun breaks out & catches those
    dainty weeds at it--you remember that weed-garden of mine?--& then
    --then the far hills sleeping in a dim blue trance--oh, hearing
    about it is nothing, you should be here to see it!

In the same letter he refers to some work that he was writing for his
own satisfaction--‘Letters from the Earth’; said letters supposed
to have been written by an immortal visitant and addressed to other
immortals in some remote sphere.

    I’ll read passages to you. This book will never be published
    --in fact it couldn’t be, because it would be felony... Paine
    enjoys it, but Paine is going to be damned one of these days, I
    suppose.

I very well remember his writing those ‘Letters from the Earth’. He
read them to me from time to time as he wrote them, and they were fairly
overflowing with humor and philosophy and satire concerning the
human race. The immortal visitor pointed out, one after another, the
absurdities of mankind, his ridiculous conception of heaven, and
his special conceit in believing that he was the Creator’s pet--the
particular form of life for which all the universe was created. Clemens
allowed his exuberant fancy free rein, being under no restrictions as
to the possibility of print or public offense. He enjoyed them himself,
too, as he read them aloud, and we laughed ourselves weak over his bold
imaginings.

One admissible extract will carry something of the flavor of these
chapters. It is where the celestial correspondent describes man’s
religion.

    His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing,
    grotesque. I give you my word it has not a single feature in it
    that he actually values. It consists--utterly and entirely--of
    diversions which he cares next to nothing about here in the earth,
    yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven. Isn’t it curious?
    Isn’t it interesting? You must not think I am exaggerating, for it
    is not so. I will give you the details.

    Most, men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay
    where others are singing if it be continued more than two hours.
    Note that.

    Only about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument,
    and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that
    down.

    Many men pray, not many of them like to do it. A few pray long, the
    others make a short-cut.

    More men go to church than want to.

    To forty-nine men in fifty the Sabbath day is a dreary, dreary bore.

    Further, all sane people detest noise.

    All people, sane or insane, like to have variety in their lives.
    Monotony quickly wearies them.

    Now then, you have the facts. You know what men don’t enjoy. Well,
    they have invented a heaven, out of their own heads, all by
    themselves; guess what it is like? In fifteen hundred years you
    couldn’t do it. They have left out the very things they care for
    most their dearest pleasures--and replaced them with prayer!

    In man’s heaven everybody sings. There are no exceptions. The man
    who did not sing on earth sings there; the man who could not sing on
    earth sings there. Thus universal singing is not casual, not
    occasional, not relieved by intervals of quiet; it goes on all day
    long and every day during a stretch of twelve hours. And everybody
    stays where on earth the place would be empty in two hours. The
    singing is of hymns alone. Nay, it is one hymn alone. The words
    are always the same in number--they are only about a dozen--there is
    no rhyme--there is no poetry. “Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna unto the
    highest!” and a few such phrases constitute the whole service.

    Meantime, every person is playing on a harp! Consider the deafening
    hurricane of sound. Consider, further, it is a praise service--a
    service of compliment, flattery, adulation. Do you ask who it is
    that is willing to endure this strange compliment, this insane
    compliment, and who not only endures it but likes it, enjoys it,
    requires it, commands it? Hold your breath: It is God! This race’s
    God I mean--their own pet invention.

Most of the ideas presented in this his last commentary on human
absurdities were new only as to phrasing. He had exhausted the topic
long ago, in one way or another; but it was one of the themes in which
he never lost interest. Many subjects became stale to him at last; but
the curious invention called man remained a novelty to him to the end.

From my note-book:

    October 25. I am constantly amazed at his knowledge of history--all
    history--religious, political, military. He seems to have read
    everything in the world concerning Rome, France, and England
    particularly.

    Last night we stopped playing billiards while he reviewed, in the
    most vivid and picturesque phrasing, the reasons of Rome’s decline.
    Such a presentation would have enthralled any audience--I could not
    help feeling a great pity that he had not devoted some of his public
    effort to work of that sort. No one could have equaled him at it.
    He concluded with some comments on the possibility of America
    following Rome’s example, though he thought the vote of the people
    would always, or at least for a long period, prevent imperialism.

    November 1. To-day he has been absorbed in his old interest in
    shorthand. “It is the only rational alphabet,” he declared. “All
    this spelling reform is nonsense. What we need is alphabet reform,
    and shorthand is the thing. Take the letter M, for instance; it is
    made with one stroke in shorthand, while in longhand it requires at
    least three. The word Mephistopheles can be written in shorthand
    with one-sixth the number of strokes that is required in longhand.
    I tell you shorthand should be adopted as the alphabet.”

    I said: “There is this objection: the characters are so slightly
    different that each writer soon forms a system of his own and it is
    seldom that two can read each other’s notes.”

    “You are talking of stenographic reporting,” he said, rather warmly.
    “Nothing of the kind is true in the case of the regular alphabet.
    It is perfectly clear and legible.”

    “Would you have it in the schools, then?”

    “Yes, it should be taught in the schools, not for stenographic
    purposes, but only for use in writing to save time.”

    He was very much in earnest, and said he had undertaken an article
    on the subject.

    November 3. He said he could not sleep last night, for thinking
    what a fool he had been in his various investments.

    “I have always been the victim of somebody,” he said, “and always an
    idiot myself, doing things that even a child would not do. Never
    asking anybody’s advice--never taking it when it was offered. I
    can’t see how anybody could do the things I have done and have kept
    right on doing.”
     I could see that the thought agitated him, and I suggested that we
    go to his room and read, which we did, and had a riotous time over
    the most recent chapters of the ‘Letters from the Earth’, and some
    notes he had made for future chapters on infant damnation and other
    distinctive features of orthodox creeds. He told an anecdote of an
    old minister who declared that Presbyterianism without infant
    damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn’t be
    identified because it had lost its tag.

    Somewhat on the defensive I said, “But we must admit that the so-
    called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive.”

    He answered, “Yes, but in spite of their religion, not because of
    it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the
    day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in
    child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical
    curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and
    geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition.
    The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five
    hundred years before the Christian religion was born.

    “I have been reading Gibbon’s celebrated Fifteenth Chapter,” he said
    later, “and I don’t see what Christians found against it. It is so
    mild--so gentle in its sarcasm.” He added that he had been reading
    also a little book of brief biographies and had found in it the
    saying of Darwin’s father, “Unitarianism is a featherbed to catch
    falling Christians.”

    “I was glad to find and identify that saying,” he said; “it is so
    good.”

    He finished the evening by reading a chapter from Carlyle’s French
    Revolution--a fine pyrotechnic passage--the gathering at Versailles.
    I said that Carlyle somehow reminded me of a fervid stump-speaker
    who pounded his fists and went at his audience fiercely, determined
    to convince them.

    “Yes,” he said, “but he is the best one that ever lived.”

    November 10. This morning early he heard me stirring and called. I
    went in and found him propped up with a book, as usual. He said:

    “I seldom read Christmas stories, but this is very beautiful. It
    has made me cry. I want you to read it.” (It was Booth
    Tarkington’s ‘Beasley’s Christmas Party’.) “Tarkington has the true
    touch,” he said; “his work always satisfies me.” Another book he
    has been reading with great enjoyment is James Branch Cabell’s
    Chivalry. He cannot say enough of the subtle poetic art with which
    Cabell has flung the light of romance about dark and sordid chapters
    of history.



CCLXXVII. MARK TWAIN’S READING

Perhaps here one may speak of Mark Twain’s reading in general. On the
table by him, and on his bed, and in the billiard-room shelves he kept
the books he read most. They were not many--not more than a dozen--but
they were manifestly of familiar and frequent usage. All, or nearly
all, had annotations--spontaneously uttered marginal notes, title
prefatories, or concluding comments. They were the books he had read
again and again, and it was seldom that he had not had something to say
with each fresh reading.

There were the three big volumes by Saint-Simon--‘The Memoirs’--which he
once told me he had read no less than twenty times. On the fly-leaf of
the first volume he wrote--

This, & Casanova & Pepys, set in parallel columns, could afford a good
coup d’oeil of French & English high life of that epoch.

All through those finely printed volumes are his commentaries, sometimes
no more than a word, sometimes a filled, closely written margin.
He found little to admire in the human nature of Saint-Simon’s
period--little to approve in Saint-Simon himself beyond his unrestrained
frankness, which he admired without stint, and in one paragraph where
the details of that early period are set down with startling fidelity he
wrote: “Oh, incomparable Saint-Simon!”

Saint-Simon is always frank, and Mark Twain was equally so. Where the
former tells one of the unspeakable compulsions of Louis XIV., the
latter has commented:

We have to grant that God made this royal hog; we may also be permitted
to believe that it was a crime to do so.

And on another page:

In her memories of this period the Duchesse de St. Clair makes this
striking remark: “Sometimes one could tell a gentleman, but it was only
by his manner of using his fork.”

His comments on the orthodox religion of Saint-Simon’s period are not
marked by gentleness. Of the author’s reference to the Edict of Nantes,
which he says depopulated half of the realm, ruined its commerce, and
“authorized torments and punishments by which so many innocent people of
both sexes were killed by thousands,” Clemens writes:

So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from
the Gospel: “Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor’s religion
is.” Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is
claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine
enough to add that new law to its code.

In the place where Saint-Simon describes the death of Monseigneur, son
of the king, and the court hypocrites are wailing their extravagantly
pretended sorrow, Clemens wrote:

It is all so true, all so human. God made these animals. He must have
noticed this scene; I wish I knew how it struck Him.

There were not many notes in the Suetonius, nor in the Carlyle
Revolution, though these were among the volumes he read oftenest.
Perhaps they expressed for him too completely and too richly their
subject-matter to require anything at his hand. Here and there are
marked passages and occasional cross-references to related history and
circumstance.

There was not much room for comment on the narrow margins of the old
copy of Pepys, which he had read steadily since the early seventies;
but here and there a few crisp words, and the underscoring and marked
passages are plentiful enough to convey his devotion to that quaint
record which, perhaps next to Suetonius, was the book he read and quoted
most.

Francis Parkman’s Canadian Histories he had read periodically,
especially the story of the Old Regime and of the Jesuits in North
America. As late as January, 1908, he wrote on the title-page of the Old
Regime:

Very interesting. It tells how people religiously and otherwise insane
came over from France and colonized Canada.

He was not always complimentary to those who undertook to Christianize
the Indians; but he did not fail to write his admiration of their
courage--their very willingness to endure privation and even the
fiendish savage tortures for the sake of their faith. “What manner of
men are these?” he wrote, apropos of the account of Bressani, who had
undergone the most devilish inflictions which savage ingenuity could
devise, and yet returned maimed and disfigured the following spring to
“dare again the knives and fiery brand of the Iroquois.” Clemens was
likely to be on the side of the Indians, but hardly in their barbarism.
In one place he wrote:

    That men should be willing to leave their happy homes and endure
    what the missionaries endured in order to teach these Indians the
    road to hell would be rational, understandable, but why they should
    want to teach them a way to heaven is a thing which the mind somehow
    cannot grasp.

Other histories, mainly English and French, showed how he had read
them--read and digested every word and line. There were two volumes
of Lecky, much worn; Andrew D. White’s ‘Science and Theology’--a chief
interest for at least one summer--and among the collection a well-worn
copy of ‘Modern English Literature--Its Blemishes and Defects’, by Henry
H. Breen. On the title-page of this book Clemens had written:

    HARTFORD, 1876. Use with care, for it is a scarce book. England
    had to be ransacked in order to get it--or the bookseller speaketh
    falsely.

He once wrote a paper for the Saturday Morning Club, using for his text
examples of slipshod English which Breen had noted.

Clemens had a passion for biography, and especially for autobiography,
diaries, letters, and such intimate human history. Greville’s ‘Journal
of the Reigns of George IV. and William IV.’ he had read much and
annotated freely. Greville, while he admired Byron’s talents, abhorred
the poet’s personality, and in one place condemns him as a vicious
person and a debauchee. He adds:

Then he despises pretenders and charlatans of all sorts, while he is
himself a pretender, as all men are who assume a character which does
not belong to them and affect to be something which they are all the
time conscious they are not in reality.

Clemens wrote on the margin:

    But, dear sir, you are forgetting that what a man sees in the human
    race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own
    heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel
    as Byron did, and for the same reason. Do you admire the race (&
    consequently yourself)?

A little further along--where Greville laments that Byron can take no
profit to himself from the sinful characters he depicts so faithfully,
Clemens commented:

    If Byron--if any man--draws 50 characters, they are all himself--50
    shades, 50 moods, of his own character. And when the man draws them
    well why do they stir my admiration? Because they are me--I
    recognize myself.

A volume of Plutarch was among the biographies that showed usage, and
the Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself. Two Years Before the Mast
he loved, and never tired of. The more recent Memoirs of Andrew D. White
and Moncure D. Conway both, I remember, gave him enjoyment, as did the
Letters of Lowell. A volume of the Letters of Madame de Sevigne had some
annotated margins which were not complimentary to the translator, or
for that matter to Sevigne herself, whom he once designates as
a “nauseating” person, many of whose letters had been uselessly
translated, as well as poorly arranged for reading. But he would read
any volume of letters or personal memoirs; none were too poor that had
the throb of life in them, however slight.

Of such sort were the books that Mark Twain had loved best, and such
were a few of his words concerning them. Some of them belong to his
earlier reading, and among these is Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man’, a book
whose influence was always present, though I believe he did not read
it any more in later years. In the days I knew him he read steadily
not much besides Suetonius and Pepys and Carlyle. These and his simple
astronomies and geologies and the Morte Arthure and the poems of Kipling
were seldom far from his hand.



CCLXXXVIII. A BERMUDA BIRTHDAY

It was the middle of November, 1909, when Clemens decided to take
another Bermuda vacation, and it was the 19th that we sailed. I went
to New York a day ahead and arranged matters, and on the evening of the
18th received the news that Richard Watson Gilder had suddenly died.

Next morning there was other news. Clemens’s old friend, William M.
Laffan, of the Sun, had died while undergoing a surgical operation. I
met Clemens at the train. He had already heard about Gilder; but he had
not yet learned of Laffan’s death. He said:

“That’s just it. Gilder and Laffan get all the good things that come
along and I never get anything.”

Then, suddenly remembering, he added:

“How curious it is! I have been thinking of Laffan coming down on
the train, and mentally writing a letter to him on this Stetson-Eddy
affair.”

I asked when he had begun thinking of Laffan.

He said: “Within the hour.”

It was within the hour that I had received the news, and naturally in
my mind had carried it instantly to him. Perhaps there was something
telepathic in it.

He was not at all ill going down to Bermuda, which was a fortunate
thing, for the water was rough and I was quite disqualified. We did
not even discuss astronomy, though there was what seemed most important
news--the reported discovery of a new planet.

But there was plenty of talk on the subject as soon as we got settled in
the Hamilton Hotel. It was windy and rainy out-of-doors, and we looked
out on the drenched semi-tropical foliage with a great bamboo swaying
and bending in the foreground, while he speculated on the vast distance
that the new planet must lie from our sun, to which it was still
a satellite. The report had said that it was probably four hundred
billions of miles distant, and that on this far frontier of the solar
system the sun could not appear to it larger than the blaze of a tallow
candle. To us it was wholly incredible how, in that dim remoteness, it
could still hold true to the central force and follow at a snail-pace,
yet with unvarying exactitude, its stupendous orbit. Clemens said that
heretofore Neptune, the planetary outpost of our system, had been called
the tortoise of the skies, but that comparatively it was rapid in its
motion, and had become a near neighbor. He was a good deal excited at
first, having somehow the impression that this new planet traveled out
beyond the nearest fixed star; but then he remembered that the distance
to that first solar neighbor was estimated in trillions, not billions,
and that our little system, even with its new additions, was a child’s
handbreadth on the plane of the sky. He had brought along a small book
called The Pith of Astronomy--a fascinating little volume--and he read
from it about the great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of
flame roll up two thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a
tiny star in the deeps of the universe.

If I dwell unwarrantably on this phase of Mark Twain’s character, it is
because it was always so fascinating to me, and the contemplation of
the drama of the skies always meant so much to him, and somehow always
seemed akin to him in its proportions. He had been born under a flaming
star, a wanderer of the skies. He was himself, to me, always a comet
rushing through space, from mystery to mystery, regardless of sun and
systems. It is not likely to rain long in Bermuda, and when the sun
comes back it brings summer, whatever the season. Within a day after our
arrival we were driving about those coral roads along the beaches, and
by that marvelously variegated water. We went often to the south shore,
especially to Devonshire Bay, where the reefs and the sea coloring seem
more beautiful than elsewhere. Usually, when we reached the bay, we got
out to walk along the indurated shore, stopping here and there to look
out over the jeweled water liquid turquoise, emerald lapis-lazuli, jade,
the imperial garment of the Lord.

At first we went alone with only the colored driver, Clifford Trott,
whose name Clemens could not recollect, though he was always attempting
resemblances with ludicrous results. A little later Helen Allen, an
early angel-fish member already mentioned, was with us and directed the
drives, for she had been born on the island and knew every attractive
locality, though, for that matter, it would be hard to find there a
place that was not attractive.

Clemens, in fact, remained not many days regularly at the hotel. He kept
a room and his wardrobe there; but he paid a visit to Bay House--the
lovely and quiet home of Helen’s parents--and prolonged it from day to
day, and from week to week, because it was a quiet and peaceful place
with affectionate attention and limitless welcome. Clifford Trott had
orders to come with the carriage each afternoon, and we drove down to
Bay House for Mark Twain and his playmate, and then went wandering at
will among the labyrinth of blossom-bordered, perfectly kept roadways of
a dainty paradise, that never, I believe, becomes quite a reality even
to those who know it best.

Clemens had an occasional paroxysm during these weeks, but they were not
likely to be severe or protracted; and I have no doubt the peace of
his surroundings, the remoteness from disturbing events, as well as the
balmy temperature, all contributed to his improved condition.

He talked pretty continuously during these drives, and he by no means
restricted his subjects to juvenile matters. He discussed history and
his favorite sciences and philosophies, and I am sure that his drift was
rarely beyond the understanding of his young companion, for it was Mark
Twain’s gift to phrase his thought so that it commanded not only the
respect of age, but the comprehension and the interest of youth. I
remember that once he talked, during an afternoon’s drive, on the French
Revolution and the ridiculous episode of Anacharsis Cloots, “orator and
advocate of the human race,” collecting the vast populace of France to
swear allegiance to a king even then doomed to the block. The very name
of Cloots suggested humor, and nothing could have been more delightful
and graphic than the whole episode as he related it. Helen asked if he
thought such a thing as that could ever happen in America.

“No,” he said, “the American sense of humor would have laughed it out of
court in a week; and the Frenchman dreads ridicule, too, though he never
seems to realize how ridiculous he is--the most ridiculous creature in
the world.”

On the morning of his seventy-fourth birthday he was looking wonderfully
well after a night of sound sleep, his face full of color and freshness,
his eyes bright and keen and full of good-humor. I presented him with
a pair of cuff-buttons silver-enameled with the Bermuda lily, and I
thought he seemed pleased with them.

It was rather gloomy outside, so we remained indoors by the fire and
played cards, game after game of hearts, at which he excelled, and he
was usually kept happy by winning. There were no visitors, and after
dinner Helen asked him to read some of her favorite episodes from Tom
Sawyer, so he read the whitewashing scene, Peter and the Pain-killer,
and such chapters until tea-time. Then there was a birthday cake, and
afterward cigars and talk and a quiet fireside evening.

Once, in the course of his talk, he forgot a word and denounced his poor
memory:

“I’ll forget the Lord’s middle name some time,” he declared, “right in
the midst of a storm, when I need all the help I can get.”

Later he said:

“Nobody dreamed, seventy-four years ago to-day, that I would be in
Bermuda now.” And I thought he meant a good deal more than the words
conveyed.

It was during this Bermuda visit that Mark Twain added the finishing
paragraph to his article, “The Turning-Point in My Life,” which, at
Howells’s suggestion, he had been preparing for Harper’s Bazar. It was
a characteristic touch, and, as the last summary of his philosophy of
human life, may be repeated here.

    Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of
    yours) was the Garden of Eden. It was there that the first link was
    forged of the chain that was ultimately to lead to the emptying of
    me into the literary guild. Adam’s temperament was the first
    command the Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. And
    it was the only command Adam would never be able to disobey. It
    said, “Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable.”
     The later command, to let the fruit alone, was certain to be
    disobeyed. Not by Adam himself, but by his temperament--which he
    did not create and had no authority over. For the temperament is
    the man; the thing tricked out with clothes and named Man is merely
    its Shadow, nothing more. The law of the tiger’s temperament is,
    Thou shaft kill; the law of the sheep’s temperament is, Thou shalt
    not kill. To issue later commands requiring the tiger to let the
    fat stranger alone, and requiring the sheep to imbrue its hands in
    the blood of the lion is not worth while, for those commands can’t
    be obeyed. They would invite to violations of the law of
    temperament, which is supreme, and takes precedence of all other
    authorities. I cannot help feeling disappointed in Adam and Eve.
    That is, in their temperaments. Not in them, poor helpless young
    creatures--afflicted with temperaments made out of butter, which
    butter was commanded to get into contact with fire and be melted.
    What I cannot help wishing is, that Adam and Eve had been postponed,
    and Martin Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place--that splendid
    pair equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos.
    By neither sugary persuasions nor by hell-fire could Satan have
    beguiled them to eat the apple.

    There would have been results! Indeed yes. The apple would be
    intact to-day; there would be no human race; there would be no you;
    there would be no me. And the old, old creation-dawn scheme of
    ultimately launching me into the literary guild would have been
    defeated.



CCLXXXIX. THE DEATH OF JEAN

He decided to go home for the holidays, and how fortunate it seems now
that he did so! We sailed for America on the 18th of December, arriving
the 21st. Jean was at the wharf to meet us, blue and shivering with the
cold, for it was wretchedly bleak there, and I had the feeling that she
should not have come.

She went directly, I think, to Stormfield, he following a day or two
later. On the 23d I was lunching with Jean alone. She was full of
interest in her Christmas preparations. She had a handsome tree set
up in the loggia, and the packages were piled about it, with new ones
constantly arriving. With her farm management, her housekeeping, her
secretary work, and her Christmas preparations, it seemed to me that
she had her hands overfull. Such a mental pressure could not be good for
her. I suggested that for a time at least I might assume a part of her
burden.

I was to remain at my own home that night, and I think it was as I left
Stormfield that I passed jean on the stair. She said, cheerfully, that
she felt a little tired and was going up to lie down, so that she would
be fresh for the evening. I did not go back, and I never saw her alive
again.

I was at breakfast next morning when word was brought in that one of the
men from Stormfield was outside and wished to see me immediately. When
I went out he said: “Miss Jean is dead. They have just found her in her
bath-room. Mr. Clemens sent me to bring you.”

It was as incomprehensible as such things always are. I could not
realize at all that Jean, so full of plans and industries and action
less than a day before, had passed into that voiceless mystery which we
call death.

Harry Iles drove me rapidly up the hill. As I entered Clemens’s room he
looked at me helplessly and said:

“Well, I suppose you have heard of this final disaster.”

He was not violent or broken down with grief. He had come to that place
where, whatever the shock or the ill-turn of fortune, he could accept
it, and even in that first moment of loss he realized that, for Jean at
least, the fortune was not ill. Her malady had never been cured, and it
had been one of his deepest dreads that he would leave her behind him.
It was believed, at first; that Jean had drowned, and Dr. Smith tried
methods of resuscitation; but then he found that it was simply a case of
heart cessation caused by the cold shock of her bath.

The Gabrilowitsches were by this time in Europe, and Clemens cabled
them not to come. Later in the day he asked me if we would be willing
to close our home for the winter and come to Stormfield. He said that
he should probably go back to Bermuda before long; but that he wished to
keep the house open so that it would be there for him to come to at any
time that he might need it.

We came, of course, for there was no thought among any of his friends
but for his comfort and peace of mind. Jervis Langdon was summoned from
Elmira, for Jean would lie there with the others.

In the loggia stood the half-trimmed Christmas tree, and all about lay
the packages of gifts, and in Jean’s room, on the chairs and upon her
desk, were piled other packages. Nobody had been forgotten. For her
father she had bought a handsome globe; he had always wanted one. Once
when I went into his room he said:

“I have been looking in at Jean and envying her. I have never greatly
envied any one but the dead. I always envy the dead.”

He told me how the night before they had dined together alone; how he
had urged her to turn over a part of her work to me; how she had clung
to every duty as if now, after all the years, she was determined to make
up for lost time.

While they were at dinner a telephone inquiry had come concerning his
health, for the papers had reported him as returning from Bermuda in a
critical condition. He had written this playful answer:

    MANAGER ASSOCIATED PRESS,
    New York.

    I hear the newspapers say I am dying. The charge is not true. I
    would not do such a thing at my time of life. I am behaving as good
    as I can.

    Merry Christmas to everybody!     MARK TWAIN.

Jean telephoned it for him to the press. It had been the last secretary
service she had ever rendered.

She had kissed his hand, he said, when they parted, for she had a severe
cold and would not wish to impart it to him; then happily she had said
good night, and he had not seen her again. The reciting of this was good
to him, for it brought the comfort of tears.

Later, when I went in again, he was writing:

“I am setting it down,” he said--“everything. It is a relief to me to
write it. It furnishes me an excuse for thinking.”

He continued writing most of the day, and at intervals during the next
day, and the next.

It was on Christmas Day that they went with Jean on her last journey.
Katie Leary, her baby nurse, had dressed her in the dainty gown which
she had worn for Clara’s wedding, and they had pinned on it a pretty
buckle which her father had brought her from Bermuda, and which she had
not seen. No Greek statue was ever more classically beautiful than she
was, lying there in the great living-room, which in its brief history
had seen so much of the round of life.

They were to start with jean at about six o’clock, and a little before
that time Clemens (he was unable to make the journey) asked me what had
been her favorite music. I said that she seemed always to care most for
the Schubert Impromptu.--[Op. 142, No. 2.]--Then he said:

“Play it when they get ready to leave with her, and add the Intermezzo
for Susy and the Largo for Mrs. Clemens. When I hear the music I shall
know that they are starting. Tell them to set lanterns at the door, so I
can look down and see them go.”

So I sat at the organ and began playing as they lifted and bore her
away. A soft, heavy snow was falling, and the gloom of those shortest
days was closing in. There was not the least wind or noise, the whole
world was muffled. The lanterns at the door threw their light out on the
thickly falling flakes. I remained at the organ; but the little group at
the door saw him come to the window above--the light on his white hair
as he stood mournfully gazing down, watching Jean going away from
him for the last time. I played steadily on as he had instructed, the
Impromptu, the Intermezzo from “Cavalleria,” and Handel’s Largo. When I
had finished I went up and found him.

“Poor little Jean,” he said; “but for her it is so good to go.”

In his own story of it he wrote:

    From my windows I saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the
    road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and
    presently disappear. Jean was gone out of my life, and would not
    come back any more. The cousin she had played with when they were
    babies together--he and her beloved old Katie--Were conducting her
    to her distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother’s
    side once more, in the company of Susy and Langdon.

He did not come down to dinner, and when I went up afterward I found him
curiously agitated. He said:

“For one who does not believe in spirits I have had a most peculiar
experience. I went into the bath-room just now and closed the door. You
know how warm it always is in there, and there are no draughts. All at
once I felt a cold current of air about me. I thought the door must be
open; but it was closed. I said, ‘Jean, is this you trying to let me
know you have found the others?’ Then the cold air was gone.”

