They sailed on the Batavia, and with them went a young man named
Thompson, a theological student whom Clemens had consented to take as an
amanuensis. There is a pathetic incident connected with this young man,
and it may as well be set down here. Clemens found, a few weeks after
his arrival in England, that so great was the tax upon his time that
he could make no use of Thompson's services. He gave Thompson fifty
dollars, and upon the possibility of the young man's desiring to return
to America, advanced him another fifty dollars, saying that he could
return it some day, and never thought of it again. But the young man
remembered it, and one day, thirty-six years later, after a life of
hardship and struggle, such as the life of a country minister is apt
to be, he wrote and inclosed a money-order, a payment on his debt. That
letter and its inclosure brought only sorrow to Mark Twain. He felt that
it laid upon him the accumulated burden of the weary thirty-six years'
struggle with ill-fortune. He returned the money, of course, and in a
biographical note commented:
How pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it! Thompson's
heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and
which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound
obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days. I had
forgotten Thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly
as lightning. I can see him now. It was on the deck of the
Batavia, in the dock. The ship was casting off, with that hubbub
and confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and
shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure
preparations in those days--an impressive contrast with the solemn
silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships of
the present day. Mrs. Clemens, Clara Spaulding, little Susy, and
the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion. We all
had on our storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and
designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance
with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being distinctly
and odiously out of the question.
Very well. On that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable
and properly upholstered groups, appeared Thompson, young, grave,
long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper
end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down, without
break or wrinkle, to his ankles. He came straight to us, and shook
hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew him. A
nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder astonishment.
However, Thompson didn't know that anything was happening. He had
no prejudices about clothes. I can still see him as he looked when
we passed Sandy Hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us.
Erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug
on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind, level
with his neck. There were scoffers observing, but he didn't know
it; he wasn't disturbed.
In my mind, I see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me
down in shorthand. The Shah of Persia had come to England and Dr.
Hosmer, of the Herald, had sent me to Ostend, to view his Majesty's
progress across the Channel and write an account of it. I can't
recall Thompson after that, and I wish his memory had been as poor
as mine.
They had been a month in London, when the final incident referred to
took place--the arrival of the Shah of Persia--and were comfortably
quartered at the Langham Hotel. To Twichell Clemens wrote:
We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor,
our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a
noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland
Place and the crook that joins it onto Regent Street).
Nine p.m. full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west.
I am not going to write anything; rather tell it when I get back.
I love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I've got
anyway. And I mean to keep that fresh all the time.
Mrs. Clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared: “It is perfectly
discouraging to try to write you. There is so much to write about that
it makes me feel as if it was no use to begin.”
It was a period of continuous honor and entertainment. If Mark Twain had
been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than royalty now. His
rooms at the Langham were like a court. Miss Spaulding (now Mrs. John
B. Stanchfield) remembers that Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John
Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke (then at the height of his
fame) were among those that called to pay their respects. In a recent
letter she says:
I remember a delightful luncheon that Charles Kingsley gave for Mr.
Clemens; also an evening when Lord Dunraven brought Mr. Home, the
medium, Lord Dunraven telling many of the remarkable things he had
seen Mr. Home do. I remember I wanted so much to see him float out
of a seven or eight story window, and enter another, which Lord
Dunraven said he had seen him do many times. But Mr. Home had been
very ill, and said his power had left him. My great regret was that
we did not see Carlyle, who was too sad and ill for visits.
Among others they met Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland,
and found him so shy that it was almost impossible to get him to say a
word on any subject.
“The shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met,” Clemens
once wrote. “Dr. MacDonald and several other lively talkers were
present, and the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but
Carroll sat still all the while, except now and then when he answered a
question.”
At a dinner given by George Smalley they met Herbert Spencer, and at a
luncheon-party at Lord Houghton's, Sir Arthur Helps, then a world-wide
celebrity.
Lord Elcho, a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the
table. He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming. It
was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the
Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling,
and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it
startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. In the
middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests on
her right and on her left, in a matter-of-fact way, “Excuse me, I
have an engagement,” and without further ceremony, she went off to
meet it. This would have been doubtful etiquette in America. Lord
Houghton told a number of delightful stories. He told them in
French, and I lost nothing of them but the nubs.
Little Susy and her father thrived on London life, but after a time
it wore on Mrs. Clemens. She delighted in the English cordiality and
culture, but the demands were heavy, the social forms sometimes trying.
Life in London was interesting, and in its way charming, but she did not
enter into it with quite her husband's enthusiasm and heartiness. In
the end they canceled all London engagements and quietly set out for
Scotland. On the way they rested a few days in York, a venerable place
such as Mark Twain always loved to describe. In a letter to Mrs. Langdon
he wrote:
For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with
its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew
no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper
stories far overhanging the street, and thus marking their date,
say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated
gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque
ruin of St. Mary's Abbey, suggesting their date, say five hundred
years ago, in the heart of Crusading times and the glory of English
chivalry and romance; the vast Cathedral of York, with its worn
carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of still remoter
days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that
stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish
dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of
King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with Saxon
oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred
years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins
and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of
stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by
the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed
and, caressed them every lagging day since the Roman Emperor's
soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son of Mary
walked the streets of Nazareth a youth, with no more name or fame
than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street this
moment.
