Mark Twain A Biography Part 105

Great Scott, but it's a long year--for you & me! I never knew the almanac to drag so. At least not since I was finis.h.i.+ng that other machine.

I watch for your letters hungrily--just as I used to watch for the telegram saying the machine's finished--but when "next week certainly" suddenly swelled into "three weeks sure" I recognized the old familiar tune I used to hear so much. W----don't know what sick-heartedness is--but he is in a way to find out.

And finally, on the 4th:

I am very glad indeed if you and Mr. Langdon are able to see any daylight ahead. To me none is visible. I strongly advise that every penny that comes in shall be applied to paying off debts. I may be in error about this, but it seems to me that we have no other course open. We can pay a part of the debts owing to outsiders --none to Clemenses. In very prosperous times we might regard our stock & copyrights as a.s.sets sufficient, with the money owing to us, to square up & quit even, but I suppose we may not hope for such luck in the present condition of things.

What I am mainly hoping for is to save my book royalties. If they come into danger I hope you will cable me so that I can come over & try to save them, for if they go I am a beggar.

I would sail to-day if I had anybody to take charge of my family & help them through the difficult journeys commanded by the doctors.

A few days later he could stand it no longer, and on August 29 (1893) sailed, the second time that year, for New York.

CLx.x.xV. AN INTRODUCTION TO H. H. ROGERS

Clemens took a room at The Players--"a cheap room," he wrote, "at $1.50 per day." It was now the end of September, the beginning of a long half-year, during which Mark Twain's fortunes were at a lower ebb than ever before; lower, even, than during those mining days among the bleak Esmeralda hills. Then he had no one but him self and was young. Now, at fifty-eight, he had precious lives dependent upon him, and he was weighed down with a vast burden of debt. The liabilities of Charles L.

Webster & Co. were fully two hundred thousand dollars. Something like sixty thousand dollars of this was money supplied by Mrs. Clemens, but the vast remaining sum was due to banks, to printers, to binders, and to dealers in various publis.h.i.+ng materials. Somehow it must be paid. As for their a.s.sets, they looked ample enough on paper, but in reality, at a time like this, they were problematical. In fact, their value was very doubtful indeed. What he was to do Clemens did not know. He could not even send cheerful reports to Europe. There was no longer anything to promise concerning the type-setter. The fifty machines which the company had started to build had dwindled to ten machines; there was a prospect that the ten would dwindle to one, and that one a reconstruction of the original Hartford product, which had cost so much money and so many weary years. Clemens spent a good part of his days at The Players, reading or trying to write or seeking to divert his mind in the company of the congenial souls there, waiting for-he knew not what.

Yet at this very moment a factor was coming into his life, a human element, a man to whom in his old age Mark Twain owed more than to any other of his myriad of friends. One night, when he was with Dr. Clarence C. Rice at the Murray Hill Hotel, Rice said:

"Clemens, I want you to know my friend, Mr. H. H. Rogers. He is an admirer of your books."

Clemens turned and was looking into the handsome, clean-cut features of the great financier, whose name was hardly so familiar then as it became at a later period, but whose power was already widely known and felt among his kind.

"Mr. Clemens," said Mr. Rogers, "I was one of your early admirers.

I heard you lecture a long time ago on the Sandwich Islands. I was interested in the subject in those days, and I heard that Mark Twain was a man who had been there. I didn't suppose I'd have any difficulty getting a seat, but I did; the house was jammed. When I came away I realized that Mark Twain was a great man, and I have read everything of yours since that I could get hold of."

They sat down at a table, and Clemens told some of his amusing stories.

Rogers was in a perpetual gale of laughter. When at last he rose to go the author and the financier were as old friends. Mr. Rogers urged him to visit him at his home. He must introduce him to Mrs. Rogers, he said, who was also his warm admirer. It was only a little while after this that Dr. Rice said to the millionaire:

"Mr. Rogers, I wish you would look into Clemens's finances a little: I am afraid they are a good deal confused."

This would be near the end of September, 1893. On October 18 Clemens wrote home concerning a possible combination of Webster & Co. with John Brisben Walker, of the 'Cosmopolitan', and added:

I have got the best and wisest man of the whole Standard Oil group-a multi-millionaire--a good deal interested in looking into the type- setter. He has been searching into that thing for three weeks and yesterday he said to me:

"I find the machine to be all you represent it. I have here exhaustive reports from my own experts, and I know every detail of its capacity, its immense construction, its cost, its history, and all about its inventor's character. I know that the New York company and the Chicago company are both stupid, and that they are unbusinesslike people, dest.i.tute of money and in a hopeless boggle."

Then he told me the scheme he had planned and said:

"If I can arrange with these people on this basis--it will take several weeks to find out--I will see to it that they get the money they need. In the mean time you 'stop walking the floor'."

Of course, with this encouragement, Clemens was in the clouds again.

Furthermore, Rogers had suggested to his son-in-law, William Evarts Benjamin, also a subscription publisher, that he buy from the Webster company The Library of American Literature for fifty thousand dollars, a sum which provided for the more insistent creditors. There was hope that the worst was over. Clemens did in reality give up walking the floor, and for the time, at least, found happier diversions. He must not return to Europe as yet, for the type-setter matter was still far from conclusion. On the 11th of November he was gorgeously entertained by the Lotos Club in its new building. Introducing him, President Frank Lawrence said:

"What name is there in literature that can be likened to his? Perhaps some of the distinguished gentlemen about this table can tell us, but I know of none. Himself his only parallel, it seems to me. He is all our own--a ripe and perfect product of the American soil."

CLx.x.xVI. "THE BELLE OF NEW YORK"

Those were feverish weeks of waiting, with days of alternate depression and exaltation as the pendulum swung to and fro between hope and despair. By daylight Clemens tried to keep himself strenuously busy; evenings and nights he plunged into social activities--dinners, amus.e.m.e.nts, suppers, b.a.l.l.s, and the like. He was besieged with invitations, sought for by the gayest and the greatest; "Jamie" Dodge conferred upon him the appropriate t.i.tle: of "The Belle of New York." In his letters home he describes in detail many of the festivities and the wildness with which he has flung himself into them, dilating on his splendid renewal of health, his absolute immunity from fatigue. He attributes this to his indifference to diet and regularities of meals and sleep; but we may guess that it was due to a reaction from having s.h.i.+fted his burden to stronger financial shoulders. Henry Rogers had taken his load upon him.

"It rests me," Rogers said, "to experiment with the affairs of a friend when I am tired of my own. You enjoy yourself. Let me work at the puzzle a little."

And Clemens, though his conscience p.r.i.c.ked him, obeyed, as was his habit at such times. To Mrs. Clemens (in Paris now, at the Hotel Brighton) he wrote:

He is not common clay, but fine-fine & delicate. I did hate to burden his good heart & overworked head, but he took hold with avidity & said it was no burden to work for his friends, but a pleasure. When I arrived in September, Lord! how black the prospect was & how desperate, how incurably desperate! Webster & Co. had to have a small sum of money or go under at once. I flew to Hartford --to my friends--but they were not moved, not strongly interested, & I was ashamed that I went. It was from Mr. Rogers, a stranger, that I got the money and was by it saved. And then--while still a stranger--he set himself the task of saving my financial life without putting upon me (in his native delicacy) any sense that I was the recipient of a charity, a benevolence. He gave time to me --time, which could not be bought by any man at $100,000 a month--no, nor for three times the money.

He adds that a friend has just offered to Webster & Co. a book that arraigns the Standard Oil magnates individual by individual.

I wanted to say the only man I care for in the world, the only man I would give a d---n for, the only man who is lavis.h.i.+ng his sweat & blood to save me & mine from starvation is a Standard Oil magnate.

If you know me, you know whether I want the book or not.

But I didn't say that. I said I didn't want any book; I wanted to get out of this publis.h.i.+ng business & out of all business & was here for that purpose & would accomplish it if I could.

He tells how he played billiards with Rogers, tirelessly as always, until the millionaire had looked at him helplessly and asked:

"Don't you ever get tired?"

And he answered:

"I don't know what it is to get tired. I wish I did."

He wrote of going with Mr. Rogers to the Madison Square Garden to see an exhibition of boxing given by the then splendid star of pugilism, James J. Corbett. Dr. Rice accompanied him, and painters Robert Reid and Edward Simmons, from The Players. They had five seats in a box, and Stanford White came along presently and took Clemens into the champion's dressing-room.

Corbett has a fine face and is modest and diffident, besides being the most perfectly & beautifully constructed human animal in the world. I said:

"You have whipped Mitch.e.l.l & maybe you will whip Jackson in June --but you are not done then. You will have to tackle me."

He answered, so gravely that one might easily have thought him in earnest:

"No, I am not going to meet you in the ring. It is not fair or right to require it. You might chance to knock me out, by no merit of your own, but by a purely accidental blow, & then my reputation would be gone & you would have a double one. You have got fame enough & you ought not to want to take mine away from me."

Corbett was for a long time a clerk in the Nevada Bank, in San Francisco.

There were lots of little boxing-matches to entertain the crowd; then at last Corbett appeared in the ring & the 8,000 people present went mad with enthusiasm. My two artists went mad about his form.

They said they had never seen anything that came reasonably near equalling its perfection except Greek statues, & they didn't surpa.s.s it.

Corbett boxed 3 rounds with the middle-weight Australian champion --oh, beautiful to see!--then the show was over and we struggled out through a perfect mash of humanity. When we reached the street I found I had left my arctics in the box. I had to have them, so Simmons said he would go back & get them, & I didn't dissuade him.

I wouldn't see how he was going to make his way a single yard into that solid incoming wave of people--yet he must plow through it full 50 yards. He was back with the shoes in 3 minutes!

How do you reckon he accomplished that miracle? By saying: