Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  A Mr. Scott was Webster’s bookkeeper. Back in the summer, when the subscription money had begun to pour in in a great and steady stream of bank-bills, sent by express, Webster told me he was suspicious of Scott and was going to lay a trap for him. He was going to pass some marked bank notes through his hands and see if they would stick.

  Saturday, June 2, 1906

  Examination of the books and punishment of Scott, who had stolen twenty-six thousand dollars—Webster refuses books which Mr. Clemens wishes published and accepts worthless ones—Finally he takes drugs, and Mr. Clemens buys him out—He is succeeded by Hall—Webster accepted Stedman’s “Library of American Literature” which caused the firm to fail—Mr. Clemens starts on his lecturing tour around the world and in thirteen months pays off all his indebtedness—J. W. Paige, and the type-setting machine.

  I suspected that that bookkeeper, Scott, was going to have an uncomfortable time. Whenever Webster got a fellow human being by the scruff of the neck, so to speak—a human being who was helpless, a human being who could be strangled without in any way endangering the strangler—the strangulation was exceedingly likely to ensue.

  Charles L. Webster was one of the most assful persons I have ever met—perhaps the most assful. The times when he had an opportunity to be an ass and failed to take advantage of it were so few that, in a monarchy, they would have entitled him to a decoration. The thing which he had proposed concerning Scott—the laying of the time-worn trap in the form of marked money—was a good common-sense idea, and as it offered Webster a chance to play detective, and snoop and spy around and catch somebody committing sin, I expected him to set that project in operation at once. He was very fond of detective work. There wasn’t a detective in America—at least a distinguished one—that knew less about it than Webster did. He was about on a level with Sherlock Holmes.

  Webster did not set the trap—why he didn’t is beyond my guess. His suspicions had not been removed. They continued alive. As the months went by, rumors floated over from Jersey to the effect that Scott was become a very fast and very popular young man in his town; that he was starting social clubs of various kinds and making himself useful to them as manager or director or president, and so on; that he was the life and soul of these clubs; that he was a valuable supporter of the livery stables; that the life he was leading was an expensive one—for him, or for somebody—but a profitable one for his community.

  Three or four months after Webster had proposed to set that trap the time came for an examination of the books by expert accountants, in the interest of Mrs. Grant. Webster ordered the examination. The experts came, and Scott lavished his assistance upon them. He got out the books and spread them open. He would fetch a sweep down a column in the journal, point to the total at the bottom, skip to the ledger, show that the total in the ledger tallied with the total in the journal. The whole examination was over in a little while. The experts went away satisfied. Webster was satisfied—and as for Scott, he was probably something more than satisfied.

  But Fred Grant was not satisfied. He had heard those rumors. By the authority in him vested as representative of three-fourths of the partnership in the book, he ordered another examination, without giving any notice of it. He selected the expert accountants himself, and they stepped into Scott’s domain armed and equipped for business, and unexpected. They called for the books. Scott bustled around, got them out, as before, began as before to sweep his finger down a journal column and then show the accountant that the journal and the ledger tallied. But he got in only one sample of his help. The expert coldly explained to him that he knew how to examine books and didn’t need the assistance of a bookkeeper who was personally interested in the examination.

  Webster was looking on. He said that the color went out of poor Scott’s face, and he looked very sick. He excused himself from further attendance—said he would go home and lie down. The expert found that Scott had stolen twenty-six thousand dollars. Webster and the other tadpole, Whitford, were now in a high state of excitement and effectiveness. Whitford set himself the task of fetching Scott before the grand jury, with the idea of hanging him, which couldn’t be done for that kind of an offence, but Whitford didn’t know it. Webster set himself the task of finding out what sort of a record lay back of Scott—a thing which he might better have done before he hired him. But, as I have said, Webster was one of the most assful persons I have ever known. He got at Scott’s record without any difficulty. It was easy to trace him from employment to employment. In fact you could trace him from one employment to the next by the stolen money which he had dripped along the road. Poor Scott was sent to the penitentiary for five years—or nine—I don’t remember which. It was another instance of sending up the wrong man. It ought to have been Webster.

  Webster had been hating me pretty venomously on account of the sarcasms which I had tried to entertain him with at the time that he hired his fine new quarters in Union Square. His detestation of me had solidified and become permanent and insoluble when the latest contract had made him master and me his slave. I was not able to understand why he had not hunted Scott down when he first suspected him, for that was his nature. In trying to solve the riddle I arrived at the charitable conclusion that Webster was willing to have the concern robbed because it cost me nine dollars where it cost him one. I have always been charitable in my judgments of people, and that was my guess as an explanation of Webster’s long continued indifference in the Scott matter. There seemed evidence that that might be the explanation, when the matter used to cross my mind in later times. For instance, whereas the book had been distributed among the group of regular general agents, here and there, in great centres of population throughout the country, we had reserved the New York general agency for ourselves. It was a matter quite easily handled, and was worth to us a profit of thirty thousand dollars. By and by Webster, as autocrat, and without consulting me, generously gave the whole profit of this general agency to the Grants, not even requiring them to pay part of the salaries and other general agency expenses. I think he was willing to stand his three-thousand-dollar part of the sacrifice so long as I had to stand twenty-seven thousand—besides he might find some way to recoup, whereas I couldn’t.

  Three-fourths of the twenty-six thousand dollars stolen by Scott had to be made good to the Grants, since the money was taken after it was already in our possession. This expense had been put upon us by Webster’s stupidity and mismanagement, but that did not discourage him from appealing to me beseechingly and tearfully to pay to him his share of that loss out of my pocket. He had originally been intended for a mendicant, and he knew the trade by instinct. He could beg like a professional. I am the most assful person I have ever been acquainted with, and I granted his prayer, although I was not able to see how his tenth of the deficit of eighteen or nineteen thousand dollars could amount to four thousand. But apparently it did. He was a master hand at figures when he was figuring for C.L. Webster.

  In the early days, when the general agents were being chosen, he conferred one of the best western general agencies upon an ex-preacher, a professional revivalist whom God had deposited in Iowa for improprieties of one kind and another which had been committed by that State. All the other candidates for agencies warned Webster to keep out of that man’s hands, assuring him that no sagacities of Whitford, or anybody else, would be able to defeat that revivalist’s inborn proclivity to steal. Their persuasions went for nothing. Webster gave him the agency. We furnished him the books. He did a thriving trade. He collected a gross sum of thirty-six thousand dollars, and Webster never got a cent of it.

  It is no great marvel to me that Mrs. Grant got a matter of half a million dollars out of that book. The miracle is that it didn’t run her into debt. It was fortunate for her that we had only one Webster. It was an unnatural oversight in me that I didn’t hunt for another one.

  Let me try to bring this painful business to a close. One of the things which poisoned Webster’s days and nights was the
aggravating circumstance that whereas he, Charles L. Webster, was the great publisher—the greatest of publishers—and my name did not appear anywhere as a member of the firm, the public persisted in regarding me as the substance of that firm and Webster the shadow. Everybody who had a book to publish offered it to me, not to Webster. I accepted several excellent books, but Webster declined them every time, and he was master. But if anybody offered him a book, he was so charmed with the compliment that he took the book without examining it. He was not able to get hold of one that could make its living.

  Joe Jefferson wrote me and said he had written his autobiography and he would like me to be the publisher. Of course I wanted the book. I sent his letter to Webster and asked him to arrange the matter. Webster did not decline the book. He simply ignored it, and brushed the matter out of his mind. He accepted and published two or three war books that furnished no profit. He accepted still another one: distributed the agency contracts for it, named its price (three dollars and a half in cloth) and also agreed to have the book ready by a certain date, two or three months ahead. One day I went down to New York and visited the office and asked for a sight of that book. I asked Webster how many thousand words it contained. He said he didn’t know. I asked him to count the words, by rough estimate. He did it. I said,

  “It doesn’t contain words enough for the price and dimensions, by four-fifths. You will have to pad it with a brick. We must start a brickyard, and right away, because it is much cheaper to make bricks than it is to buy them in the market.”

