Chapter XXXVI: of the Mississippi book (22)

Mr. Rogers is perfectly satisfied that our course was right, absolutely right and wise--cheer up, the best is yet to come.

And again:

Now & then a good and dear Joe Twichell or Susy Warner condoles with
me & says, “Cheer up-don't be downhearted,” and some other friend
says, “I'm glad and surprised to see how cheerful you are & how
bravely you stand it,” & none of them suspect what a burden has been
lifted from me & how blithe I am inside. Except when I think of
you, dear heart--then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you
grieving and ashamed, & dreading to look people in the face. For in
the thick of the fight there is cheer, but you are far away & cannot
hear the drum nor see the wheeling squadrons. You only seem to see
rout, retreat, & dishonored colors dragging in the dirt--whereas
none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but no
dishonor--& we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, “Sho,
Livy isn't worrying. So long as she's got you and the children she
doesn't care what happens. She knows it isn't her affair.” Which
didn't convince me.

Olivia Clemens wrote bravely and encouragingly to him, and more cheerfully than she felt, for in a letter to her sister she said:

The hideous news of Webster & Co.'s failure reached me by cable on
Thursday, and Friday morning Galignani's Messenger had a squib about
it. Of course I knew it was likely to come, but I had great hope
that it would be in some way averted. Mr. Rogers was so sure there
was no way out but failure that I suppose it was true. But I have a
perfect horror and heart-sickness over it. I cannot get away from
the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I suppose it
always will mean that to me. We have put a great deal of money into
the concern, and perhaps there would have been nothing but to keep
putting it in and losing it. We certainly now have not much to
lose. We might have mortgaged the house; that was the only thing I
could think of to do. Mr. Clemens felt that there would never be
any end, and perhaps he was right. At any rate, I know that he was
convinced that it was the only thing, because when he went back he
promised me that if it was possible to save the thing he would do so
if only on account of my sentiment in the matter.

Sue, if you were to see me you would see that I have grown old very
fast during this last year. I have wrinkled.

Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems to me
so impossible. I do not make things go very well, and I feel that
my life is an absolute and irretrievable failure. Perhaps I am
thankless, but I so often feel that I should like to give it up and
die. However, I presume that if I could have the opportunity I
should at once desire to live.

Clemens now hurried back to Paris, arriving about the middle of May,
his second trip in two months. Scarcely had he got the family
settled at La Bourboule-les-Bains, a quiet watering-place in the
southern part of France, when a cable from Mr. Rogers, stating that
the typesetter was perfected, made him decide to hurry back to
America to assist in securing the new fortune. He did not go,
however. Rogers wrote that the machine had been installed in the
Times-Herald office, Chicago, for a long and thorough trial. There
would be plenty of time, and Clemens concluded to rest with his
family at La Bourboule-les-Bains. Later in the summer they went to
Etretat, where he settled down to work.

CLXXXIX. AN EVENTFUL YEAR ENDS

That summer (July, '94.) the 'North American Review' published “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” a rare piece of literary criticism and probably the most human and convincing plea ever made for that injured, ill-fated woman. An admirer of Shelley's works, Clemens could not resist taking up the defense of Shelley's abandoned wife. It had become the fashion to refer to her slightingly, and to suggest that she had not been without blame for Shelley's behavior. A Shelley biography by Professor Dowden, Clemens had found particularly irritating. In the midst of his tangle of the previous year he had paused to give it attention. There were times when Mark Twain wrote without much sequence, digressing this way and that, as his fancy led him, charmingly and entertainingly enough, with no large, logical idea. He pursued no such method in this instance. The paper on Harriet Shelley is a brief as direct and compact and cumulative as could have been prepared by a trained legal mind of the highest order, and it has the added advantage of being the utterance of a human soul voicing an indignation inspired by human suffering and human wrong. By no means does it lack humor, searching and biting sarcasm. The characterization of Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley as a “literary cake-walk” is a touch which only Mark Twain could have laid on. Indeed, the “Defense of Harriet Shelly,” with those early chapters of Joan at Florence, maybe counted as the beginning for Mark Twain of a genuine literary renaissance. It was to prove a remarkable period less voluminous than the first, but even more choice, containing, as it would, besides Joan and the Shelley article, the rest of that remarkable series collected now as Literary Essays; the Hadleyburg story; “Was it Heaven or Hell?”; those masterly articles on our national policies; closing at last with those exquisite memories, in his final days.

The summer of 1894 found Mark Twain in the proper frame of mind for literary work. He was no longer in a state of dread. At Etretat, a watering-place on the French coast, he returned eagerly to the long-neglected tale of Joan--“a book which writes itself,” he wrote Mr. Rogers”--a tale which tells itself; I merely have to hold the pen.” Etretat, originally a fishing-village, was less pretentious than to-day, and the family had taken a small furnished cottage a little way back from the coast--a charming place, and a cheap one--as became their means. Clemens worked steadily at Etretat for more than a month, finishing the second part of his story, then went over to Rouen to visit the hallowed precincts where Joan dragged out those weary months that brought her to the stake. Susy Clemens was taken ill at Rouen, and they lingered in that ancient city, wandering about its venerable streets, which have been changed but slowly by the centuries, and are still full of memories.

They returned to Paris at length--to the Brighton; their quarters of the previous winter--but presently engaged for the winter the studio home of the artist Pomroy at 169 rue de l'Universite, beyond the Seine. Mark Twain wrote of it once:

It was a lovely house; large, rambling, quaint, charmingly furnished
and decorated, built upon no particular plan, delightfully uncertain
and full of surprises. You were always getting lost in it, and
finding nooks and corners which you did not know were there and
whose presence you had not suspected before. It was built by a rich
French artist, and he had also furnished it and decorated it
himself. The studio was coziness itself. With us it served as a
drawing-room, sitting-room, living-room, dancing-room--we used it
for everything. We couldn't get enough of it. It is odd that it
should have been so cozy, for it was 40 feet long, 40 feet high, and
30 feet wide, with a vast fireplace on, each side, in the middle,
and a musicians' gallery at one end.

Mrs. Clemens had hoped to return to America, to their Hartford home. That was her heart's desire--to go back once more to their old life and fireside, to forget all this period of exile and wandering. Her letters were full of her home-longing; her three years of absence seemed like an eternity.

In its way, the Pomroy house was the best substitute for home they had found. Its belongings were of the kind she loved. Susy had better health, and her husband was happy in his work. They had much delightful and distinguished company. Her letters tell of these attractive things, and of their economies to make their income reach.

It was near the end of the year that the other great interest--the machine--came finally to a conclusion. Reports from the test had been hopeful during the summer. Early in October Clemens, receiving a copy of the Times-Herald, partly set by the machine, wrote: “The Herald has just arrived, and that column is healing for sore eyes. It affects me like Columbus sighting land.” And again on the 28th:

It seems to me that things couldn't well be going better at Chicago
than they are. There's no other machine that can set type eight
hours with only seventeen minutes' stoppage through cussedness. The
others do rather more stopping than working. By and by our machines
will be perfect; then they won't stop at all.

But that was about the end of the good news. The stoppages became worse and worse. The type began to break--the machine had its old trouble: it was too delicately adjusted--too complicated.

“Great guns, what is the matter with it?” wrote Clemens in November when he received a detailed account of its misconduct.

Mr. Rogers and his son-in-law, Mr. Broughton, went out to Chicago to investigate. They went to the Times-Herald office to watch the type-setter in action. Mr. Rogers once told of this visit to the writer of these chapters. He said:

“Certainly it was a marvelous invention. It was the nearest approach to a human being in the wonderful things it could do of any machine I have ever known. But that was just the trouble; it was too much of a human being and not enough of a machine. It had all the complications of the human mechanism, all the liability of getting out of repair, and it could not be replaced with the ease and immediateness of the human being. It was too costly; too difficult of construction; too hard to set up. I took out my watch and timed its work and counted its mistakes. We watched it a long time, for it was most interesting, most fascinating, but it was not practical--that to me was clear.”

It had failed to stand the test. The Times-Herald would have no more of it. Mr. Rogers himself could see the uselessness of the endeavor. He instructed Mr. Broughton to close up the matter as best he could and himself undertook the harder task of breaking the news to Mark Twain. His letters seem not to have been preserved, but the replies to them tell the story.

169 rue de l'Universite,

PARIS, December 22, 1894.

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--I seemed to be entirely expecting your letter, and
also prepared and resigned; but Lord, it shows how little we know
ourselves and how easily we can deceive ourselves. It hit me like a
thunder-clap. It knocked every rag of sense out of my head, and I
went flying here and there and yonder, not knowing what I was doing,
and only one clearly defined thought standing up visible and
substantial out of the crazy storm-drift--that my dream of ten years
was in desperate peril and out of the 60,000 or 70,000 projects for
its rescue that came flocking through my skull not one would hold
still long enough for me to examine it and size it up. Have you
ever been like that? Not so much, I reckon.

There was another clearly defined idea--I must be there and see it
die. That is, if it must die; and maybe if I were there we might
hatch up some next-to-impossible way to make it take up its bed and
take a walk.

So, at the end of four hours I started, still whirling, and walked
over to the rue Scribe--4 p.m.--and asked a question or two and was
told I should be running a big risk if I took the 9 p.m. train for
London and Southampton; “better come right along at 6.52 per Havre
special and step aboard the New York all easy and comfortable.”
Very! and I about two miles from home and no packing done.

Then it occurred to me that none of these salvation notions that
were whirlwinding through my head could be examined or made
available unless at least a month's time could be secured. So I
cabled you, and said to myself that I would take the French steamer
to-morrow (which will be Sunday).

By bedtime Mrs. Clemens had reasoned me into a fairly rational and
contented state of mind; but of course it didn't last long. So I
went on thinking--mixing it with a smoke in the dressing-room once
an hour--until dawn this morning. Result--a sane resolution; no
matter what your answer to my cable might be I would hold still and
not sail until I should get an answer to this present letter which I
am now writing or a cable answer from you saying “Come” or “Remain.”