They reached Edinburgh at the end of July and secluded themselves in
Veitch's family hotel in George Street, intending to see no one. But
this plan was not a success; the social stress of London had been
too much for Mrs. Clemens, and she collapsed immediately after their
arrival. Clemens was unacquainted in Edinburgh, but remembered that Dr.
John Brown, who had written Rab and His Friend, lived there. He learned
his address, and that he was still a practising physician. He walked
around to 23 Rutland Street, and made himself known. Dr. Brown came
forthwith, and Mrs. Clemens speedily recovered under his able and
inspiring treatment.
The association did not end there. For nearly a month Dr. Brown was
their daily companion, either at the hotel, or in his own home, or on
protracted drives when he made his round of visits, taking these new
friends along. Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Edinburgh, everybody
in Scotland, for that matter, and his story of Rab had won him a
following throughout Christendom. He was an unpretentious sovereign.
Clemens once wrote of him:
His was a sweet and winning face, as beautiful a face as I have ever
known. Reposeful, gentle, benignant; the face of a saint at peace
with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine of love
that filled his heart.
He was the friend of all dogs, and of all people. It has been told of
him that once, when driving, he thrust his head suddenly out of the
carriage window, then resumed his place with a disappointed look.
“Who was it?” asked his companion. “Some one you know?”
“No,” he said. “A dog I don't know.”
He became the boon companion and playmate of little Susy, then not quite
a year and a half old. He called her Megalopis, a Greek term, suggested
by her eyes; those deep, burning eyes that seemed always so full of
life's sadder philosophies, and impending tragedy. In a collection of
Dr. Brown's letters he refers to this period. In one place he says:
Had the author of The Innocents Abroad not come to Edinburgh at that
time we in all human probability might never have met, and what a
deprivation that would have been to me during the last quarter of a
century!
And in another place:
I am attending the wife of Mark Twain. His real name is Clemens.
She is a quite lovely little woman, modest and clever, and she has a
girlie eighteen months old, her ludicrous miniature--and such eyes!
Those playmates, the good doctor and Megalopis, romped together through
the hotel rooms with that complete abandon which few grown persons can
assume in their play with children, and not all children can assume in
their play with grown-ups. They played “bear,” and the “bear” (which was
a very little one, so little that when it stood up behind the sofa
you could just get a glimpse of yellow hair) would lie in wait for her
victim, and spring out and surprise him and throw him into frenzies of
fear.
Almost every day they made his professional rounds with him. He always
carried a basket of grapes for his patients. His guests brought along
books to read while they waited. When he stopped for a call he would
say:
“Entertain yourselves while I go in and reduce the population.”
There was much sight-seeing to do in Edinburgh, and they could not quite
escape social affairs. There were teas and luncheons and dinners with
the Dunfermlines and the Abercrombies, and the MacDonalds, and with
others of those brave clans that no longer slew one another among the
grim northern crags and glens, but were as sociable and entertaining
lords and ladies as ever the southland could produce. They were very
gentle folk indeed, and Mrs. Clemens, in future years, found her heart
going back oftener to Edinburgh than to any other haven of those first
wanderings. August 24th she wrote to her sister:
We leave Edinburgh to-morrow with sincere regret; we have had such a
delightful stay here--we do so regret leaving Dr. Brown and his
sister, thinking that we shall probably never see them again [as
indeed they never did].
They spent a day or two at Glasgow and sailed for Ireland, where they
put in a fortnight, and early in September were back in England again,
at Chester, that queer old city where; from a tower on the wall, Charles
I. read the story of his doom. Reginald Cholmondeley had invited them to
visit his country seat, beautiful Condover Hall, near Shrewsbury, and in
that lovely retreat they spent some happy, restful days. Then they were
in the whirl of London once more, but escaped for a fortnight to Paris,
sight-seeing and making purchases for the new home.
Mrs. Clemens was quite ready to return to America, by this time.
I am blue and cross and homesick [she wrote]. I suppose what makes
me feel the latter is because we are contemplating to stay in London
another month. There has not one sheet of Mr. Clemens's proof come
yet, and if he goes home before the book is published here he will
lose his copyright. And then his friends feel that it will be
better for him to lecture in London before his book is published,
not only that it will give him a larger but a more enviable
reputation. I would not hesitate one moment if it were simply for
the money that his copyright will bring him, but if his reputation
will be better for his staying and lecturing, of course he ought to
stay.... The truth is, I can't bear the thought of postponing going
home.
It is rather gratifying to find Olivia Clemens human, like that, now
and then. Otherwise, on general testimony, one might well be tempted to
regard her as altogether of another race and kind.