My Mark Twain | Page 2

Keeler, author of one of the most unjustly forgotten
books, 'Vagabond Adventures', a true bit of picaresque autobiography.
Keeler never had any money, to the general knowledge, and he never
borrowed, and he could not have had credit at the restaurant where he
invited us to feast at his expense. There was T. B. Aldrich, there was J.
T. Fields, much the oldest of our company, who had just freed himself
from the trammels of the publishing business, and was feeling his
freedom in every word; there was Bret Harte, who had lately come East
in his princely progress from California; and there was Clemens.
Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and
aimless and joyful talk-play, beginning and ending nowhere, of eager
laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning
shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional concentration of our
joint mockeries upon our host, who took it gladly; and amid the
discourse, so little improving, but so full of good fellowship, Bret
Harte's fleeting dramatization of Clemens's mental attitude toward a
symposium of Boston illuminates. "Why, fellows," he spluttered, "this
is the dream of Mark's life," and I remember the glance from under
Clemens's feathery eyebrows which betrayed his enjoyment of the fun.
We had beefsteak with mushrooms, which in recognition of their shape
Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the feast we had an omelette
souse, which the waiter brought in as flat as a pancake, amid our shouts
of congratulations to poor Keeler, who took them with appreciative
submission. It was in every way what a Boston literary lunch ought not
to have been in the popular ideal which Harte attributed to Clemens.
Our next meeting was at Hartford, or, rather, at Springfield, where
Clemens greeted us on the way to Hartford. Aldrich was going on to be
his guest, and I was going to be Charles Dudley Warner's, but Clemens

had come part way to welcome us both. In the good fellowship of that
cordial neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer
shines on in his round. There was constant running in and out of
friendly houses where the lively hosts and guests called one another by
their Christian names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as
knocking or ringing at doors. Clemens was then building the stately
mansion in which he satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been
another sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which
enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance. The house was the
design of that most original artist, Edward Potter, who once, when hard
pressed by incompetent curiosity for the name of his style in a certain
church, proposed that it should be called the English violet order of
architecture; and this house was so absolutely suited to the owner's
humor that I suppose there never was another house like it; but its
character must be for recognition farther along in these reminiscences.
The vividest impression which Clemens gave us two ravenous young
Boston authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of
subscription publication. An army of agents was overrunning the
country with the prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the
scores of thousands in completed sale. Of the 'Innocents Abroad' he
said, "It sells right along just like the Bible," and 'Roughing It' was
swiftly following, without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity.
But he lectured Aldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication
in the trade which we had thought it the highest success to achieve a
chance in. "Anything but subscription publication is printing for private
circulation," he maintained, and he so won upon our greed and hope
that on the way back to Boston we planned the joint authorship of a
volume adapted to subscription publication. We got a very good name
for it, as we believed, in Memorable Murders, and we never got farther
with it, but by the time we reached Boston we were rolling in wealth so
deep that we could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we
still thought it best to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of
even in that opulence.

III.

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