 17 Mark Twain a Biography by Albert Bigelow Payne CHAPTER 228 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 in the editorial he replied only with a word of thanks, and did not even ingest, encouraged 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 writer's 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 wheel-barrow 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 the special Mark Twain Day on which a National Literary Convention would be held. But when his consent was asked and his cooperation 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 honours, 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 honours themselves, so long as we remain alive we are not safe from doing things which, however righteously and honourably intended, can wreck our repute and extinguish our friendships. I hope that no society will be named for me while I am still alive, or I might at some time or other do something which would cause its members to regret having done me that honour. 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 honours upon me, I must still forbear to accept them, spontaneous and unpremeditated honours 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 honours that happen, but charry of those that come by canvas and intention. But 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, folksal crowds of negro-senors with a negro on the safety valve. In his letter to President Francis he said, as two 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 and 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 a 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 and, by consequence, would make no impression upon me. Once he allowed himself to be interviewed for the herald when from Mr. Roger'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 hot-weather subject, and he could be as light-minded about it as he chose. CHAPTER 229 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. Howell 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 fraily 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 first 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 Twichel, "'Livvy 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 and in wheelchair, and in the matter of superintending everything and 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, shot 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 tail, 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 notebook, Today I placed flowers on Susie's grave, for the last time probably, and read words, Good night, dear heart, good night. They did not return to Riverdale, but went to the Hotel Grovener for the intervening weeks. They had engaged passage for Italy on the Princess Irene, which would sail on the twenty-fourth. It was during the period of their waiting that Clemens concluded his final harper contract. On that day, in his notebook, he wrote, The Prophecy. In 1895 Cheiro, the plamest, examined my hand, and said that in my sixty-eighth year 1903 I would become suddenly rich. I was a bankrupt, and ninety-four thousand dollars in debt at the time through the failure of Charles L. Webster and Company. Two years later, in London, Cheiro repeated this long-distance prediction, and added that the riches would come from a quite unexpected source. I am superstitious. I kept the prediction in mind, and often thought of it. When at last it came true, October 22, 1903. There was but a month and nine days to spare. The contract signed that day concentrates all my books in harper's hands, and now, at last, they are valuable. In fact, they are a fortune. They guarantee me twenty-five thousand dollars a year for five years, and they will yield twice as much as that. In earlier notebooks 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 almost 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 Canoa. Joe Goodman came from the Pacific to pay him a good-bye 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 Dalton. Young Dalton came with manuscripts seeking a hearing of the magazine editors, so Clemens wrote a letter which would ensure that favour. Introducing Mr. George Dalton to Gilder, Alden, Harvey, McClure, Walker, Page, Bach, 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 favour to me, to wave prejudice and superstition for this once, and 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 fifty 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 and 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 God-like Clemens. He is the biggest man you have on your side of the water, by a dam-site, 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-booey 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-booey is a deeply impressive fellow-being. In these many recent trips up and down the sound in the canawa, 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. Someday I hope to hear the poem chanted or sung with the bell-booey, 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. CHAPTER 230 THE RETURN TO FLORENCE From the Notebook Saturday, October 24, 1903. Sailed in the Princess Irene for Genoa at eleven, flowers and fruit from Mrs. Rogers and Mrs. Coe. We have with us Katie Leary in our domestic service twenty-three years, and Miss Margaret Sherry, trained nurse. Two days later he wrote, Heavy storm all night, only three stewardesses. Hours served sixty meals in rooms this morning. On the twenty-seventh, Livy is enduring the voyage marvelously well, as well as Clara and