In a small cottage belonging to Richard Watson Gilder, at Tyringham,
Massachusetts, Samuel Clemens and his daughters tried to plan for the
future. Mrs. Clemens had always been the directing force--they were lost
without her. They finally took a house in New York City, No. 21 Fifth
Avenue, at the corner of Ninth Street, installed the familiar
furnishings, and tried once more to establish a home. The house was
handsome within and without--a proper residence for a venerable author
and sage--a suitable setting for Mark Twain. But it was lonely for him.
It lacked soul--comfort that would reach the heart. He added presently a
great Aeolian orchestrelle, with a variety of music for his different
moods. Sometimes he played it himself, though oftener his secretary
played to him. He went out little that winter--seeing only a few old and
intimate friends. His writing, such as it was, was of a serious nature,
protests against oppression and injustice in a variety of forms. Once he
wrote a "War Prayer," supposed to have been made by a mysterious,
white-robed stranger who enters a church during those ceremonies that
precede the marching of the nation's armies to battle. The minister had
prayed for victory, a prayer which the stranger interprets as a petition
that the enemy's country be laid waste, its soldiers be torn by shells,
its people turned out roofless, to wander through their desolated land
in rags and hunger. It was a scathing arraignment of war, a prophecy,
indeed, which to-day has been literally fulfilled. He did not print it,
because then it would have been regarded as sacrilege.
When summer came again, in a beautiful house at Dublin, New Hampshire, on
the Monadnock slope, he seemed to get back into the old swing of work,
and wrote that pathetic story, "A Horse's Tale." Also "Eve's Diary,"
which, under its humor, is filled with tenderness, and he began a wildly
fantastic tale entitled "Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes," a
satire in which Gulliver is outdone. He never finished it. He never
could finish it, for it ran off into amazing by-paths that led nowhere,
and the tale was lost. Yet he always meant to get at it again some day
and make order out of chaos.
Old friends were dying, and Mark Twain grew more and more lonely. "My
section of the procession has but a little way to go," he wrote when the
great English actor Henry Irving died. Charles Henry Webb, his first
publisher, John Hay, Bret Harte, Thomas B. Reed, and, indeed, most of his
earlier associates were gone. When an invitation came from San Francisco
to attend a California reunion he replied that his wandering days were
over and that it was his purpose to sit by the fire for the rest of his
life. And in another letter:
"I have done more for San Francisco than any other of its old
residents. Since I left there, it has increased in population fully
300,000. I could have done more--I could have gone earlier--it was
suggested."
A choice example, by the way, of Mark Twain's best humor, with its
perfectly timed pause, and the afterthought. Most humorists would have
been content to end with the statement, "I could have gone earlier."
Only Mark Twain could have added that final exquisite touch--"it was
suggested."
Mark Twain was nearing seventy. With the 30th of November (1905) he
would complete the scriptural limitation, and the president of his
publishing-house, Col. George Harvey, of Harper's, proposed a great
dinner for him in celebration of his grand maturity. Clemens would have
preferred a small assembly in some snug place, with only his oldest and
closest friends. Colonel Harvey had a different view. He had given a
small, choice dinner to Mark Twain on his sixty-seventh birthday; now it
must be something really worth while--something to outrank any former
literary gathering. In order not to conflict with Thanksgiving holidays,
the 5th of December was selected as the date. On that evening, two
hundred American and English men and women of letters assembled in
Delmonico's great banquet-hall to do honor to their chief. What an
occasion it was! The tables of gay diners and among them Mark Twain, his
snow-white hair a gleaming beacon for every eye. Then, by and by,
presented by William Dean Howells, he rose to speak. Instantly the
brilliant throng was on its feet, a shouting billow of life, the white
handkerchiefs flying foam-like on its crest. It was a supreme moment!
The greatest one of them all hailed by their applause as he scaled the
mountaintop.
Never did Mark Twain deliver a more perfect address than he gave that
night. He began with the beginning, the meagerness of that little hamlet
that had seen his birth, and sketched it all so quaintly and delightfully
that his hearers laughed and shouted, though there was tenderness under
it, and often the tears were just beneath the surface. He told of his
habits of life, how he had reached seventy by following a plan of living
that would probably kill anybody else; how, in fact, he believed he had
no valuable habits at all. Then, at last, came that unforgetable close:
"Threescore years and ten!
"It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe no
active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-
expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your
term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become
an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions
are not for you, nor any bugle-call but 'lights out.' You pay the
time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline, if you prefer--and
without prejudice--for they are not legally collectable.
"The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so
many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave
you will never need it again. If you shrink at thought of night,
and winter, and the late homecomings from the banquet and the lights
and laughter, through the deserted streets--a desolation which would
not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends
are sleeping and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them,
but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never
disturb them more--if you shrink at the thought of these things you
need only reply, 'Your invitation honors me and pleases me because
you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy,
and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read
my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and
that when you, in your turn, shall arrive at Pier 70 you may step
aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your
course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.'"
The tears that had been lying in wait were no longer kept back. If there
were any present who did not let them flow without shame, who did not
shout their applause from throats choked with sobs, they failed to
mention the fact later.
Many of his old friends, one after another, rose to tell their love for
him--Cable, Carnegie, Gilder, and the rest. Mr. Rogers did not speak,
nor the Reverend Twichell, but they sat at his special table. Aldrich
could not be there, but wrote a letter. A group of English authors,
including Alfred Austin, Barrie, Chesterton, Dobson, Doyle, Hardy,
Kipling, Lang, and others, joined in a cable. Helen Keller wrote:
"And you are seventy years old? Or is the report exaggerated, like
that of your death? I remember, when I saw you last, at the house
of dear Mr. Hutton, in Princeton, you said:
"'If a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight, he knows too
much. If he is an optimist after he is forty-eight, he knows too
little.'
"Now we know you are an optimist, and nobody would dare to accuse one
on the 'seven-terraced summit' of knowing little. So probably you
are not seventy, after all, but only forty-seven!"
Helen Keller was right. Mark Twain was never a pessimist in his heart.