by Mark Twain
Carbuncles have families, when they are treated by bunglers. Mine’s first son was born at sea and was lanced in Sydney. The second son was born in Melbourne, but there was a real doctor there—Fitz Gerald—a doctor with an immense practice, and he said he would cure it in twenty-four hours. He kept his word; also, he taught us his art, and we squelched the rest of the family, one by one, as they arrived. Only one of them lasted two days. The carbuncle-expert of Elmira charged me $135 for half-curing one carbuncle. If I had not been obliged to leave on the lecture-tour he would be propagating that one’s posterity to this day.
That Elmira leech knew that I had fallen heir to a heavy debt, and was starting on a year’s journey around the globe to lecture it off and set myself free, but that did not move him to spare me when he had a chance to afflict me with social calls and charge pirate-rates for them. I resolved that I would never again sit in the Sunday school that he superintended, and I have kept my word to this day. However, I was never in it anyway.
It is a bad business to get the habit of getting sick. You will find it hard to break. From my seventh year to my fifty-sixth I had had the habit of being well—I had hardly known what sickness was, in all that time. Then the change came. We were living in Berlin. On a very cold winter’s night I lectured for the benefit of an English or American church-charity in a hall that was as hot as the Hereafter. On my way home, I froze. I spent thirty-four days in bed, with congestion of the wind’ard lung. That was the beginning. That lung has remained in a damaged condition ever since. Whenever I catch a cold in the head it descends at once to the bronchial tubes, and I have to send for the medical plumber. That is, I used to do that, but when I found out at last that to relieve it, modify it, shorten its stay or cure it were all beyond his art, I ceased from calling him and allowed the cough to bark itself out at its leisure and perish of fatigue. Its term is six weeks, under these conditions. Before giving up, I experimented with ten physicians in different parts of the world.
In the beginning of ’96 I caught a cold in Ceylon, and by the time we reached Bombay, a few days later, my tubes were in bad shape and I sent for the plumber. He bore the great name of Sidney Smith. I took his dreadful medicine seven days, with no improvement, then I discharged him. He charged me double price per visitation because I was not a resident. It was the custom, I was told. I thought it would have been as rational to charge me double because I was a Presbyterian. I paid half the bill.
I barked at audiences all about India for six weeks, then the cough expired by statute of limitation. I had attacks in London, later. The first doctor (Parsons), soon confessed that he was making no progress with the case, and retired from the struggle with honor; the other one (Ogilvie), probably concluded before long, that the case was beyond his science, for he stopped bothering with it, but came every day and told ancient anecdotes for an hour and enjoyed them—I could see it. I was deceived again; I took these wearisome afflictions for social calls, and forebore to protect myself. But at last I saw that in my weak state the burden of his society was a positive danger, so I pulled the remains of my resolution together and discharged him. He charged full rates for all those visits, whereas he knew quite well that to collect on a full half of them was plain dishonesty.
This text survives in an untitled 1906 typescript made by Josephine Hobby, now in the Mark Twain Papers. Hobby copied an earlier typescript, now lost, created by Jean Clemens from Isabel Lyon’s notes of Clemens’s original dictation in April 1904, and Clemens briefly revised and corrected Hobby’s copy. It is the only one of the six known Florentine dictations that Clemens did not include in his final text for the autobiography (see the Introduction, note 55).
Clemens’s friendship with multimillionaire Henry Huttleston Rogers (1840–1909), vice-president of Standard Oil, began in the fall of 1893, when Clemens’s publishing firm, Charles L. Webster and Company, was close to financial collapse. Rogers became Clemens’s financial adviser and provided the funds needed to keep the company afloat, at least temporarily. The firm nevertheless declared bankruptcy in April 1894, but not before Rogers arranged for the transfer of all Clemens’s assets, including the copyright on his books, to Olivia Clemens, on the grounds that she was owed more than $60,000 by the bankrupt firm.
