Mark Twain: Man in White Part 9

In the copy Macy sent him of Greenwood's The Shakespeare Problem Restated, Twain wrote, "Did ever a man move the world by writing solely out of what he learned from schools and books, and leaving out what he had lived and felt?" Of course, what he wanted was a Shakespeare who resembled Mark Twain-a largely self-educated writer of humble origins who came of age in a bucolic river village, and who went off one day to find adventure in wild places, then moved to a big city and used his wit, imagination, and experience to conquer the world, and who succeeded beyond all measure, and who retired from the limelight to savor his triumph and burnish his legacy. Writing Is Shakespeare Dead? gave Twain the chance to speculate on the nature of his own posthumous fame. And what he found was rea.s.suring. Though he didn't have a Hamlet or a Macbeth to his credit, the story of his life was second to none, and the literature that had flowed from it was pretty good, too.24 ...

IT TOOK TWAIN only two months to finish Is Shakespeare Dead? He was in high spirits for much of that time, exulting in the pleasure of "throwing bricks at Shakespeare," as he put it. He dictated some parts of the book, and wrote others in longhand, and was pleasantly surprised at how easily he fell back into the old routine of writing a certain number of words each day. One afternoon, after working for several hours, he came into Isabel Lyon's room to tell her that he had finished writing for the day. He was enjoying the subject so much that he was confident of continuing his flow of thought the next morning without any trouble. "Now," he told her, "I let it rest there; where formerly I would force myself to write two-thirds of a sentence to be my starting point for the next day."25 As the book speedily progressed, he became more and more satisfied with his performance, "chuckling" to himself while he reread the latest addition to the ma.n.u.script. When he was finished, he went to Lyon and waved the ma.n.u.script in triumph, feeling certain that it would be a great success. "He was proud of it," she recalled. But she still had her reservations, and wasn't surprised when the editors at Harper's showed little enthusiasm for the book.

"Harper's did not want to publish it," she later commented, "but they were under contract to print anything he wrote. ... Col. Harvey said to me: 'Can't you get Uncle Mark not to have these ideas of his made public? His readers are not looking for such matter. ... They want only the beloved humorous side of him.' "26 Twain knew that Harvey wasn't pleased, yet he insisted not only that Harper's publish the book, but also that the firm bring it out as soon as possible. He wanted to make sure it appeared before William Stone Booth's book, which was scheduled for publication in late April. In obedience to his wishes, the staff at Harper's rushed to get the work into print. The ma.n.u.script was completed on March 9, and the book was published on April 8, 1909.

The reviews were mixed, and only a few critics seemed to appreciate Twain's comic intentions or his autobiographical slant, despite the book's subt.i.tle, "From My Autobiography." But by the time the reviews appeared, problems at home would give Twain far more serious things to worry about than the reception of his book. He would ignore the critics, with the exception of one outraged British author-George Greenwood.

A Philadelphia lawyer named Thomas B. Harned bought a copy and noticed that several pages of text from Greenwood's The Shakespeare Problem Restated were included verbatim in Is Shakespeare Dead? Harned was one of Walt Whitman's literary executors, and was well versed in copyright law. He was also on close terms with George Greenwood and was amazed to see so much of his friend's work reproduced in Twain's book. Claiming that these pages offered the best evidence the playwright must have had some legal training, Twain had acknowledged the source and warmly praised it. But in the rush to get his book out, he had failed to identify Greenwood as the author of the borrowed text and didn't personally contact him for permission to quote.

In early May Harned sent Greenwood a copy of Is Shakespeare Dead? and wrote on the flyleaf, "This book is a fine boost for your book." But then he asked, "Did Mark Twain get your permission to use your chapter 'Was Shakespeare a Lawyer?' [?] I a.s.sume that he did & that you have already got a copy. I send this for full measure." When Greenwood received this gift from his American friend, he wasn't pleased to discover that Twain had taken so much material from him. Angrily, he took a pencil and underscored Harned's comment, "I a.s.sume that he did," and then scrawled his response in the margin, "No, he did not."27 A meticulous, forthright man, Greenwood decided to fight back against the apparent infringement of his rights, directing his publisher to fire off threatening letters to Harper's. In an effort to embarra.s.s Twain and to create some publicity for Greenwood in America, the publisher-John Lane-wrote to the New York Times, complaining of "literary larceny."28 Twain should have known not to quote so liberally from a lawyer's work, but it soon emerged that he had, in fact, done nothing legally wrong. After the initial panic wore off at Harper's, the staff consulted the correspondence files and discovered that Lane's firm had been contacted before publication and had given written permission for Twain to use the lengthy excerpt from Greenwood's book. On March 29 a request had been sent on Twain's behalf to the managing director of Lane's New York branch-Rutger Bleecker Jewett, who generously responded that Twain could "quote from Mr. Greenwood's book as much as he pleased." Such a reply was binding and was the only permission needed. The firm had no legal case against Twain in America, yet Lane was upset because Jewett had not cleared the request with the London office. So he and his author decided to shift the blame to Twain and to insist that more credit be given to The Shakespeare Problem Restated.29 Graciously, Twain apologized for the unintentional omission of the author's name. When the British edition of Is Shakespeare Dead? appeared, there was an extra leaf tipped in to advertise "The Shakespeare Problem Restated, by George G. Greenwood, MP." And shortly thereafter Lane ran more advertis.e.m.e.nts in the trade press that included a blurb from the alleged larcenist himself. Shamelessly, the publisher used Twain's words from a New York Times article in which the author had defended himself against Lane's bogus claim of injustice. "In writing my book I took the liberty of using large extracts from Mr. Greenwood's book," Twain told the paper. "I made use of the extracts because of the great admiration which I have for that book." Conveniently, Lane ended the blurb at that point, because Twain's next comment would have made the publisher look foolish. The entire sentence reads, "I made use of the extracts because of the great admiration which I have for that book, and with the full permission of the publishers."30 When the dust settled, it was clear that the only harm done was to Greenwood's vanity. And the only reason John Lane encouraged his author to complain was that he saw a chance to sell more copies of a book that had not received much attention up to that point. More amused than annoyed, Twain declared that Greenwood should consider himself lucky. As he mischievously explained to the press, "To have a man like Mark Twain steal portions from another man's book makes that book something extraordinary."31 ...

TWAIN SEEMED TO ENJOY his brief notoriety as a literary thief. He must have found a comic irony in the exaggerated complaints of John Lane, given that he had struggled for so many years to stop people stealing from his books-especially in Britain, where his work was routinely pirated in the 1870s by the notorious John Camden Hotten (or "Hottentot," as Twain sometimes called him). As a young author fresh from America's wild frontier, he had made far more serious threats against Hotten than John Lane would have dared to use in the more civilized world of 1909. Writing in the London Spectator in 1872, Twain had suggested that if Hotten didn't give up literary piracy, he might have to crack his head open: "I feel as if I wanted to take a broom-straw & go & knock that man's brains out. Not in anger, for I feel none. Oh! not in anger; but only to see, that is all. Mere idle curiosity."32 By the spring of 1909, however, Twain could afford to take a much less bellicose view of protecting literary property. Congress had finally bestirred itself and done something important for authors. On March 3 both houses pa.s.sed a new copyright act. Among other things, it extended the term of protection to fifty-six years after the date of publication. It wasn't everything that Twain had hoped for, but he saw it as a good start and was relieved to know that even some of his earliest books would now remain in copyright well into the 1920s. Huck Finn wouldn't lose its protection until the beginning of the 1940s.

If the bill had pa.s.sed only a few months earlier, he might have been less willing to accept Ralph Ashcroft's plan for creating the Mark Twain Company. But even though, as subsequent chapters will show, disentangling himself from Ashcroft's snares wouldn't be easy, he could still take great satisfaction from the fact that Congress had given him and his fellow authors a law they could accept.

To Congressman Champ Clark of Missouri (who would soon become Speaker of the House), he wrote, "I think we've got a mighty good (& lucid) copyright law at last. Hereafter there'll be no complexities to fuss over. Effort can be restricted to a single & simple detail-extension of the term. Ten or fifteen years at a time. In the end, the author will be lifted to the rank of the publisher & the shoemaker: he will be the actual owner of his property." Twain was especially proud of the fact that America's new law was better than Britain's existing one. "At last-at last and for the first time in copyright history-we are ahead of England! Ahead of her in two ways: by length of time and by fairness to all interests concerned."33 For the first time in his career, he had reason to believe that American law would safeguard his works for many years beyond his death. It made him proud, and he was justified in feeling that he was partly responsible for the new law. Wearing white had paid off. In fact, Paine fervently believed that if Twain had not made such a memorable case for the bill during his appearance at the Capitol in December 1906, it wouldn't have pa.s.sed for many years to come.

"Champ Clark was the last to linger that day," Paine recalled of Twain's lobbying efforts in 1906, "and they had talked far into the dusk. Clark was powerful and had fathered the bill." Clark himself didn't have any doubt that Twain was the prime influence on the legislation. After its pa.s.sage, he wrote the author to ask "if the copyright law is acceptable to you. If it is not acceptable to you I want to ask you to write and tell me how it should be changed and I will give my best endeavors to the work. I believe that your ideas and wishes in the matter const.i.tute the best guide we have as to what should be done in the case."34 Over time many others would come to see that Twain's eloquent support of copyright reform had made an important difference in the long debate that produced the 1909 act. Almost fifty years after Congress pa.s.sed the law, the American Bar a.s.sociation took note of Twain's contribution, praising him in a special resolution adopted at its annual meeting in 1957. Their tribute "recognized the efforts of Mark Twain, who was so greatly responsible for the laws relating to copyrights which have meant so much to all free peoples throughout the world."35 ...

ISABEL LYON'S LACK OF ENTHUSIASM for Is Shakespeare Dead? was partly a reflection of her depressed state of mind throughout the period of its composition. While Twain was gleefully engineering his a.s.sault on the man from Stratford, Lyon was often in bed and unable to leave her room. If he wanted to read to her from his ma.n.u.script, he would have to go to her room to do it. "Miss Lyon is sick abed these two or three weeks," Twain wrote his angelfish Frances Nunnally in February. "It is a sort of nervous break-down, attributable to too much work & care."36 Apparently, what finally pushed Lyon over the edge was the sudden return of Jean from Europe. A few days after Helen Keller's visit to Stormfield, Jean arrived in New York, having been ordered home by her father on the advice of Dr. Peterson. The doctor was alarmed by the news that Jean was receiving a certain medication in Berlin that he considered dangerous, and he told Twain that she should stop seeing her German doctor immediately and return to America. At any rate, that was the reason given to Jean, who was enjoying Berlin so much that she didn't want to come home. But the real reason may have been that both Peterson and Twain feared that her German doctor wasn't supervising her closely enough. As she innocently reported in her letters home, she was living so freely in Berlin that she was staying up "quite late" and had come home from one party in the early morning hours. According to Peterson's view of epilepsy, keeping such irregular hours was a sure path to disaster for the patient.37 But Jean's return to America meant that Lyon was once again faced with the problem of keeping her away from Stormfield. In January she had found a rooming house for her in Babylon, Long Island, where there were two live-in nurses. But Jean took an immediate dislike to the place, especially after coming there from her stimulating life in Germany. "The country was as flat as a pan-cake," she later wrote, "and contained nothing but a few bushes and small ponds used as ice-ponds. After Berlin and the varied life and broad interests that one sees over there, it was too much of a come-down."

Finding the place "unendurable," Jean took action. "I hadn't been there ten minutes," she was to recall, "when I telephoned Clara & told her I could not stay there." In response, Clara complained to Lyon, and the ongoing feud between the two women became even worse as each resisted giving in to the other. For the first time, Clara made a serious and sustained effort to find out why her sister wasn't being allowed to live at Stormfield. Lyon offered the usual reason-Dr. Peterson didn't think Jean was well enough. But Clara couldn't believe he still held that view after Jean's four months abroad, and she threatened to discuss the matter directly with Dr. Peterson.38 Lyon did her best to keep Clara in the dark, but near the end of January, she lost her nerve and retreated to her bed, using illness as an excuse to avoid any more confrontations. She had a lot to hide and may have thought that if she merely stayed out of Clara's way for a while, the volatile daughter would calm down and turn her attention to other things. But Clara continued to press her case, and on February 23, when Twain was in the last stages of work on his new book, Lyon decided that she couldn't sulk in her room any longer and did the unthinkable-she deserted her King and left Stormfield. She told him that she wanted to go to a hotel and "to have a good long uninterrupted rest."39 "Miss Lyon has gone to Hartford for ten days, sick," Twain wrote Jean, whose complaints had been heeded, and who was now on her way to a new house in Montclair, New Jersey, which would prove to be much more to her liking. After moving in, she wrote her father on March 5, "You don't know how glad I am to be here! ... I really couldn't write you from Babylon, because ... I didn't want to start complaining as soon as I had gotten back."40 But this move wasn't enough to satisfy Clara. Her suspicions about Lyon had been aroused to such an extent that she wasn't going to be content with one or two changes. So while Lyon was in Hartford, Clara went to Stormfield and tried her best to make her father reconsider the trust he had placed in his secretary. She wanted everything out in the open now and explained why she had been feuding with Lyon, and why she didn't like the way the household was being run, and why she objected to the way Jean's illness was being treated. Though she didn't understand exactly what Lyon and Ashcroft were up to, she knew they had too much influence over her father, and she wanted him to see the danger before it was too late. As soon as possible, she insisted, he needed to authorize a complete audit of the family's finances. And she wanted him to deal directly with Dr. Peterson so that a way could be found to bring Jean home immediately.

