My Mark Twain | Page 3

family should
not be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be
after we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars,
and soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both
talked and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the
earth, and the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I
would come away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of
those locust- shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the
end of summer. Once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to
New York together, and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker
without passing a syllable till we had occasion to say, "Well, we're
there." Then, with our installation in a now vanished hotel (the old
Brunswick, to be specific), the talk began again with the inspiration of
the novel environment, and went on and on. We wished to be asleep,
but we could not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long
nightgown which he always wore in preference to the pajamas which
he despised, and told the story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy,
the Arabian Nights story, which I could never tire of even when it
began to be told over again. Or at times he would reason high--
"Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, Fixed fate, free will,
foreknowledge absolute,"
walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and
slant of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck
him.
He was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great
friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and at least tacitly far from the
entire negation he came to at last. I should say he had hardly yet
examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife's belief, for
it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful and

tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most
faithful soul. I make bold to speak of the love between them, because
without it I could not make him known to others as he was known to
me. It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their
wives, and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the
devotion, all the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty
of character. She was in a way the loveliest person I have ever seen, the
gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united
wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted
her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it. I am not sure that he
noticed all her goodness in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to
others, he so had the habit of her goodness; but if there was any forlorn
and helpless creature in the room Mrs. Clemens was somehow
promptly at his side or hers; she was always seeking occasion of
kindness to those in her household or out of it; she loved to let her heart
go beyond the reach of her hand, and imagined the whole hard and
suffering world with compassion for its structural as well as incidental
wrongs. I suppose she had her ladyhood limitations, her female fears of
etiquette and convention, but she did not let them hamper the wild and
splendid generosity with which Clemens rebelled against the social
stupidities and cruelties. She had been a lifelong invalid when he met
her, and he liked to tell the beautiful story of their courtship to each
new friend whom he found capable of feeling its beauty or worthy of
hearing it. Naturally, her father had hesitated to give her into the
keeping of the young strange Westerner, who had risen up out of the
unknown with his giant reputation of burlesque humorist, and
demanded guaranties, demanded proofs. "He asked me," Clemens
would say, "if I couldn't give him the names of people who knew me in
California, and when it was time to hear from them I heard from him.
'Well, Mr. Clemens,' he said, 'nobody seems to have a very good word
for you.' I hadn't referred him to people that I thought were going to
whitewash me. I thought it was all up with me, but I was disappointed.
'So I guess I shall have to back you myself.'"
Whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put in him I cannot say,
but probably not; it was always in him to be faithful to any trust, and in
proportion as a trust of his own was