Yet Clemens seems never to have been openly violent with Paige. In the memorandum which he completed about this time he wrote:
Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he
knows perfectly well that if I had him in a steel trap I would shut
out all human succor and watch that trap until he died.
He was grabbing at straws now. He offered a twentieth or a hundredth or a thousandth part of the enterprise for varying sums, ranging from one thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. He tried to capitalize his advance (machine) royalties, and did dispose of a few of these; but when the money came in for them he was beset by doubts as to the final outcome, and though at his wit's ends for further funds, he returned the checks to the friends who had sent them. One five-thousand-dollar check from a friend named Arnot, in Elmira, went back by the next mail. He was willing to sacrifice his own last penny, but he could not take money from those who were blindly backing his judgment only and not their own. He still had faith in Jones, faith which lasted up to the 13th of February, 1891. Then came a final letter, in which Jones said that he had canvassed the situation thoroughly with such men as Mackay, Don Cameron, Whitney, and others, with the result that they would have nothing to do with the machine. Whitney and Cameron, he said, were large stockholders in the Mergenthaler. Jones put it more kindly and more politely than that, and closed by saying that there could be no doubt as to the machine's future —an ambiguous statement. A letter from young Hall came about the same time, urging a heavy increase of capital in the business. The Library of American Literature, its leading feature, was handled on the instalment plan. The collections from this source were deferred driblets, while the bills for manufacture and promotion must be paid down in cash. Clemens realized that for the present at least the dream was ended. The family securities were exhausted. The book trade was dull; his book royalties were insufficient even to the demands of the household. He signed further notes to keep business going, left the matter of the machine in abeyance, and turned once more to the trade of authorship. He had spent in the neighborhood of one hundred and ninety thousand dollars on the typesetter—money that would better have been thrown into the Connecticut River, for then the agony had been more quickly over. As it was, it had shadowed many precious years.
CLXXV. “THE CLAIMANT”—LEAVING HARTFORD
For the first time in twenty years Mark Twain was altogether dependent on literature. He did not feel mentally unequal to the new problem; in fact, with his added store of experience, he may have felt himself more fully equipped for authorship than ever before. It had been his habit to write within his knowledge and observation. To a correspondent of this time he reviewed his stock in trade—
... I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when
pretending to portray life. But I confined myself to the boy-life
out on the Mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and
not because I was not familiar with other phases of life. I was a
soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted
like a rat the whole time. Familiar? My splendid Kipling himself
hasn't a more burnt-in, hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity
with that death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which
is a raw soldier's first fortnight in the field—and which, without
any doubt, is the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is
ever going to see.
Yes, and I have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple
of weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that
direction. And I've done “pocket-mining” during three months in the
one little patch of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals
gold in pockets—or did before we robbed all of those pockets and
exhausted, obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak Nature
ever indulged in. There are not thirty men left alive who, being
told there was a pocket hidden on the broad slope of a mountain,
would know how to go and find it, or have even the faintest idea of
how to set about it; but I am one of the possible 20 or 30 who
possess the secret, and I could go and put my hand on that hidden
treasure with a most deadly precision.
And I've been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when I find
it—just with a touch of the tongue. And I've been a silver miner
and know how to dig and shovel and drill and put in a blast. And so
I know the mines and the miners interiorly as well as Bret Harte
knows them exteriorly.
And I was a newspaper reporter four years in cities, and so saw the
inside of many things; and was reporter in a legislature two
sessions and the same in Congress one session, and thus learned to
know personally three sample bodies of the smallest minds and the
selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.
And I was some years a Mississippi pilot, and familiarly knew all
the different kinds of steamboatmen—a race apart, and not like
other folk.
And I was for some years a traveling “jour” printer, and wandered
from city to city—and so I know that sect familiarly.
And I was a lecturer on the public platform a number of seasons and
was a responder to toasts at all the different kinds of banquets
—and so I know a great many secrets about audiences—secrets not to
be got out of books, but only acquirable by experience.
And I watched over one dear project of mine for years, spent a
fortune on it, and failed to make it go—and the history of that
would make a large book in which a million men would see themselves
as in a mirror; and they would testify and say, Verily, this is not
imagination; this fellow has been there—and after would they cast
dust upon their heads, cursing and blaspheming.
And I am a publisher, and did pay to one author's widow (General
Grant's) the largest copyright checks this world has seen
—aggregating more than L80,000 in the first year.
And I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.
Now then: as the most valuable capital or culture or education
usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to
be well equipped for that trade.
I surely have the equipment, a wide culture, and all of it real,
none of it artificial, for I don't know anything about books.
This generous bill of literary particulars was fully warranted. Mark Twain's equipment was equal to his occasions. It is true that he was no longer young, and that his health was not perfect, but his resolution and his energy had not waned.
His need was imminent and he lost no time. He dug out from his pigeonholes such materials as he had in stock, selecting a few completed manuscripts for immediate disposal—among them his old article entitled, “Mental Telegraphy,” written in 1878, when he had hesitated to offer it, in the fear that it would not be accepted by the public otherwise than as a joke. He added to it now a supplement and sent it to Mr. Alden, of Harper's Magazine.
Psychic interest had progressed in twelve years; also Mark Twain had come to be rather more seriously regarded. The article was accepted promptly!—[The publication of this article created a good deal of a stir and resulted in the first general recognition of what later became known as Telepathy. A good many readers insisted on regarding the whole matter as one of Mark Twain's jokes, but its serious acceptance was much wider.]—The old sketch, “Luck,” also found its way to Harper's Magazine, and other manuscripts were looked over and furbished up with a view to their disposal. Even the history game was dragged from the dust of its retirement, and Hall was instructed to investigate its chance of profit.