Mark Twain A Biography Part 180

I spent most of each day with him, merely sitting by the bed and reading while he himself read or dozed. His nights were wakeful--he found it easier to sleep by day--and he liked to think that some one was there. He became interested in Hardy's Jude, and spoke of it with high approval, urging me to read it. He dwelt a good deal on the morals of it, or rather on the lack of them. He followed the tale to the end, finishing it the afternoon before we sailed. It was his last continuous reading. I noticed, when he slept, that his breathing was difficult, and I could see from day to day that he did not improve; but each evening he would be gay and lively, and he liked the entire family to gather around, while he became really hilarious over the various happenings of the day. It was only a few days before we sailed that the very severe attacks returned. The night of the 8th was a hard one. The doctors were summoned, and it was only after repeated injections of morphine that the pain had been eased. When I returned in the early morning he was sitting in his chair trying to sing, after his old morning habit. He took my hand and said:

"Well, I had a picturesque night. Every pain I had was on exhibition."

He looked out the window at the sunlight on the bay and green dotted islands. "'Sparkling and bright in the liquid light,'" he quoted.

"That's Hoffman. Anything left of Hoffman?"

"No," I said.

"I must watch for the Bermudian and see if she salutes," he said, presently. "The captain knows I am here sick, and he blows two short whistles just as they come up behind that little island. Those are for me."

He said he could breathe easier if he could lean forward, and I placed a card-table in front of him. His breakfast came in, and a little later he became quite gay. He drifted to Macaulay again, and spoke of King James's plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate William II., and how the clergy had brought themselves to see that there was no difference between killing a king in battle and by a.s.sa.s.sination. He had taken his seat by the window to watch for the Bermudian. She came down the bay presently, her bright red stacks towering vividly above the green island. It was a brilliant morning, the sky and the water a marvelous blue. He watched her anxiously and without speaking. Suddenly there were two white puffs of steam, and two short, hoa.r.s.e notes went up from her.

"Those are for me," he said, his face full of contentment. "Captain Fraser does not forget me."

There followed another bad night. My room was only a little distance away, and Claude came for me. I do not think any of us thought he would survive it; but he slept at last, or at least dozed. In the morning he said:

"That breast pain stands watch all night and the short breath all day.

I am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army. I want a jugful of that hypnotic injunction every night and every morning."

We began to fear now that he would not be able to sail on the 12th; but by great good-fortune he had wonderfully improved by the 12th, so much so that I began to believe, if once he could be in Stormfield, where the air was more vigorous, he might easily survive the summer. The humid atmosphere of the season increased the difficulty of his breathing.

That evening he was unusually merry. Mr. and Mrs. Allen and Helen and myself went in to wish him good night. He was loath to let us leave, but was reminded that he would sail in the morning, and that the doctor had insisted that he must be quiet and lie still in bed and rest. He was never one to be very obedient. A little later Mrs. Allen and I, in the sitting-room, heard some one walking softly outside on the veranda. We went out there, and he was marching up and down in his dressing-gown as unconcerned as if he were not an invalid at all. He hadn't felt sleepy, he said, and thought a little exercise would do him good. Perhaps it did, for he slept soundly that night--a great blessing.

Mr. Allen had chartered a special tug to come to Bay House landing in the morning and take him to the ship. He was carried in a little hand-chair to the tug, and all the way out he seemed light-spirited, anything but an invalid: The sailors carried him again in the chair to his state-room, and he bade those dear Bermuda friends good-by, and we sailed away.

As long as I remember anything I shall remember the forty-eight hours of that homeward voyage. It was a brief two days as time is measured; but as time is lived it has taken its place among those unmeasured periods by the side of which even years do not count.

At first he seemed quite his natural self, and asked for a catalogue of the ship's library, and selected some memoirs of the Countess of Cardigan for his reading. He asked also for the second volume of Carlyle's French Revolution, which he had with him. But we ran immediately into the more humid, more oppressive air of the Gulf Stream, and his breathing became at first difficult, then next to impossible.

There were two large port-holes, which I opened; but presently he suggested that it would be better outside. It was only a step to the main-deck, and no pa.s.sengers were there. I had a steamer-chair brought, and with Claude supported him to it and bundled him with rugs; but it had grown damp and chilly, and his breathing did not improve. It seemed to me that the end might come at any moment, and this thought was in his mind, too, for once in the effort for breath he managed to say:

"I am going--I shall be gone in a moment."

Breath came; but I realized then that even his cabin was better than this. I steadied him back to his berth and shut out most of that deadly dampness. He asked for the "hypnotic 'injunction" (for his humor never left him), and though it was not yet the hour prescribed I could not deny it. It was impossible for him to lie down, even to recline, without great distress. The opiate made him drowsy, and he longed for the relief of sleep; but when it seemed about to possess him the struggle for air would bring him upright.

During the more comfortable moments he spoke quite in the old way, and time and again made an effort to read, and reached for his pipe or a cigar which lay in the little berth hammock at his side. I held the match, and he would take a puff or two with satisfaction. Then the peace of it would bring drowsiness, and while I supported him there would come a few moments, perhaps, of precious sleep. Only a few moments, for the devil of suffocation was always lying in wait to bring him back for fresh tortures. Over and over again this was repeated, varied by him being steadied on his feet or sitting on the couch opposite the berth.

In spite of his suffering, two dominant characteristics remained--the sense of humor, and tender consideration for another.

Once when the ship rolled and his hat fell from the hook, and made the circuit of the cabin floor, he said:

"The ship is pa.s.sing the hat."

Again he said:

"I am sorry for you, Paine, but I can't help it--I can't hurry this dying business. Can't you give me enough of the hypnotic injunction to put an end to me?"

He thought if I could arrange the pillows so he could sit straight up it would not be necessary to support him, and then I could sit on the couch and read while he tried to doze. He wanted me to read Jude, he said, so we could talk about it. I got all the pillows I could and built them up around him, and sat down with the book, and this seemed to give him contentment. He would doze off a little and then come up with a start, his piercing, agate eyes searching me out to see if I was still there.

Over and over--twenty times in an hour--this was repeated. When I could deny him no longer I administered the opiate, but it never completely possessed him or gave him entire relief.

As I looked at him there, so reduced in his estate, I could not but remember all the labor of his years, and all the splendid honor which the world had paid to him. Something of this may have entered his mind, too, for once, when I offered him some of the milder remedies which we had brought, he said:

"After forty years of public effort I have become just a target for medicines."

The program of change from berth to the floor, from floor to the couch, from the couch back to the berth among the pillows, was repeated again and again, he always thinking of the trouble he might be making, rarely uttering any complaint; but once he said:

"I never guessed that I was not going to outlive John Bigelow." And again:

"This is such a mysterious disease. If we only had a bill of particulars we'd have something to swear at."

Time and again he picked up Carlyle or the Cardigan Memoirs, and read, or seemed to read, a few lines; but then the drowsiness would come and the book would fall. Time and again he attempted to smoke, or in his drowse simulated the motion of placing a cigar to his lips and puffing in the old way.

Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which the t.i.tle-role of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of this now and then when it had pa.s.sed, and it seemed to amuse him. The other was a discomfort: a college a.s.sembly was attempting to confer upon him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at me searchingly and asked:

"Isn't there something I can resign and be out of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't want it." Then realizing, he said: "I am like a bird in a cage: always expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires." And, somewhat later: "Oh, it is such a mystery, and it takes so long."

Toward the evening of the first day, when it grew dark outside, he asked:

"How long have we been on this voyage?"

I answered that this was the end of the first day.

"How many more are there?" he asked.

"Only one, and two nights."

"We'll never make it," he said. "It's an eternity."

"But we must on Clara's account," I told him, and I estimated that Clara would be more than half-way across the ocean by now.

"It is a losing race," he said; "no ship can outsail death."

It has been written--I do not know with what proof--that certain great dissenters have recanted with the approach of death--have become weak, and afraid to ignore old traditions in the face of the great mystery. I wish to write here that Mark Twain, as he neared the end, showed never a single tremor of fear or even of reluctance. I have dwelt upon these hours when suffering was upon him, and death the imminent shadow, in order to show that at the end he was as he had always been, neither more nor less, and never less than brave.

Once, during a moment when he was comfortable and quite himself, he said, earnestly:

"When I seem to be dying I don't want to be stimulated back to life. I want to be made comfortable to go."

There was not a vestige of hesitation; there was no grasping at straws, no suggestion of dread.

Somehow those two days and nights went by. Once, when he was partially relieved by the opiate, I slept, while Claude watched; and again, in the fading end of the last night, when we had pa.s.sed at length into the cold, bracing northern air, and breath had come back to him, and with it sleep.

Relatives, physicians, and news-gatherers were at the dock to welcome him. He was awake, and the northern air had brightened him, though it was the chill, I suppose, that brought on the pains in his breast, which, fortunately, he had escaped during the voyage. It was not a prolonged attack, and it was, blessedly, the last one.

An invalid-carriage had been provided, and a compartment secured on the afternoon express to Redding--the same train that had taken him there two years before. Dr. Robert H. Halsey and Dr. Edward Quintard attended him, and he made the journey really in cheerful comfort, for he could breathe now, and in the relief came back old interests. Half reclining on the couch, he looked through the afternoon papers. It happened curiously that Charles Harvey Genung, who, something more than four years earlier, had been so largely responsible for my a.s.sociation with Mark Twain, was on the same train, in the same coach, bound for his country-place at New Hartford.

Lounsbury was waiting with the carriage, and on that still, sweet April evening we drove him to Stormfield much as we had driven him two years before. Now and then he mentioned the apparent backwardness of the season, for only a few of the trees were beginning to show their green.

As we drove into the lane that led to the Stormfield entrance, he said:

"Can we see where you have built your billiard-room?"