-
From My Mark Twain (1910)
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
[105] === From My Mark Twain (1910) W. D. Howells Howells also remembered a visit to Twain’s new home in Hartford when his friend reminisced about the death from diphtheria of his son Langdon four years earlier. the visits to hartford which had begun with this affluence continued without actual increase of riches for me, but now I went alone, and in Warner ’s European and Egyptian absences I formed the habit of going to Clemens . By this time he was in his new house, where he used to give me a royal chamber on the ground floor, and come in at night after I had gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be after we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer. Once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to New York together, and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker without passing a syllable till we had occasion to say, “Well, we’re there.” Then, with our installation in a now vanished hotel (the old Brunswick, to be specific), the talk began again with the inspiration of the novel environment, and went on and on. We wished to be asleep, but we could not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which he always wore in preference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never tire of even when it began to be told over again. Or at times he would reason high— twain in his own time [106] “Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,”1 walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him. He was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell,2 and at least tacitly far from the entire negation he came to at last. I should say he had hardly yet examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife’s belief, for it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful and tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most faithful soul. I make bold to speak of the love between them, because without it I could not make him known to others as he was known to me. . . . She had been a lifelong invalid when he met her, and he liked to tell the beautiful story of their courtship to each new friend whom he found capable of feeling its beauty or worthy of hearing it. Naturally, her father had hesitated to give her into the keeping of the young strange Westerner, who had risen up out of the unknown with his giant reputation of burlesque humorist, and demanded guaranties, demanded proofs. “He asked me,” Clemens would say, “if I couldn’t give him the names of people who knew me in California, and when it was time to hear from them I heard from him. ‘Well, Mr. Clemens,’ he said, ‘nobody seems to have a very good word for you.’ I hadn’t referred him to people that I thought were going to whitewash me. I thought it was all up with me, but I was disappointed. ‘So I guess I shall have to back you myself.’” Whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put in him I cannot say, but probably not; it was always in him to be faithful to any trust, and in proportion as a trust of his own was betrayed he was ruthlessly and implacably resentful. But I wish now to speak of the happiness of that household in Hartford which responded so perfectly to the ideals of the mother when the three daughters, so lovely...