The Boys' Life of Mark Twain Part 30

LVIII.

MARK TWAIN AT SEVENTY

In a small cottage belonging to Richard Watson Gilder, at Tyringham, Ma.s.sachusetts, Samuel Clemens and his daughters tried to plan for the future. Mrs. Clemens had always been the directing force--they were lost without her. They finally took a house in New York City, No. 21 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Ninth Street, installed the familiar furnishings, and tried once more to establish a home. The house was handsome within and without--a proper residence for a venerable author and sage--a suitable setting for Mark Twain. But it was lonely for him.

It lacked soul--comfort that would reach the heart. He added presently a great Aeolian orchestrelle, with a variety of music for his different moods. Sometimes he played it himself, though oftener his secretary played to him. He went out little that winter--seeing only a few old and intimate friends. His writing, such as it was, was of a serious nature, protests against oppression and injustice in a variety of forms. Once he wrote a "War Prayer," supposed to have been made by a mysterious, white-robed stranger who enters a church during those ceremonies that precede the marching of the nation's armies to battle. The minister had prayed for victory, a prayer which the stranger interprets as a pet.i.tion that the enemy's country be laid waste, its soldiers be torn by sh.e.l.ls, its people turned out roofless, to wander through their desolated land in rags and hunger. It was a scathing arraignment of war, a prophecy, indeed, which to-day has been literally fulfilled. He did not print it, because then it would have been regarded as sacrilege.

When summer came again, in a beautiful house at Dublin, New Hampshire, on the Monadnock slope, he seemed to get back into the old swing of work, and wrote that pathetic story, "A Horse's Tale." Also "Eve's Diary,"

which, under its humor, is filled with tenderness, and he began a wildly fantastic tale ent.i.tled "Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes," a satire in which Gulliver is outdone. He never finished it. He never could finish it, for it ran off into amazing by-paths that led nowhere, and the tale was lost. Yet he always meant to get at it again some day and make order out of chaos.

Old friends were dying, and Mark Twain grew more and more lonely. "My section of the procession has but a little way to go," he wrote when the great English actor Henry Irving died. Charles Henry Webb, his first publisher, John Hay, Bret Harte, Thomas B. Reed, and, indeed, most of his earlier a.s.sociates were gone. When an invitation came from San Francisco to attend a California reunion he replied that his wandering days were over and that it was his purpose to sit by the fire for the rest of his life. And in another letter:

"I have done more for San Francisco than any other of its old residents. Since I left there, it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more--I could have gone earlier--it was suggested."

A choice example, by the way, of Mark Twain's best humor, with its perfectly timed pause, and the afterthought. Most humorists would have been content to end with the statement, "I could have gone earlier."

Only Mark Twain could have added that final exquisite touch--"it was suggested."

Mark Twain was nearing seventy. With the 30th of November (1905) he would complete the scriptural limitation, and the president of his publishing-house, Col. George Harvey, of Harper's, proposed a great dinner for him in celebration of his grand maturity. Clemens would have preferred a small a.s.sembly in some snug place, with only his oldest and closest friends. Colonel Harvey had a different view. He had given a small, choice dinner to Mark Twain on his sixty-seventh birthday; now it must be something really worth while--something to outrank any former literary gathering. In order not to conflict with Thanksgiving holidays, the 5th of December was selected as the date. On that evening, two hundred American and English men and women of letters a.s.sembled in Delmonico's great banquet-hall to do honor to their chief. What an occasion it was! The tables of gay diners and among them Mark Twain, his snow-white hair a gleaming beacon for every eye. Then, by and by, presented by William Dean Howells, he rose to speak. Instantly the brilliant throng was on its feet, a shouting billow of life, the white handkerchiefs flying foam-like on its crest. It was a supreme moment!

The greatest one of them all hailed by their applause as he scaled the mountaintop.

Never did Mark Twain deliver a more perfect address than he gave that night. He began with the beginning, the meagerness of that little hamlet that had seen his birth, and sketched it all so quaintly and delightfully that his hearers laughed and shouted, though there was tenderness under it, and often the tears were just beneath the surface. He told of his habits of life, how he had reached seventy by following a plan of living that would probably kill anybody else; how, in fact, he believed he had no valuable habits at all. Then, at last, came that unforgetable close:

"Threescore years and ten!

"It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time- expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emanc.i.p.ated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-call but 'lights out.' You pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline, if you prefer--and without prejudice--for they are not legally collectable.

"The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will never need it again. If you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and the late homecomings from the banquet and the lights and laughter, through the deserted streets--a desolation which would not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more--if you shrink at the thought of these things you need only reply, 'Your invitation honors me and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and that when you, in your turn, shall arrive at Pier 70 you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.'"

The tears that had been lying in wait were no longer kept back. If there were any present who did not let them flow without shame, who did not shout their applause from throats choked with sobs, they failed to mention the fact later.

Many of his old friends, one after another, rose to tell their love for him--Cable, Carnegie, Gilder, and the rest. Mr. Rogers did not speak, nor the Reverend Twich.e.l.l, but they sat at his special table. Aldrich could not be there, but wrote a letter. A group of English authors, including Alfred Austin, Barrie, Chesterton, Dobson, Doyle, Hardy, Kipling, Lang, and others, joined in a cable. Helen Keller wrote:

"And you are seventy years old? Or is the report exaggerated, like that of your death? I remember, when I saw you last, at the house of dear Mr. Hutton, in Princeton, you said:

"'If a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight, he knows too much. If he is an optimist after he is forty-eight, he knows too little.'

"Now we know you are an optimist, and n.o.body would dare to accuse one on the 'seven-terraced summit' of knowing little. So probably you are not seventy, after all, but only forty-seven!"

Helen Keller was right. Mark Twain was never a pessimist in his heart.

LIX.

MARK TWAIN ARRANGES FOR HIS BIOGRAPHY

It was at the beginning of 1906--a little more than a month after the seventieth-birthday dinner--that the writer of these chapters became personally a.s.sociated with Mark Twain. I had met him before, and from time to time he had returned a kindly word about some book I had written and inconsiderately sent him, for he had been my literary hero from childhood. Once, indeed, he had allowed me to use some of his letters in a biography I was writing of Thomas Nast; he had been always an admirer of the great cartoonist, and the permission was kindness itself. Before the seating at the birthday dinner I happened to find myself for a moment alone with Mark Twain and remembered to thank him in person for the use of the letters; a day or two later I sent him a copy of the book. I did not expect to hear from it again.

It was a little while after this that I was asked to join in a small private dinner to be given to Mark Twain at the Players, in celebration of his being made an honorary member of that club--there being at the time only one other member of this cla.s.s, Sir Henry Irving. I was in the Players a day or two before the event, and David Munro, of "The North American Review," a man whose gentle and kindly nature made him "David"

to all who knew him, greeted me joyfully, his face full of something he knew I would wish to hear.

He had been chosen, he said, to propose the Players' dinner to Mark Twain, and had found him propped up in bed, and beside him a copy of the Nast book. I suspect now that David's generous heart prompted Mark Twain to speak of the book, and that his comment had lost nothing in David's eager retelling. But I was too proud and happy to question any feature of the precious compliment, and Munro--always most happy in making others happy--found opportunity to repeat it, and even to improve upon it --usually in the presence of others--several times during the evening.

The Players' dinner to Mark Twain was given on the evening of January 3, 19066, and the picture of it still remains clear to me. The guests, a.s.sembled around a single table in the private dining-room, did not exceed twenty-five in number. Brander Matthews presided, and the knightly Frank Millet, who would one day go down on the "t.i.tanic," was there, and Gilder and Munro and David Bispham and Robert Reid, and others of their kind. It so happened that my seat was nearly facing the guest of the evening, who by a custom of the Players is placed at the side and not at the distant end of the long table. Regarding him at leisure, I saw that he seemed to be in full health. He had an alert, rested look; his complexion had the tints of a miniature painting. Lit by the soft glow of the shaded candles, outlined against the richness of the shadowed walls, he made a figure of striking beauty. I could not take my eyes from it, for it stirred in me the farthest memories. I saw the interior of a farm-house sitting-room in the Middle West where I had first heard the name of Mark Twain, and where night after night a group had gathered around the evening lamp to hear read aloud the story of the Innocents on their Holy Land pilgrimage, which to a boy of eight had seemed only a wonderful poem and fairy-tale. To Charles Harvey Genung, who sat next to me, I whispered something of this, and how during the thirty-six years since then no one had meant to me quite what Mark Twain had meant--in literature and, indeed, in life. Now here he was just across the table.

It was a fairy-tale come true.

Genung said: "You should write his life."

It seemed to me no more than a pleasant remark, but he came back to it again and again, trying to encourage me with the word that Munro had brought back concerning the biography of Nast. However, nothing of what he said had kindled any spark of hope. I put him off by saying that certainly some one of longer and closer friendship and larger experience had been selected for the work. Then the speaking began, and the matter went out of my mind. Later in the evening, when we had left our seats and were drifting about the table, I found a chance to say a word to our guest concerning his "Joan of Arc," which I had recently re-read. To my happiness, he told me that long-ago incident--the stray leaf from Joan's life, blown to him by the wind--which had led to his interest in all literature. Then presently I was with Genung again and he was still insisting that I write the life of Mark Twain. It may have been his faithful urging, it may have been the quick sympathy kindled by the name of "Joan of Arc"; whatever it was, in the instant of bidding good-by to our guest I was prompted to add:

"May I call to see you, Mr. Clemens, some day?" And something--to this day I do not know what--prompted him to answer:

"Yes, come soon."

Two days later, by appointment with his secretary, I arrived at 21 Fifth Avenue, and waited in the library to be summoned to his room. A few moments later I was ascending the long stairs, wondering why I had come on so useless an errand, trying to think up an excuse for having come at all.

He was propped up in bed--a regal bed, from a dismantled Italian palace --delving through a copy of "Huckleberry Finn," in search of a paragraph concerning which some unknown correspondent had inquired. He pushed the cigars toward me, commenting amusingly on this correspondent and on letter-writing in general. By and by, when there came a lull, I told him what so many thousands had told him before--what his work had meant to me, so long ago, and recalled my childish impressions of that large black-and-gilt book with its wonderful pictures and adventures "The Innocents Abroad." Very likely he was willing enough to let me change the subject presently and thank him for the kindly word which David Munro had brought. I do not remember what was his comment, but I suddenly found myself saying that out of his encouragement had grown a hope (though certainly it was less), that I might some day undertake a book about himself. I expected my errand to end at this point, and his silence seemed long and ominous.

He said at last that from time to time he had himself written chapters of his life, but that he had always tired of the work and put it aside. He added that he hoped his daughters would one day collect his letters, but that a biography--a detailed story of a man's life and effort--was another matter. I think he added one or two other remarks, then all at once, turning upon me those piercing agate-blue eyes, he said:

"When would you like to begin?"

There was a dresser, with a large mirror, at the end of the room. I happened to catch my reflection in it, and I vividly recollect saying to it, mentally "This is not true; it is only one of many similar dreams."

But even in a dream one must answer, and I said:

"Whenever you like. I can begin now."

He was always eager in any new undertaking.

"Very good," he said, "the sooner, then, the better. Let's begin while we are in the humor. The longer you postpone a thing of this kind, the less likely you are ever to get at it."

This was on Sat.u.r.day; I asked if Tuesday, January 9, would be too soon to start. He agreed that Tuesday would do, and inquired as to my plan of work. I suggested bringing a stenographer to make notes of his life-story as he could recall it, this record to be supplemented by other material--letters, journals, and what not. He said:

"I think I should enjoy dictating to a stenographer with some one to prompt me and act as audience. The room adjoining this was fitted up for my study. My ma.n.u.script and notes and private books and many of my letters are there, and there are a trunkful or two of such things in the attic. I seldom use the room myself. I do my writing and reading in bed. I will turn that room over to you for this work. Whatever you need will be brought to you. We can have the dictations here in the morning, and you can put in the rest of the day to suit yourself. You can have a key and come and go as you please."

That was always his way. He did nothing by halves. He got up and showed me the warm luxury of the study, with its ma.s.s of material--disordered, but priceless.

I have no distinct recollections of how I came away, but presently, back at the Players, I was confiding the matter to Charles Harvey Genung, who said he was not surprised; but I think he was.

LX.

WORKING WITH MARK TWAIN

It was true, after all; and on Tuesday morning, January 9, 1906, I was on hand with a capable stenographer, ready to begin. Clemens, meantime, had developed a new idea: he would like to add, he said, the new dictations to his former beginnings, completing an autobiography which was to be laid away and remain unpublished for a hundred years. He would pay the stenographer himself, and own the notes, allowing me, of course, free use of them as material for my book. He did not believe that he could follow the story of his life in its order of dates, but would find it necessary to wander around, picking up the thread as memory or fancy prompted. I could suggest subjects and ask questions. I a.s.sented to everything, and we set to work immediately.