New York tried to outdo Vienna and London in honoring Mark Twain. Every
newspaper was filled with the story of his great fight against debt, and
his triumph. "He had behaved like Walter Scott," writes Howells, "as
millions rejoiced to know who had not known how Walter Scott behaved till
they knew it was like Clemens." Clubs and societies vied with one
another in offering him grand entertainments. Literary and lecture
proposals poured in. He was offered at the rate of a dollar a word for
his writing--he could name his own terms for lectures.
These sensational offers did not tempt him. He was sick of the platform.
He made a dinner speech here and there--always an event--but he gave no
lectures or readings for profit. His literary work he confined to a few
magazines, and presently concluded an arrangement with "Harper &
Brothers" for whatever he might write, the payment to be twenty (later
thirty) cents per word. He arranged with the same firm for the
publication of all his books, by this time collected in uniform edition.
He wished his affairs to be settled as nearly as might be. His desire
was freedom from care. Also he would have liked a period of quiet and
rest, but that was impossible. He realized that the multitude of honors
tendered him was in a sense a vast compliment which he could not entirely
refuse. Howells writes that Mark Twain's countrymen "kept it up past all
precedent," and in return Mark Twain tried to do his part. "His friends
saw that he was wearing himself out," adds Howells, and certain it is
that he grew thin and pale and had a hacking cough. Once to Richard
Watson Gilder he wrote:
"In bed with a chest cold and other company.
"DEAR GILDER,--I can't. If I were a well man I could explain
with this pencil, but in the cir--ces I will leave it all to
your imagination.
"Was it Grady that killed himself trying to do all the dining
and speeching? No, old man, no, no!
"Ever yours, MARK."
In the various dinner speeches and other utterances made by Mark Twain at
this time, his hearers recognized a new and great seriousness of purpose.
It was not really new, only, perhaps, more emphasized. He still made
them laugh, but he insisted on making them think, too. He preached a new
gospel of patriotism--not the patriotism that means a boisterous cheering
of the Stars and Stripes wherever unfurled, but the patriotism that
proposes to keep the Stars and Stripes clean and worth shouting for. In
one place he said:
"We teach the boys to atrophy their independence. We teach them to
take their patriotism at second hand; to shout with the largest
crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter
--exactly as boys under monarchies are taught, and have always been
taught."
He protested against the blind allegiance of monarchies. He was seldom
"with the largest crowd" himself. Writing much of our foreign affairs,
then in a good deal of a muddle, he assailed so fearlessly and fiercely
measures which he held to be unjust that he was caricatured as an armed
knight on a charger and as Huck Finn with a gun.
But he was not always warlike. One of the speeches he made that winter
was with Col. Henry Watterson, a former Confederate soldier, at a Lincoln
birthday memorial at Carnegie Hall. "Think of it!" he wrote Twichell,
"two old rebels functioning there; I as president and Watterson as orator
of the day. Things have changed somewhat in these forty years, thank
God!"
The Clemens household did not go back to Hartford. During their early
years abroad it had been Mrs. Clemens's dream to return and open the
beautiful home, with everything the same as before. The death of Susy
had changed all this. The mother had grown more and more to feel that
she could not bear the sorrow of Susy's absence in the familiar rooms.
After a trip which Clemens himself made to Hartford, he wrote, "I realize
that if we ever enter the house again to live, our hearts will break."
So they did not go back. Mrs. Clemens had seen it for the last time on
that day when the carriage waited while she went back to take a last look
into the vacant rooms. They had taken a house at 14 West Tenth Street
for the winter, and when summer came they went to a log cabin on
Saranac Lake, which they called "The Lair." Here Mark Twain wrote
"A Double-barreled Detective Story," a not very successful burlesque of
Sherlock Holmes. But most of the time that summer he loafed and rested,
as was his right. Once during the summer he went on a cruise with H. H.
Rogers, Speaker "Tom" Reed, and others on Mr. Rogers's yacht.