Mark Twain A Biography Part 133

Still, to have everything beyond cavil right, We will dine with you here till Sunday night.

Thomas Brackett Reed followed with what proved to be the last speech he would ever make, as it was also one of his best. All the speakers did well that night, and they included some of the country's foremost in oratory: Chauncey Depew, St. Clair McKelway, Hamilton Mabie, and Wayne MacVeagh. Dr. Henry van d.y.k.e and John Kendrick Bangs read poems. The chairman constantly kept the occasion from becoming too serious by maintaining an att.i.tude of "thinking amba.s.sador" for the guest of the evening, gently pushing Clemens back in his seat when he attempted to rise and expressing for him an opinion of each of the various tributes.

"The limit has been reached," he announced at the close of Dr. van d.y.k.e's poem. "More that is better could not be said. Gentlemen, Mr.

Clemens."

It is seldom that Mark Twain has made a better after-dinner speech than he delivered then. He was surrounded by some of the best minds of the nation, men a.s.sembled to do him honor. They expected much of him--to Mark Twain always an inspiring circ.u.mstance. He was greeted with cheers and hand-clapping that came volley after volley, and seemed never ready to end. When it had died away at last he stood waiting a little in the stillness for his voice; then he said, "I think I ought to be allowed to talk as long as I want to," and again the storm broke.

It is a speech not easy to abridge--a finished and perfect piece of after-dinner eloquence,--[The "Sixty-seventh Birthday Speech" entire is included in the volume Mark Twain's Speeches.]--full of humorous stories and moving references to old friends--to Hay; and Reed, and Twich.e.l.l, and Howells, and Rogers, the friends he had known so long and loved so well. He told of his recent trip to his boyhood home, and how he had stood with John Briggs on Holliday's Hill and they had pointed out the haunts of their youth. Then at the end he paid a tribute to the companion of his home, who could not be there to share his evening's triumph. This peroration--a beautiful heart-offering to her and to those that had shared in long friendship--demands admission:

Now, there is one invisible guest here. A part of me is not present; the larger part, the better part, is yonder at her home; that is my wife, and she has a good many personal friends here, and I think it won't distress any one of them to know that, although she is going to be confined to her bed for many months to come from that nervous prostration, there is not any danger and she is coming along very well--and I think it quite appropriate that I should speak of her. I knew her for the first time just in the same year that I first knew John Hay and Tom Reed and Mr. Twich.e.l.l--thirty-six years ago--and she has been the best friend I have ever had, and that is saying a good deal--she has reared me--she and Twich.e.l.l together --and what I am I owe to them. Twich.e.l.l--why, it is such a pleasure to look upon Twich.e.l.l's face! For five and twenty years I was under the Rev. Mr. Twich.e.l.l's tuition, I was in his pastorate occupying a pew in his church and held him in due reverence. That man is full of all the graces that go to make a person companionable and beloved; and wherever Twich.e.l.l goes to start a church the people flock there to buy the land; they find real estate goes up all around the spot, and the envious and the thoughtful always try to get Twich.e.l.l to move to their neighborhood and start a church; and wherever you see him go you can go and buy land there with confidence, feeling sure that there will be a double price for you before very long.

I have tried to do good in this world, and it is marvelous in how many different ways I have done good, and it is comfortable to reflect--now, there's Mr. Rogers--just out of the affection I bear that man many a time I have given him points in finance that he had never thought of--and if he could lay aside envy, prejudice, and superst.i.tion, and utilize those ideas in his business, it would make a difference in his bank-account.

Well, I liked the poetry. I liked all the speeches and the poetry, too. I liked Dr. van d.y.k.e's poem. I wish I could return thanks in proper measure to you, gentlemen, who have spoken and violated your feelings to pay me compliments; some were merited and some you overlooked, it is true; and Colonel Harvey did slander every one of you, and put things into my mouth that I never said, never thought of at all.

And now my wife and I, out of our single heart, return you our deepest and most grateful thanks, and--yesterday was her birthday.

The sixty-seventh birthday dinner was widely celebrated by the press, and newspaper men generally took occasion to pay brilliant compliments to Mark Twain. Arthur Brisbane wrote editorially:

For more than a generation he has been the Messiah of a genuine gladness and joy to the millions of three continents.

It was little more than a week later that one of the old friends he had mentioned, Thomas Brackett Reed, apparently well and strong that birthday evening, pa.s.sed from the things of this world. Clemens felt his death keenly, and in a "good-by" which he wrote for Harper's Weekly he said:

His was a nature which invited affection--compelled it, in fact--and met it half-way. Hence, he was "Tom" to the most of his friends and to half of the nation....

I cannot remember back to a time when he was not "Tom" Reed to me, nor to a time when he could have been offended at being so addressed by me. I cannot remember back to a time when I could let him alone in an after-dinner speech if he was present, nor to a time when he did not take my extravagance concerning him and misstatements about him in good part, nor yet to a time when he did not pay them back with usury when his turn came. The last speech he made was at my birthday dinner at the end of November, when naturally I was his text; my last word to him was in a letter the next day; a day later I was ill.u.s.trating a fantastic article on art with his portrait among others--a portrait now to be laid reverently away among the jests that begin in humor and end in pathos. These things happened only eight days ago, and now he is gone from us, and the nation is speaking of him as one who was. It seems incredible, impossible.

Such a man, such a friend, seems to us a permanent possession; his vanishing from our midst is unthinkable, as was the vanishing of the Campanile, that had stood for a thousand years and was turned to dust in a moment.

The appreciation closes:

I have only wished to say how fine and beautiful was his life and character, and to take him by the hand and say good-by, as to a fortunate friend who has done well his work and gees a pleasant journey.

CCXXV. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CONTROVERSIES

The North American Review for December (1902) contained an instalment of the Christian Science series which Mark Twain had written in Vienna several years before. He had renewed his interest in the doctrine, and his admiration for Mrs. Eddy's peculiar abilities and his antagonism toward her had augmented in the mean time. Howells refers to the "mighty moment when Clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which superst.i.tion n.o.body, and he least of all, expected to destroy":

He believed that as a religious machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church, and destined to be more formidable in its control of the minds of men....

An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not.

only his admiration for the masterly policy of the Christian Science hierarchy, but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on his friends and family if they wished it. He had a tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scienticians, but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the regulars, rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in. He was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines.

Clemens never had any quarrel with the theory of Christian Science or mental healing, or with any of the empiric practices. He acknowledged good in all of them, and he welcomed most of them in preference to materia medica. It is true that his animosity for the founder of the Christian Science cult sometimes seems to lap over and fringe the religion itself; but this is apparent rather than real. Furthermore, he frequently expressed a deep obligation which humanity owed to the founder of the faith, in that she had organized a healing element ignorantly and indifferently employed hitherto. His quarrel with Mrs.

Eddy lay in the belief that she herself, as he expressed it, was "a very unsound Christian Scientist."

I believe she has a serious malady--self-edification--and that it will be well to have one of the experts demonstrate over her. [But he added]: Closely examined, painstakingly studied, she is easily the most interesting person on the planet, and in several ways as easily the most extraordinary woman that was ever born upon it.

Necessarily, the forces of Christian Science were aroused by these articles, and there were various replies, among them, one by the founder herself, a moderate rejoinder in her usual literary form.

"Mrs. Eddy in Error," in the North American Review for April, 1903, completed what Clemens had to say on the matter for this time.

He was putting together a book on the subject, comprised of his various published papers and some added chapters. It would not be a large volume, and he offered to let his Christian Science opponents share it with him, stating their side of the case. Mr. William D. McCrackan, one of the church's chief advocates, was among those invited to partic.i.p.ate.

McCrackan and Clemens, from having begun as enemies, had become quite friendly, and had discussed their differences face to face at considerable length. Early in the controversy Clemens one night wrote McCrackan a pretty savage letter. He threw it on the hall table for mailing, but later got out of bed and slipped down-stairs to get it. It was too late--the letters had been gathered up and mailed. Next evening a truly Christian note came from McCrackan, returning the hasty letter, which he said he was sure the writer would wish to recall. Their friendship began there. For some reason, however, the collaborated volume did not materialize. In the end, publication was delayed a number of years, by which time Clemens's active interest was a good deal modified, though the practice itself never failed to invite his attention.

Howells refers to his anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the postponement of the book, and these Clemens vented at the time in another ma.n.u.script ent.i.tled, "Eddypus," an imaginary history of a thousand years hence, when Eddyism should rule the world. By that day its founder would have become a deity, and the calendar would be changed to accord with her birth. It was not publishable matter, and really never intended as such. It was just one of the things which Mark Twain wrote to relieve mental pressure.

CCXXVI. "WAS IT HEAVEN? OR h.e.l.l?"

The Christmas number of Harper's Magazine for 1902 contained the story, "Was it Heaven? or h.e.l.l?" and it immediately brought a flood of letters to its author from grateful readers on both sides of the ocean. An Englishman wrote: "I want to thank you for writing so pathetic and so profoundly true a story"; and an American declared it to be the best short story ever written. Another letter said:

I have learned to love those maiden liars--love and weep over them --then put them beside Dante's Beatrice in Paradise.

There were plenty of such letters; but there was one of a different sort. It was a letter from a man who had but recently gone through almost precisely the experience narrated in the tale. His dead daughter had even borne the same name--Helen. She had died of typhus while her mother was prostrated with the same malady, and the deception had been maintained in precisely the same way, even to the fict.i.tiously written letters. Clemens replied to this letter, acknowledging the striking nature of the coincidence it related, and added that, had he invented the story, he would have believed it a case of mental telegraphy.

I was merely telling a true story just as it had been told to me by one who well knew the mother and the daughter & all the beautiful & pathetic details. I was living in the house where it had happened, three years before, & I put it on paper at once while it was fresh in my mind, & its pathos still straining at my heartstrings.

Clemens did not guess that the coincidences were not yet complete, that within a month the drama of the tale would be enacted in his own home.

In his note-book, under the date of December 24(1902), he wrote:

Jean was. .h.i.t with a chill: Clara was completing her watch in her mother's room and there was no one able to force Jean to go to bed.

As a result she is pretty ill to-day-fever & high temperature.

Three days later he added:

It was pneumonia. For 5 days jean's temperature ranged between 103 & 104 2/5, till this morning, when it got down to 101. She looks like an escaped survivor of a forest fire. For 6 days now my story in the Christmas Harper's "Was it Heaven? or h.e.l.l?"--has been enacted in this household. Every day Clara & the nurses have lied about Jean to her mother, describing the fine times she is having outdoors in the winter sports.

That proved a hard, trying winter in the Clemens home, and the burden of it fell chiefly, indeed almost entirely, upon Clara Clemens. Mrs.

Clemens became still more frail, and no other member of the family, not even her husband, was allowed to see her for longer than the briefest interval. Yet the patient was all the more anxious to know the news, and daily it had to be prepared--chiefly invented--for her comfort. In an account which Clemens once set down of the "Siege and Season of Unveracity," as he called it, he said:

Clara stood a daily watch of three or four hours, and hers was a hard office indeed. Daily she sealed up in her heart a dozen dangerous truths, and thus saved her mother's life and hope and happiness with holy lies. She had never told her mother a lie in her life before, and I may almost say that she never told her a truth afterward. It was fortunate for us all that Clara's reputation for truthfulness was so well established in her mother's mind. It was our daily protection from disaster. The mother never doubted Clara's word. Clara could tell her large improbabilities without exciting any suspicion, whereas if I tried to market even a small and simple one the case would have been different. I was never able to get a reputation like Clara's. Mrs. Clemens questioned Clara every day concerning Jean's health, spirits, clothes, employments, and amus.e.m.e.nts, and how she was enjoying herself; and Clara furnished the information right along in minute detail--every word of it false, of course. Every day she had to tell how Jean dressed, and in time she got so tired of using Jean's existing clothes over and over again, and trying to get new effects out of them, that finally, as a relief to her hard-worked invention, she got to adding imaginary clothes to Jean's wardrobe, and probably would have doubled it and trebled it if a warning note in her mother's comments had not admonished her that she was spending more money on these spectral gowns and things than the family income justified.

Some portions of detailed accounts of Clara's busy days of this period, as written at the time by Clemens to Twich.e.l.l and to Mrs. Crane, are eminently worth preserving. To Mrs. Crane:

Clara does not go to her Monday lesson in New York today [her mother having seemed not so well through the night], but forgets that fact and enters her mother's room (where she has no business to be) toward train-time dressed in a wrapper.

LIVY. Why, Clara, aren't you going to your lesson?

CLARA (almost caught). Yes.

L. In that costume?

CL. Oh no.

L. Well, you can't make your train; it's impossible.

CL. I know, but I'm going to take the other one.

L. Indeed that won't do--you'll be ever so much too late for your lesson.