"He touched me for a tenner the first time I ever saw him," drawled Mark to me, "and I coughed it up and have been coughing them up, whenever he"s around, with punctuality and regularity."
The "Earl" was indeed a terror, especially when he had been drinking.
His belief in his peerage was as absolute as Colonel Sellers" in his millions. All he wanted was money enough "to get over there" and "state his case." During the Tichborne trial Mark Twain and I were in London, and one day he said to me:
"I have investigated this Durham business down at the Herald"s office.
There"s nothing to it. The Lamptons pa.s.sed out of the Demesne of Durham a hundred years ago. They had long before dissipated the estates.
Whatever the t.i.tle, it lapsed. The present earldom is a new creation, not the same family at all. But, I tell you what, if you"ll put up five hundred dollars I"ll put up five hundred more, we"ll fetch our chap across and set him in as a claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy"s fat boy won"t be a marker to him!"
He was so pleased with his conceit that later along he wrote a novel and called it The Claimant. It is the only one of his books, though I never told him so, that I could not enjoy. Many years after, I happened to see upon a hotel register in Rome these entries: "The Earl of Durham," and in the same handwriting just below it, "Lady Anne Lambton" and "The Hon.
Reginald Lambton." So the Lambtons--they spelled it with a b instead of a p--were yet in the peerage. A Lambton was Earl of Durham. The next time I saw Mark I rated him on his deception. He did not defend himself, said something about its being necessary to perfect the joke.
"Did you ever meet this present peer and possible usurper?" I asked.
"No," he answered, "I never did, but if he had called on me, I would have had him come up."
III
His mind turned ever to the droll. Once in London I was living with my family at 103 Mount Street. Between 103 and 102 there was the parochial workhouse, quite a long and imposing edifice. One evening, upon coming in from an outing, I found a letter he had written on the sitting-room table. He had left it with his card. He spoke of the shock he had received upon finding that next to 102--presumably 103--was the workhouse. He had loved me, but had always feared that I would end by disgracing the family--being hanged or something--but the "work"us,"
that was beyond him; he had not thought it would come to that. And so on through pages of horseplay; his relief on ascertaining the truth and learning his mistake, his regret at not finding me at home, closing with a dinner invitation.
It was at Geneva, Switzerland, that I received a long, overflowing letter, full of flamboyant oddities, written from London. Two or three hours later came a telegram. "Burn letter. Blot it from your memory.
Susie is dead."
How much of melancholy lay hidden behind the mask of his humour it would be hard to say. His griefs were tempered by a vein of stoicism. He was a medley of contradictions. Unconventional to the point of eccentricity, his sense of his proper dignity was sound and sufficient. Though lavish in the use of money, he had a full realization of its value and made close contracts for his work. Like Sellers, his mind soared when it sailed financial currents. He lacked acute business judgment in the larger things, while an excellent economist in the lesser.
His marriage was the most brilliant stroke of his life. He got the woman of all the world he most needed, a truly lovely and wise helpmate, who kept him in bounds and headed him straight and right while she lived. She was the best of housewives and mothers, and the safest of counsellors and critics. She knew his worth; she appreciated his genius; she understood his limitations and angles. Her death was a grievous disaster as well as a staggering blow. He never wholly recovered from it.
IV
It was in the early seventies that Mark Twain dropped into New York, where there was already gathered a congenial group to meet and greet him. John Hay, quoting old Jack Dade"s description of himself, was wont to speak of this group as "of high aspirations and peregrinations."
It radiated between Franklin Square, where Joseph W. Harper--"Joe Brooklyn," we called him--reigned in place of his uncle, Fletcher Harper, the man of genius among the original Harper Brothers, and the Lotos Club, then in Irving Place, and Delmonico"s, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, with Sutherland"s in Liberty Street for a downtown place of luncheon resort, not to forget Dorlon"s in Fulton Market.
[Ill.u.s.tration: General Leonidas Polk--Lieutenant General C.S.A.--Killed in Georgia June 14, 1864--P.E. Bishop of Louisiana]
The Harper contingent, beside its chief, embraced Tom Nast and William A. Seaver, whom John Russell Young named "Papa Pendennis," and pictured as "a man of letters among men of the world and a man of the world among men of letters," a very apt phrase appropriated from Doctor Johnson, and Major Constable, a giant, who looked like a dragoon and not a bookman, yet had known Sir Walter Scott and was sprung from the family of Edinburgh publishers. Bret Harte had but newly arrived from California.
Whitelaw Reid, though still subordinate to Greeley, was beginning to make himself felt in journalism. John Hay played high priest to the revels. Occasionally I made a pious pilgrimage to the delightful shrine.
Truth to tell, it emulated rather the G.o.ds than the graces, though all of us had literary leanings of one sort and another, especially late at night; and Sam Bowles would come over from Springfield and Murat Halstead from Cincinnati to join us. Howells, always something of a prig, living in Boston, held himself at too high account; but often we had Joseph Jefferson, then in the heyday of his career, with once in a while Edwin Booth, who could not quite trust himself to go our gait.
The fine fellows we caught from oversea were innumerable, from the elder Sothern and Sala and Yates to Lord Dufferin and Lord Houghton. Times went very well those days, and whilst some looked on askance, notably Curtis and, rather oddly, Stedman, and thought we were wasting time and convivializing more than was good for us, we were mostly young and hearty, ranging from thirty to five and forty years of age, with amazing capabilities both for work and play, and I cannot recall that any hurt to any of us came of it.
Although robustious, our fribbles were harmless enough--ebullitions of animal spirit, sometimes perhaps of gaiety unguarded--though each shade, treading the Celestian way, as most of them do, and recurring to those Noctes Ambrosianae, might e"en repeat to the other the words on a memorable occasion addressed by Curran to Lord Avonmore:
_"We spent them not in toys or l.u.s.t or wine; But search of deep philosophy, Wit, eloquence and poesy-- Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine."_
V
Mark Twain was the life of every company and all occasions. I remember a practical joke of his suggestion played upon Murat Halstead. A party of us were supping after the theater at the old Brevoort House. A card was brought to me from a reporter of the World. I was about to deny myself, when Mark Twain said:
"Give it to me, I"ll fix it," and left the table.
Presently he came to the door and beckoned me out.
"I represented myself as your secretary and told this man," said he, "that you were not here, but that if Mr. Halstead would answer just as well I would fetch him. The fellow is as innocent as a lamb and doesn"t know either of you. I am going to introduce you as Halstead and we"ll have some fun."
No sooner said than done. The reporter proved to be a little bald-headed cherub newly arrived from the isle of dreams, and I lined out to him a column or more of very hot stuff, reversing Halstead in every opinion.
I declared him in favor of paying the national debt in greenbacks.
Touching the sectional question, which was then the burning issue of the time, I made the mock Halstead say: "The "b.l.o.o.d.y shirt" is only a kind of Pickwickian battle cry. It is convenient during political campaigns and on election day. Perhaps you do not know that I am myself of dyed-in-the-wool Southern and secession stock. My father and grandfather came to Ohio from South Carolina just before I was born. Naturally I have no sectional prejudices, but I live in Cincinnati and I am a Republican."
There was not a little more of the same sort. Just how it pa.s.sed through the World office I know not; but it actually appeared. On returning to the table I told the company what Mark Twain and I had done. They thought I was joking. Without a word to any of us, next day Halstead wrote a note to the World repudiating the interview, and the World printed his disclaimer with a line which said: "When Mr. Halstead conversed with our reporter he had dined." It was too good to keep. A day or two later, John Hay wrote an amusing story for the Tribune, which set Halstead right.
Mark Twain"s place in literature is not for me to fix. Some one has called him "The Lincoln of letters." That is striking, suggestive and apposite. The genius of Clemens and the genius of Lincoln possessed a kinship outside the circ.u.mstances of their early lives; the common lack of tools to work with; the privations and hardships to be endured and to overcome; the way ahead through an unblazed and trackless forest; every footstep over a stumbling block and each effort saddled with a handicap.
But they got there, both of them, they got there, and mayhap somewhere beyond the stars the light of their eyes is shining down upon us even as, amid the thunders of a world tempest, we are not wholly forgetful of them.
Chapter the Sixth
Houston and Wigfall of Texas--Stephen A. Douglas--The Twaddle about Puritans and Cavaliers--Andrew Johnson and John C. Breckenridge
I
The National Capitol--old men"s fancies fondly turn to thoughts of youth--was picturesque in its personalities if not in its architecture.
By no means the least striking of these was General and Senator Sam Houston, of Texas. In his life of adventure truth proved very much stranger than fiction.
The handsomest of men, tall and stately, he could pa.s.s no way without attracting attention; strangers in the Senate gallery first asked to have him pointed out to them, and seeing him to all appearance idling his time with his jacknife and bits of soft wood which he whittled into various shapes of hearts and anchors for distribution among his lady acquaintances, they usually went away thinking him a queer old man. So inded he was; yet on his feet and in action singularly impressive, and, when he chose, altogether the statesman and orator.
There united in him the spirits of the troubadour and the spearman.
Ivanhoe was not more gallant nor Bois-Guilbert fiercer. But the valor and the prowess were tempered by humor. Below the surging subterranean flood that stirred and lifted him to high attempt, he was a comedian who had tales to tell, and told them wondrous well. On a lazy summer afternoon on the shady side of Willard"s Hotel--the Senate not in session--he might be seen, an admiring group about him, spinning these yarns, mostly of personal experience--rarely if ever repeating himself--and in tone, gesture and grimace reproducing the drolleries of the backwoods, which from boyhood had been his home.
He spared not himself. According to his own account he had been in the early days of his Texas career a drunkard. "Everybody got drunk," I once heard him say, referring to the beginning of the Texas revolution, as he gave a side-splitting picture of that b.l.o.o.d.y episode, "and I realized that somebody must get sober and keep sober."
From the hour of that realization, when he "swore off," to the hour of his death he never touched intoxicants of any sort.
He had fought under Jackson, had served two terms in Congress and had been elected governor of Tennessee before he was forty. Then he fell in love. The young lady was a beautiful girl, well-born and highly educated, a schoolmate of my mother"s elder sister. She was persuaded by her family to throw over an obscure young man whom she preferred, and to marry a young man so eligible and distinguished.
He took her to Nashville, the state capital. There were rounds of gayety. Three months pa.s.sed. Of a sudden the little town woke to the startling rumor, which proved to be true, that the brilliant young couple had come to a parting of the ways. The wife had returned to her people. The husband had resigned his office and was gone, no one knew where.