The death of little Margaret was the final misfortune that came to the
Clemens family in Florida. Doubtless it hastened their departure. There
was a superstition in those days that to refer to health as good luck,
rather than to ascribe it to the kindness of Providence, was to bring
about a judgment. Jane Clemens one day spoke to a neighbor of their good
luck in thus far having lost no member of their family. That same day,
when the sisters, Pamela and Margaret, returned from school, Margaret
laid her books on the table, looked in the glass at her flushed cheeks,
pulled out the trundle-bed, and lay down.
She was never in her right mind again. The doctor was sent for and
diagnosed the case “bilious fever.” One evening, about nine o'clock,
Orion was sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed by the patient, when
the door opened and Little Sam, then about four years old, walked in
from his bedroom, fast asleep. He came to the side of the trundle-bed
and pulled at the bedding near Margaret's shoulder for some time before
he woke. Next day the little girl was “picking at the coverlet,” and it
was known that she could not live. About a week later she died. She
was nine years old, a beautiful child, plump in form, with rosy cheeks,
black hair, and bright eyes. This was in August, 1839. It was Little
Sam's first sight of death--the first break in the Clemens family: it
left a sad household. The shoemaker who lived next door claimed to
have seen several weeks previous, in a vision, the coffin and the
funeral-procession pass the gate by the winding road, to the cemetery,
exactly as it happened.
Matters were now going badly enough with John Clemens. Yet he never was
without one great comforting thought--the future of the Tennessee land.
It underlaid every plan; it was an anodyne for every ill.
“When we sell the Tennessee land everything will be all right,” was the
refrain that brought solace in the darkest hours. A blessing for
him that this was so, for he had little else to brighten his days.
Negotiations looking to the sale of the land were usually in progress.
When the pressure became very hard and finances were at their lowest
ebb, it was offered at any price--at five cents an acre, sometimes. When
conditions improved, however little, the price suddenly advanced even
to its maximum of one thousand dollars an acre. Now and then a genuine
offer came along, but, though eagerly welcomed at the moment, it was
always refused after a little consideration.
“We will struggle along somehow, Jane,” he would say. “We will not throw
away the children's fortune.”
There was one other who believed in the Tennessee land--Jane Clemens's
favorite cousin, James Lampton, the courtliest, gentlest, most prodigal
optimist of all that guileless race. To James Lampton the land always
had “millions in it”--everything had. He made stupendous fortunes daily,
in new ways. The bare mention of the Tennessee land sent him off into
figures that ended with the purchase of estates in England adjoining
those of the Durham Lamptons, whom he always referred to as “our
kindred,” casually mentioning the whereabouts and health of the “present
earl.” Mark Twain merely put James Lampton on paper when he created
Colonel Sellers, and the story of the Hawkins family as told in The
Gilded Age reflects clearly the struggle of those days. The words
“Tennessee land,” with their golden promise, became his earliest
remembered syllables. He grew to detest them in time, for they came to
mean mockery.
One of the offers received was the trifling sum of two hundred and fifty
dollars, and such was the moment's need that even this was considered.
Then, of course, it was scornfully refused. In some autobiographical
chapters which Orion Clemens left behind he said:
“If we had received that two hundred and fifty dollars, it would have
been more than we ever made, clear of expenses, out of the whole of the
Tennessee land, after forty years of worry to three generations.”
What a less speculative and more logical reasoner would have done in
the beginning, John Clemens did now; he selected a place which,
though little more than a village, was on a river already navigable--a
steamboat town with at least the beginnings of manufacturing and trade
already established--that is to say, Hannibal, Missouri--a point well
chosen, as shown by its prosperity to-day.
He did not delay matters. When he came to a decision, he acted quickly.
He disposed of a portion of his goods and shipped the remainder
overland; then, with his family and chattels loaded in a wagon, he was
ready to set out for the new home. Orion records that, for some reason,
his father did not invite him to get into the wagon, and how, being
always sensitive to slight, he had regarded this in the light of
deliberate desertion.
“The sense of abandonment caused my heart to ache. The wagon had gone a
few feet when I was discovered and invited to enter. How I wished they
had not missed me until they had arrived at Hannibal. Then the world
would have seen how I was treated and would have cried 'Shame!'”
This incident, noted and remembered, long after became curiously
confused with another, in Mark Twain's mind. In an autobiographical
chapter published in The North American Review he tells of the move to
Hannibal and relates that he himself was left behind by his absentminded
family. The incident of his own abandonment did not happen then, but
later, and somewhat differently. It would indeed be an absent-minded
family if the parents, and the sister and brothers ranging up to
fourteen years of age, should drive off leaving Little Sam, age four,
behind. --[As mentioned in the Prefatory Note, Mark Twain's memory
played him many tricks in later life. Incidents were filtered through
his vivid imagination until many of them bore little relation to
the actual occurrence. Some of these lapses were only amusing, but
occasionally they worked an unintentional injustice. It is the author's
purpose in every instance, so far as is possible, to keep the record
straight.]
VII. THE LITTLE TOWN OF HANNIBAL. Hannibal in 1839 was already a
corporate community and had an atmosphere of its own. It was a town
with a distinct Southern flavor, though rather more astir than the true
Southern community of that period; more Western in that it planned,
though without excitement, certain new enterprises and made a show, at
least, of manufacturing. It was somnolent (a slave town could not be
less than that), but it was not wholly asleep--that is to say, dead--and
it was tranquilly content. Mark Twain remembered it as “the white town
drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning,... the great Mississippi,
the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along;... the
dense forest away on the other side.”
The little city was proud of its scenery, and justly so: circled with
bluffs, with Holliday's Hill on the north, Lover's Leap on the south,
the shining river in the foreground, there was little to be desired in
the way of setting.
The river, of course, was the great highway. Rafts drifted by;
steamboats passed up and down and gave communication to the outside
world; St. Louis, the metropolis, was only one hundred miles away.
Hannibal was inclined to rank itself as of next importance, and took on
airs accordingly. It had society, too--all kinds--from the negroes and
the town drunkards (“General” Gaines and Jimmy Finn; later, Old Ben
Blankenship) up through several nondescript grades of mechanics and
tradesmen to the professional men of the community, who wore tall hats,
ruffled shirt-fronts, and swallow-tail coats, usually of some positive
color-blue, snuff-brown, and green. These and their families constituted
the true aristocracy of the Southern town. Most of them had pleasant
homes--brick or large frame mansions, with colonnaded entrances, after
the manner of all Southern architecture of that period, which had an
undoubted Greek root, because of certain drawing-books, it is said,
accessible to the builders of those days. Most of them, also, had
means--slaves and land which yielded an income in addition to their
professional earnings. They lived in such style as was considered
fitting to their rank, and had such comforts as were then obtainable.
It was to this grade of society that judge Clemens and his family
belonged, but his means no longer enabled him to provide either the
comforts or the ostentation of his class. He settled his family and
belongings in a portion of a house on Hill Street--the Pavey Hotel; his
merchandise he established modestly on Main Street, with Orion, in a
new suit of clothes, as clerk. Possibly the clothes gave Orion a renewed
ambition for mercantile life, but this waned. Business did not begin
actively, and he was presently dreaming and reading away the time. A
little later he became a printer's apprentice, in the office of the
Hannibal Journal, at his father's suggestion.
Orion Clemens perhaps deserves a special word here. He was to be
much associated with his more famous brother for many years, and his
personality as boy and man is worth at least a casual consideration. He
was fifteen now, and had developed characteristics which in a greater
or less degree were to go with him through life. Of a kindly, loving
disposition, like all of the Clemens children, quick of temper, but
always contrite, or forgiving, he was never without the fond regard
of those who knew him best. His weaknesses were manifold, but, on the
whole, of a negative kind. Honorable and truthful, he had no tendency
to bad habits or unworthy pursuits; indeed, he had no positive traits
of any sort. That was his chief misfortune. Full of whims and fancies,
unstable, indeterminate, he was swayed by every passing emotion and
influence. Daily he laid out a new course of study and achievement, only
to fling it aside because of some chance remark or printed paragraph or
bit of advice that ran contrary to his purpose. Such a life is bound to
be a succession of extremes--alternate periods of supreme exaltation and
despair. In his autobiographical chapters, already mentioned, Orion sets
down every impulse and emotion and failure with that faithful humility
which won him always the respect, if not always the approval, of men.
