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[222] === “Some Reminiscences of Mark Twain” (1929) James Ross Clemens, M.D. Ironically, James Ross Clemens, M.D. (1866–1948), a distant cousin from St. Louis with whom Twain had been confused, learned of Twain’s ostensible distress and offered to help him. in the winter of 1898, when a medical student at St. Thomas’s hospital, London, I chanced to read in the London Evening Globe that Mark Twain was residing in London in straitened circumstances. A letter was forthwith dispatched by me to him, care of Chatto and Windus, his London publishers , in which I introduced myself as another of the Clemens tribe and asked for the honor and privilege of being allowed to aid him in his distress. Several days passed and then one evening there came a knock at my street door and in walked Clemens himself. Fortunately the report of his bankruptcy proved false but he seemed altogether at a loss how to express adequately his appreciation of my letter and was visibly touched. From that time on to the day of his death I was always his “Dr. Jim.” I was often invited to his home in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and met at his table all of England’s literary lions. The following story bears repeating: On a certain wet Sunday Mr. Clemens found himself stranded in the country and obliged to put up at a village inn. Man-like he gravitated to the smoking room and there met a brother derelict and after the time of day had been passed a desultory conversation commenced between the two men. It was but natural that Mr. Clemens soon had literary subjects to the fore and began to attack England’s latest giant, Thomas Hardy, but the little man with the broken nose across the table did not seem somehow to concur as heartily as Mark Twain had expected in his diatribes against the author of Tess of the D’Ubervilles. When the little man arose to go, after paying his score, he gave Mark Twain a look that can best be described as “dirty” and stalked from the room with the hauteur of a Spanish grandee. Vaguely ill at ease, Mr. Clemens asked the waiter the name of the gentleman. “Mr. Thomas ’Ardy, sir.” [223] I can still hear Mr. Clemens’s delighted chuckle as he scored the point against himself. At the Strand Theater—William Gillette in Secret Service and Mr. Clemens and myself, as Gillette’s guests, were occupying a stage box. In the second act a black cat walked across the stage although its name was not on the program. “Mark my words, Dr. Jim,” exclaimed Clemens excitedly, “poor Gillette is in for some misfortune or other this evening.” And sure enough, when we went behind the scenes at the end of that act we found Gillette binding up a forefinger which he had cut about to the bone on the telegraph key. I happened to quote to Mr. Clemens a London saying that there were only three really funny sayings in the world and that two of them were not fit for the drawing room. “O why didn’t I know of that when I was writing Pudd’nhead Wilson,” exclaimed Mr. Clemens feelingly. “I should have headed one of the chapters with it as a caption.” Mark Twain, like Dr. Johnson, hated getting up in the morning and on one occasion entering his bedroom long past the hour of noon I found him in bed, luxuriously propped up on pillows and busily skimming through a crowd of books he had entrenched himself among. “I have to make some after-dinner remarks tonight although I am not supposed to know that I am to be called upon so I am doing my ‘improvising’ now” was his explanation. . . . “Dr. Jim,” said Mr. Clemens to me one day in his most solemn manner, “I have in a safe deposit box the manuscript of an unpublished work of mine which is the best thing by far I ever did and I give you the following excerpt as a sample of its quality. Being last summer in Germany in the company of a crowd of German research scholars I was fired by their example to do a little research of my own and the piece of work I attempted was to answer the question as to whether or not ants have intelligence. And to this end I first had made about a dozen little toy...

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