XLI. Letters of 1902. Riverdale. York Harbor. Illness Of Mrs. Clemens
The year 1902 was an eventful one for Mark Twain. In April he received a degree of LL.D. from the University of Missouri and returned to his native State to accept it. This was his last journey to the Mississippi River. During the summer Mrs. Clemens’s health broke down and illnesses of one sort or another visited other members of the family. Amid so much stress and anxiety Clemens had little time or inclination for work. He wrote not many letters and mainly somber ones. Once, by way of diversion, he worked out the idea of a curious club – which he formed – its members to be young girls – girls for the most part whom he had never seen. They were elected without their consent from among those who wrote to him without his consent, and it is not likely that any one so chosen declined membership. One selection from his letters to the French member, Miss Helene Picard, of St.-Die, France, will explain the club and present a side of Mask Twain somewhat different from that found in most of his correspondence.
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To Miss Picard, in St.-Die, France:
Riverdale-on-the-Hudson, February 22, 1902.
Dear miss Helene, – If you will let me call you so, considering that my head is white and that I have grownup daughters. Your beautiful letter has given me such deep pleasure! I will make bold to claim you for a friend and lock you up with the rest of my riches; for I am a miser who counts his spoil every day and hoards it secretly and adds to it when he can, and is grateful to see it grow.
Some of that gold comes, like yourself, in a sealed package, and I can’t see it and may never have the happiness; but I know its value without that, and by what sum it increases my wealth.
I have a Club, a private Club, which is all my own. I appoint the Members myself, and they can’t help themselves, because I don’t allow them to vote on their own appointment and I don’t allow them to resign! They are all friends whom I have never seen (save one), but who have written friendly letters to me.
By the laws of my Club there can be only one Member in each country, and there can be no male Member but myself. Some day I may admit males, but I don’t know – they are capricious and inharmonious, and their ways provoke me a good deal. It is a matter which the Club shall decide.
I have made four appointments in the past three or four months: You as Member for France, a young Highland girl as Member for Scotland, a Mohammedan girl as Member for Bengal, and a dear and bright young niece of mine as Member for the United States – for I do not represent a country myself, but am merely Member at Large for the Human Race.
You must not try to resign, for the laws of the Club do not allow that. You must console yourself by remembering that you are in the best of company; that nobody knows of your membership except myself – that no Member knows another’s name, but only her country; that no taxes are levied and no meetings held (but how dearly I should like to attend one!).
One of my Members is a Princess of a royal house, another is the daughter of a village book-seller on the continent of Europe. For the only qualification for Membership is intellect and the spirit of good will; other distinctions, hereditary or acquired, do not count.
May I send you the Constitution and Laws of the Club? I shall be so pleased if I may. It is a document which one of my daughters typewrites for me when I need one for a new Member, and she would give her eyebrows to know what it is all about, but I strangle her curiosity by saying: “There are much cheaper typewriters than you are, my dear, and if you try to pry into the sacred mysteries of this Club one of your prosperities will perish sure.”
My favorite? It is “Joan of Arc.” My next is “Huckleberry Finn,” but the family’s next is “The Prince and the Pauper.” (Yes, you are right – I am a moralist in disguise; it gets me into heaps of trouble when I go thrashing around in political questions.)
I wish you every good fortune and happiness and I thank you so much for your letter.
Sincerely yours,
S. L. Clemens.
Early in the year Clemens paid a visit to Twichell in Hartford, and after one of their regular arguments on theology and the moral accountability of the human race, arguments that had been going on between them for more than thirty years – Twichell lent his visitor Freedom of the Will, by Jonathan Edwards, to read on the way home. The next letter was the result.
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To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
Riverdale-on-the-Hudson.
Feb. ’02.
Dear Joe, – “After compliments.”[46]From Bridgeport to New York; thence to home; and continuously until near midnight I wallowed and reeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immediately refreshed and fine at 10 this morning, but with a strange and haunting sense of having been on a three days’ tear with a drunken lunatic. It is years since I have known these sensations. All through the book is the glaze of a resplendent intellect gone mad – a marvelous spectacle. No, not all through the book – the drunk does not come on till the last third, where what I take to be Calvinism and its God begins to show up and shine red and hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper adornment. By God I was ashamed to be in such company.
Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Arminian position) that the Man (or his Soul or his Will) never creates an impulse itself, but is moved to action by an impulse back of it. That’s sound!
Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses the one which for the moment is most pleasing to itself. Perfectly correct! An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane.
Up to that point he could have written chapters III and IV of my suppressed “Gospel.” But there we seem to separate. He seems to concede the indisputable and unshakable dominion of Motive and Necessity (call them what he may, these are exterior forces and not under the man’s authority, guidance or even suggestion) – then he suddenly flies the logic track and (to all seeming) makes the man and not these exterior forces responsible to God for the man’s thoughts, words and acts. It is frank insanity.
I think that when he concedes the autocratic dominion of Motive and Necessity he grants, a third position of mine – that a man’s mind is a mere machine – an automatic machine – which is handled entirely from the outside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing: not an ounce of its fuel, and not so much as a bare suggestion to that exterior engineer as to what the machine shall do, nor how it shall do it nor when.
After that concession, it was time for him to get alarmed and shirk – for he was pointing straight for the only rational and possible next-station on that piece of road the irresponsibility of man to God.
And so he shirked. Shirked, and arrived at this handsome result:
Man is commanded to do so-and-so. It has been ordained from the beginning of time that some men shan’t and others can’t.
These are to be blamed: let them be damned.
I enjoy the Colonel very much, and shall enjoy the rest of him with an obscene delight.
Joe, the whole tribe shout love to you and yours!
Mark.
We have not heard of Joe Goodman since the trying days of ’90 and ’91, when he was seeking to promote the fortunes of the type-setting machine. Goodman, meantime, who had in turn been miner, printer, publisher, and farmer; had been devoting his energies and genius to something entirely new: he had been translating the prehistoric Mayan inscriptions of Yucatan, and with such success that his work was elaborately published by an association of British scientists. In due time a copy of this publication came to Clemens, who was full of admiration of the great achievement.
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To J. T. Goodman, in California:
Riverdale-on-the-Hudson,
June 13, ’02.
Dear Joe, – I am lost in reverence and admiration! It is now twenty-four hours that I have been trying to cool down and contemplate with quiet blood this extraordinary spectacle of energy, industry, perseverance, pluck, analytical genius, penetration, this irruption of thunders and fiery splendors from a fair and flowery mountain that nobody had supposed was a sleeping volcano, but I seem to be as excited as ever. Yesterday I read as much as half of the book, not understanding a word but enchanted nevertheless – partly by the wonder of it all, the study, the erudition, the incredible labor, the modesty, the dignity, the majestic exclusiveness of the field and its lofty remoteness from things and contacts sordid and mean and earthy, and partly by the grace and beauty and limpidity of the book’s unsurpassable English. Science, always great and worshipful, goes often in hodden grey, but you have clothed her in garments meet for her high degree.
You think you get “poor pay” for your twenty years? No, oh no. You have lived in a paradise of the intellect whose lightest joys were beyond the reach of the longest purse in Christendom, you have had daily and nightly emancipation from the world’s slaveries and gross interests, you have received a bigger wage than any man in the land, you have dreamed a splendid dream and had it come true, and to-day you could not afford to trade fortunes with anybody – not even with another scientist, for he must divide his spoil with his guild, whereas essentially the world you have discovered is your own and must remain so.
It is all just magnificent, Joe! And no one is prouder or gladder than
Yours always,
Mark.
At York Harbor, Maine, where they had taken a cottage for the summer – a pretty place, with Howells not far distant, at Kittery Point – Mrs. Clemens’s health gave way. This was at a period when telegraphic communication was far from reliable. The old-time Western Union had fallen from grace; its “system” no longer justified the best significance of that word. The new day of reorganization was coming, and it was time for it. Mark Twain’s letter concerning the service at York Harbor would hardly be warranted today, but those who remember conditions of that earlier time will agree that it was justified then, and will appreciate its satire.
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To the President of The Western Union, in New York:
“The Pines”
York harbor, Maine.
Dear sir, – I desire to make a complaint, and I bring it to you, the head of the company, because by experience I know better than to carry it to a subordinate.
I have been here a month and a half, and by testimony of friends, reinforced by personal experience I now feel qualified to claim as an established fact that the telegraphic service here is the worst in the world except that Boston.
These services are actually slower than was the New York and Hartford service in the days when I last complained to you – which was fifteen or eighteen years ago, when telegraphic time and train time between the mentioned points was exactly the same, to-wit, three hours and a half. Six days ago – it was that raw day which provoked so much comment – my daughter was on her way up from New York, and at noon she telegraphed me from New Haven asking that I meet her with a cloak at Portsmouth. Her telegram reached me four hours and a quarter later – just 15 minutes too late for me to catch my train and meet her.
I judge that the telegram traveled about 200 miles. It is the best telegraphic work I have seen since I have been here, and I am mentioning it in this place not as a complaint but as a compliment. I think a compliment ought always to precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.
Still, there is a detail or two connected with this matter which ought perhaps to be mentioned. And now, having smoothed the way with the compliment, I will venture them. The head corpse in the York Harbor office sent me that telegram altho (1) he knew it would reach me too late to be of any value; (2) also, that he was going to send it to me by his boy; (3) that the boy would not take the trolley and come the 2 miles in 12 minutes, but would walk; (4) that he would be two hours and a quarter on the road; (5) and that he would collect 25 cents for transportation, for a telegram which the he knew to be worthless before he started it. From these data I infer that the Western Union owes me 75 cents; that is to say, the amount paid for combined wire and land transportation – a recoup provided for in the printed paragraph which heads the telegraph-blank.
By these humane and Christian stages we now arrive at the complaint proper. We have had a grave case of illness in the family, and a relative was coming some six hundred miles to help in the sick-room during the convalescing period. It was an anxious time, of course, and I wrote and asked to be notified as to the hour of the expected arrival of this relative in Boston or in York Harbor. Being afraid of the telegraph – which I think ought not to be used in times of hurry and emergency – I asked that the desired message be brought to me by some swift method of transportation. By the milkman, if he was coming this way. But there are always people who think they know more than you do, especially young people; so of course the young fellow in charge of this lady used the telegraph. And at Boston, of all places! Except York Harbor.
The result was as usual; let me employ a statelier and exacter term, and say, historical.
The dispatch was handed to the h. c. of the Boston office at 9 this morning. It said, “Shall bring A. S. to you eleven forty-five this morning.” The distance traveled by the dispatch is forty or fifty miles, I suppose, as the train-time is five minutes short of two hours, and the trains are so slow that they can’t give a W. U. telegram two hours and twenty minutes start and overtake it.
As I have said, the dispatch was handed in at Boston at 9. The expected visitors left Boston at 9.40, and reached my house at 12 noon, beating the telegram 2 solid hours, and 5 minutes over.
The boy brought the telegram. It was bald-headed with age, but still legible. The boy was prostrate with travel and exposure, but still alive, and I went out to condole with him and get his last wishes and send for the ambulance. He was waiting to collect transportation before turning his passing spirit to less serious affairs. I found him strangely intelligent, considering his condition and where he is getting his training. I asked him at what hour the telegram was handed to the h. c. in Boston. He answered brightly, that he didn’t know.
I examined the blank, and sure enough the wary Boston h. c. had thoughtfully concealed that statistic. I asked him at what hour it had started from Boston. He answered up as brightly as ever, and said he didn’t know.
I examined the blank, and sure enough the Boston h. c. had left that statistic out in the cold, too. In fact it turned out to be an official concealment – no blank was provided for its exposure. And none required by the law, I suppose. “It is a good one-sided idea,” I remarked; “They can take your money and ship your telegram next year if they want to – you’ve no redress. The law ought to extend the privilege to all of us.”
The boy looked upon me coldly.
I asked him when the telegram reached York Harbor. He pointed to some figures following the signature at the bottom of the blank—“12.14.” I said it was now 1.45 and asked—
“Do you mean that it reached your morgue an hour and a half ago?”
He nodded assent.
“It was at that time half an hour too late to be of any use to me, if I wanted to go and meet my people – which was the case – for by the wording of the message you can see that they were to arrive at the station at 11.45. Why did, your h. c. send me this useless message? Can’t he read? Is he dead?”
“It’s the rules.”
“No, that does not account for it. Would he have sent it if it had been three years old, I in the meantime deceased, and he aware of it?”
The boy didn’t know.
“Because, you know, a rule which required him to forward to the cemetery to-day a dispatch due three years ago, would be as good a rule as one which should require him to forward a telegram to me to-day which he knew had lost all its value an hour or two before he started it. The construction of such a rule would discredit an idiot; in fact an idiot – I mean a common ordinary Christian idiot, you understand – would be ashamed of it, and for the sake of his reputation wouldn’t make it. What do you think?”
He replied with much natural brilliancy that he wasn’t paid for thinking.
This gave me a better opinion of the commercial intelligence pervading his morgue than I had had before; it also softened my feelings toward him, and also my tone, which had hitherto been tinged with bitterness.
“Let bygones be bygones,” I said, gently, “we are all erring creatures, and mainly idiots, but God made us so and it is dangerous to criticise.”
