Mark Twain, A Biography Complete

A >> Albert Bigelow Paine >> Mark Twain, A Biography Complete


Well, whatever I get out of the wreckage will be due to good luck
--the good luck of getting you into the scheme--for, but for that
there wouldn't be any wreckage; it would be total loss.

I wish you had been in at the beginning. Then we should have had
the good luck to step promptly ashore.

So it was that the other great interest died and was put away forever.
Clemens scarcely ever mentioned it again, even to members of his family.
It was a dead issue; it was only a pity that it had ever seemed a live
one. A combination known as the Regius Company took over Paige's
interest, but accomplished nothing. Eventually--irony of fate--the
Mergenthaler Company, so long scorned and derided, for twenty thousand
dollars bought out the rights and assets and presented that marvelous
work of genius, the mechanical wonder of the age, to the Sibley College
of Engineering, where it is shown as the costliest piece of machinery,
for its size, ever constructed. Mark Twain once received a letter from
an author who had written a book calculated to assist inventors and
patentees, asking for his indorsement. He replied:

DEAR SIR,--I have, as you say, been interested in patents and
patentees. If your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me
nine editions. Send them by express.

Very truly yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.

The collapse of the "great hope" meant to the Clemens household that
their struggle with debt was to continue, that their economies were to
become more rigid. In a letter on her wedding anniversary, February a
(1895), Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister:

As I was starting down the stairs for my breakfast this morning Mr.
Clemens called me back and took out a five-franc piece and gave it to me,
saying: "It is our silver-wedding day, and so I give you a present."

It was a symbol of their reduced circumstances--of the change that
twenty-five years had brought.

Literary matters, however, prospered. The new book progressed amazingly.
The worst had happened; other and distracting interests were dead. He
was deep in the third part-the story of Joan's trial and condemnation,
and he forgot most other things in his determination to make that one a
reality.

As at Viviani, Clemens read his chapters to the family circle. The story
was drawing near the end now; tragedy was closing in on the frail martyr;
the farce of her trial was wringing their hearts. Susy would say, "Wait,
wait till I get a handkerchief," and one night when the last pages had
been written and read, and Joan had made the supreme expiation for
devotion to a paltry king, Susy wrote in her diary, "To-night Joan of Arc
was burned at the stake," meaning that the book was finished.

Susy herself had literary taste and might have written had it not been
that she desired to sing. There are fragments of her writing that show
the true literary touch. Her father, in an unpublished article which he
once wrote of her, quoted a paragraph, doubtless intended some day to
take its place at the end of a story:

And now at last when they lie at rest they must go hence. It is
always so. Completion; perfection, satisfaction attained--a human
life has fulfilled its earthly destiny. Poor human life! It may
not pause and rest, for it must hasten on to other realms and
greater consummations.

She was a deep reader, and she had that wonderful gift of brilliant,
flowing, scintillating speech. From her father she had inherited a rare
faculty of oral expression, born of a superior depth of mind, swiftness
and clearness of comprehension, combined with rapid, brilliant, and
forceful phrasing. Her father wrote of her gift:

Sometimes in those days of swift development her speech was rocket-
like for vividness and for the sense it carried of visibility. I
seem to see it stream into the sky and burst full in a shower of
colored fire.

We are dwelling here a moment on Susy, for she was at her best that
winter.

She was more at home than the others. Her health did not permit her to
go out so freely and her father had more of her companionship. They
discussed many things--the problems of life and of those beyond life,
philosophies of many kinds, and the subtleties of literary art. He
recalled long after how once they lost themselves in trying to solve the
mystery of the emotional effect of certain word-combinations--certain
phrases and lines of verse--as, for instance, the wild, free breath of
the open that one feels in "the days when we went gipsying a long time
ago" and the tender, sunlit, grassy slope and mossy headstones suggested
by the simple words, "departed this life." Both Susy and her father
cared more for Joan than any of the former books. To Mr. Rogers, Clemens
wrote:

"Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for
love." A memorandum which he made at the time, apparently for no one but
himself, brings us very close to the personality behind it.

Do you know that shock? I mean when you come at your regular hour
into the sick-room where you have watched for months and find the
medicine-bottles all gone, the night-table removed, the bed
stripped, the furniture set stiffly to rights, the windows up, the
room cold, stark, vacant--& you catch your breath & realize what has
happened.

Do you know that shock?

The man who has written a long book has that experience the morning
after he has revised it for the last time & sent it away to the
printer. He steps into his study at the hour established by the
habit of months--& he gets that little shock. All the litter &
confusion are gone. The piles of dusty reference-books are gone
from the chairs, the maps from the floor; the chaos of letters,
manuscripts, note-books, paper-knives, pipes, matches, photographs,
tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the writing-table, the
furniture is back where it used to be in the long-ago. The
housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there &
tidied it up & scoured it clean & made it repellent & awful.

I stand here this morning contemplating this desolation, & I realize
that if I would bring back the spirit that made this hospital home-
like & pleasant to me I must restore the aids to lingering
dissolution to their wonted places & nurse another patient through
& send it forth for the last rites, With many or few to assist
there, as may happen; & that I will do.




CXC

STARTING ON THE LONG TRAIL

The tragedy of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', with its splendid illustrations by
Louis Loeb, having finished its course in the Century Magazine, had been
issued by the American Publishing Company. It proved not one of Mark
Twain's great books, but only one of his good books. From first to last
it is interesting, and there are strong situations and chapters finely
written. The character of Roxy is thoroughly alive, and her weird
relationship with her half-breed son is startling enough. There are not
many situations in fiction stronger than that where half-breed Tom sells
his mother down the river into slavery. The negro character is well
drawn, of course-Mark Twain could not write it less than well, but its
realism is hardly to be compared with similar matter in his other books
--in Tom Sawyer, for instance, or Huck Finn. With the exceptions of Tom,
Roxy, and Pudd'nhead the characters are slight. The Twins are mere
bodiless names that might have been eliminated altogether. The character
of Pudd'nhead Wilson is lovable and fine, and his final triumph at the
murder trial is thrilling in the extreme. Identification by thumb-marks
was a new feature in fiction then--in law, too, for that matter. But it
is chiefly Pudd'nhead Wilson's maxims, run at the head of each chapter,
that will stick in the memory of men. Perhaps the book would live
without these, but with them it is certainly immortal.

Such aphorisms as: "Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits";
"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good
example"; "When angry count four, and when very angry swear," cannot
perish; these, with the forty or so others in this volume and the added
collection of rare philosophies that head the chapters of Following the
Equator, have insured to Philosopher Pudd'nhead a respectful hearing for
all time.--[The story of Pudd'nhead Wilson was dramatized by Frank Mayo,
who played it successfully as long as he lived. It is by no means dead,
and still pays a royalty to the Mayo and Clemens estates.]

Clemens had meant to begin another book, but he decided first to make a
trip to America, to give some personal attention to publishing matters
there. They were a good deal confused. The Harpers had arranged for the
serial and book publication of Joan, and were negotiating for the Webster
contracts. Mr. Rogers was devoting priceless time in an effort to
establish amicable relations between the Harpers and the American Company
at Hartford so that they could work on some general basis that would be
satisfactory and profitable to all concerned. It was time that Clemens
was on the scene of action. He sailed on the New York on the end of
February, and a little more than a month later returned by the Paris
--that is, at the end of March. By this time he had altogether a new
thought. It was necessary to earn a large sum of money as promptly as
possible, and he adopted the plan which twice before in his life in 1872
and in 1884:--had supplied him with needed funds. Loathing the platform
as he did, he was going back to it. Major Pond had proposed a lecture
tour soon after his failure.

"The loss of a fortune is tough," wrote Pond, "but there are other
resources for another fortune. You and I will make the tour together."

