Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1

by Mark Twain

  Bliss escaped me, and got into his grave a month or two before the first statement of account was due on “A Tramp Abroad.” When the statement was presented of course it was a revelation. I saw that through those royalty deceptions, Bliss had been robbing me ever since the day that I had signed the 7½ per cent contract for “Roughing It.” I was present, as a partner in the contract, when that statement was laid before the Board of Directors in the house of Mr. Newton Case, in Hartford.

  I denounced Bliss, and said that the Board must have known of these swindles, and was an accessory to them after the fact. But they denied it.

  Now was my time to do a wise thing, for once in my life. But of course I did a foolish thing instead of it, old habits being hard to break. I ought to have continued with that Company and squeezed it. I ought to have made my terms five-sixths of the profits and continued the squeeze to this day. The Company would have been obliged to endure it, and I should have gotten my due. But I severed our relations, in a fine large leather-headed passion, and carried “The Prince and the Pauper” to J. R. Osgood, who was the loveliest man in the world, and the most incapable publisher. All I got out of that book was seventeen thousand dollars. But he thought he could do better next time. So I gave him “Old Times on the Mississippi,” but said I should prefer that he make the book at my expense and sell it at a royalty to be paid by me to him. When he had finished making the plates and printing and binding the first edition, these industries of his had cost me fifty-six thousand dollars, and I was becoming uncomfortable through the monotony of signing checks. Osgood botched it again, dear good soul. I think my profit on that book was only thirty thousand dollars. It may have been more, but it is long ago and I can give only my impression.

  I made still one more experiment outside of my proper line. I brought to New York Charles L. Webster, a young relative of mine by marriage, and with him to act as clerk and manager I published “Huckleberry Finn” myself. It was a little book; nothing much was to be expected from it pecuniarily—but at the end of three months after its publication, Webster handed me the statement of results and a check for fifty-four thousand five hundred dollars. This persuaded me that as a publisher I was not altogether a failure.

  Thursday, February 22, 1906

  Susy’s remarks about her grandfather Langdon—Mr. Clemens tells about

  Mr. Atwater—Mr. David Gray; and about meeting David Gray, junior,

  at a dinner recently.

  I have wandered far from Susy’s chat about her grandfather, but that is no matter. In this autobiography it is my purpose to wander whenever I please and come back when I get ready. I have now come back, and we will set down what Susy has to say about her grandfather.

  From Susy’s Biography.

  I mentioned that mamma and papa couldn’t stay in their house in Bufalo because it reminded so much of grandpapa. Mamma received a letter from Aunt Susy in which Aunt Susy says a good deal about grandpapa, and the letter showed so clearly how much every one that knew grandpapa loved and respected him, that mamma let me take it to copy what is in it about grandpapa, and mamma thought it would fit in nicely here.

  “Quarry Farm.

  April 16, ’85.

  Livy dear, are you not reminded by to-day’s report of General Grant of father? You remember how as Judge Smith and others whom father had chosen as executors were going out of the room, he said ‘Gentlemen I shall live to bury you all’—smiled, and was cheerful. At that time he had far less strength than General Grant seems to have, but that same wonderful courage to battle with the foe. All along there has been much to remind me of father—of his quiet patience—in General Grant. There certainly is a marked likeness in the souls of the two men. Watching, day by day, the reports from the Nation’s sick room brings to mind so vividly the days of that summer of 1870. And yet they seem so far away. I seemed as a child, compared with now, both in years and experience. The best and the hardest of life have been since then to me, and I know this is so in your life. All before seems dreamy. I sepose this was because our lives had to be all readjusted to go on without that great power in them. Father was quietly such a power in so many lives beside ours, Livy dear—not in kind or degree the same to any one but oh, a power!

  The evening of the last company, I was so struck with the fact that Mr. Atwater stood quietly before father’s portrait a long time and turning to me said, ‘We shall never see his like again,’ with a tremble and a choking in his voice—this after fifteen years, and from a business friend. And some stranger, a week ago, spoke of his habit of giving, as so remarkable, he having heard of father’s generosity. . . .”

  I remember Mr. Atwater very well. There was nothing citified about him or his ways. He was in middle age, and had lived in the country all his life. He had the farmer look, the farmer gait; he wore the farmer clothes, and also the farmer goatee, a decoration which had been universal when I was a boy, but was now become extinct in some of the western towns and in all of the eastern towns and cities. He was transparently a good and sincere and honest man. He was a humble helper of Mr. Langdon, and had been in his employ many years. His rôle was general utility. If Mr. Langdon’s sawmills needed unscientific but plain common-sense inspection, Atwater was sent on that service. If Mr. Langdon’s timber rafts got into trouble on account of a falling river or a rising one, Atwater was sent to look after the matter. Atwater went on modest errands to Mr. Langdon’s coal mines; also to examine and report upon Mr. Langdon’s interests in the budding coal-oil fields of Pennsylvania. Mr. Atwater was always busy, always moving, always useful in humble ways, always religious, and always ungrammatical, except when he had just finished talking and had used up what he had in stock of that kind of grammar. He was effective—that is, he was effective if there was plenty of time. But he was constitutionally slow, and as he had to discuss all his matters with whomsoever came along, it sometimes happened that the occasion for his services had gone by before he got them in. Mr. Langdon never would discharge Atwater, though young Charley Langdon suggested that course now and then. Young Charley could not abide Atwater, because of his provoking dilatoriness and of his comfortable contentment in it. But I loved Atwater. Atwater was a treasure to me. When he would arrive from one of his inspection journeys and sit at the table, at noon, and tell the family all about the campaign in delicious detail, leaving out not a single inane, inconsequential and colorless incident of it, I heard it gratefully; I enjoyed Mr. Langdon’s placid patience with it; the family’s despondency and despair; and more than all these pleasures together, the vindictiveness in young Charley’s eyes and the volcanic disturbances going on inside of him which I could not see, but which I knew were there.

  I am dwelling upon Atwater just for love. I have nothing important to say about Atwater—in fact only one thing to say about him at all. And even that one thing I could leave unmentioned if I wanted to—but I don’t want to. It has been a pleasant memory to me for a whole generation. It lets in a fleeting ray of light upon Livy’s gentle and calm and equable spirit. Although she could feel strongly and utter her feelings strongly, none but a person familiar with her and with all her moods would ever be able to tell by her language that that language was violent. Young Charley had many and many a time tried to lodge a seed of unkindness against Atwater in Livy’s heart, but she was as steadfast in her fidelity as was her father, and Charley’s efforts always failed. Many and many a time he brought to her a charge against Atwater which he believed would bring the longed-for bitter word, and at last he scored a success—for “all things come to him who waits.”

  I was away at the time, but Charley could not wait for me to get back. He was too glad, too eager. He sat down at once and wrote to me while his triumph was fresh and his happiness hot and contenting. He told me how he had laid the whole exasperating matter before Livy and then had asked her “Now what do you say?” And she said “Damn Atwater.”

  Charley knew that there was no need to explain this to me. He knew I would perfectl
y understand. He knew that I would know that he was not quoting, but was translating. He knew that I would know that his translation was exact, was perfect, that it conveyed the precise length, breadth, weight, meaning and force of the words which Livy had really used. He knew that I would know that the phrase which she really uttered was “I disapprove of Atwater.”

  He was quite right. In her mouth that word “disapprove” was as blighting and withering and devastating as another person’s damn.

  One or two days ago I was talking about our sorrowful and pathetic brief sojourn in Buffalo, where we became hermits, and could have no human comradeship except that of young David Gray and his young wife and their baby boy. It seems an age ago. Last night I was at a large dinner party at Norman Hapgood’s palace up-town, and a very long and very slender gentleman was introduced to me—a gentleman with a fine, alert and intellectual face, with a becoming gold pince-nez on his nose and clothed in an evening costume which was perfect from the broad spread of immaculate bosom to the rosetted slippers on his feet. His gait, his bows, and his intonations were those of an English gentleman, and I took him for an earl. I said I had not understood his name, and asked him what it was. He said “David Gray.” The effect was startling. His very father stood before me, as I had known him in Buffalo thirty-six years ago. This apparition called up pleasant times in the beer mills of Buffalo with David Gray and John Hay when this David Gray was in his cradle, a beloved and troublesome possession. And this contact kept me in Buffalo during the next hour, and made it difficult for me to keep up my end of the conversation at my extremity of the dinner-table. The text of my reveries was “What was he born for? What was his father born for? What was I born for? What is anybody born for?”

  His father was a poet, but was doomed to grind out his living in a most uncongenial occupation—the editing of a daily political newspaper. He was a singing bird in a menagerie of monkeys, macaws, and hyenas. His life was wasted. He had come from Scotland when he was five years old; he had come saturated to the bones with Presbyterianism of the bluest, the most uncompromising and most unlovely shade. At thirty-three, when I was comrading with him, his Presbyterianism was all gone and he had become a frank rationalist and pronounced unbeliever. After a few years news came to me in Hartford that he had had a sunstroke. By and by the news came that his brain was affected, as a result. After another considerable interval I heard, through Ned House, who had been visiting him, that he was no longer able to competently write either politics or poetry, and was living quite privately and teaching a daily Bible Class of young people, and was interested in nothing else. His unbelief had passed away; his early Presbyterianism had taken its place.

  This was true. Some time after this I telegraphed and asked him to meet me at the railway station. He came, and I had a few minutes’ talk with him—this for the last time. The same sweet spirit of the earlier days looked out of his deep eyes. He was the same David I had known before,—great, and fine, and blemishless in character, a creature to adore.

  Not long afterward he was crushed and burned up in a railway disaster, at night—and I probably thought then, as I was thinking now, through the gay laughter-and-chatter fog of that dinner-table, “What was he born for? What was the use of it?” These tiresome and monotonous repetitions of the human life—where is their value? Susy asked that question when she was a little child. There was nobody then who could answer it; there is nobody yet.

  1870

  When Mr. Langdon died, on the 6th of August, 1870, I found myself suddenly introduced into what was to me a quite new rôle—that of business man, temporarily.

  Friday, February 23, 1906

  Mr. Clemens tells how he became a business man—Mentions his brother Orion’s autobiography.

  During the previous year or year and a half, Mr. Langdon had suffered some severe losses through a Mr. Talmage Brown, who was an annex of the family by marriage. Brown had paved Memphis, Tennessee, with the wooden pavement so popular in that day. He had done this as Mr. Langdon’s agent. Well managed, the contract would have yielded a sufficient profit, but through Brown’s mismanagement it had merely yielded a large loss. With Mr. Langdon alive, this loss was not a matter of consequence, and could not cripple the business. But with Mr. Langdon’s brain and hand and credit and high character removed, it was another matter. He was a dealer in anthracite coal. He sold this coal over a stretch of country extending as far as Chicago, and he had important branches of his business in a number of cities. His agents were usually considerably in debt to him, and he was correspondingly in debt to the owners of the mines. His death left three young men in charge of the business—young Charley Langdon, Theodore Crane, and Mr. Slee. He had recently made them partners in the business, by gift. But they were unknown. The business world knew J. Langdon, a name that was a power, but these three young men were ciphers without a unit. Slee turned out afterward to be a very able man, and a most capable and persuasive negotiator, but at the time that I speak of his qualities were quite unknown. Mr. Langdon had trained him, and he was well equipped for his headship of the little firm. Theodore Crane was competent in his line—that of head clerk and superintendent of the subordinate clerks. No better man could have been found for that place; but his capacities were limited to that position. He was good and upright and indestructibly honest and honorable, but he had neither desire nor ambition to be anything above chief clerk. He was much too timid for larger work or larger responsibilities. Young Charley was twenty-one, and not any older than his age—that is to say, he was a boy. His mother had indulged him from the cradle up, and had stood between him and such discomforts as duties, studies, work, responsibility, and so on. He had gone to school only when he wanted to, as a rule, and he didn’t want to often enough for his desire to be mistaken for a passion. He was not obliged to study at home when he had the headache, and he usually had the headache—the thing that was to be expected. He was allowed to play when his health and his predilections required it, and they required it with a good deal of frequency, because he was the judge in the matter. He was not required to read books, and he never read them. The results of this kind of bringing up can be imagined. But he was not to blame for them. His mother was his worst enemy, and she became this merely through her love for him, which was an intense and steadily burning passion. It was a most pathetic case. He had an unusually bright mind; a fertile mind; a mind that should have been fruitful. But because of his mother’s calamitous indulgence, it got no cultivation and was a desert. Outside of business, it is a desert yet.