Sincerely,
S. L. Clemens.
One day there arrived from Europe a caller with a letter of introduction from Elizabeth, Queen of Rumania, better known as Carmen Sylva. The visitor was Madam Hartwig, formerly an American girl, returning now, because of reduced fortunes, to find profitable employment in her own land. Her husband, a man of high principle, had declined to take part in an “affair of honor,” as recognized by the Continental code; hence his ruin. Elizabeth of Rumania was one of the most loved and respected of European queens and an author of distinction. Mark Twain had known her in Vienna. Her letter to him and his own letter to the public (perhaps a second one, for its date is two years later) follow herewith.
From Carmen Sylva to Mark Twain:
Bucarest, May 9, 1902.
Honored master, – If I venture to address you on behalf of a poor lady, who is stranded in Bucarest I hope not to be too disagreeable.
Mrs. Hartwig left America at the age of fourteen in order to learn to sing which she has done thoroughly. Her husband had quite a brilliant situation here till he refused to partake ‘dans une afaire onéreuse’, so it seems. They haven’t a penny and each of them must try to find a living. She is very nice and pleasant and her school is so good that she most certainly can give excellent singing lessons.
I beg your pardon for being a bore to one I so deeply love and admire, to whom I owe days and days of forgetfulness of self and troubles and the intensest of all joys: Hero-worship! People don’t always realize what a happiness that is! God bless you for every beautiful thought you poured into my tired heart and for every smile on a weary way!
Carmen Sylva.
From Mark Twain to the Public:
Nov. 16, ’04.
To whom it may concern, – I desire to recommend Madame Hartwig to my friends and the public as a teacher of singing and as a concert-vocalist. She has lived for fifteen years at the court of Roumania, and she brought with her to America an autograph letter in which her Majesty the Queen of Roumania cordially certified her to me as being an accomplished and gifted singer and teacher of singing, and expressed a warm hope that her professional venture among us would meet with success; through absence in Europe I have had no opportunity to test the validity of the Queen’s judgment in the matter, but that judgment is the utterance of an entirely competent authority – the best that occupies a throne, and as good as any that sits elsewhere, as the musical world well knows – and therefore back it without hesitation, and endorse it with confidence.
I will explain that the reason her Majesty tried to do her friend a friendly office through me instead of through someone else was, not that I was particularly the right or best person for the office, but because I was not a stranger. It is true that I am a stranger to some of the monarchs – mainly through their neglect of their opportunities – but such is not the case in the present instance. The latter fact is a high compliment to me, and perhaps I ought to conceal it. Some people would.
Mark Twain.
Mrs. Clemens’s improvement was scarcely perceptible. It was not until October that they were able to remove her to Riverdale, and then only in a specially arranged invalid-car. At the end of the long journey she was carried to her room and did not leave it again for many months.
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To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
Riverdale, N. Y., Oct. 31, ’02.
Dear Joe, – It is ten days since Susy (Twichell) wrote that you were laid up with a sprained shoulder, since which time we have had no news about it. I hope that no news is good news, according to the proverb; still, authoritative confirmation of it will be gladly received in this family, if some of you will furnish it. Moreover, I should like to know how and where it happened. In the pulpit, as like as not, otherwise you would not be taking so much pains to conceal it. This is not a malicious suggestion, and not a personally-invented one: you told me yourself, once, that you threw artificial power and impressiveness into places in your sermons where needed, by “banging the bible”—(your own words.) You have reached a time of life when it is not wise to take these risks. You would better jump around. We all have to change our methods as the infirmities of age creep upon us. Jumping around will be impressive now, whereas before you were gray it would have excited remark
Poor Livy drags along drearily. It must be hard times for that turbulent spirit. It will be a long time before she is on her feet again. It is a most pathetic case. I wish I could transfer it to myself. Between ripping and raging and smoking and reading, I could get a good deal of a holiday out of it.
Clara runs the house smoothly and capably. She is discharging a trial-cook today and hiring another.
A power of love to you all!
Mark.
Such was the state of Mrs. Clemens’s health that visitors were excluded from the sick room, and even Clemens himself was allowed to see her no more than a few moments at a time. These brief, precious visits were the chief interests of his long days. Occasionally he was allowed to send her a few lines, reporting his occupations, and these she was sometimes permitted to answer. Only one of his notes has been preserved, written after a day, now rare, of literary effort. Its signature, the letter Y, stands for “Youth,” always her name for him.
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To Mrs. Clemens:
Dear heart, – I’ve done another full day’s work, and finished before 4. I have been reading and dozing since and would have had a real sleep a few minutes ago but for an incursion to bring me a couple of unimportant letters. I’ve stuck to the bed all day and am getting back my lost ground. Next time I will be strictly careful and make my visit very short – just a kiss and a rush. Thank you for your dear, dear note; you who are my own and only sweetheart.
Sleep well!
Y.