Having delayed this showdown for months, Clara was so full of anger and frustration that her heated criticisms and demands made Twain think she was exaggerating the problem. Despite his reputation for being impatient and impulsive, he advised patience and moderation in this case. He promised to get a financial report from Ashcroft, but didn't see any reason to have outsiders conduct an audit unless there was some specific evidence of impropriety. He wasn't going to engage in a messy confrontation with Lyon unless he had the proof to back him up. "Not theory, not guess," he told Clara, "but evidence."

Meanwhile, Lyon was pretending to be a semi-invalid trying to regain her strength in Hartford, where she was supposed to be staying at a quiet hotel. In fact, she was living in luxury at the city's best hotel on a busy street downtown. The Heublein wasn't the kind of place a single woman with her salary could afford. It enjoyed a national reputation for the high quality of its rooms-its brochures promised "an Oriental carpet in every room"-and for the superior "cuisine and fine liquors" served in its restaurant. The local company that owned it-G. F. Heublein-was one of America's biggest importers of wines and spirits. As Twain later remarked of her stay at the hotel, she couldn't have had a room "for anything short of ten dollars a day." At that rate, a mere five days would have consumed every penny of her monthly pay.41 But Twain didn't want to believe that he had misjudged Lyon. On March 11-only two days after finishing his book on Shakespeare-he told Clara, "I know Ashcroft & Miss Lyon better & more intimately than I have ever known any one except your mother, & I am quite without suspicion of either their honesty or their honorableness." He made it clear that he was particularly grateful for Lyon's many efforts on his behalf. "She could not have been replaced at any price, for she was qualified to meet our friends socially & be acceptable to them. ... And she has been a house builder. In this service-a heavy one, an exacting one, & making her liable to fault-finding-she labored hard for a year. I would not have done it at any price, neither would you. ... She was not trained to business & doubtless has been loose & unmethodical, but that is all."42 But Clara had lost any interest in mustering sympathy for a woman she now regarded as her family's enemy. She hired a lawyer to advise her and wanted to enlist Henry Rogers's help in reviewing any figures Ashcroft managed to produce. Her steely resolve in this matter left Twain wondering how he could possibly satisfy her demands without tearing the household apart. He didn't want the dispute to become public, so he tried to persuade Clara to avoid dragging others into it, and was reluctant to seek advice from even his closest friends.

Paine was someone who might have been expected to take Clara's side against Lyon, but just as the conflict was heating up in mid-February, he left on a tour of the Mediterranean to see some of the places Twain had written about in The Innocents Abroad. Having put the finishing touches on his life of Texas Ranger Bill McDonald, he was free to spend a couple of months abroad and took his daughter Louise with him on the long voyage. But while they were gone, Paine's wife, Dora, watched the drama unfold at Stormfield and sent reports to her husband. On March 8 she warned him that the domestic turmoil was driving Twain "almost crazy," and said the "poor old man" had told her that the last few weeks "had been h--and if things did not get better he would cut his G--D-throat."

Such news may have made Paine wonder whether he should come home early to rescue his beleaguered subject. But he was probably also grateful that he had avoided getting caught in the crossfire, especially when he read the next piece of news in his wife's letter. Faced with Clara's implacable opposition, Lyon and Ashcroft had raised the stakes by deciding to fight her together as husband and wife. No public announcement had been made, Dora said, but the couple planned to marry very soon. No matter how she looked at it, Dora couldn't make sense of it, especially given the eleven-year age difference between the two. Speaking of Ashcroft, she asked her husband, "What can he be thinking[?]"43 It was a question a lot of people would soon be asking.

At his billiards table, Twain contemplates his next move.

EIGHTEEN.

End of the Line.

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.

Mark Twain.

ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY 1909, Ralph Ashcroft and Isabel Lyon went to New York to pay a visit to the Marriage Bureau at City Hall. The clerk who issued their license said they "seemed happy as larks and treading on air." The following morning they exchanged vows in a short wedding ceremony at the Episcopalian Church of the Ascension, one block from Twain's former home at 21 Fifth Avenue. Popular with several of Manhattan's old established families-including the Rhinelanders and the Astors-the big brownstone church had been the scene of many important weddings. The altar was one of the most beautiful in the city, and was designed in the 1880s by a young Stanford White, who used a golden arch to enclose John La Farge's large painting of the Ascension scene. ("A dim old church, hushed to admiration before a great religious picture," was how Henry James described the interior.)2 But on the chilly Thursday morning when Isabel Lyon walked to the altar wearing a dark dress with a small hat and veil, the church was practically empty, with only a few friends and family sitting in the front pews. Isabel's mother was there, and Ashcroft's brother John stood at his side as best man, but conspicuously absent were Clara and almost everyone else in Twain's circle. The author himself was present, though he didn't look pleased to be there. Asked by the press to account for the sudden marriage of his secretary and his financial adviser, Twain replied, "A business a.s.sociation ripened into warm friendship and then grew worse."3 A few days earlier, while they were in the billiards room at Stormfield, Ashcroft had tried to tell Twain why he wanted to marry Lyon. It wasn't for love or l.u.s.t, he explained, emphasizing that they were not going to have children. He said it was simply because she was a vulnerable woman who needed a capable man to protect her. She believed that he was the right one to help her, and he agreed. (As Lyon put it in a letter from Hartford, "I will have one with the right to watch me, & keep me from breaking down.")4 Twain was amazed that a man of Ashcroft's relative youth would accept a loveless marriage. As he later wrote of their conversation, "He told me frankly & without a blush that he didn't love her, he only wanted to be in a position to take care of her in her persistent & exhausting illnesses. He knew she got her illness out of a whisky bottle & was drunk a good half of her time, but I didn't know it. ... He told me she had proposed the marriage, & had also urged it. It was that day in the billiard room, & the 'urgency' had seemed to me to translate itself into compulsion. This was a justifiable guess, in view of a thousand familiar circ.u.mstances, but not as good a guess as I could make now. Now that I know what they had up their sleeve."5 Because in March he was still giving them the benefit of the doubt, he was simply at a loss to explain why the two would offer such an implausible excuse for marrying. He tried to talk them out of it. He didn't hold back. "You two are insane to think of marrying," he told them; "don't do it; you will separate within two years." The kind of n.o.ble union they had described to him was foolish, he said, and would never work. The only conclusion he could draw was that they were ashamed to admit their s.e.xual "compulsion." Trying to lighten the mood, he told Ashcroft, "The first one that gets pregnant gets fired."6 Twain even bet Ashcroft ten dollars to one that Lyon would have children, and continued to believe he was right long after both had left his service. Privately, he noted that the coldly calculating Ashcroft seemed to be stirred by the volatile Lyon: "It is a case of iceberg & volcano, you see; there may be an [eruption], there may be a litter of kitty icebergs-let us wait & see."7 When the couple continued to insist that they must get married-and soon-Twain put his objections aside and reluctantly agreed to attend the ceremony. But all the while that he was in the church, he couldn't wait to get out. It was "cold & clammy," he recalled, and Lyon "could hardly have been more sweetly and gushingly ... girlish." On the way out, a photographer asked the newlyweds to pose with their employer. Ashcroft was all smiles, and Lyon looked demure. But in his haste to leave, Twain ignored the camera and kept his eyes down as he finished b.u.t.toning his overcoat. In the published photo he looks more like a pa.s.serby than a friend of the bride and groom.

The little wedding party broke up, and the Ashcrofts went straight back to Stormfield with Twain. Isabel wanted to continue her work as though nothing had changed. There were no plans for a honeymoon. It wasn't because of a shortage of money, however. The couple had a ready supply of cash-enough, in fact, to splurge on a twelve-dollar cablegram to Paine, whose travels had taken him at that moment to Egypt. The new Mrs. Ashcroft was eager to make sure that her rival knew of her marriage before he returned to America. She seemed to believe that both Paine and Clara would be less willing to challenge her position at Stormfield now that she had a clever young husband to intercede on her behalf.

Ashcroft was willing to marry Isabel, and to serve as her champion, because he needed her complete cooperation if he wanted to secure control of the Mark Twain Company. She knew too much, and he couldn't risk leaving her free to expose his plans to others. The marriage, Twain later wrote, "was a binding together of conspirators, for protective purposes. Each knew of the other's crimes, & neither was willing to trust the other, ungagged. ... Otherwise why was he tying himself to her? He didn't want her. He had never proposed to her. He told me so, himself."

Knowing that Clara would continue making trouble for him, Ashcroft wanted to strengthen his position in the household not only by marrying Lyon but also by persuading Twain to give him a new job with increased authority. The more Clara complained, the easier it was for Ashcroft to insist that Twain clear up any confusion by spelling out his responsibilities. His aim was to make sure that every penny the author earned or spent went through his hands first. Five days before the wedding ceremony, he asked Twain to sign a handful of legal doc.u.ments. One gave him the power to supervise the writer's "household affairs and expenditures," and another authorized him to manage all business dealings for two years on a commission basis. Two more agreements concerned Isabel, increasing her salary to $100 a month and giving her permission "to compile for publication the ma.n.u.script of a book or books to be ent.i.tled 'Life and Letters of Mark Twain.' "8 It was unlikely that Isabel would ever be able to buckle down and complete an edition of Twain's letters, but she and Ashcroft wanted some way to keep Paine in check, and this was the best they could manage for the time being. It gave them an excuse to withhold letters from him if he tried to give any support to Clara. Simply by saying that she was busy working with certain letters for her edition, she could hold on to them for months and create endless delays for Paine as he tried to complete his own work. But, of course, the couple gave no hint of their true intentions to Twain. In fact, they pretended that Isabel's work on the edition would be an entirely selfless act of devotion to her King. To make Twain believe this, Ashcroft stipulated in the doc.u.ment that Isabel would do the work for free, forgoing any claim on future royalties.

Instead of questioning why Ashcroft was so keen to put so many new agreements in writing, Twain a.s.sumed they must be in his best interest. He thought they provided the kind of safeguards Clara was seeking for the family. After signing them he was quick to send her a note of rea.s.surance. "All things in this house are now upon a strictly business basis," he wrote. "All duties are strictly defined, under several written contracts, signed before a notary. All services rendered me are paid for, henceforth."

But more contracts were not going to satisfy Clara. They only made her more suspicious that the Ashcrofts were hiding something. She didn't want to make peace with her adversaries. She was determined to catch them in some act of wrongdoing and to prove to her father that his trust in them was misplaced. Yet he was almost desperate to avoid that kind of upheaval, knowing that it would cause him far more pain than Clara could imagine. The new contracts didn't solve anything, but they gave him some hope that he could preserve his haven at Stormfield a little longer.

"There is no vestige of ugly feeling," he wrote Clara of his new arrangements with the Ashcrofts, "no hostility on either side. The comradeship remains, but it is paid for; also the friendship. Stormfield was a home; it is a tavern now, & I am the landlord. ... Jesus, what a week!"9 ...

FOR A SHORT PERIOD after the wedding, Stormfield was relatively calm. The Ashcrofts made an effort to seem mild and forbearing, but Isabel was still relying on alcohol to soothe her nerves, and Ralph was continuing to look for new ways to undermine Clara's authority and to dissuade her from challenging his. In the near term, he held the advantage, because in late March and early April Clara was forced to direct her attention elsewhere. Her next big concert was fast approaching, and she needed to devote most of her time to rehearsing. Scheduled for April 13 at Mendelssohn Hall, it would be her first major performance in New York. An audience of at least a thousand was expected, and she knew that many of the city's most influential critics would be there. Anxious to impress, she put together an ambitious program that included numbers by Debussy, Strauss, and Schumann. While she prepared for her important night, her feud with the Ashcrofts was put on hold.

One visitor who was fooled by the deceptive calm at Stormfield was William Dean Howells. On March 23 he arrived for a three-day stay and thought everything seemed fine. Twain looked "tired," but was "full of fire and fun," and the two old friends had "a roaring time." There was no mention of any family troubles, and Howells considered Twain fortunate to have two devoted friends looking after him. "The Ashcrofts," he wrote home, "watch over him with tender constancy." If Howells-the great novelist of American manners-was so easily deceived by the couple, it is no wonder that Twain persisted in thinking they could be trusted.10 What impressed him most during his visit was Twain's deep attachment to Stormfield. "Truly he loved the place," he wrote afterward. As the father of the architect, he was delighted by Twain's show of pride in every aspect of the house. It was his first visit, and he was pleasantly surprised by the "beautiful country" surrounding the large and modern home. "In the early spring days," he wrote of his stay, "all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the northern winter. It opened in the surpa.s.sing loveliness of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor."11 Twain was so eager for company that he urged Howells to build a house in the neighborhood. He even had a lot picked out for him. Though he turned down the idea, Howells was touched by Twain's desire to share Stormfield's charms with sympathetic friends. "Every morning before I dressed," he was to recall of his visit, "I heard him sounding my name through the house, for the fun of it and I know for the fondness; and if I looked out of my door, there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one."

SHORTLY AFTER HOWELLS left Stormfield, Twain had the chance to "frolic" in a big way with Henry Rogers. As Howells put it in a letter home, Twain was "going to Norfolk, Va., with Rogers, to open a railroad." All 446 miles of track on the Virginian Railway were now in place, and new locomotives in West Virginia were ready to begin hauling thousands of tons of coal each day to the ma.s.sive pier at Sewell's Point on Hampton Roads. To mark the completion of this railroad from the mountains to the Tidewater, Rogers and the civic leaders of Norfolk scheduled two days of festivities at the beginning of April. Once again, Rogers wanted to share the spotlight in Virginia with Twain, who was happy to go back if he didn't have to exert himself too much. The organizers were quick to a.s.sure him that he would have an easy time of it, especially at the large formal dinner in Rogers's honor. As Twain noted with satisfaction before leaving home, he wasn't expected to sit through the whole banquet or "come in black clothes." Accompanying him on the trip was Ashcroft, who was content to stay in the background but was determined not to let him out of his sight.12 It was raining when the triumphant railroad magnate and his best friend arrived at the docks in Newport on the morning of April 2. Despite the wet weather an enthusiastic crowd of five hundred turned out to greet them, and many were wearing orange badges with the railway's name abbreviated in white letters as "VGN." They were driven to their hotel in a powerful new Rambler automobile, and were given a reception and luncheon at the Board of Trade, where they stood at the entrance of the large green-and-gold clubroom and shook hands with more than a thousand people. "It was a nearer approach to a White House reception than Norfolk ever had before," said one of the state's newspapers, "and when the two distinguished visitors had grasped every hand their palms were quite red."

In the densely crowded room there was so much noise and confusion that some of the local businessmen mistook Twain-who was at the head of the reception line-for Rogers. As they shook his hand, they warmly congratulated him for building such a great railroad, and the author silently accepted their compliments. When everyone was gathered in the clubroom, cries of "Speech! Speech!" came from the crowd. In response Twain mounted a chair, and the room grew quiet.

"My friends," he said, "while I have been shaking your hands I have listened to some very flattering compliments. ... They went straight to my heart, and I thank you all. I could not help but feel flattered as you pa.s.sed me and thanked me so sincerely for the splendid railway I had built through your state. I like compliments, gentlemen, and I thank you."

The wave of laughter that swept across the room removed any doubt about the ident.i.ty of the man on the chair, and the room soon erupted with calls for Rogers to come forward and address the gathering. Taking Twain's place, he kept his remarks short. "Gentlemen, it is my business to build railroads," he said, and then placed his hand on his friend's shoulder. "I employ my orator here to talk about them."

"I have raised my price," Twain said.13 Rogers spent the next two days inspecting his new rail yards and coal pier while Twain held court in the lobby of the Lynnhaven Hotel or strolled around downtown showing off his clothes. The big banquet took place on Sat.u.r.day, April 3, at the Monticello Hotel, and, as promised, Twain was spared the ordeal of sitting through the seven-course meal that included cove oysters on the half sh.e.l.l, broiled guinea hen, fried hominy, baked potatoes, cheeses, cakes, and strawberry frappe. About ten o'clock he strolled into the dining room and took his place next to Rogers at the head table. The speakers that night outdid each other trying to find superlatives for the new railroad and the man who built it. Governor Swanson called the project "the chief event in the history of Virginia since the civil war."14 Twain was the only speaker who knew the guest of honor well enough to tease him. "I like to hear my old friend complimented, but I don't like to hear it overdone," he told the audience. He admitted that he couldn't get too excited about a "railroad in which I own no stock." Though everyone else was full of enthusiasm for the coal pier, he dared to make light of it, calling it "that dump down yonder." Rogers laughed heartily when Twain explained that a glimpse of the pier from the sea was enough to make him decline an invitation for a closer look. "I didn't go because I was diffident, sentimentally diffident, about going and looking at that thing again-that great, long, bony thing; it looked just like Mr. Rogers's foot."

Knowing that the other speakers would do nothing but sing the praises of Rogers the railway builder, Twain decided to joke about that subject so he could then speak with perfect seriousness about matters closer to his heart. Everyone knew of his friend's reputation as a businessman, he said, but not many were aware "of that generous heart of his." A man of few words in public, the proud tyc.o.o.n rarely spoke of his efforts to help others in need. "He is supposed to be a moon which has one side dark and the other bright," said Twain. "But the other side, though you don't see it, is not dark; it is bright, and its rays penetrate."

Growing emotional, the author declared that he was one whose life had been penetrated by those rays of generosity, and he wanted the audience to know the details. "If I don't look at him," he said, "I can tell it now."

Concisely, he described how his publishing firm had failed in the hard economic times of the early 1890s, and how he had become mired in debt. "I was on my back; my books were not worth anything at all, and I could not give away my copyrights. Mr. Rogers had long enough vision ahead to say, 'Your books have supported you before, and after the panic is over they will support you again,' and that was a correct proposition. He saved my copyrights, and saved me from financial ruin."

Though Twain knew how hard Rogers had worked to complete the railroad and to expand his vast business empire, he wanted everyone to know that their friendship was rooted in something that had nothing to do with great wealth or power. It had begun with a simple act of kindness and was sustained by a deep bond of sympathy unrelated to either man's fame. Surrounded by hard-nosed businessmen, Twain wanted to acknowledge a debt he could never repay. If Rogers had not saved him, he said, "I would now be living out-of-doors under an umbrella, and a borrowed one at that."15 The next morning Rogers invited Twain to accompany him and other dignitaries on an inspection trip of the railroad all the way to its western terminus in the coalfields of West Virginia. That was asking too much. Though he loved the owner of the rails, Twain still didn't care to ride them if he didn't have to, and politely declined the offer. He chose instead to sail home the following day. But before he parted from Rogers, he requested one last favor, and was careful to do so within earshot of reporters. He asked him to "speak to Manager Johnston, of the hotel, and a.s.sure him that Mark was a nice man and probably would pay his hotel bill some time."