Jean, I think, and far better than the trained nurse. She has been out on deck an hour. CHAPTER II Due at Gibraltar ten days from New York, three days to Naples, then two day to Genoa. At supper the band played Cavallaria Rusticana, which is forever associated in my mind with Susie. I love it better than any other, but it breaks my heart. It was the intermezzo he referred to which had been Susie's favorite music, and whenever he heard it he remembered always one particular opera night long ago, and Susie's face rose before him. They were in Naples on the fifth, thence to Genoa and to Florence, where presently they were installed in Villa Reale de 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 Württemberg and Russia. Now it was the property of the Countess Massiglia, from whom Clemens had leased it. They had hoped to secure the Via Papignando under Fiesole, near Professor Fisk, but negotiations for it had fallen through. The Via 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 towards Valombrossa and the Chianti Hills. Yet now, in 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 Parish 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 mouldering marbles, and a clock that long ago forgot the hours, gave it a mortuary look. In a way it suggested Arnold Bocklin's Totteninsel, and it might well have served as the allegorical setting for a gateway to the born 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 barn-like, 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. Via Quarto has recently been purchased by Signore P. Der Ritter Lajoni, and thoroughly restored and refreshed and beautiful, 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 McAllister, Clemens said, Florentine sunshine, bless you there, isn't any. We have heavy fogs every morning and 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 a 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 Twitchell 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 magazine's thirty thousand 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. And so when you have finished an article and are willing to let it go to print, it represents only ten cents a word instead of thirty. But this time I had the curious and unprecedented luck to start right in each case. I turned out thirty seven thousand words in twenty-five working days. And 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 idol and 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 and silent solitude, this clean, soft air, and this enchanting view of Florence, the great valley and snow mountains that frame it, are the right conditions for work. They are a persistent inspiration. Today is very lovely. When the afternoon arrives there will be a new picture every hour till dark, and each of them divine, or progressing from divine to diviner and divinist. On this second floor Clara's room commands the finest. She keeps the window ten feet high, wide open all the time, and frames it in that. I go in from time to time every day and trade sass for a look. The central detail is a distant and stately snow hump that rises above and behind black forested hills, and its sloping, vast buttresses, velvety and 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 7th, 1904, we gather that the weather had greatly improved, and with it Mrs. Clemens' health, notwithstanding she had an alarming attack in December. One of the stories he had finished was the $30,000 request. 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 amenuensis 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 and south. This one slants across between, and 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 thirty-three glass doors or windows, which pierce the side of the house, which looks upon the terrace and 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, and 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, and exposes a white snowstorm of villas and cities that you cannot train yourself to have confidence in. They appear and disappear so mysteriously, as if they might not be villas and cities at all, but the ghosts of perished ones of the remote and dim Etruscan times. And late in the afternoon the sun sets down behind those mountains somewhere, at no particular time, and 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 for and a half months, my prejudices have fallen away one by one, and the place has become very home-like 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, and 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' 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 of 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 howls, 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 travelling the way to recovery, but the good days were always a little less hopeful, the bad days a little more discouraging. On February 22 Clemens wrote in his notebook, at midnight Livy's pulse went to 192, and there was a collapse, great alarm. Subcutaneous injection of brandy saved her. And to McAllister, toward the end of March, we are having quite perfect weather now, and 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 notebook says, April 8 Clara's concert was a triumph. Livy woke up and sent for her to tell her all about it near midnight. But a day or two later she was worse again than 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, Molly Clemens, Orian's wife, died, news which was kept for 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 Twitchel, 