LETTERS, 1898, TO HOWELLS AND TWICHELL.LIFE IN VIENNA.PAYMENT OF THE DEBTS.ASSASSINATION OF THE EMPRESSThe end of January saw the payment of the last of Mark Twain's debts.
Once more he stood free before the world--a world that sounded his praises.The latter fact rather amused him."Honest men must be pretty scarce," he said, "when they make so much fuss over even a defective specimen." When the end was in sight Clemens wrote the news to Howells in a letter as full of sadness as of triumph.
To W.D.Howells, in New York:
HOTEL METROPOLE, VIENNA, Jan.22, '98.
DEAR HOWELLS,--Look at those ghastly figures.I used to write it "Hartford, 1871." There was no Susy then--there is no Susy now.And how much lies between--one long lovely stretch of scented fields, and meadows, and shady woodlands, and suddenly Sahara! You speak of the glorious days of that old time--and they were.It is my quarrel--that traps like that are set.Susy and Winnie given us, in miserable sport, and then taken away.
About the last time I saw you I described to you the culminating disaster in a book I was going to write (and will yet, when the stroke is further away)--a man's dead daughter brought to him when he had been through all other possible misfortunes--and I said it couldn't be done as it ought to be done except by a man who had lived it--it must be written with the blood out of a man's heart.I couldn't know, then, how soon I was to be made competent.I have thought of it many a time since.If you were here I think we could cry down each other's necks, as in your dream.
For we are a pair of old derelicts drifting around, now, with some of our passengers gone and the sunniness of the others in eclipse.
I couldn't get along without work now.I bury myself in it up to the ears.Long hours--8 and 9 on a stretch, sometimes.And all the days, Sundays included.It isn't all for print, by any means, for much of it fails to suit me; 50,000 words of it in the past year.It was because of the deadness which invaded me when Susy died.But I have made a change lately--into dramatic work--and I find it absorbingly entertaining.
I don't know that I can write a play that will play: but no matter, I'll write half a dozen that won't, anyway.Dear me, I didn't know there was such fun in it.I'll write twenty that won't play.I get into immense spirits as soon as my day is fairly started.Of course a good deal of this friskiness comes of my being in sight of land--on the Webster & Co.
debts, I mean.(Private.) We've lived close to the bone and saved every cent we could, and there's no undisputed claim, now, that we can't cash.
I have marked this "private" because it is for the friends who are attending to the matter for us in New York to reveal it when they want to and if they want to.There are only two claims which I dispute and which I mean to look into personally before I pay them.But they are small.
Both together they amount to only $12,500.I hope you will never get the like of the load saddled onto you that was saddled onto me 3 years ago.
And yet there is such a solid pleasure in paying the things that I reckon maybe it is worth while to get into that kind of a hobble, after all.
Mrs.Clemens gets millions of delight out of it; and the children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping, from the beginning.
We all send you and all of you our love.
MARK.
Howells wrote: "I wish you could understand how unshaken you are, you old tower, in every way; your foundations are struck so deep that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years, and bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare."The Clemens apartments at the Metropole became a sort of social clearing-house of the Viennese art and literary life, much more like an embassy than the home of a mere literary man.Celebrities in every walk of life, persons of social and official rank, writers for the press, assembled there on terms hardly possible in any other home in Vienna.Wherever Mark Twain appeared in public he was a central figure.Now and then he read or spoke to aid some benefit, and these were great gatherings attended by members of the royal family.It was following one such event that the next letter was written.
(Private)
To Rev.J.H.Twichell, in Hartford:
HOTEL METROPOLE, VIENNA, Feb.3, '98.
DEAR JOE, There's that letter that I began so long ago--you see how it is: can't get time to finish anything.I pile up lots of work, nevertheless.There may be idle people in the world, but I'm not one of them.I say "Private" up there because I've got an adventure to tell, and you mustn't let a breath of it get out.First I thought I would lay it up along with a thousand others that I've laid up for the same purpose--to talk to you about, but--those others have vanished out of my memory; and that must not happen with this.
The other night I lectured for a Vienna charity; and at the end of it Livy and I were introduced to a princess who is aunt to the heir apparent of the imperial throne--a beautiful lady, with a beautiful spirit, and very cordial in her praises of my books and thanks to me for writing them; and glad to meet me face to face and shake me by the hand--just the kind of princess that adorns a fairy tale and makes it the prettiest tale there is.
Very well, we long ago found that when you are noticed by supremacies, the correct etiquette is to go, within a couple of days, and pay your respects in the quite simple form of writing your name in the Visitors'
Book kept in the office of the establishment.That is the end of it, and everything is squared up and ship-shape.
So at noon today Livy and I drove to the Archducal palace, and got by the sentries all right, and asked the grandly-uniformed porter for the book and said we wished to write our names in it.And he called a servant in livery and was sending us up stairs; and said her Royal Highness was out but would soon be in.Of course Livy said "No--no--we only want the book;" but he was firm, and said, "You are Americans?""Yes."