Mark Twain A Biography Part 171

"I could stand any amount of that," he said, and presently: "Life is too long and too short. Too long for the weariness of it; too short for the work to be done. At the very most, the average mind can only master a few languages and a little history."

I said: "Still, we need not worry. If death ends all it does not matter; and if life is eternal there will be time enough."

"Yes," he a.s.sented, rather grimly, "that optimism of yours is always ready to turn h.e.l.l's back yard into a playground."

I said that, old as I was, I had taken up the study of French, and mentioned Bayard Taylor's having begun Greek at fifty, expecting to need it in heaven.

Clemens said, reflectively: "Yes--but you see that was Greek."

CCLx.x.xI. THE LAST SUMMER AT STORMFIELD

I was at Stormfield pretty constantly during the rest of that year. At first I went up only for the day; but later, when his health did not improve, and when he expressed a wish for companions.h.i.+p evenings, I remained most of the nights as well. Our rooms were separated only by a bath-room; and as neither of us was much given to sleep, there was likely to be talk or reading aloud at almost any hour when both were awake. In the very early morning I would usually slip in, softly, sometimes to find him propped up against his pillows sound asleep, his gla.s.ses on, the reading-lamp blazing away as it usually did, day or night; but as often as not he was awake, and would have some new plan or idea of which he was eager to be delivered, and there was always interest, and nearly always amus.e.m.e.nt in it, even if it happened to be three in the morning or earlier.

Sometimes, when he thought it time for me to be stirring, he would call softly, but loudly enough for me to hear if awake; and I would go in, and we would settle again problems of life and death and science, or, rather, he would settle them while I dropped in a remark here and there, merely to hold the matter a little longer in solution.

The pains in his breast came back, and with a good deal of frequency as the summer advanced; also, they became more severe. Dr. Edward Quintard came up from New York, and did not hesitate to say that the trouble proceeded chiefly from the heart, and counseled diminished smoking, with less active exercise, advising particularly against Clemens's lifetime habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs.

There was no prohibition as to billiards, however, or leisurely walking, and we played pretty steadily through those peaceful summer days, and often took a walk down into the meadows or perhaps in the other direction, when it was not too warm or windy. Once we went as far as the river, and I showed him a part of his land he had not seen before--a beautiful cedar hillside, remote and secluded, a place of enchantment.

On the way I pointed out a little corner of land which earlier he had given me to straighten our division line. I told him I was going to build a study on it, and call it "Markland." He thought it an admirable building-site, and I think he was pleased with the name. Later he said:

"If you had a place for that extra billiard-table of mine [the Rogers table, which had been left in New York] I would turn it over to you."

I replied that I could adapt the size of my proposed study to fit a billiard-table, and he said:

"Now that will be very good. Then, when I want exercise, I can walk down and play billiards with you, and when you want exercise you can walk up and play billiards with me. You must build that study."

So it was we planned, and by and by Mr. Lounsbury had undertaken the work.

During the walks Clemens rested a good deal. There were the New England hills to climb, and then he found that he tired easily, and that weariness sometimes brought on the pain. As I remember now, I think how bravely he bore it. It must have been a deadly, sickening, numbing pain, for I have seen it crumple him, and his face become colorless while his hand dug at his breast; but he never complained, he never bewailed, and at billiards he would persist in going on and playing in his turn, even while he was bowed with the anguish of the attack.

We had found that a gla.s.s of very hot water relieved it, and we kept always a thermos bottle or two filled and ready. At the first hint from him I would pour out a gla.s.s and another, and sometimes the relief came quickly; but there were times, and alas! they came oftener, when that deadly gripping did not soon release him. Yet there would come a week or a fortnight when he was apparently perfectly well, and at such times we dismissed the thought of any heart malady, and attributed the whole trouble to acute indigestion, from which he had always suffered more or less.

