From our joint experience in failing I argue that Clemens’s affection for
me must have been great to enable him to condone in me the final
defection which was apt to be the end of our enterprises. I have fancied
that I presented to him a surface of such entire trustworthiness that he
could not imagine the depths of unreliability beneath it; and that never
realizing it, he always broke through with fresh surprise but unimpaired
faith. He liked, beyond all things, to push an affair to the bitter end,
and the end was never too bitter unless it brought grief or harm to
another. Once in a telegraph office at a railway station he was treated
with such insolent neglect by the young lady in charge, who was
preoccupied in a flirtation with a “gentleman friend,” that emulous of
the public spirit which he admired in the English, he told her he should
report her to her superiors, and (probably to her astonishment) he did
so. He went back to Hartford, and in due time the poor girl came to me
in, terror and in tears; for I had abetted Clemens in his action, and had
joined my name to his in his appeal to the authorities. She was
threatened with dismissal unless she made full apology to him and brought
back assurance of its acceptance. I felt able to give this, and, of
course, he eagerly approved; I think he telegraphed his approval. Another
time, some years afterward, we sat down together in places near the end
of a car, and a brakeman came in looking for his official note-book.
Clemens found that he had sat down upon it, and handed it to him; the man
scolded him very abusively, and came back again and again, still scolding
him for having no more sense than to sit down on a note-book. The
patience of Clemens in bearing it was so angelic that I saw fit to
comment, “I suppose you will report this fellow.” “Yes,” he answered,
slowly and sadly. “That’s what I should have done once. But now I
remember that he gets twenty dollars a month.”
Nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer, and his humanity was not
for humanity alone. He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman
in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met him in the country
he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a
blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay
throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might have
given a wounded child. I find this a fit place to say that his mind and
soul were with those who do the hard work of the world, in fear of those
who give them a chance for their livelihoods and underpay them all they
can. He never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if he went that
way at all, but he was fascinated with Looking Backward and had Bellamy
to visit him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of organized
labor as the only present help for working-men. He would show that side
with such clearness and such force that you could not say anything in
hopeful contradiction; he saw with that relentless insight of his that
with Unions was the working-man’s only present hope of standing up like a
man against money and the power of it. There was a time when I was
afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in the very
last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that this great
humorist was as great a humanist as ever. I wish that all the work-folk
could know this, and could know him their friend in life as he was in
literature; as he was in such a glorious gospel of equality as the
‘Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.’