A tide of condolence flowed in from all parts of the world. It was
impossible to answer all. Only a few who had been their closest
friends received a written line, but the little printed
acknowledgment which was returned was no mere formality. It was a
heartfelt, personal word.
They arrived in America in July, and were accompanied by Twichell to
Elmira, and on the 14th Mrs. Clemens was laid to rest by the side of
Susy and little Langdon. R. W. Gilder had arranged for them to
occupy, for the summer, a cottage on his place at Tyringham, in the
Berkshire Hills. By November they were at the Grosvenor, in New
York, preparing to establish themselves in a house which they had
taken on the corner of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue--Number 21.
*****
To F. N. Doubleday, in New York:
DEAR DOUBLEDAY,--I did not know you were going to England: I would have
freighted you with such messages of homage and affection to Kipling. And
I would have pressed his hand, through you, for his sympathy with me in
my crushing loss, as expressed by him in his letter to Gilder. You know
my feeling for Kipling and that it antedates that expression.
I was glad that the boys came here to invite me to the house-warming and
I think they understood why a man in the shadow of a calamity like mine
could not go.
It has taken three months to repair and renovate our house--corner of
9th and 5th Avenue, but I shall be in it in io or 15 days hence. Much
of the furniture went into it today (from Hartford). We have not seen
it for 13 years. Katy Leary, our old housekeeper, who has been in our
service more than 24 years, cried when she told me about it to-day. She
said “I had forgotten it was so beautiful, and it brought Mrs. Clemens
right back to me--in that old time when she was so young and lovely.”
Jean and my secretary and the servants whom we brought from Italy
because Mrs. Clemens liked them so well, are still keeping house in the
Berkshire hills--and waiting. Clara (nervously wrecked by her mother's
death) is in the hands of a specialist in 69th St., and I shall not be
allowed to have any communication with her--even telephone--for a year.
I am in this comfortable little hotel, and still in bed--for I dasn't
budge till I'm safe from my pet devil, bronchitis.
Isn't it pathetic? One hour and ten minutes before Mrs. Clemens died
I was saying to her “To-day, after five months search, I've found the
villa that will content you: to-morrow you will examine the plans and
give it your consent and I will buy it.” Her eyes danced with pleasure,
for she longed for a home of her own. And there, on that morrow, she lay
white and cold. And unresponsive to my reverent caresses--a new thing
to me and a new thing to her; that had not happened before in five and
thirty years.
I am coming to see you and Mrs. Doubleday by and bye. She loved and
honored Mrs. Doubleday and her work.
Always yours,
MARK.
It was a presidential year and the air was thick with politics.
Mark Twain was no longer actively interested in the political
situation; he was only disheartened by the hollowness and pretense
of office-seeking, and the methods of office-seekers in general.
Grieved that Twichell should still pin his faith to any party when
all parties were so obviously venal and time-serving, he wrote in
outspoken and rather somber protest.
*****
To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
THE GROSVENOR, Nov. 4, '04.
Oh, dear! get out of that sewer--party politics--dear Joe. At least
with your mouth. We hail only two men who could make speeches for their
parties and preserve their honor and their dignity. One of them is dead.
Possibly there were four. I am sorry for John Hay; sorry and ashamed.
And yet I know he couldn't help it. He wears the collar, and he had to
pay the penalty. Certainly he had no more desire to stand up before
a mob of confiding human incapables and debauch them than you had.
Certainly he took no more real pleasure in distorting history,
concealing facts, propagating immoralities, and appealing to the sordid
side of human nature than did you; but he was his party's property, and
he had to climb away down and do it.
It is interesting, wonderfully interesting--the miracles which
party-politics can do with a man's mental and moral make-up. Look
at McKinley, Roosevelt, and yourself: in private life spotless
in character; honorable, honest, just, humane, generous; scorning
trickeries, treacheries, suppressions of the truth, mistranslations of
the meanings of facts, the filching of credit earned by another, the
condoning of crime, the glorifying of base acts: in public political
life the reverse of all this.
McKinley was a silverite--you concealed it. Roosevelt was a
silverite--you concealed it. Parker was a silverite--you publish it.
Along with a shudder and a warning: “He was unsafe then. Is he any safer
now?”
Joe, even I could be guilty of such a thing as that--if I were in
party-politics; I really believe it.
Mr. Cleveland gave the country the gold standard; by implication you
credit the matter to the Republican party.
By implication you prove the whole annual pension-scoop, concealing the
fact that the bulk of the money goes to people who in no way deserve it.
You imply that all the batteners upon this bribery-fund are Republicans.
An indiscreet confession, since about half of them must have been
Democrats before they were bought.
You as good as praise Order 78. It is true you do not shout, and you do
not linger, you only whisper and skip--still, what little you do in the
matter is complimentary to the crime.
It means, if it means anything, that our outlying properties will all
be given up by the Democrats, and our flag hauled down. All of them? Not
only the properties stolen by Mr. McKinley and Mr. Roosevelt, but the
properties honestly acquired? Joe, did you believe that hardy statement
when you made it? Yet you made it, and there it stands in permanent
print. Now what moral law would suffer if we should give up the stolen
ones? But--
“You know our standard-bearer. He will maintain all that we have
gained”--by whatever process. Land, I believe you!
By George, Joe, you are as handy at the game as if you had been in
training for it all your life. Your campaign Address is built from the
ground up upon the oldest and best models. There isn't a paragraph in it
whose facts or morals will wash--not even a sentence, I believe.
But you will soon be out of this. You didn't want to do it--that is
sufficiently apparent, thanks be!--but you couldn't well get out of it.
In a few days you will be out of it, and then you can fumigate yourself
and take up your legitimate work again and resume your clean and
wholesome private character once more and be happy--and useful.
I know I ought to hand you some guff, now, as propitiation and apology
for these reproaches, but on the whole I believe I won't.
I have inquired, and find that Mitsikuri does not arrive here until
to-morrow night. I shall watch out, and telephone again, for I greatly
want to see him.
Always Yours,
MARK.
P. S.--Nov, 4. I wish I could learn to remember that it is unjust and
dishonorable to put blame upon the human race for any of its acts.
For it did not make itself, it did not make its nature, it is merely
a machine, it is moved wholly by outside influences, it has no hand in
creating the outside influences nor in choosing which of them it will
welcome or reject, its performance is wholly automatic, it has no more
mastership nor authority over its mind than it has over its stomach,
which receives material from the outside and does as it pleases with
it, indifferent to it's proprietor's suggestions, even, let alone his
commands; wherefore, whatever the machine does--so called crimes and
infamies included--is the personal act of its Maker, and He, solely,
is responsible. I wish I could learn to pity the human race instead of
censuring it and laughing at it; and I could, if the outside influences
of old habit were not so strong upon my machine. It vexes me to catch
myself praising the clean private citizen Roosevelt, and blaming the
soiled President Roosevelt, when I know that neither praise nor blame
is due to him for any thought or word or deed of his, he being merely a
helpless and irresponsible coffee-mill ground by the hand of God.
Through a misunderstanding, Clemens, something more than a year
earlier, had severed his connection with the Players' Club, of which
he had been one of the charter members. Now, upon his return to New
York, a number of his friends joined in an invitation to him to
return. It was not exactly a letter they sent, but a bit of an old
Scotch song--
“To Mark Twain
from
The Clansmen.
Will ye no come back again,
Will ye no come back again?
Better lo'ed ye canna be.
Will ye no come back again?”
Those who signed it were David Monroe, of the North American Review;
Robert Reid, the painter, and about thirty others of the Round Table
Group, so called because its members were accustomed to lunching at
a large round table in a bay window of the Player dining-room. Mark
Twain's reply was prompt and heartfelt. He wrote:
*****
To Robt. Reid and the Others:
WELL-BELOVED,--Surely those lovely verses went to Prince Charley's
heart, if he had one, and certainly they have gone to mine. I shall
be glad and proud to come back again after such a moving and beautiful
compliment as this from comrades whom I have loved so long. I hope you
can poll the necessary vote; I know you will try, at any rate. It will
be many months before I can foregather with you, for this black border
is not perfunctory, not a convention; it symbolizes the loss of one
whose memory is the only thing I worship.
It is not necessary for me to thank you--and words could not deliver
what I feel, anyway. I will put the contents of your envelope in the
small casket where I keep the things which have become sacred to me.