There were many pleasanter things, to be sure. The farm life never failed with each returning summer; the winters brought gay company and fair occasions. Sir Henry and Lady Stanley, visiting America, were entertained in the Clemens home, and Clemens went on to Boston to introduce Stanley to his lecture audience. Charles Dickens's son, with his wife and daughter, followed a little later. An incident of their visit seems rather amusing now. There is a custom in England which requires the host to give the guest notice of bedtime by handing him a lighted candle. Mrs. Clemens knew of this custom, but did not have the courage to follow it in her own home, and the guests knew of no other way to relieve the situation; as a result, all sat up much later than usual. Eventually Clemens himself suggested that possibly the guests would like to retire.
Robert Louis Stevenson came down from Saranac, and Clemens went in to visit him at his New York hotel, the St. Stevens, on East Eleventh Street. Stevenson had orders to sit in the sunshine as much as possible, and during the few days of their association he and Clemens would walk down to Washington Square and sit on one of the benches and talk. They discussed many things—philosophies, people, books; it seems a pity their talk could not have been preserved.
Stevenson was a great admirer of Mark Twain's work. He said that during a recent painting of his portrait he had insisted on reading Huck Finn aloud to the artist, a Frenchman, who had at first protested, and finally had fallen a complete victim to Huck's yarn. In one of Stevenson's letters to Clemens he wrote:
My father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read Roughing It
(his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening
spent with the book he declared: “I am frightened. It cannot be
safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much.”
What heaps of letters, by the way, remain from this time, and how curious some of them are! Many of them are requests of one sort or another, chiefly for money—one woman asking for a single day's income, conservatively estimated at five thousand dollars. Clemens seldom answered an unwarranted letter; but at one time he began a series of unmailed answers—that is to say, answers in which he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual balance. He prepared an introduction for this series. In it he said:
... You receive a letter. You read it. It will be tolerably
sure to produce one of three results: 1, pleasure; 2, displeasure;
3, indifference. I do not need to say anything about Nos. 1 & 3;
everybody knows what to do with those breeds of letters; it is breed
No. 2 that I am after. It is the one that is loaded up with
trouble.
When you get an exasperating letter what happens? If you are young
you answer it promptly, instantly—and mail the thing you have
written. At forty what do you do? By that time you have found out
that a letter written in a passion is a mistake in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred; that it usually wrongs two persons, and always
wrongs one—yourself. You have grown weary of wronging yourself and
repenting; so you manacle, you fetter, you log-chain the frantic
impulse to write a pulverizing answer. You will wait a day or die.
But in the mean time what do you do? Why, if it is about dinner-
time, you sit at table in a deep abstraction all through the meal;
you try to throw it off and help do the talking; you get a start
three or four times, but conversation dies on your lips every time
—your mind isn't on it; your heart isn't in it. You give up, and
subside into a bottomless deep of silence, permanently; people must
speak to you two or three times to get your attention, and then say
it over again to make you understand. This kind of thing goes on
all the rest of the evening; nobody can interest you in anything;
you are useless, a depressing influence, a burden. You go to bed at
last; but at three in the morning you are as wide awake as you were
in the beginning. Thus we see what you have been doing for nine
hours—on the outside. But what were you doing on the inside? You
were writing letters—in your mind. And enjoying it, that is quite
true; that is not to be denied. You have been flaying your
correspondent alive with your incorporeal pen; you have been
braining him, disemboweling him, carving him into little bits, and
then—doing it all over again. For nine hours.
It was wasted time, for you had no intention of putting any of this
insanity on paper and mailing it. Yes, you know that, and confess
it—but what were you to do? Where was your remedy? Will anybody
contend that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, Go, and
be obeyed?
No, he cannot; that is certainly true. Well, then, what is he to
do? I will explain by the suggestion contained in my opening
paragraph. During the nine hours he has written as many as forty-
seven furious letters—in his mind. If he had put just one of them
on paper it would have brought him relief, saved him eight hours of
trouble, and given him an hour's red-hot pleasure besides.
He is not to mail this letter; he understands that, and so he can
turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm. He is only
writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a volcano:
imaging himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater
and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he would
get relief.
Before he has filled his first sheet sometimes the relief is there.
He degenerates into good-nature from that point.
Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as
three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry
one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in
it here and there. He pigeonholes these and then does one of two
things—dismisses the whole matter from his mind or writes the
proper sort of letter and mails it.
To this day I lose my balance and send an overwarm letter—or more
frequently telegram—two or three times a year. But that is better
than doing it a hundred times a year, as I used to do years ago.
Perhaps I write about as many as ever, but I pigeonhole them. They
ought not to be thrown away. Such a letter a year or so old is as
good as a sermon to the maw who wrote it. It makes him feel small
and shabby, but—well, that wears off. Any sermon does; but the
sermon does some little good, anyway. An old cold letter like that
makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about
nothing.
The unmailed answers that were to accompany this introduction were plentiful enough and generally of a fervent sort. One specimen will suffice. It was written to the chairman of a hospital committee.
