Mark Twain: A Biography. Complete






CLXIX. THE COMING OF KIPLING

It was the summer of 1889 that Mark Twain first met Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was making his tour around the world, a young man wholly unheard of outside of India. He was writing letters home to an Indian journal, The Pioneer, and he came to Elmira especially to see Mark Twain. It was night when he arrived, and next morning some one at the hotel directed him to Quarry Farm. In a hired hack he made his way out through the suburbs, among the buzzing planing-mills and sash factories, and toiled up the long, dusty, roasting east hill, only to find that Mark Twain was at General Langdon's, in the city he had just left behind. Mrs. Crane and Susy Clemens were the only ones left at the farm, and they gave him a seat on the veranda and brought him glasses of water or cool milk while he refreshed them with his talk-talk which Mark Twain once said might be likened to footprints, so strong and definite was the impression which it left behind. He gave them his card, on which the address was Allahabad, and Susy preserved it on that account, because to her India was a fairyland, made up of magic, airy architecture, and dark mysteries. Clemens once dictated a memory of Kipling's visit.

    Kipling had written upon the card a compliment to me. This gave it
    an additional value in Susy's eyes, since, as a distinction, it was
    the next thing to being recognized by a denizen of the moon.

    Kipling came down that afternoon and spent a couple of hours with
    me, and at the end of that time I had surprised him as much as he
    had surprised me—and the honors were easy. I believed that he knew
    more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that
    I knew less than any person he had met before—though he did not say
    it, and I was not expecting that he would. When he was gone Mrs.
    Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said:

    “He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man—and I am
    the other one. Between us we cover all knowledge; he knows all that
    can be known, and I know the rest.”

    He was a stranger to me and to all the world, and remained so for
    twelve months, then he became suddenly known, and universally known.
    From that day to this he has held this unique distinction—that of
    being the only living person, not head of a nation, whose voice is
    heard around the world the moment it drops a remark; the only such
    voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail, but
    always travels first-class—by cable.

    About a year after Kipling's visit in Elmira George Warner came into
    our library one morning in Hartford with a small book in his hand
    and asked me if I had ever heard of Rudyard Kipling. I said, “No.”

    He said I would hear of him very soon, and that the noise he was
    going to make would be loud and continuous. The little book was the
    Plain Tales, and he left it for me to read, saying it was charged
    with a new and inspiriting fragrance, and would blow a refreshing
    breath around the world that would revive the nations. A day or two
    later he brought a copy of the London World which had a sketch of
    Kipling in it, and a mention of the fact that he had traveled in the
    United States. According to this sketch he had passed through
    Elmira. This remark, with the additional fact that he hailed from
    India, attracted my attention—also Susy's. She went to her room
    and brought his card from its place in the frame of her mirror, and
    the Quarry Farm visitor stood identified.

Kipling also has left an account of that visit. In his letter recording it he says:

    You are a contemptible lot over yonder. Some of you are
    Commissioners and some are Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the
    V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm
    with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning,
    have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar—no, two cigars—with him,
    and talked with him for more than two hours! Understand clearly
    that I do not despise you; indeed, I don't. I am only very sorry
    for you, from the Viceroy downward.

    A big, darkened drawing-room; a huge chair; a man with eyes, a mane
    of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a
    woman's, a strong, square hand shaking mine, and the slowest,
    calmest, levelest voice in all the world saying:

    “Well, you think you owe me something, and you've come to tell me
    so. That's what I call squaring a debt handsomely.”

    “Piff!” from a cob-pipe (I always said that a Missouri meerschaum
    was the best smoking in the world), and behold! Mark Twain had
    curled himself up in the big arm-chair, and I was smoking
    reverently, as befits one in the presence of his superior.

    The thing that struck me first was that he was an elderly man; yet,
    after a minute's thought, I perceived that it was otherwise, and in
    five minutes, the eyes looking at me, I saw that the gray hair was
    an accident of the most trivial. He was quite young. I was shaking
    his hand. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk—this
    man I had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away.

    Reading his books, I had striven to get an idea of his personality,
    and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality.
    Blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face
    to face with a revered writer.

The meeting of those two men made the summer of '89 memorable in later years. But it was recalled sadly, too. Theodore Crane, who had been taken suddenly and dangerously ill the previous autumn, had a recurring attack and died July 3d. It was the first death in the immediate families for more than seventeen years. Mrs. Clemens, remembering that earlier period of sorrow, was depressed with forebodings.

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