  It set him in a fury. Any little thing like that would have that effect. He was one of the most sensitive creatures I ever saw, for the quality of the material that he was made of.

  He had several books on hand—worthless books which he had accepted because they had been offered to him instead of to me—and I found that he had never counted the words in any of them. He had taken them without examination. Webster was a good general agent, but he knew nothing about publishing, and he was incapable of learning anything about it. By and by I found that he had agreed to resurrect Henry Ward Beecher’s “Life of Christ.” I suggested that he ought to have tried for Lazarus, because that had been tried once and we knew it could be done. He was exasperated again. He certainly was the most sensitive creature that ever was, for his make. He had also advanced to Mr. Beecher, who was not in prosperous circumstances at the time, five thousand dollars on the future royalties. Mr. Beecher was to revamp the book—or rather I think he was to finish the book. I think he had just issued the first of the two volumes of which it was to consist when that ruinous scandal broke out and suffocated the enterprise. I think the second volume had not been written, and that Mr. Beecher was now undertaking to write it. If he failed to accomplish this within a given time he was to return the money. He did not succeed, and the money was eventually returned.

  Webster kept back a book of mine, “A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur,” as long as he could, and finally published it so surreptitiously that it took two or three years to find out that there was any such book. He suppressed a compilation made by Howells and me, “The Library of Humor,” so long, and finally issued it so clandestinely, that I doubt if anybody in America ever did find out that there was such a book.

  William M. Laffan told me that Mr. Walters, of Baltimore, was going to have a sumptuous book made which should illustrate in detail his princely art collection; that he was going to bring the best artists from Paris to make the illustrations; that he was going to make the book himself and see to it that it was made exactly to his taste; that he was going to spend a quarter of a million dollars on it; that he wanted it issued at a great price—a price consonant with its sumptuous character, and that he wanted no penny of the proceeds. The publisher would have nothing to do but distribute the book and take the whole of the profit. Laffan said,

  “There, Mark, you can make a fortune out of that without any trouble at all, and without risk or expense.”

  I said I would send Webster down to Baltimore at once. I tried to do it, but I never succeeded. Webster never touched the matter in any way whatever. If it had been a second-hand dog that Mr. Walters wanted published, he would have only needed to apply to Webster. Webster would have broken his neck getting down to Baltimore to annex that dog. But Mr. Walters had applied to the wrong man. Webster’s pride was hurt, and he would not look at Mr. Walters’s book. Webster had immense pride, but he was short of other talents.

  Webster was the victim of a cruel neuralgia in the head. He eased his pain with the new German drug, phenacetine. The physicians limited his use of it, but he found a way to get it in quantity: under our free institutions anybody can poison himself that wants to and will pay the price. He took this drug with increasing frequency and in increasing quantity. It stupefied him and he went about as one in a dream. He ceased from coming to the office except at intervals, and when he came he was pretty sure to exercise his authority in ways perilous for the business. In his condition, he was not responsible for his acts.

  Something had to be done. Whitford explained that there was no way to get rid of this dangerous element except by buying Webster out. But what was there to buy? Webster had always promptly collected any money that was due him. He had squandered, long ago, my share of the book’s profit—a hundred thousand dollars. The business was gasping, dying. The whole of it was not worth a dollar and a half. Then what would be a fair price for me to pay for a tenth interest in it? After much consultation and much correspondence, it transpired that Webster would be willing to put up with twelve thousand dollars and step out. I furnished the check.