DEAR SIR,—If I were Smithfield I would certainly go out and get
behind something and blush. According to your report, “the
politicians are afraid to tax the people for the support” of so
humane and necessary a thing as a hospital. And do your “people”
propose to stand that?—at the hands of vermin officials whom the
breath of their votes could blow out of official existence in a
moment if they had the pluck to band themselves together and blow.
Oh, come, these are not “people”—they are cowed school-boys with
backbones made of boiled macaroni. If you are not misreporting
those “people” you are just in the right business passing the
mendicant hat for them. Dear sir, communities where anything like
citizenship exists are accustomed to hide their shames, but here we
have one proposing to get up a great “exposition” of its dishonor
and advertise it all it can.
It has been eleven years since I wrote anything for one of those
graveyards called a “Fair paper,” and so I have doubtless lost the
knack of it somewhat; still I have done the best I could for you.
This was from a burning heart and well deserved. One may almost regret that he did not send it.
Once he received a letter intended for one Samuel Clements, of Elma, New York, announcing that the said Clements's pension had been allowed. But this was amusing. When Clemens had forwarded the notice to its proper destination he could not resist sending this comment to the commissioner at Washington:
DEAR SIR,—I have not applied for a pension. I have often wanted a
pension—often—ever so often—I may say, but in as much as the only
military service I performed during the war was in the Confederate
army, I have always felt a delicacy about asking you for it.
However, since you have suggested the thing yourself, I feel
strengthened. I haven't any very pensionable diseases myself, but I
can furnish a substitute—a man who is just simply a chaos, a museum
of all the different kinds of aches and pains, fractures,
dislocations and malformations there are; a man who would regard
“rheumatism and sore eyes” as mere recreation and refreshment after
the serious occupations of his day. If you grant me the pension,
dear sir, please hand it to General Jos. Hawley, United States
Senator—I mean hand him the certificate, not the money, and he will
forward it to me. You will observe by this postal-card which I
inclose that he takes a friendly interest in the matter. He thinks
I've already got the pension, whereas I've only got the rheumatism;
but didn't want that—I had that before. I wish it were catching. I
know a man that I would load up with it pretty early. Lord, but we
all feel that way sometimes. I've seen the day when but never mind
that; you may be busy; just hand it to Hawley—the certificate, you
understand, is not transferable.
Clemens was in good standing at Washington during the Cleveland administration, and many letters came, asking him to use his influence with the President to obtain this or that favor. He always declined, though once—a few years later, in Europe—when he learned that Frank Mason, consul-general at Frankfort, was about to be displaced, Clemens, of his own accord, wrote to Baby Ruth Cleveland about it.
MY DEAR RUTH, I belong to the Mugwumps, and one of the most sacred
rules of our order prevents us from asking favors of officials or
recommending men to office, but there is no harm in writing a
friendly letter to you and telling you that an infernal outrage is
about to be committed by your father in turning out of office the
best Consul I know (and I know a great many) just because he is a
Republican and a Democrat wants his place.
He went on to recall Mason's high and honorable record, suggesting that Miss Ruth take the matter into her own hands. Then he said:
I can't send any message to the President, but the next time you
have a talk with him concerning such matters I wish you would tell
him about Captain Mason and what I think of a Government that so
treats its efficient officials.
Just what form of appeal the small agent made is not recorded, but by and by Mark Twain received a tiny envelope, postmarked Washington, inclosing this note in President Cleveland's handwriting:
Miss Ruth Cleveland begs to acknowledge the receipt of Mr. Twain's
letter and say that she took the liberty of reading it to the
President, who desires her to thank Mr. Twain for her information,
and to say to him that Captain Mason will not be disturbed in the
Frankfort Consulate. The President also desires Miss Cleveland to
say that if Mr. Twain knows of any other cases of this kind he will
be greatly obliged if he will write him concerning them at his
earliest convenience.
Clemens immensely admired Grover Cleveland, also his young wife, and his visits to Washington were not infrequent. Mrs. Clemens was not always able to accompany him, and he has told us how once (it was his first visit after the President's marriage) she put a little note in the pocket of his evening waistcoat, which he would be sure to find when dressing, warning him about his deportment. Being presented to Mrs. Cleveland, he handed her a card on which he had written “He didn't,” and asked her to sign her name below those words. Mrs. Cleveland protested that she couldn't sign it unless she knew what it was he hadn't done; but he insisted, and she promised to sign if he would tell her immediately afterward all about it. She signed, and he handed her Mrs. Clemens's note, which was very brief. It said:
“Don't wear your arctics in the White House.”
Mrs. Cleveland summoned a messenger and had the card she had signed mailed at once to Mrs. Clemens at Hartford.
He was not always so well provided against disaster. Once, without consulting his engagements, he agreed to assist Mrs. Cleveland at a dedication, only to find that he must write an apology later. In his letter he said:
I do not know how it is in the White House, but in this house of
ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run
itself without the help of the major half it gets aground.
He explained his position, and added:
I suppose the President often acts just like that; goes and makes an
impossible promise, and you never find it out until it is next to
impossible to break it up and set things straight again. Well, that
is just our way exactly—one-half the administration always busy
getting the family into trouble and the other half busy getting it
out.
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