Clemens took a room at The Players--“a cheap room,” he wrote, “at $1.50
per day.” It was now the end of September, the beginning of a long
half-year, during which Mark Twain's fortunes were at a lower ebb than
ever before; lower, even, than during those mining days among the bleak
Esmeralda hills. Then he had no one but him self and was young. Now,
at fifty-eight, he had precious lives dependent upon him, and he was
weighed down with a vast burden of debt. The liabilities of Charles L.
Webster & Co. were fully two hundred thousand dollars. Something like
sixty thousand dollars of this was money supplied by Mrs. Clemens, but
the vast remaining sum was due to banks, to printers, to binders, and to
dealers in various publishing materials. Somehow it must be paid. As for
their assets, they looked ample enough on paper, but in reality, at a
time like this, they were problematical. In fact, their value was very
doubtful indeed. What he was to do Clemens did not know. He could not
even send cheerful reports to Europe. There was no longer anything to
promise concerning the type-setter. The fifty machines which the company
had started to build had dwindled to ten machines; there was a prospect
that the ten would dwindle to one, and that one a reconstruction of
the original Hartford product, which had cost so much money and so
many weary years. Clemens spent a good part of his days at The Players,
reading or trying to write or seeking to divert his mind in the company
of the congenial souls there, waiting for-he knew not what.
Yet at this very moment a factor was coming into his life, a human
element, a man to whom in his old age Mark Twain owed more than to any
other of his myriad of friends. One night, when he was with Dr. Clarence
C. Rice at the Murray Hill Hotel, Rice said:
“Clemens, I want you to know my friend, Mr. H. H. Rogers. He is an
admirer of your books.”
Clemens turned and was looking into the handsome, clean-cut features of
the great financier, whose name was hardly so familiar then as it became
at a later period, but whose power was already widely known and felt
among his kind.
“Mr. Clemens,” said Mr. Rogers, “I was one of your early admirers.
I heard you lecture a long time ago on the Sandwich Islands. I was
interested in the subject in those days, and I heard that Mark Twain
was a man who had been there. I didn't suppose I'd have any difficulty
getting a seat, but I did; the house was jammed. When I came away I
realized that Mark Twain was a great man, and I have read everything of
yours since that I could get hold of.”
They sat down at a table, and Clemens told some of his amusing stories.
Rogers was in a perpetual gale of laughter. When at last he rose to go
the author and the financier were as old friends. Mr. Rogers urged him
to visit him at his home. He must introduce him to Mrs. Rogers, he said,
who was also his warm admirer. It was only a little while after this
that Dr. Rice said to the millionaire:
“Mr. Rogers, I wish you would look into Clemens's finances a little: I
am afraid they are a good deal confused.”
This would be near the end of September, 1893. On October 18 Clemens
wrote home concerning a possible combination of Webster & Co. with John
Brisben Walker, of the 'Cosmopolitan', and added:
I have got the best and wisest man of the whole Standard Oil group-a
multi-millionaire--a good deal interested in looking into the type-
setter. He has been searching into that thing for three weeks and
yesterday he said to me:
“I find the machine to be all you represent it. I have here
exhaustive reports from my own experts, and I know every detail of
its capacity, its immense construction, its cost, its history, and
all about its inventor's character. I know that the New York
company and the Chicago company are both stupid, and that they are
unbusinesslike people, destitute of money and in a hopeless boggle.”
Then he told me the scheme he had planned and said:
“If I can arrange with these people on this basis--it will take
several weeks to find out--I will see to it that they get the money
they need. In the mean time you 'stop walking the floor'.”
Of course, with this encouragement, Clemens was in the clouds again.
Furthermore, Rogers had suggested to his son-in-law, William Evarts
Benjamin, also a subscription publisher, that he buy from the Webster
company The Library of American Literature for fifty thousand dollars, a
sum which provided for the more insistent creditors. There was hope that
the worst was over. Clemens did in reality give up walking the floor,
and for the time, at least, found happier diversions. He must not
return to Europe as yet, for the type-setter matter was still far from
conclusion. On the 11th of November he was gorgeously entertained by
the Lotos Club in its new building. Introducing him, President Frank
Lawrence said:
“What name is there in literature that can be likened to his? Perhaps
some of the distinguished gentlemen about this table can tell us, but I
know of none. Himself his only parallel, it seems to me. He is all our
own--a ripe and perfect product of the American soil.”