I accompanied him on a trip he made to Washington in the interest of
copyright. Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon lent us his private room in the
Capitol, and there all one afternoon Mark Twain received Congressmen, and
in an atmosphere blue with cigar-smoke preached the gospel of copyright.
It was a historic trip, and for me an eventful one, for it was on the way
back to New York that Mark Twain suggested that I take up residence in
his home. There was a room going to waste, he said, and I would be
handier for the early and late billiard sessions. I accepted, of course.
Looking back, now, I see pretty vividly three quite distinct pictures.
One of them, the rich, red interior of the billiard-room, with the
brilliant green square in the center on which the gay balls are rolling,
and bent over it his luminous white figure in the instant of play. Then
there is the long lighted drawing-room, with the same figure stretched on
a couch in the corner, drowsily smoking while the rich organ tones summon
for him scenes and faces which the others do not see. Sometimes he rose,
pacing the length of the parlors, but oftener he lay among the cushions,
the light flooding his white hair and dress, heightening his brilliant
coloring. He had taken up the fashion of wearing white altogether at
this time. Black, he said, reminded him of his funerals.
The third picture is that of the dinner-table--always beautifully laid,
and always a shrine of wisdom when he was there. He did not always talk,
but he often did, and I see him clearest, his face alive with interest,
presenting some new angle of thought in his vivid, inimitable speech.
These are pictures that will not fade from my memory. How I wish the
marvelous things he said were like them! I preserved as much of them as
I could, and in time trained myself to recall portions of his exact
phrasing. But even so they seemed never quite as he had said them. They
lacked the breath of his personality. His dinner-table talk was likely
to be political, scientific, philosophic. He often discussed aspects of
astronomy, which was a passion with him. I could succeed better with the
billiard-room talk--that was likely to be reminiscent, full of anecdotes.
I kept a pad on the window-sill, and made notes while he was playing. At
one time he told me of his dreams.
"There is never a month passes," he said, "that I do not dream of being
in reduced circumstances and obliged to go back to the river to earn a
living. Usually in my dream I am just about to start into a black shadow
without being able to tell whether it is Selma Bluff, or Hat Island, or
only a black wall of night. Another dream I have is being compelled to
go back to the lecture platform. In it I am always getting up before an
audience, with nothing to say, trying to be funny, trying to make the
audience laugh, realizing I am only making silly jokes. Then the
audience realizes it, and pretty soon they commence to get up and leave.
That dream always ends by my standing there in the semi-darkness talking
to an empty house."
He did not return to Dublin the next summer, but took a house at Tuxedo,
nearer New York. I did not go there with him, for in the spring it was
agreed that I should make a pilgrimage to the Mississippi and the Pacific
coast to see those few still remaining who had known Mark Twain in his
youth. John Briggs was alive, also Horace Bixby, "Joe" Goodman, Steve
and Jim Gillis, and there were a few others.
It was a trip taken none too soon. John Briggs, a gentle-hearted old man
who sat by his fire and through one afternoon told me of the happy days
along the river-front from the cave to Holliday's Hill, did not reach the
end of the year. Horace Bixby, at eighty-one, was still young, and
piloting a government snag-boat. Neither was Joseph Goodman old, by any
means, but Jim Gillis was near his end, and Steve Gillis was an invalid,
who said:
"Tell Sam I'm going to die pretty soon, but that I love him; that I've
loved him all my life, and I'll love him till I die."