I guess we've got a perfect machine at last. We never break a type, now,
and the new device for enabling the operator to touch the last letters
and justify the line simultaneously works, to a charm.
With love to you both,
MARK
The year closed gloomily enough. The type-setter seemed to be
perfected, but capital for its manufacture was not forthcoming.
The publishing business of Charles L. Webster & Co. was returning
little or no profit. Clemens's mother had died in Keokuk at the end
of October, and his wife's mother, in Elmira a month later. Mark
Twain, writing a short business letter to his publishing manager,
Fred J. Ball, closed it: “Merry Xmas to you!--and I wish to God I
could have one myself before I die.”
XXXI. LETTERS, 1891, TO HOWELLS, MRS. CLEMENS AND OTHERS. RETURN TO
LITERATURE. AMERICAN CLAIMANT. LEAVING HARTFORD. EUROPE. DOWN THE RHINE.
Clemens was still not without hope in the machine, at the
beginning of the new year (1891) but it was a hope no longer
active, and it presently became a moribund. Jones, on about
the middle of February, backed out altogether, laying the
blame chiefly on Mackay and the others, who, he said, had
decided not to invest. Jones “let his victim down easy”
with friendly words, but it was the end, for the present, at
least, of machine financiering.
It was also the end of Mark Twain's capital. His publishing
business was not good. It was already in debt and needing
more money. There was just one thing for him to do and he
did it at once, not stopping to cry over spilt milk, but
with good courage and the old enthusiasm that never failed
him, he returned to the trade of authorship. He dug out
half-finished articles and stories, finished them and sold
them, and within a week after the Jones collapse he was at
work on a novel based an the old Sellers idea, which eight
years before he and Howells had worked into a play. The
brief letter in which he reported this news to Howells bears
no marks of depression, though the writer of it was in his
fifty-sixth year; he was by no means well, and his financial
prospects were anything but golden.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston: