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

by Mark Twain

  The performance began at a quarter past two, and I, number three in a list of ten (if we include the introducer) was not called to the bat until a quarter after three. My reading was ten minutes long. When I had selected it originally, it was twelve minutes long, and it had taken me a good hour to find ways of reducing it by two minutes without damaging it. I was through in ten minutes. Then I retired to my seat to enjoy the agonies of the audience. I did enjoy them for an hour or two; then all the cruelty in my nature was exhausted, and my native humanity came to the front again. By half past five a third of the house was asleep; another third were dying; and the rest were dead. I got out the back way and went home.

  During several years, after that, the Authors’ Readings continued. Every now and then we assembled in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and scourged the people. It was found impossible to teach the persons who managed these orgies any sense. Also it was found impossible to teach the readers any sense. Once I went to Boston to help in one of these revels which had been instigated in the interest of a memorial to Mr. Longfellow. Howells was always a member of these traveling afflictions, and I was never able to teach him to rehearse his proposed reading by the help of a watch and cut it down to a proper length. He couldn’t seem to learn it. He was a bright man in all other ways, but whenever he came to select a reading for one of these carousals his intellect decayed and fell to ruin. I arrived at his house in Cambridge the night before the Longfellow Memorial occasion, and I probably asked him to show me his selection. At any rate, he showed it to me—and I wish I may never attempt the truth again if it wasn’t seven thousand words. I made him set his eye on his watch and keep game while I should read a paragraph of it. This experiment proved that it would take me an hour and ten minutes to read the whole of it, and I said “And mind you, this is not allowing anything for such interruptions as applause—for the reason that after the first twelve minutes there wouldn’t be any.”

  He had a time of it to find something short enough, and he kept saying that he never would find a short enough selection that would be good enough—that is to say, he never would be able to find one that would stand exposure before an audience.

  I said “It’s no matter. Better that than a long one—because the audience could stand a bad short one, but couldn’t stand a good long one.”

  We got it arranged at last. We got him down to fifteen minutes, perhaps. But he and Dr. Holmes and Aldrich and I had the only short readings that day out of the most formidable accumulation of authors that had ever thus far been placed in position before the enemy—a battery of sixteen. I think that that was the occasion when we had sixteen. If it wasn’t then it was in Washington, in 1888. Yes, I think that that occasion was the time when we had that irresistible, that unconquerable force. It was in the afternoon, in the Globe Theatre, and the place was packed, and the air would have been very bad only there wasn’t any. I can see that mass of people yet, opening and closing their mouths like fishes gasping for breath. It was intolerable.

  That graceful and competent speaker, Professor Norton, opened the game with a very handsome speech, but it was a good twenty minutes long. And a good ten minutes of it, I think, were devoted to the introduction of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who hadn’t any more need of an introduction than the Milky Way. Then Dr. Holmes recited—as only Dr. Holmes could recite it—“The Last Leaf,” and the house rose as one individual and went mad with worshiping delight. And the house stormed along, and stormed along, and got another poem out of the Doctor as an encore; it stormed again and got a third one—though the storm was not so violent this time as had been the previous outbreaks. By this time Dr. Holmes had himself lost a part of his mind, and he actually went on reciting poem after poem until silence had taken the place of encores, and he had to do the last encore by himself. He was the loveliest human being in Boston, and it was a pathetic thing that he should treat himself so.

  I had learned, long ago, to stipulate for third place on the program. The performance began at two o’clock. My train for Hartford would leave at four o’clock. I would need fifteen minutes for transit to the station. I needed ten minutes for my reading. I did my reading in the ten minutes; I fled at once from the theatre, and I came very near not catching that train. I was told afterward that by the time reader number eight stepped forward and trained his gun on the house, the audience were drifting out of the place in groups, shoals, blocks, and avalanches, and that about that time the siege was raised and the conflict given up, with six or seven readers still to hear from.

  1888

  At the reading in Washington, in the spring of ’88 there was a crowd of readers. They all came overloaded, as usual. Thomas Nelson Page read forty minutes by the watch, and he was no further down than the middle of the list. We were all due at the White House at half past nine. The President and Mrs. Cleveland were present, and at half past ten they had to go away—the President to attend to some official business which had been arranged to be considered after our White House reception, it being supposed by Mr. Cleveland, who was inexperienced in Authors’ Readings, that our reception at the White House would be over by half past eleven, whereas if he had known as much about Authors’ Readings as he knew about other kinds of statesmanship, he would have known that we were not likely to get through before time for early breakfast.

  I think that it was upon the occasion of this visit to Washington that Livy, always thoughtful of me, prepared me for my visit to the Executive Mansion. No, it wasn’t—that was earlier. She was with me, this time, and could look after me herself.

  Monday, March 5, 1906

  Mrs. Clemens’s warning to Mr. Clemens when he attends the Cleveland reception at White House—Describes the Paris house in which they lived in 1893—Also room in Villa Viviani—Also dining room in house at Riverdale—Tells how Mr. Clemens was “dusted off” after the various dinners—and the card system of signals—Letter from Mr. Gilder regarding Mr. Cleveland’s sixty-ninth birthday—Mason.

  I was always heedless. I was born heedless; and therefore I was constantly, and quite unconsciously, committing breaches of the minor proprieties, which brought upon me humiliations which ought to have humiliated me but didn’t, because I didn’t know anything had happened. But Livy knew; and so the humiliations fell to her share, poor child, who had not earned them and did not deserve them. She always said I was the most difficult child she had. She was very sensitive about me. It distressed her to see me do heedless things which could bring me under criticism, and so she was always watchful and alert to protect me from the kind of transgressions which I have been speaking of.

  When I was leaving Hartford for Washington, upon the occasion referred to, she said “I have written a small warning and put it in a pocket of your dress vest. When you are dressing to go to the Authors’ Reception at the White House you will naturally put your fingers in your vest pockets, according to your custom, and you will find that little note there. Read it carefully, and do as it tells you. I cannot be with you, and so I delegate my sentry duties to this little note. If I should give you the warning by word of mouth, now, it would pass from your head and be forgotten in a few minutes.”

  It was President Cleveland’s first term. I had never seen his wife—the young, the beautiful, the good-hearted, the sympathetic, the fascinating. Sure enough, just as I had finished dressing to go to the White House I found that little note, which I had long ago forgotten. It was a grave little note, a serious little note, like its writer, but it made me laugh. Livy’s gentle gravities often produced that effect upon me, where the expert humorist’s best joke would have failed, for I do not laugh easily.

  When we reached the White House and I was shaking hands with the President, he started to say something but I interrupted him and said,

  “If your Excellency will excuse me, I will come back in a moment; but now I have a very important matter to attend to, and it must be attended to at once.”

  I turned to Mrs. Cleveland, the
young, the beautiful, the fascinating, and gave her my card, on the back of which I had written “He didn’t”—and I asked her to sign her name below those words.

  She said “He didn’t? He didn’t what?”

  “Oh,” I said, “never mind. We cannot stop to discuss that now. This is urgent. Won’t you please sign your name?” (I handed her a fountain pen.)

  “Why,” she said, “I cannot commit myself in that way. Who is it that didn’t?—and what is it that he didn’t?”

  “Oh,” I said, “time is flying, flying, flying. Won’t you take me out of my distress and sign your name to it? It’s all right. I give you my word it’s all right.”

  She looked nonplused; but hesitatingly and mechanically she took the pen and said,

  “I will sign it. I will take the risk. But you must tell me all about it, right afterward, so that you can be arrested before you get out of the house in case there should be anything criminal about this.”

  Then she signed; and I handed her Mrs. Clemens’s note, which was very brief, very simple, and to the point. It said “Don’t wear your arctics in the White House.” It made her shout; and at my request she summoned a messenger and we sent that card at once to the mail on its way to Mrs. Clemens in Hartford.

  1893–94

  During 1893 and ’94 we were living in Paris, the first half of the time at the Hotel Brighton, in the rue de Rivoli, the other half in a charming mansion in the rue de l’Université, on the other side of the Seine, which, by good luck, we had gotten hold of through another man’s ill luck. This was Pomeroy, the artist. Illness in his family had made it necessary for him to go to the Riviera. He was paying thirty-six hundred dollars a year for the house, but allowed us to have it at twenty-six hundred. It was a lovely house; large, quaint, indefinite, charmingly furnished and decorated; built upon no particular plan; delightfully rambling, uncertain, and full of surprises. You were always getting lost in it, and finding nooks and corners and rooms which you didn’t know were there and whose presence you had not suspected before. It was built by a rich French artist; and he had also furnished it and decorated it with his own hand. The studio was cosiness itself. We used it as drawing-room, sitting-room, living-room, dancing-room—we used it for everything. We couldn’t get enough of it. It is odd that it should have been so cosy, for it was forty feet long, forty feet high, and thirty feet wide, with a vast fireplace on each side in the middle, and a musicians’ gallery at one end. But we had, before this, found out that under the proper conditions spaciousness and cosiness do go together most affectionately and congruously. We had found it out a year or two earlier, when we were living in the Villa Viviani three miles outside the walls of Florence. That house had a room in it which was forty feet square and forty feet high, and at first we couldn’t endure it. We called it the Mammoth Cave; we called it the skating-rink; we called it the Great Sahara; we called it all sorts of names intended to convey our disrespect. We had to pass through it to get from one end of the house to the other, but we passed straight through and did not loiter—and yet before long, and without our knowing how it came about, we found ourselves infesting that vast place day and night, and preferring it to any other part of the house.

  Four or five years ago, when we took a house on the banks of the Hudson, at Riverdale, we drifted from room to room on our tour of inspection, always with a growing doubt as to whether we wanted that house or not. But at last when we arrived in a dining room that was sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and had two great fireplaces in it, that settled it.

  But I have wandered. What I was proposing to talk about was quite another matter—to wit: in that pleasant Paris house Mrs. Clemens gathered little dinner companies together once or twice a week, and it goes without saying that in these circumstances my defects had a large chance for display. Always, always without fail, as soon as the guests were out of the house, I saw that I had been miscarrying again. Mrs. Clemens explained to me the various things which I had been doing which should have been left undone, and she was always able to say,

  “I have told you over and over again, yet you do these same things every time, just as if I never had warned you.”

  The children always waited up to have the joy of overhearing this. Nothing charmed them, nothing delighted them, nothing satisfied their souls like seeing me under the torture. The moment we started up stairs we would hear skurrying garments, and we knew that those children had been at it again. They had a name for this performance. They called it “dusting-off papa.” They were obedient young rascals as a rule, by habit, by training, by long experience; but they drew the line there. They couldn’t be persuaded to obey the command to stay out of hearing when I was being dusted off.

  At last I had an inspiration. It is astonishing that it had not occurred to me earlier. I said,

  “Why Livy, you know that dusting me off after these dinners is not the wise way. You could dust me off after every dinner for a year and I should always be just as competent to do the forbidden thing at each succeeding dinner as if you had not said a word, because in the meantime I have forgotten all these instructions. I think the correct way is for you to dust me off immediately before the guests arrive, and then I can keep some of it in my head and things will go better.”

  She recognized that that was wisdom, and that it was a very good idea. Then we set to work to arrange a system of signals to be delivered by her to me during dinner; signals which would indicate definitely which particular crime I was now engaged in, so that I could change to another. Apparently one of the children’s most precious joys had come to an end and passed out of their life. I supposed that that was so, but it wasn’t. The young unteachables got a screen arranged so that they could be behind it during the dinner and listen for the signals and entertain themselves with them. The system of signals was very simple, but it was very effective. If Mrs. Clemens happened to be so busy, at any time, talking with her elbow-neighbor, that she overlooked something that I was doing, she was sure to get a low-voiced hint from behind that screen in these words:

  “Blue card, mamma;” or “red card, mamma”—“green card, mamma”—so that I was under double and triple guard. What the mother didn’t notice the children detected for her.

  As I say, the signals were quite simple, but very effective. At a hint from behind the screen, Livy would look down the table and say, in a voice full of interest, if not of counterfeited apprehension, “What did you do with the blue card that was on the dressing-table—”

  That was enough. I knew what was happening—that I was talking the lady on my right to death and never paying any attention to the one on my left. The blue card meant “Let the lady on your right have a reprieve; destroy the one on your left;” so I would at once go to talking vigorously to the lady on my left. It wouldn’t be long till there would be another hint, followed by a remark from Mrs. Clemens which had in it an apparently casual reference to a red card, which meant “Oh, are you going to sit there all the evening and never say anything? Do wake up and talk.” So I waked up and drowned the table with talk. We had a number of cards, of different colors, each meaning a definite thing, each calling attention to some crime or other in my common list; and that system was exceedingly useful. It was entirely successful. It was like Buck Fanshaw’s riot, it broke up the riot before it got a chance to begin. It headed off crime after crime all through the dinner, and I always came out at the end successful, triumphant, with large praises owing to me, and I got them on the spot.

  It is a far call back over the accumulation of years to that night in the White House when Mrs. Cleveland signed the card. Many things have happened since then. The Cleveland family have been born since then. Ruth, the first-born, whom I never knew, but with whom I corresponded when she was a baby, lived to reach a blooming and lovely young maidenhood, then passed away.

  To-day comes this letter, and it brings back the Clevelands, and the past, and my lost little correspondent.

  Editorial Department


  The Century Magazine.

  March 3, 1906.

  Union Square, New York.

  My dear Mr. Clemens:

  President Finley and I are collecting letters to Ex-President Cleveland from his friends, appropriate to his 69th birthday.

  If the plan appeals to you, will you kindly send a sealed greeting under cover to me at the above address, and I will send it, and the other letters, South to him in time for him to get them, all together, on the 18th of the present month.

  Yours sincerely,

  R. W. Gilder.

  G.

  Mr. Samuel L. Clemens.