For a time it was a question whether he should not go back with his
family to their old home in Hartford. Perhaps the father’s and mother’s
hearts drew them there all the more strongly because of the grief written
ineffaceably over it, but for the younger ones it was no longer the
measure of the world. It was easier for all to stay on indefinitely in
New York, which is a sojourn without circumstance, and equally the home
of exile and of indecision. The Clemenses took a pleasant, spacious
house at Riverdale, on the Hudson, and there I began to see them again on
something like the sweet old terms. They lived far more unpretentiously
than they used, and I think with a notion of economy, which they had
never very successfully practised. I recall that at the end of a certain
year in Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for
everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and
asking me to guess how many bills they had at New Year’s; he hastened to
say that a horse-car would not have held them. At Riverdale they kept no
carriage, and there was a snowy night when I drove up to their handsome
old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud as from
the going down of the Deluge after transporting Noah and his family from
the Ark to whatever point they decided to settle at provisionally. But
the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of
mind or soul, was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our
middle youth. It was the mighty moment when Clemens was building his
engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which
superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy. It would
not be easy to say whether in his talk of it his disgust for the
illiterate twaddle of Mrs. Eddy’s book, or his admiration of her genius
for organization was the greater. He believed that as a religious
machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church
and destined to be, more formidable in its control of the minds of men.
He looked for its spread over the whole of Christendom, and throughout
the winter he spent at Riverdale he was ready to meet all listeners more
than half-way with his convictions of its powerful grasp of the average
human desire to get something for nothing. The vacuous vulgarity of its
texts was a perpetual joy to him, while he bowed with serious respect to
the sagacity which built so securely upon the everlasting rock of human
credulity and folly.
An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not only his
admiration for the masterly, policy of the Christian Science hierarchy,
but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on
his friends and family, if they wished it. He had a tender heart for the
whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scientitians,
but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the
regulars rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in.
He was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try
their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines.