Mark Twain A Biography Part 112

It explained that Susy was slightly ill-nothing of consequence. But we were disquieted and began to cable for later news. This was Friday. All day no answer--and the ship to leave Southampton next day at noon. Clara and her mother began packing, to be ready in case the news should be bad. Finally came a cablegram saying, "Wait for cablegram in the morning." This was not satisfactory--not rea.s.suring. I cabled again, asking that the answer be sent to Southampton, for the day was now closing. I waited in the post- office that night till the doors were closed, toward midnight, in the hope that good news might still come, but there was no message.

We sat silent at home till one in the morning waiting--waiting for we knew not what. Then we took the earlier morning train, and when we reached Southampton the message was there. It said the recovery would be long but certain. This was a great relief to me, but not to my wife. She was frightened. She and Clara went aboard the steamer at once and sailed for America, to nurse Susy. I remained behind to search for another and larger house in Guildford.

That was the 15th of August, 1896. Three days later, when my wife and Clara were about half-way across the ocean, I was standing in our dining-room, thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, "Susy was peacefully released to-day."

Some of those who in later years wondered at Mark Twain's occasional att.i.tude of pessimism and bitterness toward all creation, when his natural instinct lay all the other way, may find here some reasons in his logic of gloom. For years he and his had been fighting various impending disasters. In the end he had torn his family apart and set out on a weary pilgrimage to pay, for long financial unwisdom, a heavy price--a penance in which all, without complaint, had joined. Now, just when it seemed about ended, when they were ready to unite and be happy once more, when he could hold up his head among his fellows--in this moment of supreme triumph had come the message that Susy's lovely and blameless life was ended. There are not many greater dramas in fiction or in history than this. The wonder is not that Mark Twain so often preached the doctrine of despair during his later life, but that he did not exemplify it--that he did not become a misanthrope in fact.

Mark Twain's life had contained other tragedies, but no other that equaled this one. This time none of the elements were lacking--not the smallest detail. The dead girl had been his heart's pride; it was a year since he had seen her face, and now by this word he knew that he would never see it again. The blow had found him alone absolutely alone among strangers--those others--half-way across the ocean, drawing nearer and nearer to it, and he with no way to warn them, to prepare them, to comfort them.

Clemens sought no comfort for himself. Just as nearly forty years before he had writhed in self-accusation for the death of his younger brother, and as later he held himself to blame for the death of his infant son, so now he crucified himself as the slayer of Susy. To Mrs. Clemens he poured himself out in a letter in which he charged himself categorically as being wholly and solely responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their downfall, the separation from Susy, and this final incredible disaster. Only a human being, he said, could have done these things.

Susy Clemens had died in the old Hartford home. She had been well for a time at Quarry Farm, well and happy, but during the summer of '96 she had become restless, nervous, and unlike herself in many ways. Her health seemed to be gradually failing, and she renewed the old interest in mental science, always with the approval of her parents. Clemens had great faith in mind over matter, and Mrs. Clemens also believed that Susy's high-strung nature was especially calculated to receive benefit from a serene and confident mental att.i.tude. From Bombay, in January, she wrote Mrs. Crane:

I am very glad indeed that Susy has taken up Mental Science, and I do hope it may do her as much good as she hopes. Last winter we were so very anxious to have her get hold of it, and even felt at one time that we must go to America on purpose to have her have the treatment, so it all seems very fortunate that it should have come about as it has this winter.

Just how much or how little Susy was helped by this treatment cannot be known. Like Stevenson, she had "a soul of flame in a body of gauze," a body to be guarded through the spirit. She worked continuously at her singing and undoubtedly overdid herself. Early in the year she went over to Hartford to pay some good-by visit, remaining most of the time in the home of Charles Dudley Warner, working hard at her singing. Her health did not improve, and when Katie Leary went to Hartford to arrange for their departure she was startled at the change in her.

"Miss Susy; you are sick," she said. "You must have the doctor come."

Susy refused at first, but she grew worse and the doctor was sent for.

He thought her case not very serious--the result, he said, of overwork.

He prescribed some soothing remedies, and advised that she be kept very quiet, away from company, and that she be taken to her own home, which was but a step away. It was then that the letter was written and the first cable sent to England. Mrs. Crane was summoned from Elmira, also Charles Langdon. Mr. Twich.e.l.l was notified and came down from his summer place in the Adirondacks.

Susy did not improve. She became rapidly worse, and a few days later the doctor p.r.o.nounced her ailment meningitis. This was on the 15th of August--that hot, terrible August of 1896. Susy's fever increased and she wandered through the burning rooms in delirium and pain; then her sight left her, an effect of the disease. She lay down at last, and once, when Katie Leary was near her, she put her hands on Katie's face and said, "mama." She did not speak after that, but sank into unconsciousness, and on the evening of Tuesday, August 18th, the flame went out forever.

To Twich.e.l.l Clemens wrote of it:

Ah, well, Susy died at home. She had that privilege. Her dying eyes rested upon no thing that was strange to them, but only upon things which they had known & loved always & which had made her young years glad; & she had you & Sue & Katie & & John & Ellen.

This was happy fortune--I am thankful that it was vouchsafed to her.

If she had died in another house--well, I think I could not have borne that. To us our house was not unsentient matter--it had a heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes & deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its eloquent welcome--& we could not enter it unmoved. And could we now? oh, now, in spirit we should enter it unshod.

A tugboat with Dr. Rice, Mr. Twich.e.l.l, and other friends of the family went down the bay to meet the arriving vessel with Mrs. Clemens and Clara on board. It was night when the ship arrived, and they did not show themselves until morning; then at first to Clara. There had been little need to formulate a message--their presence there was enough--and when a moment later Clara returned to the stateroom her mother looked into her face and she also knew. Susy already had been taken to Elmira, and at half past ten that night Mrs. Clemens and Clara arrived there by the through train--the same train and in the same coach which they had taken one year and one month before on their journey westward around the world.

And again Susy was there, not waving her welcome in the glare of the lights as she had waved her farewell to us thirteen months before, but lying white and fair in her coffin in the house where she was born.

They buried her with the Langdon relatives and the little brother, and ordered a headstone with some lines which they had found in Australia:

Warm summer sun shine kindly here; Warm southern wind blow softly here; Green sod above lie light, lie light Good night, dear heart, good night, good night.

--[These lines at first were generally attributed to Clemens himself.

When this was reported to him he ordered the name of the Australian poet, Robert Richardson, cut beneath them. The word "southern" in the original read "northern," as in Australia, the warm wind is from the north. Richardson died in England in 1901.]

CXCIV. WINTER IN TEDWORTH SQUARE

Mrs. Clemens, Clara, and Jean, with Katie Leary, sailed for England without delay. Arriving there, they gave up the house in Guildford, and in a secluded corner of Chelsea, on the tiny and then almost unknown Tedworth Square (No. 23), they hid themselves away for the winter. They did not wish to be visited; they did not wish their whereabouts known except to a few of their closest friends. They wanted to be alone with their sorrow, and not a target for curious attention. Perhaps not a dozen people in London knew their address and the outside world was ignorant of it altogether. It was through this that a wild report started that Mark Twain's family had deserted him--that ill and in poverty he was laboring alone to pay his debts. This report--exploited in five-column head-lines by a hyper-hysterical paper of that period received wide attention.

James Ross Clemens, of the St. Louis branch, a nephew of Frau von Versen, was in London just then, and wrote at once, through Chatto & Windus, begging Mark Twain to command his relative's purse. The reply to this kind offer was an invitation to tea, and "Young Doctor Jim," as he was called, found his famous relative by no means abandoned or in want, but in pleasant quarters, with his family still loyal. The general impression survived, however, that Mark Twain was sorely pressed, and the New York Herald headed a public benefit fund for the payment of his debts. The Herald subscribed one thousand dollars on its own account, and Andrew Carnegie followed with another thousand, but the enterprise was barely under way when Clemens wrote a characteristic letter, in which he declared that while he would have welcomed the help offered, being weary of debt, his family did not wish him to accept and so long as he was able to take care of them through his own efforts.

Meantime he was back into literary harness; a notebook entry for October 24, 1896, says:

"Wrote the fist chapter of the book to-day-'Around the World'."

He worked at it uninterruptedly, for in work; there was respite, though his note-books show something of his mental torture, also his spiritual heresies. His series of mistakes and misfortunes, ending with the death of Susy, had tended to solidify his att.i.tude of criticism toward things in general and the human race in particular.

"Man is the only animal that blushes, or that needs to," was one of his maxims of this period, and in another place he sets down the myriad diseases which human flesh is heir to and his contempt for a creature subject to such afflictions and for a Providence that could invent them.

Even Mrs. Clemens felt the general sorrow of the race. "Poor, poor human nature," she wrote once during that long, gloomy winter.

Many of Mark Twain's notes refer to Susy. In one he says:

"I did not hear her glorious voice at its supremest--that was in Hartford a month or two before the end."

Notes of heavy regret most of them are, and self-reproach and the hopelessness of it all. In one place he records her accomplishment of speech, adding:

"And I felt like saying 'you marvelous child,' but never said it; to my sorrow I remember it now. But I come of an undemonstrative race."

He wrote to Twich.e.l.l:

But I have this consolation: that dull as I was I always knew enough to be proud when she commended me or my work--as proud as if Livy had done it herself--& I took it as the accolade from the hand of genius. I see now--as Livy always saw--that she had greatness in her, & that she herself was dimly conscious of it.

And now she is dead--& I can never tell her.

And closing a letter to Howells:

Good-by. Will healing ever come, or life have value again?

And shall we see Susy? Without doubt! without a shadow of doubt if it can furnish opportunity to break our hearts again.

On November 26th, Thanksgiving, occurs this note:

"We did not celebrate it. Seven years ago Susy gave her play for the first time."

And on Christmas:

London, 11.30 Xmas morning. The Square & adjacent streets are not merely quiet, they are dead. There is not a sound. At intervals a Sunday-looking person pa.s.ses along. The family have been to breakfast. We three sat & talked as usual, but the name of the day was not mentioned. It was in our minds, but we said nothing.

And a little later:

Since bad luck struck us it is risky for people to have to do with us. Our cook's sweetheart was healthy. He is rushing for the grave now. Emily, one of the maids, has lost the sight of one eye and the other is in danger. Wallace carried up coal & blacked the boots two months--has suddenly gone to the hospital--pleurisy and a bad case.

We began to allow ourselves to see a good deal of our friends, the Bigelows--straightway their baby sickened & died. Next Wilson got his skull fractured.

January 23, 1897. I wish the Lord would disguise Himself in citizen's clothing & make a personal examination of the sufferings of the poor in London. He would be moved & would do something for them Himself.

CXCV. "PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC".

Meantime certain publishing events had occurred. During his long voyage a number of Mark Twain's articles had appeared in the magazines, among them "Mental Telegraphy Again," in Harpers, and in the North American Review that scorching reply to Paul Bourget's reflections upon America.