The order of my acquaintance, or call it intimacy, with Clemens was this:
our first meeting in Boston, my visits to him in Hartford, his visits to
me in Cambridge, in Belmont, and in Boston, our briefer and less frequent
meetings in Paris and New York, all with repeated interruptions through
my absences in Europe, and his sojourns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and
Florence, and his flights to the many ends, and odds and ends, of the
earth. I will not try to follow the events, if they were not rather the
subjective experiences, of those different periods and points of time
which I must not fail to make include his summer at York Harbor, and his
divers residences in New York, on Tenth Street and on Fifth Avenue, at
Riverdale, and at Stormfield, which his daughter has told me he loved
best of all his houses and hoped to make his home for long years.
Not much remains to me of the week or so that we had together in Paris
early in the summer of 1904. The first thing I got at my bankers was a
cable message announcing that my father was stricken with paralysis, but
urging my stay for further intelligence, and I went about, till the final
summons came, with my head in a mist of care and dread. Clemens was very
kind and brotherly through it all. He was living greatly to his mind in
one of those arcaded little hotels in the Rue de Rivoli, and he was free
from all household duties to range with me. We drove together to make
calls of digestion at many houses where he had got indigestion through
his reluctance from their hospitality, for he hated dining out. But, as
he explained, his wife wanted him to make these visits, and he did it, as
he did everything she wanted. ‘At one place, some suburban villa, he
could get no answer to his ring, and he “hove” his cards over the gate
just as it opened, and he had the shame of explaining in his
unexplanatory French to the man picking them up. He was excruciatingly
helpless with his cabmen, but by very cordially smiling and casting
himself on the drivers’ mercy he always managed to get where he wanted.
The family was on the verge of their many moves, and he was doing some
small errands; he said that the others did the main things, and left him
to do what the cat might.
It was with that return upon the buoyant billow of plasmon, renewed in
look and limb, that Clemens’s universally pervasive popularity began in
his own country. He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or
more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this
that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider
“the state of polite learning” among us, “You mustn’t expect people to
keep it up here as they do in England.” But it appeared that his
countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of
him past all precedent. One does not go into a catalogue of dinners,
receptions, meetings, speeches, and the like, when there are more vital
things to speak of. He loved these obvious joys, and he eagerly strove
with the occasions they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed so
exhaustless and was so exhausting. His friends saw that he was wearing
himself out, and it was not because of Mrs. Clemens’s health alone that
they were glad to have him take refuge at Riverdale. The family lived
there two happy, hopeless years, and then it was ordered that they should
change for his wife’s sake to some less exacting climate. Clemens was
not eager to go to Florence, but his imagination was taken as it would
have been in the old-young days by the notion of packing his furniture
into flexible steel cages from his house in Hartford and unpacking it
from them untouched at his villa in Fiesole. He got what pleasure any
man could out of that triumph of mind over matter, but the shadow was
creeping up his life. One sunny afternoon we sat on the grass before the
mansion, after his wife had begun to get well enough for removal, and we
looked up toward a balcony where by-and-by that lovely presence made
itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. A hand frailly
waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling
tenderly: “What? What?” as if it might be an asking for him instead of
the greeting it really was for me. It was the last time I saw her, if
indeed I can be said to have seen her then, and long afterward when I
said how beautiful we all thought her, how good, how wise, how
wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking
voice: “Oh, why didn’t you ever tell her? She thought you didn’t like
her.” What a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we
have told her? His unreason endeared him to me more than all his wisdom.
To that Riverdale sojourn belong my impressions of his most violent
anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the postponement of his
book, and softened into acceptance of the delay till he had well-nigh
forgotten his wrath when it come out. There was also one of those joint
episodes of ours, which, strangely enough, did not eventuate in entire
failure, as most of our joint episodes did. He wrote furiously to me of
a wrong which had been done to one of the most helpless and one of the
most helped of our literary brethren, asking me to join with him in
recovering the money paid over by that brother’s publisher to a false
friend who had withheld it and would not give any account of it. Our
hapless brother had appealed to Clemens, as he had to me, with the facts,
but not asking our help, probably because he knew he need not ask; and
Clemens enclosed to me a very taking-by-the-throat message which he
proposed sending to the false friend. For once I had some sense, and
answered that this would never do, for we had really no power in the
matter, and I contrived a letter to the recreant so softly diplomatic
that I shall always think of it with pride when my honesties no longer
give me satisfaction, saying that this incident had come to our
knowledge, and suggesting that we felt sure he would not finally wish to
withhold the money. Nothing more, practically, than that, but that was
enough; there came promptly back a letter of justification, covering a
very substantial check, which we hilariously forwarded to our
beneficiary. But the helpless man who was so used to being helped did
not answer with the gladness I, at least, expected of him. He
acknowledged the check as he would any ordinary payment, and then he made
us observe that there was still a large sum due him out of the moneys
withheld. At this point I proposed to Clemens that we should let the
nonchalant victim collect the remnant himself. Clouds of sorrow had
gathered about the bowed head of the delinquent since we began on him,
and my fickle sympathies were turning his way from the victim who was
really to blame for leaving his affairs so unguardedly to him in the
first place. Clemens made some sort of grit assent, and we dropped the
matter. He was more used to ingratitude from those he helped than I was,
who found being lain down upon not so amusing as he found my revolt. He
reckoned I was right, he said, and after that I think we never recurred
to the incident. It was not ingratitude that he ever minded; it was
treachery, that really maddened him past forgiveness.