I saw that the incident had made a very great impression upon him; but I
don’t remember that he ever mentioned it afterward.

Next day the storm had turned into a fearful blizzard; the whole hilltop
was a raging, driving mass of white. He wrote most of the day, but
stopped now and then to read some of the telegrams or letters of
condolence which came flooding in. Sometimes he walked over to the
window to look out on the furious tempest. Once, during the afternoon,
he said:

“Jean always so loved to see a storm like this, and just now at Elmira
they are burying her.”

Later he read aloud some lines by Alfred Austin, which Mrs. Crane had
sent him lines which he had remembered in the sorrow for Susy:

       When last came sorrow, around barn and byre
       Wind-careen snow, the year’s white sepulchre, lay.
       “Come in,” I said, “and warm you by the fire”;
       And there she sits and never goes away.

It was that evening that he came into the room where Mrs. Paine and I
sat by the fire, bringing his manuscript.

“I have finished my story of Jean’s death,” he said. “It is the end of
my autobiography. I shall never write any more. I can’t judge it myself
at all. One of you read it aloud to the other, and let me know what you
think of it. If it is worthy, perhaps some day it may be published.”

It was, in fact, one of the most exquisite and tender pieces of writing
in the language. He had ended his literary labors with that perfect
thing which so marvelously speaks the loftiness and tenderness of
his soul. It was thoroughly in keeping with his entire career that he
should, with this rare dramatic touch, bring it to a close. A paragraph
which he omitted may be printed now:

    December 27. Did I know jean’s value? No, I only thought I did.
    I knew a ten-thousandth fraction of it, that was all. It is always
    so, with us, it has always been so. We are like the poor ignorant
    private soldier-dead, now, four hundred years--who picked up the
    great Sancy diamond on the field of the lost battle and sold it for
    a franc. Later he knew what he had done.

    Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. For
    I know my temperament. And I know that the temperament is master of
    the man, and that he is its fettered and helpless slave and must in
    all things do as it commands. A man’s temperament is born in him,
    and no circumstances can ever change it.

    My temperament has never allowed my spirits to remain depressed long
    at a time.

    That was a feature of Jean’s temperament, too. She inherited it
    from me. I think she got the rest of it from her mother.

Jean Clemens had two natural endowments: the gift of justice and a
genuine passion for all nature. In a little paper found in her desk she
had written:

    I know a few people who love the country as I do, but not many.
    Most of my acquaintances are enthusiastic over the spring and summer
    months, but very few care much for it the year round. A few people
    are interested in the spring foliage and the development of the wild
    flowers--nearly all enjoy the autumn colors--while comparatively few
    pay much attention to the coming and going of the birds, the changes
    in their plumage and songs, the apparent springing into life on some
    warm April day of the chipmunks and woodchucks, the skurrying of
    baby rabbits, and again in the fall the equally sudden disappearance
    of some of the animals and the growing shyness of others. To me it
    is all as fascinating as a book--more so, since I have never lost
    interest in it.

It is simple and frank, like Thoreau. Perhaps, had she exercised it,
there was a third gift--the gift of written thought.

Clemens remained at Stormfield ten days after Jean was gone. The weather
was fiercely cold, the landscape desolate, the house full of tragedy.
He kept pretty closely to his room, where he had me bring the heaps
of letters, a few of which he answered personally; for the others he
prepared a simple card of acknowledgment. He was for the most part in
gentle mood during these days, though he would break out now and then,
and rage at the hardness of a fate that had laid an unearned burden of
illness on Jean and shadowed her life.

They were days not wholly without humor--none of his days could be
altogether without that, though it was likely to be of a melancholy
sort.

Many of the letters offered orthodox comfort, saying, in effect: “God
does not willingly punish us.”

When he had read a number of these he said:

“Well, why does He do it then? We don’t invite it. Why does He give
Himself the trouble?”

I suggested that it was a sentiment that probably gave comfort to the
writer of it.

“So it does,” he said, “and I am glad of it--glad of anything that gives
comfort to anybody.”

He spoke of the larger God--the God of the great unvarying laws, and
by and by dropped off to sleep, quite peacefully, and indeed peace came
more and more to him each day with the thought that Jean and Susy and
their mother could not be troubled any more. To Mrs. Gabrilowitsch he
wrote:

                     REDDING, CONN, December 29, 1909.

    O, Clara, Clara dear, I am so glad she is out of it & safe--safe!

    I am not melancholy; I shall never be melancholy again, I think.

    You see, I was in such distress when I came to realize that you were
    gone far away & no one stood between her & danger but me--& I could
    die at any moment, & then--oh then what would become of her! For
    she was wilful, you know, & would not have been governable.

    You can’t imagine what a darling she was that last two or three
    days; & how fine, & good, & sweet, & noble--& joyful, thank Heaven!
    --& how intellectually brilliant. I had never been acquainted with
    Jean before. I recognized that.

    But I mustn’t try to write about her--I can’t. I have already
    poured my heart out with the pen, recording that last day or two.
    I will send you that--& you must let no one but Ossip read it.

    Good-by. I love you so! And Ossip.
                                FATHER.



CCXC. THE RETURN TO BERMUDA

I don’t think he attempted any further writing for print. His mind
was busy with ideas, but he was willing to talk, rather than to write,
rather even than to play billiards, it seemed, although we had a few
quiet games--the last we should ever play together. Evenings he asked
for music, preferring the Scotch airs, such as “Bonnie Doon” and “The
Campbells are Coming.” I remember that once, after playing the latter
for him, he told, with great feeling, how the Highlanders, led by Gen.
Colin Campbell, had charged at Lucknow, inspired by that stirring
air. When he had retired I usually sat with him, and he drifted into
literature, or theology, or science, or history--the story of the
universe and man.

One evening he spoke of those who had written but one immortal thing and
stopped there. He mentioned “Ben Bolt.”

“I met that man once,” he said. “In my childhood I sang ‘Sweet Alice,
Ben Bolt,’ and in my old age, fifteen years ago, I met the man who wrote
it. His name was Brown.--[Thomas Dunn English. Mr. Clemens apparently
remembered only the name satirically conferred upon him by Edgar Allan
Poe, “Thomas Dunn Brown.”]--He was aged, forgotten, a mere memory. I
remember how it thrilled me to realize that this was the very author of
‘Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt.’ He was just an accident. He had a vision and
echoed it. A good many persons do that--the thing they do is to put in
compact form the thing which we have all vaguely felt. ‘Twenty Years
Ago’ is just like it ‘I have wandered through the village, Tom, and sat
beneath the tree’--and Holmes’s ‘Last Leaf’ is another: the memory of
the hallowed past, and the gravestones of those we love. It is all so
beautiful--the past is always beautiful.”

He quoted, with great feeling and effect:

           The massy marbles rest
           On the lips that we have pressed
           In their bloom,
           And the names we love to hear
           Have been carved for many a year
           On the tomb.

He continued in this strain for an hour or more. He spoke of humor, and
thought it must be one of the chief attributes of God. He cited
plants and animals that were distinctly humorous in form and in their
characteristics. These he declared were God’s jokes.

“Why,” he said, “humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.”

“Your own case is an example,” I answered. “Without it, whatever your
reputation as a philosopher, you could never have had the wide-spread
affection that is shown by the writers of that great heap of letters.”

“Yes,” he said, gently, “they have liked to be amused.”

I tucked him in for the night, promising to send him to Bermuda, with
Claude to take care of him, if he felt he could undertake the journey in
two days more.

He was able, and he was eager to go, for he longed for that sunny
island, and for the quiet peace of the Allen home. His niece, Mrs.
Loomis, came up to spend the last evening in Stormfield, a happy evening
full of quiet talk, and next morning, in the old closed carriage that
had been his wedding-gift, he was driven to the railway station. This
was on January 4, 1910.

He was to sail next day, and that night, at Mr. Loomis’s, Howells came
in, and for an hour or two they reviewed some of the questions they
had so long ago settled, or left forever unsettled, and laid away.
I remember that at dinner Clemens spoke of his old Hartford butler,
George, and how he had once brought George to New York and introduced
him at the various publishing houses as his friend, with curious and
sometimes rather embarrassing results.

The talk drifted to sociology and to the labor-unions, which Clemens
defended as being the only means by which the workman could obtain
recognition of his rights.

Howells in his book mentions this evening, which he says “was made
memorable to me by the kind, clear, judicial sense with which he
explained and justified the labor-unions as the sole present help of the
weak against the strong.”

They discussed dreams, and then in a little while Howells rose to go.
I went also, and as we walked to his near-by apartment he spoke of Mark
Twain’s supremacy. He said:

“I turn to his books for cheer when I am down-hearted. There was never
anybody like him; there never will be.”

Clemens sailed next morning. They did not meet again.



CCXCI. LETTERS FROM BERMUDA

Stormfield was solemn and empty without Mark Twain; but he wrote by
every steamer, at first with his own hand, and during the last week by
the hand of one of his enlisted secretaries--some member of the
Allen family usually Helen. His letters were full of brightness and
pleasantry--always concerned more or less with business matters, though
he was no longer disturbed by them, for Bermuda was too peaceful and too
far away, and, besides, he had faith in the Mark Twain Company’s ability
to look after his affairs. I cannot do better, I believe, than to offer
some portions of these letters here.

He reached Bermuda on the 7th of January, 1910, and on the 12th he
wrote:

    Again I am living the ideal life. There is nothing to mar it but
    the bloody-minded bandit Arthur,--[A small playmate of Helen’s of
    whom Clemens pretended to be fiercely jealous. Once he wrote a
    memorandum to Helen: “Let Arthur read this book. There is a page in
    it that is poisoned.”]--who still fetches and carries Helen.
    Presently he will be found drowned. Claude comes to Bay House twice
    a day to see if I need any service. He is invaluable. There was a
    military lecture last night at the Officers’ Mess Prospect; as the
    lecturer honored me with a special urgent invitation, and said he
    wanted to lecture to me particularly, I naturally took Helen and her
    mother into the private carriage and went.

    As soon as we landed at the door with the crowd the Governor came to
    me& was very cordial. I “met up” with that charming Colonel Chapman
    [we had known him on the previous visit] and other officers of the
    regiment & had a good time.

A few days later he wrote:

    Thanks for your letter & for its contenting news of the situation in
    that foreign & far-off & vaguely remembered country where you &
    Loomis & Lark and other beloved friends are.

    I had a letter from Clara this morning. She is solicitous & wants
    me well & watchfully taken care of. My, my, she ought to see Helen
    & her parents & Claude administer that trust. Also she says, “I
    hope to hear from you or Mr. Paine very soon.”

    I am writing her & I know you will respond to your part of her
    prayer. She is pretty desolate now after Jean’s emancipation--the
    only kindness that God ever did that poor, unoffending child in all
    her hard life.

    Send Clara a copy of Howells’s gorgeous letter.

The “gorgeous letter” mentioned was an appreciation of his recent Bazar
article, “The Turning-Point in My Life,” and here follows:

    January 18, 1910.

    DEAR CLEMENS,--While your wonderful words are warm in my mind yet I
    want to tell you what you know already: that you never wrote
    anything greater, finer, than that turning-point paper of yours.

    I shall feel it honor enough if they put on my tombstone “He was
    born in the same century and general section of Middle Western
    country with Dr. S. L. Clemens, Oxon., and had his degree three
    years before him through a mistake of the University.”

    I hope you are worse. You will never be riper for a purely
    intellectual life, and it is a pity to have you lagging along with a
    worn-out material body on top of your soul.

                  Yours ever,
                            W. D. HOWELLS.

On the margin of this letter Clemens had written:

    I reckon this spontaneous outburst from the first critic of the day
    is good to keep, ain’t it, Paine?

January 24th he wrote again of his contentment:

    Life continues here the same as usual. There isn’t a fault in it
    --good times, good home, tranquil contentment all day & every day
    without a break. I know familiarly several very satisfactory people
    & meet them frequently: Mr. Hamilton, the Sloanes, Mr. & Mrs. Fells,
    Miss Waterman, & so on. I shouldn’t know how to go about bettering
    my situation.

On February 5th he wrote that the climate and condition of his health
might require him to stay in Bermuda pretty continuously, but that he
wished Stormfield kept open so that he might come to it at any time. And
he added:

    Yesterday Mr. Allen took us on an excursion in Mr. Hamilton’s big
    motor-boat. Present: Mrs. Allen, Mr. & Mrs. & Miss Sloane, Helen,
    Mildred Howells, Claude, & me. Several hours’ swift skimming over
    ravishing blue seas, a brilliant sun; also a couple of hours of
    picnicking & lazying under the cedars in a secluded place.

    The Orotava is arriving with 260 passengers--I shall get letters by
    her, no doubt.

    P. S.--Please send me the Standard Unabridged that is on the table in
    my bedroom. I have no dictionary here.

There is no mention in any of these letters of his trouble; but he was
having occasional spasms of pain, though in that soft climate they
would seem to have come with less frequency, and there was so little to
disturb him, and much that contributed to his peace. Among the callers
at the Bay House to see him was Woodrow Wilson, and the two put in some
pleasant hours at miniature golf, “putting” on the Allen lawn. Of course
a catastrophe would come along now and then--such things could not
always be guarded against. In a letter toward the end of February he
wrote:    It is 2.30 in the morning & I am writing because I can’t sleep.
    I can’t sleep because a professional pianist is coming to-morrow
    afternoon to play for me. My God! I wouldn’t allow Paderewski or
    Gabrilowitsch to do that. I would rather have a leg amputated.
    I knew he was coming, but I never dreamed it was to play for me.
    When I heard the horrible news 4 hours ago, be d---d if I didn’t
    come near screaming. I meant to slip out and be absent, but now I
    can’t. Don’t pray for me. The thing is just as d---d bad as it can
    be already.

Clemens’s love for music did not include the piano, except for very
gentle melodies, and he probably did not anticipate these from a
professional player. He did not report the sequel of the matter; but it
is likely that his imagination had discounted its tortures. Sometimes
his letters were pure nonsense. Once he sent a sheet, on one side of
which was written:

                            BAY HOUSE,
                            March s, 1910.
       Received of S. L. C.
       Two Dollars and Forty Cents
       in return for my promise to believe everything he says
       hereafter.
                            HELEN S. ALLEN.

and on the reverse:

                       FOR SALE

    The proprietor of the hereinbefore mentioned Promise desires to part
    with it on account of ill health and obliged to go away somewheres
    so as to let it reciprocate, and will take any reasonable amount for
    it above 2 percent of its face because experienced parties think it
    will not keep but only a little while in this kind of weather & is a
    kind of proppity that don’t give a cuss for cold storage nohow.

Clearly, however serious Mark Twain regarded his physical condition, he
did not allow it to make him gloomy. He wrote that matters were going
everywhere to his satisfaction; that Clara was happy; that his
household and business affairs no longer troubled him; that his personal
surroundings were of the pleasantest sort. Sometimes he wrote of what he
was reading, and once spoke particularly of Prof. William Lyon Phelps’s
Literary Essays, which he said he had been unable to lay down until he
had finished the book.--[To Phelps himself he wrote: “I thank you ever
so much for the book, which I find charming--so charming, indeed, that
I read it through in a single night, & did not regret the lost night’s
sleep. I am glad if I deserve what you have said about me; & even if I
don’t I am proud & well contented, since you think I deserve it.”]

So his days seemed full of comfort. But in March I noticed that he
generally dictated his letters, and once when he sent some small
photographs I thought he looked thinner and older. Still he kept up his
merriment. In one letter he said:

    While the matter is in my mind I will remark that if you ever send
    me another letter which is not paged at the top I will write you
    with my own hand, so that I may use with utter freedom & without
    embarrassment the kind of words which alone can describe such a
    criminal, to wit, - - - -; you will have to put into words those
    dashes because propriety will not allow me to do it myself in my
    secretary’s hearing. You are forgiven, but don’t let it occur
    again.

He had still made no mention of his illness; but on the 25th of March he
wrote something of his plans for coming home. He had engaged passage on
the Bermudian for April 23d, he said; and he added:

    But don’t tell anybody. I don’t want it known. I may have to go
    sooner if the pain in my breast does not mend its ways pretty
    considerable. I don’t want to die here, for this is an unkind place
    for a person in that condition. I should have to lie in the
    undertaker’s cellar until the ship would remove me & it is dark down
    there & unpleasant.

    The Colliers will meet me on the pier, & I may stay with them a week
    or two before going home. It all depends on the breast pain. I
    don’t want to die there. I am growing more and more particular
    about the place.

But in the same letter he spoke of plans for the summer, suggesting
that we must look into the magic-lantern possibilities, so that library
entertainments could be given at Stormfield. I confess that this letter,
in spite of its light tone, made me uneasy, and I was tempted to sail
for Bermuda to bring him home. Three days later he wrote again:

    I have been having a most uncomfortable time for the past four days
    with that breast pain, which turns out to be an affection of the
    heart, just as I originally suspected. The news from New York is to
    the effect that non-bronchial weather has arrived there at last;
    therefore, if I can get my breast trouble in traveling condition I
    may sail for home a week or two earlier than has been proposed.

The same mail that brought this brought a letter from Mr. Allen, who
frankly stated that matters had become very serious indeed. Mr. Clemens
had had some dangerous attacks, and the physicians considered his
condition critical.

These letters arrived April 1st. I went to New York at once and sailed
next morning. Before sailing I consulted with Dr. Quintard, who provided
me with some opiates and instructed me in the use of the hypodermic
needle. He also joined me in a cablegram to the Gabrilowitsches, then in
Italy, advising them to sail without delay.



CCXCII. THE VOYAGE HOME

I sent no word to Bermuda that I was coming, and when on the second
morning I arrived at Hamilton, I stepped quickly ashore from the tender
and hurried to Bay House. The doors were all open, as they usually are
in that summer island, and no one was visible. I was familiar with the
place, and, without knocking, I went through to the room occupied by
Mark Twain. As I entered I saw that he was alone, sitting in a large
chair, clad in the familiar dressing-gown.

Bay House stands upon the water, and the morning light, reflected in at
the window, had an unusual quality. He was not yet shaven, and he seemed
unnaturally pale and gray; certainly he was much thinner. I was too
startled, for the moment, to say anything. When he turned and saw me he
seemed a little dazed.

“Why,” he said, holding out his hand, “you didn’t tell us you were
coming.”

“No,” I said, “it is rather sudden. I didn’t quite like the sound of
your last letters.”

“But those were not serious,” he protested. “You shouldn’t have come on
my account.”

I said then that I had come on my own account; that I had felt the need
of recreation, and had decided to run down and come home with him.

“That’s--very--good,” he said, in his slow, gentle fashion. “Now I’m
glad to see you.”

His breakfast came in and he ate with an appetite.

When he had been shaved and freshly propped tip in his pillows it seemed
to me, after all, that I must have been mistaken in thinking him so
changed. Certainly he was thinner, but his color was fine, his eyes were
bright; he had no appearance of a man whose life was believed to be in
danger. He told me then of the fierce attacks he had gone through, how
the pains had torn at him, and how it had been necessary for him to have
hypodermic injections, which he amusingly termed “hypnotic injunctions”
 and “subcutaneous applications,” and he had his humor out of it, as of
course he must have, even though Death should stand there in person.

From Mr. and Mrs. Allen and from the physician I learned how slender had
been his chances and how uncertain were the days ahead. Mr. Allen had
already engaged passage on the Oceana for the 12th, and the one purpose
now was to get him physically in condition for the trip.

How devoted those kind friends had been to him! They had devised every
imaginable thing for his comfort. Mr. Allen had rigged an electric bell
which connected with his own room, so that he could be aroused instantly
at any hour of the night. Clemens had refused to have a nurse, for it
was only during the period of his extreme suffering that he needed any
one, and he did not wish to have a nurse always around. When the pains
were gone he was as bright and cheerful, and, seemingly, as well as
ever.

On the afternoon of my arrival we drove out, as formerly, and he
discussed some of the old subjects in quite the old way. He had been
rereading Macaulay, he said, and spoke at considerable length of the
hypocrisy and intrigue of the English court under James II. He spoke,
too, of the Redding Library. I had sold for him that portion of the land
where Jean’s farm-house had stood, and it was in his mind to use the
money for some sort of a memorial to Jean. I had written, suggesting
that perhaps he would like to put up a small library building, as the
Adams lot faced the corner where Jean had passed every day when she rode
to the station for the mail. He had been thinking this over, he said,
and wished the idea carried out. He asked me to write at once to his
lawyer, Mr. Lark, and have a paper prepared appointing trustees for a
memorial library fund.

The pain did not trouble him that afternoon, nor during several
succeeding days. He was gay and quite himself, and he often went out
on the lawn; but we did not drive out again. For the most part, he sat
propped up in his bed, reading or smoking, or talking in the old way;
and as I looked at him he seemed so full of vigor and the joy of life
that I could not convince myself that he would not outlive us all.
I found that he had been really very much alive during those three
months--too much for his own good, sometimes--for he had not been
careful of his hours or his diet, and had suffered in consequence.

He had not been writing, though he had scribbled some playful valentines
and he had amused himself one day by preparing a chapter of advice--for
me it appeared--which, after reading it aloud to the Allens and
receiving their approval, he declared he intended to have printed for my
benefit. As it would seem to have been the last bit of continued
writing he ever did, and because it is characteristic and amusing, a
few paragraphs may be admitted. The “advice” is concerning deportment on
reaching the Gate which St. Peter is supposed to guard--

    Upon arrival do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to. It is not
    your place to begin.

    Do not begin any remark with “Say.”

    When applying for a ticket avoid trying to make conversation. If
    you must talk let the weather alone. St. Peter cares not a damn for
    the weather. And don’t ask him what time the 4.30 train goes; there
    aren’t any trains in heaven, except through trains, and the less
    information you get about them the better for you.

    You can ask him for his autograph--there is no harm in that--but be
    careful and don’t remark that it is one of the penalties of
    greatness. He has heard that before.

    Don’t try to kodak him. Hell is full of people who have made that
    mistake.

    Leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit
    you would stay out and the dog would go in.

    You will be wanting to slip down at night and smuggle water to those
    poor little chaps (the infant damned), but don’t you try it. You
    would be caught, and nobody in heaven would respect you after that.

    Explain to Helen why I don’t come. If you can.

There were several pages of this counsel. One paragraph was written in
shorthand. I meant to ask him to translate it; but there were many other
things to think of, and I did not remember.

I spent most of each day with him, merely sitting by the bed and reading
while he himself read or dozed. His nights were wakeful--he found it
easier to sleep by day--and he liked to think that some one was
there. He became interested in Hardy’s Jude, and spoke of it with high
approval, urging me to read it. He dwelt a good deal on the morals of
it, or rather on the lack of them. He followed the tale to the end,
finishing it the afternoon before we sailed. It was his last continuous
reading. I noticed, when he slept, that his breathing was difficult, and
I could see from day to day that he did not improve; but each evening
he would be gay and lively, and he liked the entire family to gather
around, while he became really hilarious over the various happenings of
the day. It was only a few days before we sailed that the very severe
attacks returned. The night of the 8th was a hard one. The doctors were
summoned, and it was only after repeated injections of morphine that the
pain had been eased. When I returned in the early morning he was sitting
in his chair trying to sing, after his old morning habit. He took my
hand and said:

“Well, I had a picturesque night. Every pain I had was on exhibition.”

He looked out the window at the sunlight on the bay and green dotted
islands. “‘Sparkling and bright in the liquid light,’” he quoted.
“That’s Hoffman. Anything left of Hoffman?”

“No,” I said.

“I must watch for the Bermudian and see if she salutes,” he said,
presently. “The captain knows I am here sick, and he blows two short
whistles just as they come up behind that little island. Those are for
me.”

He said he could breathe easier if he could lean forward, and I placed a
card-table in front of him. His breakfast came in, and a little later
he became quite gay. He drifted to Macaulay again, and spoke of King
James’s plot to assassinate William II., and how the clergy had brought
themselves to see that there was no difference between killing a king
in battle and by assassination. He had taken his seat by the window to
watch for the Bermudian. She came down the bay presently, her bright
red stacks towering vividly above the green island. It was a brilliant
morning, the sky and the water a marvelous blue. He watched her
anxiously and without speaking. Suddenly there were two white puffs of
steam, and two short, hoarse notes went up from her.

“Those are for me,” he said, his face full of contentment. “Captain
Fraser does not forget me.”

There followed another bad night. My room was only a little distance
away, and Claude came for me. I do not think any of us thought he would
survive it; but he slept at last, or at least dozed. In the morning he
said:

“That breast pain stands watch all night and the short breath all day.
I am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army. I want a jugful of
that hypnotic injunction every night and every morning.”

We began to fear now that he would not be able to sail on the 12th; but
by great good-fortune he had wonderfully improved by the 12th, so much
so that I began to believe, if once he could be in Stormfield, where
the air was more vigorous, he might easily survive the summer. The humid
atmosphere of the season increased the difficulty of his breathing.

That evening he was unusually merry. Mr. and Mrs. Allen and Helen and
myself went in to wish him good night. He was loath to let us leave, but
was reminded that he would sail in the morning, and that the doctor had
insisted that he must be quiet and lie still in bed and rest. He was
never one to be very obedient. A little later Mrs. Allen and I, in the
sitting-room, heard some one walking softly outside on the veranda. We
went out there, and he was marching up and down in his dressing-gown as
unconcerned as if he were not an invalid at all. He hadn’t felt sleepy,
he said, and thought a little exercise would do him good. Perhaps it
did, for he slept soundly that night--a great blessing.

Mr. Allen had chartered a special tug to come to Bay House landing
in the morning and take him to the ship. He was carried in a little
hand-chair to the tug, and all the way out he seemed light-spirited,
anything but an invalid: The sailors carried him again in the chair to
his state-room, and he bade those dear Bermuda friends good-by, and we
sailed away.

As long as I remember anything I shall remember the forty-eight hours of
that homeward voyage. It was a brief two days as time is measured; but
as time is lived it has taken its place among those unmeasured periods
by the side of which even years do not count.

At first he seemed quite his natural self, and asked for a catalogue
of the ship’s library, and selected some memoirs of the Countess
of Cardigan for his reading. He asked also for the second volume
of Carlyle’s French Revolution, which he had with him. But we ran
immediately into the more humid, more oppressive air of the Gulf Stream,
and his breathing became at first difficult, then next to impossible.
There were two large port-holes, which I opened; but presently he
suggested that it would be better outside. It was only a step to the
main-deck, and no passengers were there. I had a steamer-chair brought,
and with Claude supported him to it and bundled him with rugs; but it
had grown damp and chilly, and his breathing did not improve. It seemed
to me that the end might come at any moment, and this thought was in his
mind, too, for once in the effort for breath he managed to say:

“I am going--I shall be gone in a moment.”

Breath came; but I realized then that even his cabin was better than
this. I steadied him back to his berth and shut out most of that deadly
dampness. He asked for the “hypnotic ‘injunction” (for his humor never
left him), and though it was not yet the hour prescribed I could not
deny it. It was impossible for him to lie down, even to recline, without
great distress. The opiate made him drowsy, and he longed for the relief
of sleep; but when it seemed about to possess him the struggle for air
would bring him upright.

