But a few days later he experienced a revelation. It came when he
perseveringly attacked still a third work of Scott--Quentin Durward.
Hastily he wrote to Matthews again:
I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dullness since I broke
into Sir Walter & lost my temper. I finished Guy Mannering that curious,
curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows gibbering around a single
flesh-&-blood being--Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the
very refuse of the romance artist's stage properties--finished it & took
up Quentin Durward & finished that.
It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living; it was like
withdrawing from the infant class in the college of journalism to sit
under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.
I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?--[This letter, enveloped, addressed,
and stamped, was evidently mislaid. It was found and mailed seven years
later, June, 1910 message from the dead.]
Among other books which he read that winter and spring was Helen
Keller's 'The Story of My Life', then recently published. That he
finished it in a mood of sweet gentleness we gather from a long, lovely
letter which he wrote her--a letter in which he said:
I am charmed with your book--enchanted. You are a wonderful creature,
the most wonderful in the world--you and your other half together--Miss
Sullivan, I mean--for it took the pair of you to make a complete &
perfect whole. How she stands out in her letters! her brilliancy,
penetration, originality, wisdom, character, & the fine literary
competencies of her pen--they are all there.
When reading and writing failed as diversion, Mark Twain often turned
to mathematics. With no special talent for accuracy in the matter of
figures, he had a curious fondness for calculations, scientific and
financial, and he used to cover pages, ciphering at one thing and
another, arriving pretty inevitably at the wrong results. When the
problem was financial, and had to do with his own fortunes, his figures
were as likely as not to leave him in a state of panic. The expenditures
were naturally heavy that spring; and one night, when he had nothing
better to do, he figured the relative proportion to his income. The
result showed that they were headed straight for financial ruin. He
put in the rest of the night fearfully rolling and tossing, and
reconstructing his figures that grew always worse, and next morning
summoned Jean and Clara and petrified them with the announcement that
the cost of living was one hundred and twenty-five per cent. more than
the money-supply.
Writing to MacAlister three days later he said:
It was a mistake. When I came down in the morning, a gray and aged
wreck, I found that in some unaccountable way (unaccountable to a
business man, but not to me) I had multiplied the totals by two. By
God, I dropped seventy-five years on the floor where I stood!
Do you know it affected me as one is affected when one wakes out of
a hideous dream & finds it was only a dream. It was a great comfort
& satisfaction to me to call the daughters to a private meeting of
the board again. Certainly there is a blistering & awful reality
about a well-arranged unreality. It is quite within the
possibilities that two or three nights like that of mine would drive
a man to suicide. He would refuse to examine the figures, they
would revolt him so, & he would go to his death unaware that there
was nothing serious about them. I cannot get that night out of my
head, it was so vivid, so real, so ghastly: In any other year of
these thirty-three the relief would have been simple: go where you
can, cut your cloth to fit your income. You can't do that when your
wife can't be moved, even from one room to the next.
The doctor & a specialist met in conspiracy five days ago, & in
their belief she will by and by come out of this as good as new,
substantially. They ordered her to Italy for next winter--which
seems to indicate that by autumn she will be able to undertake the
voyage. So Clara is writing to a Florence friend to take a look
around among the villas for us in the regions near that city.