Later that morning he decided to liven up his free Sunday in Norfolk by trying out his old routine of loitering outside a church in the hope of attracting attention from the crowd leaving the worship service. In this case he chose the big Baptist church on Freemason Street, a few blocks from his hotel. In no time he was surrounded by admirers and was asked to Sunday dinner by one of the deacons of the church, Dr. Livius Lankford. As a prominent leader of the new Laymen's Missionary Movement, Lankford may have been a little too pious for Twain's tastes, but he accepted the dinner invitation despite being reminded by Ashcroft that they had made another engagement for that hour.

"Guess I am man enough to break it," Twain said, and ambled off to see more of Norfolk.16 ...

WHEN TWAIN ARRIVED BACK in New York on April 7, he went alone to Stuyvesant Square to visit Clara at her apartment. Her concert at Mendelssohn Hall was less than a week away, and he wanted to make it clear that he intended to be in the audience. Because the event was so important to her professionally, she welcomed all the support she could get, and didn't raise any of her old objections to the possibility that her famous father's presence might overshadow her performance. Even the Ashcrofts were planning to attend, thinking it prudent to be present on the all-important night. Whether she succeeded or failed, they wanted to be among the first to know the outcome and to a.s.sess any changes in her mood.

Though she was preoccupied with rehearsing, she had lost none of her desire to be rid of the Ashcrofts, and said as much to her father during his visit. She was more convinced than ever that her family was in danger of losing everything to the couple, who were acting as if they already owned Stormfield. She was appalled at Isabel's "impudence" in openly wearing jewelry that had belonged to Livy. One day she noticed a brooch pinned to Isabel's dress, and recognized it as her mother's. After Clara revealed her indignation with "a pretty decided look," the brooch was silently returned to the cabinet where it belonged. Realizing that she was taking too many risks, Isabel hastened to return other items to their rightful places, including some carnelian beads of Livy's. She also took the precaution of hiding her journals in a "voluminous dress that hung inside out in her closet." In addition, she may have begun destroying at this time certain parts of her journal for 1909. Only a few entries from it have survived.17 To Clara's surprise, her father confessed at her apartment that he now had reason to think her suspicions of the couple were well founded. Something had happened during his stay in Norfolk that had shaken his confidence in Ralph Ashcroft. The two men had argued on the night he gave his speech at the banquet, and Clara was the subject of their disagreement. With no definitive evidence to back him up, Ashcroft told Twain that Clara had unjustly dismissed one of the servants at Stormfield. Twain strongly suspected that Ashcroft was lying, and was now able to get Clara's side of the story. She easily demonstrated that the charge was false. She had not discharged anyone. In fact, it was Ashcroft who had frightened the servant into leaving, and who had then tried to blame Clara for it.

All the facts wouldn't come out for a few more weeks, but Twain heard enough from Clara to make him more sympathetic to her view that Ashcroft and his new bride were up to no good. For the first time the author had serious doubts about the trustworthiness of the couple in whom he had placed so much confidence, and those doubts grew stronger as he recalled the younger man's arrogant att.i.tude toward him during their argument. Ashcroft had given the impression that he didn't care whether the truth came out or not. He seemed to think he could make Twain believe anything.

At that very moment, while father and daughter were discussing the incident, the telephone rang. It was Jean calling from the house in New Jersey where she had been living for the past few weeks. The conversation went well, and afterward both Twain and Clara agreed that Jean seemed in unusually good spirits. She was bursting with pride after the New York Times had recently published one of her letters to the editor. The topic of the letter didn't have any direct connection to her, but was related to her general sympathy for victims of cruelty. In this case her tender heart was moved by the abuse of a Native American youth living hundreds of miles away from her.

In late March a small band of Creek Indians in Oklahoma had begun an uprising after losing their lands to new settlers. The leader-an elderly chief named Crazy Snake-was wanted for murder, and when deputies captured one of his sons, they used torture to find out where the chief was hiding. "Tell us where your father is," they had shouted to the son after tying a rope around his throat and slowly lifting him off the ground, "or you'll hang there until you die." Running out of breath, the young man gasped for mercy and was finally let down when he agreed to cooperate.

This episode didn't raise much concern in the Eastern press, but it enraged Jean, who responded with a sharp letter of protest overflowing with the kind of indignant sarcasm her father was famous for. The letter appeared on April 5 under the heading "Medieval Torture," and was signed "Jean L. Clemens, Montclair, N.J."

Is it possible that in this civilized land today a Deputy Sheriff can with impunity torture a prisoner? Though the son of Crazy Snake is but an Indian, how is it that the Sheriff could threaten him with death by half hanging him in order to extort revelations concerning his father and his friends? Is such brutality to pa.s.s without punishment merely because the prisoner is not a citizen? If we, considering ourselves one of the most civilized nations of the world, permit our officers to make use of the methods of the middle ages-without counting our wholesale robbery of the Indians' lands-then they who make less pretense of being civilized should be expected to murder and burn on all occasions.18 After discussing this powerful protest and their telephone conversation with Jean, Twain and Clara once again took up the question of why such a vibrant young woman wasn't living in her own home. With his mind now troubled by misgivings about the Ashcrofts, Twain decided on the spot to shake things up. Clara was given permission to deal directly with Dr. Peterson, and to arrange for Jean to come home as soon as possible. And, with grim resolve, Twain agreed that the time had come to change his relationship with the Ashcrofts.

He would start with Isabel, he confided, terminating her contract after giving her the necessary notice of thirty days. He thought it was best to do this on April 15, avoiding any conflict with Clara's concert on the 13th. Ralph Ashcroft's case would take more time to address because his contracts and his position at the Mark Twain Company made him more difficult to dismiss, and because the author himself wasn't sure how he could run his affairs without his business manager's expertise. But it was clear that Twain had reached his breaking point and was ready to act.

Though Clara wasn't sure how the Ashcrofts would respond, she was glad that at long last her father had seen the light. And she knew that once he had turned against someone, he was unlikely to reverse his decision. He was now able to admit that he had misjudged the Ashcrofts. He had allowed himself to become entangled in what he would later call a "queer & shabby & pitiful tale-to wit, a pair of degraded & sufficiently clumsy sharpers, & I the born a.s.s, their easy victim."19 After returning to Stormfield, he tried not to give Isabel any hint that her days in his employ were numbered, but he did reveal his intention to bring Jean home as soon as possible. She didn't take the news well. She panicked, and it showed as she nervously insisted that such a move was impossible. She claimed that Jean was still too ill, and then made her usual argument that the young woman's condition would deteriorate quickly in a busy house where guests were constantly coming and going. Whereas Twain had always taken her objections to heart in the past, he ignored them now and said that he would do whatever was necessary to win Dr. Peterson's approval for the move. In fact, the more Isabel protested, the more convinced Twain became that he was doing the right thing, and that she had been misleading him for years.

