The Clemenses returned to Hartford to find their new house “ready,” though still full of workmen, decorators, plumbers, and such other minions of labor as make life miserable to those with ambitions for new or improved habitations. The carpenters were still on the lower floor, but the family moved in and camped about in rooms up-stairs that were more or less free from the invader. They had stopped in New York ten days to buy carpets and furnishings, and these began to arrive, with no particular place to put them; but the owners were excited and happy with it all, for it was the pleasant season of the year, and all the new features of the house were fascinating, while the daily progress of the decorators furnished a fresh surprise when they roamed through the rooms at evening. Mrs. Clemens wrote home:
We are perfectly delighted with everything here and do so want you
all to see it.
Her husband, as he was likely to do, picked up the letter and finished it:
Livy appoints me to finish this; but how can a headless man perform
an intelligent function? I have been bully-ragged all day by the
builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who
is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the
carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and
has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the
ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a
book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified.
Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and I a man
who loathes details with all his heart! But I haven't lost my
temper, and I've made Livy lie down most of the time; could anybody
make her lie down all the time?
Warner wrote from Egypt expressing sympathy for their unfurnished state of affairs, but added, “I would rather fit out three houses and fill them with furniture than to fit out one 'dahabiyeh'.” Warner was at that moment undertaking his charmingly remembered trip up the Nile.
The new home was not entirely done for a long time. One never knows when a big house like that—or a little house, for that matters done. But they were settled at last, with all their beautiful things in place; and perhaps there have been richer homes, possibly more artistic ones, but there has never been a more charming home, within or without, than that one.
So many frequenters have tried to express the charm of that household. None of them has quite succeeded, for it lay not so much in its arrangement of rooms or their decorations or their outlook, though these were all beautiful enough, but rather in the personality, the atmosphere; and these are elusive things to convey in words. We can only see and feel and recognize; we cannot translate them. Even Howells, with his subtle touch, can present only an aspect here and there; an essence, as it were, from a happy garden, rather than the fullness of its bloom.
As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house was unlike any other house ever built. People asked him why he built the kitchen toward the street, and he said:
“So the servants can see the circus go by without running out into the front yard.”
But this was probably an after-thought. The kitchen end of the house extended toward Farmington Avenue, but it was by no means unbeautiful. It was a pleasing detail of the general scheme. The main entrance faced at right angles with the street and opened to a spacious hall. In turn, the hall opened to a parlor, where there was a grand piano, and to the dining-room and library, and the library opened to a little conservatory, semicircular in form, of a design invented by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Says Howells: