ARRIVING IN BERMUDA at the height of the tourist season, Twain and Rogers found that though their rooms had been held for them at the crowded Princess Hotel, they weren"t together on the same floor, and neither of them had much s.p.a.ce. Twain complained that his room "was intended for a cigar box, in fact it was a cigar box once." But the mood at the hotel was so festive, and the views across the harbor so beautiful, that it was easy to put up with a little inconvenience and enjoy the stay. Rogers had no complaints, though he was slow to drop his formal manner and adopt the easygoing spirit of the island. One day, as Twain watched his friend walking toward him in the hotel"s large dining room, he teased him for maintaining such a stately air in a place meant for relaxation.
"There he comes, looking just like Gibb"s Lighthouse," said Twain, referring to a local landmark, "stiff and tall, turning his lights from side to side."7 To chip away at some of his friend"s reserve, Twain took him to a baseball game. It was an unconventional affair, not least because it was played at Richmond Ground, the home field of the Hamilton Cricket Club. The American game was played between teams from the two largest hotels, the Hamilton and the Princess.
"Mark Twain was a champion of the Princess nine," one observer reported. "He sat in the front row of the grandstand, and there was not a good play nor a bad one which escaped him. When he was particularly pleased with something the Princess team did he would subside, after applauding it in a cloud of smoke which rolled from a big, black cigar. Several times he puffed so hard as to almost obscure his white-flannelled figure and silvery mane."
Unfortunately, all the excitement was too much for Rogers, who appeared to be a little shaky as he left the grandstand at the end of the game. The next day he felt much better, however, and was ready to explore more of the island with Twain, who seemed to be on the go all the time, traveling around each day in carriages or donkey carts. At the end of the first week, when everyone was preparing to attend the Princess Hotel"s regular Friday night ball, Lyon summed up Twain"s first few days of activity with the comment, "The King drives out, and he walks out, and he is gay and young and full of a new and splendid life."8 While Twain and Rogers were busy enjoying themselves, Lyon made a new friend among the guests at the hotel. She was a tall, dignified woman named Elizabeth Wallace, who was about the same age as Lyon. Highly educated and fluent in Spanish and French, Wallace was on leave from her job as an a.s.sociate professor of French literature at the University of Chicago and had been staying at the hotel with her mother since the first of the year. She entered easily into a friendship with Lyon, and they began spending much of their time together. They went on shopping expeditions, took afternoon tea with other ladies at the hotel, and sat on the veranda watching the sailboats while Wallace read to Lyon from her unpublished memoir of a year spent in Paris.
Twain approved of Wallace, whom he described in one of his dictations as "a bright and charming lady with a touch of gray in her hair." Fascinated by Twain after meeting him on his short visit the month before, she was now amused by his comings and goings with Rogers. "It was always a mooted question," she reflected a few years later, "whether Mr. Rogers took care of Mr. Clemens or Mr. Clemens of Mr. Rogers. It was a question that they took much delight in unsettling."9 On their visit to Bermuda in early 1908, Twain and Henry Rogers became fond of "our beloved Betsy," as they came to call Elizabeth Wallace, a charming and sophisticated professor of French literature at the University of Chicago.
When Wallace adopted Lyon"s habit of referring to Twain as the King, he was flattered, but didn"t want Rogers to feel slighted and therefore suggested an equally regal t.i.tle for him-the Rajah. Everyone laughed when the two men began referring to each other by their respective t.i.tles, but the joke must have given the greatest pleasure to Twain. No doubt it pleased him to pretend that he and h.e.l.l Hound were a couple of royal impostors who, in another life, might have been rapscallions like the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn. (Of course, Rogers"s critics would have argued that the millionaire was already a pretty convincing rapscallion.) On Bermuda, however, the pair"s schemes were rather tame. Early on, Wallace was asked to partic.i.p.ate in one that Rogers called the S.L.C. Life-Saving Society. After breakfast one day he solemnly explained to her that because of Twain"s "guileless and unsuspecting nature" strangers were always trying to take advantage of him and to monopolize his time. Protecting the writer from such "annoying relationships" was Wallace"s job as the newest member of the S.L.C. Life-Saving Society. At the first sight of some "doubtful party" trying to engage his interest, she was expected to approach Twain and say, "Pardon me, but Mr. Rogers is looking for you, and would like to speak to you immediately." Otherwise, Rogers explained, his friend"s "kind heart" would never allow him to get away. (Though he was slow to warm to most people, the millionaire took an instant liking to Wallace, calling her "our beloved Betsy.")10 After two weeks on the island Twain had no doubt that his friend was doing much better. On March 10 he remarked, "Mr. Rogers is improving so decidedly that he has stopped talking about going back home-so I am hoping & expecting to keep him here until April 11." Rogers certainly needed all the energy he could muster to keep pace with Twain, who was full of plans. "We are having very lively times every day," Twain exulted.
Indeed, they never seemed to lack things to do. Together the old friends roamed the grounds of the island"s military garrison and watched the British troops parade in their red coats, inspected the coral reefs in a gla.s.s-bottomed boat as guests of Bermuda"s governor, sailed to Agar"s Island to tour the large aquarium, made themselves conspicuous as they took daily drives through Hamilton in an open carriage, went to picnics and band concerts, and played billiards and late-night card games in the hotel parlors.
"I am now so strong," Twain wrote in a burst of enthusiasm, "that I suppose I could pull up one of these islands by the roots & throw it half way to New York. In fact I know I could."11 ...
TWAIN"S GOOD SPIRITS were tested one day when he and Rogers were invited to have lunch at Sh.o.r.eby, a small estate not far from the Princess Hotel. Their hostess was planning to serve a dark stew made of three kinds of meat, hot peppers, and spicy seasonings.
It was at Twain"s request that the dish was served. In his good mood he seems to have misjudged his ability to digest it and had cheerfully asked his hostess, whose cook was famous for the potent stew, to prepare a big kettle of it.
"Rogers, did you ever eat West Indian pepper pot?" Twain had asked when the subject of the meal first came up.
"Not knowingly," his friend replied.
"Mrs. Peck," he had said to their hostess, "some day invite poor Rogers here to eat pepper pot." The invitation was promptly extended and just as promptly accepted by Twain on behalf of himself and his friend. The stew had to cook for three or four days, so by the time the lunch took place the number of guests had increased to almost a dozen, and included Wallace and Lyon.
When the big kettle was carried to the table, only a few of the guests seem to have known what was in store for their taste buds. "It possesses an apparently mild flavor until you have half finished your dishful," Wallace later wrote of the pepper pot. "Then it begins to burn insidiously, first your tongue, then your palate, then your throat, until you feel gently aflame."
It didn"t take long for everyone"s eyes to begin watering, and many of the guests soon found the tears cascading down their cheeks. Neither Twain nor Rogers wanted to let the other think he couldn"t stand it, and both bravely continued eating.
After a long silence at the table, Twain dried his eyes and said slowly, "This would be a very good dish if it had a little pepper in it."
"We all smiled humidly," Elizabeth Wallace recalled, "and furtively wiped our eyes."12 The trials of eating pepper pot were offset by the pleasure of spending time with the charming hostess. During his previous visit to Bermuda, Twain had enjoyed getting to know Mrs. Mary Peck, an attractive American in her mid-forties who often spent the winter on the island. She was married to a wealthy businessman she didn"t love whose life revolved around his woolen mills in Ma.s.sachusetts, and who didn"t care for Bermuda. A free spirit who felt stifled in New England, she shocked the high-minded people in her husband"s hometown by her unconventional habits and modern ideas. "Woman Seen Smoking on East Street" was the headline in the local paper after she dared to light up a cigarette in public.
In Bermuda she found more acceptance, though the island"s wives kept a close eye on their husbands when she was around. Known for her "frank courting of susceptible males," she regularly attended the weekly b.a.l.l.s at the Princess and Hamilton hotels, where she loved to dance and flirt and show off her fine figure in the latest fashions.13 She took an instant liking to Twain, regarding him as a sweet "old dear" whom she could spoil with affectionate attention. It was hard for even the most upright of men to ignore her tender looks and soothing words. One woman said that Mary Peck used her pretty voice "caressingly though lazily," and that she had an "absorbing way of listening to the words of wisdom uttered by a man." The warmth of her feelings toward Twain is evident in a photograph taken when he came to Sh.o.r.eby for lunch with his friends. Everyone is standing on the wide porch of her home, with Rogers posing stiffly at one end and Isabel Lyon looking small and insignificant at the other. In the middle is the hostess-dressed all in white like Twain-with her arm around his shoulder and a coy smile on her lips. Another woman in the background whose face isn"t visible also has a hand on the shoulder of the author, who has the look of a contented pet.14 In New York Twain might have been more reserved around a woman like Mary Peck, but in Bermuda he could let down his guard and enjoy being the occasional object of her attention, especially since he knew she had no designs on him. As he had discovered on his previous visit, she seemed far more interested in another man-someone of her own generation, a quiet, bookish fellow who had begun making solitary trips to the island to escape the pressures of his job as the head of an Ivy League university. He was Woodrow Wilson, of Princeton. Only fifty-one at the beginning of 1908, he had served as the university"s president for almost six years.
Wilson had met Mary Peck on his first holiday to Bermuda in 1907. She caught his eye one day when she hurried past his table in a gold lace dress as he sat eating alone at his hotel. After they were introduced at a party a short time later, Wilson quickly fell under her spell, and hated to leave her when it was time to return to Princeton. On the last day of his stay he dropped by her house to say goodbye, but she had already gone out, and he left a note that reveals the depth of his great attraction to her despite its stilted tone. "It was with the keenest disappointment that I found you not at home this afternoon," he wrote. "It is not often that I can have the privilege of meeting anyone whom I can so entirely admire and enjoy."15 At the beginning of 1908 he returned to the island with the intention of spending as much time with her as possible. It was at this point that Twain showed up on his first visit of the year, and Wilson was initially jealous of the author. They didn"t know each other well, though they had met a couple of times a few years earlier and shared a mutual friend in George Harvey, who was an early supporter of Wilson"s political ambitions. When Mary Peck postponed an appointment with Wilson to greet Twain"s ship at the waterfront, he wasn"t happy. "Now I am cut out by Mark Twain!" he complained. "He arrived on the boat this morning, and Mrs. Peck at once took possession of him."16 He didn"t have any cause for worry. She soon made it clear that he had captured her heart. As she would remind him several years later, when they were coming to the end of their affair, "You have been the greatest, most enn.o.bling influence in my life. You helped me to have my soul alive and I am grateful." All the same, they made such an unlikely couple that rumors of their affair wouldn"t be taken seriously for years. Theodore Roosevelt burst out laughing when it was suggested that the relationship could be used against Wilson in the presidential election of 1912. "You can"t cast a man as Romeo," he said, "who looks and acts so much like an apothecary"s clerk."17 The son of a Presbyterian minister, Wilson was tormented by strong desires that he worked to suppress for most of his life, cultivating a public image as a man of high ideals and superior moral character. With his bland face, fastidious manners, and solid reputation as a loyal husband and the father of three daughters, he seemed beyond reproach. But meeting seductive Mary in the relaxed atmosphere of Bermuda opened the emotional floodgates and allowed him to reveal the pa.s.sionate side of his nature. With her, he said, he "lost all of the abominable self-consciousness that has been my bane all my life." She made him feel "perfectly at ease, happily myself, released from bonds to enjoy the full freedom of my mind."18 Wilson"s fascination with Mary Peck must have been obvious to Twain during his first trip of 1908, for the visiting academic quickly managed to become a regular guest at her home as well as her escort to the hotel b.a.l.l.s. (Wilson always declined to dance, appearing content to sit in the gallery and to guard Peck"s fan or scarf while she glided across the floor with someone else.) In due course he and Twain became better acquainted and grew to like each other. Among Wilson"s many talents, the most impressive for Twain may have been his skill at the billiards tables in the parlors of their hotels. The university president loved the game almost as much as Twain did and considered himself an expert. "I have seen a good deal of him," Wilson said of Twain. "He seems to like being with me. Yesterday Mrs. Peck gave him a lunch at her house and gathered a most interesting little group of garrison people to meet him. He was in great form and delighted everybody."19 With his Oxford degree, Twain was now in a position to shoot the breeze even with an Ivy League president and never feel at the slightest disadvantage. He also didn"t see any need to drop hints that Princeton might want to add to his collection of sheepskins. After his experience in Oxford, nothing else could measure up. Besides, whenever Wilson began sounding too academic, he left Twain cold. The writer was easily bored by any professorial p.r.o.nouncements on political or economic subjects.
The two men did see eye to eye, however, on one local issue of political concern and joined forces to campaign for it. They launched an effort to save Bermuda from what they perceived as a dire threat to its tranquillity-the proposed importation of automobiles. At the time, the colonial government was trying to decide whether to allow a limited number of people to own motor cars, and the members of the House of a.s.sembly were almost equally divided on the question. The future American president couldn"t resist adding his voice to the debate, having found that one of the things he liked best about Bermuda was bicycling for miles in complete safety along its peaceful roads. "There is only one automobile in Bermuda," he had noted on his first visit, "and that, I was delighted to learn, broke down almost immediately after arriving here."
Though Twain was a lot fonder of automobiles than bicycles, he agreed that the noisy machines would do more harm than good on the tiny island. Wilson prepared a pet.i.tion expressing support for the anti-automobile faction in the House of a.s.sembly, and Twain signed it. Before it was published in the local paper, 109 other guests at the two major hotels had added their signatures to the doc.u.ment, which warned that tourism might be the first casualty if the island suffered an invasion of motor cars. The opening put the case succinctly: "We, the undersigned, visitors to Bermuda, venture respectfully to express the opinion that the admission of automobiles to the island would alter the whole character of the place. ... The island now attracts visitors in considerable numbers because of the quiet and dignified simplicity of its life. It derives its princ.i.p.al charm from its utter detachment from the world of strenuous business and feverish pleasure in which most of us are obliged to spend the greater part of our time."20 Alienating tourists was the last thing the colony wanted to do. The opinions of such famous American guests as Twain and Wilson mattered a great deal, and the pet.i.tion may have helped to influence the debate. In April 1908 a ban on automobiles pa.s.sed the House of a.s.sembly by the narrow margin of fifteen to fourteen. Though it was a small triumph for a man who would soon be using his powers of persuasion on the world stage, the ban had a long-lasting effect on life in Bermuda. It remained in force for the next thirty-eight years.
Wilson"s copy of the pet.i.tion was still among his papers at his death in 1924, and many decades later the meticulous editor of those papers-Arthur S. Link-noticed a shorthand notation in Wilson"s hand on the back of the pet.i.tion. When it was deciphered, Link found that it was the beginning of a love letter. "My precious one, my beloved Mary," Wilson wrote, and then stopped, apparently deciding that even disguised in shorthand such a personal message shouldn"t be continued on the back of a pet.i.tion.
But Wilson didn"t work hard enough to hide his love for Peck. Rumors of their affair began to circulate in 1908 and would become a source of great worry after he entered politics two years later. Though Theodore Roosevelt didn"t put any faith in those rumors, many others did, jokingly referring to Wilson as "Peck"s bad boy." By the time he ran for reelection to the presidency in 1916, the affair would be behind him, but that wouldn"t stop his political foes from trying their best to use it against him. As Mary herself later claimed, a Republican operative offered her as much as $300,000 for her two hundred letters from Wilson, but she refused and always insisted that she had been nothing more than a good friend. When Wilson"s first wife-Ellen-died of kidney failure in 1914, there was some gossip that she had actually died of a broken heart after learning of the affair.21 In the years after Ellen"s death Wilson was increasingly plagued by guilt over his relationship with Mary, saying that it belonged to a time "of folly and gross impertinence in my life." But when Twain set foot in Bermuda for the second time in 1908, his new friend Woodrow was still in the exuberant stage of loving Mary and was willing to do almost anything in order to be with her, even if it meant sitting down at her table to share a steaming kettle of pepper pot with one of America"s most notorious robber barons, Henry Rogers.22 In the memoir that she wrote in her seventies, Peck recalled that Wilson was reluctant to dine with a member of the "money-trust," but that he had done so to please her, and that he enjoyed the company, though not the dish. "He had a sensitive digestion," she wrote, "which was accustomed to rebel suddenly if displeased." The pa.s.sage of more than twenty-five years, however, had played tricks with her memory, causing her to confuse a meal she served to Twain and Wilson with the one she served to Rogers and Twain. But she was right in remembering that Wilson had been willing to meet Rogers at her place. In fact, he spent the last day of his winter vacation waiting for him and Mark Twain to come over for a visit. A storm came up, however, and it rained all afternoon. At short notice they couldn"t find a closed carriage to take them over to Sh.o.r.eby. And, of course, there were no automobiles available.23 And so, even though Twain and Wilson would see each other again in Bermuda, Rogers missed his chance to meet the future president of the United States, the very man-as fate would have it-who in 1913 would sign into law a measure dreaded by all robber barons: the federal income tax.
ONE DAY AT THE PRINCESS HOTEL, as Twain and Elizabeth Wallace were walking down one of its long corridors, he suddenly began hopping and skipping, and then broke into a run. When a door to one of the guest rooms opened, he dug in his heels and came to an abrupt halt before resuming his progress in a stately walk more appropriate to his age. Though Wallace was amused that he would want to put on this act for her sake, she could also see how eager he was to prove that a few weeks in Bermuda had taken years off his age. It was one thing to have the heart of a boy, but the longer he stayed on the island, the more he seemed to relish acting like a boy.
She saw another example of this on a Sunday night when she heard a soft knock at her door and opened it to find him motioning her to step quietly into the corridor. "Hush," he cautioned, not wanting to rouse her mother in the adjoining room. "Can"t you run away and have a game of cards?"
When she answered that her mother wouldn"t approve of her playing cards on a Sunday, he responded like a mischievous schoolboy trying to tempt a good girl to break the rules.
"Play hookey," he whispered, "she"ll never know."
A moment later the well-behaved middle-aged professor was following Twain to the card table downstairs, unable to refuse his invitation to sin. "Closing the door," she later wrote, "we escaped down the hall, with a well-simulated thrill of adventure, while ... Mother remained sweetly unconscious of the perfidy."
Henry Rogers didn"t feel neglected when Twain was busy entertaining Wallace or others, and he didn"t show any sign of wanting to go home before April. "This was the very place for him," Twain said of Henry in a letter to Emilie Rogers at the beginning of March. "He enjoys himself and is as quarrelsome as a cat." Emilie herself arrived on the island in the middle of March and soon began organizing activities to keep her husband entertained. Sometimes Twain joined them, and sometimes he wandered off to find other amus.e.m.e.nts.24 While many adults bored him with their polite small talk or tiresome efforts to impress him, he was overjoyed whenever he fell into the company of some worshipful young girl on the island who could make him feel young again. What he wanted was the kind of attention he had enjoyed as the young father of three affectionate girls, and the kind of companionship that he had hoped to enjoy with those daughters in his old age. Death had taken Susy from him, frustrated ambitions had undermined Clara"s relationship with him, and illness had separated him from Jean.
He had no grandchildren to turn to, yet he knew that he had "reached the grandpa stage of life," and felt deeply the need for something that he had spent much of his literary career celebrating-the high spirits of youth. It was a comfort to him not only to share in those spirits with a willing friend, but to see the world again through a young person"s eyes-especially those of girls who seemed to him the ideal of innocence, ones "to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears."25 During his two winter visits he made friends with several girls who either lived on the island or were staying at his hotel. It wasn"t uncommon to see him riding around town in a donkey cart driven by one of these girls or to find him spending the afternoon telling one of them tall tales on the hotel veranda. He was aware that his conduct prompted more than a few raised eyebrows, but he meant no harm and did none. He certainly never overstepped the bounds of propriety that Clara and others tended to worry so much about. "Consider well the proportions of things," he liked to say to the girls. "It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise."26 Elizabeth Wallace accompanied him on his donkey cart excursions with a bright-eyed twelve-year-old from New York named Margaret Blackmer. As a teacher, Wallace was fascinated to see how easily Twain was able to understand a young person"s point of view, and how he could adopt it without appearing to be condescending. One reason that he was so much fun to be with, she concluded, was that he had not lost what most adults eventually lose-a child"s sense of wonder and freshness. When she shared his company with Margaret, she found that his influence was stronger than ever: "All pretentious wisdom, all sophisticated phrases, all acquired and meaningless conventions were laid aside, and we said what we meant, and spontaneity took the place of calculation."27 Walking along the beach one day with the girl, Twain picked up a small sh.e.l.l and gently separated the two halves. Giving her one, he said that if they met again at some distant time in the future, and she looked so different that he couldn"t recognize her, she only had to produce her half of the sh.e.l.l to prove her ident.i.ty. Margaret was charmed by the idea and agreed to keep the sh.e.l.l in a safe place. But, for Twain, the fun of this arrangement wasn"t to be had in the distant future.
The next morning, when he saw her in the hotel dining room, he went up to her with a sad face and pretended not to recognize her, insisting that she looked like "my Margaret," but was somehow different. As he turned to walk away, she cried out for him to stop and "triumphantly" produced her half of the sh.e.l.l. Twain beamed with pleasure, taking satisfaction from the scene because it was spontaneous on her part and cleverly theatrical on his.
"The child could not have enjoyed this thrilling little drama more if we had been playing it on the stage," he later remarked in an autobiographical dictation. "Many times afterward she played the chief part herself, pretending to be in doubt as to my ident.i.ty and challenging me to produce my half of the sh.e.l.l. She was always hoping to catch me without it, but I always defeated that game-wherefore she came at last to recognize that I was not only old but very smart."28 Unlike so many adults, Twain paid careful attention to what children said and took their words seriously. It was a pleasure for him simply to sit and listen to the unpremeditated way that most children spoke, and to take note of their unexpected turns of phrase and inventive twists of syntax.
His habit of doing this had paid rich dividends earlier in his career in the case of his now famous encounter with an African-American boy he nicknamed "Sociable Jimmy." As Sh.e.l.ley Fisher Fishkin has argued in her groundbreaking study Was Huck Black?, the style and substance of the boy"s comments to Twain may have provided a model for "the distinctive voice of Huck Finn." He met the boy-whose real name was probably William Evans-after giving a lecture in Paris, Illinois, at the end of 1870. Evans lived next door to the local hotel and was sent to Twain"s room to serve him dinner. The author engaged young Evans in conversation and was amazed by the extraordinary flow of speech that came from the boy as he made himself at home in the room, relaxing in an armchair with his legs thrown over one arm and discussing how his "Pa used to git drunk," and how the hotel owners hated cats and drowned them, and why the town wasn"t larger-"Some folks says dis town would be considerable bigger if it wa"n"t on accounts of so much lan" all roun" it dat ain"t got no houses on it." Twain considered the boy "the most artless, sociable, and exhaustless talker I ever came across," and was so captivated by his words that he tried to write them down as accurately as possible and later declared, "I think I could swing my legs over the arms of a chair & that boy"s spirit would descend upon me & enter into me."29 Part of the secret of Twain"s literary success was his skill at capturing in print what he made a point of studying and celebrating in person-the magical spirit of childhood. Though his literary powers had diminished in old age, he never lost his fascination with the things that make Huck such a compelling character. When he was around young people, he became a genteel version of the Missouri boy that still lived within him, which helps to explain his teasing but affectionate manner toward girls.
BESIDES ELIZABETH WALLACE, there was another person in Bermuda who closely observed Twain"s interactions with children on the island, and who put her impressions on paper. She was Marion Schuyler Allen from Belmont, New York, whose husband, William, was the American vice consul in Hamilton. They lived only a short walk from the Princess Hotel, and their thirteen-year-old daughter, Helen, liked going there to watch the fancy b.a.l.l.s. One evening toward the end of Twain"s long stay on the island, Helen met him at the hotel and invited him to come over to her place the next afternoon.
When he arrived at Bay House, as her home was known, he found that she was still at school, and that her mother was just leaving to do some shopping in town. For most of her life Marion Allen had been an admirer of Twain"s work, and had always considered herself lucky that years ago she had caught a glimpse of him at a distance in upstate New York. Now he was standing in front of her, and she didn"t know what to say to him. When he broke the silence by offering to go shopping with her, she accepted, but was in awe of his presence the whole time. She couldn"t quite believe that her childhood hero was at her side while she went about her daily routine in the shops of Hamilton.
They both enjoyed their afternoon together, and when Helen returned from school, she found that her mother and Twain were already acting like old friends. In fact, Marion had discovered in her conversations with Twain that the Allen family had old connections to Livy"s family in Elmira. William Allen"s mother-who was then in her eighties and lived in her own house on the island-had known Livy and the rest of the Langdon family many years ago.
"Was it not a strange coincidence?" Marion later wondered.30 Marion made Twain feel that he was almost like family, and gave him to understand that her home would always be open to him. So, for the last few days of his stay in Bermuda, he was often in the company of the Allens and their daughter. He spent his last full day on the island swimming with Helen in the shallow waters at the foot of Bay House. Isabel Lyon took pictures of the two splashing about in the placid bay. In one shot Twain can be seen showing off to Helen by arching his back to dive under the surface like a porpoise. He loved the pictures and later sent her copies after boasting to her in a letter that it took several days and "5 separate and distinct soapings & scourings" to get all the salt out of his hair.31 On future trips to Bermuda, Bay House would become like a second home to Twain. Surrounded by thick hedges of oleanders, "the low, rambling, white stone house" was two hundred years old, and stood at the end of a cedar-lined drive. It was a comfortable house, with a big fireplace for rainy days, and a wide porch for shade on sunny days. There was ample room for a guest or two.32 Twain"s friendship with Helen and her parents would deepen with each visit. Marion would never lose her admiration for him. The more she saw of him, the more she liked him. Though Helen was a strong-willed daughter who often found herself at odds with her parents, her mother was impressed from the beginning at how much patience and kindness Twain showed toward the girl. Young people "attracted and inspired him," she recalled. "He could be himself with them, a simple lovable man, childlike in his ingeniousness; also they were the best of shields from the too [demanding] grown-ups."33 Twain"s use of the seash.e.l.l to forge a bond with Margaret Blackmer seems to have given him the idea that each girl who became his friend should have a similar token. While he was in Bermuda he found a lapel pin with the figure of an angelfish in enamel, and decided that it made the perfect gift because the small creature was the most beautiful thing swimming in the waters of the island.
Twain became like an adopted member of the family at Bay House in Bermuda, where he often stayed as the guest of the American vice consul, William Allen, whose wife, Marion Schuyler Allen, was a great admirer of the author"s work. Here Twain is shown in 1908 swimming with the family"s teenage daughter, Helen.
He bought several of the pins and began sending them to the various girls in a newly established club he called the Aquarium. Margaret and Helen were among the first "angelfish," along with two American girls he had met on his trip to England, eleven-year-old Dorothy Quick and sixteen-year-old Frances Nunnally. Other girls would be added to the Aquarium over the next two years, including one of Paine"s daughters and one of George Harvey"s. Twain was immensely proud of the group, calling them "gems of the first water." Among other things, he wanted to make sure that each of them became experts in the pastimes that really mattered-billiards, card games, and storytelling. Sometimes he called himself the Admiral of the group, and sometimes its slave or shad.34 On Sat.u.r.day, April 11, Twain"s long holiday in Bermuda finally came to an end as he and his party boarded the ship for their return home. The six-week stay was one of the most enjoyable periods of his life, but Isabel Lyon was beginning to fret about their absence from America and was anxious to go home. If they continued to stay in Bermuda, she wouldn"t be able to superintend the final stages of construction on the Redding house. Rogers was also eager to return to his business affairs. He had put up with about as much relaxation as a man of his restless energy could endure. But Twain seemed pleased with the result, saying that his friend was now "rather steadier on his feet than when he went away."
The weather had been mild for most of their stay, but on the way home they ran into a final blast of winter as they approached New York. The ocean churned, the ship began "pitching heavily," and a great wave suddenly crashed over the decks, drenching Twain while he was in the middle of recruiting another girl to join his Aquarium.
"I was standing on the main deck aft," he said on his arrival in New York, "in the company of Miss Dorothy Sturgis, sixteen years old and from Boston. As we were watching the line take up its slack a beautiful blue comber broke on the rail and "soused" the two of us from head to foot."
Asked if he and his friend had suffered any injuries, he said no. But then he added with his usual air of innocence, "I never knew the ocean was so wet before."35 Safely separated by patriotic bunting at a police parade in New York City, Twain looks to his right as Cardinal Logue looks in the opposite direction.
THIRTEEN.
Farewell, Fifth Avenue.
I have made all the noise allotted to me, and now I intend to be quiet.
Mark Twain.
AS MUCH AS he had enjoyed Bermuda, Twain was glad to see New York again and was even inclined to think better of his old house after being away for so long. On his first night back, he admitted that the house was looking "homelike and inviting," and that he was "not sorry to be in my own bed again." More important, he was overjoyed to be reunited with his billiards table and to spend half the night playing with Paine, who was back in favor and seemingly content to act as if their relationship had never been under any strain. Though her long holiday had done little to soften her resentment of the biographer, Isabel Lyon did her best to be cordial and sat in the billiards room until nearly midnight, chatting amiably with neighbor Maud Littleton, the wife of Harry Thaw"s attorney.2 Now that spring was here, Twain returned to his habit of taking long walks in the afternoon, and Paine was often invited to come along. During Twain"s absence in Bermuda, his biographer had been conducting research in Hartford, and was full of questions. There was ample time for discussion because their walks up Fifth Avenue sometimes took them as far as Andrew Carnegie"s mansion on Ninety-first Street (now the Cooper-Hewitt Museum), which was about five miles from Twain"s house. On their way back they liked to rest on a bench in Central Park or at the Plaza Hotel, where the doorman knew Twain well and would greet him warmly. One Sunday when they went walking in the morning and turned back early at the Plaza, Paine suggested they hurry home to avoid the "throng" leaving St. Patrick"s Cathedral, the Brick Church, and other places of worship along their route.
Twain objected, saying simply, "I like the throng." Obviously, his long absence from the crowds of New York had made him eager to bask in their adulation again.
At a leisurely pace, he led the way back and timed things just right, weaving through hundreds of people pouring onto the sidewalks after services had ended. "Of course," Paine later said of the episode, "he was the object on which every pa.s.sing eye turned, the presence to which every hat was lifted."3 He took this game one step further on the last Wednesday in April, when he made a special trip to St. Patrick"s Cathedral to witness an extraordinary spectacle involving six thousand children selected from the city"s parochial schools. The archdiocese was celebrating the centenary of its founding, and the excitement was so great among the Catholic faithful that huge crowds were turning out at every event. Half a million attended a Sat.u.r.day parade that lasted two and a half hours, and that almost ended in disaster when a large crowd seeking a blessing from Cardinal Logue, the primate of Ireland, surged toward the reviewing stand. Hundreds of police on foot and horseback were needed to hold back the crowd and prevent a stampede. Fortunately, the only problems at the "Children"s Day" event on Wednesday were relatively minor ones-hundreds of spectators blocking the sidewalks, and a traffic jam caused by all the horse-drawn carriages and automobiles arriving at the same time from dozens of schools scattered throughout the city.
The six thousand children were coming to attend a solemn pontifical ma.s.s celebrated by Cardinal Logue. The boys were dressed in black suits with flags in their lapels, while many of the girls were all in white with gold sashes. Inside the great cathedral the tightly packed congregation was made up entirely of children-except for an elderly white-haired man who had managed to gain admission by special permission.
As a newspaper article reported the next day, "Six thousand and one children, the odd one being Mark Twain-the youngest of them all-filled St. Patrick"s cathedral to-day. ... Mark Twain, with his flowing white hair and wearing a light gray suit and hat, said he was one of the children. He pleaded his love for the little ones, and a special seat was arranged for him near the altar. The humorist explained that he had lived through the period of manhood and had relieved himself of its limitations when he pa.s.sed the threescore and ten milepost. To-day, he said, he was back with the children, and he seemed to be happy."
Under the circ.u.mstances the text of the day"s sermon-"Suffer the little children to come unto me"-seems to have been appropriate in more ways than one.4 Though he wasn"t wearing his famous suit, Twain must have felt that he couldn"t pa.s.s up the chance to join a ceremony in which so many girls were arrayed in white. While he was admiring the spectacle, he may have also been enjoying the secret thrill of being a lapsed Presbyterian among so many thousands of innocent Catholic schoolchildren. He was clearly the lone goat in that vast flock of sheep.
For much of his early life he had been inclined to view Catholicism with "enmity," to use his own word. As he confessed in The Innocents Abroad, "I have been educated to enmity toward every thing that is Catholic, and sometimes, in consequence of this, I find it much easier to discover Catholic faults than Catholic merits." His fault finding was usually directed against the Church as an inst.i.tution rather than against any individual Catholic. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur"s Court Hank Morgan blames the Church for undermining individual rights in order to expand the privileges of prelates, kings, and aristocrats, and believes that this "poison" of favoring rank over personal achievement has remained in "the blood of Christendom" from the Middle Ages to his own "birth-century." Reflecting on the unquestioning reverence for rank in King Arthur"s Britain, Hank says, "There you see the hand of that awful power, the Roman Catholic Church. In two or three little centuries it had converted a nation of men to a nation of worms."5 Yet the spring of 1908 found Mark Twain taking a seat not only at ma.s.s in St. Patrick"s Cathedral, but also at Cardinal Logue"s side in another event a few days later. The occasion was a parade on May 9 honoring the New York Police Department, and both the cardinal and the writer were among a small group of dignitaries given front-row seats at the reviewing stand next to Madison Square Park. In the middle of the platform was a wooden pole covered by red, white, and blue bunting, and on either side of this thin divide sat Twain and the cardinal. They must have presented a strange sight to the five thousand policemen who marched past them on Fifth Avenue, with Twain dressed in black for a change and the cardinal upstaging him in scarlet biretta and shiny pectoral cross.
When reporters asked why he was wearing black, the author joked that he was wearing a disguise in an effort to avoid being recognized by the police. He was careful to add, however, that he was a great admirer of the brave men of the force. "I"ve always liked the police, but I suppose that"s because they"ve always seemed to take such a deep, abiding interest in all that I do."
Before the parade started, the newspapermen had noticed that Twain seemed to be getting along well with the cardinal, who was often seen laughing as they talked. When Twain was later asked about their conversation, he gave a slightly creative reply: "I found his eminence a very nice old gentleman. He told me he had read my books. He didn"t say that he approved of them, but I didn"t need to have him tell me that. He looks like an intelligent man, so I take it for granted he approves of high cla.s.s literature."6 Twain"s mellow att.i.tude in matters of religion didn"t last long. Having been caught conversing with a cardinal in public, he may have felt that he needed to make amends by sharing with the world something of his own ongoing quarrel with G.o.d. An occasion for doing so presented itself just five days after the police parade. He was invited to speak at a dinner following the dedication of City College"s new campus on St. Nicholas Heights, overlooking Harlem. Though good citizenship was supposedly his topic, what he really wanted to discuss was religion and public life.
It was the kind of address that might have caused serious trouble for him if he had delivered it to a pious a.s.sembly of provincial worthies on a Sunday afternoon. But his City College crowd was much better suited to his purpose. It was made up of young alumni and faculty who had come down to the Waldorf-Astoria for a late-night dinner after celebrating all day on campus, and by the time Twain rose to speak at eleven o"clock, they were in such high spirits that they greeted him with a raucous toast, "l.u.s.tily" shouting that he was "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." Drink had made them merry, and n.o.body was inclined to contradict anything the old boy wanted to say.
So, after a few preliminary remarks about citizenship, Twain suddenly began to explain why he didn"t think America had any business using "In G.o.d We Trust" as a motto: "There is not a nation in the world which ever put its faith in G.o.d. It is a statement made on insufficient evidence. In the unimportant cases of life, perhaps, we do trust in G.o.d-that is, if we rule out the gamblers and burglars, and plumbers, for of course they do not believe in G.o.d. If the cholera or black plague should ever come to these sh.o.r.es, perhaps the bulk of the nation would pray to be delivered from it, but the rest of the population would put their trust in the Health Board of the City of New York."7 This was the kind of thing that he often said in private. In fact, in December he had made it the subject of one of his dictations, declaring boldly, "It is not proper to brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter in at the narrow gate." If America is a Christian country, Twain said in the privacy of his study, "so is h.e.l.l." Indeed, because of the demanding entrance requirements to the other place, he a.s.sumed that h.e.l.l must be "the only really prominent Christian community in any of the worlds."8 What prompted his criticism of "In G.o.d We Trust" was the popular uproar that had followed President Roosevelt"s decision in November 1907 to eliminate the motto from a new issue of ten-dollar and twenty-dollar gold coins. After designing the coins, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens had told Roosevelt that the motto needed to be left out because it would mar the beauty of his work, creating an "inartistic intrusion." Roosevelt agreed, but later claimed that his reason for doing so was to avoid the sacrilegious a.s.sociation of G.o.d and Mammon. This excuse was widely ridiculed, especially by those who wanted the motto restored. But in his December dictation, Twain had a different reason for dismissing Roosevelt"s excuse, saying, "That is just like the President. ... He is very much in the habit of furnishing a poor reason for his acts while there is an excellent reason staring him in the face. ... The motto stated a lie. If this nation has ever trusted in G.o.d, that time has gone by."9 If Twain had inserted more comments from his private dictations into his speech at the Waldorf, some in his audience might eventually have sobered up and shouted objections. But he said just enough to make his point, and then softened it with a couple of well-placed jokes before letting it go. The motto, he jested, should at least be revised to say, "Within certain judicious limitations we trust in G.o.d." If that couldn"t be made to fit, then he suggested that the government simply "enlarge the coin."
As soon as he was finished speaking, he made a quick exit, perhaps thinking it wasn"t wise to linger after expressing his honest opinion of America"s relationship with G.o.d. "With a long cigar in his mouth," one paper reported, "he hastened from the dining hall, pausing at the door to say: "I have an important engagement at a quarter of eleven." It was then 11:45."10 His subject, however, couldn"t have been more relevant. The day before he gave his speech, the Senate pa.s.sed a new act requiring the motto to appear on coins in accordance with a custom dating back to the Civil War. Six days later, a humbled Roosevelt signed the act into law in an effort to put the contentious issue behind him. Most Americans wanted the motto to be a permanent fixture on every coin. In pulpits across the land, the idea of excluding it had been denounced. One group of Presbyterian ministers had warned that the Panic of 1907 ill.u.s.trated why the nation must put its faith in G.o.d instead of "in trust companies and banks." And some journalists had joked that if a new law wasn"t approved, the country might soon see coins featuring a Teddy Bear with the inscription "In Theodore We Trust."11 The day after he gave his speech Twain saw parts of it printed in some of the New York papers, and at first these excerpts worried him. He wasn"t sure cold type could convey his efforts at comic relief. "If only the reporters would not try to improve on what I say," he told Paine. "They seem to miss the fact that the very art of saying a thing effectively is in its delicacy, and as they can"t reproduce the manner and intonation in type they make it emphatic and clumsy in trying to convey it to the reader." But, of course, this was the risk he took in going public with thoughts that he usually tried to keep private. For Paine"s benefit, Twain took one last shot at the subject, saying that the earlier troubles of the Knickerbocker Trust had made him wonder "how many were trusting in G.o.d" to restore their savings.12 ...
AFTER A FEW WEEKS of having fun in the public arena, Twain turned his attention to his big move to Redding, which was set for the middle of June. Despite his hopes that the new house would give Jean and Clara a family home as good as or better than the one they had lost in Hartford, neither of his daughters would be with him when he moved in. In fact, Jean was now living 250 miles away. After giving up on Katonah at the end of 1907, she had not done well at the house in Greenwich where Dr. Peterson had arranged for her to stay. She had experienced several seizures within days of leaving Katonah, where she had been free from such attacks for nine months. Without nurses and doctors routinely checking on her, it took a whole day for her to realize what had been happening. "I had bitten my tongue," she recalled, "and that aroused some very slight suspicions, but I didn"t know I had been ill five times."13 If proof was needed that the sanitarium had been good for her, this was it. But she was determined not to return there and managed to get through the winter and early spring without suffering another setback. With the arrival of warm weather, however, Dr. Peterson worried that her condition might grow worse if the summer heat became too intense. He advised that she and her housemates-the Cowles sisters and Marguerite Schmitt-should spend the summer in Ma.s.sachusetts at a cottage on Cape Ann. Having vacationed there on several occasions, he knew the area well and thought the cool sea breezes would be good for Jean.
In April Isabel Lyon went up to the old fishing port of Gloucester and found a pleasant cottage for Jean to share with her friends. It was located in the fashionable area of Eastern Point, where there were usually a number of summer homes available for rent. Two or three good-sized hotels stood along the sh.o.r.e of the rocky peninsula, including the rambling old Hawthorne Inn. Several large houses built by wealthy New England families were scattered over the area, and nestled among them were more modest homes and studios for the artists who came every summer to paint seascapes. A Harvard soph.o.m.ore by the name of Thomas Stearns Eliot sometimes came up from Cambridge during his summer holidays to stay at the vacation home his father built at Eastern Point a decade earlier. In fact, T. S. Eliot was so fond of Cape Ann that he would later write a moving meditation on its rough beauty in "The Dry Salvages," one of the poems in his Four Quartets.
Despite the many attractions of the area, Twain was worried that Jean would resent being uprooted and wouldn"t like living in a place so far away. As always, he thought it was best to accept whatever Dr. Peterson recommended. "I must help Dr. Peterson in his good work," he wrote Jean, "& not mar it & hinder it by going counter to his judgment & commands." But he feared that she might feel too isolated at Eastern Point. He had a couple of anxious days in mid-May, waiting for her to settle into the new place and wondering whether she would like it. To his relief, she was so pleased with Eastern Point that, as he later put it, she couldn"t "find adjectives enough to express her delight in it." Responding to the good news, he confessed, "I had a growing fear-founded upon nothing-that you would feel the other way about it. I am unspeakably glad that it pleases you, and now I hope & believe you will have a happy summer."14 The "salt-laden air" and the easy life among the summer visitors to the peninsula brought a quick improvement to Jean"s health. She ate heartily, slept well, and spent most of her days exploring the area in a leisurely fashion. "I am out-doors-with exception of meal-times-all the time," she wrote her father on May 26. In addition to going on long drives, she said, "I sleep out, I sit out on the rocks, [and] I take my cold baths out." Dr. Peterson asked a local colleague to keep an eye on her, but for much of the time, she was free to do as she pleased. Marguerite Schmitt was usually at her side, and they thoroughly enjoyed each other"s company. (It was a different story with the Cowles sisters, who had turned out to be a troubled pair, and with whom Jean was trying to have as little to do as possible.) A leading figure in the social life of Eastern Point was the painter Cecilia Beaux, whom Jean knew through Richard Watson Gilder and his family. Beaux made a point of getting to know Jean better, extending an open invitation to visit her at Green Alley, her charming house a short walk away. It was airy and comfortable, and was surrounded by one of the finest gardens on Cape Ann. Both Jean and Cecilia Beaux encouraged Twain not merely to pay a visit in the summer-as he planned to do-but to come and stay in the area for a long period. "She asked me to tell you from her," Jean wrote of Beaux in a letter to Twain, "that if you came up here, she hoped you would stay for some time, [and] that you would find the place quiet & that you should not be disturbed."
A contemporary description of Beaux"s property in summer makes the area sound as idyllic as anything in Bermuda. The "sh.e.l.l-colored cottage" was hidden from the road by a thicket of tupelo trees and stood at the end of a narrow path shaded by interlaced branches and lined with wild flowers. Covered by vines, climbing roses, and clematis, the two-story house had a brick terrace with a wide view over the lawn, which sloped toward the sea, and was bordered by "clumps of larkspur" as blue as the bay.15 Grateful to be in such an environment, Jean had only praise for Dr. Peterson"s decision to send her there. She was more convinced than ever that Katonah had been a mistake and wouldn"t give the sanitarium any credit for helping her. But she didn"t blame Peterson for trying it in her case. She disliked Dr. Sharp so much that she made a distinction between the administration of the sanitarium and the treatments prescribed by Peterson. "I can say but little good of the place, even today," she wrote of Sharp"s establishment in May, but "of Dr. Peterson"s treatment, I cannot say enough."16 For Clara, May 1908 was also an eventful time. Half of it was spent preparing for her first overseas tour. The plan was for her to sail to England in the middle of the month and then to spend the summer performing and sightseeing in various parts of Europe. During her father"s long stay in Bermuda, she had been appearing in small concerts in New York and in much larger ones in several cities in the South and the Midwest. Her most important performance took place in Atlanta on April 2. Billed as "Miss Clara Clemens, Contralto, Daughter of Mark Twain," she sang at the Grand Opera House on Peachtree Street.
Her reviews were generally good, and she pa.s.sed some along to her father, who continued to give her encouragement. "You are coming along, dear, you are coming along. You are getting splendid notices, & I am aware that you deserve them. It makes me very glad." But she was on the move so much that her father couldn"t keep track of her half the time. "I don"t know where you are," he wrote her three days after her appearance in Atlanta, "but you are drifting professionally around somewhere, I suppose-& hope."17 By the time she had finished her tour, Clara was in such a nervous state that she didn"t know whether she would be able to travel to Europe. Her spring concerts were supposed to have provided valuable preparation for her London debut, but the traveling and the rehearsals wore her down, undermining her confidence. When she returned home to New York, she made life difficult for Isabel Lyon, whose help she needed in planning the trip overseas. Her moods were so volatile that one day she would tell Lyon to continue making preparations for the voyage, and the next day she would consider canceling the whole tour. Nine days before Clara was supposed to sail, an exasperated Lyon complained in her journal, "Santa is never sure for 24 hours if she will be able to make this trip to London. ... My days are terrible."18 At the same time Lyon was also trying to prepare for the move to Redding and to make sure that the new house would be ready for its owner. The burden was too much for one person, but she tried to hide the strain, suffering in silence rather than disappoint her boss or risk a falling out with her "dear Santa Clara." One weekend in early May she almost reached her breaking point. Clara was being especially unreasonable, complaining not only about the upcoming tour but also about Lyon"s plans for decorating the new house.
"Headache. So ill all day," Lyon wrote, "for I wept without control for hours last night, because I was exhausted, and the fact that Santa misunderstood all my efforts, in working over the house. My anxiety over the finishings, my interest in my search for the right thing for the King"s house has all been misinterpreted, and the child says I am trying to ignore her."19 Lyon wanted everything to be perfect and dreaded the thought that Clara and her father might not like the finished house. As the builder"s son, Philip Sunderland, would recall, Lyon was uncompromising in her determination to get everything just right: "We had the whole interior finished, painted white, and Miss Lyon decided she didn"t like it. The house was supposed to look like an Italian villa; she felt we had made it look like a New England colonial place. She said what it needed was a dark stain-so we did the whole place over again in the dark stain."20 Though the emotional tension kept Lyon in a constant state of misery, she continued to humor Clara and to maintain her composure around her. Because Clara took so long to reach a final decision about her travel plans, Robert Collier"s help had to be enlisted at the last moment to book tickets and to make all the necessary arrangements for her and the three people she was taking along-her accompanist and friend Charles Wark, the violinist Marie Nichols, and the family housekeeper Katy Leary. It was an enormous relief for Lyon when Clara and her party boarded their ship in New York and sailed for London on May 16. Largely unaware of the difficulties that Clara had been causing at home, Twain wrote her a cheerful note while she was at sea, sending it ahead to her hotel in London. He wished her good luck with her debut, telling her, "Dear heart, I hope everything will come out exactly as you would wish." He also made a point of adding, "Robert Collier did certainly do well by you. He is a dear."21 On her arrival in London, Clara was asked by a reporter why she had not brought her father with her. As politely as possible, and with a light touch, she explained that she preferred not to be upstaged. "I had him with me for two years in America, accompanying me, but I found he was so anxious to get on the platform and make a speech before I had finished singing, and the people seemed to want to hear him so much, that I thought it safer to leave him behind."22 ...
WHILE CLARA WENT OFF to conquer new worlds, her father set aside a whole day to think up a new name for Autobiography House. He was bothered by the fact that the original name wasn"t likely to make much of an impression on the general public, and, of course, his ambition in most things was to get the world"s attention and keep it.
So he set himself a challenge. He needed to find a name that would meet four conditions: "I wanted a name that wasn"t use-worn; & wouldn"t resemble any other house"s name, either in this world or Sheol; & couldn"t be copied by anybody; & would at once suggest me to anybody hearing it uttered or seeing it in print."
In other words, he wanted a name for the house that was as memorable as the one under which he had chosen to write his books. At the beginning of June he sent a letter to Clara in London and headed it with the words "Summer-address, INNOCENCE AT HOME, REDDING, CONN." He liked the nice twist on the t.i.tle of his The Innocents Abroad, but he also thought the name was in keeping with his public image as the Man in White, eternally youthful and pure of heart. "Many populations will think it describes me," he said of Innocence at Home, and then added in a spirit of modesty, "but I do not wish to seem to know that."23 From the moment the name came to him, he began looking forward to people discussing its significance just as they discussed his habit of wearing white. The fun of answering questions on the subject would come from being coy about it. As he confessed to Jean, the name was "susceptible of more than one interpretation." But Clara had no interest in this sort of game and would later insist on a different name. For the time being, however, she was preoccupied with her tour and let the subject drop. Everyone else, however, seemed to like Twain"s choice, and he took pride in using it as his new address.24 As he waited for the day of the big move, he invited nearly everyone he knew-young and old-to come out and pay him a summer visit once he was settled in Redding. He wanted the house to be full of friends all the time and planned to record the comings and goings in a formal guest-book. On the chance that he might want to have an automobile for transporting his guests to and from the local railroad station, Robert Collier offered to pick out one of the latest models and have it delivered to the house. But Twain continued to resist having a car of his own, especially since he had no intention of learning how to drive. "The chauffeur would be expensive," he reasoned, "we shouldn"t use the thing often, for I mean to walk, not ride; we should have to build a garage-an unsightly one, no doubt. And so, there"s not going to be any mobile."25 Two friends who seemed especially eager to be among the first to stay at the new house were the young actresses Billie Burke and Margaret Illington. In 1908 they were two bright stars on the American stage, and both were devoted admirers of Twain. Whenever Burke was invited to dinner at No. 21, she was quick to drop what she was doing and race to his door. As Burke recalled in her autobiography, "I thought nothing of making a trip to New York from either Boston or Philadelphia after the show if he had invited me to one of his charming little Sunday night dinners."26 "You were especially born to love and be loved, and be happy," Twain wrote Margaret Illington, whose friendship he valued and whose Broadway career he followed closely.
When Margaret Illington learned that Twain was planning to make the billiards room of Innocence at Home the headquarters of his Aquarium Club, she insisted on becoming an official angelfish, despite the fact that she was twenty-six and married. When Twain laughed off her request, she staged an elaborate prank to change his mind. About a month before he moved to Redding, Twain invited Illington and her husband, Dan Frohman, to a Sunday night dinner and was amazed when he went to the door and found her playing a new part solely for his benefit.
"She was dressed for 12 years," Twain later remarked, "& had pink ribbons at the back of her neck & looked about 14 years old; so I admitted her as an angel-fish, & pinned the badge on her bosom. There"s lots of lady-candidates, but I guess we won"t let any more in, unless perhaps Billie Burke."
If Twain was expecting some more actresses to show up at his house in costumes similar to Illington"s, it was probably a good idea that he made producer Frohman an officer of the Aquarium Club. On the membership roll he listed him as "legal staff," just below Clara"s designation as "Mother Superior."27 Obviously, he was no longer worried that life in the country would be dull. But in the event that he failed to persuade enough people to visit him "up-country," as he liked to call Redding, he was prepared to come back to No. 21 for short periods in order to see friends or to appear at some worthy public function. He wasn"