Марк Твен - Complete Letters of Mark Twain

In the next place – Mr. Langdon is old, and is trying hard to withdraw from business and seek repose. I will not burden him with a purchase – but I will ask him to take full possession of a coal tract of the land without paying a cent, simply conditioning that he shall mine and throw the coal into Mark.t at his own cost, and pay to you and all of you what he thinks is a fair portion of the profits accruing – you can do as you please with the rest of the land. Therefore, send me (to Elmira,) information about the coal deposits so framed that he can comprehend the matter and can intelligently instruct an agent how to find it and go to work.

Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience—4,000 critics – and on the success of this matter depends my future success in New England. But I am not distressed. Nasby is in the same boat. Tonight decides the fate of his brand-new lecture. He has just left my room – been reading his lecture to me – was greatly depressed. I have convinced him that he has little to fear.

I get just about five hundred more applications to lecture than I can possibly fill – and in the West they say “Charge all you please, but come.” I shan’t go West at all. I stop lecturing the 22d of January, sure. But I shall talk every night up to that time. They flood me with high-priced invitations to write for magazines and papers, and publishers besiege me to write books. Can’t do any of these things.

I am twenty-two thousand dollars in debt, and shall earn the money and pay it within two years – and therefore I am not spending any money except when it is necessary.

I had my life insured for $10,000 yesterday (what ever became of Mr. Moffett’ s life insurance?) “for the benefit of my natural heirs”—the same being my mother, for Livy wouldn’t claim it, you may be sure of that. This has taken $200 out of my pocket which I was going to send to Ma. But I will send her some, soon. Tell Orion to keep a stiff upper lip – when the worst comes to the worst I will come forward. Must talk in Providence, R. I., tonight. Must leave now. I thank Mollie and Orion and the rest for your letters, but you see how I am pushed – ought to have 6 clerks.

Affectionately,

Sam .

By the end of January, 1870 more than thirty thousand copies of the Innocents had been sold, and in a letter to his publisher the author expressed his satisfaction.

*****

To Elisha Bliss, in Hartford:

Elmira , Jan. 28 ’70.

Friend bliss ,—…. Yes, I am satisfied with the way you are running the book. You are running it in staving, tip-top, first-class style. I never wander into any corner of the country but I find that an agent has been there before me, and many of that community have read the book. And on an average about ten people a day come and hunt me up to thank me and tell me I’m a benefactor! I guess this is a part of the programme we didn’t expect in the first place.

I think you are rushing this book in a manner to be proud of; and you will make the finest success of it that has ever been made with a subscription book, I believe. What with advertising, establishing agencies, &c., you have got an enormous lot of machinery under way and hard at work in a wonderfully short space of time. It is easy to see, when one travels around, that one must be endowed with a deal of genuine generalship in order to maneuvre a publication whose line of battle stretches from end to end of a great continent, and whose foragers and skirmishers invest every hamlet and besiege every village hidden away in all the vast space between.

I’ll back you against any publisher in America, Bliss – or elsewhere.

Yrs as ever,

Clemens .

There is another letter written just at this time which of all letters must not be omitted here. Only five years earlier Mark Twain, poor, and comparatively unknown, had been carrying water while Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker washed out the pans of dirt in search of the gold pocket which they did not find. Clemens must have received a letter from Gillis referring to some particular occasion, but it has disappeared; the reply, however, always remained one of James Gillis’s treasured possessions.

*****

To James Gillis, in his cabin on Jackass Hill, Tuolumne Co., California:

Elmira , N.Y. Jan. 26, ’70.

Dear Jim , – I remember that old night just as well! And somewhere among my relics I have your remembrance stored away. It makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. Still, it shouldn’t – for right in the depths of their poverty and their pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune. You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain and mud of Angels’ Camp I mean that day we sat around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from the yarn and laughed over it, out there on the hillside while you and dear old Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it – I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up! I published that story, and it became widely known in America, India, China, England – and the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands and thousands of dollars since. Four or five months ago I bought into the Express (I have ordered it sent to you as long as you live – and if the book keeper sends you any bills, you let me hear of it.) I went heavily in debt never could have dared to do that, Jim, if we hadn’t heard the jumping Frog story that day.

And wouldn’t I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn’t I love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of “Rinalds” in the “Burning Shame!” Where is Dick and what is he doing? Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances.

A week from today I shall be married to a girl even better, and lovelier than the peerless “Chapparal Quails.” You can’t come so far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come, anyhow – and I invite Dick, too. And if you two boys were to land here on that pleasant occasion, we would make you right royally welcome.

Truly your friend,

Sam L. Clemens .

P. S. “California plums are good, Jim – particularly when they are stewed.”

Steve Gillis, who sent a copy of his letter to the writer, added: “Dick Stoker – dear, gentle unselfish old Dick-died over three years ago, aged 78. I am sure it will be a melancholy pleasure to Mark to know that Dick lived in comfort all his later life, sincerely loved and respected by all who knew him. He never left Jackass Hill. He struck a pocket years ago containing enough not only to build himself a comfortable house near his old cabin, but to last him, without work, to his painless end. He was a Mason, and was buried by the Order in Sonora.

“The ’Quails’—the beautiful, the innocent, the wild little Quails – lived way out in the Chapparal; on a little ranch near the Stanislaus River, with their father and mother. They were famous for their beauty and had many suitors.”

The mention of “California plums” refers to some inedible fruit which Gillis once, out of pure goodness of heart, bought of a poor wandering squaw, and then, to conceal his motive, declared that they were something rare and fine, and persisted in eating them, though even when stewed they nearly choked him.

Samuel L. Clemens and Olivia Langdon were married in the Langdon home at Elmira, February 2, 1870, and took up their residence in Buffalo in a beautiful home, a wedding present from the bride’s father. The story of their wedding, and the amusing circumstances connected with their establishment in Buffalo, have been told elsewhere. [12] Mark Twain: A Biography, chap. LXXIVL. Mark Twain now believed that he was through with lecturing. Two letters to Redpath, his agent, express his comfortable condition.