Now he had resolved to make a tour-one that even Pond himself had not
contemplated. He would go platforming around the world! He would take
Pond with him as far as the Pacific coast, arranging with some one
equally familiar with the lecture circuit on the other side of the
Pacific. He had heard of R. S. Smythe, who had personally conducted
Henry M. Stanley and other great lecturers through Australia and the
East, and he wrote immediately, asking information and advice concerning
such a tour. Clemens himself has told us in one of his chapters how his
mental message found its way to Smythe long before his written one, and
how Smythe's letter, proposing just such a trip, crossed his own.

He sailed for America, with the family on the 11th of May, and a little
more than a week later, after four years of exile, they found themselves
once more at beautiful Quarry Farm. We may imagine how happy they were
to reach that peaceful haven. Mrs. Clemens had written:

"It is, in a way, hard to go home and feel that we are not able to open
our house. But it is an immense delight to me to think of seeing our
friends."

Little at the farm was changed. There were more vines on the home--the
study was overgrown--that was all. Even Ellerslie remained as the
children had left it, with all the small comforts and utensils in place.
Most of the old friends were there; only Mrs. Langdon and Theodore Crane
were missing. The Beechers drove up to see them, as formerly, and the
old discussions on life and immortality were taken up in the old places.

Mrs. Beecher once came with some curious thin layers of leaves of stone
which she had found, knowing Mark Twain's interest in geology. Later,
when they had been discussing the usual problems, he said he would write
an agreement on those imperishable leaves, to be laid away until the ages
should solve their problems. He wrote it in verse:

If you prove right and I prove wrong,
A million years from now,
In language plain and frank and strong
My error I'll avow
To your dear waking face.

If I prove right, by God His grace,
Full sorry I shall be,
For in that solitude no trace
There'll be of you and me.

A million years, O patient stone,
You've waited for this message.
Deliver it a million hence;
(Survivor pays expressage.)
MARK TWAIN

Contract with Mrs. T. K. Beecher, July 2, 1895.


Pond came to Elmira and the route westward was arranged. Clemens decided
to give selections from his books, as he had done with Cable, and to
start without much delay. He dreaded the prospect of setting out on that
long journey alone, nor could Mrs. Clemens find it in her heart to
consent to such a plan. It was bitterly hard to know what to do, but it
was decided at last that she and one of the elder daughters should
accompany him, the others remaining with their aunt at Quarry Farm.
Susy, who had the choice, dreaded ocean travel, and felt that she would
be happier and healthier to rest in the quiet of that peaceful hilltop.
She elected to remain with her aunt and jean; and it fell to Clara to go.
Major Pond and his wife would accompany them as far as Vancouver. They
left Elmira on the night of the 14th of July. When the train pulled away
their last glimpse was of Susy, standing with the others under the
electric light of the railway platform, waving them good-by.




CXCI

Clemens had been ill in Elmira with a distressing carbuncle, and was
still in no condition to undertake steady travel and entertainment in
that fierce summer heat. He was fearful of failure. "I sha'n't be able
to stand on a platform," he wrote Mr. Rogers; but they pushed along
steadily with few delays. They began in Cleveland, thence by the Great
Lakes, traveling by steamer from one point to another, going constantly,
with readings at every important point--Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Paul,
Winnipeg, Butte, and through the great Northwest, arriving at Vancouver
at last on August 16th, but one day behind schedule time.

It had been a hot, blistering journey, but of immense interest, for none
of them had traveled through the Northwest, and the wonder and grandeur
of it all, its scenery, its bigness, its mighty agriculture, impressed
them. Clemens in his notes refers more than once to the "seas" and
"ocean" of wheat.

There is the peace of the ocean about it and a deep contentment, a
heaven-wide sense of ampleness, spaciousness, where pettiness and
all small thoughts and tempers must be out of place, not suited to
it, and so not intruding. The scattering, far-off homesteads, with
trees about them, were so homelike and remote from the warring
world, so reposeful and enticing. The most distant and faintest
under the horizon suggested fading ships at sea.

The Lake travel impressed him; the beauties and cleanliness of the Lake
steamers, which he compares with those of Europe, to the disadvantage of
the latter. Entering Port Huron he wrote:

The long approach through narrow ways with flat grass and wooded
land on both sides, and on the left a continuous row of summer
cottages, with small-boat accommodations for visiting across the
little canals from family to family, the groups of summer-dressed
young people all along waving flags and handkerchiefs and firing
cannon, our boat replying with toots of the hoarse whistle and now
and then a cannon, and meeting steamers in the narrow way, and once
the stately sister-ship of the line crowded with summer-dressed
people waving-the rich browns and greens of the rush-grown, far-
reaching flat-lands, with little glimpses of water away on their
farther edges, the sinking sun throwing a crinkled broad carpet of
gold on the water-well, it is the perfection of voyaging.

It had seemed a doubtful experiment to start with Mrs. Clemens on that
journey in the summer heat; but, strange to say, her health improved, and
she reached Vancouver by no means unfit for the long voyage ahead. No
doubt the change and continuous interest and their splendid welcome
everywhere and their prosperity were accountable. Everywhere they were
entertained; flowers filled their rooms; carriages and committees were
always waiting. It was known that Mark Twain had set out for the purpose
of paying his debts, and no cause would make a deeper appeal to his
countrymen than that, or, for that matter, to the world at large.

From Winnipeg he wrote to Mr. Rogers:

At the end of an hour and a half I offered to let the audience go,
but they said "go on," and I did.

He had five thousand dollars to forward to Rogers to place against his
debt account by the time he reached the Coast, a fine return for a
month's travel in that deadly season. At no more than two places were
the houses less than crowded. One of these was Anaconda, then a small
place, which they visited only because the manager of the entertainment
hall there had known Clemens somewhere back in the sixties and was eager
to have him. He failed to secure the amount of the guarantee required by
Pond, and when Pond reported to Clemens that he had taken "all he had"
Clemens said:

"And you took the last cent that poor fellow had. Send him one hundred
dollars, and if you can't afford to stand your share charge it all to me.
I'm not going around robbing my friends who are disappointed in my
commercial value. I don't want to get money that way."

"I sent the money," said Pond afterward, "and was glad of the privilege
of standing my share."

Clemens himself had not been in the best of health during the trip. He
had contracted a heavy cold and did not seem to gain strength. But in a
presentation copy of 'Roughing It', given to Pond as a souvenir, he
wrote:

"Here ends one of the smoothest and pleasantest trips across the
continent that any group of five has ever made."

There were heavy forest fires in the Northwest that year, and smoke
everywhere. The steamer Waryimoo, which was to have sailed on the 16th,
went aground in the smoke, and was delayed a week. While they were
waiting, Clemens lectured in Victoria, with the Governor-General and Lady
Aberdeen and their little son in the audience. His note-book says:

They came in at 8.45, 15 minutes late; wish they would always be
present, for it isn't permissible to begin until they come; by that
time the late-comers are all in.

Clemens wrote a number of final letters from Vancouver. In one of them
to Mr. J. Henry Harper, of Harper & Brothers, he expressed the wish that
his name might now be printed as the author of "Joan," which had begun
serially in the April Magazine. He thought it might, help his lecturing
tour and keep his name alive. But a few days later, with Mrs. Clemens's
help, he had reconsidered, and wrote:

My wife is a little troubled by my wanting my nom de plume put to
the "Joan of Arc" so soon. She thinks it might go counter to your
plans, and that you ought to be left free and unhampered in the
matter.

All right-so be it. I wasn't strenuous about it, and wasn't meaning
to insist; I only thought my reasons were good, and I really think
so yet, though I do confess the weight and fairness of hers.

As a matter of fact the authorship of "Joan" had been pretty generally
guessed by the second or third issue. Certain of its phrasing and humor
could hardly have come from another pen than Mark Twain's. The
authorship was not openly acknowledged, however, until the publication of
the book, the following May.

Among the letters from Vancouver was this one to Rudyard Kipling

DEAR KIPLING,--It is reported that you are about to visit India.
This has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may
unload from my conscience a debt long due to you. Years ago you
came from India to Elmira to visit me, as you said at the time. It
has always been my purpose to return that visit & that great
compliment some day. I shall arrive next January & you must be
ready. I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with
silver bells & ribbons & escorted by a troop of native howdahs
richly clad & mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; & you must be
on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.