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 and acquaintances fall about me now in my gray-headed days. Vereshagin, Momsen, Dvorak, Lenbach, and Jokai, all so recently, and now Stanley. I have known Stanley thirty-seven years. Goodness, who is there I haven't known. End of Chapter 230 The Return to Florence Red by John Greenman Section 20 of Mark Twain, A Biography Part 1, 1900-1907 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' room except for the briefest moment at a time. But on May 12, to R. W. Gilder, he reported, For two days now we have not been anxious about Mrs. Clemens. After twenty months of bed-ridden solitude and bodily misery, she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid, shrunken shadow, and looks bright and young and 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 am. I have just paid one of my pair of permitted two-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 wheelchair 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 fifth 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 fulfill 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, 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 an exaltation. He went to his room at first. Then he was moved to do a thing which he had seldom done since Susie died. He went to the piano upstairs and sang the old jubilee songs that Susie 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 notebook that night he wrote, at a quarter past nine this evening, she that was the life of my life passed to the relief and the peace of death after twenty-two months of unjust and unearned suffering. I first saw her near thirty-seven years ago, and now I have looked upon her face for the last time. Oh, so unexpected! I was full of remorse for things done and said in these thirty-four 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 Twitchell and to Mrs. Crane, those nearest and dearest ones. To Twitchell 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 rejuvenessence was noticeable within two hours after her death, and when I went down again, to thirty, it was complete. In all that night and all that day she never noticed my caressing hand. It seemed strange. To Howells he recalled the closing scene. I bent over her and looked in her face, and I think I spoke. I was surprised and troubled that she did not notice me. Then we understood, and our hearts broke. How poor we are today! But how thankful I am that her persecutions are ended! I would not call her back if I could. Today, treasured in her worn Old Testament, I found a dear and gentle letter from you, dated far Rockaway, September 13th, 1896, about our poor Susie's death. I am tired and old. I wish I were with Livy. And in a few days it would break Livy's heart to see Clara. We excuse ourselves 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, and could put my arms around his neck and tell him all, everything, and ease my heart. 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 cable-grams came first, bundles of them from every corner of the world, then the letters, a steady inflow. Howells, Twitchell, Aldridge, 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. Twitchell 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 friend's 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 Susie and little Langdon, but beyond that they could not see. Then they remembered a quiet spot in Massachusetts, Tiringham, 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 tomorrow 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, and 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 nearest chance that he saved himself from falling to the ground far below. He mentions this in his notebook, and once, speaking of it to Frederick Dynaca, 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. S. L. last night at 10. The bugle called 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 sixty-eight Junes, but how vague and colorless sixty-seven 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. And now at last I realize it is a calamity. July 2, 1904. In these thirty-four years we have made many voyages together. Livy dear, and now we are making our last. You down below and lonely. I above with a crowd. And lonely. July 3, 1904. Ship time 8 a.m. In thirteen hours and a quarter it will be four weeks since Livy died. Thirty-one years ago we made our first voyage together, and this is our last one in company. Susie was a year old then. She died at twenty-four and had been in her grave eight years. July 10, 1904. Tonight it will be five weeks. But to me it remains yesterday, as it has from the first. But this funeral march, how sad and 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 thirty-four years ago. There her coffin rested. And over it, in the same voice that had made her a wife, then committed her departed spirit to God now. It was Joseph Twitchell 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, or moor and fen, or crag and torrent, till the night is gone. And with the mourn their angel faces smile, which I have loved long since, and lost a while. And so good-bye, good-bye, dear heart, strong, tender and true. Good-bye, 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. Glemmons 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, End of Chapter 232 The Sad Journey Home, Read by John Greenman. Section 22 of Mark Twain, A Biography. Part 1, 1900-1907. There was an extra cottage on the Gilder Place at Tiringham, and this they occupied for the rest of that sad summer. Glemmons, in his notebook, 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 and, through water, remembering there was a brood of swallows in the chimney. The tragedy was averted. July 31. Lee, Massachusetts, Berkshire Hills. Last night the young people out on a moonlight ride. Trolley frightened Jean's horse. Collision! Horse killed. Rodman Gilder picked Jean up unconscious. She was taken to the doctor, per the car. Face, nose, side, back, contused. Tendon of left ankle broken. August 10, New York. Clara here sick. Never well since June 5. Jean is at the summer home in the Berkshire Hills, crippled. The next entry records the third death in the Glemmons family within a period of eight months. That of Mrs. Moffat, who had been Pamela Glemmons. Glemmons writes, September 1. Died at Greenwich, Connecticut. My sister Pamela Moffat. Aged about 73. Death dates this year. January 14. June 5. September 1. That fall they took a house in New York City on the corner of 9th Street and 5th Avenue, number 21, remaining for a time at the Grovner, while the new home was being set in order. The home furniture was brought from Hartford, unwrapped, and established in the light of strange environment. Glemmons wrote, We have not seen it for 13 years. Katie Leary, our old housekeeper, who has been in our service more than 24 years, cried when she told me about it today. She said I had forgotten it was so beautiful, and it brought Mrs. Glemmons right back to me in that old time when she was so young and lovely. Clara Glemmons had not recovered from the strain of her mother's long illness and the shock of her death, and she was ordered into retirement with the care of a trained nurse. The life at 21 Fifth Avenue therefore began with only two remaining members of the broken family, Glemmons and Jean. Glemmons had undertaken to divert himself with work at Tiringham, though without much success. He was not well. He was restless and disturbed. His heart bleak with a great loneliness. He prepared an article on copyright for the North American Review, published January 1905. A dialogue presentation of copyright conditions addressed to Thornwald Stalberg, Register of Copyrights, Washington, D.C., one of the best of Mark Twain's papers on the subject. And he began, or at least contemplated, that beautiful, fancy, Eew's diary, which in the widest and most reverential sense, from the first word to the last, conveys his love, his worship, and his tenderness for the one he had laid away. Adam's single comment at the end, where, so ever she was, there was Eden, was his own comment, and is perhaps the most tenderly beautiful line he ever wrote. These two books, Adam's diary and Eew's, amusing and sometimes absurd as they are, and so far removed from the literal, are as autobiographic as anything he has done, and one of them as lovely in its truth. Like the first maker of men, Mark Twain created Adam in his own image, and his rare Eew is no less the companion with whom half a lifetime before he had begun the marriage journey. Only here the likeness ceases. No serpent ever entered there, Eden, and they never left it. It travelled with them, so long as they remained together. In the Christmas Harper for 1904 was published St. Joan of Arc, the same being the Joan introduction prepared in London five years before. Joan's proposed beatification had stirred a new interest in the martyred girl, and this most beautiful article became a sort of keynote of the public heart. Those who read it were likely to go back and read the recollections, and a new appreciation grew for that masterpiece. In his later and wider acceptance by his own land and by the world at large, the book came to be regarded with a fresh understanding. Letters came from scores of readers as if it were a newly issued volume. A distinguished educator wrote, I would rather have written your history of Joan of Arc than any other piece of literature in any language. And this sentiment grew. The demand for the book increased and has continued to increase steadily and rapidly. In the long and last analysis the good must prevail. A day will come when there will be as many readers of Joan as of any other of Mark Twain's works. The growing appreciation of Joan is shown by the report of sales for the three years following 1904, the sales for that year in America were 1,726, for 1905, 2,445, for 1906, 5,381, for 1907, 6,574. At this point it passed Putt and Head Wilson, the Yankee, the Gilded Age, life on the Mississippi, overtook the tramp abroad, and more than doubled the American claimant. Only the innocence abroad, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Ruffing It, still ranged ahead of it, in the order named. End of Chapter 233, Beginning Another Home, read by John Greenman. Section 23 of Mark Twain a Biography. Part 1, 1900 to 1907. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain a Biography, by Albert Bigelow Payne. Chapter 234, Life at 21 Fifth Avenue. The house at 21 Fifth Avenue, built by the architect who had designed Grace Church, had a distinctly ecclesiastical suggestion about its windows, and was of fine and stately proportions within. It was a proper residence for a venerable author and a sage, and with the handsome Hartford furnishings distributed through it, made a distinctly suitable setting for Mark Twain. But it was lonely for him. It lacked soul. He added presently a great Aeolian orchestral with a variety of music for his different moods. He believed that he would play it himself when he needed the comfort of harmony, and that Gene, who had not received musical training, or his secretary, could also play to him. He had a passion for music, or at least for melody and stately rhythmic measures, though his ear was not attuned to what are termed the more classical compositions. For Wagner, for instance, he cared little, though in a letter to Mrs. Crane he said, Certainly nothing in the world is so solemn and impressive, and so divinely beautiful as Tannhauser. It ought to be used as a religious service. Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies also moved him deeply. Once, writing to Gene, he asked, What is your favorite piece of music, dear? Mine is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. I have found that out within a day or two. It was the majestic movement and melodies of the second part that he found most satisfying, but he often are inclined to the still tenderer themes of Chopin's nocturnes and one of Schubert's impromptus, while the Lorelei and the Erlking and the Scottish Ayres never wearied him. Music thus became a chief consolation during these lonely days, rich organ harmonies that filled the emptiness of his heart and beguiled from dull material surroundings back into worlds and dreams that he had known and laid away. He went out very little that winter, usually to the homes of old and intimate friends. Once he attended a small dinner given him by George Smalley at the Metropolitan Club, but it was a private affair, with only good friends present. Still it formed the beginning of his return to social life, and it was not in his nature to retire from the brightness of human society, or to submerge himself in mourning. As the months wore on, he appeared here and there and took on something of his old-time habit. Then his annual bronchitis appeared, and he was confined a good deal to his home, where he wrote, or planned, new reforms and enterprises. The improvement of railway service, through which fewer persons should be maimed and destroyed each year, interested him. He estimated that the railroads and electric lines killed and wounded more than all of the wars combined, and he accumulated statistics and prepared articles on the subject, though he appears to have offered little of such matter for publication. Once, however, when his sympathy was awakened by the victim of a frightful trolley and train collision in Newark, New Jersey, he wrote a letter which promptly found its way into print. Dear Miss Madeline, your good and admiring and affectionate brother has told me of your sorrowful share in the trolley disaster which brought unaccustomed tears to millions of eyes, and fierce resentment against those whose criminal indifference to their responsibilities caused it, and the reminder has brought back to me a pang out of that bygone time. I wish I could take you sound and whole out of your bed and break the legs of those officials, and put them in it to stay there, for in my spirit I am merciful and would not break their necks and backs also, as some would who have no feeling. It is your brother who permits me to write this line, and so it is not an intrusion, you see. May you get well and soon, sincerely yours, S. L. Clemens. A very little later he was writing another letter on a similar subject to St. Clair McElway, who had narrowly escaped injury in a railway accident. Dear McElway, your innumerable friends are grateful, most grateful, as I understand the telegrams. The engineers of your train had never seen a locomotive before. The government's official report, showing that our railways killed 1,200 persons last year, and injured 60,000, convinces me that under present conditions one providence is not enough properly and efficiently to take care of our railroad business. But it is characteristically American, always trying to get along, shorthanded and save wages. A massacre of Jews in Moscow renewed his animosity for semi-barbaric Russia. Asked for a Christmas sentiment, he wrote, It is my warm and world-embracing Christmas hope that all of us that deserve it may finally be gathered together in a heaven of rest and peace, and the others permitted to retire into the clutches of Satan, or the Emperor of Russia, according to preference, if they have a preference. An article, Vizars Soliloquy, written at this time, was published in the North American Review from March 1905. He wrote much more, but most of the other matter he put aside. On a subject like that he always discarded three times as much as he published, and it was usually about three times as terrific as that which found its way into type. The Soliloquy, however, is severe enough. It represents the Tsar as contemplating himself without his clothes, and reflecting on what a poor human specimen he represents. Is it this that 140 million Russians kiss the dust before and worship? Manifestly not. No one could worship this spectacle, which is me. Then who is it? What is it that they worship? Privately, none knows better than I. It is my clothes. Without my clothes I should be as destitute of authority as any other naked person. No one could tell me from a parson and barber-tutor. Then who is the real Emperor of Russia? My clothes. There is no other. The Emperor continues this fancy and reflects on the fierce cruelties that are done in his name. It was a withering satire on Russian imperialism, and