My Mark Twain | Page 9

us. I must say he did them very well, quite as well as Raymond could
have done them, in whose manner he did them. But now, late toward
spring, the question was where he could get an engagement with the
play, and we ended by hiring a theatre in New York for a week of trial
performances.
Clemens came on with me to Boston, where we were going to make
some changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction,
but not to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft.
He went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and "in
visions of the night, in slumberings upon the bed," ghastly forms of
failure appalled me, and when I rose in the morning I wrote him: "Here
is a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every
actor known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an
elocutioner. We are fools." Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in
my conclusion, he agreed with me in my premises, and we promptly
bought our play off the stage at a cost of seven hundred dollars, which
we shared between us. But Clemens was never a man to give up. I
relinquished gratis all right and title I had in the play, and he paid its
entire expenses for a week of one-night stands in the country. It never
came to New York; and yet I think now that if it had come, it would
have succeeded. So hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist in
his work die.

VII.
There is an incident of this time so characteristic of both men that I will
yield to the temptation of giving it here. After I had gone to Hartford in
response to Clemens's telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in Boston,
and one of my family called on his, to explain why I was not at home to
receive his introduction: I had gone to see Mark Twain. "Oh, but he
doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?" "He likes Mr. Clemens very
much," my representative answered, "and he thinks him one of the
greatest men he ever knew." I was still Clemens's guest at Hartford
when Arnold came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet him
at a reception. While his hand laxly held mine in greeting, I saw his
eyes fixed intensely on the other side of the room. "Who-who in the
world is that?" I looked and said, "Oh, that is Mark Twain." I do not
remember just how their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold's
wish, but I have the impression that they were not parted for long
during the evening, and the next night Arnold, as if still under the
glamour of that potent presence, was at Clemens's house. I cannot say
how they got on, or what they made of each other; if Clemens ever
spoke of Arnold, I do not recall what he said, but Arnold had shown a
sense of him from which the incredulous sniff of the polite world, now
so universally exploded, had already perished. It might well have done
so with his first dramatic vision of that prodigious head. Clemens was
then hard upon fifty, and he had kept, as he did to the end, the slender
figure of his youth, but the ashes of the burnt-out years were beginning
to gray the fires of that splendid shock of red hair which he held to the
height of a stature apparently greater than it was, and tilted from side to
side in his undulating walk. He glimmered at you from the narrow slits
of fine blue-greenish eyes, under branching brows, which with age
grew more and more like a sort of plumage, and he was apt to smile
into your face with a subtle but amiable perception, and yet with a sort
of remote absence; you were all there for him, but he was not all there
for you.

VIII.

I shall, not try to give chronological order to my recollections of him,
but since I am just now with him in Hartford I will speak of him in
association with the place. Once when I came on from Cambridge he
followed me to my room to see that the water was not frozen in my
bath, or something of the kind, for it was very cold weather, and then
hospitably lingered. Not to lose time in banalities I began at once from
the thread of thought in my mind. "I wonder why we hate the past so,"
and he responded from the depths of his own consciousness, "It's so
damned humiliating," which is what any man would say