The Boys' Life of Mark Twain Part 28

MARK TWAIN PAYS HIS DEBTS

Mark Twain wrote much and well during this period, in spite of his social life. His article "Concerning the Jews" was written that first winter in Vienna--a fine piece of special pleading; also the greatest of his short stories--one of the greatest of all short stories--"The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg."

But there were good reasons why he should write better now; his mind was free of a mighty load--he had paid his debts!

Soon after his arrival in Vienna he had written to Mr. Rogers:

"Let us begin on those debts. I cannot bear the weight any longer.

It totally unfits me for work."

He had acc.u.mulated a large sum for the purpose, and the royalties from the new book were beginning to roll in. Payment of the debts was begun.

At the end of December he wrote again:

"Land, we are glad to see those debts diminis.h.i.+ng. For the first time in my life I am getting more pleasure from paying money out than from pulling it in."

A few days later he wrote to Howells that he had "turned the corner"; and again:

"We've lived close to the bone and saved every cent we could, and there's no undisputed claim now that we can't cash . . . . I hope you will never get the like of the load saddled on to you that was saddled on to me, three years ago. And yet there is such a solid pleasure in paying the things that I reckon it is worth while to get into that kind of a hobble, after all. Mrs. Clemens gets millions of delight out of it, and the children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping from the beginning."

By the end of January, 1898, Clemens had acc.u.mulated enough money to make the final payments to his creditors. At the time of his failure he had given himself five years to achieve this result. But he had needed less than four. A report from Mr. Rogers showed that a balance of thirteen thousand dollars would remain to his credit after the last accounts were wiped away.

Clemens had tried to keep his money affairs out of the newspapers, but the payment of the final claims could not be concealed, and the press made the most of it. Head-lines shouted it. Editorials heralded Mark Twain as a second Walter Scott, because Scott, too, had labored to lift a great burden of debt. Never had Mark Twain been so beloved by his fellow-men.

One might suppose now that he had had enough of invention and commercial enterprises of every sort--that is, one who did not know Mark Twain might suppose this--but it would not be true. Within a month after his debts were paid he was negotiating with the Austrian inventor Szczepanik for the American rights in a wonderful carpet-pattern machine, and, Sellers-like, was planning to organize a company with a capital of fifteen hundred million dollars to control the carpet-weaving industries of the world. He wrote to Mr. Rogers about the great scheme, inviting the Standard Oil to "come in"; but the plan failed to bear the test of Mr.

Rogers's investigation and was heard of no more.

Samuel Clemens's obligation to Henry Rogers was very great, but it was not quite the obligation that many supposed it to be. It was often a.s.serted that the financier lent, even gave, the humorist large sums, and pointed out opportunities for speculation. No part of this statement is true. Mr. Rogers neither lent nor gave Mark Twain money, and never allowed him to speculate when he could prevent it. He sometimes invested Mark Twain's own funds for him, but he never bought for him a share of stock without money in hand to pay for it in full--money belonging to, and earned by, Clemens himself.

What Henry Rogers did give to Mark Twain was his priceless counsel and time--gifts more precious than any mere sum of money--favors that Mark Twain could accept without humiliation. He did accept them, and never ceased to be grateful. He rarely wrote without expressing his grat.i.tude, and we get the size of Mark Twain's obligation when in one letter we read:

"I have abundant peace of mind again--no sense of burden. Work is become a pleasure--it is not labor any longer."

He wrote much and well, mainly magazine articles, including some of those chapters later gathered it his book on "Christian Science." He reveled like a boy in his new freedom and fortunes, in the lavish honors paid him, in the rich circ.u.mstance of Viennese life. But always just beneath the surface were unforgetable sorrows. His face in repose was always sad. Once, after writing to Howells of his successes, he added:

"All those things might move and interest one. But how desperately more I have been moved to-night by the thought of a little old copy in the nursery of 'At the Back of the North Wind.' Oh, what happy days they were when that book was read, and how Susy loved it!"

LIV.

RETURN AFTER EXILE

News came to Vienna of the death of Orion Clemens, at the age of seventy-two. Orion had died as he had lived--a gentle dreamer, always with a new plan. He had not been sick at all. One morning early he had seated himself at a table, with pencil and paper, and was putting down the details of his latest project, when death came--kindly, in the moment of new hope. He was a generous, upright man, beloved by all who understood him.

The Clemenses remained two winters in Vienna, spending the second at the Hotel Krantz, where their rooms were larger and finer than at the Metropole, and even more crowded with notabilities. Their salon acquired the name of the "Second Emba.s.sy," and Mark Twain was, in fact, the most representative American in the Austrian capital. It became the fas.h.i.+on to consult him on every question of public interest, his comments, whether serious or otherwise, being always worth printing. When European disarmament was proposed, Editor William T. Stead, of the "Review of Reviews," wrote for his opinion. He replied:

"DEAR MR. STEAD,--The Tsar is ready to disarm. I am ready to disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now. MARK TWAIN."

He refused offers of many sorts. He declined ten thousand dollars for a tobacco endors.e.m.e.nt, though he liked the tobacco well enough. He declined ten thousand dollars a year for five years to lend his name as editor of a humorous periodical. He declined another ten thousand for ten lectures, and another offer for fifty lectures at the same rates --that is, one thousand dollars per night. He could get along without these sums, he said, and still preserve some remnants of his self-respect.

It was May, 1899, when Clemens and his family left Vienna. They spent a summer in Sweden on account of the health of Jean Clemens, and located in London apartments--30 Wellington Court--for the winter. Then followed a summer at beautiful Dollis Hill, an old house where Gladstone had often visited, on a shady hilltop just outside of London. The city had not quite enclosed the place then, and there were spreading oaks, a pond with lily-pads, and wide s.p.a.ces of gra.s.sy lawn. The place to-day is converted into a public garden called Gladstone Park. Writing to Twich.e.l.l in mid-summer, Clemens said:

"I am the only person who is ever in the house in the daytime, but I am working, and deep in the luxury of it. But there is one tremendous defect. Levy is all so enchanted with the place and so in love with it that she doesn't know how she is going to tear herself away from it."

However, there was one still greater attraction than Dollis Hill, and that was America--home. Mark Twain at sixty-five and a free man once more had decided to return to his native land. They closed Dollis Hill at the end of September, and October 6, 1900, sailed on the Minnehaha for New York, bidding good-by, as Mark Twain believed, and hoped, to foreign travel. Nine days later, to a reporter who greeted him on the s.h.i.+p, he said:

"If I ever get ash.o.r.e I am going to break both of my legs so I can't get away again."

LV.

A PROPHET AT HOME

New York tried to outdo Vienna and London in honoring Mark Twain. Every newspaper was filled with the story of his great fight against debt, and his triumph. "He had behaved like Walter Scott," writes Howells, "as millions rejoiced to know who had not known how Walter Scott behaved till they knew it was like Clemens." Clubs and societies vied with one another in offering him grand entertainments. Literary and lecture proposals poured in. He was offered at the rate of a dollar a word for his writing--he could name his own terms for lectures.

These sensational offers did not tempt him. He was sick of the platform.

He made a dinner speech here and there--always an event--but he gave no lectures or readings for profit. His literary work he confined to a few magazines, and presently concluded an arrangement with "Harper & Brothers" for whatever he might write, the payment to be twenty (later thirty) cents per word. He arranged with the same firm for the publication of all his books, by this time collected in uniform edition.

He wished his affairs to be settled as nearly as might be. His desire was freedom from care. Also he would have liked a period of quiet and rest, but that was impossible. He realized that the mult.i.tude of honors tendered him was in a sense a vast compliment which he could not entirely refuse. Howells writes that Mark Twain's countrymen "kept it up past all precedent," and in return Mark Twain tried to do his part. "His friends saw that he was wearing himself out," adds Howells, and certain it is that he grew thin and pale and had a hacking cough. Once to Richard Watson Gilder he wrote:

"In bed with a chest cold and other company.

"DEAR GILDER,--I can't. If I were a well man I could explain with this pencil, but in the cir--ces I will leave it all to your imagination.

"Was it Grady that killed himself trying to do all the dining and speeching? No, old man, no, no!

"Ever yours, MARK."

In the various dinner speeches and other utterances made by Mark Twain at this time, his hearers recognized a new and great seriousness of purpose.

It was not really new, only, perhaps, more emphasized. He still made them laugh, but he insisted on making them think, too. He preached a new gospel of patriotism--not the patriotism that means a boisterous cheering of the Stars and Stripes wherever unfurled, but the patriotism that proposes to keep the Stars and Stripes clean and worth shouting for. In one place he said:

"We teach the boys to atrophy their independence. We teach them to take their patriotism at second hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter --exactly as boys under monarchies are taught, and have always been taught."

He protested against the blind allegiance of monarchies. He was seldom "with the largest crowd" himself. Writing much of our foreign affairs, then in a good deal of a muddle, he a.s.sailed so fearlessly and fiercely measures which he held to be unjust that he was caricatured as an armed knight on a charger and as Huck Finn with a gun.

But he was not always warlike. One of the speeches he made that winter was with Col. Henry Watterson, a former Confederate soldier, at a Lincoln birthday memorial at Carnegie Hall. "Think of it!" he wrote Twich.e.l.l, "two old rebels functioning there; I as president and Watterson as orator of the day. Things have changed somewhat in these forty years, thank G.o.d!"

The Clemens household did not go back to Hartford. During their early years abroad it had been Mrs. Clemens's dream to return and open the beautiful home, with everything the same as before. The death of Susy had changed all this. The mother had grown more and more to feel that she could not bear the sorrow of Susy's absence in the familiar rooms.

After a trip which Clemens himself made to Hartford, he wrote, "I realize that if we ever enter the house again to live, our hearts will break."

So they did not go back. Mrs. Clemens had seen it for the last time on that day when the carriage waited while she went back to take a last look into the vacant rooms. They had taken a house at 14 West Tenth Street for the winter, and when summer came they went to a log cabin on Saranac Lake, which they called "The Lair." Here Mark Twain wrote "A Double-barreled Detective Story," a not very successful burlesque of Sherlock Holmes. But most of the time that summer he loafed and rested, as was his right. Once during the summer he went on a cruise with H. H.

Rogers, Speaker "Tom" Reed, and others on Mr. Rogers's yacht.