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13 January, 2012
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My Mark Twain
X.
by Howells, William Dean
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I go back to that house in Hartford, where I was so often a happy guest,
with tenderness for each of its endearing aspects. Over the chimney in
the library which had been cured of smoking by so much art and science,
Clemens had written in perennial brass the words of Emerson, "The
ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it," and he gave his
guests a welcome of the simplest and sweetest cordiality: but I must not
go aside to them from my recollections of him, which will be of
sufficient garrulity, if I give them as fully as I wish. The windows of
the library looked northward from the hillside above which the house
stood, and over the little valley with the stream in it, and they showed
the leaves of the trees that almost brushed them as in a Claude Lorraine
glass. To the eastward the dining-room opened amply, and to the south
there was a wide hall, where the voices of friends made themselves heard
as they entered without ceremony and answered his joyous hail. At the
west was a little semicircular conservatory of a pattern invented by Mrs.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, and adopted in most of the houses of her kindly
neighborhood. The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines
climbed up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of a
fountain companied by callas and other water-loving lilies. There, while
we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty
bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of
its varied blossoms. Breakfast was Clemens's best meal, and he sat
longer at his steak and coffee than at the courses of his dinner;
luncheon was nothing to him, unless, as might happen, he made it his
dinner, and reserved the later repast as the occasion of walking up and
down the room, and discoursing at large on anything that came into his
head. Like most good talkers, he liked other people to have their say;
he did not talk them down; he stopped instantly at another's remark and
gladly or politely heard him through; he even made believe to find
suggestion or inspiration in what was said. His children came to the
table, as I have told, and after dinner he was apt to join his fine tenor
to their trebles in singing.
Fully half our meetings were at my house in Cambridge, where he made
himself as much at home as in Hartford. He would come ostensibly to stay
at the Parker House, in Boston, and take a room, where he would light the
gas and leave it burning, after dressing, while he drove out to Cambridge
and stayed two or three days with us. Once, I suppose it was after a
lecture, he came in evening dress and passed twenty-four hours with us in
that guise, wearing an overcoat to hide it when we went for a walk.
Sometimes he wore the slippers which he preferred to shoes at home, and
if it was muddy, as it was wont to be in Cambridge, he would put a pair
of rubbers over them for our rambles. He liked the lawlessness and our
delight in allowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his hostess,
after we had once almost worn ourselves out in our pleasure with the
intense talk, with the stories and the laughing, that his coming almost
killed her, but it was worth it.
In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with
reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it.
At first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided
that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer
under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you
go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at
Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth
considering, and Scotch-whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard.
One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot
Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a
while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then
one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o'clock, and had gone
promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like
effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences
of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged
him.
He came on to Cambridge in April, 1875, to go with me to the centennial
ceremonies at Concord in celebration of the battle of the Minute Men with
the British troops a hundred years before. We both had special
invitations, including passage from Boston; but I said, Why bother to go
into Boston when we could just as well take the train for Concord at the
Cambridge station? He equally decided that it would be absurd; so we
breakfasted deliberately, and then walked to the station, reasoning of
many things as usual. When the train stopped, we found it packed inside
and out. People stood dense on the platforms of the cars; to our
startled eyes they seemed to project from the windows, and unless memory
betrays me they lay strewn upon the roofs like brakemen slain at the post
of duty.
Whether this was really so or not, it is certain that the train presented
an impenetrable front even to our imagination, and we left it to go its
way without the slightest effort to board. We remounted the fame-worn
steps of Porter's Station, and began exploring North Cambridge for some
means of transportation overland to Concord, for we were that far on the
road by which the British went and came on the day of the battle. The
liverymen whom we appealed to received us, some with compassion, some
with derision, but in either mood convinced us that we could not have
hired a cat to attempt our conveyance, much less a horse, or vehicle of
any description. It was a raw, windy day, very unlike the exceptionally
hot April day when the routed redcoats, pursued by the Colonials, fled
panting back to Boston, with "their tongues hanging out like dogs,"
but we could not take due comfort in the vision of their discomfiture;
we could almost envy them, for they had at least got to Concord. A swift
procession of coaches, carriages, and buggies, all going to Concord,
passed us, inert and helpless, on the sidewalk in the peculiarly cold mud
of North Cambridge. We began to wonder if we might not stop one of them
and bribe it to take us, but we had not the courage to try, and Clemens
seized the opportunity to begin suffering with an acute indigestion,
which gave his humor a very dismal cast. I felt keenly the shame of
defeat, and the guilt of responsibility for our failure, and when a gay
party of students came toward us on the top of a tally ho, luxuriously
empty inside, we felt that our chance had come, and our last chance.
He said that if I would stop them and tell them who I was they would
gladly, perhaps proudly, give us passage; I contended that if with his
far vaster renown he would approach them, our success would be assured.
While we stood, lost in this "contest of civilities," the coach passed
us, with gay notes blown from the horns of the students, and then Clemens
started in pursuit, encouraged with shouts from the merry party who could
not imagine who was trying to run them down, to a rivalry in speed. The
unequal match could end only in one way, and I am glad I cannot recall
what he said when he came back to me. Since then I have often wondered
at the grief which would have wrung those blithe young hearts if they
could have known that they might have had the company of Mark Twain to
Concord that day and did not.
We hung about, unavailingly, in the bitter wind a while longer, and then
slowly, very slowly, made our way home. We wished to pass as much time
as possible, in order to give probability to the deceit we intended to
practise, for we could not bear to own ourselves baffled in our boasted
wisdom of taking the train at Porter's Station, and had agreed to say
that we had been to Concord and got back. Even after coming home to my
house, we felt that our statement would be wanting in verisimilitude
without further delay, and we crept quietly into my library, and made up
a roaring fire on the hearth, and thawed ourselves out in the heat of it
before we regained our courage for the undertaking. With all these
precautions we failed, for when our statement was imparted to the
proposed victim she instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we were left
with it on our hands intact. I think the humor of this situation was
finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord
would have been; only a few weeks before his death he laughed our defeat
over with one of my family in Bermuda, and exulted in our prompt
detection.
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