With the exception of one article--“A Majestic Literary
Fossil”--[Harper's Magazine, February, 1890. Included in the “Complete
Works.”]--Clemens was writing nothing of importance at this time.
This article grew out of a curious old medical work containing absurd
prescriptions which, with Theodore Crane, he had often laughed over at
the farm. A sequel to Huckleberry Finn--Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among
the Indians--was begun, and a number of its chapters were set in type
on the new Paige compositor, which had cost such a gallant sum, and
was then thought to be complete. There seems to have been a plan to
syndicate the story, but at the end of Chapter IX Huck and Tom had
got themselves into a predicament from which it seemed impossible to
extricate them, and the plot was suspended for further inspiration,
which apparently never came.
Clemens, in fact, was troubled with rheumatism in his arm and shoulder,
which made writing difficult. Mrs. Clemens, too, had twinges of the
malady. They planned to go abroad for the summer of 1890, to take the
waters of some of the German baths, but they were obliged to give up
the idea. There were too many business complications; also the health
of Clemens's mother had become very feeble. They went to Tannersville in
the Catskills, instead--to the Onteora Club, where Mrs. Candace Wheeler
had gathered a congenial colony in a number of picturesque cottages,
with a comfortable hotel for the more transient visitor. The Clemenses
secured a cottage for the season. Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, Laurence
Hutton, Carroll Beckwith, the painter; Brander Matthews, Dr. Heber
Newton, Mrs. Custer, and Dora Wheeler were among those who welcomed Mark
Twain and his family at a generous home-made banquet.
It was the beginning of a happy summer. There was a constant visiting
from one cottage to another, with frequent assemblings at the Bear and
Fox Inn, their general headquarters. There were pantomimes and charades,
in which Mark Twain and his daughters always had star parts. Susy
Clemens, who was now eighteen, brilliant and charming, was beginning
to rival her father as a leader of entertainment. Her sister Clara gave
impersonations of Modjeska and Ada Rehan. When Fourth of July came there
were burlesque races, of which Mark Twain was starter, and many of that
lighthearted company took part. Sometimes, in the evening, they gathered
in one of the cottages and told stories by the firelight, and once he
told the story of the Golden Arm, so long remembered, and brought
them up with the same old jump at the sudden climax. Brander Matthews
remembers that Clemens was obliged frequently to go to New York on
business connected with the machine and the publishing, and that during
one of these absences a professional entertainer came along, and in the
course of his program told a Mark Twain story, at which Mrs. Clemens
and the girls laughed without recognizing its authorship. Matthews also
remembers Jean, as a little girl of ten, allowed to ride a pony and
to go barefoot, to her great delight, full of health and happiness, a
favorite of the colony.
Clemens would seem to have forgiven Brander Matthews for his copyright
articles, for he walked over to the Matthews cottage one morning and
asked to be taught piquet, the card game most in vogue there that
season. At odd times he sat to Carroll Beckwith for his portrait, and
smoked a cob pipe meantime, so Beckwith painted him in that way.
It was a season that closed sadly. Clemens was called to Keokuk in
August, to his mother's bedside, for it was believed that her end
was near. She rallied, and he returned to Onteora. But on the 27th of
October came the close of that long, active life, and the woman who two
generations before had followed John Clemens into the wilderness, and
along the path of vicissitude, was borne by her children to Hannibal and
laid to rest at his side. She was in her eighty-eighth year.
The Clemens family were back in Hartford by this time, and it was only a
little later that Mrs. Clemens was summoned to the death-bed of her
own mother, in Elmira. Clemens accompanied her, but Jean being taken
suddenly ill he returned to Hartford. Watching by the little girl's
bedside on the night of the 27th of November, he wrote Mrs. Clemens a
birthday letter, telling of Jean's improved condition and sending other
good news and as many loving messages as he could devise. But it proved
a sad birthday for Mrs. Clemens, for on that day her mother's gentle and
beautiful soul went out from among them. The foreboding she had felt at
the passing of Theodore Crane had been justified. She had a dread that
the harvest of death was not yet ended. Matters in general were going
badly with them, and an anxiety began to grow to get away from America,
and so perhaps leave sorrow and ill-luck behind. Clemens, near the end
of December, writing to his publishing manager, Hall, said:
Merry Christmas to you, and I wish to God I could have one myself
before I die.
The house was emptier that winter than before, for Susy was at Bryn
Mawr. Clemens planned some literary work, but the beginning, after his
long idleness, was hard. A diversion was another portrait of himself,
this time undertaken by Charles Noel Flagg. Clemens rather enjoyed
portrait-sittings. He could talk and smoke, and he could incidentally
acquire information. He liked to discuss any man's profession with him,
and in his talks with Flagg he made a sincere effort to get that insight
which would enable him to appreciate the old masters. Flagg found him
a tractable sitter, and a most interesting one. Once he paid him a
compliment, then apologized for having said the obvious thing.
“Never mind the apology,” said Clemens. “The compliment that helps us on
our way is not the one that is shut up in the mind, but the one that is
spoken out.”
When Flagg's portrait was about completed, Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Crane
came to the studio to look at it. Mrs. Clemens complained only that the
necktie was crooked.
“But it's always crooked,” said Flagg, “and I have a great fancy for the
line it makes.”
She straightened it on Clemens himself, but it immediately became
crooked again. Clemens said:
“If you were to make that necktie straight people would say; 'Good
portrait, but there is something the matter with it. I don't know where
it is.'”
The tie was left unchanged.