Printing was a step downward, for it was a trade, and Orion felt it
keenly. A gentleman's son and a prospective heir of the Tennessee land,
he was entitled to a profession. To him it was punishment, and the
disgrace weighed upon him. Then he remembered that Benjamin Franklin had
been a printer and had eaten only an apple and a bunch of grapes for his
dinner. Orion decided to emulate Franklin, and for a time he took only
a biscuit and a glass of water at a meal, foreseeing the day when he
should electrify the world with his eloquence. He was surprised to find
how clear his mind was on this low diet and how rapidly he learned his
trade.
Of the other children Pamela, now twelve, and Benjamin, seven, were put
to school. They were pretty, attractive children, and Henry, the baby,
was a sturdy toddler, the pride of the household. Little Sam was the
least promising of the flock. He remained delicate, and developed little
beyond a tendency to pranks. He was a queer, fanciful, uncommunicative
child that detested indoors and would run away if not watched--always in
the direction of the river. He walked in his sleep, too, and often the
rest of the household got up in the middle of the night to find him
fretting with cold in some dark corner. The doctor was summoned for him
oftener than was good for the family purse--or for him, perhaps, if we
may credit the story of heavy dosings of those stern allopathic days.
Yet he would appear not to have been satisfied with his heritage of
ailments, and was ambitious for more. An epidemic of measles--the black,
deadly kind--was ravaging Hannibal, and he yearned for the complaint. He
yearned so much that when he heard of a playmate, one of the Bowen boys,
who had it, he ran away and, slipping into the house, crept into bed
with the infection. The success of this venture was complete. Some days
later, the Clemens family gathered tearfully around Little Sam's bed to
see him die. According to his own after-confession, this gratified him,
and he was willing to die for the glory of that touching scene. However,
he disappointed them, and was presently up and about in search of fresh
laurels.--[In later life Mr. Clemens did not recollect the precise
period of this illness. With habitual indifference he assigned it to
various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required.
Without doubt the “measles” incident occurred when he was very
young.]--He must have been a wearing child, and we may believe that Jane
Clemens, with her varied cares and labors, did not always find him a
comfort.
“You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had,” she said to him
once, in her old age.
“I suppose you were afraid I wouldn't live,” he suggested, in his
tranquil fashion.
She looked at him with that keen humor that had not dulled in eighty
years. “No; afraid you would,” she said. But that was only her joke, for
she was the most tenderhearted creature in the world, and, like mothers
in general, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of her
mother's care.
It was mainly on his account that she spent her summers on John
Quarles's farm near Florida, and it was during the first summer that
an incident already mentioned occurred. It was decided that the whole
family should go for a brief visit, and one Saturday morning in June
Mrs. Clemens, with the three elder children and the baby, accompanied
by Jennie, the slave-girl, set out in a light wagon for the day's drive,
leaving Judge Clemens to bring Little Sam on horseback Sunday morning.
The hour was early when Judge Clemens got up to saddle his horse, and
Little Sam was still asleep. The horse being ready, Clemens, his mind
far away, mounted and rode off without once remembering the little boy,
and in the course of the afternoon arrived at his brother-in-law's farm.
Then he was confronted by Jane Clemens, who demanded Little Sam.
“Why,” said the judge, aghast, “I never once thought of him after I left
him asleep.”
Wharton Lampton, a brother of Jane Clemens and Patsey Quarles, hastily
saddled a horse and set out, helter-skelter, for Hannibal. He arrived
in the early dusk. The child was safe enough, but he was crying with
loneliness and hunger. He had spent most of the day in the locked,
deserted house playing with a hole in the meal-sack where the meal
ran out, when properly encouraged, in a tiny stream. He was fed and
comforted, and next day was safe on the farm, which during that summer
and those that followed it, became so large a part of his boyhood and
lent a coloring to his later years.