During the more comfortable moments he spoke quite in the old way, and
time and again made an effort to read, and reached for his pipe or a
cigar which lay in the little berth hammock at his side. I held the
match, and he would take a puff or two with satisfaction. Then the peace
of it would bring drowsiness, and while I supported him there would come
a few moments, perhaps, of precious sleep. Only a few moments, for the
devil of suffocation was always lying in wait to bring him back for
fresh tortures. Over and over again this was repeated, varied by him
being steadied on his feet or sitting on the couch opposite the berth.
In spite of his suffering, two dominant characteristics remained--the
sense of humor, and tender consideration for another.

Once when the ship rolled and his hat fell from the hook, and made the
circuit of the cabin floor, he said:

“The ship is passing the hat.”

Again he said:

“I am sorry for you, Paine, but I can’t help it--I can’t hurry this
dying business. Can’t you give me enough of the hypnotic injunction to
put an end to me?”

He thought if I could arrange the pillows so he could sit straight up it
would not be necessary to support him, and then I could sit on the couch
and read while he tried to doze. He wanted me to read Jude, he said, so
we could talk about it. I got all the pillows I could and built them
up around him, and sat down with the book, and this seemed to give him
contentment. He would doze off a little and then come up with a start,
his piercing, agate eyes searching me out to see if I was still there.
Over and over--twenty times in an hour--this was repeated. When I could
deny him no longer I administered the opiate, but it never completely
possessed him or gave him entire relief.

As I looked at him there, so reduced in his estate, I could not but
remember all the labor of his years, and all the splendid honor which
the world had paid to him. Something of this may have entered his mind,
too, for once, when I offered him some of the milder remedies which we
had brought, he said:

“After forty years of public effort I have become just a target for
medicines.”

The program of change from berth to the floor, from floor to the couch,
from the couch back to the berth among the pillows, was repeated again
and again, he always thinking of the trouble he might be making, rarely
uttering any complaint; but once he said:

“I never guessed that I was not going to outlive John Bigelow.” And
again:

“This is such a mysterious disease. If we only had a bill of particulars
we’d have something to swear at.”

Time and again he picked up Carlyle or the Cardigan Memoirs, and read,
or seemed to read, a few lines; but then the drowsiness would come and
the book would fall. Time and again he attempted to smoke, or in his
drowse simulated the motion of placing a cigar to his lips and puffing
in the old way.

Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which
the title-role of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of
this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. The
other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon
him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at
me searchingly and asked:

“Isn’t there something I can resign and be out of all this? They
keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don’t want it.” Then
realizing, he said: “I am like a bird in a cage: always expecting to get
out, and always beaten back by the wires.” And, somewhat later: “Oh, it
is such a mystery, and it takes so long.”

Toward the evening of the first day, when it grew dark outside, he
asked:

“How long have we been on this voyage?”

I answered that this was the end of the first day.

“How many more are there?” he asked.

“Only one, and two nights.”

“We’ll never make it,” he said. “It’s an eternity.”

“But we must on Clara’s account,” I told him, and I estimated that Clara
would be more than half-way across the ocean by now.

“It is a losing race,” he said; “no ship can outsail death.”

It has been written--I do not know with what proof--that certain great
dissenters have recanted with the approach of death--have become weak,
and afraid to ignore old traditions in the face of the great mystery. I
wish to write here that Mark Twain, as he neared the end, showed never
a single tremor of fear or even of reluctance. I have dwelt upon these
hours when suffering was upon him, and death the imminent shadow, in
order to show that at the end he was as he had always been, neither more
nor less, and never less than brave.

Once, during a moment when he was comfortable and quite himself, he
said, earnestly:

“When I seem to be dying I don’t want to be stimulated back to life. I
want to be made comfortable to go.”

There was not a vestige of hesitation; there was no grasping at straws,
no suggestion of dread.

Somehow those two days and nights went by. Once, when he was partially
relieved by the opiate, I slept, while Claude watched; and again, in
the fading end of the last night, when we had passed at length into the
cold, bracing northern air, and breath had come back to him, and with it
sleep.

Relatives, physicians, and news-gatherers were at the dock to welcome
him. He was awake, and the northern air had brightened him, though
it was the chill, I suppose, that brought on the pains in his breast,
which, fortunately, he had escaped during the voyage. It was not a
prolonged attack, and it was, blessedly, the last one.

An invalid-carriage had been provided, and a compartment secured on the
afternoon express to Redding--the same train that had taken him there
two years before. Dr. Robert H. Halsey and Dr. Edward Quintard attended
him, and he made the journey really in cheerful comfort, for he could
breathe now, and in the relief came back old interests. Half reclining
on the couch, he looked through the afternoon papers. It happened
curiously that Charles Harvey Genung, who, something more than four
years earlier, had been so largely responsible for my association with
Mark Twain, was on the same train, in the same coach, bound for his
country-place at New Hartford.

Lounsbury was waiting with the carriage, and on that still, sweet April
evening we drove him to Stormfield much as we had driven him two years
before. Now and then he mentioned the apparent backwardness of the
season, for only a few of the trees were beginning to show their green.
As we drove into the lane that led to the Stormfield entrance, he said:

“Can we see where you have built your billiard-room?”

The gable showed above the trees, and I pointed it out to him.

“It looks quite imposing,” he said.

I think it was the last outside interest he ever showed in anything. He
had been carried from the ship and from the train, but when we drew
up to Stormfield, where Mrs. Paine, with Katie Leary and others of the
household, was waiting to greet him, he stepped from the carriage alone
with something of his old lightness, and with all his old courtliness,
and offered each one his hand. Then, in the canvas chair which we had
brought, Claude and I carried him up-stairs to his room and delivered
him to the physicians, and to the comforts and blessed air of home. This
was Thursday evening, April 14, 1910.



CCXCIII. THE RETURN TO THE INVISIBLE

There would be two days more before Ossip and Clara Gabrilowitsch could
arrive. Clemens remained fairly bright and comfortable during this
interval, though he clearly was not improving. The physicians denied him
the morphine, now, as he no longer suffered acutely. But he craved it,
and once, when I went in, he said, rather mournfully:

“They won’t give me the subcutaneous any more.”

It was Sunday morning when Clara came. He was cheerful and able to talk
quite freely. He did not dwell upon his condition, I think, but spoke
rather of his plans for the summer. At all events, he did not then
suggest that he counted the end so near; but a day later it became
evident to all that his stay was very brief. His breathing was
becoming heavier, though it seemed not to give him much discomfort. His
articulation also became affected. I think the last continuous talking
he did was to Dr. Halsey on the evening of April 17th--the day of
Clara’s arrival. A mild opiate had been administered, and he said he
wished to talk himself to sleep. He recalled one of his old subjects,
Dual Personality, and discussed various instances that flitted through
his mind--Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and fact. He became
drowsier as he talked. He said at last:

“This is a peculiar kind of disease. It does not invite you to read; it
does not invite you to be read to; it does not invite you to talk, nor
to enjoy any of the usual sick-room methods of treatment. What kind of
a disease is that? Some kinds of sicknesses have pleasant features about
them. You can read and smoke and have only to lie still.”

And a little later he added:

“It is singular, very singular, the laws of mentality--vacuity. I put
out my hand to reach a book or newspaper which I have been reading most
glibly, and it isn’t there, not a suggestion of it.”

He coughed violently, and afterward commented:

“If one gets to meddling with a cough it very soon gets the upper hand
and is meddling with you. That is my opinion--of seventy-four years’
growth.”

The news of his condition, everywhere published, brought great heaps of
letters, but he could not see them. A few messages were reported to
him. At intervals he read a little. Suetonius and Carlyle lay on the bed
beside him, and he would pick them up as the spirit moved him and read a
paragraph or a page. Sometimes, when I saw him thus-the high color
still in his face, and the clear light in his eyes--I said: “It is not
reality. He is not going to die.” On Tuesday, the 19th, he asked me to
tell Clara to come and sing to him. It was a heavy requirement, but she
somehow found strength to sing some of the Scotch airs which he loved,
and he seemed soothed and comforted. When she came away he bade her
good-by, saying that he might not see her again.

But he lingered through the next day and the next. His mind was
wandering a little on Wednesday, and his speech became less and less
articulate; but there were intervals when he was quite clear, quite
vigorous, and he apparently suffered little. We did not know it, then,
but the mysterious messenger of his birth-year, so long anticipated by
him, appeared that night in the sky.--[The perihelion of Halley’s Comet
for 1835 was November 16th; for 1910 it was April 20th.]

On Thursday morning, the 21st, his mind was generally clear, and it was
said by the nurses that he read a little from one of the volumes on his
bed, from the Suetonius, or from one of the volumes of Carlyle. Early in
the forenoon he sent word by Clara that he wished to see me, and when
I came in he spoke of two unfinished manuscripts which he wished me to
“throw away,” as he briefly expressed it, for he had not many words left
now. I assured him that I would take care of them, and he pressed my
hand. It was his last word to me.

Once or twice that morning he tried to write some request which he could
not put into intelligible words.

And once he spoke to Gabrilowitsch, who, he said, could understand him
better than the others. Most of the time he dozed.

Somewhat after midday, when Clara was by him, he roused up and took her
hand, and seemed to speak with less effort.

“Good-by,” he said, and Dr. Quintard, who was standing near, thought he
added: “If we meet”--but the words were very faint. He looked at her for
a little while, without speaking, then he sank into a doze, and from it
passed into a deeper slumber, and did not heed us any more.

Through that peaceful spring afternoon the life-wave ebbed lower and
lower. It was about half past six, and the sun lay just on the horizon
when Dr. Quintard noticed that the breathing, which had gradually become
more subdued, broke a little. There was no suggestion of any struggle.
The noble head turned a little to one side, there was a fluttering sigh,
and the breath that had been unceasing through seventy-four tumultuous
years had stopped forever.

He had entered into the estate envied so long. In his own words--the
words of one of his latest memoranda:

“He had arrived at the dignity of death--the only earthly dignity that
is not artificial--the only safe one. The others are traps that can
beguile to humiliation.

“Death--the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose
peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure--the rich
and the poor--the loved and the unloved.”



CCXCIV. THE LAST RITES

It is not often that a whole world mourns. Nations have often mourned
a hero--and races--but perhaps never before had the entire world really
united in tender sorrow for the death of any man.

In one of his aphorisms he wrote: “Let us endeavor so to live that when
we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” And it was thus that
Mark Twain himself had lived.

No man had ever so reached the heart of the world, and one may not even
attempt to explain just why. Let us only say that it was because he was
so limitlessly human that every other human heart, in whatever sphere
or circumstance, responded to his touch. From every remote corner of
the globe the cables of condolence swept in; every printed sheet in
Christendom was filled with lavish tribute; pulpits forgot his heresies
and paid him honor. No king ever died that received so rich a homage
as his. To quote or to individualize would be to cheapen this vast
offering.

We took him to New York to the Brick Church, and Dr. Henry van Dyke
spoke only a few simple words, and Joseph Twichell came from Hartford
and delivered brokenly a prayer from a heart wrung with double grief,
for Harmony, his wife, was nearing the journey’s end, and a telegram
that summoned him to her death-bed came before the services ended.

Mark Twain, dressed in the white he loved so well, lay there with the
nobility of death upon him, while a multitude of those who loved him
passed by and looked at his face for the last time. The flowers, of
which so many had been sent, were banked around him; but on the casket
itself lay a single laurel wreath which Dan Beard and his wife had
woven from the laurel which grows on Stormfield hill. He was never more
beautiful than as he lay there, and it was an impressive scene to see
those thousands file by, regard him for a moment gravely, thoughtfully,
and pass on. All sorts were there, rich and poor; some crossed
themselves, some saluted, some paused a little to take a closer look;
but no one offered even to pick a flower. Howells came, and in his book
he says:

    I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient
    with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of a puzzle,
    a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of
    a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the
    unwise took for the whole of him.

That night we went with him to Elmira, and next day--a somber day of
rain--he lay in those stately parlors that had seen his wedding-day, and
where Susy had lain, and Mrs. Clemens, and Jean, while Dr. Eastman spoke
the words of peace which separate us from our mortal dead. Then in the
quiet, steady rain of that Sunday afternoon we laid him beside those
others, where he sleeps well, though some have wished that, like De
Soto, he might have been laid to rest in the bed of that great river
which must always be associated with his name.



CCXCV. MARK TWAIN’S RELIGION

There is such a finality about death; however interesting it may be as
an experience, one cannot discuss it afterward with one’s friends. I
have thought it a great pity that Mark Twain could not discuss, with
Howells say, or with Twichell, the sensations and the particulars of the
change, supposing there be a recognizable change, in that transition of
which we have speculated so much, with such slender returns. No one
ever debated the undiscovered country more than he. In his whimsical,
semi-serious fashion he had considered all the possibilities of the
future state--orthodox and otherwise--and had drawn picturesquely
original conclusions. He had sent Captain Stormfield in a dream to
report the aspects of the early Christian heaven. He had examined the
scientific aspects of the more subtle philosophies. He had considered
spiritualism, transmigration, the various esoteric doctrines, and in the
end he had logically made up his mind that death concludes all, while
with that less logical hunger which survives in every human heart he had
never ceased to expect an existence beyond the grave. His disbelief and
his pessimism were identical in their structure. They were of his mind;
never of his heart.

Once a woman said to him:

“Mr. Clemens, you are not a pessimist, you only think you are.” And she
might have added, with equal force and truth:

“You are not a disbeliever in immortality; you only think you are.”

Nothing could have conveyed more truly his attitude toward life and
death. His belief in God, the Creator, was absolute; but it was a God
far removed from the Creator of his early teaching. Every man builds his
God according to his own capacities. Mark Twain’s God was of colossal
proportions--so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but
molecules in His veins--a God as big as space itself.

Mark Twain had many moods, and he did not always approve of his own God;
but when he altered his conception, it was likely to be in the direction
of enlargement--a further removal from the human conception, and the
problem of what we call our lives.

In 1906 he wrote:--[See also 1870, chap. lxxviii; 1899, chap. ccv; and
various talks, 1906-07, etc.]

    Let us now consider the real God, the genuine God, the great God,
    the sublime and supreme God, the authentic Creator of the real
    universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only comets unto
    which incredible distant Neptune is merely an out post, a Sandy Hook
    to homeward-bound specters of the deeps of space that have not
    glimpsed it before for generations--a universe not made with hands
    and suited to an astronomical nursery, but spread abroad through the
    illimitable reaches of space by the flat of the real God just
    mentioned, by comparison with whom the gods whose myriads infest the
    feeble imaginations of men are as a swarm of gnats scattered and
    lost in the infinitudes of the empty sky.

At an earlier period-the date is not exactly fixable, but the stationery
used and the handwriting suggest the early eighties--he set down a few
concisely written pages of conclusions--conclusions from which he did
not deviate materially in after years. The document follows:

    I believe in God the Almighty.

    I do not believe He has ever sent a message to man by anybody, or
    delivered one to him by word of mouth, or made Himself visible to
    mortal eyes at any time in any place.

    I believe that the Old and New Testaments were imagined and written
    by man, and that no line in them was authorized by God, much less
    inspired by Him.

    I think the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are
    manifested in His works: I perceive that they are manifested toward
    me in this life; the logical conclusion is that they will be
    manifested toward me in the life to come, if there should be one.

    I do not believe in special providences. I believe that the
    universe is governed by strict and immutable laws: If one man’s
    family is swept away by a pestilence and another man’s spared it is
    only the law working: God is not interfering in that small matter,
    either against the one man or in favor of the other.

    I cannot see how eternal punishment hereafter could accomplish any
    good end, therefore I am not able to believe in it. To chasten a
    man in order to perfect him might be reasonable enough; to
    annihilate him when he shall have proved himself incapable of
    reaching perfection might be reasonable enough; but to roast him
    forever for the mere satisfaction of seeing him roast would not be
    reasonable--even the atrocious God imagined by the Jews would tire
    of the spectacle eventually.

    There may be a hereafter and there may not be. I am wholly
    indifferent about it. If I am appointed to live again I feel sure
    it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to flounder
    about for ages in a lake of fire and brimstone for having violated a
    confusion of ill-defined and contradictory rules said (but not
    evidenced) to be of divine institution. If annihilation is to
    follow death I shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore
    shall not care a straw about it.

    I believe that the world’s moral laws are the outcome of the world’s
    experience. It needed no God to come down out of heaven to tell men
    that murder and theft and the other immoralities were bad, both for
    the individual who commits them and for society which suffers from
    them.

    If I break all these moral laws I cannot see how I injure God by it,
    for He is beyond the reach of injury from me--I could as easily
    injure a planet by throwing mud at it. It seems to me that my
    misconduct could only injure me and other men. I cannot benefit God
    by obeying these moral laws--I could as easily benefit the planet by
    withholding my mud. (Let these sentences be read in the light of
    the fact that I believe I have received moral laws only from man
    --none whatever from God.) Consequently I do not see why I should be
    either punished or rewarded hereafter for the deeds I do here.

If the tragedies of life shook his faith in the goodness and justice
and the mercy of God as manifested toward himself, he at any rate never
questioned that the wider scheme of the universe was attuned to the
immutable law which contemplates nothing less than absolute harmony.
I never knew him to refer to this particular document; but he never
destroyed it and never amended it, nor is it likely that he would have
done either had it been presented to him for consideration even during
the last year of his life.

He was never intentionally dogmatic. In a memorandum on a fly-leaf of
Moncure D. Conway’s Sacred Anthology he wrote:


                       RELIGION

The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly
teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

                     MARK TWAIN, 19th Cent. A.D.

And in another note:

I would not interfere with any one’s religion, either to strengthen it
or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one’s religion can affect his
hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion maybe.
But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life hence it is a
valuable possession to him.

Mark Twain’s religion was a faith too wide for doctrines--a benevolence
too limitless for creeds. From the beginning he strove against
oppression, sham, and evil in every form. He despised meanness; he
resented with every drop of blood in him anything that savored of
persecution or a curtailment of human liberties. It was a religion
identified with his daily life and his work. He lived as he wrote, and
he wrote as he believed. His favorite weapon was humor--good-humor--with
logic behind it. A sort of glorified truth it was truth wearing a smile
of gentleness, hence all the more quickly heeded.

“He will be remembered with the great humorists of all time,” says
Howells, “with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy of his
company; none of them was his equal in humanity.”

Mark Twain understood the needs of men because he was himself supremely
human. In one of his dictations he said:

I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not
possess in either a small or a large way. When it is small, as compared
with the same ingredient in somebody else, there is still enough of it
for all the purposes of examination.

With his strength he had inherited the weaknesses of our kind. With
him, as with another, a myriad of dreams and schemes and purposes daily
flitted by. With him, as with another, the spirit of desire led
him often to a high mountain-top, and was not rudely put aside, but
lingeringly--and often invited to return. With him, as with another, a
crowd of jealousies and resentments, and wishes for the ill of others,
daily went seething and scorching along the highways of the soul. With
him, as with another, regret, remorse, and shame stood at the bedside
during long watches of the night; and in the end, with him, the better
thing triumphed--forgiveness and generosity and justice--in a word,
Humanity. Certain of his aphorisms and memoranda each in itself
constitutes an epitome of Mark Twain’s creed. His paraphrase, “When
in doubt tell the truth,” is one of these, and he embodied his whole
attitude toward Infinity when in one of his stray pencilings he wrote:

Why, even poor little ungodlike man holds himself responsible for the
welfare of his child to the extent of his ability. It is all that we
require of God.



CCXCVI. POSTSCRIPT

Every life is a drama--a play in all its particulars; comedy, farce,
tragedy--all the elements are there. To examine in detail any life,
however conspicuous or obscure, is to become amazed not only at the
inevitable sequence of events, but at the interlinking of details, often
far removed, into a marvelously intricate pattern which no art can hope
to reproduce, and can only feebly imitate.

The biographer may reconstruct an episode, present a picture, or reflect
a mood by which the reader is enabled to feel something of the glow of
personality and know, perhaps, a little of the substance of the past.
In so far as the historian can accomplish this his work is a success. At
best his labor will be pathetically incomplete, for whatever its detail
and its resemblance to life, these will record mainly but an outward
expression, behind which was the mighty sweep and tumult of unwritten
thought, the overwhelming proportion of any life, which no other human
soul can ever really know.

Mark Twain’s appearance on the stage of the world was a succession of
dramatic moments. He was always exactly in the setting. Whatever he did,
or whatever came to him, was timed for the instant of greatest effect.
At the end he was more widely observed and loved and honored than ever
before, and at the right moment and in the right manner he died.

How little one may tell of such a life as his! He traveled always such
a broad and brilliant highway, with plumes flying and crowds following
after. Such a whirling panorama of life, and death, and change! I have
written so much, and yet I have put so much aside--and often the best
things, it seemed afterward, perhaps because each in its way was best
and the variety infinite. One may only strive to be faithful--and I
would have made it better if I could.



                       APPENDIX.


APPENDIX A

LETTER FROM ORION CLEMENS TO MISS WOOD CONCERNING HENRY CLEMENS

(See Chapter xxvi)

                         KEOKUK, Iowa, October 3, 1858.

MISS WOOD,--My mother having sent me your kind letter, with a request
that myself and wife should write to you, I hasten to do so.

In my memory I can go away back to Henry’s infancy; I see his large,
blue eyes intently regarding my father when he rebuked him for his
credulity in giving full faith to the boyish idea of planting his
marbles, expecting a crop therefrom; then comes back the recollection
of the time when, standing we three alone by our father’s grave, I told
them always to remember that brothers should be kind to each other;
afterward I see Henry returning from school with his books for the last
time. He must go into my printing-office. He learned rapidly. A word
of encouragement or a word of discouragement told upon his organization
electrically. I could see the effects in his day’s work. Sometimes
I would say, “Henry!” He would stand full front with his eyes upon
mine--all attention. If I commanded him to do something, without a word
he was off instantly, probably in a run. If a cat was to be drowned or
shot Sam (though unwilling yet firm) was selected for the work. If
a stray kitten was to be fed and taken care of Henry was expected to
attend to it, and he would faithfully do so. So they grew up, and
many was the grave lecture commenced by ma, to the effect that Sam was
misleading and spoiling Henry. But the lectures were never concluded,
for Sam would reply with a witticism, or dry, unexpected humor, that
would drive the lecture clean out of my mother’s mind, and change it to
a laugh. Those were happier days. My mother was as lively as any girl
of sixteen. She is not so now. And sister Pamela I have described in
describing Henry; for she was his counterpart. The blow falls crushingly
on her. But the boys grew up--Sam a rugged, brave, quick-tempered,
generous-hearted fellow, Henry quiet, observing, thoughtful, leaning on
Sam for protection; Sam and I too leaning on him for knowledge picked up
from conversation or books, for Henry seemed never to forget anything,
and devoted much of his leisure hours to reading.

Henry is gone! His death was horrible! How I could have sat by him,
hung over him, watched day and night every change of expression, and
ministered to every want in my power that I could discover. This was
denied to me, but Sam, whose organization is such as to feel the utmost
extreme of every feeling, was there. Both his capacity of enjoyment
and his capacity of suffering are greater than mine; and knowing how it
would have affected me to see so sad a scene, I can somewhat appreciate
Sam’s sufferings. In this time of great trouble, when my two brothers,
whose heartstrings have always been a part of my own, were suffering the
utmost stretch of mortal endurance, you were there, like a good angel,
to aid and console, and I bless and thank you for it with my whole
heart. I thank all who helped them then; I thank them for the flowers
they sent to Henry, for the tears that fell for their sufferings, and
when he died, and all of them for all the kind attentions they bestowed
upon the poor boys. We thank the physicians, and we shall always
gratefully remember the kindness of the gentleman who at so much expense
to himself enabled us to deposit Henry’s remains by our father.

With many kind wishes for your future welfare, I remain your earnest
friend,

                           Respectfully,
                                ORION CLEMENS.



APPENDIX B

MARK TWAIN’S BURLESQUE OF CAPTAIN ISAIAH SELLERS

(See Chapter xxvii)

The item which served as a text for the “Sergeant Fathom” communication
was as follows:

                            VICKSBURG, May 4, 1859.

My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans: The water is
higher this far up than it has been since 1815. My opinion is that the
water will be four feet deep in Canal Street before the first of next
June. Mrs. Turner’s plantation at the head of Big Black Island is all
under water, and it has not been since 1815.                            I. SELLERS.--[Captain Sellers, as
                            in this case, sometimes signed
                            his own name to his
                            communications.]

THE BURLESQUE INTRODUCTORY

Our friend Sergeant Fathom, one of the oldest cub pilots on the river,
and now on the Railroad Line steamer Trombone, sends us a rather bad
account concerning the state of the river. Sergeant Fathom is a “cub”
 of much experience, and although we are loath to coincide in his view
of the matter, we give his note a place in our columns, only hoping that
his prophecy will not be verified in this instance. While introducing
the Sergeant, “we consider it but simple justice (we quote from a friend
of his) to remark that he is distinguished for being, in pilot phrase,
‘close,’ as well as superhumanly ‘safe.’” It is a well-known fact that
he has made fourteen hundred and fifty trips in the New Orleans and
St. Louis trade without causing serious damage to a steamboat. This
astonishing success is attributed to the fact that he seldom runs his
boat after early candle-light. It is related of the Sergeant that
upon one occasion he actually ran the chute of Glasscock’s Island,
down-stream, in the night, and at a time, too, when the river was
scarcely more than bank full. His method of accomplishing this feat
proves what we have just said of his “safeness”--he sounded the chute
first, and then built a fire at the head of the island to run by. As to
the Sergeant’s “closeness,” we have heard it whispered that he once went
up to the right of the “Old Hen,”--[Glasscock’s Island and the “Old
Hen” were phenomenally safe places.]--but this is probably a pardonable
little exaggeration, prompted by the love and admiration in which he
is held by various ancient dames of his acquaintance (for albeit the
Sergeant may have already numbered the allotted years of man, still his
form is erect, his step is firm, his hair retains its sable hue, and,
more than all, he hath a winning way about him, an air of docility and
sweetness, if you will, and a smoothness of speech, together with an
exhaustless fund of funny sayings; and, lastly, an overflowing stream,
without beginning, or middle, or end, of astonishing reminiscences of
the ancient Mississippi, which, taken together, form a ‘tout ensemble’
which is sufficient excuse for the tender epithet which is, by common
consent, applied to him by all those ancient dames aforesaid, of
“che-arming creature!”). As the Sergeant has been longer on the river,
and is better acquainted with it than any other “cub” extant, his
remarks are entitled to far more consideration, and are always read
with the deepest interest by high and low, rich and poor, from “Kiho” to
Kamschatka, for let it be known that his fame extends to the uttermost
parts of the earth:


THE COMMUNICATION

R.R. Steamer Trombone, VICKSBURG, May 8, 1859.

The river from New Orleans up to Natchez is higher than it has been
since the niggers were executed (which was in the fall of 1813) and my
opinion is that if the rise continues at this rate the water will be
on the roof of the St. Charles Hotel before the middle of January. The
point at Cairo, which has not even been moistened by the river since
1813, is now entirely under water.

However, Mr. Editor, the inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley should
not act precipitately and sell their plantations at a sacrifice on
account of this prophecy of mine, for I shall proceed to convince them
of a great fact in regard to this matter, viz.: that the tendency of the
Mississippi is to rise less and less high every year (with an occasional
variation of the rule), that such has been the case for many centuries,
and eventually that it will cease to rise at all. Therefore, I would
hint to the planters, as we say in an innocent little parlor game
commonly called “draw,” that if they can only “stand the rise” this time
they may enjoy the comfortable assurance that the old river’s banks will
never hold a “full” again during their natural lives.

In the summer of 1763 I came down the river on the old first Jubilee.
She was new then, however; a singular sort of a single-engine boat, with
a Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew, forecastle on her stern, wheels
in the center, and the jackstaff “nowhere,” for I steered her with a
window-shutter, and when we wanted to land we sent a line ashore and
“rounded her to” with a yoke of oxen.

Well, sir, we wooded off the top of the big bluff above Selmathe only
dry land visible--and waited there three weeks, swapping knives and
playing “seven up” with the Indians, waiting for the river to fall.
Finally, it fell about a hundred feet, and we went on. One day we
rounded to, and I got in a horse-trough, which my partner borrowed from
the Indians up there at Selma while they were at prayers, and went down
to sound around No. 8, and while I was gone my partner got aground on
the hills at Hickman. After three days’ labor we finally succeeded in
sparring her off with a capstan bar, and went on to Memphis. By the time
we got there the river had subsided to such an extent that we were
able to land where the Gayoso House now stands. We finished loading at
Memphis, and loaded part of the stone for the present St. Louis Court
House (which was then in process of erection), to be taken up on our
return trip.

You can form some conception, by these memoranda, of how high the water
was in 1763. In 1775 it did not rise so high by thirty feet; in 1790 it
missed the original mark at least sixty-five feet; in 1797, one hundred
and fifty feet; and in 1806, nearly two hundred and fifty feet. These
were “high-water” years. The “high waters” since then have been so
insignificant that I have scarcely taken the trouble to notice them.
Thus, you will perceive that the planters need not feel uneasy. The
river may make an occasional spasmodic effort at a flood, but the time
is approaching when it will cease to rise altogether.

In conclusion, sir, I will condescend to hint at the foundation of these
arguments: When me and De Soto discovered the Mississippi I could stand
at Bolivar Landing (several miles above “Roaring Waters Bar”) and pitch
a biscuit to the main shore on the other side, and in low water we waded
across at Donaldsonville. The gradual widening and deepening of the
river is the whole secret of the matter.

                     Yours, etc.
                            SERGEANT FATHOM.



APPENDIX C.


I. MARK TWAIN’S EMPIRE CITY HOAX (See Chapter xli) THE LATEST SENSATION.

    A Victim to Jeremy Diddling Trustees--He Cuts his Throat from Ear to
    Ear, Scalps his Wife, and Dashes Out the Brains of Six Helpless
    Children!

From Abram Curry, who arrived here yesterday afternoon from Carson, we
learn the following particulars concerning a bloody massacre which was
committed in Ormsby County night before last. It seems that during the
past six months a man named P. Hopkins, or Philip Hopkins, has been
residing with his family in the old log-house just at the edge of the
great pine forest which lies between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s. The
family consisted of nine children--five girls and four boys--the oldest
of the group, Mary, being nineteen years old, and the youngest, Tommy,
about a year and a half. Twice in the past two months Mrs. Hopkins,
while visiting Carson, expressed fears concerning the sanity of her
husband, remarking that of late he had been subject to fits of violence,
and that during the prevalence of one of these he had threatened to take
her life. It was Mrs. Hopkins’s misfortune to be given to exaggeration,
however, and but little attention was given to what she said.

About 10 o’clock on Monday evening Hopkins dashed into Carson on
horseback, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and bearing in his hand
a reeking scalp, from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping,
and fell in a dying condition in front of the Magnolia saloon. Hopkins
expired, in the course of five minutes, without speaking. The long, red
hair of the scalp he bore marked it as that of Mrs. Hopkins. A number of
citizens, headed by Sheriff Gasherie, mounted at once and rode down to
Hopkins’s house, where a ghastly scene met their eyes. The scalpless
corpse of Mrs. Hopkins lay across the threshold, with her head split
open and her right hand almost severed from the wrist. Near her lay
the ax with which the murderous deed had been committed. In one of
the bedrooms six of the children were found, one in bed and the
others scattered about the floor. They were all dead. Their brains had
evidently been dashed out with a club, and every mark about them seemed
to have been made with a blunt instrument. The children must have
struggled hard for their lives, as articles of clothing and broken
furniture were strewn about the room in the utmost confusion. Julia
and Emma, aged respectively fourteen and seventeen, were found in the
kitchen, bruised and insensible, but it is thought their recovery is
possible. The eldest girl, Mary, must have sought refuge, in her terror,
in the garret, as her body was found there frightfully mutilated, and
the knife with which her wounds had been inflicted still sticking in her
side. The two girls Julia and Emma, who had recovered sufficiently to be
able to talk yesterday morning, declare that their father knocked them
down with a billet of wood and stamped on them. They think they were the
first attacked. They further state that Hopkins had shown evidence
of derangement all day, but had exhibited no violence. He flew into a
passion and attempted to murder them because they advised him to go to
bed and compose his mind.

Curry says Hopkins was about forty-two years of age, and a native of
western Pennsylvania; he was always affable and polite, and until very
recently no one had ever heard of his ill-treating his family. He had
been a heavy owner in the best mines of Virginia and Gold Hill, but when
the San Francisco papers exposed our game of cooking dividends in order
to bolster up our stocks he grew afraid and sold out, and invested an
immense amount in the Spring Valley Water Company, of San Francisco. He
was advised to do this by a relative of his, one of the editors of
the San Francisco Bulletin, who had suffered pecuniarily by the
dividend-cooking system as applied to the Daney Mining Company recently.
Hopkins had not long ceased to own in the various claims on the Comstock
lead, however, when several dividends were cooked on his newly acquired
property, their water totally dried up, and Spring Valley stock went
down to nothing. It is presumed that this misfortune drove him mad, and
resulted in his killing himself and the greater portion of his family.
The newspapers of San Francisco permitted this water company to go on
borrowing money and cooking dividends, under cover of which the cunning
financiers crept out of the tottering concern, leaving the crash to come
upon poor and unsuspecting stockholders, without offering to expose the
villainy at work. We hope the fearful massacre detailed above may prove
the saddest result of their silence.


II. NEWS-GATHERING WITH MARK TWAIN.

Alfred Doten’s son gives the following account of a reporting trip made
by his father and Mark Twain, when the two were on Comstock papers:

My father and Mark Twain were once detailed to go over to Como and write
up some new mines that had been discovered over there. My father was on
the Gold Hill News. He and Mark had not met before, but became promptly
acquainted, and were soon calling each other by their first names.

They went to a little hotel at Carson, agreeing to do their work there
together next morning. When morning came they set out, and suddenly on a
corner Mark stopped and turned to my father, saying:

“By gracious, Alf! Isn’t that a brewery?”

“It is, Mark. Let’s go in.”

They did so, and remained there all day, swapping yarns, sipping beer,
and lunching, going back to the hotel that night.

The next morning precisely the same thing occurred. When they were on
the same corner, Mark stopped as if he had never been there before, and
sand:

“Good gracious, Alf! Isn’t that a brewery?”

“It is, Mark. Let’s go in.”

So again they went in, and again stayed all day.

This happened again the next morning, and the next. Then my father
became uneasy. A letter had come from Gold Hill, asking him where his
report of the mines was. They agreed that next morning they would
really begin the story; that they would climb to the top of a hill that
overlooked the mines, and write it from there.

But the next morning, as before, Mark was surprised to discover the
brewery, and once more they went in. A few moments later, however, a
man who knew all about the mines--a mining engineer connected with
them--came in. He was a godsend. My father set down a valuable,
informing story, while Mark got a lot of entertaining mining yarns out
of him.

Next day Virginia City and Gold Hill were gaining information from my
father’s article, and entertainment from Mark’s story of the mines.



APPENDIX D

FROM MARK TWAIN’S FIRST LECTURE, DELIVERED OCTOBER 2, 1866.

(See Chapter liv) HAWAIIAN IMPORTANCE TO AMERICA.

After a full elucidation of the sugar industry of the Sandwich Islands,
its profits and possibilities, he said:

I have dwelt upon this subject to show you that these islands have a
genuine importance to America--an importance which is not generally
appreciated by our citizens. They pay revenues into the United States
Treasury now amounting to over a half a million a year.

I do not know what the sugar yield of the world is now, but ten years
ago, according to the Patent Office reports, it was 800,000 hogsheads.
The Sandwich Islands, properly cultivated by go-ahead Americans, are
capable of providing one-third as much themselves. With the Pacific
Railroad built, the great China Mail Line of steamers touching at
Honolulu--we could stock the islands with Americans and supply a
third of the civilized world with sugar--and with the silkiest,
longest-stapled cotton this side of the Sea Islands, and the very best
quality of rice.... The property has got to fall to some heir, and why
not the United States?


NATIVE PASSION FOR FUNERALS

They are very fond of funerals. Big funerals are their main weakness.
Fine grave clothes, fine funeral appointments, and a long procession are
things they take a generous delight in. They are fond of their chief and
their king; they reverence them with a genuine reverence and love them
with a warm affection, and often look forward to the happiness they
will experience in burying them. They will beg, borrow, or steal money
enough, and flock from all the islands, to be present at a royal funeral
on Oahu. Years ago a Kanaka and his wife were condemned to be hanged for
murder. They received the sentence with manifest satisfaction because it
gave an opening for a funeral, you know. All they care for is a funeral.
It makes but little difference to them whose it is; they would as soon
attend their own funeral as anybody else’s. This couple were people of
consequence, and had landed estates. They sold every foot of ground
they had and laid it out in fine clothes to be hung in. And the woman
appeared on the scaffold in a white satin dress and slippers and fathoms
of gaudy ribbon, and the man was arrayed in a gorgeous vest, blue
claw-hammer coat and brass buttons, and white kid gloves. As the noose
was adjusted around his neck, he blew his nose with a grand theatrical
flourish, so as to show his embroidered white handkerchief. I never,
never knew of a couple who enjoyed hanging more than they did.


VIEW FROM HALEAKALA

It is a solemn pleasure to stand upon the summit of the extinct crater
of Haleakala, ten thousand feet above the sea, and gaze down into
its awful crater, 27 miles in circumference and ago feet deep, and to
picture to yourself the seething world of fire that once swept up out of
the tremendous abyss ages ago.

The prodigious funnel is dead and silent now, and even has bushes
growing far down in its bottom, where the deep-sea line could hardly
have reached in the old times, when the place was filled with liquid
lava. These bushes look like parlor shrubs from the summit where you
stand, and the file of visitors moving through them on their mules is
diminished to a detachment of mice almost; and to them you, standing so
high up against the sun, ten thousand feet above their heads, look no
larger than a grasshopper.

This in the morning; but at three or four in the afternoon a thousand
little patches of white clouds, like handfuls of wool, come drifting
noiselessly, one after another, into the crater, like a procession of
shrouded phantoms, and circle round and round the vast sides, and settle
gradually down and mingle together until the colossal basin is filled
to the brim with snowy fog and all its seared and desolate wonders are
hidden from sight.

And then you may turn your back to the crater and look far away upon the
broad valley below, with its sugar-houses glinting like white specks in
the distance, and the great sugar-fields diminished to green veils amid
the lighter-tinted verdure around them, and abroad upon the limitless
ocean. But I should not say you look down; you look up at these things.

You are ten thousand feet above them, but yet you seem to stand in a
basin, with the green islands here and there, and the valleys and the
wide ocean, and the remote snow-peak of Mauna Loa, all raised up before
and above you, and pictured out like a brightly tinted map hung at the
ceiling of a room.

You look up at everything; nothing is below you. It has a singular
and startling effect to see a miniature world thus seemingly hung in
mid-air.

But soon the white clouds come trooping along in ghostly squadrons and
mingle together in heavy masses a quarter of a mile below you and
shut out everything-completely hide the sea and all the earth save the
pinnacle you stand on. As far as the eye can reach, it finds nothing
to rest upon but a boundless plain of clouds tumbled into all manner of
fantastic shapes-a billowy ocean of wool aflame with the gold and purple
and crimson splendors of the setting sun! And so firm does this grand
cloud pavement look that you can hardly persuade yourself that you could
not walk upon it; that if you stepped upon it you would plunge headlong
and astonish your friends at dinner ten thousand feet below.

Standing on that peak, with all the world shut out by that vast plain of
clouds, a feeling of loneliness comes over a man which suggests to his
mind the last man at the flood, perched high upon the last rock, with
nothing visible on any side but a mournful waste of waters, and the ark
departing dimly through the distant mists and leaving him to storm and
night and solitude and death!



NOTICE OF MARK TWAIN’S LECTURE

“THE TROUBLE IS OVER”

“The inimitable Mark Twain, delivered himself last night of his first
lecture on the Sandwich Islands, or anything else.

“Some time before the hour appointed to open his head the Academy
of Music (on Pine Street) was densely crowded with one of the most
fashionable audiences it was ever my privilege to witness during my long
residence in this city. The Elite of the town were there, and so was the
Governor of the State, occupying one of the boxes, whose rotund face
was suffused with a halo of mirth during the whole entertainment. The
audience promptly notified Mark by the usual sign--stamping--that the
auspicious hour had arrived, and presently the lecturer came sidling
and swinging out from the left of the stage. His very manner produced
a generally vociferous laugh from the assemblage. He opened with an
apology, by saying that he had partly succeeded in obtaining a band, but
at the last moment the party engaged backed out. He explained that he
had hired a man to play the trombone, but he, on learning that he was
the only person engaged, came at the last moment and informed him that
he could not play. This placed Mark in a bad predicament, and wishing to
know his reasons for deserting him at that critical moment, he replied,
‘That he wasn’t going to make a fool of himself by sitting up there
on the stage and blowing his horn all by himself.’ After the applause
subsided, he assumed a very grave countenance and commenced his remarks
proper with the following well-known sentence: ‘When, in the course of
human events,’ etc. He lectured fully an hour and a quarter, and his
humorous sayings were interspersed with geographical, agricultural,
and statistical remarks, sometimes branching off and reaching beyond,
soaring, in the very choicest language, up to the very pinnacle of
descriptive power.”



APPENDIX E

FROM “THE JUMPING FROG” BOOK (MARK TWAIN’S FIRST PUBLISHED VOLUME)

(See Chapters lviii and lix)


I. ADVERTISEMENT

“Mark Twain” is too well known to the public to require a formal
introduction at my hands. By his story of the Frog he scaled the heights
of popularity at a single jump and won for himself the ‘sobriquet’ of
The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope. He is also known to fame as The
Moralist of the Main; and it is not unlikely that as such he will
go down to posterity. It is in his secondary character, as humorist,
however, rather than in the primal one of moralist, that I aim to
present him in the present volume. And here a ready explanation will be
found for the somewhat fragmentary character of many of these sketches;
for it was necessary to snatch threads of humor wherever they could be
found--very often detaching them from serious articles and moral
essays with which they were woven and entangled. Originally written for
newspaper publication, many of the articles referred to events of the
day, the interest of which has now passed away, and contained local
allusions, which the general reader would fail to understand; in such
cases excision became imperative. Further than this, remark or comment
is unnecessary. Mark Twain never resorts to tricks of spelling nor
rhetorical buffoonery for the purpose of provoking a laugh; the vein of
his humor runs too rich and deep to make surface gliding necessary. But
there are few who can resist the quaint similes, keen satire, and hard,
good sense which form the staple of his writing.

J. P.


II. FROM ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS

“MORAL STATISTICIAN”--I don’t want any of your statistics. I took your
whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are
always ciphering out how much a man’s health is injured, and how much
his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents
he wastes in the course of ninety-two years’ indulgence in the fatal
practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking
coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of
wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc....

Of course you can save money by denying yourself all these vicious
little enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it?
What use can you put it to? Money can’t save your infinitesimal
soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and
enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and
enjoyment, where is the use in accumulating cash? It won’t do for you to
say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing good table,
and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know
yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give
away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that
you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the
daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good-humor, will try
to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your
knees, with your eyes buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box
comes around; and you never give the revenue-officers a true statement
of your income. Now you all know all these things yourself, don’t you?
Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable
lives to a clean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving
money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don’t you go
off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into
becoming as “ornery” and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your
ceaseless and villainous “moral statistics”? Now, I don’t approve of
dissipation, and I don’t indulge in it, either; but I haven’t a particle
of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatever, and
so I don’t want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same
man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice
of smoking cigars and then came back, in my absence, with your vile,
reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful
parlor-stove.



III. FROM “A STRANGE DREAM”

(Example of Mark Twain’s Early Descriptive Writing)

... In due time I stood, with my companion, on the wall of the vast
caldron which the natives, ages ago, named ‘Hale mau mau’--the abyss
wherein they were wont to throw the remains of their chiefs, to the end
that vulgar feet might never tread above them. We stood there, at dead
of night, a mile above the level of the sea, and looked down a thousand
feet upon a boiling, surging, roaring ocean of fire!--shaded our eyes
from the blinding glare, and gazed far away over the crimson waves with
a vague notion that a supernatural fleet, manned by demons and freighted
with the damned, might presently sail up out of the remote distance;
started when tremendous thunder-bursts shook the earth, and followed
with fascinated eyes the grand jets of molten lava that sprang high up
toward the zenith and exploded in a world of fiery spray that lit up the
somber heavens with an infernal splendor.

“What is your little bonfire of Vesuvius to this?”

My ejaculation roused my companion from his reverie, and we fell into a
conversation appropriate to the occasion and the surroundings. We came
at last to speak of the ancient custom of casting the bodies of dead
chieftains into this fearful caldron; and my comrade, who is of the
blood royal, mentioned that the founder of his race, old King Kamehameha
the First--that invincible old pagan Alexander--had found other
sepulture than the burning depths of the ‘Hale mau mau’. I grew
interested at once; I knew that the mystery of what became of the corpse
of the warrior king hail never been fathomed; I was aware that there was
a legend connected with this matter; and I felt as if there could be no
more fitting time to listen to it than the present. The descendant of
the Kamehamehas said:

The dead king was brought in royal state down the long, winding road
that descends from the rim of the crater to the scorched and chasm-riven
plain that lies between the ‘Hale mau mau’ and those beetling walls
yonder in the distance. The guards were set and the troops of mourners
began the weird wail for the departed. In the middle of the night came a
sound of innumerable voices in the air and the rush of invisible wings;
the funeral torches wavered, burned blue, and went out. The mourners
and watchers fell to the ground paralyzed by fright, and many minutes
elapsed before any one dared to move or speak; for they believed that
the phantom messengers of the dread Goddess of Fire had been in their
midst. When at last a torch was lighted the bier was vacant--the dead
monarch had been spirited away!



APPENDIX F

THE INNOCENTS ABROAD (See Chapter lx)

NEW YORK “HERALD” EDITORIAL ON THE RETURN OF THE “QUAKER CITY”
 PILGRIMAGE, NOVEMBER 19, 1867.

In yesterday’s Herald we published a most amusing letter from the pen of
that most amusing American genius, Mark Twain, giving an account of that
most amusing of all modern pilgrimages--the pilgrimage of the ‘Quaker
City’. It has been amusing all through, this Quaker City affair. It
might have become more serious than amusing if the ship had been sold at
Jaffa, Alexandria, or Yalta, in the Black Sea, as it appears might have
happened. In such a case the passengers would have been more effectually
sold than the ship. The descendants of the Puritan pilgrims have,
naturally enough, some of them, an affection for ships; but if all that
is said about this religious cruise be true they have also a singularly
sharp eye to business. It was scarcely wise on the part of the pilgrims,
although it was well for the public, that so strange a genius as Mark
Twain should have found admission into the sacred circle. We are not
aware whether Mr. Twain intends giving us a book on this pilgrimage, but
we do know that a book written from his own peculiar standpoint, giving
an account of the characters and events on board ship and of the scenes
which the pilgrims witnessed, would command an almost unprecedented
sale. There are varieties of genius peculiar to America. Of one of these
varieties Mark Twain is a striking specimen. For the development of his
peculiar genius he has never had a more fitting opportunity. Besides,
there are some things which he knows, and which the world ought to know,
about this last edition of the Mayflower.



APPENDIX G

MARK TWAIN AT THE CORRESPONDENTS CLUB, WASHINGTON

(See Chapter lxiii)

WOMAN A EULOGY OF THE FAIR SEX.

The Washington Correspondents Club held its anniversary on Saturday
night. Mr. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, responded to the toast,
“Woman, the pride of the professions and the jewel of ours.” He said:

Mr. President,--I do not know why I should have been singled out to
receive the greatest distinction of the evening--for so the office
of replying to the toast to woman has been regarded in every age.
[Applause.] I do not know why I have received this distinction, unless
it be that I am a trifle less homely than the other members of the club.
But, be this as it may, Mr. President, I am proud of the position,
and you could not have chosen any one who would have accepted it more
gladly, or labored with a heartier good--will to do the subject justice,
than I. Because, Sir, I love the sex. [Laughter.] I love all the women,
sir, irrespective of age or color. [Laughter.]

Human intelligence cannot estimate what we owe to woman, sir. She sews
on our buttons [laughter]; she mends our clothes [laughter]; she ropes
us in at the church fairs; she confides in us; she tells us whatever she
can find out about the private affairs of the neighbors; she gives
good advice, and plenty of it; she gives us a piece of her mind
sometimes--and sometimes all of it; she soothes our aching brows; she
bears our children. (Ours as a general thing.)--[this last sentence
appears in Twain’s published speeches and may have been added later.
D.W.]

In all relations of life, sir, it is but just and a graceful tribute to
woman to say of her that she is a brick. [Great laughter.]

Wheresoever you place woman, sir--in whatsoever position or estate--she
is an ornament to that place she occupies, and a treasure to the world.
[Here Mr. Twain paused, looked inquiringly at his hearers, and remarked
that the applause should come in at this point. It came in. Mr. Twain
resumed his eulogy.] Look at the noble names of history! Look at
Cleopatra! Look at Desdemona! Look at Florence Nightingale! Look at Joan
of Arc! Look at Lucretia Borgia! [Disapprobation expressed. “Well,” said
Mr. Twain, scratching his head, doubtfully, “suppose we let Lucretia
slide.”] Look at Joyce Heth! Look at Mother Eve! I repeat, sir, look
at the illustrious names of history! Look at the Widow Machree! Look
at Lucy Stone! Look at Elizabeth Cady Stanton! Look at George Francis
Train! [Great laughter.] And, sir, I say with bowed head and deepest
veneration, look at the mother of Washington! She raised a boy that
could not lie--could not lie. [Applause.] But he never had any chance.
It might have been different with him if he had belonged to a newspaper
correspondents’ club. [Laughter, groans, hisses, cries of “put him out.”
 Mark looked around placidly upon his excited audience, and resumed.]

I repeat, sir, that in whatsoever position you place a woman she is an
ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart she has
few equals and no superior [laughter]; as a cousin she is convenient; as
a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper she is precious; as a
wet nurse she has no equal among men! [Laughter.]

What, sir, would the people of this earth be without woman? They would
be scarce, sir. (Mighty scarce.)--[another line added later in the
published ‘Speeches’. D.W.] Then let us cherish her, let us protect her,
let us give her our support, our encouragement, our sympathy--ourselves,
if we get a chance. [Laughter.]

But, jesting aside, Mr. President, woman is lovable, gracious, kind
of heart, beautiful; worthy of all respect, of all esteem, of all
deference. Not any here will refuse to drink her health right cordially,
for each and every one of us has personally known, loved, and honored
the very best one of them all--his own mother! [Applause.]



APPENDIX H

ANNOUNCEMENT FOR LECTURE OF JULY 2, 1868

(See Chapter lxvi)

THE PUBLIC TO MARK TWAIN--CORRESPONDENCE

SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.

MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Hearing that you are about to sail for New
York in the P. M. S. S. Company’s steamer of the 6th July, to publish a
book, and learning with the deepest concern that you propose to read a
chapter or two of that book in public before you go, we take this method
of expressing our cordial desire that you will not. We beg and implore
you do not. There is a limit to human endurance.

We are your personal friends. We have your welfare at heart. We desire
to see you prosper. And it is upon these accounts, and upon these only,
that we urge you to desist from the new atrocity you contemplate. Yours
truly,

    60 names including: Bret Harte, Maj.-Gen. Ord, Maj.-Gen. Halleck,
    The Orphan Asylum, and various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on
    Foot and Horseback, and 1500 in the Steerage.
(REPLY)

                         SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th

TO THE 1,500 AND OTHERS,--It seems to me that your course is entirely
unprecedented. Heretofore, when lecturers, singers, actors, and other
frauds have said they were about to leave town, you have always been the
very first people to come out in a card beseeching them to hold on
for just one night more, and inflict just one more performance on the
public, but as soon as I want to take a farewell benefit you come after
me, with a card signed by the whole community and the board of aldermen,
praying me not to do it. But it isn’t of any use. You cannot move me
from my fell purpose. I will torment the people if I want to. I have a
better right to do it than these strange lecturers and orators that come
here from abroad. It only costs the public a dollar apiece, and if they
can’t stand it what do they stay here for? Am I to go away and let them
have peace and quiet for a year and a half, and then come back and only
lecture them twice? What do you take me for?

No, gentlemen, ask of me anything else and I will do it cheerfully; but
do not ask me not to afflict the people. I wish to tell them all I know
about VENICE. I wish to tell them about the City of the Sea--that most
venerable, most brilliant, and proudest Republic the world has ever
seen. I wish to hint at what it achieved in twelve hundred years,
and what it lost in two hundred. I wish to furnish a deal of pleasant
information, somewhat highly spiced, but still palatable, digestible,
and eminently fitted for the intellectual stomach. My last lecture was
not as fine as I thought it was, but I have submitted this discourse to
several able critics, and they have pronounced it good. Now, therefore,
why should I withhold it?

Let me talk only just this once, and I will sail positively on the 6th
of July, and stay away until I return from China--two years.

        Yours truly, MARK TWAIN.



(FURTHER REMONSTRANCE)

SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.

MR. MARK TWAIN,--Learning with profound regret that you have concluded
to postpone your departure until the 6th July, and learning also, with
unspeakable grief, that you propose to read from your forthcoming book,
or lecture again before you go, at the New Mercantile Library, we hasten
to beg of you that you will not do it. Curb this spirit of lawless
violence, and emigrate at once. Have the vessel’s bill for your passage
sent to us. We will pay it.

                         Your friends,
                            Pacific Board of Brokers [and
                            other financial and social
                            institutions]

                         SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.

MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Will you start now, without any unnecessary
delay?

                            Yours truly,
                            Proprietors of the Alta,
                            Bulletin, Times, Call, Examiner
                            [and other San Francisco
                            publications].

                         SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.

MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Do not delay your departure. You can come
back and lecture another time. In the language of the worldly--you can
“cut and come again.”

                        Your friends,
                            THE CLERGY.

                         SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.

MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--You had better go.

                         Yours,
                            THE CHIEF OF POLICE.
(REPLY)

SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.

GENTLEMEN,--Restrain your emotions; you observe that they cannot avail.
Read:

                  NEW MERCANTILE LIBRARY
                      Bush Street

               Thursday Evening, July 2, 1868
                    One Night Only

                   FAREWELL LECTURE
                         of
                      MARK TWAIN
                      Subject:
                The Oldest of the Republics
                       VENICE
                   PAST AND PRESENT

            Box-Office open Wednesday and Thursday
             No extra charge for reserved seats

       ADMISSION........... ONE DOLLAR
       Doors open at 7      Orgies to commence at 8 P. M.

    The public displays and ceremonies projected to give fitting eclat
    to this occasion have been unavoidably delayed until the 4th. The
    lecture will be delivered certainly on the 2d, and the event will be
    celebrated two days afterward by a discharge of artillery on the
    4th, a procession of citizens, the reading of the Declaration of
    Independence, and by a gorgeous display of fireworks from Russian
    Hill in the evening, which I have ordered at my sole expense, the
    cost amounting to eighty thousand dollars.

                AT NEW MERCANTILE LIBRARY
                      Bush Street
               Thursday Evening, July 2, 1868



APPENDIX I. MARK TWAIN’S CHAMPIONSHIP OF THOMAS K. BEECHER

(See Chapter lxxiv)

There was a religious turmoil in Elmira in 1869; a disturbance among
the ministers, due to the success of Thomas K. Beecher in a series of
meetings he was conducting in the Opera House. Mr. Beecher’s teachings
had never been very orthodox or doctrinal, but up to this time they had
been seemingly unobjectionable to his brother clergymen, who fraternized
with him and joined with him in the Monday meetings of the Ministerial
Union of Elmira, when each Monday a sermon was read by one of the
members. The situation presently changed. Mr. Beecher was preaching his
doubtful theology to large and nightly increasing audiences, and it
was time to check the exodus. The Ministerial Union of Elmira not only
declined to recognize and abet the Opera House gatherings, but they
requested him to withdraw from their Monday meetings, on the ground that
his teachings were pernicious. Mr. Beecher said nothing of the matter,
and it was not made public until a notice of it appeared in a religious
paper. Naturally such a course did not meet with the approval of the
Langdon family, and awoke the scorn of a man who so detested bigotry
in any form as Mark Twain. He was a stranger in the place, and not
justified to speak over his own signature, but he wrote an article and
read it to members of the Langdon family and to Dr. and Mrs. Taylor,
their intimate friends, who were spending an evening in the Langdon
home. It was universally approved, and the next morning appeared in the
Elmira Advertiser, over the signature of “S’cat.” It created a stir, of
course.

The article follows:


MR. BEECHER AND THE CLERGY

“The Ministerial Union of Elmira, N. Y., at a recent meeting passed
resolutions disapproving the teachings of Rev. T. K. Beecher, declining
to co-operate with him in his Sunday evening services at the Opera
House, and requesting him to withdraw from their Monday morning meeting.
This has resulted in his withdrawal, and thus the pastors are relieved
from further responsibility as to his action.”--N. Y. Evangelist.

Poor Beecher! All this time he could do whatever he pleased that was
wrong, and then be perfectly serene and comfortable over it, because the
Ministerial Union of Elmira was responsible to God for it. He could
lie if he wanted to, and those ministers had to answer for it; he could
promote discord in the church of Christ, and those parties had to
make it right with the Deity as best they could; he could teach false
doctrines to empty opera houses, and those sorrowing lambs of the
Ministerial Union had to get out their sackcloth and ashes and stand
responsible for it. He had such a comfortable thing of it! But he went
too far. In an evil hour he slaughtered the simple geese that laid the
golden egg of responsibility for him, and now they will uncover their
customary complacency, and lift up their customary cackle in his behalf
no more. And so, at last, he finds himself in the novel position of
being responsible to God for his acts, instead of to the Ministerial
Union of Elmira. To say that this is appalling is to state it with a
degree of mildness which amounts to insipidity.

We cannot justly estimate this calamity, without first reviewing certain
facts that conspired to bring it about. Mr. Beecher was and is in
the habit of preaching to a full congregation in the Independent
Congregational Church, in this city. The meeting-house was not large
enough to accommodate all the people who desired admittance. Mr. Beecher
regularly attended the meetings of the Ministerial Union of Elmira every
Monday morning, and they received him into their fellowship, and never
objected to the doctrines which he taught in his church. So, in an
unfortunate moment, he conceived the strange idea that they would
connive at the teaching of the same doctrines in the same way in a
larger house. Therefore he secured the Opera House and proceeded to
preach there every Sunday evening to assemblages comprising from a
thousand to fifteen hundred persons. He felt warranted in this course by
a passage of Scripture which says, “Go ye into all the world and
preach the gospel unto every creature.” Opera-houses were not ruled out
specifically in this passage, and so he considered it proper to regard
opera-houses as a part of “all the world.” He looked upon the people
who assembled there as coming under the head of “every creature.” These
ideas were as absurd as they were farfetched, but still they were
the honest ebullitions of a diseased mind. His great mistake was in
supposing that when he had the Saviour’s indorsement of his conduct
he had all that was necessary. He overlooked the fact that there
might possibly be a conflict of opinion between the Saviour and the
Ministerial Union of Elmira. And there was. Wherefore, blind and foolish
Mr. Beecher went to his destruction. The Ministerial Union withdrew
their approbation, and left him dangling in the air, with no other
support than the countenance and approval of the gospel of Christ.

Mr. Beecher invited his brother ministers to join forces with him and
help him conduct the Opera House meetings. They declined with great
unanimity. In this they were wrong. Since they did not approve of those
meetings, it was a duty they owed to their consciences and their God to
contrive their discontinuance. They knew this. They felt it. Yet they
turned coldly away and refused to help at those meetings, when they well
knew that their help, earnestly and persistently given, was able to kill
any great religious enterprise that ever was conceived of.

The ministers refused, and the calamitous meetings at the Opera House
continued; and not only continued, but grew in interest and importance,
and sapped of their congregations churches where the Gospel was preached
with that sweet monotonous tranquillity and that impenetrable profundity
which stir up such consternation in the strongholds of sin. It is a pity
to have to record here that one clergyman refused to preach at the Opera
House at Mr. Beecher’s request, even when that incendiary was sick and
disabled; and if that man’s conscience justifies him in that refusal
I do not. Under the plea of charity for a sick brother he could have
preached to that Opera House multitude a sermon that would have done
incalculable damage to the Opera House experiment. And he need not have
been particular about the sermon he chose, either. He could have relied
on any he had in his barrel.

The Opera House meetings went on; other congregations were thin, and
grew thinner, but the Opera House assemblages were vast. Every Sunday
night, in spite of sense and reason, multitudes passed by the churches
where they might have been saved, and marched deliberately to the Opera
House to be damned. The community talked, talked, talked. Everybody
discussed the fact that the Ministerial Union disapproved of the Opera
House meetings; also the fact that they disapproved of the teachings put
forth there. And everybody wondered how the Ministerial Union could tell
whether to approve or disapprove of those teachings, seeing that those
clergymen had never attended an Opera House meeting, and therefore
didn’t know what was taught there. Everybody wondered over that curious
question, and they had to take it out in wondering.

Mr. Beecher asked the Ministerial Union to state their objections to the
Opera House matter. They could not--at least they did not. He said to
them that if they would come squarely out and tell him that they desired
the discontinuance of those meetings he would discontinue them. They
declined to do that. Why should they have declined? They had no right to
decline, and no excuse to decline, if they honestly believed that those
meetings interfered in the slightest degree with the best interests of
religion. (That is a proposition which the profoundest head among them
cannot get around.)

But the Opera House meetings went on. That was the mischief of it. And
so, one Monday morning, when Mr. B. appeared at the usual Ministers’
meeting, his brother clergymen desired him to come there no more. He
asked why. They gave no reason. They simply declined to have his company
longer. Mr. B. said he could not accept of this execution without a
trial, and since he loved them and had nothing against them he must
insist upon meeting with them in the future just the same as ever.
And so, after that, they met in secret, and thus got rid of this man’s
importunate affection.

The Ministerial Union had ruled out Beecher--a point gained. He would
get up an excitement about it in public. But that was a miscalculation.
He never mentioned it. They waited and waited for the grand crash, but
it never came. After all their labor-pains, their ministerial mountain
had brought forth only a mouse--and a still-born one at that. Beecher
had not told on them; Beecher malignantly persisted in not telling on
them. The opportunity was slipping away. Alas, for the humiliation of
it, they had to come out and tell it themselves! And after all, their
bombshell did not hurt anybody when they did explode it. They had ceased
to be responsible to God for Beecher, and yet nobody seemed paralyzed
about it. Somehow, it was not even of sufficient importance, apparently,
to get into the papers, though even the poor little facts that Smith has
bought a trotting team and Alderman Jones’s child has the measles
are chronicled there with avidity. Something must be done. As the
Ministerial Union had told about their desolating action, when nobody
else considered it of enough importance to tell, they would also publish
it, now that the reporters failed to see anything in it important enough
to print. And so they startled the entire religious world no doubt
by solemnly printing in the Evangelist the paragraph which heads this
article. They have got their excommunication-bull started at last. It is
going along quite lively now, and making considerable stir, let us hope.
They even know it in Podunk, wherever that may be. It excited a two-line
paragraph there. Happy, happy world, that knows at last that a little
congress of congregationless clergymen of whom it had never heard before
have crushed a famous Beecher, and reduced his audiences from fifteen
hundred down to fourteen hundred and seventy-five at one fell blow!
Happy, happy world, that knows at last that these obscure innocents
are no longer responsible for the blemishless teachings, the power, the
pathos, the logic, and the other and manifold intellectual pyrotechnics
that seduce, but to damn, the Opera House assemblages every Sunday
night in Elmira! And miserable, O thrice miserable Beecher! For the
Ministerial Union of Elmira will never, no, never more be responsible to
God for his shortcomings. (Excuse these tears.)

(For the protection of a man who is uniformly charged with all the
newspaper deviltry that sees the light in Elmira journals, I take this
opportunity of stating, under oath, duly subscribed before a magistrate,
that Mr. Beecher did not write this article. And further still, that he
did not inspire it. And further still, the Ministerial Union of Elmira
did not write it. And finally, the Ministerial Union did not ask me to
write it. No, I have taken up this cudgel in defense of the Ministerial
Union of Elmira solely from a love of justice. Without solicitation, I
have constituted myself the champion of the Ministerial Union of Elmira,
and it shall be a labor of love with me to conduct their side of a
quarrel in print for them whenever they desire me to do it; or if they
are busy, and have not the time to ask me, I will cheerfully do it
anyhow. In closing this I must remark that if any question the right
of the clergymen of Elmira to turn Mr. Beecher out of the Ministerial
Union, to such I answer that Mr. Beecher recreated that institution
after it had been dead for many years, and invited those gentlemen to
come into it, which they did, and so of course they have a right to turn
him out if they want to. The difference between Beecher and the man who
put an adder in his bosom is, that Beecher put in more adders than he
did, and consequently had a proportionately livelier time of it when
they got warmed up.)

                     Cheerfully,
                                S’CAT.



APPENDIX J

THE INDIGNITY PUT UPON THE REMAINS OF GEORGE HOLLAND BY THE REV. MR.
SABINE.

(See Chapter lxxvii)

What a ludicrous satire it was upon Christian charity!--even upon the
vague, theoretical idea of it which doubtless this small saint mouths
from his own pulpit every Sunday. Contemplate this freak of nature, and
think what a Cardiff giant of self-righteousness is crowded into his
pigmy skin. If we probe, and dissect; and lay open this diseased, this
cancerous piety of his, we are forced to the conviction that it is the
production of an impression on his part that his guild do about all
the good that is done on the earth, and hence are better than common
clay--hence are competent to say to such as George Holland, “You are
unworthy; you are a play-actor, and consequently a sinner; I cannot take
the responsibility of recommending you to the mercy of Heaven.” It must
have had its origin in that impression, else he would have thought, “We
are all instruments for the carrying out of God’s purposes; it is not
for me to pass judgment upon your appointed share of the work, or to
praise or to revile it; I have divine authority for it that we are all
sinners, and therefore it is not for me to discriminate and say we will
supplicate for this sinner, for he was a merchant prince or a banker,
but we will beseech no forgiveness for this other one, for he was a
play-actor.”

It surely requires the furthest possible reach of self-righteousness to
enable a man to lift his scornful nose in the air and turn his back upon
so poor and pitiable a thing as a dead stranger come to beg the last
kindness that humanity can do in its behalf. This creature has violated
the letter of the Gospel, and judged George Holland--not George Holland,
either, but his profession through him. Then it is, in a measure, fair
that we judge this creature’s guild through him. In effect he has said,
“We are the salt of the earth; we do all the good work that is done; to
learn how to be good and do good men must come to us; actors and such
are obstacles to moral progress.” Pray look at the thing reasonably a
moment, laying aside all biases of education and custom. If a common
public impression is fair evidence of a thing then this minister’s
legitimate, recognized, and acceptable business is to tell people
calmly, coldly, and in stiff, written sentences, from the pulpit, to go
and do right, be just, be merciful, be charitable. And his congregation
forget it all between church and home. But for fifty years it was George
Holland’s business on the stage to make his audience go and do right,
and be just, merciful, and charitable--because by his living, breathing,
feeling pictures he showed them what it was to do these things, and
how to do them, and how instant and ample was the reward! Is it not
a singular teacher of men, this reverend gentleman who is so poorly
informed himself as to put the whole stage under ban, and say, “I do not
think it teaches moral lessons”? Where was ever a sermon preached that
could make filial ingratitude so hateful to men as the sinful play of
“King Lear”? Or where was there ever a sermon that could so convince
men of the wrong and the cruelty of harboring a pampered and unanalyzed
jealousy as the sinful play of “Othello”? And where are there ten
preachers who can stand in the pulpit preaching heroism, unselfish
devotion, and lofty patriotism, and hold their own against any one of
five hundred William Tells that can be raised upon five hundred stages
in the land at a day’s notice? It is almost fair and just to aver
(although it is profanity) that nine-tenths of all the kindness and
forbearance and Christian charity and generosity in the hearts of
the American people today got there by being filtered down from their
fountain-head, the gospel of Christ, through dramas and tragedies and
comedies on the stage, and through the despised novel and the Christmas
story, and through the thousand and one lessons, suggestions, and
narratives of generous deeds that stir the pulses, and exalt and augment
the nobility of the nation day by day from the teeming columns of ten
thousand newspapers, and not from the drowsy pulpit.

All that is great and good in our particular civilization came straight
from the hand of Jesus Christ, and many creatures, and of divers sorts,
were doubtless appointed to disseminate it; and let us believe that this
seed and the result are the main thing, and not the cut of the
sower’s garment; and that whosoever, in his way and according to his
opportunity, sows the one and produces the other, has done high service
and worthy. And further, let us try with all our strength to believe
that whenever old simple-hearted George Holland sowed this seed, and
reared his crop of broader charities and better impulses in men’s
hearts, it was just as acceptable before the Throne as if the seed had
been scattered in vapid platitudes from the pulpit of the ineffable
Sabine himself.

Am I saying that the pulpit does not do its share toward disseminating
the marrow, the meat of the gospel of Christ? (For we are not talking of
ceremonies and wire-drawn creeds now, but the living heart and soul of
what is pretty often only a specter.)

No, I am not saying that. The pulpit teaches assemblages of people twice
a week nearly two hours altogether--and does what it can in that time.
The theater teaches large audiences seven times a week--28 or 30
hours altogether--and the novels and newspapers plead, and argue, and
illustrate, stir, move, thrill, thunder, urge, persuade, and supplicate,
at the feet of millions and millions of people every single day, and
all day long and far into the night; and so these vast agencies till
nine-tenths of the vineyard, and the pulpit tills the other tenth.
Yet now and then some complacent blind idiot says, “You unanointed are
coarse clay and useless; you are not as we, the regenerators of
the world; go, bury yourselves elsewhere, for we cannot take the
responsibility of recommending idlers and sinners to the yearning mercy
of Heaven.” How does a soul like that stay in a carcass without getting
mixed with the secretions and sweated out through the pores? Think of
this insect condemning the whole theatrical service as a disseminator
of bad morals because it has Black Crooks in it; forgetting that if that
were sufficient ground people would condemn the pulpit because it had
Crooks and Kallochs and Sabines in it!

No, I am not trying to rob the pulpit of any atom of its full share and
credit in the work of disseminating the meat and marrow of the gospel of
Christ; but I am trying to get a moment’s hearing for worthy agencies
in the same work, that with overwrought modesty seldom or never claim a
recognition of their great services. I am aware that the pulpit does
its excellent one-tenth (and credits itself with it now and then, though
most of the time a press of business causes it to forget it); I am
aware that in its honest and well-meaning way it bores the people
with uninflammable truisms about doing good; bores them with correct
compositions on charity; bores them, chloroforms them, stupefies them
with argumentative mercy without a flaw in the grammar or an emotion
which the minister could put in in the right place if he turned his back
and took his finger off the manuscript. And in doing these things the
pulpit is doing its duty, and let us believe that it is likewise doing
its best, and doing it in the most harmless and respectable way. And so
I have said, and shall keep on saying, let us give the pulpit its full
share of credit in elevating and ennobling the people; but when a pulpit
takes to itself authority to pass judgment upon the work and worth of
just as legitimate an instrument of God as itself, who spent a long life
preaching from the stage the selfsame gospel without the alteration of
a single sentiment or a single axiom of right, it is fair and just that
somebody who believes that actors were made for a high and good purpose,
and that they accomplish the object of their creation and accomplish
it well, should protest. And having protested, it is also fair and
just--being driven to it, as it were--to whisper to the Sabine pattern
of clergyman, under the breath, a simple, instructive truth, and say,
“Ministers are not the only servants of God upon earth, nor his most
efficient ones, either, by a very, very long distance!” Sensible
ministers already know this, and it may do the other kind good to find
it out.

But to cease teaching and go back to the beginning again, was it not
pitiable--that spectacle? Honored and honorable old George Holland,
whose theatrical ministry had for fifty years softened hard hearts, bred
generosity in cold ones, kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base
ones, broadened bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one
glad and filled it brimful of gratitude, figuratively spit upon in
his unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious,
self-righteous reptile!



APPENDIX K

A SUBSTITUTE FOR RULOFF HAVE WE A SIDNEY CARTON AMONG US?

(See Chapter lxxxii)

To EDITOR of ‘Tribune’.

SIR,--I believe in capital punishment. I believe that when a murder has
been done it should be answered for with blood. I have all my life been
taught to feel this way, and the fetters of education are strong. The
fact that the death--law is rendered almost inoperative by its very
severity does not alter my belief in its righteousness. The fact that in
England the proportion of executions to condemnations is one to sixteen,
and in this country only one to twenty-two, and in France only one to
thirty-eight, does not shake my steadfast confidence in the propriety
of retaining the death-penalty. It is better to hang one murderer in
sixteen, twenty-two, thirty-eight than not to hang any at all.

Feeling as I do, I am not sorry that Ruloff is to be hanged, but I am
sincerely sorry that he himself has made it necessary that his vast
capabilities for usefulness should be lost to the world. In this, mine
and the public’s is a common regret. For it is plain that in the person
of Ruloff one of the most marvelous of intellects that any age has
produced is about to be sacrificed, and that, too, while half the
mystery of its strange powers is yet a secret. Here is a man who has
never entered the doors of a college or a university, and yet by the
sheer might of his innate gifts has made himself such a colossus in
abstruse learning that the ablest of our scholars are but pigmies in
his presence. By the evidence of Professor Mather, Mr. Surbridge, Mr.
Richmond, and other men qualified to testify, this man is as familiar
with the broad domain of philology as common men are with the passing
events of the day. His memory has such a limitless grasp that he is able
to quote sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, chapter
after chapter, from a gnarled and knotty ancient literature that
ordinary scholars are capable of achieving little more than a bowing
acquaintance with. But his memory is the least of his great endowments.
By the testimony of the gentlemen above referred to he is able to
critically analyze the works of the old masters of literature, and
while pointing out the beauties of the originals with a pure and
discriminating taste is as quick to detect the defects of the accepted
translations; and in the latter case, if exceptions be taken to his
judgment, he straightway opens up the quarries of his exhaustless
knowledge, and builds a very Chinese wall of evidence around his
position. Every learned man who enters Ruloff’s presence leaves it
amazed and confounded by his prodigious capabilities and attainments.
One scholar said he did not believe that in matters of subtle analysis,
vast knowledge in his peculiar field of research, comprehensive grasp of
subject, and serene kingship over its limitless and bewildering
details, any land or any era of modern times had given birth to Ruloff’s
intellectual equal. What miracles this murderer might have wrought, and
what luster he might have shed upon his country, if he had not put
a forfeit upon his life so foolishly! But what if the law could be
satisfied, and the gifted criminal still be saved. If a life be offered
up on the gallows to atone for the murder Ruloff did, will that suffice?
If so, give me the proofs, for in all earnestness and truth I aver
that in such a case I will instantly bring forward a man who, in
the interests of learning and science, will take Ruloff’s crime upon
himself, and submit to be hanged in Ruloff’s place. I can, and will
do this thing; and I propose this matter, and make this offer in good
faith. You know me, and know my address.

                     SAMUEL LANGHORNE.
                                   April 29, 1871.



APPENDIX L. ABOUT LONDON

ADDRESS AT A DINNER GIVEN BY THE SAVAGE CLUB, LONDON, SEPTEMBER 28,
1872.

(See Chapter lxxxvii)

Reported by Moncure D. Conway in the Cincinnati Commercial

It affords me sincere pleasure to meet this distinguished club, a club
which has extended its hospitalities and its cordial welcome to so many
of my countrymen. I hope [and here the speaker’s voice became low and
fluttering] you will excuse these clothes. I am going to the theater;
that will explain these clothes. I have other clothes than these.
Judging human nature by what I have seen of it, I suppose that the
customary thing for a stranger to do when he stands here is to make a
pun on the name of this club, under the impression, of course, that he
is the first man that that idea has occurred to. It is a credit to our
human nature, not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all
our depravity (and God knows and you know we are depraved enough) and
all our sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ
of innocence and simplicity still. When a stranger says to me, with
a glow of inspiration in his eye, some gentle, innocuous little thing
about “Twain and one flesh” and all that sort of thing, I don’t try to
crush that man into the earth--no. I feel like saying, “Let me take
you by the hand, sir; let me embrace you; I have not heard that pun for
weeks.” We will deal in palpable puns. We will call parties named King
“your Majesty” and we will say to the Smiths that we think we have heard
that name before somewhere. Such is human nature. We cannot alter this.
It is God that made us so for some good and wise purpose. Let us not
repine. But though I may seem strange, may seem eccentric, I mean to
refrain from punning upon the name of this club, though I could make a
very good one if I had time to think about it--a week.

I cannot express to you what entire enjoyment I find in this first visit
to this prodigious metropolis of yours. Its wonders seem to me to be
limitless. I go about as in a dream--as in a realm of enchantment--where
many things are rare and beautiful, and all things are strange and
marvelous. Hour after hour I stand--I stand spellbound, as it were-and
gaze upon the statuary in Leicester Square. [Leicester Square being a
horrible chaos, with the relic of an equestrian statue in the center,
the king being headless and limbless, and the horse in little better
condition.] I visit the mortuary effigies of noble old Henry VIII., and
Judge Jeffreys, and the preserved gorilla, and try to make up my mind
which of my ancestors I admire the most. I go to that matchless Hyde
Park and drive all around it, and then I start to enter it at the Marble
Arch--and am induced to “change my mind.” [Cabs are not permitted in
Hyde Park--nothing less aristocratic than a private carriage.] It is a
great benefaction--is Hyde Park. There, in his hansom cab, the invalid
can go--the poor, sad child of misfortune--and insert his nose between
the railings, and breathe the pure, health-giving air of the country and
of heaven. And if he is a swell invalid who isn’t obliged to depend upon
parks for his country air he can drive inside--if he owns his vehicle.
I drive round and round Hyde Park and the more I see of the edges of it
the more grateful I am that the margin is extensive.

And I have been to the Zoological Gardens. What a wonderful place
that is! I have never seen such a curious and interesting variety of
wild-animals in any garden before--except Mabille. I never believed
before there were so many different kinds of animals in the world as you
can find there--and I don’t believe it yet. I have been to the British
Museum. I would advise you to drop in there some time when you have
nothing to do for--five minutes--if you have never been there. It
seems to me the noblest monument this nation has, yet erected to her
greatness. I say to her, our greatness--as a nation. True, she has built
other monuments, and stately ones, as well; but these she has uplifted
in honor of two or three colossal demigods who have stalked across the
world’s stage, destroying tyrants and delivering nations, and whose
prodigies will still live in the memories of men ages after their
monuments shall have crumbled to dust--I refer to the Wellington
and Nelson monuments, and--the Albert memorial. [Sarcasm. The Albert
memorial is the finest monument in the world, and celebrates the
existence of as commonplace a person as good luck ever lifted out of
obscurity.]

The Library at the British Museum I find particularly astounding. I have
read there hours together, and hardly made an impression on it. I revere
that library. It is the author’s friend. I don’t care how mean a book
is, it always takes one copy. [A copy of every book printed in Great
Britain must by law be sent to the British Museum, a law much complained
of by publishers.] And then every day that author goes there to gaze
at that book, and is encouraged to go on in the good work. And what a
touching sight it is of a Saturday afternoon to see the poor, careworn
clergymen gathered together in that vast reading-room cabbaging sermons
for Sunday! You will pardon my referring to these things. Everything in
this monster city interests me, and I cannot keep from talking, even
at the risk of being instructive. People here seem always to express
distances by parables. To a stranger it is just a little confusing to be
so parabolic--so to speak. I collar a citizen, and I think I am going
to get some valuable information out of him. I ask him how far it is to
Birmingham, and he says it is twenty-one shillings and sixpence. Now
we know that doesn’t help a man who is trying to learn. I find myself
down-town somewhere, and I want to get some sort of idea where I
am--being usually lost when alone--and I stop a citizen and say, “How
far is it to Charing Cross?” “Shilling fare in a cab,” and off he goes.
I suppose if I were to ask a Londoner how far it is from the sublime
to the ridiculous he would try to express it in a coin. But I am
trespassing upon your time with these geological statistics and
historical reflections. I will not longer keep you from your orgies.
‘Tis a real pleasure for me to be here, and I thank you for it. The name
of the Savage Club is associated in my mind with the kindly interest and
the friendly offices which you lavished upon an old friend of mine who
came among you a stranger, and you opened your English hearts to him and
gave him a welcome and a home--Artemus Ward. Asking that you will join
me, I give you his Memory.



APPENDIX M

LETTER WRITTEN TO MRS. CLEMENS FROM BOSTON, NOVEMBER, 1874, PROPHESYING
A MONARCHY IN SIXTY-ONE YEARS.

(See Chapter xcvii)

                            BOSTON, November 16, 1935.

DEAR LIVY,--You observe I still call this beloved old place by the name
it had when I was young. Limerick! It is enough to make a body sick.

The gentlemen-in-waiting stare to see me sit here telegraphing this
letter to you, and no doubt they are smiling in their sleeves. But let
them! The slow old fashions are good enough for me, thank God, and I
will none other. When I see one of these modern fools sit absorbed,
holding the end of a telegraph wire in his hand, and reflect that a
thousand miles away there is another fool hitched to the other end of
it, it makes me frantic with rage; and then I am more implacably fixed
and resolved than ever to continue taking twenty minutes to telegraph
you what I might communicate in ten seconds by the new way if I would so
debase myself. And when I see a whole silent, solemn drawing-room full
of idiots sitting with their hands on each other’s foreheads “communing”
 I tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings
me the blessed relief of suffocation. In our old day such a gathering
talked pure drivel and “rot,” mostly, but better that, a thousand times,
than these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in
this mad generation.

It is sixty years since I was here before. I walked hither then with my
precious old friend. It seems incredible now that we did it in two days,
but such is my recollection. I no longer mention that we walked back
in a single day, it makes me so furious to see doubt in the face of the
hearer. Men were men in those old times. Think of one of the puerile
organisms in this effeminate age attempting such a feat.

My air-ship was delayed by a collision with a fellow from China loaded
with the usual cargo of jabbering, copper-colored missionaries, and so I
was nearly an hour on my journey. But by the goodness of God thirteen of
the missionaries were crippled and several killed, so I was content to
lose the time. I love to lose time anyway because it brings soothing
reminiscences of the creeping railroad days of old, now lost to us
forever.

Our game was neatly played, and successfully. None expected us, of
course. You should have seen the guards at the ducal palace stare when
I said, “Announce his Grace the Archbishop of Dublin and the Right
Honorable the Earl of Hartford.” Arrived within, we were all eyes to see
the Duke of Cambridge and his Duchess, wondering if we might remember
their faces and they ours. In a moment they came tottering in; he, bent
and withered and bald; she, blooming with wholesome old age. He peered
through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice, “Come
to my arms! Away with titles--I’ll know ye by no names but Twain and
Twichell!” Then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear,
the which we filled with shoutings to this effect: “God bless you, old
Howells, what is left of you!”

We talked late that night--none of your silent idiot “communings” for
us--of the olden time. We rolled a stream of ancient anecdotes over our
tongues and drank till the Lord Archbishop grew so mellow in the mellow
past that Dublin ceased to be Dublin to him, and resumed its sweeter,
forgotten name of New York. In truth he almost got back into his ancient
religion, too, good Jesuit as he has always been since O’Mulligan the
First established that faith in the empire.

And we canvassed everybody. Bailey Aldrich, Marquis of Ponkapog, came
in, got nobly drunk, and told us all about how poor Osgood lost his
earldom and was hanged for conspiring against the second Emperor; but
he didn’t mention how near he himself came to being hanged, too, for
engaging in the same enterprise. He was as chaffy as he was sixty years
ago, too, and swore the Archbishop and I never walked to Boston; but
there was never a day that Ponkapog wouldn’t lie, so be it by the grace
of God he got the opportunity.

The Lord High Admiral came in, a hale gentleman close upon seventy and
bronzed by the suns and storms of many climes and scarred by the
wounds got in many battles, and I told him how I had seen him sit in a
high-chair and eat fruit and cakes and answer to the name of Johnny. His
granddaughter (the eldest) is but lately married to the youngest of the
Grand Dukes, and so who knows but a day may come when the blood of the
Howellses may reign in the land? I must not forget to say, while I think
of it, that your new false teeth are done, my dear, and your wig. Keep
your head well bundled with a shawl till the latter comes, and so cheat
your persecuting neuralgias and rheumatisms. Would you believe it?--the
Duchess of Cambridge is deafer than you--deafer than her husband. They
call her to breakfast with a salvo of artillery; and usually when it
thunders she looks up expectantly and says, “Come in.” But she has
become subdued and gentle with age and never destroys the furniture now,
except when uncommonly vexed. God knows, my dear, it would be a happy
thing if you and old Lady Harmony would imitate this spirit. But indeed
the older you grow the less secure becomes the furniture. When I throw
chairs through the window I have sufficient reason to back it. But
you--you are but a creature of passion.

The monument to the author of ‘Gloverson and His Silent Partners’ is
finished.--[Ralph Keeler. See chap. lxxxiii.]--It is the stateliest and
the costliest ever erected to the memory of any man. This noble classic
has now been translated into all the languages of the earth and is
adored by all nations and known to all creatures. Yet I have
conversed as familiarly with the author of it as I do with my own
great-grandchildren.

I wish you could see old Cambridge and Ponkapog. I love them as dearly
as ever, but privately, my dear, they are not much improvement on
idiots. It is melancholy to hear them jabber over the same pointless
anecdotes three and four times of an evening, forgetting that they had
jabbered them over three or four times the evening before. Ponkapog
still writes poetry, but the old-time fire has mostly gone out of it.
Perhaps his best effort of late years is this:

           O soul, soul, soul of mine!
           Soul, soul, soul of throe!
           Thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine,
           And sing thy lauds in crystal wine!

This he goes about repeating to everybody, daily and nightly, insomuch
that he is become a sore affliction to all that know him.

But I must desist. There are draughts here everywhere and my gout is
something frightful. My left foot hath resemblance to a snuff-bladder.
God be with you.                                HARTFORD.

These to Lady Hartford, in the earldom of Hartford, in the upper portion
of the city of Dublin.



APPENDIX N

MARK TWAIN AND COPYRIGHT

I. PETITION

Concerning Copyright (1875) (See Chapter cii)

TO THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES IN
CONGRESS ASSEMBLED.

We, your petitioners, do respectfully represent as follows, viz.: That
justice, plain and simple, is a thing which right-feeling men stand
ready at all times to accord to brothers and strangers alike. All such
men will concede that it is but plain, simple justice that American
authors should be protected by copyright in Europe; also, that European
authors should be protected by copyright here.

Both divisions of this proposition being true, it behooves our
government to concern itself with that division of it which comes
peculiarly within its province--viz., the latter moiety--and to grant
to foreign authors with all convenient despatch a full and effective
copyright in America without marring the grace of the act by stopping
to inquire whether a similar justice will be done our own authors by
foreign governments. If it were even known that those governments
would not extend this justice to us it would still not justify us in
withholding this manifest right from their authors. If a thing is right
it ought to be done--the thing called “expediency” or “policy” has no
concern with such a matter. And we desire to repeat, with all respect,
that it is not a grace or a privilege we ask for our foreign brethren,
but a right--a right received from God, and only denied them by man.
We hold no ownership in these authors, and when we take their work from
them, as at present, without their consent, it is robbery. The fact that
the handiwork of our own authors is seized in the same way in foreign
lands neither excuses nor mitigates our sin.

With your permission we will say here, over our signatures, and
earnestly and sincerely, that we very greatly desire that you shall
grant a full copyright to foreign authors (the copyright fee for the
entry in the office of the Congressional Librarian to be the same as we
pay ourselves), and we also as greatly desire that this grant shall be
made without a single hampering stipulation that American authors shall
receive in turn an advantage of any kind from foreign governments.

Since no author who was applied to hesitated for a moment to append his
signature to this petition we are satisfied that if time had permitted
we could have procured the signature of every writer in the United
States, great and small, obscure or famous. As it is, the list comprises
the names of about all our writers whose works have at present a
European market, and who are therefore chiefly concerned in this matter.

No objection to our proposition can come from any reputable publisher
among us--or does come from such a quarter, as the appended signatures
of our greatest publishing firms will attest. A European copyright here
would be a manifest advantage to them. As the matter stands now the
moment they have thoroughly advertised a desirable foreign book, and
thus at great expense aroused public interest in it, some small-spirited
speculator (who has lain still in his kennel and spent nothing) rushes
the same book on the market and robs the respectable publisher of half
the gains.

Then, since neither our authors nor the decent among our publishing
firms will object to granting an American copyright to foreign authors
and artists, who can there be to object? Surely nobody whose protest is
entitled to any weight.

Trusting in the righteousness of our cause we, your petitioners, will
ever pray, etc.                     With great respect,
                                Your Ob’t Serv’ts.



CIRCULAR TO AMERICAN AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS

DEAR SIR,--We believe that you will recognize the justice and the
righteousness of the thing we desire to accomplish through the
accompanying petition. And we believe that you will be willing that our
country shall be the first in the world to grant to all authors alike
the free exercise of their manifest right to do as they please with the
fruit of their own labor without inquiring what flag they live under. If
the sentiments of the petition meet your views, will you do us the favor
to sign it and forward it by post at your earliest convenience to our
secretary?

                               }Committee
Address      -------------------Secretary of the Committee.



II. Communications supposed to have been written by the Tsar of Russia
and the Sultan of Turkey to Mark Twain on the subject of International
Copyright, about 1890.

                            ST. PETERSBURG, February.

COL. MARK TWAIN, Washington.

Your cablegram received. It should have been transmitted through my
minister, but let that pass. I am opposed to international copyright.
At present American literature is harmless here because we doctor it in
such a way as to make it approve the various beneficent devices which we
use to keep our people favorable to fetters as jewelry and pleased with
Siberia as a summer resort. But your bill would spoil this. We should
be obliged to let you say your say in your own way. ‘Voila’! my empire
would be a republic in five years and I should be sampling Siberia
myself.

If you should run across Mr. Kennan--[George Kennan, who had graphically
pictured the fearful conditions of Siberian exile.]--please ask him to
come over and give some readings. I will take good care of him.

                                ALEXANDER III.

144--Collect.

                            CONSTANTINOPLE, February.

DR. MARK TWAIN, Washington.

Great Scott, no! By the beard of the Prophet, no! How can you ask such
a thing of me? I am a man of family. I cannot take chances, like other
people. I cannot let a literature come in here which teaches that a
man’s wife is as good as the man himself. Such a doctrine cannot do any
particular harm, of course, where the man has only one wife, for then
it is a dead-level between them, and there is no humiliating inequality,
and no resulting disorder; but you take an extremely married person,
like me, and go to teaching that his wife is 964 times as good as he is,
and what’s hell to that harem, dear friend? I never saw such a fool as
you. Do not mind that expression; I already regret it, and would replace
it with a softer one if I could do it without debauching the truth. I
beseech you, do not pass that bill. Roberts College is quite all the
American product we can stand just now. On top of that, do you want to
send us a flood of freedom-shrieking literature which we can’t edit the
poison out of, but must let it go among our people just as it is? My
friend, we should be a republic inside of ten years.

                                       ABDUL II.


III. MARK TWAIN’S LAST SUGGESTION ON COPYRIGHT.

A MEMORIAL RESPECTFULLY TENDERED TO THE MEMBERS OF THE SENATE AND THE
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.

(Prepared early in 1909 at the suggestion of Mr. Champ Clack but not
offered. A bill adding fourteen years to the copyright period was passed
about this time.)

The Policy of Congress:--Nineteen or twenty years ago James Russell
Lowell, George Haven Putnam, and the under signed appeared before the
Senate Committee on Patents in the interest of Copyright. Up to that
time, as explained by Senator Platt, of Connecticut, the policy of
Congress had been to limit the life of a copyright by a term of years,
with one definite end in view, and only one--to wit, that after an
author had been permitted to enjoy for a reasonable length of time the
income from literary property created by his hand and brain the property
should then be transferred “to the public” as a free gift. That is still
the policy of Congress to-day.

The Purpose in View:--The purpose in view was clear: to so reduce the
price of the book as to bring it within the reach of all purses, and
spread it among the millions who had not been able to buy it while it
was still under the protection of copyright.

The Purpose Defeated:--This purpose has always been defeated. That is to
say, that while the death of a copyright has sometimes reduced the price
of a book by a half for a while, and in some cases by even more, it
has never reduced it vastly, nor accomplished any reduction that was
permanent and secure.

The Reason:--The reason is simple: Congress has never made a reduction
compulsory. Congress was convinced that the removal of the author’s
royalty and the book’s consequent (or at least probable) dispersal among
several competing publishers would make the book cheap by force of the
competition. It was an error. It has not turned out so. The reason is, a
publisher cannot find profit in an exceedingly cheap edition if he must
divide the market with competitors.

Proposed Remedy:--The natural remedy would seem to be, amended law
requiring the issue of cheap editions.

Copyright Extension:--I think the remedy could be accomplished in the
following way, without injury to author or publisher, and with extreme
advantage to the public: by an amendment to the existing law providing
as follows--to wit: that at any time between the beginning of a book’s
forty-first year and the ending of its forty-second the owner of the
copyright may extend its life thirty years by issuing and placing on
sale an edition of the book at one-tenth the price of the cheapest
edition hitherto issued at any time during the ten immediately preceding
years. This extension to lapse and become null and void if at any
time during the thirty years he shall fail during the space of three
consecutive months to furnish the ten per cent. book upon demand of any
person or persons desiring to buy it.

The Result:--The result would be that no American classic enjoying the
thirty-year extension would ever be out of the reach of any American
purse, let its uncompulsory price be what it might. He would get
a two-dollar book for 20 cents, and he could get none but
copyright-expired classics at any such rate.

The Final Result:--At the end of the thirty-year extension the copyright
would again die, and the price would again advance. This by a natural
law, the excessively cheap edition no longer carrying with it an
advantage to any publisher.

Reconstruction of The Present Law Not Necessary:--A clause of the
suggested amendment could read about as follows, and would obviate
the necessity of taking the present law to pieces and building it over
again:

    All books and all articles enjoying forty-two years copyright-life
    under the present law shall be admitted to the privilege of the
    thirty-year extension upon complying with the condition requiring
    the producing and placing upon permanent sale of one grade or form
    of said book or article at a price of 90 per cent. below the
    cheapest rate at which said book or article had been placed upon the
    market at any time during the immediately preceding ten years.

                       REMARKS

If the suggested amendment shall meet with the favor of the present
Congress and become law--and I hope it will--I shall have personal
experience of its effects very soon. Next year, in fact, in the person
of my first book, ‘The Innocents Abroad’. For its forty-two-year
copyright-life will then cease and its thirty-year extension begin--and
with the latter the permanent low-rate edition. At present the highest
price of the book is eight dollars, and its lowest price three dollars
per copy. Thus the permanent low rate will be thirty cents per copy.
A sweeping reduction like this is what Congress from the beginning
has desired to achieve, but has not been able to accomplish because no
inducement was offered to publishers to run the risk.

              Respectfully submitted,

                                S. L. CLEMENS.

(A full and interesting elucidation of Mark Twain’s views on Copyright
may be found in an article entitled “Concerning Copyright,” published in
the North American Review for January, 1905.)



APPENDIX O

(See Chapter cxiv)

    Address of Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) from a report of the
    dinner given by the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly in honor of
    the Seventieth Anniversary of the Birth of John Greenleaf Whittier,
    at the Hotel Brunswick, Boston, December 17, 1877, as published in
    the Boston Evening Transcript, December 18, 1877.

MR. CHAIRMAN, This is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of
pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk, therefore I will drop
lightly into history myself. Standing here on the shore of the Atlantic,
and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, I am reminded
of a thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when I had just
succeeded in stirring up a little Nevadian literary puddle myself, whose
spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly California-ward. I started an
inspection tramp through the southern mines of California. I was callow
and conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my ‘nom de guerre’. I
very soon had an opportunity. I knocked at a miner’s lonely log cabin
in the foothills of the Sierras just at nightfall. It was snowing at the
time. A jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened the door
to me. When he heard my ‘nom de guerre’ he looked more dejected than
before. He let me in-pretty reluctantly, I thought--and after the
customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whisky, I took a pipe.
This sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time. Now he
spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering,
“You’re the fourth--I’m going to move.” “The fourth what?” said I. “The
fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--I’m going
to move.” “You don’t tell me!” said I; “who were the others?” “Mr.
Longfellow. Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--consound the
lot!”

You can easily believe I was interested. I supplicated--three hot
whiskies did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. Said he:

“They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in, of
course. Said they were going to the Yosemite. They were a rough lot, but
that’s nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot. Mr. Emerson
was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. Mr. Holmes was as fat as a
balloon; he weighed as much as three hundered, and had double chins
all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a
prize-fighter. His head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a
wig made of hair-brushes. His nose lay straight down in his face, like a
finger with the end joint tilted up. They had been drinking, I could see
that. And what queer talk they used! Mr. Holmes inspected this cabin,
then he took me by the buttonhole and says he:

     “‘Through the deep caves of thought
       I hear a voice that sings,

       “Build thee more stately mansions,
       O my soul!”’

“Says I, ‘I can’t afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don’t want to.’
Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger that
way. However, I started to get out my bacon and beans when Mr. Emerson
came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole
and says:

     “‘Give me agates for my meat;
       Give me cantharids to eat;
       From air and ocean bring me foods,
       From all zones and altitudes.’

“Says I, ‘Mr. Emerson, if you’ll excuse me, this ain’t no hotel.’ You
see, it sort of riled me--I warn’t used to the ways of Jittery swells.
But I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr. Longfellow and
buttonholes me and interrupts me. Says he:

     “‘Honor be to Mudjekeewis!
       You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis--’

“But I broke in, and says I, ‘Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you’ll
be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get
this grub ready, you’ll do me proud.’ Well, sir, after they’d filled up
I set out the jug. Mr. Holmes looks at it and then he fires up all of a
sudden and yells:

     “‘Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!
       For I would drink to other days.’

“By George, I was getting kind of worked up. I don’t deny it, I was
getting kind of worked up. I turns to Mr. Holmes and says I, ‘Looky
here, my fat friend, I’m a-running this shanty, and if the court knows
herself you’ll take whisky straight or you’ll go dry.’ Them’s the
very words I said to him. Now I don’t want to sass such famous Littery
people, but you see they kind of forced me. There ain’t nothing
onreasonable ‘bout me. I don’t mind a passel of guests a-treadin’ on
my tail three or four times, but when it comes to standing on it it’s
different, ‘and if the court knows herself,’ I says, ‘you’ll take whisky
straight or you’ll go dry.’ Well, between drinks they’d swell around
the cabin and strike attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out
a greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on
trust. I began to notice some pretty suspicious things. Mr. Emerson
dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says:

     “‘I am the doubter and the doubt--’

and calmly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new lay-out.
Says he:

     “‘They reckon ill who leave me out;
       They know not well the subtle ways I keep.
       I pass and deal again!’

Hang’d if he didn’t go ahead and do it, too! Oh, he was a cool one!
Well, in about a minute things were running pretty tight, but all of a
sudden I see by Mr. Emerson’s eye he judged he had ‘em. He had already
corralled two tricks and each of the others one. So now he kind of lifts
a little in his chair and says,

     “‘I tire of globes and aces!
       Too long the game is played!’

and down he fetched a right bower. Mr. Longfellow smiles as sweet as pie
and says,

     “‘Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
       For the lesson thou hast taught,’

and blamed if he didn’t down with another right bower! Emerson claps
his hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver, and I went
under a bunk. There was going to be trouble; but that monstrous Holmes
rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, ‘Order, gentlemen; the
first man that draws I’ll lay down on him and smother him!’ All quiet on
the Potomac, you bet!

“They were pretty how-come-you-so by now, and they begun to blow.
Emerson says, ‘The noblest thing I ever wrote was “Barbara Frietchie.”’
Says Longfellow, ‘It don’t begin with my “Bigelow Papers.”’ Says Holmes,
‘My “Thanatopsis” lays over ‘em both.’ They mighty near ended in a
fight. Then they wished they had some more company, and Mr. Emerson
pointed to me and says:

     “‘Is yonder squalid peasant all
       That this proud nursery could breed?’

He was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so I let it pass. Well, sir,
next they took it into their heads that they would like some music; so
they made me stand up and sing, ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ till
I dropped--at thirteen minutes past four this morning. That’s what I’ve
been through, my friend. When I woke at seven they were leaving, thank
goodness, and Mr. Longfellow had my only boots on and his’n under his
arm. Says I, ‘Hold on there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with
them?’ He says, ‘Going to make tracks with ‘em, because--

     “‘Lives of great men all remind us
       We can make our lives sublime;
       And, departing, leave behind us
       Footprints on the sands of time.’

“As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours and I’m
going to move; I ain’t suited to a Littery atmosphere.”

I said to the miner, “Why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious
singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these
were impostors.”

The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he,
“Ah! impostors, were they? Are you?”

I did not pursue the subject, and since then I have not traveled on my
‘nom de guerre’ enough to hurt. Such was the reminiscence I was moved
to contribute, Mr. Chairman. In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated
the details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since
I believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular
fact on an occasion like this.



APPENDIX P

THE ADAM MONUMENT PETITION

(See Chapter cxxxiv)

TO THE HONORABLE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED
STATES IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED.

WHEREAS, A number of citizens of the city of Elmira in the State of New
York having covenanted among themselves to erect in that city a monument
in memory of Adam, the father of mankind, being moved thereto by a
sentiment of love and duty, and these having appointed the undersigned
to communicate with your honorable body, we beg leave to lay before you
the following facts and append to the same our humble petition.

1. As far as is known no monument has ever been raised in any part of
the world to commemorate the services rendered to our race by this great
man, whilst many men of far less note and worship have been rendered
immortal by means of stately and indestructible memorials.

2. The common father of mankind has been suffered to lie in entire
neglect, although even the Father of our Country has now, and has had
for many years, a monument in course of construction.

3. No right-feeling human being can desire to see this neglect
continued, but all just men, even to the farthest regions of the globe,
should and will rejoice to know that he to whom we owe existence is
about to have reverent and fitting recognition of his works at the hands
of the people of Elmira. His labors were not in behalf of one locality,
but for the extension of humanity at large and the blessings which
go therewith; hence all races and all colors and all religions are
interested in seeing that his name and fame shall be placed beyond the
reach of the blight of oblivion by a permanent and suitable monument.

4. It will be to the imperishable credit of the United States if this
monument shall be set up within her borders; moreover, it will be a
peculiar grace to the beneficiary if this testimonial of affection and
gratitude shall be the gift of the youngest of the nations that have
sprung from his loins after 6,000 years of unappreciation on the part of
its elders.

5. The idea of this sacred enterprise having originated in the city
of Elmira, she will be always grateful if the general government shall
encourage her in the good work by securing to her a certain advantage
through the exercise of its great authority.

Therefore, Your petitioners beg that your honorable body will be pleased
to issue a decree restricting to Elmira the right to build a monument to
Adam and inflicting a heavy penalty upon any other community within the
United States that shall propose or attempt to erect a monument or other
memorial to the said Adam, and to this end we will ever pray.

NAMES: (100 signatures)



APPENDIX Q

GENERAL GRANT’S GRAMMAR

(Written in 1886. Delivered at an Army and Navy Club dinner in New York
City)

Lately a great and honored author, Matthew Arnold, has been finding
fault with General Grant’s English. That would be fair enough, maybe, if
the examples of imperfect English averaged more instances to the page in
General Grant’s book than they do in Arnold’s criticism on the book--but
they do not. It would be fair enough, maybe, if such instances were
commoner in General Grant’s book than they are in the works of the
average standard author--but they are not. In fact, General Grant’s
derelictions in the matter of grammar and construction are not more
frequent than such derelictions in the works of a majority of the
professional authors of our time, and of all previous times--authors
as exclusively and painstakingly trained to the literary trade as was
General Grant to the trade of war. This is not a random statement: it
is a fact, and easily demonstrable. I have a book at home called Modern
English Literature: Its Blemishes and Defects, by Henry H. Breen, a
countryman of Mr. Arnold. In it I find examples of bad grammar and
slovenly English from the pens of Sydney Smith, Sheridan, Hallam,
Whately, Carlyle, Disraeli, Allison, Junius, Blair, Macaulay,
Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, Southey, Lamb, Landor, Smollett, Walpole,
Walker (of the dictionary), Christopher North, Kirk White, Benjamin
Franklin, Sir Walter Scott, and Mr. Lindley Murray (who made the
grammar).

In Mr. Arnold’s criticism on General Grant’s book we find two
grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and
slovenly English, enough of them to entitle him to a lofty place in the
illustrious list of delinquents just named.

The following passage all by itself ought to elect him:

    “Meade suggested to Grant that he might wish to have immediately
    under him Sherman, who had been serving with Grant in the West. He
    begged him not to hesitate if he thought it for the good of the
    service. Grant assured him that he had not thought of moving him,
    and in his memoirs, after relating what had passed, he adds, etc.”

To read that passage a couple of times would make a man dizzy; to read
it four times would make him drunk.

Mr. Breen makes this discriminating remark: “To suppose that because
a man is a poet or a historian he must be correct in his grammar is to
suppose that an architect must be a joiner, or a physician a compounder
of medicine.”

People may hunt out what microscopic motes they please, but, after all,
the fact remains, and cannot be dislodged, that General Grant’s book
is a great and, in its peculiar department, a unique and unapproachable
literary masterpiece. In their line there is no higher literature than
those modest, simple memoirs. Their style is at least flawless and no
man could improve upon it, and great books are weighed and measured by
their style and matter, and not by the trimmings and shadings of their
grammar.

There is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and when we
think of General Grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we
only remember that this is the simple soldier who, all untaught of the
silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the
art of the schools and put into them a something which will still
bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his
vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts. What do we care for
grammar when we think of those thunderous phrases, “Unconditional and
immediate surrender,” “I propose to move immediately upon your works,”
 “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” Mr.
Arnold would doubtless claim that that last phrase is not strictly
grammatical, and yet it did certainly wake up this nation as a hundred
million tons of A-number-one fourth-proof, hard-boiled, hide-bound
grammar from another mouth could not have done. And finally we have that
gentler phrase, that one which shows you another true side of the man,
shows you that in his soldier heart there was room for other than gory
war mottoes and in his tongue the gift to fitly phrase them: “Let us
have peace.”



APPENDIX R

PARTY ALLEGIANCE.

BEING A PORTION OF A PAPER ON “CONSISTENCY,” READ BEFORE THE MONDAY
EVENING CLUB IN 1887.

(See Chapter clxiii)

... I have referred to the fact that when a man retires from his
political party he is a traitor--that he is so pronounced in plain
language. That is bold; so bold as to deceive many into the fancy that
it is true. Desertion, treason--these are the terms applied. Their
military form reveals the thought in the man’s mind who uses them:
to him a political party is an army. Well, is it? Are the two things
identical? Do they even resemble each other? Necessarily a political
party is not an army of conscripts, for they are in the ranks by
compulsion. Then it must be a regular army or an army of volunteers.
Is it a regular army? No, for these enlist for a specified and
well-understood term, and can retire without reproach when the term is
up. Is it an army of volunteers who have enlisted for the war, and may
righteously be shot if they leave before the war is finished? No, it
is not even an army in that sense. Those fine military terms are
high-sounding, empty lies, and are no more rationally applicable to
a political party than they would be to an oyster-bed. The volunteer
soldier comes to the recruiting office and strips himself and proves
that he is so many feet high, and has sufficiently good teeth, and
no fingers gone, and is sufficiently sound in body generally; he is
accepted; but not until he has sworn a deep oath or made other solemn
form of promise to march under, that flag until that war is done or his
term of enlistment completed. What is the process when a voter joins a
party? Must he prove that he is sound in any way, mind or body? Must he
prove that he knows anything--is capable of anything--whatever? Does he
take an oath or make a promise of any sort?--or doesn’t he leave himself
entirely free? If he were informed by the political boss that if he
join, it must be forever; that he must be that party’s chattel and wear
its brass collar the rest of his days--would not that insult him? It
goes without saying. He would say some rude, unprintable thing, and turn
his back on that preposterous organization. But the political boss puts
no conditions upon him at all; and this volunteer makes no promises,
enlists for no stated term. He has in no sense become a part of an army;
he is in no way restrained of his freedom. Yet he will presently find
that his bosses and his newspapers have assumed just the reverse
of that: that they have blandly arrogated to themselves an ironclad
military authority over him; and within twelve months, if he is an
average man, he will have surrendered his liberty, and will actually be
silly enough to believe that he cannot leave that party, for any cause
whatever, without being a shameful traitor, a deserter, a legitimately
dishonored man.

There you have the just measure of that freedom of conscience, freedom
of opinion, freedom of speech and action which we hear so much inflated
foolishness about as being the precious possession of the republic.
Whereas, in truth, the surest way for a man to make of himself a target
for almost universal scorn, obloquy, slander, and insult is to stop
twaddling about these priceless independencies and attempt to exercise
one of them. If he is a preacher half his congregation will clamor for
his expulsion--and will expel him, except they find it will injure real
estate in the neighborhood; if he is a doctor his own dead will turn
against him.