I have slept 6 hours, my pond has clarified, and I find the sediment
of my 70,000 projects to be of this character:

He follows with a detailed plan for reconstructing the machine, using brass type, etc., and concludes:

Don't say I'm wild. For really I'm sane again this morning.

I am going right along with Joan now, and wait untroubled till I
hear from you. If you think I can be of the least use cable me
“Come.” I can write Joan on board ship and lose no time. Also I
could discuss my plan with the publisher for a de luxe Joan, time
being an object, for some of the pictures could be made over here,
cheaply and quickly, that would cost much more time and money in
America.

The second letter followed five days later:

169 rue de l'Universite,
PARIS, December 27, 1894.

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--Notwithstanding your heart is “old and hard” you
make a body choke up. I know you “mean every word you say” and I do
take it “in the same spirit in which you tender it.” I shall keep
your regard while we two live--that I know; for I shall always
remember what you have done for me, and that will insure me against
ever doing anything that could forfeit it or impair it.

It is six days or seven days ago that I lived through that
despairing day, and then through a night without sleep; then settled
down next day into my right mind (or thereabouts) and wrote you. I
put in the rest of that day till 7 P.m. plenty comfortably enough
writing a long chapter of my book; then went to a masked ball
blacked up as Uncle Remus, taking Clara along, and we had a good
time. I have lost no day since, and suffered no discomfort to speak
of, but drove my troubles out of my mind and had good success in
keeping them out--through watchfulness. I have done a good week's
work and put the book a good way ahead in the Great Trial [of Joan],
which is the difficult part: the part which requires the most
thought and carefulness. I cannot see the end of the Trial yet, but
I am on the road. I am creeping surely toward it.

“Why not leave them all to me?” My business brothers? I take you by
the hand! I jump at the chance!

I ought to be ashamed and I am trying my best to be ashamed--and yet
I do jump at the chance in spite of it. I don't want to write
Irving and I don't want to write Stoker. It doesn't seem as if I
could. But I can suggest something for you to write them; and then
if you see that I am unwise you can write them something quite
different. Now this is my idea:

1. To return Stoker's $100 to him and keep his stock.

2. And tell Irving that when luck turns with me I will make
good to him what the salvage from the dead Co. fails to pay him
of his $500.

[P. S. Madam says No, I must face the music. So I inclose my
effort--to be used if you approve, but not otherwise.]

We shall try to find a tenant for our Hartford house; not an easy
matter, for it costs heavily to live in. We can never live in it
again; though it would break the family's hearts if they could
believe it.

Nothing daunts Mrs. Clemens or makes the world look black to her
--which is the reason I haven't drowned myself.

I got the Xmas journals which you sent and I thank you for that Xmas
remembrance.

We all send our deepest and warmest greetings to you and all of
yours and a Happy New Year!

S. L. CLEMENS. --[Brain Stoker and Sir Henry Irving had each taken a small interest in the machine. The inclosure for Stoker ran as follows:]

MY DEAR STOKER,--I am not dating this, because it is not to be
mailed at present.

When it reaches you it will mean that there is a hitch in my machine
enterprise--a hitch so serious as to make it take to itself the
aspect of a dissolved dream. This letter, then, will contain cheque
for the $100 which you have paid. And will you tell Irving for me
--I can't get up courage enough to talk about this misfortune myself,
except to you, whom by good luck I haven't damaged yet--that when
the wreckage presently floats ashore he will get a good deal of his
$500 back; and a dab at a time I will make up to him the rest.

I'm not feeling as fine as I was when I saw you there in your home.
Please remember me kindly to Mrs. Stoker. I gave up that London
lecture-project entirely. Had to--there's never been a chance since
to find the time.

Sincerely yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.

A week later he added what was about his final word on the subject:

Yours of December 21 has arrived, containing the circular to
stockholders, and I guess the Co. will really quit--there doesn't
seem to be any other wise course.

There's one thing which makes it difficult for me to soberly realize
that my ten-year dream is actually dissolved; and that is that it
reverses my horoscope. The proverb says, “Born lucky, always
lucky.”

It was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned
in the Mississippi or in Bear Creek, but I was pulled out in a
drowned condition 9 times before I learned to swim, and was
considered to be a cat in disguise. When the Pennsylvania blew up
and the telegraph reported my brother as fatally injured (with 60
others) but made no mention of me, my uncle said to my mother “it
means that Sam was somewhere else, after being on that boat a year
and a half--he was born lucky.” Yes, I was somewhere else. I am so
superstitious that I have always been afraid to have business
dealings with certain relatives and friends of mine because they
were unlucky people. All my life I have stumbled upon lucky chances
of large size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my
own stupidity and carelessness. And so I have felt entirely certain
that the machine would turn up trumps eventually. It disappointed
me lots of times, but I couldn't shake off the confidence of a
lifetime in my luck.

Well, whatever I get out of the wreckage will be due to good luck
--the good luck of getting you into the scheme--for, but for that
there wouldn't be any wreckage; it would be total loss.

I wish you had been in at the beginning. Then we should have had
the good luck to step promptly ashore.

So it was that the other great interest died and was put away forever. Clemens scarcely ever mentioned it again, even to members of his family. It was a dead issue; it was only a pity that it had ever seemed a live one. A combination known as the Regius Company took over Paige's interest, but accomplished nothing. Eventually--irony of fate--the Mergenthaler Company, so long scorned and derided, for twenty thousand dollars bought out the rights and assets and presented that marvelous work of genius, the mechanical wonder of the age, to the Sibley College of Engineering, where it is shown as the costliest piece of machinery, for its size, ever constructed. Mark Twain once received a letter from an author who had written a book calculated to assist inventors and patentees, asking for his indorsement. He replied:

DEAR SIR,--I have, as you say, been interested in patents and
patentees. If your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me
nine editions. Send them by express.

Very truly yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.

The collapse of the “great hope” meant to the Clemens household that their struggle with debt was to continue, that their economies were to become more rigid. In a letter on her wedding anniversary, February a (1895), Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister:

As I was starting down the stairs for my breakfast this morning Mr. Clemens called me back and took out a five-franc piece and gave it to me, saying: “It is our silver-wedding day, and so I give you a present.”

It was a symbol of their reduced circumstances--of the change that twenty-five years had brought.

Literary matters, however, prospered. The new book progressed amazingly. The worst had happened; other and distracting interests were dead. He was deep in the third part-the story of Joan's trial and condemnation, and he forgot most other things in his determination to make that one a reality.

As at Viviani, Clemens read his chapters to the family circle. The story was drawing near the end now; tragedy was closing in on the frail martyr; the farce of her trial was wringing their hearts. Susy would say, “Wait, wait till I get a handkerchief,” and one night when the last pages had been written and read, and Joan had made the supreme expiation for devotion to a paltry king, Susy wrote in her diary, “To-night Joan of Arc was burned at the stake,” meaning that the book was finished.

Susy herself had literary taste and might have written had it not been that she desired to sing. There are fragments of her writing that show the true literary touch. Her father, in an unpublished article which he once wrote of her, quoted a paragraph, doubtless intended some day to take its place at the end of a story:

And now at last when they lie at rest they must go hence. It is
always so. Completion; perfection, satisfaction attained--a human
life has fulfilled its earthly destiny. Poor human life! It may
not pause and rest, for it must hasten on to other realms and
greater consummations.

She was a deep reader, and she had that wonderful gift of brilliant, flowing, scintillating speech. From her father she had inherited a rare faculty of oral expression, born of a superior depth of mind, swiftness and clearness of comprehension, combined with rapid, brilliant, and forceful phrasing. Her father wrote of her gift:

Sometimes in those days of swift development her speech was rocket-
like for vividness and for the sense it carried of visibility. I
seem to see it stream into the sky and burst full in a shower of
colored fire.

We are dwelling here a moment on Susy, for she was at her best that winter.

She was more at home than the others. Her health did not permit her to go out so freely and her father had more of her companionship. They discussed many things--the problems of life and of those beyond life, philosophies of many kinds, and the subtleties of literary art. He recalled long after how once they lost themselves in trying to solve the mystery of the emotional effect of certain word-combinations--certain phrases and lines of verse--as, for instance, the wild, free breath of the open that one feels in “the days when we went gipsying a long time ago” and the tender, sunlit, grassy slope and mossy headstones suggested by the simple words, “departed this life.” Both Susy and her father cared more for Joan than any of the former books. To Mr. Rogers, Clemens wrote:

“Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for love.” A memorandum which he made at the time, apparently for no one but himself, brings us very close to the personality behind it.

Do you know that shock? I mean when you come at your regular hour
into the sick-room where you have watched for months and find the
medicine-bottles all gone, the night-table removed, the bed
stripped, the furniture set stiffly to rights, the windows up, the
room cold, stark, vacant--& you catch your breath & realize what has
happened.

Do you know that shock?

The man who has written a long book has that experience the morning
after he has revised it for the last time & sent it away to the
printer. He steps into his study at the hour established by the
habit of months--& he gets that little shock. All the litter &
confusion are gone. The piles of dusty reference-books are gone
from the chairs, the maps from the floor; the chaos of letters,
manuscripts, note-books, paper-knives, pipes, matches, photographs,
tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the writing-table, the
furniture is back where it used to be in the long-ago. The
housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there &
tidied it up & scoured it clean & made it repellent & awful.

I stand here this morning contemplating this desolation, & I realize
that if I would bring back the spirit that made this hospital home-
like & pleasant to me I must restore the aids to lingering
dissolution to their wonted places & nurse another patient through
& send it forth for the last rites, With many or few to assist
there, as may happen; & that I will do.

CXC. STARTING ON THE LONG TRAIL. The tragedy of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', with its splendid illustrations by Louis Loeb, having finished its course in the Century Magazine, had been issued by the American Publishing Company. It proved not one of Mark Twain's great books, but only one of his good books. From first to last it is interesting, and there are strong situations and chapters finely written. The character of Roxy is thoroughly alive, and her weird relationship with her half-breed son is startling enough. There are not many situations in fiction stronger than that where half-breed Tom sells his mother down the river into slavery. The negro character is well drawn, of course-Mark Twain could not write it less than well, but its realism is hardly to be compared with similar matter in his other books--in Tom Sawyer, for instance, or Huck Finn. With the exceptions of Tom, Roxy, and Pudd'nhead the characters are slight. The Twins are mere bodiless names that might have been eliminated altogether. The character of Pudd'nhead Wilson is lovable and fine, and his final triumph at the murder trial is thrilling in the extreme. Identification by thumb-marks was a new feature in fiction then--in law, too, for that matter. But it is chiefly Pudd'nhead Wilson's maxims, run at the head of each chapter, that will stick in the memory of men. Perhaps the book would live without these, but with them it is certainly immortal.

Such aphorisms as: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits”; “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example”; “When angry count four, and when very angry swear,” cannot perish; these, with the forty or so others in this volume and the added collection of rare philosophies that head the chapters of Following the Equator, have insured to Philosopher Pudd'nhead a respectful hearing for all time.--[The story of Pudd'nhead Wilson was dramatized by Frank Mayo, who played it successfully as long as he lived. It is by no means dead, and still pays a royalty to the Mayo and Clemens estates.]

Clemens had meant to begin another book, but he decided first to make a trip to America, to give some personal attention to publishing matters there. They were a good deal confused. The Harpers had arranged for the serial and book publication of Joan, and were negotiating for the Webster contracts. Mr. Rogers was devoting priceless time in an effort to establish amicable relations between the Harpers and the American Company at Hartford so that they could work on some general basis that would be satisfactory and profitable to all concerned. It was time that Clemens was on the scene of action. He sailed on the New York on the end of February, and a little more than a month later returned by the Paris--that is, at the end of March. By this time he had altogether a new thought. It was necessary to earn a large sum of money as promptly as possible, and he adopted the plan which twice before in his life in 1872 and in 1884:--had supplied him with needed funds. Loathing the platform as he did, he was going back to it. Major Pond had proposed a lecture tour soon after his failure.

“The loss of a fortune is tough,” wrote Pond, “but there are other resources for another fortune. You and I will make the tour together.”

Now he had resolved to make a tour-one that even Pond himself had not contemplated. He would go platforming around the world! He would take Pond with him as far as the Pacific coast, arranging with some one equally familiar with the lecture circuit on the other side of the Pacific. He had heard of R. S. Smythe, who had personally conducted Henry M. Stanley and other great lecturers through Australia and the East, and he wrote immediately, asking information and advice concerning such a tour. Clemens himself has told us in one of his chapters how his mental message found its way to Smythe long before his written one, and how Smythe's letter, proposing just such a trip, crossed his own.

He sailed for America, with the family on the 11th of May, and a little more than a week later, after four years of exile, they found themselves once more at beautiful Quarry Farm. We may imagine how happy they were to reach that peaceful haven. Mrs. Clemens had written:

“It is, in a way, hard to go home and feel that we are not able to open our house. But it is an immense delight to me to think of seeing our friends.”

Little at the farm was changed. There were more vines on the home--the study was overgrown--that was all. Even Ellerslie remained as the children had left it, with all the small comforts and utensils in place. Most of the old friends were there; only Mrs. Langdon and Theodore Crane were missing. The Beechers drove up to see them, as formerly, and the old discussions on life and immortality were taken up in the old places.

Mrs. Beecher once came with some curious thin layers of leaves of stone which she had found, knowing Mark Twain's interest in geology. Later, when they had been discussing the usual problems, he said he would write an agreement on those imperishable leaves, to be laid away until the ages should solve their problems. He wrote it in verse:

If you prove right and I prove wrong,
A million years from now,
In language plain and frank and strong
My error I'll avow
To your dear waking face.

If I prove right, by God His grace,
Full sorry I shall be,
For in that solitude no trace
There'll be of you and me.

A million years, O patient stone,
You've waited for this message.
Deliver it a million hence;
(Survivor pays expressage.)
MARK TWAIN

Contract with Mrs. T. K. Beecher, July 2, 1895.

Pond came to Elmira and the route westward was arranged. Clemens decided to give selections from his books, as he had done with Cable, and to start without much delay. He dreaded the prospect of setting out on that long journey alone, nor could Mrs. Clemens find it in her heart to consent to such a plan. It was bitterly hard to know what to do, but it was decided at last that she and one of the elder daughters should accompany him, the others remaining with their aunt at Quarry Farm. Susy, who had the choice, dreaded ocean travel, and felt that she would be happier and healthier to rest in the quiet of that peaceful hilltop. She elected to remain with her aunt and jean; and it fell to Clara to go. Major Pond and his wife would accompany them as far as Vancouver. They left Elmira on the night of the 14th of July. When the train pulled away their last glimpse was of Susy, standing with the others under the electric light of the railway platform, waving them good-by.

CXCI. Clemens had been ill in Elmira with a distressing carbuncle, and was still in no condition to undertake steady travel and entertainment in that fierce summer heat. He was fearful of failure. “I sha'n't be able to stand on a platform,” he wrote Mr. Rogers; but they pushed along steadily with few delays. They began in Cleveland, thence by the Great Lakes, traveling by steamer from one point to another, going constantly, with readings at every important point--Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Winnipeg, Butte, and through the great Northwest, arriving at Vancouver at last on August 16th, but one day behind schedule time.

It had been a hot, blistering journey, but of immense interest, for none of them had traveled through the Northwest, and the wonder and grandeur of it all, its scenery, its bigness, its mighty agriculture, impressed them. Clemens in his notes refers more than once to the “seas” and “ocean” of wheat.

There is the peace of the ocean about it and a deep contentment, a
heaven-wide sense of ampleness, spaciousness, where pettiness and
all small thoughts and tempers must be out of place, not suited to
it, and so not intruding. The scattering, far-off homesteads, with
trees about them, were so homelike and remote from the warring
world, so reposeful and enticing. The most distant and faintest
under the horizon suggested fading ships at sea.

The Lake travel impressed him; the beauties and cleanliness of the Lake steamers, which he compares with those of Europe, to the disadvantage of the latter. Entering Port Huron he wrote:

The long approach through narrow ways with flat grass and wooded
land on both sides, and on the left a continuous row of summer
cottages, with small-boat accommodations for visiting across the
little canals from family to family, the groups of summer-dressed
young people all along waving flags and handkerchiefs and firing
cannon, our boat replying with toots of the hoarse whistle and now
and then a cannon, and meeting steamers in the narrow way, and once
the stately sister-ship of the line crowded with summer-dressed
people waving-the rich browns and greens of the rush-grown, far-
reaching flat-lands, with little glimpses of water away on their
farther edges, the sinking sun throwing a crinkled broad carpet of
gold on the water-well, it is the perfection of voyaging.

It had seemed a doubtful experiment to start with Mrs. Clemens on that journey in the summer heat; but, strange to say, her health improved, and she reached Vancouver by no means unfit for the long voyage ahead. No doubt the change and continuous interest and their splendid welcome everywhere and their prosperity were accountable. Everywhere they were entertained; flowers filled their rooms; carriages and committees were always waiting. It was known that Mark Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that matter, to the world at large.

From Winnipeg he wrote to Mr. Rogers:

At the end of an hour and a half I offered to let the audience go,
but they said “go on,” and I did.

He had five thousand dollars to forward to Rogers to place against his debt account by the time he reached the Coast, a fine return for a month's travel in that deadly season. At no more than two places were the houses less than crowded. One of these was Anaconda, then a small place, which they visited only because the manager of the entertainment hall there had known Clemens somewhere back in the sixties and was eager to have him. He failed to secure the amount of the guarantee required by Pond, and when Pond reported to Clemens that he had taken “all he had” Clemens said:

“And you took the last cent that poor fellow had. Send him one hundred dollars, and if you can't afford to stand your share charge it all to me. I'm not going around robbing my friends who are disappointed in my commercial value. I don't want to get money that way.”

“I sent the money,” said Pond afterward, “and was glad of the privilege of standing my share.”

Clemens himself had not been in the best of health during the trip. He had contracted a heavy cold and did not seem to gain strength. But in a presentation copy of 'Roughing It', given to Pond as a souvenir, he wrote:

“Here ends one of the smoothest and pleasantest trips across the continent that any group of five has ever made.”

There were heavy forest fires in the Northwest that year, and smoke everywhere. The steamer Waryimoo, which was to have sailed on the 16th, went aground in the smoke, and was delayed a week. While they were waiting, Clemens lectured in Victoria, with the Governor-General and Lady Aberdeen and their little son in the audience. His note-book says:

They came in at 8.45, 15 minutes late; wish they would always be
present, for it isn't permissible to begin until they come; by that
time the late-comers are all in.

Clemens wrote a number of final letters from Vancouver. In one of them to Mr. J. Henry Harper, of Harper & Brothers, he expressed the wish that his name might now be printed as the author of “Joan,” which had begun serially in the April Magazine. He thought it might, help his lecturing tour and keep his name alive. But a few days later, with Mrs. Clemens's help, he had reconsidered, and wrote:

My wife is a little troubled by my wanting my nom de plume put to
the “Joan of Arc” so soon. She thinks it might go counter to your
plans, and that you ought to be left free and unhampered in the
matter.

All right-so be it. I wasn't strenuous about it, and wasn't meaning
to insist; I only thought my reasons were good, and I really think
so yet, though I do confess the weight and fairness of hers.

As a matter of fact the authorship of “Joan” had been pretty generally guessed by the second or third issue. Certain of its phrasing and humor could hardly have come from another pen than Mark Twain's. The authorship was not openly acknowledged, however, until the publication of the book, the following May.

Among the letters from Vancouver was this one to Rudyard Kipling

DEAR KIPLING,--It is reported that you are about to visit India.
This has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may
unload from my conscience a debt long due to you. Years ago you
came from India to Elmira to visit me, as you said at the time. It
has always been my purpose to return that visit & that great
compliment some day. I shall arrive next January & you must be
ready. I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with
silver bells & ribbons & escorted by a troop of native howdahs
richly clad & mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; & you must be
on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.

To the press he gave this parting statement:

It has been reported that I sacrificed for the benefit of the
creditors the property of the publishing firm whose financial backer
I was and that I am now lecturing for my own benefit. This is an
error. I intend the lectures as well as the property for the
creditors. The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a
merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws
of insolvency and start free again for himself. But I am not a
business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot
compromise for less than 100 cents on the dollar and its debts never
outlaw. From my reception thus far on my lecturing tour I am
confident that if I live I can pay off the last debt within four
years, after which, at the age of sixty-four, I can make a fresh and
unincumbered start in life. I am going to Australia, India, and
South Africa, and next year I hope to make a tour of the great
cities of the United States. I meant, when I began, to give my
creditors all the benefit of this, but I am beginning to feel that I
am gaining something from it, too, and that my dividends, if not
available for banking purposes, may be even more satisfactory than
theirs.

There was one creditor, whose name need, not be “handed down to infamy,” who had refused to consent to any settlement except immediate payment in full, and had pursued with threatened attachment of earnings and belongings, until Clemens, exasperated, had been disposed to turn over to his creditors all remaining properties and let that suffice, once and for all. But this was momentary. He had presently instructed Mr. Rogers to “pay Shylock in full,” and to assure any others that he would pay them, too, in the end. But none of the others annoyed him.

It was on the afternoon of August 23, 1895, that they were off at last. Major Pond and his wife lunched with them on board and waved them good-by as long as they could see the vessel. The far voyage which was to carry them for the better part of the year to the under side of the world had begun.

CXCII. “FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR”

Mark Twain himself has written with great fulness the story of that traveling--setting down what happened, and mainly as it happened, with all the wonderful description, charm, and color of which he was so great a master. We need do little more than summarize then--adding a touch here and there, perhaps, from another point of view.

They had expected to stop at the Sandwich Islands, but when they arrived in the roadstead of Honolulu, word came that cholera had broken out and many were dying daily. They could not land. It was a double disappointment; not only were the lectures lost, but Clemens had long looked forward to revisiting the islands he had so loved in the days of his youth. There was nothing for them to do but to sit on the decks in the shade of the awnings and look at the distant shore. In his book he says:

We lay in luminous blue water; shoreward the water was green-green
and brilliant; at the shore itself it broke in a long, white ruffle,
and with no crash, no sound that we could hear. The town was buried
under a mat of foliage that looked like a cushion of moss. The
silky mountains were clothed in soft, rich splendors of melting
color, and some of the cliffs were veiled in slanting mists. I
recognized it all. It was just as I had seen it long before, with
nothing of its beauty lost, nothing of its charm wanting.

In his note-book he wrote: “If I might, I would go ashore and never leave.”

This was the 31 st of August. Two days later they were off again, sailing over the serene Pacific, bearing to the southwest for Australia. They crossed the equator, which he says was wisely put where it is, because if it had been run through Europe all the kings would have tried to grab it. They crossed it September 6th, and he notes that Clara kodaked it. A day or two later the north star disappeared behind them and the constellation of the Cross came into view above the southern horizon. Then presently they were among the islands of the southern Pacific, and landed for a little time on one of the Fiji group. They had twenty-four days of halcyon voyaging between Vancouver and Sydney with only one rough day. A ship's passengers get closely acquainted on a trip of that length and character. They mingle in all sorts of diversions to while away the time; and at the end have become like friends of many years.

On the night of September 15th-a night so dark that from the ship's deck one could not see the water--schools of porpoises surrounded the ship, setting the water alive with phosphorescent splendors: “Like glorified serpents thirty to fifty feet long. Every curve of the tapering long body perfect. The whole snake dazzlingly illumined. It was a weird sight to see this sparkling ghost come suddenly flashing along out of the solid gloom and stream past like a meteor.”

They were in Sydney next morning, September 16, 1895, and landed in a pouring rain, the breaking up of a fierce drought. Clemens announced that he had brought Australia good-fortune, and should expect something in return.

Mr. Smythe was ready for them and there was no time lost in getting to work. All Australia was ready for them, in fact, and nowhere in their own country were they more lavishly and royally received than in that faraway Pacific continent. Crowded houses, ovations, and gorgeous entertainment--public and private--were the fashion, and a little more than two weeks after arrival Clemens was able to send back another two thousand dollars to apply on his debts. But he had hard luck, too, for another carbuncle developed at Melbourne and kept him laid up for nearly a week. When he was able to go before an audience again he said:

“The doctor says I am on the verge of being a sick man. Well, that may be true enough while I am lying abed all day trying to persuade his cantankerous, rebellious medicines to agree with each other; but when I come out at night and get a welcome like this I feel as young and healthy as anybody, and as to being on the verge of being a sick man I don't take any stock in that. I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet.”

In his book Clemens has told us his joy in Australia, his interest in the perishing native tribes, in the wonderfully governed cities, in the gold-mines, and in the advanced industries. The climate he thought superb; “a darling climate,” he says in a note-book entry.

Perhaps one ought to give a little idea of the character of his entertainment. His readings were mainly from his earlier books, 'Roughing It' and 'Innocents Abroad'. The story of the dead man which, as a boy, he had discovered in his father's office was one that he often told, and the “Mexican Plug” and his “Meeting with Artemus Ward” and the story of Jim Blaine's old ram; now and again he gave chapters from 'Huck Finn' and 'Tom Sawyer'. He was likely to finish with that old fireside tale of his early childhood, the “Golden Arm.” But he sometimes told the watermelon story, written for Mrs. Rogers, or gave extracts from Adam's Diary, varying his program a good deal as he went along, and changing it entirely where he appeared twice in one city.

Mrs. Clemens and Clara, as often as they had heard him, generally went when the hour of entertainment came: They enjoyed seeing his triumph with the different audiences, watching the effect of his subtle art.

One story, the “Golden Arm,” had in it a pause, an effective, delicate pause which must be timed to the fraction of a second in order to realize its full value. Somewhere before we have stated that no one better than Mark Twain knew the value of a pause. Mrs. Clemens and Clara were willing to go night after night and hear that tale time and again, for its effect on each new, audience.

From Australia to New Zealand--where Clemens had his third persistent carbuncle,--[In Following the Equator the author says: “The dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. Humor is out of place in a dictionary.”]--and again lost time in consequence. It was while he was in bed with this distressing ailment that he wrote Twichell:

I think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here
at Napier instead of in some hotel in the center of a noisy city.
Here we have the smooth & placidly complaining sea at our door, with
nothing between us & it but 20 yards of shingle--& hardly a
suggestion of life in that space to mar it or to make a noise. Away
down here fifty-five degrees south of the equator this sea seems to
murmur in an unfamiliar tongue--a foreign tongue--a tongue bred
among the ice-fields of the antarctic--a murmur with a note of
melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come
from. It was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night &
find it still pulsing there. I wish you were here--land, but it
would be fine!

Mrs. Clemens and himself both had birthdays in New Zealand; Clemens turned sixty, and his wife passed the half-century mark.

“I do not like it one single bit,” she wrote to her sister. “Fifty years old-think of it; that seems very far on.”

And Clemens wrote:

Day before yesterday was Livy's birthday (underworld time) &
tomorrow will be mine. I shall be 60--no thanks for it!

From New Zealand back to Australia, and then with the new year away to Ceylon. Here they were in the Orient at last, the land of color, enchantment, and gentle races. Clemens was ill with a heavy cold when they arrived; and in fact, at no time during this long journeying was his health as good as that of his companions. The papers usually spoke of him as looking frail, and he was continually warned that he must not remain in India until the time of the great heat. He was so determined to work, however, and working was so profitable, that he seldom spared himself.

He traveled up and down and back and forth the length and breadth of India--from Bombay to Allahabad, to Benares, to Calcutta and Darjeeling, to Lahore, to Lucknow, to Delhi--old cities of romance--and to Jeypore--through the heat and dust on poor, comfortless railways, fighting his battle and enjoying it too, for he reveled in that amazing land--its gorgeous, swarming life, the patience and gentleness of its servitude, its splendid pageantry, the magic of its architecture, the maze and mystery of its religions, the wonder of its ageless story.

One railway trip he enjoyed--a thirty-five-mile flight down the steep mountain of Darjeeling in a little canopied hand-car. In his book he says:

That was the most enjoyable time I have spent in the earth. For
rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that
approaches the bird-flight down the Himalayas in a handcar. It has
no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty-
five miles of it, instead of five hundred.

Mark Twain found India all that Rudyard Kipling had painted it and more. “INDIA THE MARVELOUS” he printed in his note-book in large capitals, as an effort to picture his thought, and in his book he wrote:

So far as I am able to judge nothing has been left undone, either by
man or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the
sun visits on his rounds. “Where every prospect pleases, and only
man is vile.”

Marvelous India is, certainly; and he saw it all to the best advantage, for government official and native grandee spared no effort to do honor to his party--to make their visit something to be remembered for a lifetime. It was all very gratifying, and most of it of extraordinary interest. There are not many visitors who get to see the inner household of a native prince of India, and the letter which Mark Twain wrote to Kumar Shri Samatsinhji, a prince of the Palitana state, at Bombay, gives us a notion of how his unostentatious, even if lavish, hospitality was appreciated.