of our modern tailoring forbids men, though it flatters
women to every excess in it; yet he also enjoyed the
shock, the offence, the pang which it gave the sensibilities
of others. Then there were times he played these
pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of the witness.
Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room
at Hartford in a pair of white cowskin slippers, with
the hair out, and do a crippled colored uncle to the
joy of all beholders. Or, I must not say all,
for I remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and
her low, despairing cry of, “Oh, Youth!”
That was her name for him among their friends, and
it fitted him as no other would, though I fancied
with her it was a shrinking from his baptismal Samuel,
or the vernacular Sam of his earlier companionships.
He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of
a boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good
boy, or a bad boy, but always a wilful boy, and wilfulest
to show himself out at every, time for just the boy
he was.
There is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, which
I think is of a year or two, for the next thing I
remember of him is meeting him at a lunch in Boston,
given us by that genius of hospitality, the tragically
destined Ralph Keeler, author of one of the most unjustly
forgotten books, ‘Vagabond Adventures’,
a true bit of picaresque autobiography. Keeler
never had any money, to the general knowledge, and
he never borrowed, and he could not have had credit
at the restaurant where he invited us to feast at
his expense. There was T. B. Aldrich, there was
J. T. Fields, much the oldest of our company, who
had just freed himself from the trammels of the publishing
business, and was feeling his freedom in every word;
there was Bret Harte, who had lately come East in his
princely progress from California; and there was Clemens.
Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense
of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play, beginning
and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless
good stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer
of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional concentration
of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it
gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving,
but so full of good fellowship, Bret Harte’s
fleeting dramatization of Clemens’s mental attitude
toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. “Why,
fellows,” he spluttered, “this is the dream
of Mark’s life,” and I remember the glance
from under Clemens’s feathery eyebrows which
betrayed his enjoyment of the fun. We had beefsteak
with mushrooms, which in recognition of their shape
Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the feast
we had an omelette souse, which the waiter brought
in as flat as a pancake, amid our shouts of congratulations
to poor Keeler, who took them with appreciative submission.
It was in every way what a Boston literary lunch ought
not to have been in the popular ideal which Harte attributed
to Clemens.
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