Mark Twain A Biography Part 109

There's one thing which makes it difficult for me to soberly realize that my ten-year dream is actually dissolved; and that is that it reverses my horoscope. The proverb says, "Born lucky, always lucky."

It was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned in the Mississippi or in Bear Creek, but I was pulled out in a drowned condition 9 times before I learned to swim, and was considered to be a cat in disguise. When the Pennsylvania blew up and the telegraph reported my brother as fatally injured (with 60 others) but made no mention of me, my uncle said to my mother "it means that Sam was somewhere else, after being on that boat a year and a half--he was born lucky." Yes, I was somewhere else. I am so superst.i.tious that I have always been afraid to have business dealings with certain relatives and friends of mine because they were unlucky people. All my life I have stumbled upon lucky chances of large size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my own stupidity and carelessness. And so I have felt entirely certain that the machine would turn up trumps eventually. It disappointed me lots of times, but I couldn't shake off the confidence of a lifetime in my luck.

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

I wish you had been in at the beginning. Then we should have had the good luck to step promptly ash.o.r.e.

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 a.s.sets 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 a.s.sist inventors and patentees, asking for his indors.e.m.e.nt. 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 circ.u.mstances--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 companions.h.i.+p. 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, gra.s.sy 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, ma.n.u.scripts, 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 a.s.sist there, as may happen; & that I will do.

CXC. STARTING ON THE LONG TRAIL. The tragedy of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', with its splendid ill.u.s.trations by Louis Loeb, having finished its course in the Century Magazine, had been issued by the American Publis.h.i.+ng 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d 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, b.u.t.te, 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, s.p.a.ciousness, 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 s.h.i.+ps 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: