Mark Twain A Biography Part 165

He spoke of how great literary minds usually came along in company. He said:

"Now and then, on the stream of time, small gobs of that thing which we call genius drift down, and a few of these lodge at some particular point, and others collect about them and make a sort of intellectual island--a towhead, as they say on the river--such an acc.u.mulation of intellect we call a group, or school, and name it.

"Thirty years ago there was the Cambridge group. Now there's been still another, which included Aldrich and Howells and Stedman and Cable. It will soon be gone. I suppose they will have to name it by and by."

He pointed out houses here and there of people he had known and visited in other days. The driver was very anxious to go farther, to other and more distinguished sights. Clemens mildly but firmly refused any variation of the program, and so we kept on driving around and around the shaded loop of Beacon Street until dusk fell and the lights began to twinkle among the trees.

CCLXXI. DEATH OF "SAM" MOFFETT

Clemens' next absence from Redding came on August 1, 1908, when the sudden and shocking news was received of the drowning of his nephew, Samuel E. Moffett, in the surf of the Jersey sh.o.r.e. Moffett was his nearest male relative, and a man of fine intellect and talents. He was superior in those qualities which men love--he was large-minded and large-hearted, and of n.o.ble ideals. With much of the same sense of humor which had made his uncle's fame, he had what was really an abnormal faculty of acquiring and retaining encyclopedic data. Once as a child he had visited Hartford when Clemens was laboring over his history game.

The boy was much interested, and asked permission to help. His uncle willingly consented, and referred him to the library for his facts. But he did not need to consult the books; he already had English history stored away, and knew where to find every detail of it. At the time of his death Moffett held an important editorial position on Collier's Weekly.

Clemens was fond and proud of his nephew. Returning from the funeral, he was much depressed, and a day or two later became really ill. He was in bed for a few days, resting, he said, after the intense heat of the journey. Then he was about again and proposed billiards as a diversion.

We were all alone one very still, warm August afternoon playing, when he suddenly said:

"I feel a little dizzy; I will sit down a moment."

I brought him a gla.s.s of water and he seemed to recover, but when he rose and started to play I thought he had a dazed look. He said:

"I have lost my memory. I don't know which is my ball. I don't know what game we are playing."

But immediately this condition pa.s.sed, and we thought little of it, considering it merely a phase of biliousness due to his recent journey.

I have been told since, by eminent pract.i.tioners, that it was the first indication of a more serious malady.

He became apparently quite himself again and showed his usual vigor-light of step and movement, able to skip up and down stairs as heretofore. In a letter to Mrs. Crane, August 12th, he spoke of recent happenings:

DEAR AUNT SUE,--It was a most moving, a most heartbreaking sight, the spectacle of that stunned & crushed & inconsolable family. I came back here in bad shape, & had a bilious collapse, but I am all right again, though the doctor from New York has given peremptory orders that I am not to stir from here before frost. O fortunate Sam Moffett! fortunate Livy Clemens! doubly fortunate Susy! Those swords go through & through my heart, but there is never a moment that I am not glad, for the sake of the dead, that they have escaped.

How Livy would love this place! How her very soul would steep itself thankfully in this peace, this tranquillity, this deep stillness, this dreamy expanse of woodsy hill & valley! You must come, Aunt Sue, & stay with us a real good visit. Since June 26 we have had 21 guests, & they have all liked it and said they would come again.

To Howells, on the same day, he wrote:

Won't you & Mrs. Howells & Mildred come & give us as many days as you can spare & examine John's triumph? It is the most satisfactory house I am acquainted with, & the most satisfactorily situated..

.. I have dismissed my stenographer, & have entered upon a holiday whose other end is the cemetery.

CCLXXII. STORMFIELD ADVENTURES

Clemens had fully decided, by this time, to live the year round in the retirement at Stormfield, and the house at 21 Fifth Avenue was being dismantled. He had also, as he said, given up his dictations for the time, at least, after continuing them, with more or less regularity, for a period of two and a half years, during which he had piled up about half a million words of comment and reminiscence. His general idea had been to add portions of this matter to his earlier books as the copyrights expired, to give them new life and interest, and he felt that he had plenty now for any such purpose.

He gave his time mainly to his guests, his billiards, and his reading, though of course he could not keep from writing on this subject and that as the fancy moved him, and a drawer in one of his dressers began to acc.u.mulate fresh though usually fragmentary ma.n.u.scripts... He read the daily paper, but he no longer took the keen, restless interest in public affairs. New York politics did not concern him any more, and national politics not much. When the Evening Post wrote him concerning the advisability of renominating Governor Hughes he replied:

If you had asked me two months ago my answer would have been prompt & loud & strong: yes, I want Governor Hughes renominated. But it is too late, & my mouth is closed. I have become a citizen & taxpayer of Connecticut, & could not now, without impertinence, meddle in matters which are none of my business. I could not do it with impertinence without trespa.s.sing on the monopoly of another.

Howells speaks of Mark Twain's "absolute content" with his new home, and these are the proper words' to express it. He was like a storm-beaten ship that had drifted at last into a serene South Sea haven.

The days began and ended in tranquillity. There were no special morning regulations: One could have his breakfast at any time and at almost any place. He could have it in bed if he liked, or in the loggia or livingroom, or billiard-room. He might even have it in the diningroom, or on the terrace, just outside. Guests--there were usually guests--might suit their convenience in this matter--also as to the forenoons. The afternoon brought games--that is, billiards, provided the guest knew billiards, otherwise hearts. Those two games were his safety-valves, and while there were no printed requirements relating to them the unwritten code of Stormfield provided that guests, of whatever age or previous faith, should engage in one or both of these diversions.

Clemens, who usually spent his forenoon in bed with his reading and his letters, came to the green table of skill and chance eager for the onset; if the fates were kindly, he approved of them openly. If not--well, the fates were old enough to know better, and, as heretofore, had to take the consequences. Sometimes, when the weather was fine and there were no games (this was likely to be on Sunday afternoons), there were drives among the hills and along the Saugatuck through the Bedding Glen.

The cat was always "purring on the hearth" at Stormfield--several cats--for Mark Twain's fondness for this clean, intelligent domestic animal remained, to the end, one of his happiest characteristics. There were never too many cats at Stormfield, and the "hearth" included the entire house, even the billiard-table. When, as was likely to happen at any time during the game, the kittens Sinbad, or Danbury, or Billiards would decide to hop up and play with the b.a.l.l.s, or sit in the pockets and grab at them as they went by, the game simply added this element of chance, and the uninvited player was not disturbed. The cats really owned Stormfield; any one could tell that from their deportment. Mark Twain held the t.i.tle deeds; but it was Danbury and Sinbad and the others that possessed the premises. They occupied any portion of the house or its furnishings at will, and they never failed to attract attention.

Mark Twain might be preoccupied and indifferent to the comings and goings of other members of the household; but no matter what he was doing, let Danbury appear in the offing and he was observed and greeted with due deference, and complimented and made comfortable. Clemens would arise from the table and carry certain choice food out on the terrace to Tammany, and be satisfied with almost no acknowledgment by way of appreciation. One could not imagine any home of Mark Twain where the cats were not supreme. In the evening, as at 21 Fifth Avenue, there was music--the stately measures of the orchestrelle--while Mark Twain smoked and mingled unusual speculation with long, long backward dreams.

It was three months from the day of arrival in Redding that some guests came to Stormfield without invitation--two burglars, who were carrying off some bundles of silver when they were discovered. Claude, the butler, fired a pistol after them to hasten their departure, and Clemens, wakened by the shots, thought the family was opening champagne and went to sleep again.

It was far in the night; but neighbor H. A. Lounsbury and Deputy-Sheriff Banks were notified, and by morning the thieves were captured, though only after a pretty desperate encounter, during which the officer received a bullet-wound. Lounsbury and a Stormfield guest had tracked them in the dark with a lantern to Bethel, a distance of some seven miles. The thieves, also their pursuers, had boarded the train there.

Sheriff Banks was waiting at the West Redding station when the train came down, and there the capture was made. It was a remarkably prompt and shrewd piece of work. Clemens gave credit for its success chiefly to Lounsbury, whose talents in many fields always impressed him. The thieves were taken to the Redding Town Hall for a preliminary healing.

Subsequently they received severe sentences.

Clemens tacked this notice on his front door:

NOTICE

TO THE NEXT BURGLAR

There is nothing but plated ware in this house now and henceforth.

You will find it in that bra.s.s thing in the dining-room over in the corner by the basket of kittens.

If you want the basket put the kittens in the bra.s.s thing. Do not make a noise--it disturbs the family.

You will find rubbers in the front hall by that thing which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think they call it, or pergola, or something like that.

Please close the door when you go away!

Very truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS.

CCLXXIII. STORMFIELD PHILOSOPHIES

Now came the tranquil days of the Connecticut autumn. The change of the landscape colors was a constant delight to Mark Twain. There were several large windows in his room, and he called them his picture-gallery. The window-panes were small, and each formed a separate picture of its own that was changing almost hourly. The red tones that began to run through the foliage; the red berry bushes; the fading gra.s.s, and the little touches of sparkling frost that came every now and then at early morning; the background of distant blue hills and changing skies-these things gave his gallery a mult.i.tude of variation that no art-museums could furnish. He loved it all, and he loved to walk out in it, pacing up and down the terrace, or the long path that led to the pergola at the foot of a natural garden. If a friend came, he was willing to walk much farther; and we often descended the hill in one direction or another, though usually going toward the "gorge,"

a romantic spot where a clear brook found its way through a deep and rather dangerous-looking chasm. Once he was persuaded to descend into this fairy-like place, for it was well worth exploring; but his footing was no longer sure and he did not go far.

He liked better to sit on the gra.s.s-grown, rocky arch above and look down into it, and let his talk follow his mood. He liked to contemplate the geology of his surroundings, the record of the ageless periods of construction required to build the world. The marvels of science always appealed to him. He reveled in the thought of the almost limitless stretches of time, the millions upon millions of years that had been required for this stratum and that--he liked to amaze himself with the sounding figures. I remember him expressing a wish to see the Grand Canon of Arizona, where, on perpendicular walls six thousand feet high, the long story of geological creation is written. I had stopped there during my Western trip of the previous year, and I told him something of its wonders. I urged him to see them for himself, offering to go with him. He said:

"I should enjoy that; but the railroad journey is so far and I should have no peace. The papers would get hold of it, and I would have to make speeches and be interviewed, and I never want to do any of those things again."

I suggested that the railroads would probably be glad to place a private car at his service, so that he might travel in comfort; but he shook his head.

"That would only make me more conspicuous."

"How about a disguise?"