by Mark Twain
In a conversation with Mr. Rogers and a couple of lawyers, in those days, one of the men said,
“Not 5 per cent of the men who become ruined at fifty-eight ever recover.” Another said, with enthusiasm, “Five per cent! None of them ever recover.” It made me feel very sick.
That was in ’94, I believe—though it may have been in the beginning of ’95. However, Mrs. Clemens and Clara and I started, on the 15th of July, 1895, on our lecturing raid around the world. We lectured and robbed and raided for thirteen months. I wrote a book and published it. I sent the book-money and lecture-money to Mr. Rogers as fast as we captured it. He banked it and saved it up for the creditors. We implored him to pay off the smaller creditors straightway, for they needed the money, but he wouldn’t do it. He said that when I had milked the world dry he would take the result and distribute it, pro rata, among the Webster people.
At the end of ’98 or the beginning of ’99 Mr. Rogers cabled me, at Vienna,
“The creditors have all been paid a hundred cents on the dollar. There is eighteen thousand five hundred dollars left. What shall I do with it?”
I answered, “Put it in Federal Steel”—which he did, all except a thousand dollars, and took it out again in two months with a profit of 125 per cent.
There—thanks be! A hundred times I have tried to tell this intolerable story with a pen, but I never could do it. It always made me sick before I got half way to the middle of it. But this time I have held my grip and walked the floor and emptied it all out of my system, and I hope to never hear of it again.
It would not be right for me to pretend that the speculations which I was talking about the other day ended my speculative career. During 1886, and the four succeeding years, while Webster was sitting on my financial nest and hatching ruin for me, I was assisting in the work at my end of the line, Hartford. I entered into an arrangement with a descendant of Judas Iscariot by the name of J. W. Paige, a natural liar and thief, to build a type-setting machine, I to furnish the money. Let us not dwell upon this. The machine was a failure. It was a beautiful machine—the most wonderful creation that has ever issued from a human being’s brain. It stands in Cornell University, a monument of human ingenuity and stupidity—the ingenuity was Paige’s, the stupidity was mine. I spent a hundred and seventy thousand dollars on it. More than two-thirds of it came out of Mrs. Clemens’s pocket. We pulled through——
Monday, June 4, 1906
Two years ago to-morrow occurred the death of Mrs. Clemens—Mrs. Clemens’s illness, and the journey around the world—The house in West 10th street and the overtaxing of Mrs. Clemens’s strength—Three months in the Adirondacks—House at York Harbor—Journey there in Mr. Rogers’s yacht—Mrs. Clemens’s fear of heart trouble—Howells’s visit, and the curious story which he related.
To-morrow will be the 5th of June, a day which marks the disaster of my life—the death of my wife. It occurred two years ago, in Florence, Italy, whither we had taken her in the hope of restoring her broken health.
The dictating of this autobiography, which was begun in Florence in the beginning of 1904, was soon suspended because of the anxieties of the time, and I was never moved to resume the work until January 1906, for I did not see how I was ever going to bring myself to speak in detail of the mournful episodes and experiences of that desolate interval and of the twenty-two months of wearing distress which preceded it. I wish to bridge over that hiatus, now, with an outline sketch. I can venture nothing more as yet.
Mrs. Clemens had never been strong, and a thirteen months’ journey around the world seemed a doubtful experiment for such a physique as hers, but it turned out to be a safe one. When we took the train westward-bound at Elmira on the 15th of July, 1895, we moved through blistering summer-heats, and, by and by, through summer-heats with the heat of burning forests added. This for twenty-three days—I lecturing every night. Notwithstanding these trying conditions, Mrs. Clemens reached Vancouver in as good health as she was when she began the journey. From that day her health seemed improved, although the summer continued thereafter for five months without a break. It was summer at the Sandwich Islands. We reached Sydney, Australia, thirty-four degrees south of the equator, in October, just when the Australian summer was getting well under way. It was summer during our whole stay in Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania. It was still summer when we sailed from Melbourne on the 1st of January ’96. It was blistering summer in Ceylon, of course, as it always is. It was supposed by the English residents of Bombay to be winter there, when we reached that city in January, but we couldn’t recognize that our climate had ever changed since our departure from Elmira in mid-July. It was still summer to us all over India until the 17th of March, when an English physician in Jeypore told us to fly for Calcutta and get out of India immediately, because the warm weather could come at any time, now, and it would be perilous for us. So we sweltered along through the “cold weather,” as they called it there, clear from Rawal Pindi to Calcutta, and took ship for South Africa—and still Mrs. Clemens’s health had steadily improved. She and Clara went with me all over my lecture course in South Africa, except to Pretoria, and she never had a day’s illness.
We finally finished our lecture-raid on the 14th of July ’96, sailed for England the next day, and landed at Southampton on the 31st. A fortnight later Mrs. Clemens and Clara sailed for home to nurse Susy through a reported illness, and found her in her coffin in her grandmother’s house.
The diminished family presently joined me in England. We lived in London, in Switzerland, in Vienna, in Sweden, and again in London, until October 1900. And when at that time we took ship, homeward bound, Mrs. Clemens’s health and strength were in better condition than they had ever been before since she was sixteen years old and met with the accident which I have before mentioned in a previous chapter.
We took No. 14 West 10th street, just out of Fifth Avenue, for a year, and there the overtaxing of Mrs. Clemens’s strength began. The house was large; housekeeping was a heavy labor—as indeed it always is in New York—but she would not have a housekeeper. She had resisted, and successfully resisted, all my persuasions in that direction from the day that we were married. Social life was another heavy tax upon her strength. In the drive and rush and hurly-burly of the mid-winter New York season, my correspondence grew beyond my secretary’s strength and mine, and I found that Mrs. Clemens was trying to ease our burden for us. One day I wrote thirty-two brief letters with my own hand, and then found, to my dismay, that Mrs. Clemens had written the same number. She had added this labor to her other labors, and they were already too heavy for her.
By the following June this kind of life, after her nine and a half years of tranquil and effortless life in Europe, began to exhibit effects. Three months’ repose and seclusion in the Adirondacks did her manifest good. Then we took a house in Riverdale-on-the-Hudson. It was a large house, and again the housekeeping burden was heavy. Early in 1902 she was threatened with a nervous break down, but soon the danger seemed past.
At the end of June we secured a furnished house in the outskirts of York Harbor for the summer. Mr. Rogers brought his Kanawha, the fastest steam yacht in American waters, cast anchor and sent the launch ashore at our river front, and Mrs. Clemens and Jean and I went down to embark. I found, then, that Mrs. Clemens was not taking a servant along. This was because she was so afraid of being an inconvenience and an incumbrance to Mr. Rogers. It was too bad. She could have had the whole ship and welcome. Jean’s health was bad, and she would need much attention. This service would fall upon Mrs. Clemens. My services would be of a stupid and ignorant sort, and worthless. It was too late. She had arranged to ship the entire household and all the baggage by rail to York Harbor.
It was lovely weather, and we sped over the sparkling seas like a bird, chasing all craft in sight, and sending them all astern, one by one. But these delights were not for Mrs. Clemens. She had to stay below and take care of Jean. As night fell we took refuge from heavy weather
in the harbor of New London. Mrs. Clemens did not get much rest or sleep, because of Jean. The next morning we sailed to Fairhaven. That was Mrs. Clemens’s opportunity to lie at rest on board the yacht, two or three hours, while the rest of us went ashore and visited Mr. Rogers’s family at his country place. But she elected to go ashore. She fatigued herself in many ways. She continued to add to these fatigues by nursing Jean during the rest of the voyage to York Harbor.
Once again, here was opportunity to rest, but she would not rest. She could not rest. She never was intended to rest. She had the spirit of a steam engine in a frame of flesh. It was always racking that frame with its tireless energy; it was always exacting of it labors that were beyond its strength. Her heart soon began to alarm her. Twelve years before, two Hartford physicians of high repute had ordered her to the baths of Aix-les-Bains, and had told her that with care she would live two years. Two physicians of Aix-les-Bains said that with care she would live longer than that. Physicians of repute in Rome, Florence, and Berlin had given her the usual two years—and at Nauheim (Germany) the physician lowest in the published and authorized list of physicians chartered by that Bath, examined Mrs. Clemens and told me that there was nothing very serious the matter with her; that she would probably live a good many years yet. I was affronted. I was indignant that this ignorant apprentice should be allowed to play with people’s lives, and I paid his bill and discharged him on the spot, without a recommendation. Yet he was the only physician of the dozen whose prediction was worth anything. When we took up our residence in York Harbor Mrs. Clemens had outlived all the other predictions by eleven years.
But, as I have said, she became alarmed about her heart, in York Harbor, early in July. Her alarm increased rapidly. Within a fortnight she began to dread driving out. Anything approaching swift motion terrified her. She was afraid of descending grades, even such slight ones as to be indeterminable and imperceptible in the summer twilights. She would implore the coachman not only to walk his horses down those low and imperceptible hills, but she watched him with fear and distress, and if the horses stepped out of a walk for only a moment she would seize me on one side and the carriage on the other, in an ecstasy of fright. This was the condition of things all through July.
Now comes a curious thing. Howells was living at Kittery Point, three-quarters of an hour away by trolley, and one day in July or early in August he made his second visit to us. It was afternoon, and Mrs. Clemens’s resting time. She was up stairs in her room. Howells and I sat on the veranda overlooking the river and chatting, and presently he drifted into the history of a pathetic episode in the life of a friend of his, one or two of whose most moving features were soon to find strange duplication in Mrs. Clemens’s case.
While he sat there that afternoon telling the curious story, neither of us suspected that it was prophetic, yet it was.
I at once wrote it out in the form of a tale—using fictitious names, of course—and sent it to Harper’s Monthly. I here append it.
Was it Heaven? Or Hell?
I
“You told a lie?”
“You confess it—you actually confess it—you told a lie!”
