When the bad weather came there was not much company at Stormfield,
and I went up regularly each afternoon, for it was lonely on that bleak
hill, and after his forenoon of reading or writing he craved diversion.
My own home was a little more than a half mile away, and I enjoyed the
walk, whatever the weather. I usually managed to arrive about three
o'clock. He would watch from his high windows until he saw me raise the
hilltop, and he would be at the door when I arrived, so that there might
be no delay in getting at the games. Or, if it happened that he wished
to show me something in his room, I would hear his rich voice sounding
down the stair. Once, when I arrived, I heard him calling, and going
up I found him highly pleased with the arrangement of two pictures on a
chair, placed so that the glasses of them reflected the sunlight on the
ceiling. He said:
“They seem to catch the reflection of the sky and the winter colors.
Sometimes the hues are wonderfully iridescent.”
He pointed to a bunch of wild red berries on the mantel with the sun on
them.
“How beautifully they light up!” he said; “some of them in the sunlight,
some still in the shadow.”
He walked to the window and stood looking out on the somber fields.
“The lights and colors are always changing there,” he said. “I never
tire of it.”
To see him then so full of the interest and delight of the moment, one
might easily believe he had never known tragedy and shipwreck. More
than any one I ever knew, he lived in the present. Most of us are either
dreaming of the past or anticipating the future--forever beating the
dirge of yesterday or the tattoo of to-morrow. Mark Twain's step was
timed to the march of the moment. There were days when he recalled the
past and grieved over it, and when he speculated concerning the future;
but his greater interest was always of the now, and of the particular
locality where he found it. The thing which caught his fancy, however
slight or however important, possessed him fully for the time, even if
never afterward.
He was especially interested that winter in the Shakespeare-Bacon
problem. He had long been unable to believe that the actor-manager from
Stratford had written those great plays, and now a book just published,
'The Shakespeare Problem Restated', by George Greenwood, and another one
in press, 'Some Characteristic Signatures of Francis Bacon', by William
Stone Booth, had added the last touch of conviction that Francis Bacon,
and Bacon only, had written the Shakespeare dramas. I was ardently
opposed to this idea. The romance of the boy, Will Shakespeare, who had
come up to London and began, by holding horses outside of the theater,
and ended by winning the proudest place in the world of letters,
was something I did not wish to let perish. I produced all the stock
testimony--Ben Jonson's sonnet, the internal evidence of the plays
themselves, the actors who had published them--but he refused to accept
any of it. He declared that there was not a single proof to show that
Shakespeare had written one of them.
“Is there any evidence that he didn't?” I asked.
“There's evidence that he couldn't,” he said. “It required a man with
the fullest legal equipment to have written them. When you have
read Greenwood's book you will see how untenable is any argument for
Shakespeare's authorship.”