It was the winter (1888-89) that the Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley
entertainment combination set out on its travels. Mark Twain introduced
them to their first Boston audience. Major J. B. Pond was exploiting Nye
and Riley, and Clemens went on to Boston especially to hear them. Pond
happened upon him in the lobby of the Parker House and insisted that
nothing would do but he must introduce them. In his book of memories
which he published later Pond wrote:
He replied that he believed I was his mortal enemy, and determined
that he should never have an evening's enjoyment in my presence. He
consented, however, and conducted his brother-humorist and the Hoosier
poet to the platform. Mark's presence was a surprise to the audience,
and when they recognized him the demonstration was tremendous. The
audience rose in a body, and men and women shouted at the very top of
their voices. Handkerchiefs waved, the organist even opened every forte
key and pedal in the great organ, and the noise went on unabated for
minutes. It took some time for the crowd to get down to listening, but
when they did subside, as Mark stepped to the front, the silence was as
impressive as the noise had been.
He presented the Nye-Riley pair as the Siamese Twins. “I saw them
first,” he sand, “a great many years ago, when Mr. Barnum had them, and
they were just fresh from Siam. The ligature was their best hold then,
but literature became their best hold later, when one of them committed
an indiscretion, and they had to cut the old bond to accommodate the
sheriff.”
He continued this comic fancy, and the audience was in a proper frame of
mind, when he had finished, to welcome the “Twins of Genius” who were to
entertain them:
Pond says:
It was a carnival of fun in every sense of the word. Bostonians will not
have another such treat in this generation.
Pond proposed to Clemens a regular tour with Nye and Riley. He wrote:
I will go partners with you, and I will buy Nye and Riley's time and
give an entertainment something like the one we gave in Boston. Let
it be announced that you will introduce the “Twins of Genius.”
Ostensibly a pleasure trip for you. I will take one-third of the
profits and you two-thirds. I can tell you it will be the biggest
thing that can be brought before the American public.
But Clemens, badly as he was beginning to need the money, put this
temptation behind him. His chief diversion these days was in gratuitous
appearances. He had made up his mind not to read or lecture again for
pay, but he seemed to take a peculiar enjoyment in doing these things as
a benefaction. That he was beginning to need the money may have added a
zest to the joy of his giving. He did not respond to all invitations; he
could have been traveling constantly had he done so. He consulted with
Mrs. Clemens and gave himself to the cause that seemed most worthy. In
January Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston was billed to give a reading with
Thomas Nelson Page in Baltimore. Page's wife fell ill and died, and
Colonel Johnston, in extremity, wired Charles Dudley Warner to come in
Page's place. Warner, unable to go, handed the invitation to Clemens,
who promptly wired that he would come. They read to a packed house, and
when the audience was gone and the returns had been counted an equal
division of the profits was handed to each of the authors. Clemens
pushed his share over to Johnston, saying:
“That's yours, Colonel. I'm not reading for money these days.”
Colonel Johnston, to whom the sum was important, tried to thank him, but
he only said:
“Never mind, Colonel, it only gave me pleasure to do you that little
favor. You can pass it on some day.”
As a matter of fact, hard put to it as he was for funds, Clemens at this
time regarded himself as a potential multi-millionaire. The type-setting
machine which for years had been sapping his financial strength was
believed to be perfected, and ship-loads of money were waiting in the
offing. However, we shall come to this later.
Clemens read for the cadets at West Point and for a variety of
institutions and on many special occasions. He usually gave chapters
from his Yankee, now soon to be finished, chapters generally beginning
with the Yankee's impression of the curious country and its people,
ending with the battle of the Sun-belt, when the Yankee and his
fifty-four adherents were masters of England, with twenty-five thousand
dead men lying about them. He gave this at West Point, including the
chapter where the Yankee has organized a West Point of his own in King
Arthur's reign.
In April, '89, he made an address at a dinner given to a victorious
baseball team returning from a tour of the world by way of the Sandwich
Islands. He was on familiar ground there. His heart was in his words. He
began:
I have been in the Sandwich Islands-twenty-three years ago--that
peaceful land, that beautiful land, that far-off home of solitude,
and soft idleness, and repose, and dreams, where life is one long
slumberous Sabbath, the climate one long summer day, and the good
that die experience no change, for they but fall asleep in one
heaven and wake up in another. And these boys have played baseball
there!--baseball, which is the very symbol, the outward and visible
expression, of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the
living, tearing, booming nineteenth, the mightiest of all the
centuries!
He told of the curious island habits for his hearers' amusement, but at
the close the poetry of his memories once more possessed him:
Ah, well, it is refreshment to the jaded, it is water to the
thirsty, to look upon men who have so lately breathed the soft air
of those Isles of the Blest and had before their eyes the
inextinguishable vision of their beauty. No alien land in all the
earth has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land
could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and
waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things
leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the
same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas
flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see
its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing
by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the
cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the
plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of
flowers that perished twenty years ago.