“How many more are there?” he asked.
“Only one, and two nights.”
“We'll never make it,” he said. “It's an eternity.”
“But we must on Clara's account,” I told him, and I estimated that Clara
would be more than half-way across the ocean by now.
“It is a losing race,” he said; “no ship can outsail death.”
It has been written--I do not know with what proof--that certain great
dissenters have recanted with the approach of death--have become weak,
and afraid to ignore old traditions in the face of the great mystery. I
wish to write here that Mark Twain, as he neared the end, showed never
a single tremor of fear or even of reluctance. I have dwelt upon these
hours when suffering was upon him, and death the imminent shadow, in
order to show that at the end he was as he had always been, neither more
nor less, and never less than brave.
Once, during a moment when he was comfortable and quite himself, he
said, earnestly:
“When I seem to be dying I don't want to be stimulated back to life. I
want to be made comfortable to go.”
There was not a vestige of hesitation; there was no grasping at straws,
no suggestion of dread.
Somehow those two days and nights went by. Once, when he was partially
relieved by the opiate, I slept, while Claude watched; and again, in
the fading end of the last night, when we had passed at length into the
cold, bracing northern air, and breath had come back to him, and with it
sleep.
Relatives, physicians, and news-gatherers were at the dock to welcome
him. He was awake, and the northern air had brightened him, though
it was the chill, I suppose, that brought on the pains in his breast,
which, fortunately, he had escaped during the voyage. It was not a
prolonged attack, and it was, blessedly, the last one.
An invalid-carriage had been provided, and a compartment secured on the
afternoon express to Redding--the same train that had taken him there
two years before. Dr. Robert H. Halsey and Dr. Edward Quintard attended
him, and he made the journey really in cheerful comfort, for he could
breathe now, and in the relief came back old interests. Half reclining
on the couch, he looked through the afternoon papers. It happened
curiously that Charles Harvey Genung, who, something more than four
years earlier, had been so largely responsible for my association with
Mark Twain, was on the same train, in the same coach, bound for his
country-place at New Hartford.
Lounsbury was waiting with the carriage, and on that still, sweet April
evening we drove him to Stormfield much as we had driven him two years
before. Now and then he mentioned the apparent backwardness of the
season, for only a few of the trees were beginning to show their green.
As we drove into the lane that led to the Stormfield entrance, he said:
“Can we see where you have built your billiard-room?”
The gable showed above the trees, and I pointed it out to him.
“It looks quite imposing,” he said.
I think it was the last outside interest he ever showed in anything. He
had been carried from the ship and from the train, but when we drew
up to Stormfield, where Mrs. Paine, with Katie Leary and others of the
household, was waiting to greet him, he stepped from the carriage alone
with something of his old lightness, and with all his old courtliness,
and offered each one his hand. Then, in the canvas chair which we had
brought, Claude and I carried him up-stairs to his room and delivered
him to the physicians, and to the comforts and blessed air of home. This
was Thursday evening, April 14, 1910.