Mark Twain A Biography Part 181

The gable showed above the trees, and I pointed it out to him.

"It looks quite imposing," he said.

I think it was the last outside interest he ever showed in anything. He had been carried from the ship and from the train, but when we drew up to Stormfield, where Mrs. Paine, with Katie Leary and others of the household, was waiting to greet him, he stepped from the carriage alone with something of his old lightness, and with all his old courtliness, and offered each one his hand. Then, in the canvas chair which we had brought, Claude and I carried him up-stairs to his room and delivered him to the physicians, and to the comforts and blessed air of home. This was Thursday evening, April 14, 1910.

CCXCIII. THE RETURN TO THE INVISIBLE

There would be two days more before Ossip and Clara Gabrilowitsch could arrive. Clemens remained fairly bright and comfortable during this interval, though he clearly was not improving. The physicians denied him the morphine, now, as he no longer suffered acutely. But he craved it, and once, when I went in, he said, rather mournfully:

"They won't give me the subcutaneous any more."

It was Sunday morning when Clara came. He was cheerful and able to talk quite freely. He did not dwell upon his condition, I think, but spoke rather of his plans for the summer. At all events, he did not then suggest that he counted the end so near; but a day later it became evident to all that his stay was very brief. His breathing was becoming heavier, though it seemed not to give him much discomfort. His articulation also became affected. I think the last continuous talking he did was to Dr. Halsey on the evening of April 17th--the day of Clara's arrival. A mild opiate had been administered, and he said he wished to talk himself to sleep. He recalled one of his old subjects, Dual Personality, and discussed various instances that flitted through his mind--Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and fact. He became drowsier as he talked. He said at last:

"This is a peculiar kind of disease. It does not invite you to read; it does not invite you to be read to; it does not invite you to talk, nor to enjoy any of the usual sick-room methods of treatment. What kind of a disease is that? Some kinds of sicknesses have pleasant features about them. You can read and smoke and have only to lie still."

And a little later he added:

"It is singular, very singular, the laws of mentality--vacuity. I put out my hand to reach a book or newspaper which I have been reading most glibly, and it isn't there, not a suggestion of it."

He coughed violently, and afterward commented:

"If one gets to meddling with a cough it very soon gets the upper hand and is meddling with you. That is my opinion--of seventy-four years'

growth."

The news of his condition, everywhere published, brought great heaps of letters, but he could not see them. A few messages were reported to him. At intervals he read a little. Suetonius and Carlyle lay on the bed beside him, and he would pick them up as the spirit moved him and read a paragraph or a page. Sometimes, when I saw him thus-the high color still in his face, and the clear light in his eyes--I said: "It is not reality. He is not going to die." On Tuesday, the 19th, he asked me to tell Clara to come and sing to him. It was a heavy requirement, but she somehow found strength to sing some of the Scotch airs which he loved, and he seemed soothed and comforted. When she came away he bade her good-by, saying that he might not see her again.

But he lingered through the next day and the next. His mind was wandering a little on Wednesday, and his speech became less and less articulate; but there were intervals when he was quite clear, quite vigorous, and he apparently suffered little. We did not know it, then, but the mysterious messenger of his birth-year, so long antic.i.p.ated by him, appeared that night in the sky.--[The perihelion of Halley's Comet for 1835 was November 16th; for 1910 it was April 20th.]

On Thursday morning, the 21st, his mind was generally clear, and it was said by the nurses that he read a little from one of the volumes on his bed, from the Suetonius, or from one of the volumes of Carlyle. Early in the forenoon he sent word by Clara that he wished to see me, and when I came in he spoke of two unfinished ma.n.u.scripts which he wished me to "throw away," as he briefly expressed it, for he had not many words left now. I a.s.sured him that I would take care of them, and he pressed my hand. It was his last word to me.

Once or twice that morning he tried to write some request which he could not put into intelligible words.

And once he spoke to Gabrilowitsch, who, he said, could understand him better than the others. Most of the time he dozed.

Somewhat after midday, when Clara was by him, he roused up and took her hand, and seemed to speak with less effort.

"Good-by," he said, and Dr. Quintard, who was standing near, thought he added: "If we meet"--but the words were very faint. He looked at her for a little while, without speaking, then he sank into a doze, and from it pa.s.sed into a deeper slumber, and did not heed us any more.

Through that peaceful spring afternoon the life-wave ebbed lower and lower. It was about half past six, and the sun lay just on the horizon when Dr. Quintard noticed that the breathing, which had gradually become more subdued, broke a little. There was no suggestion of any struggle.

The n.o.ble head turned a little to one side, there was a fluttering sigh, and the breath that had been unceasing through seventy-four tumultuous years had stopped forever.

He had entered into the estate envied so long. In his own words--the words of one of his latest memoranda:

"He had arrived at the dignity of death--the only earthly dignity that is not artificial--the only safe one. The others are traps that can beguile to humiliation.

"Death--the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure--the rich and the poor--the loved and the unloved."

CCXCIV. THE LAST RITES

It is not often that a whole world mourns. Nations have often mourned a hero--and races--but perhaps never before had the entire world really united in tender sorrow for the death of any man.

In one of his aphorisms he wrote: "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." And it was thus that Mark Twain himself had lived.

No man had ever so reached the heart of the world, and one may not even attempt to explain just why. Let us only say that it was because he was so limitlessly human that every other human heart, in whatever sphere or circ.u.mstance, responded to his touch. From every remote corner of the globe the cables of condolence swept in; every printed sheet in Christendom was filled with lavish tribute; pulpits forgot his heresies and paid him honor. No king ever died that received so rich a homage as his. To quote or to individualize would be to cheapen this vast offering.

We took him to New York to the Brick Church, and Dr. Henry van d.y.k.e spoke only a few simple words, and Joseph Twich.e.l.l came from Hartford and delivered brokenly a prayer from a heart wrung with double grief, for Harmony, his wife, was nearing the journey's end, and a telegram that summoned him to her death-bed came before the services ended.

Mark Twain, dressed in the white he loved so well, lay there with the n.o.bility of death upon him, while a mult.i.tude of those who loved him pa.s.sed by and looked at his face for the last time. The flowers, of which so many had been sent, were banked around him; but on the casket itself lay a single laurel wreath which Dan Beard and his wife had woven from the laurel which grows on Stormfield hill. He was never more beautiful than as he lay there, and it was an impressive scene to see those thousands file by, regard him for a moment gravely, thoughtfully, and pa.s.s on. All sorts were there, rich and poor; some crossed themselves, some saluted, some paused a little to take a closer look; but no one offered even to pick a flower. Howells came, and in his book he says:

I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of a puzzle, a great silent dignity, an a.s.sent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him.

That night we went with him to Elmira, and next day--a somber day of rain--he lay in those stately parlors that had seen his wedding-day, and where Susy had lain, and Mrs. Clemens, and Jean, while Dr. Eastman spoke the words of peace which separate us from our mortal dead. Then in the quiet, steady rain of that Sunday afternoon we laid him beside those others, where he sleeps well, though some have wished that, like De Soto, he might have been laid to rest in the bed of that great river which must always be a.s.sociated with his name.

CCXCV. MARK TWAIN'S RELIGION

There is such a finality about death; however interesting it may be as an experience, one cannot discuss it afterward with one's friends. I have thought it a great pity that Mark Twain could not discuss, with Howells say, or with Twich.e.l.l, the sensations and the particulars of the change, supposing there be a recognizable change, in that transition of which we have speculated so much, with such slender returns. No one ever debated the undiscovered country more than he. In his whimsical, semi-serious fashion he had considered all the possibilities of the future state--orthodox and otherwise--and had drawn picturesquely original conclusions. He had sent Captain Stormfield in a dream to report the aspects of the early Christian heaven. He had examined the scientific aspects of the more subtle philosophies. He had considered spiritualism, transmigration, the various esoteric doctrines, and in the end he had logically made up his mind that death concludes all, while with that less logical hunger which survives in every human heart he had never ceased to expect an existence beyond the grave. His disbelief and his pessimism were identical in their structure. They were of his mind; never of his heart.

Once a woman said to him:

"Mr. Clemens, you are not a pessimist, you only think you are." And she might have added, with equal force and truth:

"You are not a disbeliever in immortality; you only think you are."

Nothing could have conveyed more truly his att.i.tude toward life and death. His belief in G.o.d, the Creator, was absolute; but it was a G.o.d far removed from the Creator of his early teaching. Every man builds his G.o.d according to his own capacities. Mark Twain's G.o.d was of colossal proportions--so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but molecules in His veins--a G.o.d as big as s.p.a.ce itself.

Mark Twain had many moods, and he did not always approve of his own G.o.d; but when he altered his conception, it was likely to be in the direction of enlargement--a further removal from the human conception, and the problem of what we call our lives.

In 1906 he wrote:--[See also 1870, chap. lxxviii; 1899, chap. ccv; and various talks, 1906-07, etc.]

Let us now consider the real G.o.d, the genuine G.o.d, the great G.o.d, the sublime and supreme G.o.d, the authentic Creator of the real universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only comets unto which incredible distant Neptune is merely an out post, a Sandy Hook to homeward-bound specters of the deeps of s.p.a.ce that have not glimpsed it before for generations--a universe not made with hands and suited to an astronomical nursery, but spread abroad through the illimitable reaches of s.p.a.ce by the flat of the real G.o.d just mentioned, by comparison with whom the G.o.ds whose myriads infest the feeble imaginations of men are as a swarm of gnats scattered and lost in the infinitudes of the empty sky.

At an earlier period-the date is not exactly fixable, but the stationery used and the handwriting suggest the early eighties--he set down a few concisely written pages of conclusions--conclusions from which he did not deviate materially in after years. The doc.u.ment follows:

I believe in G.o.d the Almighty.

I do not believe He has ever sent a message to man by anybody, or delivered one to him by word of mouth, or made Himself visible to mortal eyes at any time in any place.

I believe that the Old and New Testaments were imagined and written by man, and that no line in them was authorized by G.o.d, much less inspired by Him.

I think the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of G.o.d are manifested in His works: I perceive that they are manifested toward me in this life; the logical conclusion is that they will be manifested toward me in the life to come, if there should be one.