Worried that he might prevail, the Ashcrofts took drastic action. They canceled their plans to attend Clara's concert and arranged an urgent meeting with Peterson at Stormfield on the day of the concert, when Twain would not be around to interfere. The idea was to persuade the doctor that Twain's daughters were trying to pressure him into doing something rash, and that the new plan had to be resisted at all costs. Unaware of how much intrigue was swirling around Stormfield, Peterson agreed to the meeting on the a.s.sumption that Isabel was simply trying to reinforce her long-standing effort to spare Twain the burden of caring for Jean at home.

Such turmoil in the family didn't help Clara's nerves, and on the night of her big performance she wasn't at her best. The audience at Mendelssohn Hall was large and enthusiastic, and many of the seats were filled with old friends and admirers. They made a great show of support, especially William Dean Howells, whose hearty encouragement prompted one observer to say that he applauded the singer "as if he belonged to a paid claque." At the end of the evening Twain approached the stage and handed his daughter a "huge" bouquet of roses.20 But the critics were out in force and were almost unanimous in their opinion that her performance was a disappointment. The New York Times tried to explain the problem without sounding too harsh. "It seems a pity that a singer with as good a natural voice as that of Miss Clemens, who sings with so much feeling, should not use her voice to better advantage. Her tones last night were too often uneven and m.u.f.fled." Other reviewers were less polite. "Miss Clemens was heard in a recital of songs not long ago," wrote the New York Sun, "and was accorded some critical censure because of her imperfect vocal technique. Her singing last evening was less affected by nervousness than it was on the previous occasion, but it could by no means have satisfied the young woman's artistic aspirations." Some critics bluntly stated that her voice had not been properly trained. One complained that her singing showed "a struggle against a poor method of tone production," and another said that it was obvious "the technical difficulties of her art are not yet fully mastered."21 Though there were many compliments for her talents, the verdict of the press was clear: by the demanding standards of America's music capital she was a second-rate performer. Her career never fully recovered from that verdict. She and her father put a brave face on it, and she made an effort later in the year to arrange another tour. But the night of April 13 marked the end of any hope that she might achieve the kind of success Gabrilowitsch had been enjoying. It was a great blow to a woman who had wanted so pa.s.sionately to outshine the two most important men in her life.

Meanwhile, the Ashcrofts used that fateful evening to make Dr. Peterson believe that sending Jean home would kill Mark Twain. They "dinned lies into his ears," as Jean would later say of their tactics. But the lies may not have been necessary. With the Ashcrofts so adamantly opposed to Jean's presence, Peterson could easily have agreed that his patient was better off not coming home. He always believed that she needed better care than Isabel was willing to provide or Twain could manage, and he still thought the best place for all his epilepsy patients was in the controlled environment of a sanitarium or similar retreat.

When Clara went to see the doctor on April 15, she didn't want to debate the true merits of Stormfield as a home for an epilepsy patient. She wanted action and, after the drubbing she had received from the city's music critics, she was in no mood to be contradicted. Yet Peterson stood his ground and refused to give permission for Jean to be moved. Frustrated, Clara kept insisting that her sister was well enough to come home, and that her father desperately wanted her there. After forty-five minutes of arguing, the doctor made a concession. As Jean later put it, Clara "succeeded in wringing his consent to a one week's trial visit."22 While his older daughter was with Peterson, Twain was at Stormfield taking action against the woman who had worked for him for nearly seven years, and whom he had once considered indispensable. He wrote her a note saying that her services were no longer needed and enclosed a month's pay. But he couldn't bring himself to give her the letter in person. Instead a servant took it to her.

Though he had tried not to reveal his plans, Isabel had noticed a change in his manner and wasn't surprised when she received his message. He had said something recently that had made her think the end was coming: "Remember, whatever I do is because of a promise I have made to Clara." All the same, it was hard for her to accept that he could turn his back on her. She had helped him in so many ways and had come to think of herself as the most important person in his life. But she and her husband had underestimated his loyalty to his daughters, and had mistakenly a.s.sumed they could manage his life and his estate for as long as they wanted. Flattered by their attentions, he had been lulled into a false sense of security, but now that his mind was filled with doubts, he couldn't carry on as usual.23 Isabel decided not to protest her dismissal. She knew it wouldn't do any good to argue with him. It made more sense to wait for his temper to cool, and then to let her husband begin the slow process of negotiating a good settlement for themselves, using as leverage the various agreements they had made with him over the last few months. She knew that, if necessary, her husband could launch a very aggressive campaign on their behalf, and perhaps make Clara regret pushing Twain into action. So she sent him a gentle response. "Thank you so much," she wrote, "for doing in so kind a way, the thing that I have been expecting."24 Though firing her was easy, Twain soon realized that ending their relationship would prove more troublesome. After all, she still owned the cottage that stood just beyond his front gate. Even if he could quickly sever Ralph Ashcroft's connection to the Mark Twain Company, he had to face the possibility that the couple would be his nearest neighbors for as long as they wanted to remain in the area, and that every time he left his grounds he would have to pa.s.s their house.

Isabel made it clear that she had no intention of leaving Redding. In the ten days following her dismissal, she even made several visits to Stormfield, hoping that she might be able to charm Twain into softening his att.i.tude toward her and her husband. She knew she had to work fast. She didn't want to be in the house when Clara brought Jean home on April 26 to begin the one-week trial visit. But her charm offensive backfired. Twain was infuriated by her visits and received her coldly, writing afterward of his amazement that she "still haunted the place, still infested it with her unwelcome presence, still tried to let on that our relations were as pleasant as ever."25 For a time, he worried that she would never go away. It was humiliating to admit that he had allowed her to exercise so much influence over him, and he desperately wanted her to fade quietly from his life. If she refused, he would have a fight on his hands that would create a scandal and ruin any chance of restoring peace at Stormfield. Having allowed himself to become so entangled in the lives of the Ashcrofts, he began to fear they would dog his steps all the way to the grave.

On April 21, at three o'clock in the morning, he was overcome by a wave of despair. The big house was still, and he was sitting up in bed with a book in his lap. It was the first volume of the Letters of James Russell Lowell, which he had been reading for the last few nights. Turning a page, he came across a pa.s.sage in which Lowell recalled a time in his youth when he had contemplated suicide. "I remember in '39 putting a c.o.c.ked pistol to my forehead," Lowell wrote in a letter of 1866 to Charles Eliot Norton, "and being afraid to pull the trigger, of which I was heartily ashamed, and am still whenever I think of it. Had I been in earnest, why, of course, you would never have had the incomparable advantage of my friendship. But, of course, I was only flattering myself. I am glad now that I was too healthy, for it is only your feeble Jerusalems that fairly carry the thing out and rid the world of what would have been mere nuisances."26 In the margin beside this pa.s.sage Twain wrote, "3 a.m., Apl. 21/09. Down to 'trigger' I am with him, but no further. It is odd that I should stumble upon this now, for it is only two days ago since something called to my mind my experience of 1866. ... I put the pistol to my head but wasn't man enough to pull the trigger. Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed, but I was never ashamed of having tried. Suicide is the only really sane thing the young or old ever do in this life. 'Feeble Jerusalems' never kill themselves; they survive the attempt. Lowell & I are instances."

It is a measure of how deeply this crisis in 1909 affected him that Twain felt obliged to compare it to a period long ago when he had come perilously close to ending his life. At a dark time in the mid-1860s he had told his brother, "If I do not get out of debt in 3 months,-pistols or poison for one-exit me." Though his will to live was too strong to succ.u.mb to the temptation of suicide, he longed for some way to make a quick "exit" from the troubles surrounding him at Stormfield.27 Much as he loved the place, he might have abandoned it altogether had Jean remained elsewhere. But she was eager to see the house that had been built with her in mind, and to make it her permanent home. And he knew it was his duty to stay put and help. He wanted to end her "exile" by making sure that she and Stormfield were right for each other. That meant putting aside his worries about the Ashcrofts and trying to undo some of the damage they had done. Gathering his strength, he prepared for Jean's arrival and sent her an encouraging note.

"Dear child," he wrote, "you will be as welcome as if it were your mother herself calling you home from exile!"28 Seemingly devoted to their boss, Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft strike deferential poses at Stormfield in this photograph from late 1908.

NINETEEN.

Crime and Punishment.

If he thought you had in any way played him false you were anathema and maranatha forever.

W. D. Howells on Mark Twain.

AS PLANNED, Jean entered her new home on April 26. She recorded that fact in the guestbook and wrote something else that made it clear she didn't intend to leave-she listed Stormfield as her only address. For the first time in years, she didn't have to worry about any interference from Isabel. There was no sign of her presence at the house. She had visited Twain a few days earlier, but by the time of Jean's arrival, she had removed the last of her things and would never again cross the threshold. Twain and his daughter did their best to ignore her cottage whenever they left the grounds, and she was careful to keep out of sight.

Jean warmed to her new home right away and finished her trial week in such high spirits that her father decided she must stay as long as she liked. Dr. Peterson didn't object, and Jean breathed a great sigh of relief, knowing that she wouldn't have to move again. Twain observed that she was "so glad to be in her own home once more that she hadn't any words for her grat.i.tude."2 To Joseph Twich.e.l.l, she wrote, "You can't imagine how thankful I am to get back home again, & in this beautiful place, too. ... I love country life & dislike city life, so that my one & only cause for irritation is the thought of what has happened in the past & the necessity of pa.s.sing the charming little house still in Miss Lyon's possession every time I leave the house."

She boasted, "I am in better health than for a long time; able at last to be of use to father."3 Indeed, her robust appearance impressed Twain so much that he thought she was as strong "as the very rocks." It seemed to him that she had finally managed to get the better of "her cruel malady," and he berated himself for "my own inexcusable stupidity" in ever listening to Isabel's advice. His former secretary had tricked him, he complained, making him an unwitting accessory to the "crime of keeping Jean exiled ... after she was well enough to live at home."4 Of course, Jean's disease was not cured, but both father and daughter wanted to believe the worst was over. Feeling that he had wronged her in the past by agreeing to so many restrictions on her freedom, Twain now went to the opposite extreme and let his daughter do more or less as she pleased. She was given a small farm next to his own property and was allowed, as she put it, "to develop & improve [the farm] after my own desire & ability." And, as she noted with immense satisfaction in her letter to Twich.e.l.l, she was "permitted once more" to ride her horse whenever she liked.

Making up for lost time, she became a whirlwind of activity. Usually, she was up before seven, and stayed busy until dinner twelve hours later, with only short breaks for lunch and tea. Wherever she went, her constant companion was her new dog, Fix, a German shepherd. She had acquired him in Berlin and spoke to him only in German. At her farm she bought some livestock and poultry, and planted a garden; at home she took over many of Isabel's old duties, answering letters and paying bills. The household affairs were in a mess after weeks of neglect. "I found bills overdue several months," she told Twich.e.l.l, "& there was plenty of evidence of letters never answered. ... I have a great deal to attend to but while it seems a pretty large amount some days, when I get things into proper running-trim, I don't expect to find it a burden."5 Twain was shocked to discover how careless Isabel had become in the last months of her employment, but was grateful to find that his daughter was willing and able to restore some order to his affairs. "How glad I am that Jean is at home again," he said to himself over and over.6 At the end of April Paine returned from his long Mediterranean voyage to find-as he would later put it in a ma.s.sive understatement-"There had been changes in my absence." Though the change he welcomed most was Isabel's departure from Stormfield, he was also pleased to see Jean living at home. Except for Clara and Twain, n.o.body was more appreciative of Jean's character than Paine, who always had a good word to say for her. As far as he could tell, her long ordeal had done nothing to undermine her spirit or her appearance. He thought she looked "fine and handsome, apparently full of life and health." He described her as "overflowingly happy" with her busy new routine.7 It was easy for anyone who didn't understand her illness to a.s.sume that she had made a remarkable recovery, and that she would be able to take care of herself. Dr. Peterson knew better, but his views had been overruled. The more Twain saw of his daughter at home, the more convinced he became that she deserved her new freedom. His anger toward Isabel also grew with each pa.s.sing day as he continued to brood on his failure to bring Jean home earlier. Every time he saw his daughter return from a day's work on her farm looking strong and healthy he was reminded of how often Isabel had told him that Jean was too ill to live with him.

While her father's resentment of Isabel deepened, Clara was busy trying to prove her suspicion that the Ashcrofts had been stealing from the family and were plotting to steal more money. In the last week of April she won her father's permission to visit Standard Oil headquarters and to ask Henry Rogers's help in conducting a professional audit of the family's finances. Rogers welcomed her warmly, listened to her story, and promptly agreed "to take up the matter" and "straighten it out."

As soon as she had left the office, Rogers dictated a letter to Twain in which he acknowledged that he wasn't entirely surpr