Part 18

“Mark’s’ cold is getting worse (the first cold he ever had). He worried and fretted all day; two swearing fits under his breath, with a short interval between them, they lasted from our arrival in town until he went to sleep after midnight. It was with great difficulty that he got through the lecture. The crowd, which kept stringing in at long intervals until half-past nine, made him so nervous that he left the stage for a time. I thought he was ill, and rushed back of the scenes, only to meet him in a white rage. He looked daggers at me, and remarked:

“‘You’ll never play a trick like this on me again. Look at that audience. It isn’t half in yet.’

“I explained that many of the people came from long distances, and that the cars ran only every half hour, the entire country on fire causing delays, and that was why the last instalment came so late. He cooled down and went at it again. He captured the crowd. He had a good time and an encore, and was obliged to give an additional story.

* * * * *

“Thursday, August 15th, Vancouver, B.C.--The Vancouver.

“‘Mark’s’ throat is in a very bad condition. It was a great effort to make himself heard. He is a thoroughbred--a great man, with wonderful will power, or he would have succumbed. We had a fine audience, a crowded house, very English, and I think ‘Mark’ liked it. Everything here is English and Canadian. There is a rumor afloat that the country about us is beautiful, but we can’t see it, for there is smoke, smoke everywhere, and no relief. My eyes are sore from it. We are told that the _Warrimoo_ will not sail until Wednesday, so I have arranged for the Victoria lecture Tuesday.

* * * * *

“Friday, August 16th, Vancouver.

“Our tour across the continent is virtually finished, and I feel the reaction. ‘Othello’s occupation gone.’ This morning ‘Mark’ had a doctor, who says he is not seriously ill. Mrs. Clemens is curing him. The more I see of this lady the greater and more wonderful she appears to be. There are few women who could manage and absolutely rule such a nature as ‘Mark’s.’ She knows the gentle and smooth way over every obstruction he meets, and makes everything lovely. This has indeed been the most delightful tour I have ever made with any party, and I wish to record it as one of the most enjoyable of all my managerial experiences. I hardly ever expect another. ‘Mark’ has written in a presentation copy of ‘Roughing It’:

“‘Here ends one of the smoothest and pleasantest trips across the continent that any group of five has ever made.’

“‘Mark’ is better this evening, so we shall surely have a good lecture in Victoria.

* * * * *

“Saturday, August 17th, Vancouver.

“We are all waiting for the news as to when the _Warrimoo_ will be off the dry dock and ready to sail. ‘Mark’ is getting better. I have booked Victoria for Tuesday, the 20th.

“‘Mark’ has lain in bed all day, as usual, spending much time writing. Reporters have been anxious to meet and interview him, and I urged it. He finally said: ‘If they’ll excuse my bed, show them up.’ A quartet of bright young English journalists came up. They all had a good time, and made much of the last interview with ‘Mark Twain’ in America, as it was. ‘Mark’ was in excellent spirits. His throat is better.

* * * * *

“Monday, August 19th.

“We are at Vancouver still, and the smoke is as firmly fixed as we are in the town. It is bad. ‘Mark’ has not been very cheerful to-day. He doesn’t get his voice back. He and I took a walk about the streets, and he seemed discouraged, I think on account of Mrs. Clemens’s dread of the long voyage, and because of the unfavorable stories we have heard of the _Warrimoo_. We leave Vancouver, and hosts of new friends, for Victoria, B.C., and then we part. That will not be easy, for we are all very happy. It makes my heart ache to see ‘Mark’ so downhearted after such continued success as he has had.

“On August 20th the boat for Victoria arrived half an hour late. We all hurried to get on board, only to be told by the captain that he had one hundred and eighty tons of freight to discharge, and that it would be four o’clock before we left. This lost our Victoria engagement, which I was obliged to postpone by telegraph. ‘Mark’ was not in condition to relish this news, and as he stood on the wharf after the ladies had gone aboard he took occasion to tell the captain, in very plain and unpious language, his opinion of a passenger-carrying company that, for a few dollars extra, would violate their contract and obligations to the public. They were a lot of ---- somethings, and deserved the penitentiary. The captain listened without response, but got very red in the face. It seems the ladies had overheard the loud talk. Soon after ‘Mark’ joined them he came to me and asked if I wouldn’t see that captain and apologize for his unmanly abuse, and see if any possible restitution could be made. I did so, and the captain and ‘Mark’ became quite friends.

“We left Vancouver on _The Charmer_ at six o’clock, arriving in Victoria a little after midnight.

* * * * *

“Wednesday, August 21st, Victoria, B.C.--The Driad.

“‘Mark’ has been in bed all day; he doesn’t seem to get strength. He smokes constantly, and I fear too much also; still, he may stand it. Physicians say it will eventually kill him.

“We had a good audience. Lord and Lady Aberdeen, who were in a box, came back on the stage after the lecture and said many very nice things of the entertainment, offering to write to friends-in Australia about it. ‘Mark’s’ voice began strong, but showed fatigue toward the last. His audience, which was one of the most appreciative he ever had, was in great sympathy with him as they realized the effort he was obliged to make, owing to his hoarseness.

“A telegram from Mr. George McL. Brown says the _Warrimoo_ will sail at six o’clock to-morrow evening. This is the last appearance of ‘Mark Twain’ in America for more than a year I know, and I much fear the very last, for it doesn’t seem possible that his physical strength can hold out. After the lecture to-night he expected to visit a club with Mr. Campbell, who did not come around. He and I, therefore, went out for a walk. He was tired and feeble, but did not want to go back to the hotel. He was nervous and weak, and disappointed, for he had expected to meet and entertain a lot of gentlemen. He and I are alike in one respect: we don’t relish disappointment.

* * * * *

“Thursday, August 22d.

“We are in Victoria yet. The blessed ‘tie that binds’ seems to be drawing tighter and tighter as the time for our final separation approaches. We shall never be happier in any combination, and Mrs. Clemens is the great magnet. What a noble woman she is! It is ‘Mark Twain’s’ wife who makes his works so great. She edits everything and brings purity, dignity, and sweetness to his writings. In ‘Joan of Arc’ I see Mrs. Clemens as much as ‘Mark Twain.’

* * * * *

“Friday, August 23d, Victoria.

“‘Mark’ and I were out all day getting books, cigars, and tobacco. He bought three thousand Manilla cheroots, thinking that with four pounds of Durham smoking tobacco he could make the three thousand cheroots last four weeks. If perpetual smoking ever kills a man, I don’t see how ‘Mark Twain’ can expect to escape. He and Mrs. Clemens, an old friend of ‘Mark’s’ and his wife, now living near here, went for a drive, and were out most of the day. This is remarkable for him. I never knew him to do such a thing before.

“The _Warrimoo_ arrived about one o’clock. We all went on board and lunched together for the last time. Mrs. Clemens is disappointed in the ship. The whole thing looks discouraging, and our hearts are almost broken with sympathy for her. She tells me she is going to brave it through, for she must do it. It is for her children. Our party got out on the deck of the _Warrimoo_, and Mr. W. G. Chase, a passenger, took a snapshot of our quintette. Then wife and I went ashore, and the old ship started across the Pacific Ocean with three of our most beloved friends on board. We waved to one another as long as they kept in sight.

“Before sailing ‘Mark Twain’ wrote a letter to the editor of the San Francisco _Examiner_, from which I quote:

“‘Now that I reflect, perhaps it is a little immodest in me to talk about my paying my debts, when by my own confession I am blandly getting ready to unload them on the whole English-speaking world. I didn’t think of that--well, no matter, so long as they are paid.

“‘Lecturing is gymnastics, chest-expander, medicine, mind healer, blues destroyer, all in one. I am twice as well as I was when I started out. I have gained nine pounds in twenty-eight days, and expect to weigh six hundred before January. I haven’t had a blue day in all the twenty-eight. My wife and daughter are accumulating health and strength and flesh nearly as fast as I am. When we reach home two years hence, we think we can exhibit as freaks.

“‘MARK TWAIN.

“‘Vancouver, B.C., August 15, 1895.”

* * * * *

On September 17, 1897, he wrote me from Weggis, Lake Lucerne:

“I feel quite sure that in Cape Town, thirteen months ago, I stood on a platform for the last time. Nothing but the Webster debts could persuade me to lecture again, and I have ceased to worry about those. You remember in the Sam Moffett interview in Vancouver, in 1895, I gave myself four years in which to make money enough to pay those debts--and that included two lecture seasons in America, one in England, and one around the world. But we are well satisfied now that we shall have those debts paid off a year earlier than the prophecy, if I continue able to work as I have been working in London and here, _and without any further help from the platform_. And so it is, as I said a moment ago, I am a cheerful man these days.”

In another letter he said: “I managed to pull through that long lecture campaign, but I was never very well, from the first night in Cleveland to the last one in Cape Town, and I found it pretty hard work on that account. I did a good deal of talking when I ought to have been in bed. At present I am not strong enough for platform work, and am not going to allow myself to think of London, or any other platform, for a long time to come. It grieves me, for I could make a satisfactory season in London and America now that I am practised in my trade again.”

On April 4, 1899, he wrote me from Vienna: “No; I don’t like lecturing. I lectured in Vienna two or three weeks ago, and in Budapest last week, but it was merely for fun, not for money. I charged nothing in Vienna, and only the family’s expenses in Budapest. I like to talk for nothing, about twice a year; but talking for money is _work_, and that takes the pleasure out of it. I do not believe you could offer me terms that would dissolve my prejudice against the platform. I do not expect to see a platform again until the wolf commands. Honest people do not go robbing the public on the platform, except when they are in debt. (Disseminate this idea; it can do good).”

In the autumn of 1895 I wanted him to give fifty lectures in England, but he thought it would not be worth his while. His book was the next thing to be thought of and planned for. Four years later, while he was in Sweden, I again suggested lecturing at a thousand dollars a night. “I think there’s stuff in ‘Following the Equator’ for a lecture, but I can’t come,” he wrote.

As a letter writer “Mark Twain” is inimitable. He writes with the same unconventionally with which he talks, and his letters are the man.

* * * * *

“DEAR POND:

“O, b’gosh, I can’t. I hate writing.

“Ever thine,

“‘MARK.’”

* * * * *

is characteristic. He is always humorous. Once he arranged for a donkey to be sent to the Elmira summer home for one of the children to ride. He acknowledged the receipt: “Much obliged, Homer, for the jackass. Tell Redpath I shall not want him now.” Of course the latter reference was to a business matter, but the conjunction was irresistible. In the autumn of 1899 he wrote to me: “I’m not going to barnstorm the platform any more, but I am glad you have corralled Howells. He’s a most sinful man, and I always knew God would send him to the platform if he didn’t behave.”

In another letter he writes: “Say! Some time ago I received notice that I had been elected honorary member of the ‘Society of Sons of Steerage Immigrants,’ and was told that Kipling, Hop Smith, and Nelson Page are officers of it. What right have they to belong? Ask Page or Smith about it.”

But it is not always fun. His business letters are clear and straightforward. He understood how to deal with his audiences and to meet requirements with the utmost honesty. But his “nerves” were readily worn out on the surface, and one of his horrors was delay in beginning and the late comers who always interrupt. He devised small programmes, printed on stiff card paper, so that they could neither be used as fans nor rustle, which is so annoying to a person on the platform. He and Cable were always friends, but the novelist never could resist the temptation to lengthen the reading of his selections, and this made a constant friction, because it necessarily curtailed the time left for “Mark,” sensitive ever to the obligation he felt to the audiences.

Throughout the scores of letters in my possession there are constant and charming references to his wife and children, unpremeditated in expression, and therefore the more valuable. His hospitable spirit is also as fully exhibited. He has the keenest sense of personal honor, as well as of his own rights.

I had received a letter from the Secretary of War notifying me that by order of the President a Congressional medal of honor had been presented to me for “most distinguished gallantry in action”--gallantry thirty-seven years ago. I was so proud that I wrote Mark about it. He wrote me from Austria, June 17, 1898, in reply:

* * * * *

“Keltenburgeben.

“DEAR POND: My, it’s a long jump from the time you played solitaire with your cannon! Yes, I should think you would want to go soldiering again. Old as I am, I want to go to the war myself. And I should do it, too, if it were not for the danger.

“To-day we ought to get great news from Cuba. I am watching for the Vienna evening papers. This is a good war with a dignified cause to fight for. A thing not to be said of the average war.”

* * * * *

“Mark Twain” eats only when he is hungry. I have known him to go days without eating a particle of food; at the same time he would be smoking constantly when he was not sleeping. He insisted that the stomach would call when in need, and it did. I have known him to sit for hours in a smoking car on a cold day, smoking his pipe and reading his German book with the window wide open. I said once: “Mark, do you know it’s a cold day and you are exposing yourself before that open window, and you are booked to lecture to-night?”

“I do--know--all--about it. I am letting some of God’s fresh air into my lungs for that purpose. My stomach is all right, and under these conditions I am not afraid of taking cold.”

“But,” said I, “the car is cold, and you are making the passengers uncomfortable by insisting on that window being wide open.”

“They deserve to be uncomfortable for not knowing how to live and take care of themselves.” He closed the window, however.

“Mark” seldom had a cold, and with the exception of carbuncles was never ill.

“Pudd’n Head Wilson” was first acted by Frank Mayo, of whom “Mark’s” appreciation was very sincere. While seeing the play for the first time, at the Herald Square Theatre, the audience discovered “Mark” in a box, and vociferously called: “Mark Twain! Mark Twain!” He rose up and said:

“I am sure I could say many complimentary things about this play which Mr. Mayo has written and about his portrayal of the chief character in it, and keep well within the bounds both of fact and of good taste; but I will limit myself to two or three. I do not know how to utter any higher praise than this: that when Mayo’s ‘Pudd’n Head’ walks this stage here, clothed in the charm of his gentle charities of speech, and acts the sweet simplicities and sincerities of his gracious nature, the thought in my mind is: ‘Why, bless your heart, you couldn’t be any dearer or lovelier or sweeter than you are without turning into that man whom all men love, and even Satan is fond of--Joe Jefferson.’”

In May, 1895, he wrote to me from Paris: “Frank Mayo has done a great thing for both of us; for he has proved himself a gifted dramatist as well as a gifted orator, and has enabled me to add another new character to American drama. I hope he will have grand success.”

The serious side of “Mark Twain” is shown in the following letter to a woman whose sister wished to go upon the lecture platform; this letter went the rounds of the press years ago, but it should be kept alive. I reproduce it, as it points a moral:

“I have seen it tried many and many a time. I have seen a lady lecturer urged upon the public in a lavishly complimentary document signed by Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and some others of supreme celebrity, but--there was nothing in her, and she failed. If there had been any great merit in her, she never would have needed those men’s help; and (at her rather mature age) would never have consented to ask it.

“There is an unwritten law about human successes, and your sister must bow to that law. She must submit to its requirements. In brief, this law is:

“1. No occupation without an apprenticeship.

“2. No pay to the apprentice.

“This law stands right in the way of the subaltern who wants to be a general before he has smelt powder; and it stands (and should stand) in everybody’s way who applies for pay and position before he has served his apprenticeship and proved himself.

“Your sister’s course is perfectly plain. Let her enclose this letter to Major J. B. Pond, Everett House, New York, and offer to lecture a year for $10 a week and her expenses, the contract to be annullable by him at any time after a month’s notice, but not annullable by her at all; the second year, he to have her services, if he wants them, at a trifle under the best price offered by anybody else.

“She can learn her trade in those two years, and then be entitled to remuneration; but she cannot learn it in any less time than that, unless she is a human miracle.

“Try it, and do not be afraid. It is the fair and right thing. If she wins, she will win squarely and righteously, and never have to blush.”

No man has ever written whose humor has so many sides, or such breadth and reach. His passages provoke the joyous laughter of young and old, of learned and unlearned, and may be read the hundredth time without losing, but rather multiplying, in power. Sentences and phrases that seem at first made only for the heartiest laughter, yield at closer view a sanity and wisdom that are good for the soul. He is also a wonderful story-teller. Thousands of people can bear testimony that the very humor which has made him known all over the world is oftentimes swept along like the débris of a freshet by the current of his fascinating narrative. His later works, like “The Yankee at King Arthur’s Court” and “Joan of Arc,” show that he has studied and apprehends also the great problems of modern life as well as those of history. Mark is personally as human as his humor; as tender and sensitive to the aspirations of the mind as in his daily living.

Business relations and travelling bring out the nature of a man. After my close relations with “Mark Twain” for sixteen years, I can say that he is not only what the world knows him to be, a humorist, a philosopher, and a genius, but a sympathetic, honest, brave gentleman.

* * * * *

MARK TWAIN and GEORGE W. CABLE travelled together one season. Twain and Cable, a colossal attraction, a happy combination! Mark owned the show, and paid Mr. Cable $600 a week and his travelling and hotel expenses. The manager took a percentage of the gross receipts for his services, and was to be sole manager. If he consulted the proprietor at all during the term of the agreement, said agreement became null and void.

These “twins of genius,” as I advertised them, were delightful company. Both were Southerners, born on the shores of the Mississippi River, and both sang well. Each was familiar with all the plantation songs and Mississippi River chanties of the negro, and they would often get to singing these together when by themselves, or with their manager for sole audience.

So delightful were these occasions, and so fond were they of embracing every private opportunity of “letting themselves out,” that I often instructed our carriage driver to take a long route between hotels and trains that I might have a concert which the public was never permitted to hear.

Mr. Cable’s singing of Creole songs was very charming and novel. They were so sweet, and he sang so beautifully, that everybody was charmed, it was all so simple, and quaint, and dignified.

* * * * *

“MARK TWAIN,” “NASBY,” AND “JOSH BILLINGS” happened to drop in at the Redpath Bureau in Boston at about the same time, one morning in 1873, after their return from lectures in nearby towns.

This conjunction of stars seemed hardly remarkable at that time, for in the palmy days of the lyceum in New England the parlor of the Redpath Bureau was a sort of club-room for men and women of letters, where they were accustomed to rendezvous in the morning after returning from some suburban lecturing engagement. I there met for the first time Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison, being introduced to them by Mr. James Redpath. I have heard Beecher, Phillips, and Garrison in many a delightful discussion of old times in these rooms. It was no uncommon occurrence for Anna Dickinson, Mrs. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and Miss Anthony to meet one another there.

But the morning that the three greatest humorists of the time met there, as they were talking, it occurred to me it would be an interesting souvenir to have a group photograph of them. So I said to them, “Gentlemen, if you will come down to Warren’s and sit for a photograph, I will pay for it.” My invitation seemed to have no effect until Mr. Redpath interceded. He was manager and owner of the bureau at the time, and on his invitation we all went to Warren’s, and they sat for the picture, which is here reproduced.

This picture has often been referred to as being in collections belonging to other friends of the distinguished humorists, but I hardly think any of them ever knew how it came to be taken.

There was a very large picture taken of the group at the same time, which was the private property of James Redpath and sold with his collection. I never knew where it went. I wish I could find it, for it was a fine photograph, and I should like to own it.

* * * * *

“MAX O’RELL” (Paul Blouet), that witty Frenchman, is the only professional humorist that I ever imported, and is one of the humorous lecturers who always score a “platform success.”

He has made three successful lecture tours in America. From Nova Scotia to New Orleans and from the Atlantic to the Pacific he has appeared in all the large cities, and the immense audiences that have welcomed him everywhere attest his success.