it stirred a wide response. This encouraged Clemens to something even more pretentious and effective in the same line. He wrote, King Leopold Soliloquy. The reflections of the fiendish sovereign who had maimed and slaughtered 15 millions of American subjects in his greed. Gentle, harmless blacks. Men, women and little children whom he had butchered and mutilated in his Congo rubber fields. Seldom in the history of the world have there been such atrocious practices as those of King Leopold in the Congo, and Clemens spared nothing in his picture of them. The article was regarded as not quite suitable for magazine publication, and it was given to the Congo Reform Association and issued as a booklet for distribution, with no return to the author, who would gladly have written a hundred times as much if he could have saved that unhappy race and have sent Leopold to the electric chair. The book was price-marked 25 cents, but the returns from such as were sold went to the cause. Thousands of them were distributed free. The Congo, a domain four times as large as the German Empire, had been made the ward of Belgium at a convention in Berlin by the agreement of 14 nations, America and 13 European states. Leopold promptly seized the country for his personal advantage, and the nations apparently found themselves powerless to depose him. No more terrible blunder was ever committed by an assemblage of civilized people. Various plans and movements were undertaken for Congo Reform, and Clemens worked and wrote letters, and gave his voice and his influence and exhausted his rage at last, as one after another of the half-organized and altogether futile undertakings showed no results. His interest did not die, but it became inactive. Eventually he declared, I have said all I can say on that terrible subject. I am heart and soul in any movement that will rescue the Congo and hang Leopold, but I cannot write any more. His fires were likely to burn themselves out, they rage so fiercely. His final paragraph on the subject was a proposed epitaph for Leopold, when time should have claimed him. It ran, Here under this gilded tomb lies rotting the body of one the smell of whose name will still offend the nostrils of men ages upon ages after all the Caesar's and Washington's and Napoleon's shall have ceased to be praised or blamed, and been forgotten. Leopold of Belgium. Clemens had not yet lost interest in the American policy in the Philippines, and in his letters to Twitchell he did not hesitate to criticize the President's attitude in this and related matters. Once in a moment of irritation he wrote, Dear Joe, I knew I had in me somewhere a definite feeling about the President. If I could only find the words to define it with. Here they are to a hair from Leonard Jerome. Quote, For twenty years I have loved Roosevelt the man, and hated Roosevelt the statesman and politician. It's mighty good. Every time in twenty-five years that I have met Roosevelt the man, a wave of welcome has streaked through me with the hand-grip. But whenever, as a rule, I meet Roosevelt the statesman and politician, I find him destitute of morals and not respect worthy. It is plain that, where his political self and party self are concerned, he has nothing resembling a conscience, that under those inspirations he is naively indifferent to the restraints of duty and even unaware of them. Ready to kick the Constitution into the backyard whenever it gets in his way. But Roosevelt is excusable, I recognize it, and ought to concede it. We are all insane, each in his own way, and with insanity goes irresponsibility. Theodore the man is sane. In fairness we ought to keep in mind that Theodore, a statesman and politician, is insane and irresponsible. He wrote a great deal more from time to time on this subject, but that is the gist of his conclusions, and whether justified by time or otherwise, it expresses today the deduction of a very large number of people. It is set down here because it is part of Mark Twain's history, and also because, a little while after his death, there happened to creep into print an incomplete and misleading note, since, often reprinted, which he once made in a moment of anger, when he was in a less judicial frame of mind. It seems proper that a man's honest sentiments should be recorded concerning the nation's servants. Clemens wrote an article at this period which he called the War Prayer. It pictured the young recruits about to march away for war, the excitement and the celebration, the drumbeat, and the heartbeat of patriotism, the final assembly in the church where the minister utters that tremendous invocation, God, the all terrible, thou who ordainest thunder, thy clarion, and lightning, thy sword, and the long prayer for victory to the nation's armies. As the prayer closes, a white-robed stranger enters, moves up the aisle, and takes the preacher's place. Then, after some moments of impressive silence, he begins, I come from the throne, bearing a message from Almighty God. He has heard the prayer of his servant, your shepherd, and will grant it, if such shall be your desire, after I, his messenger, shall have explained to you its import, that is to say its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men in that it asks, for more than he who utters it, is aware of, except he pause and think. God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two. One uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and unspoken. You have heard your servant's prayer, the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it, that part which the pastor, and also you in your hearts, fervently prayed, silently, and ignorantly, and unthinkingly. God, grant that it was so. You heard these words, grant us victory, O Lord our God. That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is completed into those pregnant words. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commanded me to put it into words. Listen. O Lord our Father, our young Patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle. Be thou near them. With them in spirit we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells. Help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their Patriot dead. Help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the wounded writhing in pain. Help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire. Help us to ring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief. Help us to turn them out ruthless with their little children to wander unfriended through wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sport of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it for our sakes who adore thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet. We ask of one who is the spirit of love and who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek his aid with humble and contrite hearts. Grant our prayer, O Lord, and thine shall be the praise and honor and glory now and ever. Amen. After a pause, ye have prayed it, if ye still desire it, speak. The messenger of the most high waits. It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic because there was no sense in what he said. To Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the war prayer, stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean and others, who had told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. Still, you are going to publish it, are you not? Clemens, pacing up and down the room in his dressing-down slippers, shook his head. No, he said, I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead. He did not care to invite the public verdict that he was a lunatic or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions and traditions and conclusions of mankind. To Tritchell he wrote playfully, but sincerely. Am I honest? I give you my word of honour, privately. I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one. Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is. We are certainly all honest in one or several ways every man in the world, though I have a reason to think I am the only one whose black list runs so light. Sometimes I feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude. It was his gospel, he referred to as his unpublished book, his doctrine of selfishness, and of man the irresponsible machine. To Tritchell he pretended to favour war, which he declared to his mind was one of the very best methods known of diminishing the human race. What a life it is, this one. Everything we try to do. Somebody intrudes and obstructs it. After years of thought and labour I have arrived within one little bit of a step of perfecting my invention for exhausting the oxygen in the globe's air during a stretch of two minutes. And, of course, along comes an obstructor who is inventing something to protect human life. Damn, such a world, anyway. He generally wrote Tritchell when he had things to say that were outside of the pale of print. He was sure of an attentive audience of one, and the audience, whether it agreed with him or not, would at least understand him and be honoured by his confidence. In one letter of that year he said, I have written you, today, not to do you a service, but to do myself one. There was bile in me. I had to empty it or lose my day to-morrow. If I tried to empty it into the North American review, well, I couldn't afford the risk. No, the certainty, the certainty, that I wouldn't be satisfied with the result. So I would burn it and try again to-morrow, burn that and try again the next day. It happens so nearly every time. I have a family to support, and I can't afford this kind of dissipation. Last winter, when I was sick, I wrote a magazine article three times before I got it to suit me. I put five hundred dollars worth of work on it every day for ten days, and at last, when I got it to suit me, it contained but three thousand words—nine hundred dollars. I burned it, and said I would reform. And I have reformed. I have to work my bile off whenever it gets to where I can't stand it, but I can work it off on you economically, because I don't have to make it suit me. It may not suit you, but that isn't any matter. I'm not writing it for that. I have used you as an equilibrium restorer more than once in my time, and shall continue, I guess. I would like to use Mr. Rogers, and he is plenty good natured enough, but it wouldn't be fair to keep him rescuing me from my leather-headed business snarls, and make him read interminable bile eruptions besides. I can't use howls. He is busy, and old, and lazy, and won't stand it. I danced use Clara. There's things I have to say which she wouldn't put up with. A very dear little ash-cat, but has claws. And so you're it. See the preface to the autobiography of Mark Twain. I am writing from the grave. On these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be straightly and unqualifiedly frank, either in the grave or out of it.