We were alone together most of the time. He did not appear to care for company that summer. Clara Clemens had a concert tour in prospect, and her father, eager for her success, encouraged her to devote a large part of her time to study. For Jean, who was in love with every form of outdoor and animal life, he had established headquarters in a vacant farm-house on one corner of the estate, where she had collected some stock and poultry, and was over-flowingly happy. Ossip Gabrilowitsch was a guest in the house a good portion of the summer, but had been invalided through severe surgical operations, and for a long time rarely appeared, even at meal-times. So it came about that there could hardly have been a closer daily companions.h.i.+p than was ours during this the last year of Mark Twain's life. For me, of course, nothing can ever be like it again in this world. One is not likely to a.s.sociate twice with a being from another star.

CCLx.x.xII. PERSONAL MEMORANDA

In the notes I made of this period I caught a little drift of personality and utterance, and I do not know better how to preserve these things than to give them here as nearly as may be in the sequence and in the forth in which they were set down.

One of the first of these entries occurs in June, when Clemens was rereading with great interest and relish Andrew D. White's Science and Theology, which he called a lovely book.--['A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom'.]

June 21. A peaceful afternoon, and we walked farther than usual, resting at last in the shade of a tree in the lane that leads to Jean's farm-house. I picked a dandelion-ball, with some remark about its being one of the evidences of the intelligent principle in nature--the seeds winged for a wider distribution.

"Yes," he said, "those are the great evidences; no one who reasons can doubt them."

And presently he added:

"That is a most amusing book of White's. When you read it you see how those old theologians never reasoned at all. White tells of an old bishop who figured out that G.o.d created the world in an instant on a certain day in October exactly so many years before Christ, and proved it. And I knew a preacher myself once who declared that the fossils in the rocks proved nothing as to the age of the world. He said that G.o.d could create the rocks with those fossils in them for ornaments if He wanted to. Why, it takes twenty years to build a little island in the Mississippi River, and that man actually believed that G.o.d created the whole world and all that's in it in six days. White tells of another bishop who gave two new reasons for thunder; one being that G.o.d wanted to show the world His power, and another that He wished to frighten sinners to repent. Now consider the proportions of that conception, even in the pettiest way you can think of it. Consider the idea of G.o.d thinking of all that. Consider the President of the United States wanting to impress the flies and fleas and mosquitoes, getting up on the dome of the Capitol and beating a ba.s.s-drum and setting off red fire."

He followed the theme a little further, then we made our way slowly back up the long hill, he holding to my arm, and resting here and there, but arriving at the house seemingly fresh and ready for billiards.

June 23. I came up this morning with a basket of strawberries. He was walking up and down, looking like an ancient Roman. He said:

"Consider the case of Elsie Sigel--[Granddaughter of Gen. Franz Sigel. She was mysteriously murdered while engaged in settlement work among the Chinese.]--what a ghastly ending to any life!"

Then turning upon me fiercely, he continued:

"Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not a single life that was ever lived that was worth living. Not a single child ever begotten that the begetting of it was not a crime. Suppose a community of people to be living on the slope of a volcano, directly under the crater and in the path of lava-flow; that volcano has been breaking out right along for ages and is certain to break out again.

They do not know when it will break out, but they know it will do it--that much can be counted on. Suppose those people go to a community in a far neighborhood and say, 'We'd like to change places with you. Come take our homes and let us have yours.' Those people would say, 'Never mind, we are not interested in your country. We know what has happened there, and what will happen again.' We don't care to live under the blow that is likely to fall at any moment; and yet every time we bring a child into the world we are bringing it to a country, to a community gathered under the crater of a volcano, knowing that sooner or later death will come, and that before death there will be catastrophes infinitely worse. Formerly it was much worse than now, for before the ministers abolished h.e.l.l a man knew, when he was begetting a child, that he was begetting a soul that had only one chance in a hundred of escaping the eternal fires of d.a.m.nation. He knew that in all probability that child would be brought to d.a.m.nation--one of the ninety-nine black sheep.

But since h.e.l.l has been abolished death has become more welcome.

