Mark Twain A Biography Part 140

We are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in the world--though I have a reason to think I am the only one whose blacklist runs so light. Sometimes I feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude.

It was his Gospel he referred to as his unpublished book, his doctrine of Selfishness, and of Man the irresponsible Machine. To Twich.e.l.l he pretended to favor war, which he declared, to his mind, was one of the very best methods known of diminis.h.i.+ng the human race.

What a life it is!--this one! Everything we try to do, somebody intrudes & obstructs it. After years of thought & labor I have arrived within one little bit of a step of perfecting my invention for exhausting the oxygen in the globe's air during a stretch of two minutes, & of course along comes an obstructor who is inventing something to protect human life. d.a.m.n such a world anyway.

He generally wrote Twich.e.l.l when he had things to say that were outside of the pale of print. He was sure of an attentive audience of one, and the audience, whether it agreed with him or not, would at least understand him and be honored by his confidence. In one letter of that year he said:

I have written you to-day, not to do you a service, but to do myself one. There was bile in me. I had to empty it or lose my day to-morrow.

If I tried to empty it into the North American Review--oh, well, I couldn't afford the risk. No, the certainty! The certainty that I wouldn't be satisfied with the result; so I would burn it, & try again to-morrow; burn that and try again the next day. It happens so nearly every time. I have a family to support, & I can't afford this kind of dissipation. Last winter when I was sick I wrote a magazine article three times before I got it to suit me. I Put $500 worth of work on it every day for ten days, & at last when I got it to suit me it contained but 3,000 words-$900. I burned it & said I would reform.

And I have reformed. I have to work my bile off whenever it gets to where I can't stand it, but I can work it off on you economically, because I don't have to make it suit me. It may not suit you, but that isn't any matter; I'm not writing it for that. I have used you as an equilibrium--restorer more than once in my time, & shall continue, I guess. I would like to use Mr. Rogers, & he is plenty good-natured enough, but it wouldn't be fair to keep him rescuing me from my leather-headed business snarls & make him read interminable bile-irruptions besides; I can't use Howells, he is busy & old & lazy, & won't stand it; I dasn't use Clara, there's things I have to say which she wouldn't put up with--a very dear little ashcat, but has claws. And so--you're It.

[See the preface to the "Autobiography of Mark Twain": 'I am writing from the grave. On these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be straitly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it.' D.W.]

CCx.x.xV. A SUMMER IN NEW HAMPs.h.i.+RE

He took for the summer a house at Dublin, New Hamps.h.i.+re, the home of Henry Copley Greene, Lone Tree Hill, on the Monadnock slope. It was in a lovely locality, and for neighbors there were artists, literary people, and those of kindred pursuits, among them a number of old friends.

Colonel Higginson had a place near by, and Abbott H. Thayer, the painter, and George de Forest Brush, and the Raphael Pumpelly family, and many more.

Colonel Higginson wrote Clemens a letter of welcome as soon as the news got out that he was going to Dublin; and Clemens, answering, said:

I early learned that you would be my neighbor in the summer & I rejoiced, recognizing in you & your family a large a.s.set. I hope for frequent intercourse between the two households. I shall have my youngest daughter with me. The other one will go from the rest- cure in this city to the rest-cure in Norfolk, Connecticut; & we shall not see her before autumn. We have not seen her since the middle of October.

Jean, the younger daughter, went to Dublin & saw the house & came back charmed with it. I know the Thayers of old--manifestly there is no lack of attractions up there. Mrs. Thayer and I were s.h.i.+pmates in a wild excursion perilously near 40 years ago.

Aldrich was here half an hour ago, like a breeze from over the fields, with the fragrance still upon his spirit. I am tired wanting for that man to get old.

They went to Dublin in May, and became at once a part of the summer colony which congregated there. There was much going to and fro among the different houses, pleasant afternoons in the woods, mountain-climbing for Jean, and everywhere a spirit of fine, unpretentious comrades.h.i.+p.

