Mark Twain's Letters Part 116

We discover in the foregoing letter that the long European residence was drawing to an end. More than nine years had pa.s.sed since the closing of the Hartford house--eventful years that had seen failure, bereavement, battle with debt, and rehabilitated fortunes. All the family were anxious to get home--Mark Twain most anxious of all.

They closed Dollis Hill House near the end of September, and put up for a brief period at a family hotel, an amusing picture of which follows.

To J. Y. M. MacAlister, in London:

Sep. 1900.

MY DEAR MACALISTER,--We do really start next Sat.u.r.day. I meant to sail earlier, but waited to finish some studies of what are called Family Hotels. They are a London specialty, G.o.d has not permitted them to exist elsewhere; they are ramshackle clubs which were dwellings at the time of the Heptarchy. Dover and Albemarle Streets are filled with them.

The once s.p.a.cious rooms are split up into coops which afford as much discomfort as can be had anywhere out of jail for any money. All the modern inconveniences are furnished, and some that have been obsolete for a century. The prices are astonis.h.i.+ngly high for what you get. The bedrooms are hospitals for incurable furniture. I find it so in this one. They exist upon a tradition; they represent the vanis.h.i.+ng home-like inn of fifty years ago, and are mistaken by foreigners for it. Some quite respectable Englishmen still frequent them through inherited habit and arrested development; many Americans also, through ignorance and superst.i.tion. The rooms are as interesting as the Tower of London, but older I think. Older and dearer. The lift was a gift of William the Conqueror, some of the beds are prehistoric. They represent geological periods. Mine is the oldest. It is formed in strata of Old Red Sandstone, volcanic tufa, ignis fatuus, and bicarbonate of hornblende, superimposed upon argillaceous shale, and contains the prints of prehistoric man. It is in No. 149. Thousands of scientists come to see it. They consider it holy. They want to blast out the prints but cannot.

Dynamite rebounds from it.

Finished studies and sail Sat.u.r.day in Minnehaha.

Yours ever affectionately, MARK TWAIN.

They sailed for New York October 6th, and something more than a week later America gave them a royal welcome. The press, far and wide, sounded Mark Twain's praises once more; dinners and receptions were offered on every hand; editors and lecture agents clamored for him.

The family settled in the Earlington Hotel during a period of house-hunting. They hoped eventually to return to Hartford, but after a brief visit paid by Clemens alone to the old place he wrote:

To Sylvester Baxter, in Boston:

NEW YORK, Oct. 26, 1900.

DEAR MR. BAXTER,--It was a great pleasure to me to renew the other days with you, and there was a pathetic pleasure in seeing Hartford and the house again; but I realize that if we ever enter the house again to live, our hearts will break. I am not sure that we shall ever be strong enough to endure that strain.

Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS.

Mr. and Mrs. Rogers wished to have them in their neighborhood, but the houses there were not suitable, or were too expensive. Through Mr. Frank Doubleday they eventually found, at 14 West Tenth Street, a large residence handsomely furnished, and this they engaged for the winter. "We were lucky to get this big house furnished," he wrote MacAlister in London. "There was not another one in town procurable that would answer us, but this one is all right--s.p.a.ce enough in it for several families, the rooms all old-fas.h.i.+oned, great size."

The little note that follows shows that Mark Twain had not entirely forgotten the days of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

To a Neighbor on West Tenth Street, New York:

Nov. 30.

DEAR MADAM,--I know I ought to respect my duty and perform it, but I am weak and faithless where boys are concerned, and I can't help secretly approving pretty bad and noisy ones, though I do object to the kind that ring door-bells. My family try to get me to stop the boys from holding conventions on the front steps, but I basely s.h.i.+rk out of it, because I think the boys enjoy it.

My wife has been complaining to me this evening about the boys on the front steps and under compulsion I have made some promises. But I am very forgetful, now that I am old, and my sense of duty is getting spongy.

Very truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS.

MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1901-1906

VOLUME V.

By Mark Twain

ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE

XL. LETTERS OF 1901, CHIEFLY TO TWICh.e.l.l. MARK TWAIN AS A REFORMER.

SUMMER AT SARANAC. a.s.sa.s.sINATION OF PRESIDENT McKINLEY.

An editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal, early in 1901, said: "A remarkable transformation, or rather a development, has taken place in Mark Twain. The genial humorist of the earlier day is now a reformer of the vigorous kind, a sort of knight errant who does not hesitate to break a lance with either Church or State if he thinks them interposing on that broad highway over which he believes not a part but the whole of mankind has the privilege of pa.s.sing in the onward march of the ages."

Mark Twain had begun "breaking the lance" very soon after his return from Europe. He did not believe that he could reform the world, but at least he need not withhold his protest against those things which stirred his wrath. He began by causing the arrest of a cabman who had not only overcharged but insulted him; he continued by writing openly against the American policy in the Philippines, the missionary propaganda which had resulted in the Chinese uprising and ma.s.sacre, and against Tammany politics. Not all of his efforts were in the line of reform; he had become a sort of general spokesman which the public flocked to hear, whatever the subject. On the occasion of a Lincoln Birthday service at Carnegie Hall he was chosen to preside, and he was obliged to attend more dinners than were good for his health. His letters of this period were mainly written to his old friend Twich.e.l.l, in Hartford. Howells, who lived in New York, he saw with considerable frequency.

In the letter which follows the medicine which Twich.e.l.l was to take was Plasmon, an English proprietary remedy in which Mark Twain had invested--a panacea for all human ills which osteopathy could not reach.

To Rev. Joseph Twich.e.l.l, in Hartford:

14 W. 10TH ST. Jan. 23, '01.

DEAR JOE,--Certainly. I used to take it in my coffee, but it settled to the bottom in the form of mud, and I had to eat it with a spoon; so I dropped the custom and took my 2 teaspoonfuls in cold milk after breakfast. If we were out of milk I shoveled the dry powder into my mouth and washed it down with water. The only essential is to get it down, the method is not important.

No, blame it, I can't go to the Alumni dinner, Joe. It takes two days, and I can't spare the time. Moreover I preside at the Lincoln birthday celebration in Carnegie Hall Feb. 11, and I must not make two speeches so close together. Think of it--two old rebels functioning there--I as President, and Watterson as Orator of the Day! Things have changed somewhat in these 40 years, thank G.o.d.

Look here--when you come down you must be our guest--we've got a roomy room for you, and Livy will make trouble if you go elsewhere. Come straight to 14 West 10th.

Jan. 24. Livy says Amen to that; also, can you give us a day or two's notice, so the room will be sure to be vacant?

I'm going to stick close to my desk for a month, now, hoping to write a small book.