[begin page 329]

To the Unborn Reader.

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In your day, a hundred years hence, this Manuscript will have a distinct value; & not a small value but a large one. If it can be preserved an ten centuries it will still have a still larger value—a value augmented tenfold, in fact. For it will furnish an intimate inside view of our domestic life of to-day not to be found in naked & comprehensive detail outside of its pages. Its episodes have occurred in all lands & in all ages, but they have never been linked together in progressive order & sequence & set down as plain narrative of fact before; heretofore certain of them have been used in romances, but not otherwise. That employment of them has weakened them, not strengthened them. , because, so used, they fail of the priceless quality of authenticity.

There are three conspicuous characters in this true tale of mine, this queer & shabby & pitiful tale—to-wit, I a pair of degraded & sufficiently clumsy sharpers, & I the born ass, their easy victim. The These three characters have figured as clever inventions in many romances, but in this Manuscript we are not inventions, we are flesh & blood realities, & the silly & sordid things we have done & said are facts, not fancies.

I have sett Ⓐtextual note this history down in the form of a Letter—a letter to an old & sympathetic friend, a friend of thirty-five years’ standing, the novelist William Dean Howells. This was to give me freedom, utter freedom, limitless freedom, liberty to talk right out of my heart, without reserve. I could not talk like that to the general public, I could not strip myself naked before company.

Howells is all refinement, by nature & training. Now & then, when I have been obliged to be robust & indelicate in my speech, Howells was an embarrassment to me; I found I could not say things to him which I could not say to a lady. In these cases I have gotten over the difficulty by imagining I was talking to Colonel George Harvey. He is as robust as I am myself.

This original Manuscript will be locked up & put away, & no copy of it made. Your eye, after mine, will be the first to see it.

If the Paston LettersⒺexplanatory note had been a free-spoken private communication to a Howells of four & a quarter centuries ago, imagine the light it would throw upon domestic life in England in that old day! a life which is hidden in deep night, a life which is a sealed book to the world forever; & imagine the value of it!

Mark Twain

Stormfield, 1909, autumn.

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[begin page 330]

Insert Ashcroft’s Letter received yesterday, May 1/09.

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Ⓐtextual note

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I began at the end of my tale; I think I must go back & give you a word of introduction. In London, in about 1900, in 1899, I took $25,000 of the stock of the Plasmon Syndicate, & paid the money down; (total capital, $150,000.) I became a directorⒺexplanatory note. By May, 1900, we had the enterprise on its feet & doing a prosperous promising business. Then some Americans wanted the rights for America. Of them was John Hays Hammond, mi South African millionaire & famous engineer. I knew his South African history, & had a great respect for him & confidence in him—a man of sterling character. I had had objections, but I withdrew them when I found that Hammond was of the party. The trade was made, & the American company was presently started in New York. Henry A. Butters of California was one of the promoters & directors. He swindled me out of $12,500 & helped Wright, a subordinate, to swindle me out of $7,000 moreⒺexplanatory note.

Two of the directors—Butters & another—proceeded to gouge the companyⒺexplanatory note out of its cash capital. By about 1905 they had sucked it dry, & the company went bankruptⒺexplanatory note. At that time Ashcroft was secretary or treasurer, or both, & I became acquainted with him & liked him & believed in him. Mind, it is not yet proven that he is persistently & constantly dishonest, he is merely under suspicion, that is all.

About two years ago (say 1907), he became my self-appointed business-man & protectorⒺexplanatory note . —without salary. There was hardly anything for him to do except errands & small matters, but he was prompt and clever, at these things—none could do them better than he. did.

Presently he started a Spiral Pin companyⒺexplanatory note & I put in ten or twelve thousand dollars & hoped he would make a success of his enterprise. I don’t know how it the company [begin page 333] stands: it never makes an official report, & also refrains from declaring dividends. But it doesn’t matter; I have had similar experiences before. I only went into it because he was charging me no salary. I was of use to him now & then, in the way of introducing making him acquainted with prominent & useful people.

Is that enough introduction for the hero of this sordid little romance?

A word, then, about the heroine. Isabel V. Lyon. She came to us in 1902 when we were living at Riverdale on the Hudson. She was to be Mrs. Clemens’s secretary, at $50 a month & board & lodge in the house, or $70 & board & lodge outside. She had been child’s governess in the family of a Mr. Dana, & afterwards in the family of our old Hartford friends the WhitmoresⒺexplanatory note. She was slender, petite, comely, 38 years old by the almanac, & 18 17 in ways & carriage & dress. I liked her, but did not see much of her in those days. She boarded out. She was without order, without system, without industry, but she got along well enough, for there wasn’t much for her to do. However, in one thing she was industrious, & commendably so: this was in making pincushions to sell at the Ladies’ Exchange in Hartford. They had a ready sale—at a dollar apiece, I think she told me. She said she was helping to supporting her motherⒺexplanatory note, & I believe it was true. After she was authorized to sign checks for me, three years ago or along there somewhereⒺexplanatory note , she ceased from making pincushions. I mention this as an incident, & not as necessarily connecting the two facts. During the past two or three years she has bought out the Bermuda shawl & scarf & silk & bead & bricabrac shops, & unloaded some New York shops of their overplus of rugs, & brass pots, & copper pots, & general jimcrackery of a luxurious & tasteful sort, over she bought a single bicycle & a double one to ride around the “oval” on, she helped Ashcroft & FreemanⒺexplanatory note make me a fifty-dollar present the other day (carom-rails for the billiard table), she’s bought no end expensive books, —she has done all these luxurious things, over & has done it on $50 a month & supported her mother besides, & I have never known anybody who was more dutiful or could make $50 work harder. It was not good financial judgment, for there was a mortgage on her little Farmington house, cottage, & perhaps she could have lifted it if she had tried. I think so, because when I gave her a house & “five or ten” acres of landⒺexplanatory note, she lifted ten more out of me, & put it in the deed. I read, reflected, signed, & said nothing. According to my habit. All my life I have read, reflected, signed & said nothing, . And all my life I have never even read, with deliberation & understanding, a document before signing it if I had confidence in the honor & honesty of the person presenting it a document to me for signature. In this case present case the considerable augmentation of the acres struck me unpleasantly, & I was ashamed of Miss Lyon for confiscating them without previously telling me —just as a grace—that she was going to do it. —just as a grace. I should not have offered an objection. I had also another feeling: I was ashamed of myself for not having thought of making the allotment 20 acres in the first place. I felt just the shame a person feels who is caught in a stinginess.

But damnation, I had never been used to 20-acre ownerships! of land The “grounds” of our Buffalo house, in the dim days of the Long Ago, consisted of only half an acre; father Langdon’s sum spacious grounds in Elmira covered only three acres; our grounds [begin page 334] in Hartford covered but a scant three acres; the grounds of the house we bought at Tarrytown—five acres—seemed large to meⒺexplanatory note; the habitable & usable part of the grounds of our Riverdale house covered but four acres. And so, by old habit of mind I was land-stingy, & thought I was pretty liberal in giving away “five or ten” acres all in one great pile; indeed I was privately proud of myself. But “she”—well, she knew me. She knew she could pump ten or fifteen extra acres into the deed & I would sign & say nothing.

Why didn’t she make it 40 acres? She knows me, but also I know her; & I know she has reviled herself many a time for not having struck for 40.

She early found out one incurable defect of my character—that I would promise almost anything to a friend, if I could be caught suddenly & not allowed a chance to reflect. sleep on the matter. From that time forth she practised upon that defect—with exasperating results to me. I used to implore her to refrain from springing important matters upon me without giving me a chance to think stu to carefully study them over before saying yes; & I used to say, often & often, “Always give me 24 hours; & when you come with other people’s projects, protect me! be my friend, not theirs! make them give me 24 hours, for God’s goodness’ sake!”

Which she always did—if she wanted the project damned; but not otherwise. She damned Albert Bigelow Paine’s project, in the matter of a literary executorshipⒺexplanatory note. There was a delay, for reflection; but she did the reflecting for me. She persuaded me that Paine had dark & evil designs, in that matter.

And not in that one alone, but in many others. She made me believe Paine was always spying around; always clandestinely reading letters he hadn’t any business to readⒺexplanatory note; always dishonorably slipping away with important letters & papers, & leaving behind him no list of them & no receipt; & she go so cr◇ so saturated me with the superstition that Paine would cram so many of my old letters into his Biography of me that her & Clara’s Life & volumes of “Letters of Mark Twain” would be in a manner impoverished thereby, & commercially damagedⒺexplanatory note.

And so I actually wrote Colonel Harvey to limit Paine to “extracts” & to & such-like snippings from my letters. This would be funny, if it weren’t so— so— but I can’t use the only worthy word, it being unprintable. Day before yesterday I wrote Harvey to can annul that order of mine. He has done it promptly. I have his letter to-dayⒺexplanatory note (May 5.)

I have just said, an while ago, “I know her.” It is true. I have known her nearly a month. She has been with me 7 years.

I have known one side of her for 7 years. There was another side to her, but nobody would venture to expose it to me, for everybody knew I wouldn’t listen for a moment to to any attack upon her character or conduct, no matter who or what the source might be. It reminds me of three warnings brought to me by friends a good while ago, & which I rejected angrily & said I wanted no dealings with spies: one of them was a warning—accompanied by facts & figures—that Bliss of Hartford was swindling me. It took me nine years to discover that the charge was true; by that time my rejection of it had cost me $60,000Ⓔexplanatory note. Another of them was a warning against Paige; my rejection of it cost me $170,000Ⓔexplanatory note. The third was a warning against Webster’s book-keeper & against [begin page 335] Webster’s incompetence. I would not listen; later I had to pay the cost, which was $36,000 for believing in the bookkeeper, & something more than three times as much for believing in Webster’s competencyⒺexplanatory note.

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To resume (May 27.) Clara persisted in wanting the stewardship of Miss Lyon & Ashcroft looked into. I opposed it, & called it nonsense. I said they would be far from opposing it, for it could not hurt them—they would come out of it clear & clean. I wrote Clara that her mind had been poisoned by prejudiced people; that I knew this couple better than I knew anybody else in the world (including Clara herself by implication); & that I had absolute confidence in their honesty, their truthfulness, & their devotion to me; that Miss Lyon was invaluable when guests were in the house, because of her attractions as a talker & entertainer; that she had many talents & had acquired a graceful & effective literary style—& so on, & so on, & so on. I poured out my admiration, my gratitude & my affection esteem without stint. (And all the while—unsuspected by me, & by me alone—this pair of sneak thieves vermin were pillaging me & conspiring together to rid the house of Clara & of the suspicious servants, & make the pillaging a permanent industry!) I am ashamed of that letter now, & would like to forget it; still, it will interest you, so I will put it in here, & let you see it blush. *

(Letter to Clara)

Honestly, I did think she had acquired a literary style, but that was a mistake. I was deceived by certain letters which she wrote to BetsyⒺexplanatory note. They were bright & good. Were they inspirations? I suppose so. When she first came to us, seven years ago, her English was a curiosity. It was a child’s English; I mean, an ignorant child’s; clumsy, & incoherent & sprawling. When I would get through erasing & interlining, her page looked like a printer-apprentice’s galley-proof. And the letter wasn’t English then. There was no art that could turn her verbal slovenlinesses into English.

But I must be just, & say there was no pretentiousness about her performances. They could never remind a body of Ashcroft’s. Ashcroft’s are all wind, & sham, & conscious self-complacency, & labored & conscious effort at what he regards as fine writing. And my, when he is hitching together a sophomoric gravel-train of nine-jointed commonplace Ⓐtextual note words, with the private conviction that every car in its is a Pullman, how gifted he does feel, & how eloquent & awful & impressive! I would rather be the author of his prose-poem at the top of this letter than have the gonnorhea, Ⓐtextual note piles, I give you my word—I would, honest.

But to hark back to Clara’s proposed investigation of the pair. Ashcroft got wind of it, & called her up on the telephone & said he was quite willing, but did she want to

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*I have removed it to Chapter XIV. M.T. Ⓔexplanatory note Ⓐtextual note [begin page 336] risk the venture? It seemed an astonishing remark, & she asked for an explanation. His explanation was, that if the investigation were instituted it would reveal to her father how much money she had been costing him for some months past!

Two or three insults in a single remark! By implication, her father was a fool (plenty true enough), & knew nothing about his daughter’s affairs, nor how they were affecting his own; by implication, she was concealing her expenditures from me; by implication, I would make trouble if I knew how much she was costing me; by implication the pair of conspirators were generously protecting her from exposure & calamity by shirking a duty to me in order to hide her derelictions & save her from sorrow.

By God, Howells, it shows that even the cleverest people can lose their heads & degenerate into idiots when they get scared.

In reply to Ashcroft’s foolish “explanation,” Clara naturally resented the idea that she had anything to conceal from me. Ashcroft mentioned her expenses for the a recent month—about $865 0. Clara denied the figures & challenged Ashcroft to furnish them. He promised. As he has been asked for those figures once or twice since but has not yet forwarded them, it is possible that his statement was not true. Still it is not at s all unlikely that he was speaking the truth; for Clara is like all the artist breed, & like myself—foggy in matters pecuniary. She could easily have doubled her monthly expenses upon occasion & not been aware of it.

I must do Miss Lyon this justice: she was faithful & diligent in persuading me (when Clara was on the other side of the water) to send her only two or three hundred dollars whenever she asked for five hundred, upon the argument that the larger sum more money she had on hand the more careless & squanderous she would be with it. Miss Lyon persuaded me to scrimp Jean, too. In fact she scrimped everybody but herself. Herself & Stormfield. *over

But I needn’t use both words. She & Stormfield were one—& she was the one. That was her idea. She believed her dominion as was permanently established. She fully expected to make it absolute & perpetual. And she would have succeeded, but for Clara’s fortunate outbreak. She said to every servant,

“I want you to understand that I am sole mistress in this house, & that you are responsible to me, & to me only.” , when Miss Clemens is not here.”

That was the form for a time. But the lust of power & the sense of sovereignty grew apace, & before very long she left the Miss Clemens off. She had a passion for power, & she wanted all of it—no division. She couldn’t bear anybody near her throne—even on the bottom step of it. Not even Clara. Once when Clara was visiting me & wanted her 5 o’clock tea sent to her own parlor, she rang for Teresa & ordered it. Miss Lyon’s door

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　　(Footnote)
　　*Since I dismissed her, we have discovered that in paying the servants for February she paid two of them by the day instead of by the month, thus robbing them of a few shillings. With no advantage to herself except that she hated disliked those two. This is reducing meanness to mathematics, ain’t it? Jean made the discovery & squared-up.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 over [begin page 337] always stood open, so that she could watch me & the rest of her subjects; she saw Teresa passing by, & called her in & asked her errand. Tereesa TeresaⒶtextual note told her, & got this retort:

“Don’t you ever answer Miss Clemens’s bell again without first reporting to me. Then I’ll tell you whether to answer it or not.”

She commanded one of the maids to never answer my ring at all! Miss Lyon informed me that when I wanted anything I could ring for Horace the butler. Not ElizabethⒺexplanatory note—Elizabeth’s hands were more than full, she said, whereas she found difficulty in supplying Horace with work. Perhaps I could have believed that that was her reason, if she hadn’t revealed a better one a week or so earlier—to wit, having the maids serve me, could make talk; was making talk, all over the countryside.—was, indeed, making a scandal; that she (Miss Lyon) was doing everything she could to protect my character, & to save Stormfield from obloquy, & she begged me to help her. She was thinking about me only, she said; she was only trying to save my name from scandal.

The damned impudence of it! Why, Howells, every week-end was spent by her & Ashcroft in her bedroom, part of every day & at night, too s◇—sometimes till past midnight, & with the door shut! All the servants knew this, & so did everybody else. I mentioned this circumstance, & said I thought she & Ashcroft could be depended upon to furnish scandal enough for one countryside without help from me; & in honor of their efforts I offered to change the house’s name to Scandal Hall.

One night last October or September—it was after the burglaryⒺexplanatory note, anyway—there was an incident. At about 2 in the morning, the servants were awakened by a noise—burglars, of course!—& they flew to Ashcroft’s room to rout him out with his gun—& found his bed empty & the bedding undisturbed; nobody had been in it! Miss Lyon’s room was across the hall. She stormed out of it, & berated the servants soundly—her usual fashion—& ordered them to always knock at her door first, before meddling with Ashcroft’s.

The servants couldn’t stand Miss Lyon & her insulting slave-driver violences of speech, & they presently gave notice & left in a bodyⒺexplanatory note. Do you know, she was vain of those verbal violences of hers; she thought they were something fine, something heroic, something majestic. She used to come to me after an exhibition of the kind, & give me the details of the explosions she had let off,—laughed & the high & autocratic manner of it, & brag about it! I told her more than once that it was not a thing to boast of, but to be ashamed of; but it had no effect. She had always been a servant during her womanhood, consequently she despised servants & did not know how to treat them. She had never had any money; now she had my check-book, & was using it with a free & lavish & unwatched hand. Put a pauper in a motor-carⒶtextual note, etc., etc., etc. She was on her way. It was Clara that punched her tyre.

However, she was not herself in those days. W In fairness we must allow for that. She had hysterics;—not just occasionally, but frequently; not merely frequently, but very frequently. Hysterics—that was Ashcroft’s name for it. But the truth is, she was drunk. [begin page 338] Drunk daily. On cocktails, on whisky, & on bromides. I did not know it, I never even suspected the whisky part of it—which was the main part. Everybody on the place knew it but me. The guests knew it, & discussed it among themselves. One witness saw her take three cocktails, one after the other—without visible effect. Another Two other entirely trustworthy witnesses said that that was homeopathy for her; & added that they had seen her take more than half a tumbler of whisky straight—not a drop of water in it—and march away as upright as a derrick.

Howells, she’s a daisy! One day I rang for Elizabeth. I was in Miss Lyon’s room at the time, & Ashcroft was present. I went to my room & then returned. Miss Lyon was greatly excited, & asked, in a slave-driver-to-slave tone, what I had wanted with Elizabeth. ¶ “To find for me a batch of mislaid manuscript.”

Then she burst out—oh, like Vesuvius!

“What business has Elizabeth in there? She hasn’t any business in there! What does she know about manuscript? Ashcroft, go & find the manuscript, & send Elizabeth to the kitchen!”

Ashcroft meekly departed on his errand, & I as meekly for the billiard room.

Unquestionably she was drunk at the time, but I was not then aware that she was a drinker. After a little, Ashcroft came down & to the billiard room & said—

“She is very sorry, & apologizes, & ho asks you to forgive her. You must overlook it; she didn’t mean any harm, but she is not herself. She’s got one of those frightful three-day headaches, she is hysterical, she is all worn out in your service, & you must be gentle & considerate with her. She is all gone to pieces, she is a mere wreck, & her life is in danger, the doctor says she is right on the verge of nervous prostration.”

I mastered my anger with an effort, & only said—

“The trouble with her is, that she’s a God damned fool!”

She is a born spy. She always kept her door open all day & until she went to bed at night, & nobody could pass along the hall unobserved by her. Whenever a bell rang she would summon the servant whose bell it was, & inquire who had rung it & what was wanted.

And dear, dear, what a luxurious mendicant she was! She would get herself up in sensuous oriental silken flimseys of dainty dyes, & stretch herself out on her bepillowed lounge in her bedroom, in studied enticing attitudes, with an arm under her head & a cigarette between her lips, & imagine herself the Star of the Harem waiting for the eunuchs to fetch the Sultan; & there she would lie by the hour enjoying the imaginary probabilities. If she wanted any little thing, she would ring up a servant from down stairs to hand it to her. She was the only member of the family that never did anything for herself.

She was much the laziest white person I have ever seen, except myself. She had half a dozen duties which she greatly liked; those she did well, & gladly, & with alacrity, but she shirked all the others, never performing a single one of them that she could get around. She would promise—& promise—& promise; & never perform. When reproached, she humbly furnished an excuse: usually a pathetic one, intended to move your compassion [begin page 339] your pity; customarily an artful one; & always a lie, I do now suppose. But in those days I often believed them genuine. She had two excuses that she worked particularly hard: one was, she had “been so driven,” etc., etc.; the other was, she had been utterly prostrated by one of her three-day “sick-headaches.” The fact is, she had been drunk, but in those days I never suspected that. I finally got so tired of those two monotonous old sl stand-byes that I fell to shutting them off when she opened her mouth to throw them up. Still I did pity those imaginary headaches, most sincerely, for she certainly did look sick.

Oh, but she was a glib promiser! She was always going to do things, right away. Always “going to.” I find that she had a name which I never chanced to hear in those days: “Miss Always-Going-to.”

She always made the stenographer do her secretary-work—even to filling out checks; & by & by she got to letting a good part of it accumulate day by day for a week, then make Ashcroft slave a whole day over it at the week-end, while she did the Star of the Harem act on the sofa & puffed her cigarette & longed for the Sultan. Or even the eunuch.

After dismissing her, I found among her secretarial leavings an unpaid bill of Altman’s three months old! She quite well knew it had been the law of our house for thirty-five years to pay all bills as soon as they were presented. I now sent inquiries to Putnam, Wanamaker, AltmanⒺexplanatory note, & others, & got them to go back over their books & tell me the result. Howells, that shirk had had the custom of leaving our bills unpaid for months & months on a stretch! I used to consider the Countess Massiglia the lowest-down woman on the planetⒺexplanatory note. Well, when I get through examining Miss Lyon I shall realize that I have been doing the Countess a wrong.

Three years ago, when we were summering in the New Hampshire hills she got Albert Bigelow Paine to fill out checks for her one day. He tells me it took him all of an hour of swift writing to fight the accumulation of bills to a stand-still, so high was the pile. All but about a dozen of those bills had been lying unpaid for periods covering from six weeks to five four months!

She had then been signing checks for me about a year, & it is possible that she had begun these neglects when she first began to sign; at any rate we know she began before her authority was seven months old. Her authority was limited: she could not draw above a $1000 on a single check. That authorization (now revoked) still exists. The Lincoln National Bank has it. No similar authorization, not criminally procured, has been granted by me to anybody within the past 7 years. More of this matter by & by.

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Six years ago Miss Lyon accompanied us to Italy, & we lived outside the walls of Florence about eight months. Mi She did not live in the villa with us, but in a cottage in the grounds, therefore we did not see much of her. I had seen but little of her the previous year. I liked her. I did not perceive that she was made up of shams & artificialities & [begin page 340] affectations, & hadn’t a sincere fibre in her anywhere. When we returned to America five years ago & took a house in New York, she lived with us & was necessarily pervasive, for she was to all intents & purposes a member of the family. She sat at table & in the drawing-room when there was company & when there wasn’t; our intimates became her intimates; they visited her & she visited them; of her own motion & by her own desire she became housekeeper. Clara & Jean & I It was in those days that she began to evolute, began to develop.

Not swiftly. No, quite slowly, and by stages: one affectation, one sham, one artificiality at a time. Even I was able to notice some of them, dull as I am. But to me they were not offensive except now & then when she overdid them. On those occasions there was fine company present, as a rule, & she was showing off. She Perhaps her pet sham was this: she would start to tell what purported to be a humorous thing, a killingly humorous thing, & a thing quite too funny for this world; & she would break into throes of artificial laughter as she went along, & bow, & bend, & writhe, & twist in her chair, in sham convulsions of mirth, & finally finish her tale with broken ejaculations & “oh, dears,” & with heavings & pantings and gaspings! By God, Howells, it was the most degraded exhibition that ever was.

The disposition to show off grew upon her; she long ago ceased from saving it for company & began to practice it upon us. Even upon me all by myself. During the past two years, she showing-off has been a habit with her, not to say a passion. In I think it reached the limit in this past year. Circumstances are responsible for this. It is just about y a year since I moved into this new house; we have had shoals of guests; Miss Lyon was in full command, Clara being absent almost all the time, & Jean all the time (by grace of Miss Lyon’s own plottings & vicious ingenuities); the guests made much of her; she could blow up the servants whenever she wanted to; she felt her sovereingnty, she adored it, she prized it above her soul’s salvation, she m intendedⒶtextual note to make it perma- absolute over me, & permanent, & drive the children away for good & all. But she to rob us, strip us naked, take the roof from over our heads, was not a part of her plan—untill Ⓐtextual note after she married Ashcroft. Or at least until within two or three months of that queer event.

Yes, her head got turned, you see. She had acquired “position;” she could freely enter front doors, now, whose back ones she & Ashcroft couldn’t enter a few years earlier; she had never had anything, now there seemed to be no valuable thing that she hadn’t; she had always lived down cellar, so to speak, now she was living on the roof, along with the lightning-rod; she had always been an obscurity, now she was in correspondence with people all over the globe; between the Human Race & the Great Humorist she stood, erect, impressive, & all alone, like Liberty Enlightening New JerseyⒺexplanatory note, & no unit of that Race could get a chance to lay a prayer at his feet without her permission. You see, she had always been just a chicken-coop, now she was an aeroplane.

Yes, she was turned inside out, like a sausage, & all her contents exposed; all her shams, all her affectations. She had used to gush periodically, like the Great Geyser, but now she was practically an UnintermittentⒺexplanatory note. By my halidome it was worth a king’s ransome to hear her gush out this enthu rapturous remark about Ashcroft recently, right after [begin page 341] the insane marriage—to hear her gush it out, I say, & see her roll her happy eyes around, & languorously close them, & smile the contented smile of the cat that is digesting the canary: “Isn’t he dear?– – –and so honest!”

Honest! Such a compliment—from such a source! Howells, it is like one old prostitute praising another’s chastity.

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Miss Lyon, as I am now aware, was guilty of many meannesses, many basenesses, & many small frauds, & of a vast deal of wanton & malicious lying, & she was also guilty of one great crime, one infamous cruel & unforgivable crime. Do I mean the crime of spreading a report here a year ago (while she was pretending to be Clara’s most loving & devoted friend), that Clara was insane? No, that was bad enough, but the crime I refer to was worse. It was the crimeⒶtextual note of keeping Jean exiled in damnable dreary & depressing health-institutions a whole year & more after she was well enough to live at home without damage to her well-beingⒺexplanatory note.

How was she able to accomplish this outrage? By various devices. Mainly by keeping me persuaded that the cure of Jean’s cure pathetic malady—epilepsy—would be disastrously interrupted if she came home, where there would be company & distractions & excitements, & where she would lack the strict control & the exacting regime so necessary to her improvement. No, the sanitarium was the right place, the best place, the only healthful & wholesome place for that poor child— guiltless prisoner— that was the unvarying tune.

She even persuaded me not to read Jean’s letters, but to let her read them & tell me such of their contents as I needed to know. This upon the plea that they contained complaints which were unreasonable & were figments of Jean’s imagination; also that they contained requests which it would be impossible to grant, & projects which it would not be possible to entertain. I am aware, now, that in almost nearly all these instances Miss Lyon was lying. feeding me with falsehoods. It cuts me to the heart, now, to know that Jean made many a pathetic an imploring & beseeching appeal to me, her father, & could not get my ear; that I, who should have been her best friend, forsook her in her trouble to listen to this snake in the grass designing hypocrite whom I was coddling in the place which should have been occupied by my forsaken child. It is pitiful to know, now, that in those shameful days Jean, in her distress, even tried to get my ear through outside & roundabout ways; & tried, & could not succeed. The relatives over appealed to were afraid to come to me with Jean’s prayers & petitions, lest Miss Lyon find it out & they be visited with her enmity. Even my niece, Julie Langdon Loomis, & Jean’s aunt, Susan Langdon Crane, were afraid to speak to me in Jean’s behalf. It shows how impregnable Miss Lyon’s fortress was believed to be, & how unchallengeable her sovereignty over me & my belongings. One of Jean’s appeals (which never reached me,) was for a summer [begin page 342] lap-robe. Miss Lyon refused it—on the score of economy—& Jean had to use her winter lap-robe all summer.

over

At that same time Miss Lyon was treating herself to any & every small luxury she wanted, & footing the bills with pilferings from me.

over

Miss Lyon kept Jean scrimped in the matter of money; & Clara, alas; but I could not perceive that she scrimped herself. She always had money in her own pocket, & was a free spender—money cribbed from my bank account, in some cases, by misuse of my signature, as now appears; & procured, in other instances, by graft levied upon tradesmen. She always said she had no resources but her wage ($50 a month,) & that out of her wage she supported her mother. In her latest letter to me—at the time I dismissed her—she even uses the word “entirely.”

(Insert the pencil-letter)Ⓔexplanatory note

Last year the StanchfieldsⒺexplanatory note, while on a visit here spoke very highly of a German specialist whom they had employed, & with Dr. Peterson’s assent we sent Jean to him. Miss Lyon kept her sufficiently short of money. Jean was doubtful of the Berlin doctor, & sent home one of his prescriptions. Dr. Peterson said, “This will not do; order her home at once.” Which we did, by cable. Jean responded with a cable saying she was well enough, & asking leave to remain in Berlin at her own expense & support herself by teaching English. This grace was denied herⒺexplanatory note. I would have denied it myself if I had known about it, but I would not have added “on account of financial stringency,” for there wasn’t any. Jean was never once at the opera, while in Berlin, although the doctors were willing that she should enjoy that refreshment frequently; Miss Lyon kept her too short of money. There was never any occasion to do her that unkindness.

As I have said, Miss Lyon kept

Jean couldn’t go to the opera, but Miss Lyon & Ashcroft could indulge in expensive single (& even dob doubleⒶtextual note) bicycles by means of my check. Bicycles in these hills! There isn’t a stretch of three hundred yards in this region that is bicyclable without traveling a mile to find it. They paraded around the oval in front of the house a couple of evenings, then took on those things, then took them down & stabled them in Miss Lyon’s house & we never saw them again until the explosion came, last March, & I dismissed Miss Lyon; soon after which they smuggled them into my garret when no one was watching, & left them there: a confession that they bought them with money not there theirⒶtextual note own & were afraid of the possible consequences.

As I have said, Miss Lyon kept Jean’s home barred against her during more than a year after her health had become normal & satisfactory. Meantime she had privately kept Dr. Peterson, the specialist, persuaded that I couldn’t bear to have Jean in the home houseⒶtextual note, because she would make me nervous! The heartless miscreant! Howells, could you forgive that? & would you? Early last summer Miss Lyon secured for Jean a comfortable & very pretty cottage on the seashore about fou Ⓐtextual note three miles below [begin page 343] Gloucester, Massachusetts, & Jean took a couple of good friends to that place to keep house & be company for her. No ailing, grieving & complaining invalids present this time! Which reminds me that Jean & these friends had had a house to themselves in Greenwich, Connecticut the year beforeⒺexplanatory note; so she was probably well enough to have come home then, if there had been no Miss Lyon in the way. the path.

Miss Lyon was always objecting to my visiting Jean; she said the sight of me would remind Jean of home, & fill her heart with longings which she ought to be spared. Miss Lyon was not thinking of my going to Gloucester, or she would have prevented it. She & Ashcroft were keeping tender & solicitous watch over me all the time, like a pair of anxious & adoring nurses, & I couldn’t even go to Bermuda, & not even to New York (an hour & a half distant), without one or both of them along to see that I didn’t catch cold or get run over by a baby wagon. And I liked that nursing & petting, & was vain of being a person who could call outⒶtextual note such homage, such devotion. The pair were laughing at me all the time, but I never suspected.

But I did go to Gloucester—by a sort of accident. Paine & I had a call to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to attend the Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s memorial servicesⒺexplanatory note, & we took that opportunity to run down & pay Jean a call. We were charmed & surprised to see how well she was. , how sound & vigorous in mind & body. When we got home to Stormfield I broke the joyful good news to Miss Lyon in an outburst of enthusiasm, & said Dr. Peterson must cancel her exile & let her come home at once. Miss Lyon did her best to look glad, & said she would write the doctor, but there was frost upon her raptures, even I was able to notice it.

The minute my back was turned she sent a telegram to Dr. Peterson telling him to absolutely refuse his consent to Jean’s removal to Stormfield! Lounsbury carried the telegram, & read it.

That evening Ashcroft & Miss Lyon walked the hall in agitated conversation, & Miss Paine heard Miss Lyon say, with emphasis:

“This is the last time! He shall never leave this place again without one of us with him!” over

Doesn’t it sound like print? Isn’t it exactly the way it would happen in a book? Howells, the whole great long Lyon-Ashcroft episode is just as booky as it can be; so booky that sometimes its facts & realities seem mere cheap commonplace shopworn artificialities to me, & as if they hadn’t ever happened, but had straggled into my half-asleep consciousness out of some paltry & fussy & pretentious rom old-time novel of that hallowed ancient day when. . . . when. . . . well, you see, yourself, how dam stagey the whole thing is!

To resume. Neither Paine

over

Neither Paine nor Lounsbury tried to tell me these things. They believed I wouldn’t listen. Well, they were right. I would not have allowed any one to say a word in criticism of those worshiped pets of mine. To every man & woman in this region they were a pair of transparent rascals, but to me they were worthy of the Kingdom of heaven—may they soon land there! Everybody was laughing at me, but I didn’t know it.

The conspirators “won out” with the doctor, & I failed to get Jean home.

[begin page 344]

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June 19. Let me go away back, now, to where Clara was urging an examination of these carbuncles that had fastened themselves upon me, & I was c telling her to go on with her project if she thought she must—they would be perfectly sure to come out of the ordeal unscathed. I said they would be glad to be inspected. I proudly repeated this to Ashcroft. To my astonishment he didn’t look glad, he looked sick. I said,

“Do you mean to tell me you have objections?”

He floundered, & hesitated, & stammered, & finally managed to get out an answer: the examination by expert accountants would humiliate me, because they would tell all about my private affairs to reporters—& then what!” I was ashamed of him, & could hardly refrain from saying so, fond as I was of him. In the end he agreed to the examination. Its scope was to cover a couple of years, & would be a quite simple & easy thing, he said, & would take almost no time. (A mistake; it took a it is taking a very long time.)

Clara went to see Mr. Rogers, & he did according to his incomparable nature, the unselfishest I have known: he heard her story, then said he would send for Ashcroft & talk with him, & have him bring the check books & vouchersⒶtextual note to the Standard Oil offices, where they would be examined by his own expert without prejudice to either party of the parties to the interests involved. Which was done. Very well, the examination was begun. He did not live to see the result. He died suddenly in the early morning of the 19th of April. May. Ⓔexplanatory note In losing him I lost my best friend.

February was a cold month, as far as sentiment goes, between “Santa Clara,” “Nana” & “The Bishop of Baenares”Ⓔexplanatory note —petⒶtextual note names, all. And all withered by that frost. Withered, rotted, squshed. Squshed & discarded. For all time. But I was still on affectionate terms with Nana & Benares, & was still their champion & sturdy believer in their purity.

Until that time when Ashcroft consented to be inspected. Consented reluctantly. Reluctantly! when I was expecting joyous alacrity! The frost touched me, then; but it was only a touch, it did not invade my bones right away. This was about the first of March.

In one particular the atmospheric change was quite noticeable:, as regarded Miss Lyon: she was troubled, anxious, excitable. Ashcroft said it was overwork; overwork in my service: in entertaining company, keeping house, doing secretary-work, village library-workⒺexplanatory note, etc. That was partly an overstatementⒶtextual note, I judge. She liked entertaining, & she liked shopping. In these pleasures she was quite capable of working herself down, & was always ready & anxious to do it; but the rest of Ashcroft’s diagnosis was a work of his extravagant, not to say scrofulous, imagination. There was a better explanation of her distressed & excited condition than the one he had furnished: she was afraid of the contemplated inspe investigation of her stewardship.

She had reason to be afraid of it; & without doubt Ashcroft knew it. But I was serenely in the dark, I did not suspect her. Suspicions of Ashcroft himself had been bred in me by that reluctance of his, but they were very slight; indeed of little or no consequence.

In truth, that pair were in a state of consternation in those days, but Ashcroft did [begin page 345] not show it. He was pleasant, he was charming, he was his usual self. Exteriorly. But he was not a happy man inside. Against custom, he remained took to staying here here something more than half his time. In her room, mostly, & ostensibly hard at work preparing the investigation-statement. I now think they were discussing the outlook, & inventing precautions. I also think they eventually decided to gag each other, & do it so effectually that neither of them could for personal safety’s sake sacrifice the other.

Then came a day when things happened! Ashcroft brought me four nicely-typed & disrespectfully-worded contracts to examine & sign—right away, as usual! See Appendix. I read

The frost went on gathering. Soon it was becoming apparent to me that the parting of the ways was approaching., & that I was likely to lose one or both of these helpers crutches of mine. I was willing to lose Miss Lyon, if I must, but I was not willing to lose Ashcroft. I had supposed I could not do without either of them, & they were quite evidently of that opinion too; but Miss Lyon had grown so aggressive, & high-handed, & masterly, & fractious, & hysterical & insolent of late that if I didn’t presently turn her out of the house she would turn me out. So I was beginning to cast an eye around for somebody to take her place.

---

The domestic barometer was getting down toward 29; the atmosphere was full of uncertainty, uneasiness, expectancy; apparently something was going to happen. Miss Lyon kept to her couch, right along, during several days, with Ashcroft for company. She was having one of her spells, & looked it. The doctor came daily. One day, after he had gone, Miss Lyon told me he had said she was on the very verge of a nervous breakdown, & must pack up & go away at once, & take two weeks of absolute rest—absolute rest, uncompromising rest, in solitude. It is possible that he said it, it is possible that he didn’t. But I have not asked him, therefore I have no evidence one way or the other. However, I believed he had said it, so I told her she ought not to hesitate, nor tarry, nor stop to consider my convenience, nor her own, nor anybody else’s, but go at once. She yielded, with artful & touching reluctance, & ordered her trunk to be packed.

There was nothing the matter with her. There was a game on hand, & she was playing her part in it. Ashcroft took her to Hartford & lodged her at Heublind’sⒶtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note, the most expensive hotel in the place. She stayed there three days, in a solitude consisting of two or three friends. She was then rested-up & all right; so she went to New York for five days days, to drowse in the healing thunder of the traffic & the screaming of the whistles, then came home as sound as a nut. 〚And sober.〛

Ashcroft had been buying a near-by farm for meⒺexplanatory note. The day after Miss Lyon went away he completed the purchase & brought the deed. He had paid for the property. That surprised me. How had he managed it, the check-signer being absent? It meant (as I thought), that [begin page 346] Miss Lyon had signed blank checks & left them behind her. when she went cavorting around rest-curing. It seemed to me that that was not a good business method, & I thought I would take an early opportunity to tell her to refrain from it in future.

The truth was, Ashcroft could sign checks for me, too, but I didn’t know it! I will explain this, by & by. ¶. Come—isn’t it just like an old-time machine-made novel?

¶ In the billiard room, that afternoon, the unexpected happened again: Ashcroft, shamefaced, embarrassed, hesitating, told me he & Miss Lyon had concluded to get married! It was as amazing as if he had said they had concluded to hang themselves.

I said it was an insane id He asked my judgment upon the matter, & I gave it. I said it was an insane idea, & unbelievable.

He hastened to say they would not carry it out if it would cause me inconvenience; that they would put it aside if I wished it.

Necessarily I said it was not my affair, & I could not be put in that position: they must go their own way, & take the responsibilities themselves.

He said they would postpone it if I wished, & as long as I pleased.

But I said I was not willing to be a party to the freak in any way.

Then he said they would be willing to get married secretly and—

But of course I said they ought not to think of such a thing; it could get us all into hot water presently.

He was of the opinion that the marriage would not inconvenience me, & would change nothing: the bride would live in the my house & conduct things at the old stand in the old way, & he would continue to live with his sisters in Brooklyn, & come up here for his week-ends.

That seemed to me to be the wildest proposition of all, & I said so. I said I wouldn’t have any married people in the house, nor any babies.

He answered, with confidence & conviction, that there would not be any; that this was not that kind of a marriage; that there was nothing animal about it; that he had none of that feeling for Miss Lyon.

He said it in the coolest way, the calmest way, ‸ just as if he was perfectly sane & then it wasn’t a matter of any consequence anyway. I said,

“Why, how you talk! won’t you lover her?”

He said, composedly, “not in that way.”

“Then what in the world are you marrying her for? what is your reason?”

Howells, he was marrying her out of pity, charity, benevolence! That was the sense of his reply, though not the words. He said she had worn herself out in my service & was a physical wreck & her life was in danger; ! nothing could save her but watchful care & tender nursing. He was going to marry her & save her.

I could not know what was back of these hypocrisies, I only knew there was a mystery back of them somewhere, & that this marriage had a real purpose in view, if one could but guess what it was.

I said a marriage without love was foolish & perishable, & that this one would go to ruin inside of two years.

[begin page 347] You see, I couldn’t know that this was a marriage for revenue only; I never suspected it. I took it for a marriage of fools, I didn’t know it was a marriage of sharpers. The fact is, it was both, but I didn’t perceive it.

He offered a palliation: he said it was not wholly without love; no, for she loved him. Yes, she loved him, & he had a very great respect for her character & qualities, & also compassion for her unprotected condition.

Isn’t it refreshing! Howells, have you ever come across this kind of a frog?

We wandered back to the baby question; or at least he did, & said there wouldn’t be any—he knew it; knew it perfectly. I offered to bet him ten dollars to one, & he took me up. (In parentheis sis I will remark that when Miss Lyon got back she wanted a chance in this speculation; she wanted to put up a dollar against ten that there would be no babies, & I took her up. I do not know how my chances stand, but I suppose they are about the same as theirs: he is 34, she is 11 years older; she is fire & he is frost; it is a case of iceberg & volcano; , you see; there may be an freshet irruption, there may be a freeze—let us wait & see. litter of kitty icebergs—let us wait & see.

Ashcroft resumed the suggestion that nothing would be changed by the marriage; all our affairs would go on as before.

I said they couldn’t, for I would not have any married people in the house.

Later events showed that he did not believe me; that he believed I couldn’t conduct my house without his wife; that he could billet her on me for good & all; that he & she owned me body & soul & I couldn’t help myself; that all in good time they would be indisputably supreme here, & I another stripped & forlorn King Lear. All this to be brought about by a deep & dark & spectacular scheme which I was to accidentally stumble upon the track of by & by, three months later, &‸ which Ⓐtextual note later; a scheme so darkly & shudderingly & mysteriously showy & romantic that they must surely have lifted it out of an old-time novel, no modern mind could have invented it. You’ll see, when I get to it.

---

I have stated the young Ashcroft’s reasons for selecting the mature overdue Miss Lyon for a wife: reasons of a sort to tell to the marines; reasons that would not bear close examination. by the old sailors. He had other & better ones, but kept them to himself. Miss Lyon had reasons for selecting As the young Ashcroft for a husband. She told one of them to Mrs. LounsburyⒺexplanatory note. It had wisdom in it. She said there could be an explosion at Stormfield one of these days & a sudden house-clearing—& what would become of her? What she was going to need was a refuge & a support—somebody to lean upon, somebody to stand by her & take care of her. She did not say anything about being in love with Ashcroft. In fact she wasn’t. She greatly liked him, but so did the rest of us. She was not warmer than we were. The most of our friends liked him greatly, & greatly liked [begin page 348] & admired her, too. A few of them had vague suspicions of the pair, (as it now appears,) but only two or three had definite & ones & harsh ones—Mr. Rogers & Mr. Broughton, for instance. We had an average of twenty guests per month, & they stayed with us from one or two days up to ten. Clara & Jean were absent, & Miss Lyon was hostess. Capable? Yes. She made them happy, she made them cheerful, she made them gay, she delighted them. In the art matter of making people glad that they had come, & in shopping for bricabrac of a quality she couldn’t afford, she was at home & competent. My paths have never been pleasanter than they were during her reign.

The couple decided to get married soon. At first they were inclined to be very quiet, & tell the news to friends only. That certainly looked right enough, for none but the friends could be interested in the matter. However, Miss Lyon’s native love of showing off got the best of her, & she “announced” the engagement in a Hartford paperⒺexplanatory note, thus fondly giving it the aspect of a “society” event. Which was not right, not righteous, not godly, for the ignorant would be sure to get that very idea of it, & be taken in.

Next, the wedding-day was appointed—March 18. Then those two shams turned their vain little souls entirely loose, & fairly reveled in imitation aristocratic pomps & glories. They got out announcement-cards—engraved ones—Italian script, & all that—cards announcing that on the 18th of March they would be married in the Church of the Assumption by Rev. Percy Stickney GrantⒺexplanatory note, D D., & these they sent mailed to everybody they had ever heard of. I judge so, because there was a mountain of them on the floor by Ashcroft’s chair that reminded me of the Matterhorn, & of Mont Blanc, & of the Great Pyramid, & of Aconcagua, & impressed me more than all of those humps put together; because I thought judged I knew who was paying that postage & standing sponsor for that stationery.

Gay times! oh, gay! The radiant bride, the beaming eye, & all that!

Then there was another mountain. Engraved cards again. Making this final announcement:

Mr. & Mrs. R. W. Lyon-Ashcroft
At Home
Saturdays in June.
“Summerfield,” Redding, Conn.

Aren’t those sweet little apings of swelldom just too-too!—the hyphenated name, the At Home, the “Summerfield,” & all that? What do you suppose they sent out those thirteen barrels of At Homes for?—to impress the village postmaster? For, outside of my friends & acquaintances, Miss Lyon hadn’t any friends that were likely to make a railway journey just to see what she might look like in her wickyup & prefposterously married. She couldn’t bed them, she couldn’t shelter them, if there should be a freshet of three in one cloudburst; & there wasn’t an inn nor a hotel within eight miles of that wickyup. Very well, Ashcroft hadn’t any friends that would know what “At Home” meant, therefore madame would look for no freshet from that quarter.

[begin page 349] But no matter. Let us anticipate. The fates had decided that when the seventy-five necessary days should elapse & the first June Saturday arrive, there wouldn’t be anybody at home at “Summerfield;” nor any one there on the three succeeding Saturdays. Yesterday (June 26) was the last one; & the hyphenated Lyon-Ashcrofts—where are they? Many meridians of longitude curve about the globe’s rotundity betwixt them & the wickyup. They are traveling for Miss Lyon’s “health.”

