Mark Twain A Biography Part 138

But here we are--with you all every hour and every minute--filled with unutterable thoughts; unutterable affection for the dead and for the living. HARMONY AND JOE.

Howells in his letter said:

She hallowed what she touched far beyond priests.... What are you going to do, you poor soul?

A hundred letters crowd in for expression here, but must be denied--not, however, the beam of hope out of Helen Keller's illumined night:

Do try to reach through grief and feel the pressure of her hand, as I reach through darkness and feel the smile on my friends' lips and the light in their eyes though mine are closed.

They were adrift again without plans for the future. They would return to America to lay Mrs. Clemens to rest by Susy and little Langdon, but beyond that they could not see. Then they remembered a quiet spot in Ma.s.sachusetts, Tyringham, near Lee, where the Gilders lived, and so, on June 7th, he wrote:

DEAR GILDER FAMILY,--I have been worrying and worrying to know what to do; at last I went to the girls with an idea--to ask the Gilders to get us shelter near their summer home. It was the first time they have not shaken their heads. So to-morrow I will cable to you and shall hope to be in time.

An hour ago the best heart that ever beat for me and mine was carried silent out of this house, and I am as one who wanders and has lost his way. She who is gone was our head, she was our hands.

We are now trying to make plans--we: we who have never made a plan before, nor ever needed to. If she could speak to us she would make it all simple and easy with a word, & our perplexities would vanish away. If she had known she was near to death she would have told us where to go and what to do, but she was not suspecting, neither were we. She was all our riches and she is gone; she was our breath, she was our life, and now we are nothing.

We send you our love-and with it the love of you that was in her heart when she died.

S. L. CLEMENS.

They arranged to sail on the Prince Oscar on the 29th of June. There was an earlier steamer, but it was the Princess Irene, which had brought them, and they felt they would not make the return voyage on that vessel. During the period of waiting a curious thing happened. Clemens one day got up in a chair in his room on the second floor to pull down the high window-sash. It did not move easily and his hand slipped. It was only by the merest chance that he saved himself from falling to the ground far below. He mentions this in his note-book, and once, speaking of it to Frederick Duneka, he said:

"Had I fallen it would probably have killed me, and in my bereaved circ.u.mstances the world would have been convinced that it was suicide.

It was one of those curious coincidences which are always happening and being misunderstood."

The homeward voyage and its sorrowful conclusion are pathetically conveyed in his notes:

June 29, 1904. Sailed last night at 10. The bugle-call to breakfast. I recognized the notes and was distressed. When I heard them last Livy heard them with me; now they fall upon her ear unheeded.

In my life there have been 68 Junes--but how vague & colorless 67 of them are contrasted with the deep blackness of this one!

July 1, 1904. I cannot reproduce Livy's face in my mind's eye--I was never in my life able to reproduce a face. It is a curious infirmity--& now at last I realize it is a calamity.

July 2, 1904. In these 34 years we have made many voyages together, Livy dear--& now we are making our last; you down below & lonely; I above with the crowd & lonely.

July 3, 1904. s.h.i.+p-time, 8 A.M. In 13 hours & a quarter it will be 4 weeks since Livy died.

Thirty-one years ago we made our first voyage together--& this is our last one in company. Susy was a year old then. She died at 24 & had been in her grave 8 years.

July 10, 1904. To-night it will be 5 weeks. But to me it remains yesterday--as it has from the first. But this funeral march--how sad & long it is!

Two days more will end the second stage of it.

July 14, 1904 (ELMIRA). Funeral private in the house of Livy's young maidenhood. Where she stood as a bride 34 years ago there her coffin rested; & over it the same voice that had made her a wife then committed her departed spirit to G.o.d now.

It was Joseph Twich.e.l.l who rendered that last service. Mr. Beecher was long since dead. It was a simple, touching utterance, closing with this tender word of farewell:

Robert Browning, when he was nearing the end of his earthly days, said that death was the thing that we did not believe in. Nor do we believe in it. We who journeyed through the bygone years in companions.h.i.+p with the bright spirit now withdrawn are growing old.

The way behind is long; the way before is short. The end cannot be far off. But what of that? Can we not say, each one:

"So long that power hath blessed me, sure it still Will lead me on; O'er moor and fen; o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone; And with the morn, their angel faces smile, Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!"

And so good-by. Good-by, dear heart! Strong, tender, and true.

Good-by until for us the morning break and these shadows fly away.

Dr. Eastman, who had succeeded Mr. Beecher, closed the service with a prayer, and so the last office we can render in this life for those we love was finished.

Clemens ordered that a simple marker should be placed at the grave, bearing, besides the name, the record of birth and death, followed by the German line:

'Gott sei dir gnadig, O meine Wonne'!

CCx.x.xIII. BEGINNING ANOTHER HOME

There was an extra cottage on the Gilder place at Tyringham, and this they occupied for the rest of that sad summer. Clemens, in his note-book, has preserved some of its aspects and incidents.

July 24, 1904. Rain--rain--rain. Cold. We built a fire in my room. Then clawed the logs out & threw water, remembering there was a brood of swallows in the chimney. The tragedy was averted.

July 31. LEE, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS (BERKs.h.i.+RE HILLS). Last night the young people out on a moonlight ride. Trolley frightened Jean's horse--collision--horse killed. Rodman Gilder picked Jean up, unconscious; she was taken to the doctor, per the car. Face, nose, side, back contused; tendon of left ankle broken.

August 10. NEW YORK. Clam here sick--never well since June 5. Jean is at the summer home in the Berks.h.i.+re Hills crippled.

The next entry records the third death in the Clemens family within a period of eight months--that of Mrs. Moffett, who had been Pamela Clemens. Clemens writes:

September 1. Died at Greenwich, Connecticut, my sister, Pamela Moffett, aged about 73.

Death dates this year January 14, June 5, September 1.

That fall they took a house in New York City, on the corner of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, No. 21, remaining for a time at the Grosvenor while the new home was being set in order. The home furniture was brought from Hartford, unwrapped, and established in the light of strange environment. Clemens wrote:

We have not seen it for thirteen years. Katie Leary, our old housekeeper, who has been in our service more than twenty-four years, cried when she told me about it to-day. She said, "I had forgotten it was so beautiful, and it brought Mrs. Clemens right back to me--in that old time when she was so young and lovely."

Clara Clemens had not recovered from the strain of her mother's long illness and the shock of her death, and she was ordered into retirement with the care of a trained nurse. The life at 21 Fifth Avenue, therefore, began with only two remaining members of the broken family--Clemens and Jean.

Clemens had undertaken to divert himself with work at Tyringham, though without much success. He was not well; he was restless and disturbed; his heart bleak with a great loneliness. He prepared an article on Copyright for the 'North American Review',--[Published Jan., 7905. A dialogue presentation of copyright conditions, addressed to Thorwald s...o...b..rg, Register of Copyrights, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C. One of the best of Mark Twain's papers on the subject.]--and he began, or at least contemplated, that beautiful fancy, 'Eve's Diary', which in the widest and most reverential sense, from the first word to the last, conveys his love, his wors.h.i.+p, and his tenderness for the one he had laid away.

Adam's single comment at the end, "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden,"

was his own comment, and is perhaps the most tenderly beautiful line he ever wrote. These two books, Adam's Diary and Eve's--amusing and sometimes absurd as they are, and so far removed from the literal--are as autobiographic as anything he has done, and one of them as lovely in its truth. Like the first Maker of men, Mark Twain created Adam in his own image; and his rare Eve is no less the companion with whom, half a lifetime before, he had begun the marriage journey. Only here the likeness ceases. No Serpent ever entered their Eden. And they never left it; it traveled with them so long as they remained together.

In the Christmas Harper for 1904 was published "Saint Joan of Arc"--the same being the Joan introduction prepared in London five years before.

Joan's proposed beatification had stirred a new interest in the martyred girl, and this most beautiful article became a sort of key-note of the public heart. Those who read it were likely to go back and read the Recollections, and a new appreciation grew for that masterpiece. In his later and wider acceptance by his own land, and by the world at large, the book came to be regarded with a fresh understanding. Letters came from scores of readers, as if it were a newly issued volume. A distinguished educator wrote:

I would rather have written your history of Joan of Arc than any other piece of literature in any language.

And this sentiment grew. The demand for the book increased, and has continued to increase, steadily and rapidly. In the long and last a.n.a.lysis the good must prevail. A day will come when there will be as many readers of Joan as of any other of Mark Twain's works.

[The growing appreciation of Joan is shown by the report of sales for the three years following 1904. The sales for that year in America were 1,726; for 1905, 2,445 for 1906, 5,381; for 1907, 6,574. At this point it pa.s.sed Pudd'nhead Wilson, the Yankee, The Gilded Age, Life on the Mississippi, overtook the Tramp Abroad, and more than doubled The American Claimant. Only The Innocents Abroad, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Roughing It still ranged ahead of it, in the order named.]