Recollections of a Varied Life Part 30

A roar of applause welcomed the suggestion, and Mr. Clemens proceeded to make the speech. In the course of it he spoke of the mult.i.tude of young authors who beset every publisher and beseech him for advice after he has explained that their ma.n.u.scripts are "not available" for publication by his own firm, with its peculiar limitations. Most publishers cruelly refuse, he said, to do anything for these innocents. "I never do that,"

he added. "I always give them good advice, and more than that, I always do something for them--_I give them notes of introduction to Gilder_."

I am persuaded that many scores of the notes of introduction brought to me have been written in precisely that spirit of helpless helpfulness.

Sometimes, however, letters of introduction, given thoughtlessly, are productive of trouble far more serious than the mere waste of a busy man's time. It is a curious fact that most persons stand ready to give letters of introduction upon acquaintance so slender that they would never think of personally introducing the two concerned, or personally vouching for the one to whom the letter is given.

When I was editing _Hearth and Home_ Theodore Tilton gave a young Indiana woman a letter of introduction to me. He afterwards admitted to me that he knew nothing whatever about the young woman.

"But what can one do in such a case?" he asked. "She was charming and she wanted to know you; she was interested in you as a Hoosier writer"--the Indiana school of literature had not established itself at that early day--"and when she learned that I knew you well she asked for a letter of introduction. What could I do? Could I say to her, 'My dear young lady, I know very little about you, and my friend, George Cary Eggleston, is so innocent and unsophisticated a person that I dare not introduce you to him without some certificate of character?' No. I could only give her the letter she wanted, trusting you to discount any commendatory phrases it might contain, in the light of your acquaintance with the ways of a world in which letters of introduction are taken with grains of salt. Really, if I mean to commend one person to another, I always send a private letter to indorse my formal letter of introduction, and to a.s.sure my friend that there are no polite lies in it."

[Sidenote: Some Dangerous Letters of Introduction]

In this case the young woman did nothing very dreadful. Her character was doubtless above reproach and her reformatory impulses were no more offensive than reformatory impulses that concern others usually are.

My only complaint of her was that she condemned me without a hearing, giving me no opportunity to say why sentence should not be p.r.o.nounced upon me.

In her interview, she was altogether charming. She was fairly well acquainted with literature, and was keenly appreciative of it. We talked for an hour on such subjects, and then she went away. A week or so later she sent me a copy of the Indiana newspaper for which she was a correspondent. In it was a page interview with me in which all that I had said and a great deal that I had not said was set forth in detail.

There was also a graphic description of my office surroundings. Among these surroundings was my pipe, which lay "naked and not ashamed" on my desk. Referring to it, the young woman wrote that one saddening thing in her visit to me was the discovery that "this gifted young man is a victim of the tobacco habit."

Worse still, she emphasized that lamentable discovery in her headlines, and made so much of her compa.s.sionate regret that if I had been an inmate of a lunatic asylum, demented by the use of absinthe or morphine, her pity could hardly have been more active.

I do not know that this exhibition of reformatory ill manners did me any serious harm, but it annoyed me somewhat.

When I was serving as literary editor of the _Evening Post_, a very presentable person came to me bearing a note of introduction from Richard Henry Stoddard. Mr. Stoddard introduced the gentleman as James R. Randall, author of "My Maryland" and at that time editor of a newspaper in Augusta, Georgia. Mr. Randall was a person whom I very greatly wanted to know, but it was late on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and I had an absolutely peremptory engagement that compelled me to quit the office immediately. Accordingly, I invited the visitor to dine with me at my house the next day, Sunday, and he accepted.

Sunday came and the dinner was served, but Mr. Randall was not there.

Next morning I learned that on the plea of Sat.u.r.day afternoon and closed banks he had borrowed thirty-five dollars from one of my fellow-editors before leaving. This, taken in connection with his failure to keep his dinner engagement with me, aroused suspicion. I telegraphed to Augusta, asking the newspaper with which Mr. Randall was editorially connected whether or not Mr. Randall was in New York. Mr. Randall himself replied saying that he was not in New York and requesting me to secure the arrest of any person trying to borrow money or get checks cashed in his name. He added: "When I travel I make my financial arrangements in advance and don't borrow money of friends or strangers."

When I notified Stoddard of the situation, so that he might not commend his friend, "Mr. Randall," to others, I expressed the hope that he had not himself lent the man any money. In reply he said:

"Lent him money? Why, my dear George Cary Eggleston, what a creative imagination you must have! 'You'd orter 'a' been a poet.' Still, if I had had any money, as of course I hadn't, I should have lent it to him freely. As he didn't ask for it--probably he knew my chronic impecuniosity too well to do that--I didn't know he was 'on the borrow.'

Anyhow, I'm going to run him to earth."

[Sidenote: Moses and My Green Spectacles]

And he did. It appeared in the outcome that the man had called upon Edmund Clarence Stedman, bearing a letter from Sidney Lanier--forged, of course. Stedman had taken him out to lunch and then, as he expressed a wish to meet the literary men of the town, had given him a note of introduction to Stoddard together with several other such notes to men of letters, which were never delivered. The man proved to be the "carpetbag" ex-Governor Moses, who had looted the state of South Carolina to an extent that threatened the bankruptcy of that commonwealth. He had saved little if anything out of his plunderings, and, returning to the North, had entered upon a successful career as a "confidence man." He was peculiarly well-equipped for the part. Sagacious, well-informed, educated, and possessed of altogether pleasing manners, he succeeded in imposing himself upon the unsuspecting for many years. At last, some years after my first encounter with him, he was "caught in the act"

of swindling, and sent for a term to the Ma.s.sachusetts state prison.

On his release, at the end of his sentence, he resumed his old business of victimizing the unsuspicious--among whom I was one. It was only a few years ago when he rang my door bell and introduced himself as a confidential employee of the Lothrop Publis.h.i.+ng Company of Boston, who were my publishers. He had seen me, he said, during the only visit I had ever made to the offices of the company, but had not had the pleasure of an introduction. Being in New York he had given himself the pleasure of calling, the more because he wished to consult me concerning the artistic make-up of a book I then had in preparation at the Lothrops'.

His face seemed familiar to me, a fact which I easily accounted for on the theory that I must have seen him during my visit to the publis.h.i.+ng house. For the rest he was a peculiarly agreeable person, educated, refined, and possessed of definite ideas. We smoked together, and as an outcome of the talk about cigars, I gave him something unusual.

An indiscreetly lavish friend of mine had given me a box of gigantic cigars, each of which was encased in a gla.s.s tube, and each of which had cost a dollar. I was so pleased with my visitor that I gave him one of these, saying that it didn't often happen to a man who had anything to do with literature to smoke a dollar cigar.

At the end of his visit he somewhat casually mentioned the fact that he and his wife were staying at the Astor House, adding:

"We were anxious to leave for Boston by a late train to-night but I find it impracticable to do so. I've suffered myself to run short of money and my wife has made the matter worse by indulging in an indiscreet shopping tour to-day. I have telegraphed to Boston for a remittance and must wait over till it comes to-morrow. It is a very great annoyance, as I am needed in Boston to-morrow, but there is no help for it."

I asked him how much money was absolutely necessary to enable him to leave by the late train, which there was still time to catch, and after a moment of mental figuring, he fixed upon the sum of sixteen dollars and fifty cents as sufficient.

It was Sunday night and I had only a dollar or so in my pocket, but with a keenly realizing sense of his embarra.s.sment, I drew upon my wife's little store of household change, and made up the sum required. He seemed very grateful for the accommodation, but before leaving he asked me to let him take one of those dollar cigars, to show to a friend in Boston.

About half an hour after he had left, I suddenly remembered him and identified him as Moses--ex-carpetbag governor of South Carolina, ex-convict, and _never_ ex-swindler. A few calls over the telephone confirmed my conviction and my memory fully sustained my recollection of the man. A day or two later he was arrested in connection with an attempted swindle, but I did not bother to follow him up. I acted upon the dictum of one of the most successful men I ever knew, that "it's tomfoolery to send good money after bad."

LX

[Sidenote: English Literary Visitors]

It was during the period of my withdrawal from newspaper work that Mr.

Edmund Gosse made his first visit to this country. At that time he had not yet made the reputation he has since achieved for scholars.h.i.+p and literary accomplishment. As a scholar he was young and promising rather than a man of established reputation. As a writer he was only beginning to be known. But he was an Englishman of letters and an agreeable gentleman, wherefore we proceeded to dine him and wine him and make much of him--all of which helped the success of his lecture course.

I interrupt myself at this point to say that we do these things more generously and more lavishly than our kin beyond sea ever think of doing them. With the exception of Mark Twain, no living American author visiting England is ever received with one-half, or one-quarter, or one-tenth the attention that Americans have lavished upon British writers of no greater consequence than our own. If Irving Bach.e.l.ler, or Charles Egbert Craddock, or Post Wheeler, or R. W. Chambers, or Miss Johnston, or Will Harben, or Thomas Nelson Page, or James Whitcomb Riley, or any other of a score that might be easily named should visit London, does anybody imagine that he or she would receive even a small fraction of the attention we have given to Sarah Grand, Mr. Yeats, Max O'Rell, B. L. Farjeon, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Mr. Locke, and others? Would even Mr. Howells be made to feel that he was appreciated there as much as many far inferior English writers have been in New York? Are we helplessly provincial or hopelessly sn.o.bbish? Or is it that our English literary visitors make more skilful use of the press agent's peculiar gifts? Or is it, perhaps, that we are more generous and hospitable than the English?

Mr. Gosse, at any rate, was worthy of all the attention he received, and his later work has fully justified it, so that nothing in the vagrant paragraph above is in any way applicable to him.

Mr. Gosse had himself carefully "coached" before he visited America.

When he came to us he knew what every man of us had done in literature, art, science, or what not, and so far he made no mistakes either of ignorance or of misunderstanding.

"Bless my soul!" said James R. Osgood to me at one of the breakfasts, luncheons or banquets given to the visitor, "he has committed every American publishers' catalogue to memory, and knows precisely where each of you fellows stands."

Upon one point, however, Mr. Gosse's conceptions were badly awry. He bore the Civil War in mind, and was convinced that its bitternesses were still an active force in our social life. One night at the Authors Club I was talking with him when my brother Edward came up to us and joined in the conversation. Mr. Gosse seemed surprised and even embarra.s.sed.

Presently he said:

"It's extremely gratifying, you know, but this is a surprise to me. I understand that you two gentlemen held opposite views during the war, and one of the things my mentors in England most strongly insisted upon was that I should never mention either of you in talking with the other.

It is very gratifying to find that you are on terms with each other."

"On terms?" said Edward. "Why, Geordie and I have always been twins.

I was born two years earlier than he was, but we've been twin brothers nevertheless, all our lives. You see, we were born almost exactly on the line between the North and the South, and one fell over to one side and the other to the other. But there was never anything but affection between us."

[Sidenote: An Amusing Misconception]

On another occasion Mr. Joe Harper gave a breakfast to Mr. Gosse at the University Club. There were seventy or eighty guests--too many for anything like intimate converse. To remedy this Mr. Harper asked about a dozen of us to remain after the function was over, gather around him at the head of the table--tell all the stories we could remember, and "give Mr. Gosse a real insight into our ways of thinking," he said.

Gordon McCabe and I were in the group, and Mr. Gosse, knowing perfectly what each of us had written, knew, of course, that McCabe and I had fought on the Southern side during the Civil War. If he had not known the fact in that way he must have discovered it from the stories we told of humorous happenings in the Confederate service. Yet here we were, on the most cordial terms with men who had been on the other side. It was all a bewildering mystery to Mr. Gosse, and presently he ventured to ask about it.

"Pardon me," he said to Mr. Harper, "it is all very gratifying, I'm sure, but I don't quite understand. I think Mr. Eggleston and Mr. McCabe were in active service on the Southern side during the war?"

"Yes," answered Mr. Harper, "and they have told us all about it in their books."

"And the rest of you gentlemen sided with the North?"

"Yes."

"Well, it's very gratifying, of course, but it is astonis.h.i.+ng to a stranger to find you all on such terms of friends.h.i.+p again."

"Isn't it?" broke in Mr. Harper. "Here we are, having champagne together quite like old friends, while we all know that only a dozen years or so ago, McCabe and Eggleston were down there at Petersburg trying with all their might to _kill our subst.i.tutes_."