To go back to the early March days. Things moved swiftly after Miss Lyon’s “announcement” of her engagement in the society-column of thee newspaper. I repeated my remark that I could not have any married people in the house. Relations were now strained—strained all around. On the 13th, Ashcroft brought me four contracts & a Memorandum to sign. One of them formally constituted him my universal business agent; another constituted him Manager of the Mark Twain CorporationⒺexplanatory note , for two years, with authority to collect all moneys earned by me, & charge a commission for that service. Whenever I should have any instructions to give him, they must in all instances be conveyed “in writing.” He was not to report to me oftener than once every three months. The language was that of master to slave, I being the slave. By grace of this document he would have no duty to perform but collect his commission on my income; & that would be easy, since the Harper checks would go to him by mail (instead of to meⒶtextual note, as before); he would not have to go after them. I was content. The other document was the one I prized. By its terms he was obliged to take care of all my business affairs, & save me that annoyance & trouble. I noticed that he could annul the contract by a week’s noticeⒺexplanatory note, but I did not mind that, as I meant to make him satisfied with the position & be willing to continue in it. However, I did not notice, or rather did not perceive the importance of the fact, that it said nothing about compensation, & was therefore valueless & unbinding. I supposed the other paper covered & compensated these duties. A mistake. It didn’t. I signed both. 〚Inside of three of five weeks Ashcroft dropped the unlucrative one for good & all, & without a word.〛

I signed the other two contracts, too, & quite willingly—for they made the getting rid of Miss Lyon easy & unembarrassing. One of them constituted Miss Lyon my “social secretary”—a quite new office, I believe, & not thitherto known to this sordid & unromantic planet. By its terms Miss Lyon condescended to act as my “social” secretary—which meant that she would invite my guests for me, & preside at table & in the drawing-room & entertain them, but would most distinctly & decidedly not do any social penmanship for any one else on the premises—meaning Clara. Ashcroft explained that all other secretarying, of whatever kind, would have to be done by the stenographer. That did not trouble me, & exploded no bomb of surprise under me, for the stenographer had already been doing it three yearsⒺexplanatory note. Also, Miss Lyon was most distinctly & decidedly not to be called upon to take any part in the work of housekeeping. Miss Lyon’s wage must be $100 a month, as Social Secretary & Ornament, & she must be housed & fed at Stormfield!

This did n seem to me to be immensely impudent, after all I had said about not allowing married persons to live in the house. However, I could dissolve the contract at any time by a month’s notice, & so I made no comment, but gratefully signed it. I had recently been getting a little acquainted with Miss Lyon at last, & was growing [begin page 350] anxious to be rid of her. She has a marvelous art in concealing her character; good judges, people of old experience,—like Dr. Quintard, for instance—tell me they have never seen anything to approach it. Quintard was up here yesterday, & he said that for three years she deceived him completely. All through that period he regarded her word as gold, her spirit as beautiful, her ideals lofty, & so on, & so on: in a word, she had seemed to him without spot or blemish, altogether admirable, altogether lovely & lovable. Yet she is rotten to the very heart. If she has a heart. Which is doubtful.

The other contract promised that Miss Lyon would get to work “promptly” at the “Letters of Mark Twain,” & prepare them for the press. For this service she would accept of no compensation. This was positive. I could annul the contract with a week’s notice, & so could she.

Ashcroft astonished me

Of courseⒶtextual note this paper would annul the agreement made with her three years ago, which gave her a permanent one-tenth interest in the book’s royaltiesⒺexplanatory note.

Ashcroft explained why she was so calmly throwing that one-tenth interest overboard. He said, with quite marked contempt,

“It is petty, & she doesn’t care for it.”

I could have said,

“Why, you ass, it will be three or four volumes, & for fifty-six years will pay her a larger annual income than t she has ever had in her life or ever will have.”

But I didn’t say it, I kept it to myself, & made no comment. On the terms of that old contract I could get a competent person—which she certainly wasn’t, & was aware of that fact herself; though during my long-time admiration of her I had believed her equal to that work or almost any other. I gratefully signed.

The humor of that document! She was going to take hold of the Letters “promptly!” I had been beseeching her for three years to take hold of them. In December August last I had begged her to throw a volume of them together helter-skelter & without interspersed comments, so that Colonel Harvey could use it upon his directors to persuade them to renew my guaranty of $25,000 a year for a second term of five yearsⒺexplanatory note, but to no purpose: seven months afterward she hadn’t begun.

I knew Miss Lyon was & Ashcroft were well enough acquainted with my royalty-income -affairs to know that that one-tenth interest in the Letters was valuable & would cost but three months’ literary work, & so I was naturally surprised when it was contemptuously flung aside. I would not have been so surprised if I had known that they already had something so much larger up their sleeve that by comparison that tenth-interest was indeed “petty”—petty & contemptible.

---

I signed the four contracts in Ashcroft’s presence. Nobody else was present. Nobody else was ever present when I was signing papersⒺexplanatory note presented by Ashcroft. And there were [begin page 351] never any duplicates. There were originals only, & he always carried them away. If I afterward wanted to see what it was I had been signing, he would bring me an unsigned copy—at least what purported to be a copy. I can see, now, that some of his ways—in fact all of his ways—were suspicious; but during three or four years that idea did not occur to me.

On that memorable 13th of March Ashcroft did certainly come loaded—loaded for a complete & comprehensive clean-up; a clean-up which would wash the slate & leave nothing indefinite between us, nothing to argue over, or dispute about, or re-arrange. The four contracts have ing been signed, he produced a Memorandum, type-written on a little piece of paper. I read it & signed it.

And finally he produced what he said was four notes, for $250 each—his notes, he said; remarking that he wished to assume Miss Lyon’s debt of a thousand dollars to meⒺexplanatory note; & that, furthermore, she would presently return to me and the $500 which I had given her at Christmas, as she did not wish to accept it. D He didn’t say where she was going to get the $500, & he didn’t say where he was going to get the $1000 to pay the notes with. Both of them were living upon me & had no other source of support, & both of them knew that I knew it.

But they also knew I didn’t know they had a by & by fortune up their sleeve.

I didn’t look at the notes. I cared nothing for them. I never meant to collect them. I told Ashcroft to put them away & keep them for me. Which he probably did; I did not see them again.

Have I told about the Christmas present to Miss Lyon? Anyway, the way of it was this. While Stormfield was being built, Miss Lyon was mending-up “Summerfield”—called the “Lobster Pot” at that time—the old farm-house which I had given her a couple of years before. A year ago, when I arrived here for the first time, she remarked that she had no money to make repairs with, & was going to raise a thousand dollars by putting a mortgage on a cottage she owned in the village of Farmington. Perhaps she had forgotten that there was already a mortgage on that cottage that was making the shingles crack with its weight. But no matter, I understood her hint: she wanted to borrow of me. I told her to do so.

Very well, the repairing went on. Close upon Christmas she came to me & joyfully said the restitutions & patchings were finished, & had cost $1500. I gave her a receipt for $500 of it as a Christmas present.

The day after

On Christmas Day Ashcroft reported to me that she was much pleased. I said I was going to give her the other thousand, by & by, $500 at a time, in the form of receipts. After an interval of twenty-four hours he came to me in the library, with a receipt for a thousand dollars in his hand, & said—

“As long as you are going to give it to her eventually anyway, would you mind si—”

¶ I exclaimed with some feeling,

“What the hell have you got to do with it?” !” Won’t you be good enough to mind your own business, for a change?”

[begin page 352] Four contracts & a Memorandum, on the memorable 13th of MarchⒺexplanatory note, General Clean-Up Day. Here is the Memorandum. It is couched in Ashcroft’s deliciousest & impudentest style—a style uncopyable, inimitable, unapproachable, for self-complacent impertinence. The JeamesⒺexplanatory note style; for Ashcroft, has served long as a lackey, in England, & I doubt if there was ever a better one.

(Insert it Here.)

Memorandum

I read the Memorandum through while Ashcroft stood waiting; then I signed it & he carried it away to New York with the other documents. That night I fell to wondering what the idea of that Memorandum could be. It itemised invoiced Miss Lyon’s services in solemn & impressive detail. ? Why? Did I need the information? Certainly not. ! Who, then, needed it? Ashcroft? No—he was familiar with the facts. Why did he want them in writing, & signed?

Blest if I could guess! By & by it occurred to me that there must be a nigger in that woodpile somewhere—there must be an secret important reason secreted in that chaff, if I could only find it. Very well, I found it. At least I believed so. It could not be the doctor-bills: —Miss Lyon had known for years that I paid all the household doctor bills myself. So it must be the clothes! She was always buying them, & she generally had the village dressmaker in the house. , a AtⒶtextual note two dollars a day. I knew she had told that woman she should want her practically the whole winter. I knew it because Miss Lyon had [begin page 353] told me so herself—in one of her bragging moods—& told me how surprised & glad the woman was. Miss Lyon was just thoughtless enough to give herself away like that. It did not occur to her that I might possibly (though not probably) put two & two together & arrive at this result: that her frequently-exhibited pride in the fact that she spent little or nothing on herself, but her $50 a month salary on her mother’s support, didn’t tally very well with this new source of pride. If it cost $50 a months to merely manufacture the gowns & things, how much did the materials cost?

It seemed plain that the clothing-item must be the sensitive place in the Memorandum. Did she want me to concede, in writing, that I had authorized her to buy those clothes? There was trouble in the air. , as she & the rest of us knew. If it came to separation & a quarrell, might she not need such a paper as a protection if she should chance to be accused of misusing my check-book?

Next morning I asked requested her to telephone Ashcroft & ask him to bring back the Memorandum & let me read it again. He brought it; & said, without waiting for me to examine it—

“The clothing, she—well, she spent only about three hundred dollars, &—well, she was authorized to buy clothing.”

“Who authorized her?”

“Miss Clemens said that as she had to meet so much company she ought to be properly dressed; so she authorized her to buy such as was needed.”

“Ashcroft, Miss Lyon knew Miss Clemens’s authorization was without value. You knew it, too.”

So that was really the tender spot in the Memorandum. It wasn’t any matter, it possessed no consequence—except in one way: while this was a very small depredation & possibly had not cost me but little per year, it offered strong presumptive evidence that the depredator or depredatoress who would depredate in clothes, would not stop there, but would go further——had gone furtherⒺexplanatory note.

I put the Memorandum away & locked it up, Ashcroft making no comment. I copy it here:

Insert Memorandum.
here Ⓔexplanatory note

Months later I was to find out that the clothes were cunningly put in to conceal the real nigger in the woodpile. That real nigger was in the closing sentence.

Contract Day! Cleaning-Up Day! The Busy Day! Wonderful Thirteenth of March, the Unforgetable! How much was crowded into it, when you come to think! Not into the whole Day—no, into one hour.

As a result, I was Miss Lyon’s slave & also Mr. Ashcroft’s slave; & had confessed it in writing, & had bound myself to pay wages for the place & get absolutely nothing in return—nothing, at any rate, that couldn’t be had in the market for half the money.

But I was happy. I still had my Ashcroft, my precious, & we should now get back into the old delightful comradeship again right away—I not knowing about that Thing they [begin page 354] had up their Sleeve. As for Miss Lyon, I would not be too abrupt: I would wait thirty days before dismissing her.

---

Five days slipped by. Then came the wedding. I was there. It was a binding together of a pair of conspirators, for protective purposes. Each knew of the other’s crimes, & neither was willing to trust the other, ungagged. No, not quite that, perhaps. Ashcroft was probably not concerned about crimes already committed by him, because he had almost certainly covered them cunningly up—even from Miss Lyon, probably; what he was afraid of was, I think, that if she were not gagged she might some time or other expose the fut contemplated crimes—crimes planned by the two for future execution. Otherwise, why was he tying himself to her? He didn’t want her. He had never proposed to her. He told me so, himself. He told me she had proposed the marriage, & had also urged it. 〚It was over that day in the billiard room, & the “urgency” had seemed to me to translate itself into compulsion. This was a justifiable guess, in view of a thousand familiar circumstances, but not as good a guess as I could make now. Now that I know what they had up their sleeve.〛

over

The church was cold & clammy, which was quite proper. Miss Lyon’s mother was there, some Ashcrofts were there, the two Freemans were there, I was there. Also Mrs. Martin W. Littleton. , and God. If God He was there. I didn’t see him. Reverend Percy GrantⒺexplanatory note intimated that He was. ; Ⓐtextual note But that was probably merely an ordinary wedding-convention, with nothing in it. even said He was. Nine in all.

Miss Lyon acted the happy young bride to admiration. She almost made it look real. The reality itself could hardly have been more sweetly and gushingly & artfully artlessly girlish. And when she knelt on a prie-dieu & bowed her head reverently, with her bridal veil flowing about it, & Percy Grant stood grandly up in his consecrated livery, with hands & chin uplifted, & prayed over her—well, it was stunningly impressive & rotten, & I was glad I was there to see.

There was no bridal trip. Mr. & Mrs. R. W. Lyon-Ashcroft came back “home.” & took up night-quarters at their house & day-quarters at mine.

In these days we had guests in the house all the time, & the new bride was in great form as salaried Social Secretary & Ornament. She was the liveliest of the lively, the gayest of the gay. Clara was now in command, as housekeeper. The Ashcrofts & I were soon very friendly & sociable again, & I hoped & believed these conditions would continue. Clara hoped the opposite.

On the 30th of March Clara reported to me that Horace Hazen wanted an advance of wages & another afternoon & evening off. I said “satisfy him if you can.” He wasn’t much of a butler, but he was improving. He was a country lad, nineteen years old, very slimⒶtextual note, & apparently nineteen feet high, but this was an optical delusion, he was only 6 feet [begin page 355] 2. He was a good fellow, & of good character, & was the son of a farmer-neighbor whose forbears had occupied the farm since the earliest timesⒺexplanatory note. His wage was high enough—$35 a month—but he was learning, & would soon be worth more.

Clara & I left for New York the next morning. In the course of the three-mile drive to the station I asked about Horace, & she said he & she had agreed upon $45 per month & the extra off-time he had asked for.

I spent that night at the house of H. H. Rogers, & arranged for next day’s journey. To Norfoldk, Virginia, to speak at a banquet in his honor, & witness the glories which were to be poured out upon him by the people—for he had built a great railway 446 miles longⒺexplanatory note, down all by himself, down there, & secured for that region a vast & permanent prosperity. for Ashcroft was to go with me & take care of me, & baby me, & protect me from drafts, & so-on & so-on, just in the old-time way, the old charming way, the old happy way, & just as if nothing had ever happened to interrupt our heaven-born relations.

We went by boat, sailing at 3 p.m., along with the other guests. We were together, & ever so content & comfortable until midnight, when he tucked me in, placed my books, tobacco, pipes, cigars, matches, & hot-whisky outfit conveniently, undressed me, then went his way. We had sat together at dinner; we sat together at breakfast in the morning; we drove together to the hotel in Norfolk; we were inseparable in all our goings & comings that day. It was all exceedingly pleasant & sociable.

Then came an incident. Toward dinner time he came into my room with an open letter in his hand, & astonished me by saying,

“Miss Clemens has discharged Horace!”

“No such thing; she’s done nothing of the kind.”

“Yes, but she has!” & his little rat-eyes twinkled with malicious joy.

“How do you know she has?”

“Horace says so. This letter is from Horace, & he says just that; uses that expression.”

“Does his saying so make it so?”

“Yes, it does, because Horace is absolutely truthful—absolutely. He doesn’t know how to lie.”

“He has lied this time, all the same, unless something has been happening since I left to cause his discharge.”

“Well, he wasn’t going to stay, anyway.”

“He wasn’t? How do you know?”

“He told me so, himself. He said he would not serve under Miss Clemens for any wages in the world.”

“He said that to you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you recognise that he had insulted you? Did you try to knock him down?” 〚Ashcroft’s silence meant No.〛 “Were you skunk enough to take that?” 〚Some more silence.〛

“When did he

“WhenⒶtextual note did he tell you these things?”

[begin page 356] “The night before you left.”

“Why, you were in New York!” You went down that morning.”

That seemed to embarrass him for a moment or two, then he said,

“I had to go back to attend to some things.”

“Then Horace must have told you those things in my house. Did he?”

“Yes.”

“You knew my daughter & I were going away in the morning. Why didn’t you report that conversation to me, so that we could secure a butler in New York?”

He was getting pretty uncomfortable; words did not flow easily with him. He finally made out to say he hadn’t believed Horace was in real earnest, but was only irritated about something & would cool off & change his mind. Then he added:

“But it didn’t happen. He has been discharged; & as it was without notice, he is entitled to a month’s wages, & wants it.”

“Wants it, merely on his testimony, uncorroborated, that he has been peremptorily discharged? Well, he won’t get it right away, that I know.”

Those rat-eyes glinted again joyfully, & Ashcroft said—

“He’s already got it!”

“What do you mean?”

“That was his check that you signed this morning, & I sent it off in the noon mail.”

“Well, upon my word! You do seem to be in a most extravagant hurry. You are my salaried business conscience, my business adviser, my business nurse, my business sentinel on the watch-tower to see that nobody slips up on me with an undocumented & unverified claim, & this is your first official act! Why, Ashcroft, child as I am, I know more about business than t that, myself. Get that check back! And don’t lose any time about it.”

He pretty meekly confessed that perhaps he had been a little premature, & said he would go at once & telegraph Horace.

I would give a thousand dollars, good deal now, if I had kept still & allowed that check to be collected. But I didn’t know Ashcroft then, & so I lost my chance. to jail him.

I took Horace’s letter, read it, & put it in my pocket. There was no envelop. There had never been one, but I didn’t know that. I insert it here. For certain good & sufficient reasons, it is an interesting document.

[begin page 357] note by CC:

We reached New York from Norfolk late on Tuesday the 6th of May April. I stayed at Mr. Rogers’s house, & went to Clara’s apartment in Stuyvesant SquareⒺexplanatory note the next morning. I had telegraphed Clara on the 4th that Horace had pronounced himself discharged. She had sent at once for ClaudeⒺexplanatory note. He had a place, but could give notice & come to us on the 15th—“& very gladly,” he said, “on condition that he was not to serve under Miss Lyon.” 〚She was still “Miss Lyon” to everybody—including her husband.〛 Clara had telephoned the news to Katy, at Stormfield, ; who telephoned back, “I told Miss Lyon right away, & she was so scared she was as white as a ghost, for she knows what Claude thinks about that two-o’clock-in-the-morning incidentⒺexplanatory note, & that was why she made up her mind to drive him off the place & keep him from talking.”

I showed Horace’s letter to Clara, & she said it was totally false; that she hadn’t discharged him, & hadn’t thought of such a thing. I asked her to put the gist of it in writing—which she did, on the back of the letter. I was perplexed to a stand-still. I was not able to construct a plausible guess at how Horace had come to write the letter. Neither could Clara, but she chanced the idea that “those Ashcroft’sⒶtextual note are in it somewhere.”

[begin page 358] At mid-afternoon Ashcroft saw me to the station—for the last time—& bought my tickets & helped me aboard the train, according to old custom. Then he telephoned the lioness at “Summerfield,” & she called up Stormfield & said to TereseⒶtextual note excitedly—

“Get Horace out of the house! Get him out at once! Mr. Clemens is coming, & is in a perfect rage.”

In a rage! Another of her lies. I hadn’t anything to rage about. For I hadn’t found out, yet.

Miss Lyon was at Stormfield when I arrived, & she exclaimed with the most gushing & best-acted delight her art could furnish,

“Oh, I am so glad Claude is coming back! The best servant that ever was; the most honest, the most competent; I did so hate to lose him, & he said he would walk over burning ploughsharesⒺexplanatory note any time, to serve me. He’s just a dear!”

I was able to tell Miss Lyon some news of a sort that pleased me very much. News of the kind brought back from Gloucester by Paine & me nine months before. I said––

“Clara has had a call from Jean this morning, & I happened in just in time. Jean is in fine condition! She had come over to see Dr. Peterson, & she was on her way there now. Presently she drove thitherward in a deluge of rain. Clara & I were sure, very sure she is well enough to come home, & she called the doctor up & made an appointment with him for four o’clock to-morrow afternoon. This time he will consent, sure!”

Miss Lyon flushed, her eyes spewed fire, & she was hysterical in a moment. She broke out intemperately—

“Indeed he will not! Jean come home? It isn’t to be thought of for a moment; she is far worse than she looks; she has convulsions two & three times a month.”

I was surprised.

“How do you know?”

“From AnnaⒺexplanatory note. She keeps me posted all the time.”

“How?”

“By letter.”

The slave was lying, but I didn’t know it. I supposed she was telling the truth, & I judged Clara’s visit to Peterson would meet with no success. I was not to know, until June 25 (five days ago,) from Anna’s own lips, that Jean had had only three convulsions since her return from Germany. And they were a month apart. Anna has been in Jean’s service four years.

There is no reasonable doubt that Miss Lyon telephoned Ashcroft to forestal Clara’s visit to Peterson & fill his mind with lies. I base this upon the fact that Clara found him resolutely unwilling to lis allow Jean to come home. She was astonished at his attitude & asked why he was so unwilling. It was because I would be disturbed by Jean’s presence here!

[begin page 359] I have already told how he believed Clara was not speaking the truth when she told him that that notion was utterly groundless; & how she got Dr. Quintard to go & reason with him; & how Quintard could not convince him; & how, when I went to Peterson, in my turn, he wouldn’t believe me, at first. That was about the 20th 14th of April. He had been up here the day before, in my absence, & had been listening to Miss Lyon’s falsities all day.

I All I could get out of Peterson was permission to allow Jean to come home for one week. If the experiment was not a failure it could be tried a little longer & its results noted.

So Jean arrived here on the 26th of April; so glad to be in her own home once more, that she hadn’t any words for her gratitude. She is here yet, & is as healthy as the very rocks. Not a single symptom of her cruel malady has ever shown itself. She is up at six in the morning & is busy & active thence till bedtime at nine in the evening. She rakes & mows on her farm; superintends her men; directs the repairs upon her house & barn; buys chickens & ducks from the farmers around & feeds & cares for them herself; walks home at eleven, examines & annotates the mail, then answers the letters & draws the checks for all bills; & in an two hours has cleared off all my secretary-work for the day—a most pleasant & satisfactory change from the shirking ways of that lazy & incompetent former secretary of mine, who couldn’t write English, whereas Jean can. Jean spends the afternoon riding horseback & driving until her five o’clock tea. Imagine it—I could have had her at home two years ago, (as I have at last discovered,) but for the schemings of that pitiless pair & my own inexcusable stupidity!

Well, they themselves have avenged me. For they are married. Two months & a half. Th By this time they loathe each other. They didn’t want to marry, they were scared into it. They smelt bad weather coming. Each is a millstone around the other’s neck, & each wishes the other was in hell. New Jersey. They have over-avenged me; I couldn’t wish a dog my dearest enemy such luck as theirs.

As I have said, I reached Stormfield on the 7th of April. Things were buzzing, so to speak. Ashcroft came up a day or two later. Meantime I had seen not happened to see anything of Horace, & was too busy to look into his case. When Ashcroft arrived he paid Horace to date, & I signed the check. He paid him at the old rate—a confession, apparently, that Horace had not been “discharged,” & that Ashcroft knew it.

Yes, things were buzzing. Clara wanted Miss Lyon discharged & sent out of the house at once. I said her first month on the March 15 contract would be compted on the 15th of the current month & I would then give her a month’s notice & let her retire to her own house.

Clara wanted Miss Lyon’s trunks, in the attic, searched for stolen goods. This astonished me! Did she think Miss Lyon that kind of a thief? Yes, she thought she was; & believed she had more than merely plausible reasons for it.

On the 12th or 13 I went down to attend Clara’s concert on the 13th Ⓔexplanatory note. I went to the concert with the Rogerses. No Ashcrofts along. A month earlier, it had been planned [begin page 360] that the Ashcrofts & I would go there together; but things were changed, now; that pair wanted none of Clara’s music, & Clara was not yearning for any Ashcrofts.

On the 14th I was still in New York I suppose, (a part of the day), because I had a talk with Ashcroft which I think must have occurred about that time. He told me Clara’s feeling against Miss Lyon had reached such a pass that Miss Lyon believed Clara was going to have her trunks searched; also that she was going to have her arrested—& so Miss Lyon was in a state of pitiable humiliation & distress.

Then Ashcroft cried.

I said—

“Arrest her? Nonsense. On what ground?”

“Because she has a suspicion that—”

“Well, that is nonsense, too. Clara would apply to a lawyer, & the lawyer would not allow her to proceed upon a mere suspicion.”

Miss Lyon’s fright was a self-accusation, but I didn’t know it, & was not suspecting it. Clara’s suspicions were well grounded, but I thought they were merely grounded upon resentment & dislike.

On the 15th I was at home again, & sent & received this a letter from Clara, about a housekeeper to take Miss Lyon’s place. Miss Lyon had stipulated in her contract of a month earlier that she was to be Social Secretary only, & have nothing to do with the housekeeping. The Miss Hindhaugh mentioned was a lady who was highly educated but h & had been rich but had lost her money three years before, & from that date had been serving as housekeeper & secretary in the family of a Columbia-University professor at $50 30 a month. That is, for nine months of the year. The family went away each summer, but left her behind, without salary. She was very willing to come to us at Clara’s offer—$50 a month—but she didn’t come, because when the professor heard about it he raised her wage to $50—vacation included. She liked the family very much, & they liked her as much.

This is Clara’s letter:

(Insert it here)Ⓐtextual note

[begin page 361]

But I must go back two or three days, now, for I find I have left out a letter to me from Miss Lyon which bears date April 12. It is about the Memorandum & the clothes. The Memorandum has no date, but I have supposed it was offered along with those other documents, for signature, March 13. That is still (July 5) my impression, but I am probably wrongⒺexplanatory note. However, it isn’t important.

But the letter is.

I recognise in it a better, & clearer, & sorrier, & portrait of her character (as I am now acquainted with it) than any camera has ever made of her face. To-wit: 〚“Benares”—her pet name for Ashcroft:〛

(Insert the letter in pencil, of Apl. 12Ⓐtextual note

[begin page 362]

“The few garments I’ve bought.” “Few” must be a slip of the pen. Katy maintains that she Miss Lyon had more clothes, & costlier ones, than Clara. I am aware, myself, that her closets overflowed with gowns, & jackets, & silken shawls, & the daintyiest & delicatest auxiliary things that go to the setting off & heightening the effects of such raiment. I am also aware that in 1905–6–7–8 she had a dressmaker in attendance with several times to Clara’s once. When she had been in Stormfield a while, Paine asked her about the village dressmakerⒶtextual note, Miss Banks, & said his wifeⒺexplanatory note had some work for her & would like to know something about her abilities & prices. Miss Lyon blew cold upon the matter, & said she should keep Miss Banks employed all the winter herself. Necessarily on those “few garments” she had bought. She repeated that grandiloquent boastful remark to Paine on another occasion. She made it good, too, in a large measure. Last winter I got tha very tired of that dressmaker’s presence, for she did her sewing in a room across the hall from mine, & persisted in keeping her door open; & as I always kept mine open, too, neither of us had any privacy. It is my custom to keep to my room, in night dress, until mid-afternoon, & intersperse my work with trampings up & down, to aid reflection & composition. This kept me under the eye of that stranger, & was an annoyance which damaged my labors by banishing from them the needed reposefulness of spirit. Several times I asked her to keep her door closed. She would comply for a day [begin page 363] or two, then conveniently forget, & resume her former habit. By command of Miss Lyon, I now suppose, who was a spy upon us all, in those days.

Yes, she certainly did indulge in a few garments, on $50 a month which went “entirely” to the support of her mother. Oh, certainly! “ENTIRELY.” It is a strong word. During the years I have mentioned, she brought dainty & expensive things home so often, with the remark, sweetly & laughingly & girlishly expressed, burbled out,“They would make me take it—they insisted—they wouldn’t listen to a no—& they put it down to nearly nothing, & said if I didn’t buy I’d have to take it as a gift—& so—well, I couldn’t resist any longer, could I?”—with a birdlike upward cant of the innocent face:—made that kind of remark so often, I say, that it became the joke of the house, & even the servants got to mimicking her those airs & speeches. She would fetch home a lovely silken fabric—always lovely, for she had perfect taste in materials, qualities, colors, harmonies—& spread it over a chair r, & arrange its sweep & its folds effectively; & then stand off & worshiping it critically a minute, over cocking her head first one side then t’other;

over

then step forward & give it another artistic touch-up with her practised hand, then step back & worship again. And all the time her face would beam with rapture & she would winningly & jocosely chatter about how “they” just made her take it, & it how they put the price down to next to nothing, & said it was the very thing for her, the very thing, & if she wouldn’t buy it they’d make her take it anyway. Once when she was opening her mouth to begin a performance of this kind, Mary LawtonⒺexplanatory note, who didn’t like her, interrupted & said—

“Never mind, I know the tune, I know the I’ll sing it for you. It’s worth forty-seven dollars & they made you take it at four & a half. Because they love you so.”

Katy tells about a shopping-incident of Clara’s—to this effect. Clara was longingly examining a delicate piece of underwear, which was ravishingly belaced, & embossed, & or embroidered, or inlaid, or enameled, or whatever you call it, & when she put it aside Katy asked her why she didn’t buy it, & she said she couldn’t afford it. Katy said—

“Why, Miss Clara, Miss Lyon’s got lots of those things.”

This was early in in the first week of March last, & Clara’s allowance had just been raised to four hundred dollars a month. Katy reminded her of this, & said—

“Miss Lyon affords it, & so I don’t see why you can’t.”

“Because she can sign checks for my father. I can’t.”

By that time Clara was detesting & despising Miss Lyon most cordially & diligently, & Miss Lyon was hating Clara with her whole heart. If I didn’t tell you this, you might be misled by some of the expressions in Miss Lyon’s letter. Such as “Miss Clemens, in all sweetness & generosity;” and “she was very very dear;” & “she was the dearest creature; .” & she

Yes, Miss Lyon had bought a few garments—as many as that, anyway, during the years which I have mentioned. Ashcroft said she had bought none recently, except some silks & such things—not more than three hundred dollars’ worth; anyway— then correcting himself: — “not at the outside more than four three hundred & fifty dollars’ worth.” [begin page 364] She remarks in her letter that those silks are mine. Did she think I would send for them? Indeed she didn’t. Had she any intention of sending them to me? Indeed she hadn’t. She knew me long ago; by this time I was beginning to know her.

In her letter she is illogical—however she was always that. She refuses an advance of salary, & imagines that that justifies her in buying cost clothes at my expense without asking leave. She ought to have been able to say she had to take money not her own because she couldn’t get a raise of salary. Better still, she ought to have asked for a raise instead of refusing it. Or, she could have asked for the clothes. But somehow she couldn’t think of any way to acquire the clothes but a disreputable discreditable one. She was not an easy creature to understand. Once when I gave her a check to get a gown with, she took it; six or se months later, when I offered her a similar check for a similar purpose she declined it & said she had all the clothes she needed.