  Charley’s deadly training had made him conceited, arrogant, and overbearing. Slee and Theodore had a heavier burden to carry than had been the case with Mr. Langdon. Mr. Langdon had had nothing to do but manage the business, whereas Slee and Crane had to manage the business and Charley besides. Charley was the most difficult part of the enterprise. He was a good deal given to reorganizing and upsetting Mr. Slee’s most promising arrangements and negotiations. Then the work had to be all done over again.

  However, I started to tell how I became, all of a sudden, a business person—a matter which was entirely out of my line. A careful statement of Mr. Langdon’s affairs showed that the assets were worth eight hundred thousand dollars, and that against them was merely the ordinary obligations of the business. Bills aggregating perhaps three hundred thousand dollars—possibly four hundred thousand—would have to be paid; half in about a month, the other half in about two months. The collections to meet these obligations would come in further along. With Mr. Langdon alive, these debts could be no embarrassment. He could go to the Bank in the town, or in New York, and borrow the money without any trouble, but these boys couldn’t do that. They could get one hundred and fifty thousand dollars cash, at once, but that was all. It was Mr. Langdon’s life insurance. It was paid promptly, but it could not go far—that is it could not go far enough. It did not fall short much—in fact only fifty thousand dollars, but where to get the fifty thousand dollars was a puzzle. They
wrote to Mr. Henry W. Sage, of Ithaca, an old and warm friend and former business partner of Mr. Langdon, and begged him to come to Elmira and give them advice and help. He replied that he would come. Then, to my consternation, the young firm appointed me to do the negotiating with him. It was like asking me to calculate an eclipse. I had no idea of how to begin nor what to say. But they brought the big balance-sheet to the house and sat down with me in the library and explained, and explained, and explained, until at last I did get a fairly clear idea of what I must say to Mr. Sage.

  When Mr. Sage came he and I went to the library to examine that balance-sheet, and the firm waited and trembled in some other part of the house. When I got through explaining the situation to Mr. Sage I got struck by lightning again—that is to say, he furnished me a fresh astonishment. He was a man with a straight mouth and a wonderfully firm jaw. He was the kind of man who puts his whole mind on a thing and keeps that kind of a mouth shut and locked all the way through, while the other man states the case. On this occasion I should have been grateful for some slight indication from him, during my long explanation, which might indicate that I was making at least some kind of an impression upon him, favorable or unfavorable. But he kept my heart on the strain all the way through, and I never could catch any hint of what was passing through his mind. But at the finish he spoke out with that robust decision which was a part of his character and said:

  “Mr. Clemens, you’ve got as clear a business head on your shoulders as I have come in contact with for years. What are you an author for? You ought to be a business man.”

  I knew better, but it was not diplomatic to say so, and I didn’t. Then he said,

  “All you boys need is my note for fifty thousand dollars, at three months, handed in at the Bank, and with that support you will not need the money. If it shall be necessary to extend the note, tell Mr. Arnot it will be extended. The business is all right. Go ahead with it and have no fears. It is my opinion that this note will come back to me without your having extracted a dollar from it, at the end of the three months.”