II
The family consisted of four persons: Margaret Lester, widow, aged thirty-six; Helen Lester, her daughter, aged sixteen; Mrs. Lester’s maiden aunts, Hannah and Hester Gray, twins, aged sixty-seven. Waking and sleeping, the three women spent their days and nights in adoring the young girl; in watching the movements of her sweet spirit in the mirror of her face; in refreshing their souls with the vision of her bloom and beauty; in listening to the music of her voice; in gratefully recognizing how rich and fair for them was the world with this presence in it; in shuddering to think how desolate it would be with this light gone out of it.
By nature—and inside—the aged aunts were utterly dear and lovable and good, but in the matter of morals and conduct their training had been so uncompromisingly strict that it had made them exteriorly austere, not to say stern. Their influence was effective in the house; so effective that the mother and the daughter conformed to its moral and religious requirements cheerfully, contentedly, happily, unquestioningly. To do this was become second nature to them. And so in this peaceful heaven there were no clashings, no irritations, no fault-findings, no heart-burnings.
In it a lie had no place. In it a lie was unthinkable. In it speech was restricted to absolute truth, iron-bound truth, implacable and uncompromising truth, let the resulting consequences be what they might. At last, one day, under stress of circumstances, the darling of the house sullied her lips with a lie—and confessed it, with tears and self-upbraidings. There are not any words that can paint the consternation of the aunts. It was as if the sky had crumpled up and collapsed and the earth had tumbled to ruin with a crash. They sat side by side, white and stern, gazing speechless upon the culprit, who was on her knees before them with her face buried first in one lap and then the other, moaning and sobbing, and appealing for sympathy and forgiveness and getting no response, humbly kissing the hand of the one, then of the other, only to see it withdrawn as suffering defilement by those soiled lips.
Twice, at intervals, Aunt Hester said, in frozen amazement,
“You told a lie?”
Twice, at intervals, Aunt Hannah followed with the muttered and amazed ejaculation,
“You confess it—you actually confess it—you told a lie!”
It was all they could say. The situation was new, unheard-of, incredible; they could not understand it, they did not know how to take hold of it, it approximately paralysed speech.
At length it was decided that the erring child must be taken to her mother, who was ill, and who ought to know what had happened. Helen begged, besought, implored that she might be spared this further disgrace, and that her mother might be spared the grief and pain of it; but this could not be: duty required this sacrifice, duty takes precedence of all things, nothing can absolve one from a duty, with a duty no compromise is possible.
Helen still begged, and said the sin was her own, her mother had had no hand in it,—why must she be made to suffer for it?
But the aunts were obdurate in their righteousness, and said the law that visited the sins of the parent upon the child was by all right and reason reversible; and therefore it was but just that the innocent mother of a sinning child should suffer her rightful share of the grief and pain and shame which were the allotted wages of the sin.
The three moved toward the sick-room.
At this time the doctor was approaching the house. He was still a good distance away, however. He was a good doctor and a good man, and he had a good heart, but one had to know him a year to get over hating him, two years to learn to endure him, three to learn to like him, and four or five to learn to love him. It was a slow and trying education, but it paid. He was of great stature; he had a leonine head, a leonine face, a rough voice, and an eye which was sometimes a pirate’s and sometimes a woman’s, according to the mood. He knew nothing about etiquette, and cared nothing about it; in speech, manner, carriage, and conduct he was the reverse of conventional. He was frank, to the limit; he had opinions on all subjects; they were always on tap and ready for delivery, and he cared not a farthing whether his listener liked them or didn’t. Whom he loved he loved, and manifested it; whom he didn’t love he hated, and published it from the house-tops. In his young days he had been a sailor, and the salt airs of all the seas blew from him yet. He was a sturdy and loyal Christian, and believed he was the best one in the land, and the only one whose Christianity was perfectly sound, healthy, full-charged with common sense, and had no decayed places in it. People who had an axe to grind, or people who for any reason wanted to get on the soft side of him, called him The Christian,—a phrase whose delicate flattery was music to his ears, and whose capital T was such an enchanting and vivid object to him that he could see it when it fell out of a person’s mouth even in the dark. Many who were fond of him stood on their consciences with both feet and brazen
ly called him by that large title habitually, because it was a pleasure to them to do anything that would please him; and with eager and cordial malice his extensive and diligently cultivated crop of enemies gilded it, beflowered it, expanded it to “The Only Christian.” Of these two titles, the latter had the wider currency; the enemy, being greatly in the majority, attended to that. Whatever the doctor believed, he believed with all his heart, and would fight for it whenever he got the chance; and if the intervals between chances grew to be irksomely wide, he would invent ways of shortening them himself. He was severely conscientious, according to his rather independent lights, and whatever he took to be a duty he performed, no matter whether the judgment of the professional moralists agreed with his own or not. At sea, in his young days, he had used profanity freely, but as soon as he was converted he made a rule, which he rigidly stuck to ever afterwards, never to use it except on the rarest occasions, and then only when duty commanded. He had been a hard drinker at sea, but after his conversion he became a firm and outspoken teetotaler, in order to be an example to the young, and from that time forth he seldom drank; never, indeed, except when it seemed to him to be a duty,—a condition which sometimes occurred a couple of times a year, but never as many as five times.