  Webster’s understudy and business manager had now been for some time a young fellow named Frederick J. Hall, another Dunkirk importation. We got all our talent from that stud-farm at Dunkirk. Poor Hall meant well, but he was wholly incompetent for the place. He carried it along for a time with the heroic hopefulness of youth, but there was an obstruction which was bound to defeat him sooner or later. It was this:

  Stedman, the poet, had made a compilation, several years earlier, called “The Library of American Literature”—nine or ten octavo volumes. A publisher in Cincinnati had tried to make it succeed. It swallowed up that publisher, family and all. If Stedman had offered me the book I should have said “Sold by subscription and on the instalment plan, there is nothing in this book for us at a royalty above 4 per cent, but, in fact, it would swamp us at any kind of royalty, because such a book would require a cash capital of several hundred thousand dollars, and we haven’t a hundred thousand.”

  But Stedman didn’t bring the book to me. He took it to Webster. Webster was delighted and flattered. He accepted the book on an 8 per cent royalty, and thereby secured the lingering suicide of Charles L. Webster and Company. We struggled along two or three years under that deadly load. After Webster’s time, poor little Hall struggled along with it and got to borrowing money of a bank in which Whitford was a director—borrowing on notes endorsed by me and renewed from time to time. These notes used to come to me in Italy for renewals. I endorsed them without examining them, and sent them back. At last I found that additions had been made to the borrowings, without my knowledge or consent. I began to feel troubled. I wrote Mr. Hall about it and said I would like to have an exhaustive report of the condition of the business. The next mail brought that exhaustive report, whereby it appeared that the concern’s assets exceeded its liabilities by ninety-two thousand dollars. Then I felt better. But there was no occasion to feel better, for the report ought to have read the other way. Poor Hall soon wrote to say that we needed more money and must have it right away, or the concern would fail.

  I sailed for New York. I emptied into the till twenty-four thousand dollars which I had earned with the pen. I looked around to see where we could borrow money. There wasn’t any place. This was in the midst of the fearful panic of ’93. I went up to Hartford to borrow—couldn’t borrow a penny. I offered to mortgage our house and grounds and furniture for any small loan. T
he property had cost a hundred and sixty-seven thousand dollars, and seemed good for a small loan. Henry Robinson said,

  “Clemens, I give you my word, you can’t borrow three thousand dollars on that property.”

  Very well, I knew that if that was so, I couldn’t borrow it on a basketful of government bonds. Webster and Company failed. The firm owed me about sixty thousand dollars, borrowed money. It owed Mrs. Clemens sixty-five thousand dollars, borrowed money. Also it owed ninety-six creditors an average of a thousand dollars or so apiece. The panic had stopped Mrs. Clemens’s income. It had stopped my income from my books. We had but nine thousand dollars in the bank. We hadn’t a penny wherewith to pay the Webster creditors. Henry Robinson said,

  “Hand over everything belonging to Webster and Company to the creditors, and ask them to accept that in liquidation of the debts. They’ll do it. You’ll see that they’ll do it. They are aware that you are not individually responsible for those debts, that the responsibility rests upon the firm as a firm.”

  I didn’t think much of that way out of the difficulty, and when I made my report to Mrs. Clemens she wouldn’t hear of it at all. She said,

  “This is my house. The creditors shall have it. Your books are your property—turn them over to the creditors. Reduce the indebtedness in every way you can think of—then get to work and earn the rest of the indebtedness, if your life is spared. And don’t be afraid. We shall pay a hundred cents on the dollar, yet.”

  It was sound prophecy. Mr. Rogers stepped in, about this time, and preached to the creditors. He said they could not have Mrs. Clemens’s house—that she must be a preferred creditor, and would give up the Webster notes for sixty-five thousand dollars, money borrowed of her. He said they could not have my books; that they were not an asset of Webster and Company; that the creditors could have everything that belonged to Webster and Company; that I would wipe from the slate the sixty thousand dollars I had lent to the Company, and that I would now make it my task to earn the rest of the Webster indebtedness, if I could, and pay a hundred cents on the dollar—but that this must not be regarded as a promise.