I wrote a fairy story once. It was published somewhere. I don't remember just what it was now, but the substance of it was that a fairy gave a man the customary wishes. I was interested in seeing what he would take. First he chose wealth and went away with it, but it did not bring him happiness. Then he came back for the second selection, and chose fame, and that did not bring happiness either. Finally he went to the fairy and chose death, and the fairy said, in substance, 'If you hadn't been a fool you'd have chosen that in the first place.'

"The papers called me a pessimist for writing that story.

Pessimist--the man who isn't a pessimist is a d---d fool."

But this was one of his savage humors, stirred by tragic circ.u.mstance.

Under date of July 5th I find this happier entry:

We have invented a new game, three-ball carom billiards, each player continuing until he has made five, counting the number of his shots as in golf, the one who finishes in the fewer shots wins. It is a game we play with almost exactly equal skill, and he is highly pleased with it. He said this afternoon:

"I have never enjoyed billiards as I do now. I look forward to it every afternoon as my reward at the end of a good day's work."--[His work at this time was an article on Marjorie Fleming, the "wonder child," whose quaint writings and brief little life had been published to the world by Dr. John Brown. Clemens always adored the thought of Marjorie, and in this article one can see that she ranked almost next to Joan of Arc in his affections.]

We went out in the loggia by and by and Clemens read aloud from a book which Professor Zubelin left here a few days ago--'The Religion of a Democrat'. Something in it must have suggested to Clemens his favorite science, for presently he said:

"I have been reading an old astronomy; it speaks of the perfect line of curvature of the earth in spite of mountains and abysses, and I have imagined a man three hundred thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and looking at it and holding it in his hand.

It would be about like a billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.' The Himalayas to him, the highest peak, would be one-sixty-thousandth of his height, or about the one- thousandth part of an inch as compared with the average man."

I spoke of having somewhere read of some very tiny satellites, one as small, perhaps, as six miles in diameter, yet a genuine world.

"Could a man live on a world so small as that?" I asked.

"Oh yes," he said. "The gravitation that holds it together would hold him on, and he would always seem upright, the same as here.

His horizon would be smaller, but even if he were six feet tall he would only have one foot for each mile of that world's diameter, so you see he would be little enough, even for a world that he could walk around in half a day."

He talked astronomy a great deal--marvel astronomy. He had no real knowledge of the subject, and I had none of any kind, which made its ungraspable facts all the more thrilling. He was always thrown into a sort of ecstasy by the unthinkable distances of s.p.a.ce--the supreme drama of the universe. The fact that Alpha Centauri was twenty-five trillions of miles away--two hundred and fifty thousand times the distance of our own remote sun, and that our solar system was traveling, as a whole, toward the bright star Vega, in the constellation of Lyra, at the rate of forty-four miles a second, yet would be thousands upon thousands of years reaching its destination, fairly enraptured him.

The astronomical light-year--that is to say, the distance which light travels in a year--was one of the things which he loved to contemplate; but he declared that no two authorities ever figured it alike, and that he was going to figure it for himself. I came in one morning, to find that he had covered several sheets of paper with almost interminable rows of ciphers, and with a result, to him at least, entirely satisfactory. I am quite certain that he was prouder of those figures and their enormous aggregate than if he had just completed an immortal tale; and when he added that the nearest fixed star--Alpha Centauri--was between four and five light-years distant from the earth, and that there was no possible way to think that distance in miles or even any calculable fraction of it, his gla.s.ses shone and his hair was roached up as with the stimulation of these stupendous facts.

By and by he said:

"I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that."

And a little later he added:

"I've got some kind of a heart disease, and Quintard won't tell me whether it is the kind that carries a man off in an instant or keeps him lingering along and suffering for twenty years or so. I was in hopes that Quintard would tell me that I was likely to drop dead any minute; but he didn't. He only told me that my blood-pressure was too strong. He didn't give me any schedule; but I expect to go with Halley's comet."