It was past eleven o'clock and I was just going to bed. But this
friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was
not a doubt in my mind that his “expedition” had merit in it. I put
on my coat and boots again, and we drove away.
“Where is it? Where are we going?”
“Don't worry. You'll see.”
He was not inclined to talk. So I thought this must be a weighty
matter. My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully
under the surface. I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers as
we thundered down the long street. I am always lost in London, day
or night. It was very chilly, almost bleak. People leaned against
the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter. The crowds grew
thinner and thinner, and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away.
The sky was overcast and threatening. We drove on, and still on,
till I wondered if we were ever going to stop. At last we passed by
a spacious bridge and a vast building, and presently entered a
gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court
surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice. Then we
alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited. In a little while
footsteps were heard, a man emerged from the darkness, and we
dropped into his wake without saying anything. He led us under an
archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a
tall iron gate, which he locked behind us. We followed him down
this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than
by anything we could very distinctly see. At the end of it we came
to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a
bull's-eye lantern. Then he unlocked the gate; and I wished he had
oiled it first, it grated so dismally. The gate swung open and we
stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared
cavern, carved out of the solid darkness. The conductor and my
friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise. For the
moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the stillness
seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom. I looked my inquiry!
“It is the tomb of the great dead of England-Westminster Abbey.”...
We were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting,
standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness
--reached out their hands toward us--some appealing, some beckoning,
some warning us away. Effigies they were--statues over the graves;
but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows. Now a
little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the
bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by
the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that
sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of
yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn
of history, more than twelve hundred years ago....
Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon
that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was nothing
about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of
interest. He is a man in authority, being superintendent, and his
daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the
great pile. Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would
say:
“Observe the height of the Abbey--one hundred and three feet to the
base of the roof; I measured it myself the other day. Notice the
base of this column--old, very old--hundreds and hundreds of years
--and how well they knew how to build in those old days! Notice it
--every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature
laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day
some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and
flake. Architects cannot teach nature anything. Let me remove this
matting--it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit
of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these
scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before
time and sacrilegious idlers marred it. Now there, in the border,
was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by
the ornaments that have been pulled out--here is an A and there is
an O, and yonder another A--all beautiful Old English capitals;
there is no telling what the inscription was--no record left now.
Now move along in this direction, if you please. Yonder is where
old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the
Abbey; Sebert died in 616,--[Clemens probably misunderstood the
name. It was Ethelbert who died in 616. The name Sebert does not
appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]--and that's
as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it! Twelve
hundred and fifty years! Now yonder is the last one--Charles
Dickens--there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab--and
to this day the people come and put flowers on it.... There is
Garrick's monument; and Addison's, and Thackeray's bust--and
Macaulay lies there. And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan
and Dr. Johnson--and here is old Parr....
“That stone there covers Campbell the poet. Here are names you know
pretty well--Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who
wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson--there are three
tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got 'O, Rare Ben
Jonson' cut on them. You were standing on one of them just now he
is buried standing up. There used to be a tradition here that
explains it. The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried
in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present
of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said 'yes,' and
asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey.
Well, the King wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is,
sure enough-stood up on end.”
The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that
the book itself was never written. Just when he gave up the project is
not recorded. He was urged to lecture in London, but declined. To Mrs.
Clemens, in September, he wrote:
Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the least idea
of doing it; certainly not at present. Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to
America, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though I have sent him
word once before that I can't be hired to talk here; because I have no
time to spare. There is too much sociability; I do not get along fast
enough with work.
In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that Mrs.
Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless she would prefer
to have him come home for the winter and all of them return to London
in the spring. So it is likely that the book was not then abandoned. He
felt that his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only
just begun, but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him.
To his mother and sister, in November, he wrote:
I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend
dinners and make speeches. I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate
to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel
entirely at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make
after-dinner speeches here. I have made hundreds of friends; and last
night, in the crush at the opening of the new Guild Hall Library and
Museum, I was surprised to meet a familiar face every other step.
All his impressions of England had been happy ones. He could deliver
a gentle satire now and then at certain British institutions--certain
London localities and features--as in his speech at the Savage
Club,--[September 28, 1872. This is probably the most characteristic
speech made by Mark Twain during his first London visit; the reader will
find it in full in Appendix L, at the end of last volume.]--but taking
the snug island as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair,
rural aspects, he had found in it only delight. To Mrs. Crane he wrote:
If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me,
and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful
that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land. There is nothing
like it elsewhere on the globe. You should have a season ticket and
travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship
nature.
And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now
as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the
British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the
customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every
official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the
speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their
lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder. I
would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you
over.
He sailed November 12th, on the Batavia, loaded with Christmas presents
for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical steam-engine for
his namesake, Sam Moffett. Half-way across the Atlantic the Batavia ran
into a hurricane and was badly damaged by heavy seas, and driven far out
of her course. It was a lucky event on the whole, for she fell in with a
water-logged lumber bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors
clinging to her rigging. In the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was
launched and the perishing men were rescued. Clemens prepared a graphic
report of the matter for the Royal Humane Society, asking that medals
be conferred upon the brave rescuers, a document that was signed by his
fellow-passengers and obtained for the men complete recognition and wide
celebrity. Closing, the writer said:
As might have been anticipated, if I have been of any service toward
rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing around the
deck in a furious storm, without an umbrella, keeping an eye on
things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling whenever a
cheer seemed to be the important thing, I am glad and I am
satisfied. I ask no reward. I would do it again under the same
circumstances. But what I do plead for, earnestly and sincerely, is
that the Royal Humane Society will remember our captain and our
life-boat crew, and in so remembering them increase the high honor
and esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized
world.
The Batavia reached New York November 26, 1872. Mark Twain had been
absent three months, during which he had been brought to at least a
partial realization of what his work meant to him and to mankind.
An election had taken place during his absence--an election which
gratified him deeply, for it had resulted in the second presidency
of General Grant and in the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom he admired
perhaps, but not as presidential material. To Thomas Nast, who had aided
very effectually in Mr. Greeley's overwhelming defeat, Clemens wrote:
Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for
Grant--I mean, rather, for civilization and progress. Those pictures
were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold
his head up and be honestly proud of his share in this year's vast
events that man is unquestionably yourself. We all do sincerely honor
you, and are proud of you.
Horace Greeley's peculiar abilities and eccentricities won celebrity for
him, rather than voters. Mark Twain once said of him:
“He was a great man, an honest man, and served his, country well and
was an honor to it. Also, he was a good-natured man, but abrupt with
strangers if they annoyed him when he was busy. He was profane, but that
is nothing; the best of us is that. I did not know him well, but only
just casually, and by accident. I never met him but once. I called on
him in the Tribune office, but I was not intending to. I was looking
for Whitelaw Reid, and got into the wrong den. He was alone at his desk,
writing, and we conversed--not long, but just a little. I asked him if
he was well, and he said, 'What the hell do you want?' Well, I couldn't
remember what I wanted, so I said I would call again. But I didn't.”
Clemens did not always tell the incident just in this way. Sometimes it
was John Hay he was looking for instead of Reid, and the conversation
with Greeley varied; but perhaps there was a germ of history under it
somewhere, and at any rate it could have happened well enough, and not
have been out of character with either of the men.