Mark Twain: A Biography. Complete

by Albert Bigelow Paine

I remember a delightful luncheon that Charles Kingsley gave for Mr.
Clemens; also an evening when Lord Dunraven brought Mr. Home, the
medium, Lord Dunraven telling many of the remarkable things he had
seen Mr. Home do. I remember I wanted so much to see him float out
of a seven or eight story window, and enter another, which Lord
Dunraven said he had seen him do many times. But Mr. Home had been
very ill, and said his power had left him. My great regret was that
we did not see Carlyle, who was too sad and ill for visits.

Among others they met Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, and found him so shy that it was almost impossible to get him to say a word on any subject.

“The shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met,” Clemens once wrote. “Dr. MacDonald and several other lively talkers were present, and the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but Carroll sat still all the while, except now and then when he answered a question.”

At a dinner given by George Smalley they met Herbert Spencer, and at a luncheon-party at Lord Houghton's, Sir Arthur Helps, then a world-wide celebrity.

Lord Elcho, a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the
table. He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming. It
was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the
Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling,
and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it
startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. In the
middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests on
her right and on her left, in a matter-of-fact way, “Excuse me, I
have an engagement,” and without further ceremony, she went off to
meet it. This would have been doubtful etiquette in America. Lord
Houghton told a number of delightful stories. He told them in
French, and I lost nothing of them but the nubs.

Little Susy and her father thrived on London life, but after a time it wore on Mrs. Clemens. She delighted in the English cordiality and culture, but the demands were heavy, the social forms sometimes trying. Life in London was interesting, and in its way charming, but she did not enter into it with quite her husband's enthusiasm and heartiness. In the end they canceled all London engagements and quietly set out for Scotland. On the way they rested a few days in York, a venerable place such as Mark Twain always loved to describe. In a letter to Mrs. Langdon he wrote:

For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with
its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew
no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper
stories far overhanging the street, and thus marking their date,
say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated
gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque
ruin of St. Mary's Abbey, suggesting their date, say five hundred
years ago, in the heart of Crusading times and the glory of English
chivalry and romance; the vast Cathedral of York, with its worn
carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of still remoter
days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that
stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish
dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of
King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with Saxon
oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred
years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins
and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of
stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by
the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed
and, caressed them every lagging day since the Roman Emperor's
soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son of Mary
walked the streets of Nazareth a youth, with no more name or fame
than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street this
moment.

They reached Edinburgh at the end of July and secluded themselves in Veitch's family hotel in George Street, intending to see no one. But this plan was not a success; the social stress of London had been too much for Mrs. Clemens, and she collapsed immediately after their arrival. Clemens was unacquainted in Edinburgh, but remembered that Dr. John Brown, who had written Rab and His Friend, lived there. He learned his address, and that he was still a practising physician. He walked around to 23 Rutland Street, and made himself known. Dr. Brown came forthwith, and Mrs. Clemens speedily recovered under his able and inspiring treatment.

The association did not end there. For nearly a month Dr. Brown was their daily companion, either at the hotel, or in his own home, or on protracted drives when he made his round of visits, taking these new friends along. Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Edinburgh, everybody in Scotland, for that matter, and his story of Rab had won him a following throughout Christendom. He was an unpretentious sovereign. Clemens once wrote of him:

His was a sweet and winning face, as beautiful a face as I have ever
known. Reposeful, gentle, benignant; the face of a saint at peace
with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine of love
that filled his heart.