I repeat that the new party-member who supposed himself independent will
presently find that the party have somehow got a mortgage on his soul,
and that within a year he will recognize the mortgage, deliver up his
liberty, and actually believe he cannot retire from that party from
any motive howsoever high and right in his own eyes without shame and
dishonor.

Is it possible for human wickedness to invent a doctrine more infernal
and poisonous than this? Is there imaginable a baser servitude than it
imposes? What slave is so degraded as the slave that is proud that he
is a slave? What is the essential difference between a lifelong democrat
and any other kind of lifelong slave? Is it less humiliating to dance to
the lash of one master than another?

This infamous doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the
hands of politicians of the baser sort--and doubtless for that it was
borrowed--or stolen--from the monarchial system. It enables them to
foist upon the country officials whom no self-respecting man would vote
for if he could but come to understand that loyalty to himself is his
first and highest duty, not loyalty to any party name.

Shall you say the best good of the country demands allegiance to party?
Shall you also say that it demands that a man kick his truth and his
conscience into the gutter and become a mouthing lunatic besides? Oh no,
you say; it does not demand that. But what if it produce that in spite
of you? There is no obligation upon a man to do things which he ought
not to do when drunk, but most men will do them just the same; and so
we hear no arguments about obligations in the matter--we only hear men
warned to avoid the habit of drinking; get rid of the thing that can
betray men into such things.

This is a funny business all around. The same men who enthusiastically
preach loyal consistency to church and party are always ready and
willing and anxious to persuade a Chinaman or an Indian or a Kanaka to
desert his church or a fellow-American to desert his party. The man who
deserts to them is all that is high and pure and beautiful--apparently;
the man who deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable. This
is Consistency--with a capital C.

With the daintiest and self-complacentest sarcasm the lifelong loyalist
scoffs at the Independent--or as he calls him, with cutting irony, the
Mugwump; makes himself too killingly funny for anything in this world
about him. But--the Mugwump can stand it, for there is a great history
at his back; stretching down the centuries, and he comes of a mighty
ancestry. He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no
single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls
and bodies, the hearts and the brains of the children of this world, but
a Mugwump started it and Mugwumps carried it to victory: And their names
are the stateliest in history: Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther,
Christ. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a
human soul in this world-end never will.



APPENDIX S

ORIGINAL PREFACE FOR “A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT”

(See Chapter clxxii)

My object has been to group together some of the most odious laws which
have had vogue in the Christian countries within the past eight or ten
centuries, and illustrate them by the incidents of a story.

There was never a time when America applied the death-penalty to more
than fourteen crimes. But England, within the memory of men still
living, had in her list of crimes 223 which were punishable by death!
And yet from the beginning of our existence down to a time within
the memory of babes England has distressed herself piteously over the
ungentleness of our Connecticut Blue Laws. Those Blue Laws should have
been spared English criticism for two reasons:

1. They were so insipidly mild, by contrast with the bloody and
atrocious laws of England of the same period, as to seem characterless
and colorless when one brings them into that awful presence.

2. The Blue Laws never had any existence. They were the fancy-work of an
English clergyman; they were never a part of any statute-book. And yet
they could have been made to serve a useful and merciful purpose; if
they had been injected into the English law the dilution would have
given to the whole a less lurid aspect; or, to figure the effect in
another way, they would have been coca mixed into vitriol.

I have drawn no laws and no illustrations from the twin civilizations
of hell and Russia. To have entered into that atmosphere would have
defeated my purpose, which was to show a great and genuine progress in
Christendom in these few later generations toward mercifulness--a wide
and general relaxing of the grip of the law. Russia had to be left
out because exile to Siberia remains, and in that single punishment is
gathered together and concentrated all the bitter inventions of all the
black ages for the infliction of suffering upon human beings. Exile for
life from one’s hearthstone and one’s idols--this is rack, thumb-screw,
the water-drop, fagot and stake, tearing asunder by horses, flaying
alive--all these in one; and not compact into hours, but drawn out
into years, each year a century, and the whole a mortal immortality of
torture and despair. While exile to Siberia remains one will be obliged
to admit that there is one country in Christendom where the punishments
of all the ages are still preserved and still inflicted, that there
is one country in Christendom where no advance has been made toward
modifying the medieval penalties for offenses against society and the
State.



APPENDIX T

A TRIBUTE TO HENRY H. ROGERS

(See Chapter cc and earlier)

April 25, 1902. I owe more to Henry Rogers than to any other man whom
I have known. He was born in Fairhaven, Connecticut, in 1839, and is
my junior by four years. He was graduated from the high school there
in 1853, when he was fourteen years old, and from that time forward he
earned his own living, beginning at first as the bottom subordinate in
the village store with hard-work privileges and a low salary. When he
was twenty-four he went out to the newly discovered petroleum fields in
Pennsylvania and got work; then returned home, with enough money to
pay passage, married a schoolmate, and took her to the oil regions. He
prospered, and by and by established the Standard Oil Trust with Mr.
Rockefeller and others, and is still one of its managers and directors.

In 1893 we fell together by accident one evening in the Murray Hill
Hotel, and our friendship began on the spot and at once. Ever since then
he has added my business affairs to his own and carried them through,
and I have had no further trouble with them. Obstructions and
perplexities which would have driven me mad were simplicities to his
master mind and furnished him no difficulties. He released me from my
entanglements with Paige and stopped that expensive outgo; when Charles
L. Webster & Company failed he saved my copyrights for Mrs. Clemens when
she would have sacrificed them to the creditors although they were in no
way entitled to them; he offered to lend me money wherewith to save the
life of that worthless firm; when I started lecturing around the world
to make the money to pay off the Webster debts he spent more than a year
trying to reconcile the differences between Harper & Brothers and the
American Publishing Company and patch up a working-contract between them
and succeeded where any other man would have failed; as fast as I earned
money and sent it to him he banked it at interest and held onto it,
refusing to pay any creditor until he could pay all of the 96 alike;
when I had earned enough to pay dollar for dollar he swept off the
indebtedness and sent me the whole batch of complimentary letters which
the creditors wrote in return; when I had earned $28,500 more, $18,500
of which was in his hands, I wrote him from Vienna to put the latter
into Federal Steel and leave it there; he obeyed to the extent of
$17,500, but sold it in two months at $25,000 profit, and said it would
go ten points higher, but that it was his custom to “give the other
man a chance” (and that was a true word--there was never a truer one
spoken). That was at the end of ‘99 and beginning of 1900; and from that
day to this he has continued to break up my bad schemes and put better
ones in their place, to my great advantage. I do things which ought to
try man’s patience, but they never seem to try his; he always finds a
colorable excuse for what I have done. His soul was born superhumanly
sweet, and I do not think anything can sour it. I have not known his
equal among men for lovable qualities. But for his cool head and wise
guidance I should never have come out of the Webster difficulties on
top; it was his good steering that enabled me to work out my salvation
and pay a hundred cents on the dollar--the most valuable service any man
ever did me.

His character is full of fine graces, but the finest is this: that he
can load you down with crushing obligations and then so conduct himself
that you never feel their weight. If he would only require something in
return--but that is not in his nature; it would not occur to him. With
the Harpers and the American Company at war those copyrights were worth
but little; he engineered a peace and made them valuable. He invests
$100,000 for me here, and in a few months returns a profit of $31,000.
I invest (in London and here) $66,000 and must wait considerably for
results (in case there shall be any). I tell him about it and he
finds no fault, utters not a sarcasm. He was born serene, patient,
all-enduring, where a friend is concerned, and nothing can extinguish
that great quality in him. Such a man is entitled to the high gift of
humor: he has it at its very best. He is not only the best friend I have
ever had, but is the best man I have known.

                     S. L. CLEMENS.



APPENDIX U

FROM MARK TWAIN’S LAST POEM

BEGUN AT RIVERDALE, NEW YORK. FINISHED AT YORK HARBOR, MAINE, AUGUST 18,
1902

(See Chapter ccxxiii)

(A bereft and demented mother speaks)

... O, I can see my darling yet: the little form In slip of flimsy stuff
all creamy white, Pink-belted waist with ample bows, Blue shoes scarce
bigger than the house-cat’s ears--Capering in delight and choked with
glee.

It was a summer afternoon; the hill Rose green above me and about,
and in the vale below The distant village slept, and all the world Was
steeped in dreams. Upon me lay this peace, And I forgot my sorrow in
its spell. And now My little maid passed by, and she Was deep in thought
upon a solemn thing: A disobedience, and my reproof. Upon my face She
must not look until the day was done; For she was doing penance... She?
O, it was I! What mother knows not that? And so she passed, I worshiping
and longing... It was not wrong? You do not think me wrong? I did it for
the best. Indeed I meant it so.

She flits before me now: The peach-bloom of her gauzy crepe, The plaited
tails of hair, The ribbons floating from the summer hat, The grieving
face, dropp’d head absorbed with care. O, dainty little form! I see it
move, receding slow along the path, By hovering butterflies besieged;
I see it reach The breezy top clear-cut against the sky,... Then pass
beyond and sink from sight-forever!

Within, was light and cheer; without, A blustering winter’s right. There
was a play; It was her own; for she had wrought it out Unhelped, from
her own head-and she But turned sixteen! A pretty play, All graced
with cunning fantasies, And happy songs, and peopled all with fays, And
sylvan gods and goddesses, And shepherds, too, that piped and danced,
And wore the guileless hours away In care-free romps and games.

Her girlhood mates played in the piece, And she as well: a goddess,
she,--And looked it, as it seemed to me.

‘Twas fairyland restored-so beautiful it was And innocent. It made us
cry, we elder ones, To live our lost youth o’er again With these its
happy heirs.

Slowly, at last, the curtain fell. Before us, there, she stood, all
wreathed and draped In roses pearled with dew-so sweet, so glad, So
radiant!--and flung us kisses through the storm Of praise that crowned
her triumph.... O, Across the mists of time I see her yet, My Goddess of
the Flowers!

... The curtain hid her.... Do you comprehend? Till time shall end! Out
of my life she vanished while I looked!

... Ten years are flown. O, I have watched so long, So long. But she
will come no more. No, she will come no more.

It seems so strange... so strange... Struck down unwarned! In the
unbought grace, of youth laid low--In the glory of her fresh young bloom
laid low--In the morning of her life cut down! And I not by! Not by When
the shadows fell, the night of death closed down The sun that lit my
life went out. Not by to answer When the latest whisper passed the lips
That were so dear to me--my name! Far from my post! the world’s whole
breadth away. O, sinking in the waves of death she cried to me For
mother-help, and got for answer Silence!

We that are old--we comprehend; even we That are not mad: whose grown-up
scions still abide; Their tale complete: Their earlier selves we glimpse
at intervals Far in the dimming past; We see the little forms as once
they were, And whilst we ache to take them to our hearts, The vision
fades. We know them lost to us--Forever lost; we cannot have them back;
We miss them as we miss the dead, We mourn them as we mourn the dead.



APPENDIX V. SELECTIONS FROM AN UNFINISHED BOOK, “3,000 YEARS AMONG THE
MICROBES”

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MICROBE, WHO, IN A FORMER EXISTENCE, HAD BEEN
A MAN--HIS PRESENT HABITAT BEING THE ORGANISM OF A TRAMP, BLITZOWSKI.
(WRITTEN AT DUBLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1905)

(See Chapter ccxxxv)

Our world (the tramp) is as large and grand and awe-compelling to
us microscopic creatures as is man’s world to man. Our tramp is
mountainous, there are vast oceans in him, and lakes that are sea-like
for size, there are many rivers (veins and arteries) which are fifteen
miles across, and of a length so stupendous as to make the Mississippi
and the Amazon trifling little Rhode Island brooks by comparison. As for
our minor rivers, they are multitudinous, and the dutiable commerce
of disease which they carry is rich beyond the dreams of the American
custom-house.

Take a man like Sir Oliver Lodge, and what secret of Nature can be
hidden from him? He says: “A billion, that is a million millions,[??
Trillion D.W.] of atoms is truly an immense number, but the resulting
aggregate is still excessively minute. A portion of substance
consisting, of a billion atoms is only barely visible with the highest
power of a microscope; and a speck or granule, in order to be visible to
the naked eye, like a grain of lycopodium-dust, must be a million times
bigger still.”

The human eye could see it then--that dainty little speck. But with my
microbe-eye I could see every individual of the whirling billions of
atoms that compose the speck. Nothing is ever at rest--wood, iron,
water, everything is alive, everything is raging, whirling, whizzing,
day and night and night and day, nothing is dead, there is no such thing
as death, everything is full of bristling life, tremendous life, even
the bones of the crusader that perished before Jerusalem eight centuries
ago. There are no vegetables, all things are animal; each electron is
an animal, each molecule is a collection of animals, and each has an
appointed duty to perform and a soul to be saved. Heaven was not made
for man alone, and oblivion and neglect reserved for the rest of His
creatures. He gave them life, He gave them humble services to perform,
they have performed them, and they will not be forgotten, they will have
their reward. Man-always vain, windy, conceited-thinks he will be in the
majority there. He will be disappointed. Let him humble himself. But for
the despised microbe and the persecuted bacillus, who needed a home and
nourishment, he would not have been created. He has a mission, therefore
a reason for existing: let him do the service he was made for, and keep
quiet.

Three weeks ago I was a man myself, and thought and felt as men think
and feel; I have lived 3,000 years since then [microbic time], and I see
the foolishness of it now. We live to learn, and fortunate are we when
we are wise enough to profit by it.

In matters pertaining to microscopy we necessarily have an advantage
here over the scientist of the earth, because, as I have just been
indicating, we see with our naked eyes minutenesses which no man-made
microscope can detect, and are therefore able to register as facts many
things which exist for him as theories only. Indeed, we know as facts
several things which he has not yet divined even by theory. For example,
he does not suspect that there is no life but animal life, and that
all atoms are individual animals endowed each with a certain degree
of consciousness, great or small, each with likes and dislikes,
predilections and aversions--that, in a word, each has a character, a
character of its own. Yet such is the case. Some of the molecules of
a stone have an aversion for some of those of a vegetable or any other
creature and will not associate with them--and would not be allowed to,
if they tried. Nothing is more particular about society than a molecule.
And so there are no end of castes; in this matter India is not a
circumstance.

“Tell me, Franklin [a microbe of great learning], is the ocean an
individual, an animal, a creature?”

“Yes.”

“Then water--any water-is an individual?”

“Yes.”

“Suppose you remove a drop of it? Is what is left an individual?”

“Yes, and so is the drop.”

“Suppose you divide the drop?”

“Then you have two individuals.”

“Suppose you separate the hydrogen and the oxygen?”

“Again you have two individuals. But you haven’t water any more.”

“Of course. Certainly. Well, suppose you combine them again, but in
a new way: make the proportions equal--one part oxygen to one of
hydrogen?”

“But you know you can’t. They won’t combine on equal terms.”

I was ashamed to have made that blunder. I was embarrassed; to cover it
I started to say we used to combine them like that where I came from,
but thought better of it, and stood pat.

“Now then,” I said, “it amounts to this: water is an individual, an
animal, and is alive; remove the hydrogen and it is an animal and is
alive; the remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is
alive. Recapitulation: the two individuals combined constitute a third
individual--and yet each continues to be an individual.”

I glanced at Franklin, but... upon reflection, held my peace. I could
have pointed out to him that here was mute Nature explaining the
sublime mystery of the Trinity so luminously--that even the commonest
understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of
words had labored to do it with speech and failed. But he would not have
known what I was talking about. After a moment I resumed:

“Listen--and see if I have understood you rightly, to wit: All the atoms
that constitute each oxygen molecule are separate individuals, and each
is a living animal; all the atoms that constitute each hydrogen molecule
are separate individuals, and each one is a living animal; each drop
of water consists of millions of living animals, the drop itself is an
individual, a living animal, and the wide ocean is another. Is that it?”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“By George, it beats the band!”

He liked the expression, and set it down in his tablets.

“Franklin, we’ve got it down fine. And to think--there are other animals
that are still smaller than a hydrogen atom, and yet it is so small that
it takes five thousand of them to make a molecule--a molecule so minute
that it could get into a microbe’s eye and he wouldn’t know it was
there!”

“Yes, the wee creatures that inhabit the bodies of us germs and feed
upon us, and rot us with disease: Ah, what could they have been created
for? They give us pain, they make our lives miserable, they murder
us--and where is the use of it all, where the wisdom? Ah, friend Bkshp
[microbic orthography], we live in a strange and unaccountable world;
our birth is a mystery, our little life is a mystery, a trouble, we
pass and are seen no more; all is mystery, mystery, mystery; we know not
whence we came, nor why; we know not whither we go, nor why we go. We
only know we were not made in vain, we only know we were made for a wise
purpose, and that all is well! We shall not be cast aside in contumely
and unblest after all we have suffered. Let us be patient, let us not
repine, let us trust. The humblest of us is cared for--oh, believe
it!--and this fleeting stay is not the end!”

You notice that? He did not suspect that he, also, was engaged
in gnawing, torturing, defiling, rotting, and murdering a
fellow-creature--he and all the swarming billions of his race. None of
them suspects it. That is significant. It is suggestive--irresistibly
suggestive--insistently suggestive. It hints at the possibility that
the procession of known and listed devourers and persecutors is not
complete. It suggests the possibility, and substantially the certainty,
that man is himself a microbe, and his globe a blood-corpuscle drifting
with its shining brethren of the Milky Way down a vein of the Master
and Maker of all things, whose body, mayhap--glimpsed part-wise from
the earth by night, and receding and lost to view in the measureless
remotenesses of space--is what men name the Universe.

Yes, that was all old to me, but to find that our little old familiar
microbes were themselves loaded up with microbes that fed them, enriched
them, and persistently and faithfully preserved them and their poor old
tramp-planet from destruction--oh, that was new, and too delicious!

I wanted to see them! I was in a fever to see them! I had lenses to
two-million power, but of course the field was no bigger than a person’s
finger-nail, and so it wasn’t possible to compass a considerable
spectacle or a landscape with them; whereas what I had been craving was
a thirty-foot field, which would represent a spread of several miles of
country and show up things in a way to make them worth looking at. The
boys and I had often tried to contrive this improvement, but had failed.

I mentioned the matter to the Duke and it made him smile. He said it was
a quite simple thing-he had it at home. I was eager to bargain for the
secret, but he said it was a trifle and not worth bargaining for. He
said:

“Hasn’t it occurred to you that all you have to do is to bend an X-ray
to an angle-value of 8.4 and refract it with a parabolism, and there you
are?”

Upon my word, I had never thought of that simple thing! You could have
knocked me down with a feather.

We rigged a microscope for an exhibition at once and put a drop of my
blood under it, which got mashed flat when the lens got shut down upon
it. The result was beyond my dreams. The field stretched miles away,
green and undulating, threaded with streams and roads, and bordered all
down the mellowing distances with picturesque hills. And there was a
great white city of tents; and everywhere were parks of artillery and
divisions of cavalry and infantry waiting. We had hit a lucky moment,
evidently there was going to be a march-past or some thing like that. At
the front where the chief banner flew there was a large and showy tent,
with showy guards on duty, and about it were some other tents of a swell
kind.

The warriors--particularly the officers--were lovely to look at, they
were so trim-built and so graceful and so handsomely uniformed. They
were quite distinct, vividly distinct, for it was a fine day, and they
were so immensely magnified that they looked to be fully a finger-nail
high.--[My own expression, and a quite happy one. I said to the Duke:
“Your Grace, they’re just about finger-milers!” “How do you mean,
m’lord?” “This. You notice the stately General standing there with his
hand resting upon the muzzle of a cannon? Well, if you could stick your
little finger down against the ground alongside of him his plumes
would just reach up to where your nail joins the flesh.” The Duke said
“finger-milers was good”--good and exact; and he afterward used it
several times himself.]--Everywhere you could see officers moving
smartly about, and they looked gay, but the common soldiers looked sad.
Many wife-swinks [“Swinks,” an atomic race] and daughter-swinks and
sweetheart-swinks were about--crying, mainly. It seemed to indicate that
this was a case of war, not a summer-camp for exercise, and that the
poor labor-swinks were being torn from their planet-saving industries
to go and distribute civilization and other forms of suffering among the
feeble benighted somewhere; else why should the swinkesses cry?

The cavalry was very fine--shiny black horses, shapely and spirited;
and presently when a flash of light struck a lifted bugle (delivering
a command which we couldn’t hear) and a division came tearing down on
a gallop it was a stirring and gallant sight, until the dust rose
an inch--the Duke thought more--and swallowed it up in a rolling and
tumbling long gray cloud, with bright weapons glinting and sparkling in
it.

Before long the real business of the occasion began. A battalion of
priests arrived carrying sacred pictures. That settled it: this was war;
these far-stretching masses of troops were bound for the front. Their
little monarch came out now, the sweetest little thing that ever
travestied the human shape I think, and he lifted up his hands and
blessed the passing armies, and they looked as grateful as they could,
and made signs of humble and real reverence as they drifted by the holy
pictures.

It was beautiful--the whole thing; and wonderful, too, when those
serried masses swung into line and went marching down the valley under
the long array of fluttering flags.

Evidently they were going somewhere to fight for their king, which was
the little manny that blessed them; and to preserve him and his brethren
that occupied the other swell tents; to civilize and grasp a valuable
little unwatched country for them somewhere. But the little fellow and
his brethren didn’t fall in--that was a noticeable particular. They
didn’t fight; they stayed at home, where it was safe, and waited for the
swag.

Very well, then-what ought we to do? Had we no moral duty to perform?
Ought we to allow this war to begin? Was it not our duty to stop it, in
the name of right and righteousness? Was it not our duty to administer a
rebuke to this selfish and heartless Family?

The Duke was struck by that, and greatly moved. He felt as I did about
it, and was ready to do whatever was right, and thought we ought to pour
boiling water on the Family and extinguish it, which we did.

It extinguished the armies, too, which was not intended. We both
regretted this, but the Duke said that these people were nothing to us,
and deserved extinction anyway for being so poor-spirited as to serve
such a Family. He was loyally doing the like himself, and so was I, but
I don’t think we thought of that. And it wasn’t just the same, anyway,
because we were sooflaskies, and they were only swinks.

Franklin realizes that no atom is destructible; that it has always
existed and will exist forever; but he thinks all atoms will go out
of this world some day and continue their life in a happier one.
Old Tolliver thinks no atom’s life will ever end, but he also thinks
Blitzowski is the only world it will ever see, and that at no time in
its eternity will it be either worse off or better off than it is now
and always has been. Of course he thinks the planet Blitzowski is itself
eternal and indestructible--at any rate he says he thinks that. It could
make me sad, only I know better. D. T. will fetch Blitzy yet one of
these days.

But these are alien thoughts, human thoughts, and they falsely indicate
that I do not want this tramp to go on living. What would become of me
if he should disintegrate? My molecules would scatter all around and
take up new quarters in hundreds of plants and animals; each would carry
its special feelings along with it, each would be content in its new
estate, but where should I be? I should not have a rag of a feeling
left, after my disintegration--with his--was complete. Nothing to think
with, nothing to grieve or rejoice with, nothing to hope or despair
with. There would be no more me. I should be musing and thinking and
dreaming somewhere else--in some distant animal maybe--perhaps a
cat--by proxy of my oxygen I should be raging and fuming in some other
creatures--a rat, perhaps; I should be smiling and hoping in still
another child of Nature--heir to my hydrogen--a weed, or a cabbage, or
something; my carbonic acid (ambition) would be dreaming dreams in some
lowly wood-violet that was longing for a showy career; thus my details
would be doing as much feeling as ever, but I should not be aware of it,
it would all be going on for the benefit of those others, and I not in
it at all. I should be gradually wasting away, atom by atom, molecule by
molecule, as the years went on, and at last I should be all distributed,
and nothing left of what had once been Me. It is curious, and not
without impressiveness: I should still be alive, intensely alive, but so
scattered that I would not know it. I should not be dead--no, one cannot
call it that--but I should be the next thing to it. And to think
what centuries and ages and aeons would drift over me before the
disintegration was finished, the last bone turned to gas and blown away!
I wish I knew what it is going to feel like, to lie helpless such a
weary, weary time, and see my faculties decay and depart, one by
one, like lights which burn low, and flicker and perish, until the
ever-deepening gloom and darkness which--oh, away, away with these
horrors, and let me think of something wholesome!

My tramp is only 85; there is good hope that he will live ten years
longer--500,000 of my microbe years. So may it be.

Oh, dear, we are all so wise! Each of us knows it all, and knows he
knows it all--the rest, to a man, are fools and deluded. One man knows
there is a hell, the next one knows there isn’t; one man knows high
tariff is right, the next man knows it isn’t; one man knows monarchy is
best, the next one knows it isn’t; one age knows there are witches, the
next one knows there aren’t; one sect knows its religion is the only
true one, there are sixty-four thousand five hundred million sects that
know it isn’t so. There is not a mind present among this multitude of
verdict-deliverers that is the superior of the minds that persuade and
represent the rest of the divisions of the multitude. Yet this sarcastic
fact does not humble the arrogance nor diminish the know-it-all bulk of
a single verdict-maker of the lot by so much as a shade. Mind is plainly
an ass, but it will be many ages before it finds it out, no doubt. Why
do we respect the opinions of any man or any microbe that ever lived? I
swear I don’t know. Why do I respect my own? Well--that is different.



APPENDIX W

LITTLE BESSIE WOULD ASSIST PROVIDENCE

(See Chapter cclxxxii)

[It is dull, and I need wholesome excitements and distractions; so I
will go lightly excursioning along the primrose path of theology.]

Little Bessie was nearly three years old. She was a good child, and not
shallow, not frivolous, but meditative and thoughtful, and much given
to thinking out the reasons of things and trying to make them harmonize
with results. One day she said:

“Mama, why is there so much pain and sorrow and suffering? What is it
all for?”

It was an easy question, and mama had no difficulty in answering it:

“It is for our good, my child. In His wisdom and mercy the Lord sends us
these afflictions to discipline us and make us better.”

“Is it He that sends them?”

“Yes.”

“Does He send all of them, mama?”

“Yes, dear, all of them. None of them comes by accident; He alone sends
them, and always out of love for us, and to make us better.”

“Isn’t it strange?”

“Strange? Why, no, I have never thought of it in that way. I have not
heard any one call it strange before. It has always seemed natural and
right to me, and wise and most kindly and merciful.”

“Who first thought of it like that, mama? Was it you?”

“Oh no, child, I was taught it.”

“Who taught you so, mama?”

“Why, really, I don’t know--I can’t remember. My mother, I suppose; or
the preacher. But it’s a thing that everybody knows.”

“Well, anyway, it does seem strange. Did He give Billy Norris the
typhus?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“Why, to discipline him and make him good.”

“But he died, mama, and so it couldn’t make him good.”

“Well, then, I suppose it was for some other reason. We know it was a
good reason, whatever it was.”

“What do you think it was, mama?”

“Oh, you ask so many questions! I think it was to discipline his
parents.”

“Well, then, it wasn’t fair, mama. Why should his life be taken away for
their sake, when he wasn’t doing anything?”

“Oh, I don’t know! I only know it was for a good and wise and merciful
reason.”

“What reason, mama?”

“I think--I think-well, it was a judgment; it was to punish them for
some sin they had committed.”

“But he was the one that was punished, mama. Was that right?”

“Certainly, certainly. He does nothing that isn’t right and wise and
merciful. You can’t understand these things now, dear, but when you are
grown up you will understand them, and then you will see that they are
just and wise.”

After a pause:

“Did He make the roof fall in on the stranger that was trying to save
the crippled old woman from the fire, mama?”

“Yes, my child. Wait! Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. I only
know it was to discipline some one, or be a judgment upon somebody, or
to show His power.”

“That drunken man that stuck a pitchfork into Mrs. Welch’s baby when--”

“Never mind about it, you needn’t go into particulars; it was to
discipline the child--that much is certain, anyway.”

“Mama, Mr. Burgess said in his sermon that billions of little creatures
are sent into us to give us cholera, and typhoid, and lockjaw, and more
than a thousand other sicknesses and--mama, does He send them?”

“Oh, certainly, child, certainly. Of course.”

“What for?”

“Oh, to discipline us! Haven’t I told you so, over and over again?”

“It’s awful cruel, mama! And silly! and if I----”

“Hush, oh, hush! Do you want to bring the lightning?”

“You know the lightning did come last week, mama, and struck the new
church, and burnt it down. Was it to discipline the church?”

(Wearily.) “Oh, I suppose so.”

“But it killed a hog that wasn’t doing anything. Was it to discipline
the hog, mama?”

“Dear child, don’t you want to run out and play a while? If you would
like to----”

“Mama, only think! Mr. Hollister says there isn’t a bird, or fish, or
reptile, or any other animal that hasn’t got an enemy that Providence
has sent to bite it and chase it and pester it and kill it and suck its
blood and discipline it and make it good and religious. Is that true,
mother--because if it is true why did Mr. Hollister laugh at it?”

“That Hollister is a scandalous person, and I don’t want you to listen
to anything he says.”

“Why, mama, he is very interesting, and I think he tries to be good. He
says the wasps catch spiders and cram them down into their nests in the
ground--alive, mama!--and there they live and suffer days and days and
days, and the hungry little wasps chewing their legs and gnawing into
their bellies all the time, to make them good and religious and praise
God for His infinite mercies. I think Mr. Hollister is just lovely, and
ever so kind; for when I asked him if he would treat a spider like that
he said he hoped to be damned if he would; and then he----Dear mama,
have you fainted! I will run and bring help! Now this comes of staying
in town this hot weather.”



                      APPENDIX X.

            A CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF MARK TWAIN’S WORK

            PUBLISHED AND OTHERWISE--FROM 1851-1910


Note 1.--This is not a detailed bibliography, but merely a general list
of Mark Twain’s literary undertakings, in the order of performance,
showing when, and usually where, the work was done, when and where first
published, etc. An excellent Mark Twain bibliography has been compiled
by Mr. Merle Johnson, to whom acknowledgments are due for important
items.

Note 2.--Only a few of the more important speeches are noted. Volumes
that are merely collections of tales or articles are not noted.

Note 3.--Titles are shortened to those most commonly in use, as “Huck
Finn” or “Huck” for “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Names of periodicals are abbreviated.

The initials U. E. stand for the “Uniform Edition” of Mark Twain’s
works.

The chapter number or numbers in the line with the date refers to the
place in this work where the items are mentioned.


                       1851.
              (See Chapter xviii of this work.)

Edited the Hannibal Journal during the absence of the owner and editor,
Orion Clemens. Wrote local items for the Hannibal Journal. Burlesque of
a rival editor in the Hannibal Journal. Wrote two sketches for The Sat.
Eve. Post (Philadelphia). To MARY IN H-l. Hannibal Journal.


                       1852-53.
                   (See Chapter xviii.)

JIM WOLFE AND THE FIRE--Hannibal Journal. Burlesque of a rival editor in
the Hannibal Journal.


                       1853.
                   (See Chapter xix.)

Wrote obituary poems--not published. Wrote first letters home.


                       1855-56.
                (See Chapters xx and xxi.)

First after-dinner speech; delivered at a printers’ banquet in
Keokuk, Iowa. Letters from Cincinnati, November 16, 1856, signed
“Snodgrass”--Saturday Post (Keokuk).

                       1857.
                   (See Chapter xxi.)

Letters from Cincinnati, March 16, 1857, signed “Snodgrass”--Saturday
Post (Keokuk).


                         1858.

Anonymous contributions to the New Orleans Crescent and probably to St.
Louis papers.

                       1859.
            (See Chapter xxvii; also Appendix B.)

Burlesque of Capt. Isaiah Sellers--True Delta (New Orleans), May 8 or 9.


                         1861.
               (See Chapters xxxiii to xxxv.)


Letters home, published in The Gate City (Keokuk).


                         1862.
               (See Chapters xxxv to xxxviii.)

Letters and sketches, signed “Josh,” for the Territorial Enterprise
(Virginia City, Nevada). REPORT OF THE LECTURE OF PROF. PERSONAL
PRONOUN--Enterprise. REPORT OF A FOURTH OF JULY ORATION--Enterprise. THE
PETRIFIED MAN--Enterprise. Local news reporter for the Enterprise from
August.


                       1863.
         (See Chapters xli to xliii; also Appendix C.)

Reported the Nevada Legislature for the Enterprise. First used the name
“Mark Twain,” February 2. ADVICE TO THE UNRELIABLE--Enterprise. CURING A
COLD--Enterprise. U. E. INFORMATION FOR THE MILLION--Enterprise. ADVICE
TO GOOD LITTLE GIRLS--Enterprise. THE DUTCH NICK MASSACRE--Enterprise.
Many other Enterprise sketches. THE AGED PILOT MAN (poem)--“ROUGHING
IT.” U. E.

                       1864.
              (See. Chapters xliv to xlvii.)

Reported the Nevada Legislature for the Enterprise. Speech as “Governor
of the Third House.” Letters to New York Sunday Mercury. Local reporter
on the San Francisco Call. Articles and sketches for the Golden Era.
Articles and sketches for the Californian. Daily letters from San
Francisco to the Enterprise. (Several of the Era and Californian
sketches appear in SKETCHES NEW AND OLD. U. E.)


                       1865.
           (See Chapters xlix to li; also Appendix E.)

Notes for the Jumping Frog story; Angel’s Camp, February. Sketches etc.,
for the Golden Era and Californian. Daily letter to the Enterprise. THE
JUMPING FROG (San Francisco) Saturday Press. New York, November 18. U.
E.


                       1866.
           (See Chapters lii to lv; also Appendix D.)

Daily letter to the Enterprise. Sandwich Island letters to the
Sacramento Union. Lecture on the Sandwich Islands, San Francisco,
October 2. FORTY-THREE DAYS IN AN OPEN BOAT--Harper’s Magazine, December
(error in signature made it Mark Swain).


                       1867.
     (See Chapters lvii to lxv; also Appendices E, F, and G.)

Letters to Alta California from New York. JIM WOLFE AND THE CATS--N. Y.
Sunday Mercury. THE JUMPING FROG--book, published by Charles Henry
Webb, May 1. U. E. Lectured at Cooper Union, May, ‘66. Letters to
Alta California and New York Tribune from the Quaker City--Holy Land
excursion. Letter to New York Herald on the return from the Holy Land.
After-dinner speech on “Women” (Washington). Began arrangement for the
publication of THE INNOCENTS ABROAD.


                       1868.
       (See Chapters lxvi to lxix; also Appendices H and I.)

Newspaper letters, etc., from Washington, for New York Citizen, Tribune,
Herald, and other papers and periodicals. Preparing Quaker City
letters (in Washington and San Francisco) for book publication. CAPTAIN
WAKEMAN’S (STORMFIELD’S) VISIT TO HEAVEN (San Francisco), published
Harper’s Magazine, December, 1907-January, 1908 (also book, Harpers).
Lectured in California and Nevada on the “Holy Land,” July 2. S’CAT!
Anonymous article on T. K. Beecher (Elmira), published in local paper.
Lecture-tour, season 1868-69.


                       1869.
               (See Chapters lxx to lxxni.)

THE INNOCENTS ABROAD--book (Am. Pub. Co.), July 20. U. E. Bought
one-third ownership in the Buffalo Express. Contributed editorials,
sketches, etc., to the Express. Contributed sketches to Packard’s
Monthly, Wood’s Magazine, etc. Lecture-tour, season 1869-70.


                       1870.
         (See Chapters lxxiv to lxxx; also Appendix J.)

Contributed various matter to Buffalo Express. Contributed various
matter under general head of “MEMORANDA” to Galaxy Magazine, May to
April, ‘71. ROUGHING IT begun in September (Buffalo). SHEM’S DIARY
(Buffalo) (unfinished). GOD, ANCIENT AND MODERN (unpublished).


                       1871.
        (See Chapters lxxxi and lxxxii; also Appendix K.)

MEMORANDA continued in Galaxy to April. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND FIRST
ROMANCE--[THE FIRST ROMANCE had appeared in the Express in 1870. Later
included in SKETCHES.]--booklet (Sheldon & Co.). U. E. ROUGHING IT
finished (Quarry Farm). Ruloff letter--Tribune. Wrote several sketches
and lectures (Quarry Farm). Western play (unfinished). Lecture-tour,
season 1871-72.


                       1872.
        (See Chapters lxxxiii to lxxxvii; also Appendix L.)

ROUGHING IT--book (Am. Pub. Co.), February. U. E. THE MARK TWAIN
SCRAP-BOOK invented (Saybrook, Connecticut). TOM SAWYER begun as a
play (Saybrook, Connecticut). A few unimportant sketches published in
“Practical jokes,” etc. Began a book on England (London).


                       1873.
              (See Chapters lxxxviii to xcii.)

Letters on the Sandwich Islands-Tribune, January 3 and 6. THE GILDED AGE
(with C. D. Warner)--book (Am. Pub. Co), December. U. E. THE LICENSE
OF THE PRESS--paper for The Monday Evening Club. Lectured in London,
October 18 and season 1873-74.


                       1874.
        (See Chapters xciii to xcviii; also Appendix M.)

TOM SAWYER continued (in the new study at Quarry Farm). A TRUE STORY
(Quarry Farm)-Atlantic, November. U. E. FABLES (Quarry Farm). U. E.
COLONEL SELLERS--play (Quarry Farm) performed by John T. Raymond.
UNDERTAKER’S LOVE-STORY (Quarry Farm) (unpublished). OLD TIMES ON THE
MISSISSIPPI (Hartford) Atlantic, January to July, 1875. Monarchy letter
to Mrs. Clemens, dated 1935 (Boston).


                       1875.
           (See Chapters c to civ; also Appendix N.)

UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE--paper for The Monday Evening Club. SKETCHES NEW AND
OLD--book (Am. Pub. Co.), July. U. E. TOM SAWYER concluded (Hartford).
THE CURIOUS REP. OF GONDOUR--Atlantic, October (unsigned). PUNCH,
CONDUCTOR, PUNCH--Atlantic, February, 1876. U. E. THE SECOND ADVENT
(unfinished). THE MYSTERIOUS CHAMBER (unfinished). AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A
DAMN FOOL (unfinished). Petition for International Copyright.                       1876.
                (See Chapters cvi to cx.)

Performed in THE LOAN OF THE LOVER as Peter Spuyk (Hartford). CARNIVAL
OF CRIME--paper for The Monday Evening Club--Atlantic, June. U. E. HUCK
FINN begun (Quarry Farm). CANVASSER’S STORY (Quarry Farm)--Atlantic,
December. U. E. “1601” (Quarry Farm), privately printed. [And not
edited by Livy. D.W.] AH SIN (with Bret Harte)--play, (Hartford). TOM
SAWYER--book (Am. Pub. Co.), December. U. E. Speech on “The Weather,”
 New England Society, December 22.


                       1877.
         (See Chapters cxii to cxv; also Appendix O.)

LOVES OF ALONZO FITZ-CLARENCE, ETC. (Quarry Farm)--Atlantic. IDLE
EXCURSION (Quarry Farm)--Atlantic, October, November, December. U. E.
SIMON WHEELER, DETECTIVE--play (Quarry Farm) (not produced). PRINCE AND
PAUPER begun (Quarry Farm). Whittier birthday speech (Boston), December.


                       1878.
               (See Chapters cxvii to cxx.)

MAGNANIMOUS INCIDENT (Hartford)--Atlantic, May. U. E. A TRAMP ABROAD
(Heidelberg and Munich). MENTAL TELEGRAPHY--Harper’s Magazine, December,
1891. U. E. GAMBETTA DUEL--Atlantic, February, 1879 (included in TRAMP).
U. E. REV. IN PITCAIRN--Atlantic, March, 1879. U. E. STOLEN WHITE
ELEPHANT--book (Osgood & Co.), 1882. U. E. (The three items last named
were all originally a part of the TRAMP ABROAD.)


                       1879.
(See Chapters cxxi to cxxiv; also Chapter cxxxiv and Appendix P.)

A TRAMP ABROAD continued (Paris, Elmira, and Hartford). Adam monument
scheme (Elmira). Speech on “The Babies” (Grant dinner, Chicago),
November. Speech on “Plagiarism” (Holmes breakfast, Boston), December.


                       1880.
               (See Chapters cxxv to cxxxii.)

PRINCE AND PAUPER concluded (Hartford and Elmira). HUCK FINN continued
(Quarry Farm, Elmira). A CAT STORY (Quarry Farm) (unpublished). A TRAMP
ABROAD--book (Am. Pub. Co.), March 13. U. E. EDWARD MILLS AND GEO.
BENTON (Hartford)--Atlantic, August. U. E. MRS. McWILLIAMS AND THE
LIGHTNING (Hartford)--Atlantic, September. U. E.


                       1881.
              (See Chapters cxxxiv to cxxxvii.)

A CURIOUS EXPERIENCE--Century, November. U. E. A BIOGRAPHY OF -----
(unfinished). PRINCE AND PAUPER--book (Osgood R; CO.), December.
BURLESQUE ETIQUETTE (unfinished). [Included in LETTERS FROM THE EARTH
D.W.]


                       1882.
               (See Chapters cxl and cxli.)

LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI (Elmira and Hartford).


                       1883.
              (See Chapters cxlii to cxlviii.)

LIFE ON THE Mississippi--book (Osgood R CO.), May. U. E. WHAT Is
HAPPINESS?--paper for The Monday Evening Club. Introduction to
Portuguese conversation book (Hartford). HUCK FINN concluded (Quarry
Farm). HISTORY GAME (Quarry Farm). AMERICAN CLAIMANT (with W. D.
Howells)--play (Hartford), produced by A. P. Burbank. Dramatized TOM
SAWYER and PRINCE AND PAUPER (not produced).


                       1884.
               (See Chapters cxlix to cliii.)

Embarked in publishing with Charles L. Webster. THE CARSON
FOOTPRINTS--the San Franciscan. HUCK FINN--book (Charles L. Webster &
Co.), December. U. E. Platform-readings with George W. Cable, season
‘84-’85.


                       1885.
               (See Chapters cliv to clvii.)

Contracted for General Grant’s Memoirs. A CAMPAIGN THAT FAILED--Century,
December. U. E. THE UNIVERSAL TINKER--Century, December (open letter
signed X. Y. Z. Letter on the government of children--Christian Union.)
KIDITCHIN (children’s poem).


                       1886.
         (See Chapters clix to clxi; also Appendix Q.)

Introduced Henry M. Stanley (Boston). CONNECTICUT YANKEE begun
(Hartford). ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT--Century, April, 1887.
LUCK--Harper’s, August, 1891. GENERAL GRANT AND MATTHEW ARNOLD--Army and
Navy dinner speech.


                       1887.
         (See Chapters clxii to clxiv; also Appendix R.)

MEISTERSCHAFT--play (Hartford)-Century, January, 1888. U. E. KNIGHTS
OF LABOR--essay (not published). To THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND--Harper’s
Magazine, December. U. E. CONSISTENCY--paper for The Monday Evening
Club.


                       1888.
               (See Chapters clxv to clxviii.)

Introductory for “Unsent Letters” (unpublished). Master of Arts degree
from Yale. Yale Alumni address (unpublished). Copyright controversy with
Brander Matthews--Princeton Review. Replies to Matthew Arnold’s American
criticisms (unpublished). YANKEE continued (Elmira and Hartford).
Introduction of Nye and Riley (Boston).


                       1889.
        (See Chapters clxix to clxxiii; also Appendix S.)

A MAJESTIC LITERARY FOSSIL Harper’s Magazine, February, 1890. U. E.
HUCK AND TOM AMONG THE INDIANS (unfinished). Introduction to YANKEE (not
used). LETTER To ELSIE LESLIE--St Nicholas, February, 1890. CONNECTICUT
YANKEE--book (Webster & Co.), December. U. E.


                       1890.
              (See Chapters clxxii to clxxiv.)

Letter to Andrew Lang about English Criticism. (No important
literary matters this year. Mark Twain engaged promoting the Paige
typesetting-machine.)


                       1891.
              (See Chapters clxxv to clxxvii.)

AMERICAN CLAIMANT (Hartford) syndicated; also book (Webster & Co.),
May, 1892. U. E. European letters to New York Sun. DOWN THE RHONE
(unfinished). KORNERSTRASSE (unpublished).


                       1892.
              (See Chapters clxxx to clxxxii.)

THE GERMAN CHICAGO (Berlin--Sun.) U. E. ALL KINDS OF SHIPS (at sea). U.
E. Tom SAWYER ABROAD (Nauheim)--St. Nicholas, November, ‘93, to April,
‘94. U. E. THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS (Nauheim). U. E. PUDD’NHEAD WILSON
(Nauheim and Florence)--Century, December, ‘93, to June, ‘94 U. E.
$100,000 BANK-NOTE (Florence)--Century, January, ‘93. U. E.


                       1893.
            (See Chapters clxxxiii to clxxxvii.)

JOAN OF ARC begun (at Villa Viviani, Florence) and completed up to the
raising of the Siege of Orleans. CALIFORNIAN’S TALE (Florence) Liber
Scriptorum, also Harper’s. ADAM’S DIARY (Florence)--Niagara Book, also
Harper’s. ESQUIMAU MAIDEN’S ROMANCE--Cosmopolitan, November. U. E. IS HE
LIVING OR IS HE DEAD?--Cosmopolitan, September. U. E. TRAVELING WITH A
REFORMER--Cosmopolitan, December. U. E. IN DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY
(Florence)--N. A.--Rev., July, ‘94. U. E. FENIMORE COOPER’S
LITERARY OFFENSES--[This may not have been written until early in
1894.]--(Players, New York)--N. A. Rev., July, ’95 U. E.


                       1894.
              (See Chapters clxxxviii to cxc.)

JOAN OF ARC continued (Etretat and Paris). WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF
US (Etretat)--N. A. Rev., January, ‘95 U. E. TOM SAWYER ABROAD--book
(Webster & Co.), April. U. E. PUDD’NHEAD WILSON--book (Am. Pub. Co.),
November. U. E. The failure of Charles L. Webster & Co., April 18. THE
DERELICT--poem (Paris) (unpublished).


                       1895.
              (See Chapters clxxxix and cxcii.)

JOAN OF ARC finished (Paris), January 28, Harper’s Magazine, April to
December. MENTAL TELEGRAPHY AGAIN--Harper’s, September. U. E. A
LITTLE NOTE TO PAUL BOURGET. U. E. Poem to Mrs. Beecher (Elmira) (not
published). U. E. Lecture-tour around the world, begun at Elmira, July
14, ended July 31.


                       1896.
               (See Chapters cxci to cxciv.)

JOAN OF ARC--book (Harpers) May. U. E. TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE, and
other stories-book (Harpers), November. FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR begun (23
Tedworth Square, London).


                       1897.
               (See Chapters cxcvii to cxcix.)

FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR--book (Am. Pub. Co.), November. QUEEN’S JUBILEE
(London), newspaper syndicate; book privately printed. JAMES HAMMOND
TRUMBULL--Century, November. WHICH WAS WHICH? (London and Switzerland)
(unfinished). TOM AND HUCK (Switzerland) (unfinished).

HELLFIRE HOTCHKISS (Switzerland) (unfinished). IN MEMORIAM--poem
(Switzerland)-Harper’s Magazine. U. E. Concordia Club speech (Vienna).
STIRRING TIMES IN AUSTRIA (Vienna)--Harper’s Magazine, March, 1898. U.
E.


                       1898.
         (See Chapters cc to cciii; also Appendix T.)

THE AUSTRIAN EDISON KEEPING SCHOOL AGAIN (Vienna) Century, August. U.
E. AT THE APPETITE CURE (Vienna)--Cosmopolitan, August. U. E. FROM THE
LONDON TIMES, 1904 (Vienna)--Century, November. U. E. ABOUT PLAY-ACTING
(Vienna)--Forum, October. U. E. CONCERNING THE JEWS (Vienna)--Harper’s
Magazine, September, ‘99. U. E. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND MRS. EDDY
(Vienna)--Cosmopolitan, October. U. E. THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG
(Vienna)--Harper’s Magazine, December, ‘99 U. E. Autobiographical
chapters (Vienna); some of them used in the N. A. Rev., 1906-07. WHAT
IS MAN? (Kaltenleutgeben)--book (privately printed), August, 1906.
ASSASSINATION OF AN EMPRESS (Kaltenleutgeben) (unpublished). THE
MYSTERIOUS STRANGER (unfinished). Translations of German plays
(unproduced).


                       1899.
               (See Chapters cciv to ccviii.)

DIPLOMATIC PAY AND CLOTHES (Vienna)--Forum, March. U. E. MY LITERARY
DEBUT (Vienna)--Century, December. U. E. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE (Vienna)--N.
A. Rev., December, 1902, January and February, 1903. Translated German
plays (Vienna) (unproduced). Collaborated with Siegmund Schlesinger on
plays (Vienna) (unfinished). Planned a postal-check scheme (Vienna).
Articles about the Kellgren treatment (Sanna, Sweden) (unpublished). ST.
JOAN OF ARC (London)--Harper’s Magazine, December, 1904. U. E. MY FIRST
LIE, AND How I GOT OUT OF IT (London)--New York World. U. E.

Articles on South African War (London) (unpublished) Uniform Edition of
Mark Twain’s works (Am. Pub. Co.).

                       1900.
               (See Chapters ccix to ccxii.)

TWO LITTLE TALES (London)--Century, November, 1901. U. E. Spoke on
“Copyright” before the House of Lords. Delivered many speeches in London
and New York.


                       1901.
              (See Chapters ccxiii to ccxviii.)

TO THE PERSON SITTING IN DARKNESS (14 West Tenth Street, New York)--N.
A. Rev., February. TO MY MISSIONARY CRITICS (14 West Tenth Street, New
York)--N. A. Rev., April. DOUBLE-BARREL DETECTIVE STORY (Saranac Lake,
“The Lair”) Harper’s Magazine, January and February, 1902. Lincoln
Birthday Speech, February 11. Many other speeches. PLAN FOR CASTING VOTE
PARTY (Riverdale) (unpublished). THE STUPENDOUS PROCESSION (Riverdale)
(unpublished). ANTE-MORTEM OBITUARIES--Harper’s Weekly. Received degree
of Doctor of Letters from Yale.


                       1902.
        (See Chapters ccxix to ccxxiv; also Appendix U.)

DOES THE RACE OF MAN LOVE A LORD? (Riverdale)--N. A. Rev., April. U. E.
FIVE BOONS of LIFE (Riverdale)--Harper’s Weekly, July 5. U. E. WHY NOT
ABOLISH IT? (Riverdale)--Harper’s Weekly, July 5. DEFENSE OF GENERAL
FUNSTON (Riverdale)--N. A. Rev., May. IF I COULD BE THERE (Riverdale
unpublished). Wrote various articles, unfinished or unpublished.
Received degree of LL.D. from the University of Missouri, June.

THE BELATED PASSPORT (York Harbor)--Harper’s Weekly, December 6. U. E.
WAS IT HEAVEN? OR HELL? (York Harbor)--Harper’s Magazine, December. U.
E. Poem (Riverdale and York Harbor) (unpublished) Sixty-seventh Birthday
speech (New York), November 27.


                       1903.
               (See Chapters ccxxv to ccxxx.)

MRS. EDDY IN ERROR (Riverdale)--N. A. Rev., April. INSTRUCTIONS IN
ART (Riverdale)-Metropolitan, April and May. EDDYPUS, and other C.
S. articles (unfinished). A DOG’S TALE (Elmira)--Harper’s Magazine,
December. U. E. ITALIAN WITHOUT A MASTER (Florence)--Harper’s Weekly,
January 21, 1904. U. E. ITALIAN WITH GRAMMAR (Florence)--Harper’s
Magazine, August, U. E. THE $30,000 BEQUEST (Florence)--Harper’s Weekly,
December 10, 1904. U. E.


                       1904.
              (See Chapters ccxxx to ccxxxiv.)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Florence)--portions published, N. A. Rev. and Harper’s
Weekly. CONCERNING COPYRIGHT (Tyringham, Massachusetts)--N. A. Rev.,
January, 1905. TSARS SOLILOQUY (21 Fifth Avenue, New York)--N. A. Rev.,
March, 1905. ADAM’S DIARY--book (Harpers), April.


                       1905.
       (See Chapters ccxxxiv to ccxxxvii; also Appendix V.)

LEOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY (21 Fifth Avenue, New York)--pamphlet, P. R. Warren
Company. THE WAR PRAYER (21 Fifth Avenue, New York) (unpublished). EVE’S
DIARY (Dublin, New Hampshire)--Harper’s Magazine, December. 3,000 YEARS
AMONG THE MICROBES (unfinished). INTERPRETING THE DEITY (Dublin
New Hampshire) (unpublished). A HORSE’S TALE (Dublin, New
Hampshire)-Harper’s Magazine, August and September, 1906. Seventieth
Birthday speech. W. D. HOWELLS (21 Fifth Avenue, New York)-Harper’s
Magazine, July, 1906.


                       1906.
               (See Chapters ccxxxix to ccli.)

Autobiography dictation (21 Fifth Avenue, New York; and Dublin, New
Hampshire)--selections published, N. A. Rev., 1906 and 1907. Many
speeches. Farewell lecture, Carnegie Hall, April 19. WHAT IS MAN?--book
(privately printed). Copyright speech (Washington), December.


                       1907.
              (See Chapters cclvi to cclxiii.)

Autobiography dictations (27 Fifth Avenue, New York; and Tuxedo). Degree
of Doctor of Literature conferred by Oxford, June 26. Made many London
speeches. Begum of Bengal speech (Liverpool). CHRISTIAN SCIENCE--book
(Harpers), February. U. E. CAPTAIN STORMFIELD’S VISIT To HEAVEN--book
(Harpers).


                       1908.
               (See Chapters cclxiv to cclxx.)

Autobiography dictations (21 Fifth Avenue, New York; and Redding,
Connecticut). Lotos Club and other speeches. Aldrich memorial speech.


                       1909.
    (See Chapters cclxxvi to cclxxxix; also Appendices N and W.)

IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?--book (Harpers), April. A FABLE--Harper’s Magazine
December. Copyright documents (unpublished). Address to St. Timothy
School. MARJORIE FLEMING (Stormfield)--Harper’s Bazar, December. THE
TURNING-POINT OF MY LIFE (Stormfield)--Harper’s Bazar, February, 1910
BESSIE DIALOGUE (unpublished). LETTERS FROM THE EARTH (unfinished). THE
DEATH OF JEAN--Harper’s, December, 1910. THE INTERNATIONAL LIGHTNING
TRUST (unpublished).


                       1910.
                  (See Chapter ccxcii.)

VALENTINES TO HELEN AND OTHERS (not published). ADVICE TO PAINE (not
published).





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