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Mark Twain: A Biography. Volume III, Part 1: 1900-1907

by Albert Bigelow Paine · English · Gutenberg #2986 · 481,824 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mark Twain: A Biography. Volume III, Part 1: 1900-1907

Author: Albert Bigelow Paine


        
Release date: October 4, 2004 [eBook #2986]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN: A BIOGRAPHY. VOLUME III, PART 1: 1900-1907 ***




Produced by David Widger





MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY

By Albert Bigelow Paine



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;

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