Autobiography of Mark Twain Read online

  When it was too late, I found out what had become of Orion’s money. Any other human being would have sent a check, but he sent gold. The hotel clerk put it in the safe and went on vacation, and there it had reposed all this time enjoying its fatal work, no doubt. Another man might have thought to tell me that the money was not in a letter, but was in an express package, but it never occurred to Orion to do that.

  Later, Mr. Camp gave me another chance. He agreed to buy our Tennessee land for two hundred thousand dollars, pay a part of the amount in cash and give long notes for the rest. His scheme was to import foreigners from grape-growing and wine-making districts in Europe, settle them on the land, and turn it into a wine-growing country. He knew what Mr. Longworth thought of those Tennessee grapes, and was satisfied. I sent the contracts and things to Orion for his signature, he being one of the three heirs. But they arrived at a bad time—in a doubly bad time, in fact. The temperance virtue was temporarily upon him in strong force, and he wrote and said that he would not be a party to debauching the country with wine. Also he said how could he know whether Mr. Camp was going to deal fairly and honestly with those poor people from Europe or not?—and so, without waiting to find out, he quashed the whole trade, and there it fell, never to be brought to life again. The land, from being suddenly worth two hundred thousand dollars, became as suddenly worth what it was before—nothing, and taxes to pay. I had paid the taxes and the other expenses for some years, but I dropped the Tennessee Land there, and have never taken any interest in it since, pecuniarily or otherwise, until yesterday.

  I had supposed, until yesterday, that Orion had frittered away the last acre, and indeed that was his own impression. But a gentleman arrived yesterday from Tennessee and brought a map showing that by a correction of the ancient surveys we still own a thousand acres, in a coal district, out of the hundred thousand acres which my father left us when he died in 1847. The gentleman brought a proposition; also he brought a reputable and well-to-do citizen of New York. The proposition was that the Tennesseean gentleman should sell that land; that the New York gentleman should pay all the expenses and fight all the lawsuits, in case any should turn up, and that of such profit as might eventuate the Tennesseean gentleman should take a third, the New Yorker a third, and Sam Moffett and his sister (Mrs. Charles L. Webster), and I—who are the surviving heirs—the remaining third.

  This time I hope we shall get rid of the Tennessee Land for good and all and never hear of it again.

  I came East in January 1867. Orion remained in Carson City perhaps a year longer. Then he sold his twelve-thousand-dollar house and its furniture for thirty-five hundred in greenbacks at about 60 per cent discount. He and his wife took first-class passage in the steamer for New York. In New York they stopped at an expensive hotel; explored the city in an expensive way; then fled to Keokuk, and arrived there about as nearly penniless as they were when they had migrated thence in July ’61. About 1871 or ’72 they came to New York. They were obliged to go somewhere. Orion had been trying to make a living in the law ever since he had arrived from the Pacific coast, but he had secured only two cases. Those he was to try free of charge—but the possible result will never be known, because the parties settled the cases out of court without his help.

  I had bought my mother a house in Keokuk. I was giving her a stated sum monthly, and Orion another stated sum. They all lived together in the house. Orion could have had all the work he wanted, at good wages, in the composing-room of the Gate City, (a daily paper) but his wife had been a Governor’s wife and she was not able to permit that degradation. It was better, in her eyes, that they live upon charity.

  But, as I say, they came East and Orion got a job as proof-reader on the New York Evening Post at ten dollars a week. They took a single small room, and in it they cooked, and lived on that money. By and by Orion came to Hartford and wanted me to get him a place as reporter on a Hartford paper. Here was a chance to try my scheme again, and I did it. I made him go to the Hartford Evening Post, without any letter of introduction, and propose to scrub and sweep and do all sorts of things for nothing, on the plea that he didn’t need money but only needed work, and that that was what he was pining for. Within six weeks he was on the editorial staff of that paper at twenty dollars a week, and he was worth the money. He was presently called for by some other paper at better wages, but I made him go to the Post people and tell them about it. They stood the raise and kept him. It was the pleasantest berth he had ever had in his life. It was an easy berth. He was in every way comfortable. But ill luck came. It was bound to come.

  A new Republican daily was to be started in Rutland, Vermont, by a stock company of well-to-do politicians, and they offered him the chief editorship at three thousand a year. He was eager to accept. His wife was equally eager—no, twice as eager, three times as eager. My beseechings and reasonings went for nothing. I said,

  “You are as weak as water. Those people will find it out right away. They will easily see that you have no back-bone; that they can deal with you as they would deal with a slave. You may last six months, but not longer. Then they will not dismiss you as they would dismiss a gentleman: they will fling you out as they would fling out an intruding tramp.”

  It happened just so. Then he and his wife migrated to that persecuted and unoffending Keokuk once more. Orion wrote from there that he was not resuming the law; that he thought that what his health needed was the open air, in some sort of outdoor occupation; that his old father-in-law had a strip of ground on the river border a mile above Keokuk with some sort of a house on it, and his idea was to buy that place and start a chicken farm and provide Keokuk with chickens and eggs, and perhaps butter—but I don’t know whether you can raise butter on a chicken farm or not. He said the place could be had for three thousand dollars cash, and I sent the money. He began to raise chickens, and he made a detailed monthly report to me, whereby it appeared that he was able to work off his chickens on the Keokuk people at a dollar and a quarter a pair. But it also appeared that it cost a dollar and sixty cents to raise the pair. This did not seem to discourage Orion, and so I let it go. Meantime he was borrowing a hundred dollars per month of me regularly, month by month. Now to show Orion’s stern and rigid business ways—and he really prided himself on his large business capacities—the moment he received the advance of a hundred dollars at the beginning of each month, he always sent me his note for the amount, and with it he sent, out of that money, three months’ interest on the hundred dollars at 6 per cent per annum, these notes being always for three months. I did not keep them of course. They were of no value to anybody.

  As I say, he always sent a detailed statement of the month’s profit and loss on the chickens—at least the month’s loss on the chickens—and this detailed statement included the various items of expense—corn for the chickens, a bonnet for the wife, boots for himself, and so on; even carfares, and the weekly contribution of ten cents to help out the missionaries who were trying to damn the Chinese after a plan not satisfactory to those people. But at last when among those details I found twenty-five dollars for pew-rent I struck. I told him to change his religion and sell the pew.

  Friday, April 6, 1906

  Mr. Clemens’s present house unsatisfactory because of no sunshine—Mr. Clemens meets Etta in Washington Square—Recalls ball-room in Virginia City forty-four years ago—Orion resumed; he invents wood-sawing machine; invents steam canal-boat; his funny experience in bath-tub—Bill Nye’s story—Orion’s autobiography—His death.

  This house is No. 21 Fifth Avenue, and stands on the corner of 9th street within a couple of hundred yards of Washington Square. It was built fifty or sixty years ago by Renwick, the architect of the Roman Catholic Cathedral. It is large, and every story has good and spacious rooms. Something more than a year ago, Clara and Katy, (the housekeeper,) examined it and greatly liked it. They did not superficially examine it, but examined it in detail, and the more they searched it the better they liked it. It was then my t
urn to act, and instead of taking it for a year, with an option or two, I took it for three years and signed the contract. We put the furniture in, then moved in ourselves, and made a discovery straightway. There was not a window in the whole house, either on the Fifth Avenue front or on the long 9th street side, that had ever known what a ray of sunshine was like. It was a bad business, and too late to correct it. The entire house is in shadow at all seasons of the year except dead summertime. The sun gets in then, but as there wouldn’t ever be anybody in the house at that time of the year, it is no advantage.

  Nobody thrives in this house. Nobody profits by our sojourn in it except the doctors. They seem to be here all the time. We must move out and find a house with some sunshine in it.

  Yesterday I went down to Washington Square, turned out to the left to look at a house that stands on the corner of the Square and University Place. Presently I stepped over to the corner of the Square to take a general look at the frontage of the house. While crossing the street I met a woman, and was conscious that she recognized me, and it seemed to me that there was something in her face that was familiar to me. I had the instinct that she would turn and follow me and speak to me, and the instinct was right. She was a fat little woman, with a gentle and kindly but aged and homely face, and she had white hair, and was neatly but poorly dressed. She said,

  “Aren’t you Mr. Clemens?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I am.”

  She said, “Where is your brother Orion?”

  “Dead,” I said.

  “Where is his wife?”

  “Dead,” I said; and added, “I seem to know you, but I cannot place you.”

  She said “Do you remember Etta Booth?”

  I had known only one Etta Booth in my lifetime, and that one rose before me in an instant, and vividly. It was almost as if she stood alongside of this fat little antiquated dame in the bloom and diffidence and sweetness of her thirteen years, her hair in plaited braids down her back and her fire-red frock stopping short at her knees. Indeed I remembered Etta very well. And immediately another vision rose before me, with that child in the centre of it and accenting its sober tint like a torch with her red frock. But it was not a quiet vision; not a reposeful one. The scene was a great ball-room in some ramshackle building in Gold Hill or Virginia City, Nevada. There were two or three hundred stalwart men present and dancing with cordial energy. And in the midst of the turmoil Etta’s crimson frock was swirling and flashing; and she was the only dancer of her sex on the floor. Her mother, large, fleshy, pleasant and smiling, sat on a bench against the wall in lonely and honored state and watched the festivities in placid contentment. She and Etta were the only persons of their sex in the ball-room. Half of the men represented ladies, and they had a handkerchief tied around the left arm so that they could be told from the men. I did not dance with Etta, for I was a lady myself. I wore a revolver in my belt, and so did all the other ladies—likewise the gentlemen. It was a dismal old barn of a place, and was lighted from end to end by tallow-candle chandeliers made of barrel-hoops suspended from the ceiling, and the grease dripped all over us. That was in the beginning of the winter of 1862. It has taken forty-four years for Etta to cross my orbit again.

  I asked after her father.

  “Dead,” she said.

  I asked after her mother.

  “Dead,” she said.

  Another question brought out the fact that she had long been married, but had no children. We shook hands and parted. She walked three or four steps, then turned and came back, and her eyes filled, and she said,

  “I am a stranger here, and far from my friends—in fact I have hardly any friends left. Nearly all of them are dead. I must tell my news to you. I must tell it to somebody. I can’t bear it by myself, while it is so new. The doctor has just told me that my husband can live only a very little while, and I was not dreaming it was so bad as this.”

  Orion Resumed.

  I think the poultry experiment lasted about a year, possibly two years. It had then cost me six thousand dollars. It is my impression that Orion was not able to give the farm away, and that his father-in-law took it back as a kindly act of self-sacrifice.

  Orion returned to the law business, and I suppose he remained in that harness off and on for the succeeding quarter of a century, but so far as my knowledge goes he was only a lawyer in name, and had no clients.

  My mother died, in her eighty-eighth year, in the summer of 1890. She had saved some money, and she left it to me, because it had come from me. I gave it to Orion and he said, with thanks, that I had supported him long enough and now he was going to relieve me of that burden, and would also hope to pay back some of that expense, and maybe the whole of it. Accordingly, he proceeded to use up that money in building a considerable addition to the house, with the idea of taking boarders and getting rich. We need not dwell upon this venture. It was another of his failures. His wife tried hard to make the scheme succeed, and if anybody could have made it succeed she would have done it. She was a good woman, and was greatly liked. Her vanity was pretty large and inconvenient, but she had a practical side too, and she would have made that boarding-house lucrative if circumstances had not been against her.

  Orion had other projects for recouping me, but as they always required capital I stayed out of them, and they did not materialize. Once he wanted to start a newspaper. It was a ghastly idea, and I squelched it with a promptness that was almost rude. Then he invented a wood-sawing machine and patched it together himself, and he really sawed wood with it. It was ingenious; it was capable; and it would have made a comfortable little fortune for him; but just at the wrong time Providence interfered again. Orion applied for a patent and found that the same machine had already been patented and had gone into business and was thriving.

  Presently the State of New York offered a fifty-thousand-dollar prize for a practical method of navigating the Erie Canal with steam canal-boats. Orion worked at that thing two or three years, invented and completed a method, and was once more ready to reach out and seize upon imminent wealth when somebody pointed out a defect: his steam canal-boat could not be used in the wintertime; and in the summertime the commotion its wheels would make in the water would wash away the State of New York on both sides.

  Innumerable were Orion’s projects for acquiring the means to pay off his debt to me. These projects extended straight through the succeeding thirty years, but in every case they failed. During all those thirty years his well-established honesty kept him in offices of trust where other people’s money had to be taken care of, but where no salary was paid. He was treasurer of all the benevolent institutions; he took care of the money and other property of widows and orphans; he never lost a cent for anybody, and never made one for himself. Every time he changed his religion the church of his new faith was glad to get him; made him treasurer at once, and at once he stopped the graft and the leaks in that church. He exhibited a facility in changing his political complexion that was a marvel to the whole community. Once the following curious thing happened, and he wrote me all about it himself.

  One morning he was a Republican, and upon invitation he agreed to make a campaign speech at the Republican mass meeting that night. He prepared the speech. After luncheon he became a Democrat and agreed to write a score of exciting mottoes to be painted upon the transparencies which the Democrats would carry in their torchlight procession that night. He wrote these shouting Democratic mottoes during the afternoon, and they occupied so much of his time that it was night before he had a chance to change his politics again; so he actually made a rousing Republican campaign speech in the open air while his Democratic transparencies passed by in front of him, to the joy of every witness present.

  He was a most strange creature—but in spite of his eccentricities he was beloved, all his life, in whatsoever community he lived. And he was also held in high esteem, for at bottom he was a sterling man.

  Whenever he had a chance to get into a ridiculous position he wa
s generally competent for that occasion. When he and his wife were living in Hartford, at the time when he was on the staff of the Evening Post, they were boarders and lodgers in a house that was pretty well stocked with nice men and women of moderate means. There was a bath-room that was common to the tribe, and one Sunday afternoon when the rest of the house was steeped in restful repose, Orion thought he would take a bath, and he carried that idea to a more or less successful issue. But he didn’t lock the door. It was his custom, in summer weather, to fill the long bath-tub nearly full of cold water and then get in it on his knees with his nose on the bottom and maintain this pleasant attitude a couple of minutes at a time. A chambermaid came in there, and then she rushed out and went shrieking through the house,

  “Mr. Clemens is drowned!”

  Everybody came flying out of the doors, and Mrs. Clemens rushed by, crying out in agony,

  “How do you know it is Mr. Clemens?”