The Copley Greene house was romantically situated, with a charming outlook. Clemens wrote to Twich.e.l.l:

We like it here in the mountains, in the shadows of Monadnock. It is a woody solitude. We have no near neighbors. We have neighbors and I can see their houses scattered in the forest distances, for we live on a hill. I am astonished to find that I have known 8 of these 14 neighbors a long time; 10 years is the shortest; then seven beginning with 25 years & running up to 37 years' friends.h.i.+p. It is the most remarkable thing I ever heard of.

This letter was written in July, and he states in it that he has turned out one hundred thousand words of a large ma.n.u.script.. It was a fantastic tale ent.i.tled "3,000 Years among the Microbes," a sort of scientific revel--or revelry--the autobiography of a microbe that had been once a man, and through a failure in a biological experiment transformed into a cholera germ when the experimenter was trying to turn him into a bird. His habitat was the person of a disreputable tramp named Blitzowski, a human continent of vast areas, with seething microbic nations and fantastic life problems. It was a satire, of course--Gulliver's Lilliput outdone--a sort of scientific, socialistic, mathematical jamboree.

He tired of it before it reached completion, though not before it had attained the proportions of a book of size. As a whole it would hardly have added to his reputation, though it is not without fine and humorous pa.s.sages, and certainly not without interest. Its chief mission was to divert him mentally that summer during, those days and nights when he would otherwise have been alone and brooding upon his loneliness.--[For extracts from "3,000 Years among the Microbes" see Appendix V, at the end of this work.] MARK TWAIN'S SUGGESTED t.i.tLE-PAGE FOR HIS MICROBE BOOK:

3000 YEARS AMONG THE MICROBES

By a Microbe

WITH NOTES added by the same Hand 7000 years later

Translated from the Original Microbic by

Mark Twain

His inability to reproduce faces in his mind's eye he mourned as an increasing calamity. Photographs were lifeless things, and when he tried to conjure up the faces of his dead they seemed to drift farther out of reach; but now and then kindly sleep brought to him something out of that treasure-house where all our realities are kept for us fresh and fair, perhaps for a day when we may claim them again. Once he wrote to Mrs. Crane:

SUSY DEAR,--I have had a lovely dream. Livy, dressed in black, was sitting up in my bed (here) at my right & looking as young & sweet as she used to when she was in health. She said, "What is the name of your sweet sister?" I said, "Pamela." "Oh yes, that is it, I thought it was--(naming a name which has escaped me) won't you write it down for me?" I reached eagerly for a pen & pad, laid my hands upon both, then said to myself, "It is only a dream," and turned back sorrowfully & there she was still. The conviction flamed through me that our lamented disaster was a dream, & this a reality.

I said, "How blessed it is, how blessed it is, it was all a dream, only a dream!" She only smiled and did not ask what dream I meant, which surprised me. She leaned her head against mine & kept saying, "I was perfectly sure it was a dream; I never would have believed it wasn't." I think she said several things, but if so they are gone from my memory. I woke & did not know I had been dreaming. She was gone. I wondered how she could go without my knowing it, but I did not spend any thought upon that. I was too busy thinking of how vivid & real was the dream that we had lost her, & how unspeakably blessed it was to find that it was not true & that she was still ours & with us.

He had the orchestrelle moved to Dublin, although it was no small undertaking, for he needed the solace of its harmonies; and so the days pa.s.sed along, and he grew stronger in body and courage as his grief drifted farther behind him. Sometimes, in the afternoon or in the evening; when the neighbors had come in for a little while, he would walk up and down and talk in his old, marvelous way of all the things on land and sea, of the past and of the future, "Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate," of the friends he had known and of the things he had done, of the sorrow and absurdities of the world.

It was the same old scintillating, incomparable talk of which Howells once said:

"We shall never know its like again. When he dies it will die with him."

It was during the summer at Dublin that Clemens and Rogers together made up a philanthropic ruse on Twich.e.l.l. Twich.e.l.l, through his own prodigal charities, had fallen into debt, a fact which Rogers knew. Rogers was a man who concealed his philanthropies when he could, and he performed many of them of which the world will never know: In this case he said:

"Clemens, I want to help Twich.e.l.l out of his financial difficulty. I will supply the money and you will do the giving. Twich.e.l.l must think it comes from you."

Clemens agreed to this on the condition that he be permitted to leave a record of the matter for his children, so that he would not appear in a false light to them, and that Twich.e.l.l should learn the truth of the gift, sooner or later. So the deed was done, and Twich.e.l.l and his wife lavished their thanks upon Clemens, who, with his wife, had more than once been their benefactors, making the deception easy enough now.

Clemens writhed under these letters of grat.i.tude, and forwarded them to Clara in Norfolk, and later to Rogers himself. He pretended to take great pleasure in this part of the conspiracy, but it was not an unmixed delight. To Rogers he wrote:

I wanted her [Clara] to see what a generous father she's got. I didn't tell her it was you, but by and by I want to tell her, when I have your consent; then I shall want her to remember the letters. I want a record there, for my Life when I am dead, & must be able to furnish the facts about the Relief-of-Lucknow-Twich.e.l.l in case I fall suddenly, before I get those facts with your consent, before the Twich.e.l.ls themselves.

I read those letters with immense pride! I recognized that I had scored one good deed for sure on my halo account. I haven't had anything that tasted so good since the stolen watermelon.

P. S.-I am hurrying them off to you because I dasn't read them again! I should blush to my heels to fill up with this unearned grat.i.tude again, pouring out of the thankful hearts of those poor swindled people who do not suspect you, but honestly believe I gave that money.

Mr. Rogers hastily replied:

MY DEAR CLEMENS,--The letters are lovely. Don't breathe. They are so happy! It would be a crime to let them think that you have in any way deceived them. I can keep still. You must. I am sending you all traces of the crime, so that you may look innocent and tell the truth, as you usually do when you think you can escape detection. Don't get rattled.

Seriously. You have done a kindness. You are proud of it, I know.

You have made your friends happy, and you ought to be so glad as to cheerfully accept reproof from your conscience. Joe Wadsworth and I once stole a goose and gave it to a poor widow as a Christmas present. No crime in that. I always put my counterfeit money on the plate. "The pa.s.ser of the sa.s.ser" always smiles at me and I get credit for doing generous things. But seriously again, if you do feel a little uncomfortable wait until I see you before you tell anybody. Avoid cultivating misery. I am trying to loaf ten solid days. We do hope to see you soon.

The secret was kept, and the matter presently (and characteristically) pa.s.sed out of Clemens's mind altogether. He never remembered to tell Twich.e.l.l, and it is revealed here, according to his wish.

The Russian-j.a.panese war was in progress that summer, and its settlement occurred in August. The terms of it did not please Mark Twain. When a newspaper correspondent asked him for an expression of opinion on the subject he wrote:

Russia was on the highroad to emanc.i.p.ation from an insane and intolerable slavery. I was hoping there would be no peace until Russian liberty was safe. I think that this was a holy war, in the best and n.o.blest sense of that abused term, and that no war was ever charged with a higher mission.

I think there can be no doubt that that mission is now defeated and Russia's chain riveted; this time to stay. I think the Tsar will now withdraw the small humanities that have been forced from him, and resume his medieval barbarisms with a relieved spirit and an immeasurable joy. I think Russian liberty has had its last chance and has lost it.

I think nothing has been gained by the peace that is remotely comparable to what has been sacrificed by it. One more battle would have abolished the waiting chains of billions upon billions of unborn Russians, and I wish it could have been fought. I hope I am mistaken, yet in all sincerity I believe that this peace is ent.i.tled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history.

It was the wisest public utterance on the subject--the deep, resonant note of truth sounding amid a clamor of foolish joy-bells. It was the message of a seer--the prophecy of a sage who sees with the clairvoyance of knowledge and human understanding. Clemens, a few days later, was invited by Colonel Harvey to dine with Baron Rosen and M. Sergius Witte; but an attack of his old malady--rheumatism--prevented his acceptance.

His telegram of declination apparently pleased the Russian officials, for Witte asked permission to publish it, and declared that he was going to take it home to show to the Tsar. It was as follows:

To COLONEL HARVEY,--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the ill.u.s.trious magicians who came here equipped with nothing but a pen, & with it have divided the honors of the war with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty centuries history will not get done in admiring these men who attempted what the world regarded as the impossible & achieved it.

MARK TWAIN.

But this was a modified form. His original draft would perhaps have been less gratifying to that Russian emba.s.sy. It read: