Chapter CCLXXII: Stormfield Adventures

Clemens had fully decided, by this time, to live the year round in the retirement at Stormfield, and the house at 21 Fifth Avenue was being dismantled. He had also, as he said, given up his dictations for the time, at least, after continuing them, with more or less regularity, for a period of two and a half years, during which he had piled up about half a million words of comment and reminiscence. His general idea had been to add portions of this matter to his earlier books as the copyrights expired, to give them new life and interest, and he felt that he had plenty now for any such purpose.

He gave his time mainly to his guests, his billiards, and his reading, though of course he could not keep from writing on this subject and that as the fancy moved him, and a drawer in one of his dressers began to accumulate fresh though usually fragmentary manuscripts. . . He read the daily paper, but he no longer took the keen, restless interest in public affairs. New York politics did not concern him any more, and national politics not much. When the Evening Post wrote him concerning the advisability of renominating Governor Hughes he replied:

If you had asked me two months ago my answer would have been prompt
& loud & strong: yes, I want Governor Hughes renominated. But it is
too late, & my mouth is closed. I have become a citizen & taxpayer
of Connecticut, & could not now, without impertinence, meddle in
matters which are none of my business. I could not do it with
impertinence without trespassing on the monopoly of another.

Howells speaks of Mark Twain's "absolute content" with his new home, and these are the proper words' to express it. He was like a storm-beaten ship that had drifted at last into a serene South Sea haven.

The days began and ended in tranquillity. There were no special morning regulations: One could have his breakfast at any time and at almost any place. He could have it in bed if he liked, or in the loggia or livingroom, or billiard-room. He might even have it in the diningroom, or on the terrace, just outside. Guests--there were usually guests --might suit their convenience in this matter--also as to the forenoons. The afternoon brought games--that is, billiards, provided the guest knew billiards, otherwise hearts. Those two games were his safety-valves, and while there were no printed requirements relating to them the unwritten code of Stormfield provided that guests, of whatever age or previous faith, should engage in one or both of these diversions.

Clemens, who usually spent his forenoon in bed with his reading and his letters, came to the green table of skill and chance eager for the onset; if the fates were kindly, he approved of them openly. If not--well, the fates were old enough to know better, and, as heretofore, had to take the consequences. Sometimes, when the weather was fine and there were no games (this was likely to be on Sunday afternoons), there were drives among the hills and along the Saugatuck through the Bedding Glen.

The cat was always "purring on the hearth" at Stormfield--several cats --for Mark Twain's fondness for this clean, intelligent domestic animal remained, to the end, one of his happiest characteristics. There were never too many cats at Stormfield, and the "hearth" included the entire house, even the billiard-table. When, as was likely to happen at any time during the game, the kittens Sinbad, or Danbury, or Billiards would decide to hop up and play with the balls, or sit in the pockets and grab at them as they went by, the game simply added this element of chance, and the uninvited player was not disturbed. The cats really owned Stormfield; any one could tell that from their deportment. Mark Twain held the title deeds; but it was Danbury and Sinbad and the others that possessed the premises. They occupied any portion of the house or its furnishings at will, and they never failed to attract attention. Mark Twain might be preoccupied and indifferent to the comings and goings of other members of the household; but no matter what he was doing, let Danbury appear in the offing and he was observed and greeted with due deference, and complimented and made comfortable. Clemens would arise from the table and carry certain choice food out on the terrace to Tammany, and be satisfied with almost no acknowledgment by way of appreciation. One could not imagine any home of Mark Twain where the cats were not supreme. In the evening, as at 21 Fifth Avenue, there was music--the stately measures of the orchestrelle--while Mark Twain smoked and mingled unusual speculation with long, long backward dreams.

It was three months from the day of arrival in Redding that some guests came to Stormfield without invitation--two burglars, who were carrying off some bundles of silver when they were discovered. Claude, the butler, fired a pistol after them to hasten their departure, and Clemens, wakened by the shots, thought the family was opening champagne and went to sleep again.

It was far in the night; but neighbor H. A. Lounsbury and Deputy-Sheriff Banks were notified, and by morning the thieves were captured, though only after a pretty desperate encounter, during which the officer received a bullet-wound. Lounsbury and a Stormfield guest had tracked them in the dark with a lantern to Bethel, a distance of some seven miles. The thieves, also their pursuers, had boarded the train there. Sheriff Banks was waiting at the West Redding station when the train came down, and there the capture was made. It was a remarkably prompt and shrewd piece of work. Clemens gave credit for its success chiefly to Lounsbury, whose talents in many fields always impressed him. The thieves were taken to the Redding Town Hall for a preliminary healing. Subsequently they received severe sentences.

Clemens tacked this notice on his front door:

NOTICE

TO THE NEXT BURGLAR

There is nothing but plated ware in this house now and henceforth.

You will find it in that brass thing in the dining-room over in the
corner by the basket of kittens.

If you want the basket put the kittens in the brass thing. Do not
make a noise--it disturbs the family.

You will find rubbers in the front hall by that thing which has the
umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think they call it, or pergola, or
something like that.

Please close the door when you go away!

Very truly yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.

CCLXXIII

STORMFIELD PHILOSOPHIES

Now came the tranquil days of the Connecticut autumn. The change of the landscape colors was a constant delight to Mark Twain. There were several large windows in his room, and he called them his picture-gallery. The window-panes were small, and each formed a separate picture of its own that was changing almost hourly. The red tones that began to run through the foliage; the red berry bushes; the fading grass, and the little touches of sparkling frost that came every now and then at early morning; the background of distant blue hills and changing skies-these things gave his gallery a multitude of variation that no art-museums could furnish. He loved it all, and he loved to walk out in it, pacing up and down the terrace, or the long path that led to the pergola at the foot of a natural garden. If a friend came, he was willing to walk much farther; and we often descended the hill in one direction or another, though usually going toward the "gorge," a romantic spot where a clear brook found its way through a deep and rather dangerous-looking chasm. Once he was persuaded to descend into this fairy-like place, for it was well worth exploring; but his footing was no longer sure and he did not go far.

He liked better to sit on the grass-grown, rocky arch above and look down into it, and let his talk follow his mood. He liked to contemplate the geology of his surroundings, the record of the ageless periods of construction required to build the world. The marvels of science always appealed to him. He reveled in the thought of the almost limitless stretches of time, the millions upon millions of years that had been required for this stratum and that--he liked to amaze himself with the sounding figures. I remember him expressing a wish to see the Grand Canon of Arizona, where, on perpendicular walls six thousand feet high, the long story of geological creation is written. I had stopped there during my Western trip of the previous year, and I told him something of its wonders. I urged him to see them for himself, offering to go with him. He said:

"I should enjoy that; but the railroad journey is so far and I should have no peace. The papers would get hold of it, and I would have to make speeches and be interviewed, and I never want to do any of those things again."

I suggested that the railroads would probably be glad to place a private car at his service, so that he might travel in comfort; but he shook his head.

"That would only make me more conspicuous."

"How about a disguise?"

"Yes," he said, "I might put on a red wig and false whiskers and change my name, but I couldn't disguise my drawling speech and they'd find me out."

It was amusing, but it was rather sad, too. His fame had deprived him of valued privileges.

He talked of many things during these little excursions. Once he told how he had successively advised his nephew, Moffett, in the matter of obtaining a desirable position. Moffett had wanted to become a reporter. Clemens devised a characteristic scheme. He said:

"I will get you a place on any newspaper you may select if you promise faithfully to follow out my instructions."

The applicant agreed, eagerly enough. Clemens said:

"Go to the newspaper of your choice. Say that you are idle and want work, that you are pining for work--longing for it, and that you ask no wages, and will support yourself. All that you ask is work. That you will do anything, sweep, fill the inkstands, mucilage-bottles, run errands, and be generally useful. You must never ask for wages. You must wait until the offer of wages comes to you. You must work just as faithfully and just as eagerly as if you were being paid for it. Then see what happens."

The scheme had worked perfectly. Young Moffett had followed his instructions to the letter. By and by he attracted attention. He was employed in a variety of ways that earned him the gratitude and the confidence of the office. In obedience to further instructions, he began to make short, brief, unadorned notices of small news matters that came under his eye and laid them on the city editor's desk. No pay was asked; none was expected. Occasionally one of the items was used. Then, of course, it happened, as it must sooner or later at a busy time, that he was given a small news assignment. There was no trouble about his progress after that. He had won the confidence of the management and shown that he was not afraid to work.

The plan had been variously tried since, Clemens said, and he could not remember any case in which it had failed. The idea may have grown out of his own pilot apprenticeship on the river, when cub pilots not only received no salary, but paid for the privilege of learning.

Clemens discussed public matters less often than formerly, but they were not altogether out of his mind. He thought our republic was in a fair way to become a monarchy--that the signs were already evident. He referred to the letter which he had written so long ago in Boston, with its amusing fancy of the Archbishop of Dublin and his Grace of Ponkapog, and declared that, after all, it contained something of prophecy.--[See chap. xcvii; also Appendix M.]--He would not live to see the actual monarchy, he said, but it was coming.

"I'm not expecting it in my time nor in my children's time, though it may be sooner than we think. There are two special reasons for it and one condition. The first reason is, that it is in the nature of man to want a definite something to love, honor, reverently look up to and obey; a God and King, for example. The second reason is, that while little republics have lasted long, protected by their poverty and insignificance, great ones have not. And the condition is, vast power and wealth, which breed commercial and political corruptions, and incite public favorites to dangerous ambitions."

He repeated what I had heard him say before, that in one sense we already had a monarchy; that is to say, a ruling public and political aristocracy which could create a Presidential succession. He did not say these things bitterly now, but reflectively and rather indifferently.

He was inclined to speak unhopefully of the international plans for universal peace, which were being agitated rather persistently.

"The gospel of peace," he said, "is always making a deal of noise, always rejoicing in its progress but always neglecting to furnish statistics. There are no peaceful nations now. All Christendom is a soldier-camp. The poor have been taxed in some nations to the starvation point to support the giant armaments which Christian governments have built up, each to protect itself from the rest of the Christian brotherhood, and incidentally to snatch any scrap of real estate left exposed by a weaker owner. King Leopold II. of Belgium, the most intensely Christian monarch, except Alexander VI., that has escaped hell thus far, has stolen an entire kingdom in Africa, and in fourteen years of Christian endeavor there has reduced the population from thirty millions to fifteen by murder and mutilation and overwork, confiscating the labor of the helpless natives, and giving them nothing in return but salvation and a home in heaven, furnished at the last moment by the Christian priest.

"Within the last generation each Christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more and more effective ways of killing Christians, and, incidentally, a pagan now and then; and the surest way to get rich quickly in Christ's earthly kingdom is to invent a kind of gun that can kill more Christians at one shot than any other existing kind. All the Christian nations are at it. The more advanced they are, the bigger and more destructive engines of war they create."

Once, speaking of battles great and small, and how important even a small battle must seem to a soldier who had fought in no other, he said:

"To him it is a mighty achievement, an achievement with a big A, when to a wax-worn veteran it would be a mere incident. For instance, to the soldier of one battle, San Juan Hill was an Achievement with an A as big as the Pyramids of Cheops; whereas, if Napoleon had fought it, he would have set it down on his cuff at the time to keep from forgetting it had happened. But that is all natural and human enough. We are all like that."

The curiosities and absurdities of religious superstitions never failed to furnish him with themes more or less amusing. I remember one Sunday, when he walked down to have luncheon at my house, he sat under the shade and fell to talking of Herod's slaughter of the innocents, which he said could not have happened.

"Tacitus makes no mention of it," he said, "and he would hardly have overlooked a sweeping order like that, issued by a petty ruler like Herod. Just consider a little king of a corner of the Roman Empire ordering the slaughter of the first-born of a lot of Roman subjects. Why, the Emperor would have reached out that long arm of his and dismissed Herod. That tradition is probably about as authentic as those connected with a number of old bridges in Europe which are said to have been built by Satan. The inhabitants used to go to Satan to build bridges for them, promising him the soul of the first one that crossed the bridge; then, when Satan had the bridge done, they would send over a rooster or a jackass--a cheap jackass; that was for Satan, and of course they could fool him that way every time. Satan must have been pretty simple, even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn't have led Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship him. That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because Christ, as the Son of God, already owned the world; and, besides, what Satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of Palestine. It is just as if some one should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the Standard Oil Company, with a gallon of kerosene."

He often spoke of the unseen forces of creation, the immutable laws that hold the planet in exact course and bring the years and the seasons always exactly on schedule time. "The Great Law" was a phrase often on his lips. The exquisite foliage, the cloud shapes, the varieties of color everywhere: these were for him outward manifestations of the Great Law, whose principle I understood to be unity--exact relations throughout all nature; and in this I failed to find any suggestion of pessimism, but only of justice. Once he wrote on a card for preservation:

From everlasting to everlasting, this is the law: the sum of wrong &
misery shall always keep exact step with the sum of human
blessedness.

No "civilization," no "advance," has ever modified these proportions
by even the shadow of a shade, nor ever can, while our race endures.