To the press he gave this parting statement:

It has been reported that I sacrificed for the benefit of the
creditors the property of the publishing firm whose financial backer
I was and that I am now lecturing for my own benefit. This is an
error. I intend the lectures as well as the property for the
creditors. The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a
merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws
of insolvency and start free again for himself. But I am not a
business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot
compromise for less than 100 cents on the dollar and its debts never
outlaw. From my reception thus far on my lecturing tour I am
confident that if I live I can pay off the last debt within four
years, after which, at the age of sixty-four, I can make a fresh and
unincumbered start in life. I am going to Australia, India, and
South Africa, and next year I hope to make a tour of the great
cities of the United States. I meant, when I began, to give my
creditors all the benefit of this, but I am beginning to feel that I
am gaining something from it, too, and that my dividends, if not
available for banking purposes, may be even more satisfactory than
theirs.

There was one creditor, whose name need, not be "handed down to infamy,"
who had refused to consent to any settlement except immediate payment in
full, and had pursued with threatened attachment of earnings and
belongings, until Clemens, exasperated, had been disposed to turn over to
his creditors all remaining properties and let that suffice, once and for
all. But this was momentary. He had presently instructed Mr. Rogers to
"pay Shylock in full," and to assure any others that he would pay them,
too, in the end. But none of the others annoyed him.

It was on the afternoon of August 23, 1895, that they were off at last.
Major Pond and his wife lunched with them on board and waved them good-by
as long as they could see the vessel. The far voyage which was to carry
them for the better part of the year to the under side of the world had
begun.




CXCII

"FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR"

Mark Twain himself has written with great fulness the story of that
traveling--setting down what happened, and mainly as it happened, with
all the wonderful description, charm, and color of which he was so great
a master. We need do little more than summarize then--adding a touch
here and there, perhaps, from another point of view.

They had expected to stop at the Sandwich Islands, but when they arrived
in the roadstead of Honolulu, word came that cholera had broken out and
many were dying daily. They could not land. It was a double
disappointment; not only were the lectures lost, but Clemens had long
looked forward to revisiting the islands he had so loved in the days of
his youth. There was nothing for them to do but to sit on the decks in
the shade of the awnings and look at the distant shore. In his book he
says:

We lay in luminous blue water; shoreward the water was green-green
and brilliant; at the shore itself it broke in a long, white ruffle,
and with no crash, no sound that we could hear. The town was buried
under a mat of foliage that looked like a cushion of moss. The
silky mountains were clothed in soft, rich splendors of melting
color, and some of the cliffs were veiled in slanting mists. I
recognized it all. It was just as I had seen it long before, with
nothing of its beauty lost, nothing of its charm wanting.

In his note-book he wrote: "If I might, I would go ashore and never
leave."

This was the 31 st of August. Two days later they were off again,
sailing over the serene Pacific, bearing to the southwest for Australia.
They crossed the equator, which he says was wisely put where it is,
because if it had been run through Europe all the kings would have tried
to grab it. They crossed it September 6th, and he notes that Clara
kodaked it. A day or two later the north star disappeared behind them
and the constellation of the Cross came into view above the southern
horizon. Then presently they were among the islands of the southern
Pacific, and landed for a little time on one of the Fiji group. They had
twenty-four days of halcyon voyaging between Vancouver and Sydney with
only one rough day. A ship's passengers get closely acquainted on a trip
of that length and character. They mingle in all sorts of diversions to
while away the time; and at the end have become like friends of many
years.

On the night of September 15th-a night so dark that from the ship's deck
one could not see the water--schools of porpoises surrounded the ship,
setting the water alive with phosphorescent splendors: "Like glorified
serpents thirty to fifty feet long. Every curve of the tapering long
body perfect. The whole snake dazzlingly illumined. It was a weird
sight to see this sparkling ghost come suddenly flashing along out of the
solid gloom and stream past like a meteor."