Clemens created the dictation at a time when Olivia was quite ill and Rogers had just recently been very publicly sued for several million dollars by the Bay State Gas Company. After Rogers’s death Clemens wrote, “I am grateful to his memory for many a kindness and many a good service he did me, but gratefulest of all for the saving of my copyrights; a service which saved me and my family from want, and assured us permanent comfort and prosperity” (SLC 1909b; see also AD, 26 May 1906; HHR, 10–26, 42–43; “Mark Twain’s Company in Trouble,” New York Times, 19 Apr 1894, 9).
Paine published the dictation under the title he gave it, “Henry H. Rogers,” but without the article from the Boston Sunday Post that Clemens instructed be reproduced at the end, and he also joined it with the later manuscript about Rogers (SLC 1909b; MTA, 1:250–56). Neider declined to include any part of this text.
[Henry H. Rogers]
1893–1904
Florence. Spring of 1904. (April.)
Mr. Rogers has been visiting the witness stand periodically in Boston for more than a year now. For eleven years he has been my closest and most valuable friend. His wisdom and steadfastness saved my copyrights from being swallowed up in the wreck and ruin of Charles L. Webster and Co., and his commercial wisdom has protected my pocket ever since in those lucid intervals wherein I have been willing to listen to his counsels and abide by his advice—a thing which I do half the time and half the time I don’t.
He is four years my junior; he is young in spirit, and in looks, complexion and bearing, easy and graceful in his movements, kind-hearted, attractive, winning, a natural gentleman, the best bred gentleman I have met on either side of the ocean in any rank of life from the Kaiser of Germany down to the boot-black. He is affectionate, endowed with a fine quality of humor, and with his intimates he is a charming comrade. I am his principal intimate and that is my idea of him. His mind is a bewildering spectacle to me when I see it dealing with vast business complexities like the affairs of the prodigious Standard Oil Trust, the United States Steel and the rest of the huge financial combinations of our time—for he and his millions are in them all, and his brain is a very large part of the machinery which keeps them alive and going. Many a time in the past eleven years my small and troublesome affairs have forced me to spend days and weeks of waiting-time down in the city of New York, and my waiting-refuge has been his private office in the Standard Oil Building, stretched out on a sofa behind his chair, observing his processes, smoking, reading, listening to his reasonings with the captains of industry and intruding advice where it was not invited, not desired and in no instance adopted so far as I remember. A patient man, I can say that for him.
This private office was a spacious high-ceiled chamber on the eleventh floor of the Standard Oil Building, with large windows which looked out upon the moving life of the river with the Colossus of Liberty enlightening the world holding up her torch in the distance. When I was not there it was a solitude, since in those intervals no one occupied the place except Mr. Rogers and his brilliant private secretary, Miss Katharine I. Harrison, who he once called in on an emergency thirteen or fourteen years ago from among the seven hundred and fifty clerks laboring for the Standard Oil in the building. She was nineteen or twenty years old then and did stenographic work and typewriting at the wage of that day which was fifteen or twenty dollars a week. He has a sharp eye for capacity and after trying Miss Harrison for a week he promoted her to the post of chief of his private secretaries and raised her wages. She has held the post ever since; she has seen the building double its size and increase its clerical servants to fifteen hundred and her own salary climb to ten thousand dollars a year. She is the only private secretary who sits in the sanctum, the others are in the next room a
nd come at the bell call. Miss Harrison is alert, refined, well read in the good literature of the day, is fond of paintings and buys them, she is a cyclopedia in whose head is written down the multitudinous details of Mr. Rogers’s business, order and system are a native gift with her, Mr. Rogers refers to her as he would to a book and she responds with the desired information with a book’s confidence and accuracy. Several times I have heard Mr. Rogers say that she is quite able to conduct his affairs, substantially, without his help.
Necessarily Mr. Rogers’s pecuniary aid was sought by his full share of men and women without capital who had ideas for sale—ideas worth millions if their exploitation could be put in charge of the right man. Mr. Rogers’s share of these opportunities was so large that if he had received and conversed with all his applicants of that order he might have made many millions per hour it is true but he would not have had half an hour left in the day for his own business. He could not see all of these people, therefore he saw none of them, for he was a fair and just man. For his protection, his office was a kind of fortress with outworks, these outworks being several communicating rooms into which no one could get access without first passing through an outwork where several young colored men stood guard and carried in the cards and requests and brought back the regrets. Three of the communicating rooms were for consultations, and they were seldom unoccupied. Men sat in them waiting—men who were there by appointment—appointments not loosely specified but specified by the minute hand of the clock. These rooms had ground glass doors, and their privacy was in other ways protected and secured. Mr. Rogers consulted with a good many men in those rooms in the course of his day’s work of six hours; and whether the matter in hand was small and simple or great and complicated it was discussed and despatched with marvelous celerity. Every day these consultations supplied a plenty of vexations and exasperations for Mr. Rogers—I know this quite well—but if ever they found revealment in his face or manner it could have been for only a moment or two for the signs were gone when he re-entered his private office and he was always his brisk and cheerful self again and ready to be chaffed and joked, and reply in kind. His spirit was often heavily burdened, necessarily, but it cast no shadow, and those about him sat always in the sunshine.
Sometimes the value of his securities went down by the million day after day, sometimes they went up as fast, but no matter which it was the face and bearing exhibited by him were only proper to a rising market. Several times every day Miss Harrison had to act in a diplomatic capacity. Men called whose position in the world was such that they could not be dismissed with the formula “engaged” along with Mr. Rogers’s regrets, and to these Miss Harrison went out and explained, pleasantly and tactfully, and sent them away comfortable. Mr. Rogers transacted a vast amount of business during his six hours daily, but there always seemed time enough in the six hours for it.
That Boston Gas lawsuit came on at a bad time for Mr. Rogers, for his health was poor and remained so during several months. Every now and then he had to stay in his country house at Fairhaven, Mass., a week or two at a time, leaving his business in Miss Harrison’s hands and conferring with her once or twice daily by long distance telephone. To prepare himself for the witness stand was not an easy thing, but the materials for it were to be had, for Mr. Rogers never destroyed a piece of paper that had writing on it and as he was a methodical man he had ways of tracing out any paper he needed no matter how old it might be. The papers needed in the gas suit, wherein Mr. Rogers was sued for several millions of dollars, went back in date a good many years and were numberable by the hundreds; but Miss Harrison ferreted them all out from the stacks and bales of documents in the Standard Oil vaults and caused them to be listed and annotated by the other secretaries. This work cost weeks of constant labor, but it left Mr. Rogers in shape to establish for himself an unsurpassable reputation as a witness.
I wish to make a momentary digression here and call up an illustration of what I have been saying about Mr. Rogers’s habits in the matter of order and system. When he was a young man of twenty-four out in the oil regions of Pennsylvania and straitened in means he had some business relations with another young man; time went on, they separated and lost sight of each other. After a lapse of twenty years this man’s card came in one day, and Mr. Rogers had him brought into the private office. The man showed age, his clothes showed that he was not prosperous, and his speech and manner indicated that hard luck had soured him toward the world and the Fates. He brought a bill against Mr. Rogers, oral in form, for fifteen hundred dollars—a bill thirty years old. Mr. Rogers drew the check and gave it to him, saying he could not allow him to lose it though he almost deserved to lose it for risking the claim thirty years without presenting it. When he was gone Mr. Rogers said,
“My memory is better than his; I paid the money at the time; knowing this, I know I took a receipt although I do not remember that detail. To satisfy myself that I have not been careless, I will have that receipt searched out.”
It took a day or two, but it was found, and I saw it, then it was sent back to its place again amongst the archives.
Here follows that Boston sketch.
PEN PICTURES OF THE BIG STANDARD OIL
MILLIONAIRE, H. H. ROGERS, AS HE APPEARED
DURING THE PRESENT GAS HEARING
Boston has had the unique experience of having on the witness stand in court one of the wealthiest and brainiest men in this country, a man in the charmed inner circle of the very inner circle of the little ring of financial giants that make up the most powerful aggregation of wealth in this country. It has seen him for four days probed with an incessant volley of questions by one of the ablest lawyers in the Commonwealth and it saw him step off the witness stand at the end as calm and serene and unruffled, and fresh and vigorous, as though he were two score of years younger than he is, and as though he had just finished a pleasure trip on his yacht, instead of having passed through what to most men would be an extremely trying ordeal.
And for verbal fencing, Henry H. Rogers showed that he, by replies that were as quick as a flash and as impenetrable as adamant, is entitled to wear a crown of superiority over any witness examined in Massachusetts for many a day.
When he had finished the court had gleaned precious little about the case beyond what it had already learned from Mr. Winsor, except for Mr. Rogers’ version of the famous telephone conversation with Mr. Lawson, and that certainly is interesting, in view of the fact that Mr. Lawson’s understanding seems to have been quite different from Mr. Rogers’, this difference apparently throwing a sidelight upon the present relations between the two men that is interesting, to say the least.
It is reported that Mr. Whipple, keen as he is, unrelenting in his pursuit of a fact, acknowledges that Mr. Rogers was the best fencer he ever met in his legal career. That he was enough for Mr. Whipple, sometimes a little too much, was the general opinion of those who saw the two cross swords.
Mr. Rogers was ill soon after he came to Boston. Our east wind, or the smell of escaping gas with the lid partially off, or something else, was too much for him, and he took to his humble bed in Boston’s Waldorf-Astoria, or the nearest thing to it that the Hub possesses. There were some people who thought that meant that he was going to dodge, that he would be too ill to testify and leave Boston in the lurch, just as a famous operatic star or an actress sometimes does. But the people who knew him said: “No, Mr. Rogers is no dodger; he is a fighter in the heavyweight championship class, and he will see it through.” And he did.
One afternoon Mr. Winsor, after some 10 trying days on the witness stand, answered his last question, smiled his last smile to the court and spectators and stepped down.
The next morning a few “supes” and players of minor parts came on and did their little turn. Then a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman, one bearing the mark of a leader among men, took the centre of the stage, the witness box. For the first time the crowd in the court room got a good look at the man of many millions
as Mr. Rogers faced the questioning counsel.
The court gave permission to the witness to sit while he gave his evidence, in consideration of his recent illness.
Mr. Rogers is all that his pictures represent him to be, and much, very much, more. The first thing that almost anyone would notice is his head, a literal “dome of thought,” large, finely shaped, extraordinarily high above the line of the eyes, rounded and fully developed in the back, the head of a man with tremendous capacity for thought, a strong, forceful head, that of a man capable of planning and of executing his plans, distinctly the head of a man of affairs, of tremendous affairs.
The head might attract more attention than the face, although the latter is clearly that of a man of high standing among men, clear cut, almost ascetic in some of its lines, aggressive as to the chin, firm as to the mouth, keen as to the eyes.
The gray, well-trimmed mustache, the alert, vigorous, trim, well kept, well groomed, well set up figure, impart a military air that fits perfectly upon this man of power.
Mr. Whipple is ready to begin his bombardment of questions. Mr. Rogers sits at ease, his legs crossed, his arms upon the rails at the side of the witness box, his head thrown up and back, his eyes inscrutable, his whole demeanor that of waiting on the defence. He doesn’t pose at all, apparently. Many men do in similar positions. Their whole attitude is one of consciousness of being looked at and of trying to look as impressive as possible. But Mr. Rogers isn’t one of that sort. His attitudes fit him as well as the clothes he wears, and that is to perfection.
Mr. Whipple asks the customary questions as to name, residence, etc. Then as to occupation and as to this Mr. Rogers gives some inkling as to his baffling course as a witness. He admitted that he had been in the petroleum business for 40 years, and said: “I am trying to think if I have been in the gas business.” Everybody laughs. Evidently Mr. Rogers is going to be a very amusing witness, at times. Even Mr. Whipple, who can take a joke, even if it is on himself, smiles.