And isn’t she a hardy talker! She says Clara “will know by what I own & wear, how little I have purchased.” Why, bless you she had a whole milliner’s outfit in her trunks & closets!

And observe that shot at poor Miss Hobby the stenographer. What business had she with Miss Hobby’s affairs? Miss Hobby took dictation from me an hour & a half every forenoon, & typewrote the result every afternoon, putting in a matter of three hours on that detail of her work. She was not my secretary, she was my stenographer, & did the work she was hired to do, & did it well, & earned her money. Miss Lyon was my secretary, but she gradually unloaded three-fourths of her work onto Miss Hobby & shirked half of the other fourth. Yet she works herself into a virtuous rage at the thought of anybody’s intruding upon her special privilege of doing all the shirking herself. Miss Hobby earned her $5 a day. Miss Lyon received about half as much, but she didn’t earn it.

Miss Lyon had to “travel about” with me? It is an overstatement. I never required it of her. Whenever I projected a journey she promptly said “I shall go along; I shall not let you go unlooked-after.” I was glad to have her company, but her going along was her own affair, not mine. Th Howells, she was a most competent & eloquent flatterer—I knew that; also she was a rank & rotten hypocrite. That I didn’t know, but sometimes I did in a kind of a sort of a limited measure suspect it.

Do you remember that holy look she used to put on sometimes when there was an audience? Examine this picture, which I have cut out of the New York American, & see if you can get on the track of it.

Insert it here.Ⓐtextual note

[begin page 365]

---

Sunday. July 11, 1909. The Twichells (Rev. J. H. & Harmony) spent yesterday & the previous day here. That made an interruption. But this letter can stand interruptions; there is no hurry about finishing it. It is my only employment; also my only diversion, except billiards—daily from 5 to 7 p.m. with Paine; for I have at last acquired a “smoker’s [begin page 366] heartⒺexplanatory note,” by 60 years’ diligent effort in that direction, & am forbidden to make journeys, or take walks, or run up stairs, or accumulate fatigue in any other way. I have to hold still, & keep quiet. Very well, I have a talent for it.

As I have said, I reached home from Virginia April 7th.

On the 15th I gave Miss Lyon a month’s notice—sent it to her room by a maid. In the forenoon.

Claude (butler) arrived at noon.

In the afternoon Miss Lyon sent me her reply by a maid. She had been married about a month, but was still called by her unwedded name, & she was still using it herself, & so it came natural to her to sign the present note in that way.

(Insert the Note)Ⓐtextual note

The “collecting!” She had been for two years under written contract to collect my Letters, preparatory to arranging them for publication. At the end of which liberal period her “ collecting ” “has not gone beyond the letters Mr. Howells sent.” Always when it came to shirking work she was a daisy.

A ◇ singular character, & most difficult to understand—now that at last I am acquainted with it. I learned yesterday that only 8 days before she wrote that note she not only telephoned Teresa to get Horace out of the house at once inasmuch as I was homeward bound “in a rage,” but warned her to get all the servants out of the house before my arrival, as I was going to discharge all the whole of them immediately. They believed her, & packed their things. They expected a storm to break, but as I was not aware that one was required, I did not furnish it. So they stayed.

[begin page 367] At the very time that she was trying to get Ⓐtextual note make trouble & vexation for Clara & me by getting my servants to leave me in a body, she was accepting wages under a contract in which she particularly & especially declined to have anything to do with the housekeeping. And with this shabby rather base conduct of hers still fresh in her memory, she is was able to say—without a blush, so far as I can see—those words with which she closes her note: “with thanks inexpressable Ⓐtextual note , for the wonder & beauty you have brought into my life.”

She had been serving under the 13th of March contract about a month when I discharged her on the 15th of April, therefore she was entitled to two months’ pay. I paid it, signing the check myself, for I had revoked her check-signing power a while before.

I think

It was Ashcroft who brought the checks to be signed. Another gent would have credited the $200 on his notes, but Ashcroft is not that kind of a gent. What I always admired about Ashcroft, was his diligence & single-mindedness in looking out for Number One. An act which would look shabby to another gent would not look so to Ashcroft, let the act be what it might, if its object was to confer an advantage upon Number One.

Up to this time Ashcroft had rendered a weekly Statement every Saturday in accordance with the requirements of one of those 13th of March contracts (the o ingenious one that cunningly neglected to mention any “consideration” & was therefore worthless); & he slipped in on that errand on Saturday the 17th; did the work, then slipped away again. I saw him from my windows disappearing down the road in the distance, & have never seen him since, I think.

Miss Lyon lingered along about nine a few days. She came mornings about 10, & went home to her cottage about 5. She had nothing official to do, for I was attending to the secretary-work myself, with Mr. Grumman the stenographerⒺexplanatory note. Still, she lingered, fussing at her trunks in the attic & busying herself in various ways with her own affairs.

I wished she would go, but I couldn’t tell her so.

The next thing that happened was, that Horace appeared. I asked him to explain the mystery of the Norfolk letter.

“How did you come to say Miss Clara had discharged you when it wasn’t true?”

He was very penitent, & said he was ashamed of himself & sorry he had done it.

“Well, then, what possessed you to do it, Horace?”

Then it came out that Ashcroft made him do it!

“Ashcroft? How could Ashcroft make you do it, & he away down in Virginia?”

“No, Mr. Clemens, he was here . th On the 31st 30th Ⓐtextual note of March I had my talk with Miss Clemens, & she raised my wages to $45 & an extra evening, & in the morning I told her I was satisfied, & glad to stay. I was satisfied. Mr. Ashcroft was not here then; he had gone to New York on the noon train. Next morning—31st—you & Miss Clemens went to New York by the 10. 31, & Mr. Ashcroft came up by the noon train & got to the house about 2. He told me I was going to be discharged., & I’d better quit before I was discharged. He said Miss Clemens was going to discharge all the servants. He told me to write a letter to you, & he made me say ‘discharged.’ That was his word. I said it [begin page 368] wasn’t right, because I hadn’t been discharged, but he said use that word, & he made me use it, & said it would be worth a month’s wages to me.”

“Why, this is splendid; it’s like a romance! Go on.”

“Mr. Clemens, I don’t think I would have sent that letter that way, I would have changed it.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t, because as soon as it was finished he took it.”

“Took it away with him?”

“Yes, sir. I didn’t see it any more. He left for New York next morning, April 1, by the 7 o’clock train.”

Isn’t it interesting? And isn’t it just like the at cheap villain in a seventh-rate play?

On the 2d I took Ashcroft with me to lunch with two ladies at the Hotel GothamⒺexplanatory note, & he was very sweet & nice, & the ladies liked him ever so much, & he had that letter in his pocket all the time, & was under contract, since March 13th, to look after my business matters & take good care of them. We joined Mr. Rogers & the others on the boat at mid-afternoon, & Ashcroft, with that letter in his pocket, dined with those people, swapped anecdotes & other sociabilities with them, & in these & in all ways allowed them to treat him just as if he were a gentlemenⒶtextual note. And three of them were fellow-countrymen of his—Englishmen: Mr. Broughton & Mr. Coe, sons-in-law of Mr. Rogers, & Mr. Lancaster of LiverpoolⒺexplanatory note, the city Ashcroft was born in.

Clear till bedtime Ashcroft, was with that letter in his pocket, was as tenderly & watchfully & affectionately attentive to my slightest needs or desires as ever; & next day in Norfolk it was the same; & I think it was late afternoon of that day that he came into my room looking greatly surprised, with Horace’s open letter in his hand, & said—

“It’s from Horace—Miss Clara has discharged him!”

Isn’t it romantic! Isn’t it stagy & charming!

Horace looked in again on the 26th of April, the day that restored Jean to me, & we had another talk. He is a nice boy, a simple farmer lad, & without guile. His mother says he cried the most of the day following the spiriting-away of his letter, for he wanted to keep his place. I asked Horace to go home & write the history of the letter for me; & not to deal in generalities, but in particulars. He did so.

Insert his letterⒶtextual note

[begin page 369]

XIV

Miss Lyon had long been Supreme High Chief, but Horace’s second paragraph indicates that Ashcroft had been promoted, & was now sharing the throne with her—an arrangement which I was ignorant of, & about which I had not been consulted. And so, the butler ignores ciphers like Clara & me when he wants his wages raised, goes to Ashcroft about it. In turn, Ashcroft tells him he will “have to talk with Miss Lyon.” Why, hang him, Miss Lyon had formally & distinctly & haughtily retired from her housekeeping-sovereignty just the day before—had he forgotten it already?

You notice, this matter of Horace’s was being discussed by these three servants of ours sixteen days before Clara & I ever heard of it. The Lyon-Ashcroft impudence has not its mate fellow anywhere; it is a new kind.

In Horace’s third paragraph Ashcroft gives wings to his imagination, & lies freely, briskly, glibly, but not with good art, as it seems to me. He has talent, but he is ignorant & does not know how to use it. I could have done it better. “Miss Lyon wouldn’t stand for it!” Isn’t it good? The dear little heroine! why, Howells, you can just see her. —plucky little hou clothes-pin—standing erect & gallant, between that coal-oil derrick & harm!

Observe, she wouldn’t stand for it!—which naturally settles it. Apparently we couldn’t [begin page 371] dismiss a servant o if she that for Ⓐtextual note that uncompleted little three-weeks’ foetus declined to “stand for it.”

Horace mentions, in his fourth paragraph, that Ashcroft advised “every one of the help to leave before they got kicked out.” It is even so. He rang them all in, & delivered that remark to them in person.

It sometimes seems to me, that in secretly & slyly & surreptitiously conspiring with our servants, under the hospitable shelter of our own roof, & trying to get them to leave us, & thus put us to great inconvenience & discomfort, Ashcroft was not quite loyal to the contract he had signed earlier in the month, & which bound him to look out for my interests, & take care of them to the best of his ability. Howells, his conduct almost smacks of treachery.

Horace closes his letter with the suggestion that he was “greatly influenced.” Yes, that is what happened.

It was a bright pair, a sharp pair, an unusually clever pair. But not always. Sometimes they made a mistake. Sometimes they anticipated conditions which apparently were on the point of arriving, apparently were sure to arrive, but hadn’t arrived. In the present case absolute sovereignty over me was apparently on the verge of arriving, but it hadn’t quite arrived. They ought to have waited until they were firmly seated in the sovereignty before they undertook to drive the servants away & replace them with minions of their own selection.

---

I have left out certain things that happened in March. One was a letter which I wrote to Clara on the 11th; I will insert it by & by. Another was a matter concerning the Safe Deposit box in the Produce Exchange. There were two keys to the box—both in the hands of my pets. Under Clara’s persuasions I revoked their authority to use the keys, & took them into my own possession.

Next, Clara wanted the contents of the box examined, to see if the securities, contracts, etc., were still there. So I sent a key to Mr. Dunneka, of the Harper & Brothers’ business-staff, together with a written authorization to use it, & asked him to overhaul the box’s contents & send me a list of the same. I hadn’t a list. My secretary never kept a list of anything. She was always going-to, but never did. She never knew which stocks paid dividends, nor when the dividends were due. She was always going-to inform herself (during 7 years,) but she never did. In some regards she was the most remarkable secretary that ever secretaried in this world.

However, it turned out that Ashcroft had a list of the box’s contents. He is a shrewd, & sharp, & careful, & watchful, & observant creature, & can be depended upon to have a list of the contents of any box, or cabinet, or closet, or bank vault, or stable, or rat hole or bawdy house or cesspool he can get access to, by fair means or foul. He went with Dunneka, & took his list along.

[begin page 372] Dunneka reported to me, March 12, by letterⒺexplanatory note, enclosing a list of the box’s contents, & saying the contents agreed with Ashcroft’s list.

Now lo & behold, the list failed to mention the organization-papers of the “Mark Twain” Company!” It mentioned the stock, & the fact that all the 50 shares were present, & all in my name my control: that is, 45 in my name, & three in Ashcroft’s (transfer signed), & 2 in Miss Lyon’s (transfer signed). But there was no mention of those organization papers.

I was troubled. One—or two—or three months earlier—I couldn’t remember when—Ashcroft had come to me with some documents to sign. And he was in a hurry. He was always in a hurry when documents were to be signed. I was going to read these documents—there were three of them—but he said it wasn’t worth the trouble; that they were merely organization-papers of the Mark Twain Company, purely perfunctory, & worded according to the unvarying to the stereotyped form furnished by the statute-book.

So I signed them.

I don’t know why I supposed they would be kept in the Safe Deposit, but I had that notion. When they failed to appear in Dunneka’s list, I was uneasy.

Uneasy, I didn’t quite know why. But I had a vague notion that Except that I had noticed the phrase “real estate” in one of those organization-papers when I was signing itⒺexplanatory note. It didn’t startle me at the time, but it did now. What business had the Mark Twain Company with real estate? Its business was supposably confined to my literary copyrights.

Very well, I was uneasy. Then another thing happened; Dunneka sent me a private oral message to this effect: Do you think it safe to sign the transfers on the back of your stocks securities & trust an outsider with the key?”

Of course that was an insane things to do., & I asked Ashcroft if I had done it. He said yes. I asked him why he had allowed me to do it? He said he had felt, at the time, that it was not wise, but that as I wanted to do it he could not very well object.

Pretty soon I went down to New York, & Ashcroft & I went to the vault, & he sat opposite me at a table while I took out the papers securities, one by one, & scratched my name from the transfer-blank. I was hoping, but not quite expecting, to find the organization-papers, but they were not there. I searched, & searched, & searched, examining each & every fold of each & every paper, over & over again—to no purpose. Ashcroft sat there smiling his gentle MemphistophelianⒶtextual note smile, & never saying a word. I believed he knew what I was after. When my search was ended, I believed he had stolen the document, from under my nose, & had it upon his person. It was not a long-lived belief. We went to 44 Wall & I took John LarkinⒺexplanatory note privately aside & asked him if the Mark Twain corporation had any authority over my real estate? He said no—over nothing but the copyrights.

So I was relieved & content. Also, sorry I had suspected Ashcroft.

Now we will jump back into April, & cavort around in that month again for a while.

On Shakspeare’s birthdayⒺexplanatory note Clara went to Mr. Rogers’s house, 3 East 78th street & [begin page 373] talked our matters over with him. In the course of the day he wrote me from the Standard Oil offices, as follows:

(Insert letter dated April 23)

In my own talk with Mr. Rogers he had told me his plan of procedure. He said he would see that the examination was conducted with perfect fairness to all concerned; that he would put the matter in the hands of a man who had been in his employ twenty-five years, & had been busy at this kind of work all that time; that if there was a single instance of crookedness in the Ashcroft accounts, that man would find it—it couldn’t be hidden from him.

You notice what he says:

[begin page 374] “I think I have read between the lines. In the last two or three years I had my suspicion of things.”

You note also what he says about Clara’s statement of the case:

“Her story was very convincing.”

And yet, only six days later, according to that Croton reservoir of oratorical veracity, Ashcroft, “Mr. Rogers seems to be of the same opinion that many of your other friends are, viz., that the ghastly treatment accorded to Miss Lyon during the past few weeks by a member of your family is a mightily poor return for the way in which she has, since Mrs. Clemens’s death, looked after you, your daughters & your affairs.”

For instance, the way in which she has looked after my invalid daughter Jean—by keeping her exiled among strangers many months after her health was restored & she should have been in the comfort & shelter of her own home.

“As you have already stated, the charges emanated from a brain diseased with envy, malice & jealousy,” etc.

No, I didn’t say it. That language is much too fine for me. I wouldn’t ever be able to soar to those gaudy glittering heights. What I said to Clara was set down in just plain ordinary human English, without any Ashcroftian rainbows & firecrackers: I said she had allowed her mind to be poisoned by prejudiced friendsⒺexplanatory note. That was it. I read it to Ashcroft before I mailed it. I read it to him to show him that I was doing the best I could to defend Miss Lyon & modify Clara’s feeling against her. Why, Howells, I never could have said “emanated”—it is too fine, too exquisite, too voluminous, too aris literary, too aristocratic. I would have used a humbler form; I would have said it squirted from her brain, or something like that. And I wouldn’t have said “diseased” brain—it is much too lofty, much too ornate., I would have said rotten.

And of course I c wouldn’t have said “envy” & “jealousy,” because they wouldn’t mean anything in that connection., you can see it yourself. What was there about Miss Lyon for Clara to envy? Why should she envyⒶtextual note my housekeeper? She might as well envy the cook. And what was there about Miss Lyon for Clara to be jealous of? Howells, I wish I may be damned before my time if I can guess. Clara is young, Clara is beautiful, Clara is highly gifted, Clara is accomplished, Clara’s intimates are the choicest people in the land: why should she be jealous of this talentless, positionless, inconsequential poor old domestic?

Oh, well, I suppose Ashcroft’s muse fired off his remark about envy & jealousy not because it had any sense in it, but because it had a stately sound—which it has Howells, there is no denying it. It fairly thrills you when you come upon it all of a sudden. Ashcroft really has a remarkable ear for sound, though none for sense. And he is refined, in his phrasing, beyond any other writer of our time, I think. Always farⒶtextual note beyond me. Always he says organs of transmission where I say guts. says “Ah, me,” where others say “Oh, hell.”

I think it is time to insert his grand letter again. The oftener I read it the more I enjoy it & the more precious it becomes to me. Howells, it hasn’t its match anywhere. It stands in a class by itself: it is the Literary Emetic Vomit of the Ages. What could he have been feeding on? What do you think?

[begin page 375]

(Insert letter of Apl 29 again)Ⓐtextual note

---

Ashcroft was bitter against Clara, as it is sufficiently indicated by his letter. After I dismissed his wife on the 15th of April she still lingered, day after day, still haunted the place, still infested it with her unwelcome presence, still tried to let on that our relations were as pleasant as ever, whereas the insolences & impertinences of her contract of March 13th were rankling in me & the sight of her exasperated me.

She would come up from her house at ten every morning & occupy her room till late [begin page 376] in the afternoon. Now & then she would sail into my room, artificially radiant & girlish with something killingly funny to tell me, & would stand by my bed & detail it with all sorts of captivating airs & graces & bogus laughter—& get no response. Seeing she wasn’t going to be asked to sit down, she would presently supply the defect & cover her embarrassment by slumping into a chair as if overcome by her humorous emotions. I found it useless to wait for her to take a hint from my unsympathetic attitude & vacate the place: I always had to tell her I was busy & wanted to be alone.

Once in a burst of affectionate regard she started to tell me what a sacrifice she had made for my sake in getting married: that she had not wanted to marry, but saw it was the only way that she & Ashcroft could save me from depression in my lonely estate, & take of me the watchful & devoted care I needed—& she was going on and on; but I interrupted her, not over-gently, & said I had had enough of that offensive nonsense already from Ashcroft, & didn’t want any more of it. I said the pair had done a silly thing, with a purpose in view—“God knows what, I can’t guess!”—& it couldn’t be palmed off on me as having been done for my sake.

I think she kept coming until a couple of days before Jean’s arrival on the 26th. She spent a good deal of time in the attic among the accumulated trunks, & said she was removing her things to her house; also that she was arranging her secretarial matters so that her successor would not find them in disorder, but systematised. A very proper duty & a necessary thing to do. This being the case, it goes without saying that she shirked it; shirked it utterly, leaving her secretarial affairs in an almost miraculous condition of confusion.

She left my manuscripts in the same confusion—dumped helter-skelter into drawers. They had been in her loose custody so long that portions of several of them had been misplaced & lost.

Clara wanted to examine her trunks. She demanded her keys, & got them. I was discomforted by this; in fact a good deal distressed, & I persuaded Clara—much against her will—to spare her that humiliation.

It was a mistake. The trunks should have been searched. Miss Lyon had an almost insane fondness for pretty things, dainty things, jewels, trinkets, bricabrack, & so on; and— . . . . however the search was not made, & I am glad of it, at this late day. Provided she got away with no mementos, heirloomsⒶtextual note, things sacred from association.

It turned out, later, that she did filch one such thing—a string of large carnelian beads; beads worn, long & long ago, by Mrs. Clemens.

Paine was familiar with the incident. By my request he has he put it upon paper—as follows:Ⓐtextual note for possible use by my lawyer—as follows:

(Paine’s letter to Lark)

[begin page 377]

‸It is a wee little event, yet it is a tragedy, for it stabs a character to death. The Social Secretary & Ornament was a thief! This fact was established, beyond cavil or question. I had to concede it myself, strongly & persistently as I had believed in & championed her honesty before, in my disputes with Clara. Since she Miss Lyon would steal hallowed keepsakes, sacred memorials, might there be anything she wouldn’t steal?

Ashcroft’s wee little shabby performance regarding Horace was a tragedy, too, for it exposed his character for good & all, & killed it. TwoⒶtextual note character-suicides in one family inside of two months!‸Ⓐtextual note

---

On the great Cleaning-Up Day, March 13th, Miss Lyon, as per signed & sealed contract, had retired from all coarse all vulgar & useful activities, & had become high-throned Social Secretary & Society Ornament, with nothing to do but charm the guests & collect her augmented salary. She would need the check-book no longer; so, next day I told her to cancel her power of attorney with the banks & leave the signing of checks to me in future.

A month later (April 15), as I have already remarked, I dismissed her.

[begin page 379] Five days later (April 20), Ashcroft brought me a penciled paper, in the loggia, & said he had directed Mr. Lounsbury to smooth the roadway around the “oval,” & this was his (Lounsbury’s) estimate of the cost—$54. Ashcroft said he had told him to go ahead. He asked me if that was right. I said yes. Afterward I wondered what business he Ashcroft had to be meddling with the road. It looked like an impertinence. Then I examined the road, & found that it needed no repairing & that there was no occasion to waste money on it. But I found a place beyond the oval that needed repairing, & needed it very much. I went over it with Lounsbury, who said the cost would be $250. I told him to let the oval entirely alone, & proceed with this work—which he did. When Ashcroft next arrived from New York he inquired asked Lounsbury who had authorized him to mend that road? Lounsbury told him. Ashcroft said, “Go on with it, if you want to take the risk.”

Lounsbury couldn’t understand this. extraordinary remark. He reported it to me, & I couldn’t understand it. It had a meaning, but at that time it was too deep for me.

April 29th Ashcroft wrote his already-several-times-quoted letter.

May arrived.

Along in the first days of May, I learned something that troubled me a little. Mr. Rogers had said he would put the inspection investigation of Miss Lyon’s accounts in the hands of a man in the Standard Oil who had done nothing but that kind of work for twenty-five years; & that if there was anything crooked in the accounts he would be certain to find it, the Ashcrofts would not be able to conceal it from him.

The thing that was troubling me now, was, that Mr. Rogers had put the investigation into the hands of a woman! It was his second secretary, Miss WatsonⒺexplanatory note. I knew her. I believed the Ashcrofts would wring her heart with the cruel injuries I had heaped upon them, & maker her their devoted friend & champion, instead of judge. They would “explain” everything to her satisfaction. In the meantime I should have no chance to explain their explanations.

However, I was not very much disturbed, for Miss Watson’s report would have to be laid before Mr. Rogers, finally; then if there were any crookednesses, I believed he would be absolutely certain to find them.

Just at this time About the 9th or 10th Paine & I started to New York on business, & Lounsbury drove us to the railway station. On the way, reference was made to the cost of the rehabilitation of Miss Lyon’s house—$1500. Lounsbury said—

“Fifteen hundred? Why, it cost thirty-five hundred!”

I said no, it couldn’t be so, because Miss Lyon had given me the exact figures a day or two before Christmas—f a shade less than $1500—& had told me that the work was all finished & that that was the sum spent upon it.

But Lounsbury held his ground. He got out his deadly memorandum book, in which he sets down everything, & from it he furnished the figures, the names, & the dates. The dates showed that Miss Lyon had spent about $2,000 of my money on her house before I had offered to assist her with a loan. This was plain, simple, stark-naked theft.

I did not find Mr. Rogers at the Standard Oil, but I gave the figures to Miss HarrisonⒺexplanatory note, [begin page 380] Mr. Rogers’s first secretary., & said I should intrude only this once upon the Examination, Investigation, but I would like to have these figures placed before Miss Watson. They probably made Miss Watson pretty sick—later it had that look. And they probably made Miss Watson detest me—with a little Ashcroftian help in that direction; later it had that look.

About May 25

They gave the AshcroftsⒶtextual note a most difficult nut to crack. We now have the evidence of his Ashcroft’s attempts to crack it—attempts which sorrowfully failed. By & by I will exhibit those attempts, for they are interesting. So also is the letter to Mr. Rogers which accompaniesⒶtextual note them. If he saw the letter & Mr. Ashcroft’s abortive figures, he passed from this life knowing Miss Lyon for what she was—a pretty hardy & very deliberate thief.

If Mr. Rogers had lived he would have settled the case privately. It could still—even then—be settled privately if wisely handled. I put it into the hands of John B. StanchfieldⒺexplanatory note.

I speak of it as a “case.” It was become that, by this time. Originally it wasn’t a “case,” it was an inquiry; an inquiry instituted to satisfy Clara; an inquiry from which the Ashcrofts would emerge with characters pure and clean, white as snow, as I believed & proclaimed; an inquiry which would cover Clara with confusion & the Ashcrofts with glory.

But that stage had had its day, & was gone by. Things had happened—things like the Norfolk episode, which revealed Ashcroft as a very very small liar, sneak & swindler, & made me desire to get rid of him; also to get rid of the Ashcroft neighborship. So I had a “case.” Mr. Ashcroft must be invited to resign cancel the Mark Twain Company contract of March 13, & his wife must be invited to deed her house & ground back to me.

About the 25th of May, Paine & I went down to New York. Stanchfield wanted the examination of checks & vouchers transferred to a man ,—a public & responsible accountant. , Ⓐtextual note incorruptible by injured-servant tears & maudlin sentimentality. So Paine & I went to the Standard Oil, & I delivered my message to her Miss Watson in one of the private offices. She was very frosty; whereby I knew Miss Lyon had been crying down the back of her neck & saying damaging things about me; & that Miss Watson was further incensed against me because those deadly figures had damaged the Ashcrofts in her estimation, & she had failed to find any way to undamage them.

She was just a little inconsistent. In the beginning she remarked, gloomily, that the examination had cost her ten days of exhausting & frightful labor; whereas toward the end of her talk she remarked that the labor had been very light, because the accounts & vouchers & checks tallied so well that it was but little trouble to check them off. up.

“Check them off. up.” That was her expression. She used it again, a month later, when she sent her bill:

[begin page 381]

Evidently she thought I might dispute the bill—otherwise there was no occasion to make that opening remark. I sent the check, & observed that I was aware that Mr. Rogers had made the remark. Which was true. But he didn’t make it in that form; he didn’t say “this office,” he spoke of a person—a he, not a she—& he was jesting at the time. At his dwelling-house, speaking seriously, he had said, “Our man will not charge you as much as a public accountant.”

When Stanchfield’s expert took hold of the matter he didn’t find it so very simple & easy, he found it considerably tangled & obscure in places, & not bearing any strong resemblance to a “checking-up” picnic.

He worked over it a couple of weeks, translated it into good clear figures, f Ⓐtextual note put his fateful finger on the sore places, & charged me only $250; & when he was done. . . . but I haven’t come to that, yet.

---

Leaving the Standard Oil, Paine & I went chatting along up town in the Subway, & got out at Astor Place. The talk was to this effect: since Miss Lyon had made so free with my check-book in rehabilitating her house, perhaps we might find other instances of this license besides those exposed by Mr. Lounsbury if we should inaugurate a hunt. Paine believed we could discover cases of “graft,” at any rate. He mentioned oneⒶtextual note which had the look of a certainty: he was with Miss Lyon one day at Boiajin’s (the Armenian rug-dealer)Ⓔexplanatory note when she bought a ninety-dollar rug, & borrowed half of the money from Paine & said she would send the other half to the dealer by check. I will anticipate by [begin page 382] remarking that the investigation-discloses revealed the fact, a few weeks later, that she had kept her word: she had paid the $45 with my check.

Then there was the StrohmeyerⒺexplanatory note case. Miss Lyon had employed Strohmeyer to refit & re-upholster a couple of car-loadsⒶtextual note of furniture for us, & she said he was so grateful for her custom that he had rebuilt & perfected a large old mahogany table for her whi for nothing, & had told her he would have charged any one else $65 for this work. We wentⒶtextual note to Strohmeyer & asked him if he had repaired the table, & he—innocent man!—suspecting nothing, told us all about it. He said it was a very fine old table, but just a ruin when it came to him. It was as good as new when he was done with it. He produced his work-shop’s itemised bill—half a page of details—whereby it appeared that he had paid his workmen $33 for the work, & that he had charged Miss Lyon only $10. At the bottom of the bill the $10 was acknowledged. About this time he began to grow suspicious & a little nervous, & said no, he wouldn’t have charged a stranger $65, but probably only $45. This didn’t mend the matter much, since it was a confession that he had given Miss Lyon $33 worth of work for $10—a very plain case of graft. Paine remarked privately that it had been perfectly natural & characteristic in Miss Lyon to lie about the matter & boast of getting the work for nothing when she had really paid ten dollars for it. He said she couldn’t tell the truth in any circumstances whatsoever—she had never learned how.

Strohmeyer caught the sinister drift of our inquiries, & he was a good deal embarrassed, & said perhaps he had charged Miss Lyon the full rate—yes, undoubtedly! The ledger would show. The ledger was brought. Unhappily it confirmed the $10. But also unhappily, it didn’t stop there. There were several entries, & I asked leave to examine them. It couldn’t gracefully be excused. There was a bedstead & a mattrass—for whom? Miss Lyon’s mother. It went to Summerfield. (Pure waste of stolen money; our attice was well stocked with bedsteads & mattrasses in perfect condition—there was no occasion for Miss Lyon to buy such things.) And there was a seventy-dollar chair. My, but that was sumptuous! Whose palace was it for? Miss Lyon’s. The several items in the ledger-account, bunched together, aggregated $115. At that time Miss Lyon had not been invited to borrow money of me. Evidently she was a capable provider for herself, when unwatched.

Next, Paine & I thought we would look into Miss Lyon’s habit of delaying the payment of bills—if she really had that lazy & vicious habit. By letter we had already asked two or three of the big department-stores to go back over their books a year or two years, & tell me the a◇ dates when bills were mailed, & the dates when they were paid. Two or three had responded in the early days of the month (May.)

I had already previously come across one such bill. It arrived when Miss Lyon had been gone about a week. It was 3 months old, & had a wail in it. To-wit:

[begin page 383]

[begin page 384] The new record rendered by Altman at my request showed payments delayed 3 months, & even 5 monthsⒺexplanatory note:

It was enough to make a person want to wring that indolent creature’s neck. I did want to do it, but I refrained, on account of the talk it would make.

The contracts with architect & builder—for the building of Stormfield—were signed before President Roosevelt’s infamous panic broke outⒺexplanatory note & paralysed all industries in the land & made money very difficult to get, even for common necessities; but for once in my life I had been deep & wily & cautious: I had placed in bank in a sacred deposit by [begin page 385] itself, the sum required to pay those contracts in full, as they matured. Nevertheless, without shadow of excuse Miss Lyon kept the contractors out of their money until in some cases their men said they must quit, & hunt for work where they could get their pay, for their families were running short of food to eat.

How do I explain Miss Lyon’s conduct? I could not have explained it in those days, but I can explain it now: in the first place she was too indolent to draw the checks, & in the second, the muscle in her chest that does duty for a heart, is nothing but a potatoe. She has no feeling. She cares for no one but herself; even her ostentatious affection for her mother goes to pieces under even a slight pressure.

Wanamaker’s report is a spectacle!

[begin page 386] The first thing I ever noticed about Miss Lyon was her incredible laziness. Laziness was my own specialty, & I did not like this competition. Dear me, I was to find out , in the course of time, that in the matter of laziness I was a runaway train on a down grade & she a-standing still. At my very laziest I could hear myself whiz, when she was around.

I will add Putnam’s report, now, & close with it; a supplementary from Altman; with the remark that as a delayer, & a conscienceless one, a pitiful one, a shameless one, Miss Lyon stands elected:

[begin page 387]

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Toward the end of May our tempest in a teapot was puffing away at a great rate, & making a lively stir amongst the farms & hamlets scattered in the woodsy hills & vales of our neighborhood. Every day brought its fresh little event & added a new text for gossip. Whatever either side did or said was known next day all around, & discussed.

As soon as I had begun, in the front end of the month to ask merchants for two-year-old statements, Ashcroft heard of it. In one case I was only looking for delayed payments, but he supposed I was on a still-hunt for graft. He probably knew Miss Lyon had covered her tracks fairly well in most cases, but he must have known she had been unwary in the Strohmeyer case, for he took measures to forestal me there. He wrote & asked Strohmeyer about Miss Lyon’s dealings with him, & inquired ifⒶtextual note they had been entirely straight & correct. Strohmeyer’s answer was an almost rapturous Yes. Before he knew that Paine & I were spies, he showed us that correspondence. A sorrowful man was he, later, I reckon, when Ashcroft found he had revealed everything to us & rendrered the rapturous Yes worthless, as evidence, to be laid before the investigation-experts.

In those latter May days it was rumored that the Ashcrofts were getting uneasy, nervous, worried. Lounsbury said they were trying to mortgage Summerfield for $1500. What did they want with the money? They wanted it, according to Ashcroft, to square up with me. A month earlier, that amount would have sufficed for it, but not now. I had lent Miss Lyon $1500, but we were now aware that she had taken a couple of thousand more, before anything had been said, about borrowing or lending.

Well, then, what did they want with the money? To run away with? Yes, that impression went around, & was believed & discussed.

[begin page 388] Next, it transpired that they had acquired the $1500.

About the 28th, Ashcroft made one of his blunders. With all his smartness he was sure to do a foolish thing now & then—just as in the case of Horace & the imaginary “discharge.” The present blunder was a peculiarly stupid one. Young Harry LounsburyⒺexplanatory note was driving him from the station, & the two were exchanging gossip, when Harry spoke of a rumor that I was proposing to do so & so.

“He!” said Ashcroft, scornfully, “I can sell his house, over his head, for a thousand dollars, whenever I want to!”

Harry told this at home. His father told Paine; & ca Paine, greatly worried, came at once to me with it. I said there was nothing in it, it was only brag. But Paine was not satisfied. He said it meant that Ashcroft could do as he said. Had he a power of attorney? I said no—& nothing resembling one. I said Miss Lyon had a power of attorney to sign checks—nothing more, & that I had revoked it orally on the 14th of March.

Now

He advisedⒶtextual note me to revoke it in writing; which I did—& sent it by Lounsbury, who waited, & brought back Miss Lyon’s written acknowledgmentⒺexplanatory note.

I was now satisfied, but Paine & Clara were not. They were still worrying over that boastful remark of Ashcroft’s. On Sunday the 30th they drove over to Nickerson’s place, & he remember’ed acknowledging my signature to a general power of attorney back in November or December. He thought it conferred power upon both Miss Lyon & Ashcroft. They came back & reported. I said Nickerson’s memory was astray & there was nothing to fret about, for I had not given a general power to anybody.

That was Decoration DayⒺexplanatory note. Paine said I might be wrongⒶtextual note & Nickerson right; so we must take no chances; we must go to New York & rummage the banks. We went down the next morning, Monday, & while I loafed in the Hotel Grosvenor, Paine went to the banks. Sure enough, in the Liberty National he found a power of attorney! A stately one, a liberal one, an all-comprehensive one! By it I transferred all my belongings, down to my last shirt, to the Ashcrofts, to do as they pleased with.

So this was what they had had up their sleeve all the time! This was why Ashcroft could say to Lounsbury about the road-mending, “Go ahead if you want to take the risk Ⓐtextual note !” This was why Miss Lyon was able to say to the servants, “I am the only person in authority in this house, my word is law, & the only law, & I want you to understand it!” This was why Ashcroft could summon the servants on the 31st of March & say to them, “You better resign at once & save your faces, for you are all going to be discharged.”

Ashcroft had had this fraudulent document placed on record in New York, just as if it had been a deed. To this he had had added another unusual precaution: he had had Nickerson’s authority as a notary certified in the Fairfield county clerk’s office, & the certification recorded. Nickerson’s seal wasn’t enough for him!

This swindling paper had been in force ever since November 14, 1908—about six & a half months—& I had never suspected it.

I will insert here a copy of that formidable power of attorney, & the original revocation:

[begin page 389] [begin page 390]

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It makes a body gasp to read it! It takes possession of everything belonging to me except my soul.

This was the card they had had up their sleeve all this time, & I not suspecting it. I had been their property, their chattel, more than half a year, & didn’t know it.

These people had not asked me forⒶtextual note a power of attorney, & I had not conferred one upon them. The subject had never been mentioned.

How did they get it, then? I do not know. The original is still in the possession of my lawyers, & I have not seen it yet; so I do not know whether I signed it or whether the signature is forged. Mr. Stanchfield & Mr. Lark think I wrote the signature myself. If I did, then how did I come to do it?

I can only guess. Ashcroft probably (while my back was turned) substituted this paper which I had not seen, for one which I had read & approved, & in this way got me to sign the latter.

There were two occasions when he could have managed this. When I gave Miss Lyon the “Lobster Pot” (Summerfield), we were still living in New York & I had never visited this region up here. Paine (at Redding), sent the deed to New York & I signed it. Miss Lyon had it recorded at Redding. A little later she told Clara & Paine that she didn’t want to accept the gift as a permanency, but only for her lifetime & her mother’s; therefore she was going to make the change, & would do it either in a will or incorporate it in a new deed. The idea was her own; I did not suggest it or desire it.

A year or two later, when “Stormfield” was finished & furnished, I came up, & entered the saw the place for the first time, & entered into occupation—June 18 of last year, 1908. By & by,—in the autumn, I think—Ashcroft brought a new deed to my bedroom to be signed. I read it over. I found nothing in it that I recognized as being new. I supposed it would mention the life-ownership, but it didn’t. I said—

[begin page 392] “I don’t see anything in this about returning the property to me eventually.”

He offered no explanation, but simply said, quite unemotionally,

“There isn’t.”

I wondered at that a little, but made no comment, further than to say I had never suggested the change, it was Miss Lyon’s own idea. Also I wondered why two deeds should be wanted—& so I asked. Ashcroft said Miss Lyon had neglected to record the first one, & now she couldn’t find it. That was a good enough reason, so I asked no more questions. We were standing seven or eight feet from the centre-table. He took the deed, & turned away & carried it to the table, & arranged it there conveniently for signing; then at his call I went there and wrote my signature.

Ashcroft was lying. The first deed had been recorded, long ago, when it first came up from New York. We found this out when we the dis Ashcroft’s unguarded remark to young Harry Lounsbury at the end of last May (that he could sell me out whenever he wanted to & I couldn’t help myself) sent Paine & Clara flying to Redding on a hunt suspicious-document hunt.

Yes, the first deed was on record, & the second one wasn’tⒺexplanatory note.

Then what did Ashcroft want with the second one, since it could have no possible value, to Miss Lyon or any one else?

It could have this value: Ashcroft could take it from my hand, walk away with his back to me, sh slip it into his breast-pockedt, slip out the General Power of Attorney, sp arrange the latter on the table, conveniently folded for signature, with nothing in sight but the blanks for the signatures—& thus get my signature to a most undesirable & dangerous document which I had never seen nor heard of before.

What became of that second deed? Only the Ashcrofts can tell. It had served its purpose; it went into the fire no doubt.

There was another time when a like substitution could have been made. And quite simply & easily. That was when Ashcroft brought me a type-written document which he said was the charter of the Mark Twain Company.

I didn’t need to read it. It would be like any other charter granted under a general law. He showed me where to sign, & I signed. This could have been the General Power of Attorney in disguise. I signed. This time I signed at the bottom of a whole big type-written page. I remembered afterward that in that page I glimpsed the phrase “real estate,” & wondered what a copyright-corporation could have to do with landed property.

By & by, when the teapot-tempest rose in this house I remembered that circumstance, & that was why I got scared & took Ashcroft with me to the Safe Deposit, the time that I went there to remove my signature from stock-transfers. I believed I had signed a document which transferred my copyrights, real estate & everything else, to Ashcroft, disguised as the Mark Twain Company, & so I was badly frightened.

Very well, I had transferred everything to Ashcroft—& not only in one way, but in two. One was by transfer-signature on the Mark Twain stock. I rectified that. Ashcroft sat there privately smiling to himself I reckon, ; he knowing (I suppose) that I was hunting anxiously & despairingly for a charter which wasn’t there & which I had never signed; & [begin page 393] he being also aware that my destruction of those signatures couldn’t do me any good, since he could restore them whenever he pleased, by authority of a colossal General Power of Attorney which he had acquired of me by fraud, & of whose existence I had no suspicion.

---

Why did that couple want both of their names in the General Power of AttorneyⒶtextual note? What could be the occasion for that? It was almost beyond question that Miss Lyon would remain a member of my household (indeed to all intents & purposes a member ofⒶtextual note my family, honored, esteemed & beloved) all the rest of her life; she would be on the premises all the time; I also would be present all the time: how could three persons be needed?—for what? To sell securities? there securitiesⒶtextual note, once or twice in the year? there was nothing else to sll sellⒶtextual note. To buy securities, once or twice in the year? there was nothing else to buy. To employ legal counsel for me? I already had a lawyer—had had him five years & was satisfied with himⒺexplanatory note.

What possible occasion had I to give any one a General Power of Attorney? Even if I wanted to do so unnecessary a thing, so silly a thing, so insane a thing, why give the power to two persons? Why give an entire two persons absolute power over me & be their slave? Wouldn’t one master be enough?

I think the solution of this mystery is the one that seemed to explain that astonishing marriage: viz., both were criminals, also fellow-criminals, each was afraid of the other, they must stand or fall together; separate, they would betray each other, when, in an emergency, it came to a matter of turning State’s evidence.

We know many things now (August) which we didn’t know then. We know that Miss Lyon had been stealing money from me for two years, & that Ashcroft had been living on it & was guiltily accessory to it. Without a doubt it was Ashcroft who turned Miss Lyon into a thief. The check-stubs show that up to 1907 she was honest. He & she became friendly & sociable in the latter half of 1906 & excessively friendly & sociable in the beginning of 1907, & then the stealing began, as per the check-stubs. I don’t mean that they fell in love with each other—in a clean way. That would be impossible—at least on his part, though not on hers. I suppose she never had any principle, but I think she had been protected from dishonesty by fear until he beguiled her & showed her how to cover up her tracks—a lesson which she sometimes disastrously forgot, as the check-stubs reveal.

As to that question, Why did they want both names in the General Power of Attorney, when I was going to be here all the time in person & could have no use for such a thing? We have discussed the matter all around, & have concluded that Ashcroft had conceived the idea of robbing me on a comprehensive & exhaustive scale, & he did not feel safe to carry out his plan without first closing Miss Lyon’s mouth. He must make her a confederate. The surest way to accomplish this would be to put her into the General Power along with himself.

[begin page 394] She was persuadable; & if she wasn’t she was at least scarable: he knew that, quite well. He could expose her stealings whenever he might choose to do it; & he could prove them up to the hilt, too.

We think they were not proposing to be in a hurry about using the Power. I was 73. They could go on living upon me comfortably until I should some day get sick unto death, then they could sell my securities & transfer to themselves & my Mark Twain stock & decamp. Or remain, & furnish death-bed approvals of their acts, done worded in the first person, & with my name signature forged to them. (A week ago, August, 4, Ashcroft revealed a sample of his work of exactly this sort.)

---

If I had died while my transfer-signature was still attached to the stocks, bonds, & Mark Twain Company stock in the Safe Deposit vault! The Ashcrofts had a key & could have removed them & conveyed the ownership to themselves. It would have been difficult for a court to find an objection to it. The Mark Twain stock was paying worth a million dollars, & the other stuff about two hundred thousand. The children would have been paupers. However, I didn’t die.

It does not appear that AshfieldⒶtextual note sold anything (so far as we as yet know), except a piece of property which was not in the Deposit. The Knickerbocker Trust Company failed in the fall of 1907, & caught meⒺexplanatory note. I had $51,000 on deposit there. After a few months the company got on its feet again, & began to repay the depositors in instalments. Toward the end of 1908 it had paid us 70 per cent in cash, & 30 per cent in bank stock drawing 4 per cent. I wanted that stock. It was worth 80 & would soon reach par.Ⓐtextual note We found that eleven days after the date of the General Power of Attorney Ashcroft had sold it, through a shady broker, at 75 & that the broker had sold it on the same day for 80. There was no occasion to sell it, for we had a large balance in bank. There was $800 brokerage on the transaction, & Ashcroft probably got half of this graft, but no more.

We now arrive at June 4. Stanchfield’s official expert was getting toward the end of his examination of Miss Lyon’s check-stubs & vouchers, & was asking her some rather embarrassing questions. There were things which she could not explain satisfactorily—things which proved her a thief; proved it beyond question. The Ashcrofts were getting very nervous.

When they got married—as before remarked—they had sent out some bushels of copper-plate cards announcing that the aristocratically-hyphenated Mr. & Mrs. R. W. Lyon Ashcrofts would be “At Home” at Summerfield “Saturdays in June.” When Friday the 4th arrived the countryside flocked along the country roads & to the little railway station to see the fine city-birds that would come. But they didn’t see them. What they saw was the highly-hyphenated Ashcrofts slipping out & gliding away on the New York train! They never reappeared during that month.

[begin page 395] They were scared. They were in flight, to save Miss Lyon from arrest. They believed they were she was in danger of spending her At Homes in the Danbury jail. They privately took passage in an obscure steamer for Holland, for a date half-way between the first & second At Homes (Tuesday, June 8.)Ⓔexplanatory note Their intention was suspected.

On the 12th, Stanchfield’s subordinate, Mr. Lark, sent the following news to Mr. Paine:

So the soiled birds had flown.

They had reason to be frightened, for, as a precautionary measure, Mr. Lark had was intending to asked the district attorney of Fairfield county ry to place Miss Lyon’s case before the grand juror for said county & let him summon her, the grand juror to proceed whenever he should get further instructions. These preliminaries had been accomplished. Nothing further was to be done in this direction until all effort to settle the matter out of court should fail. It was my duty as a citizen to jail Miss Lyon, but she [begin page 396] was a woman & the thing was so revolting that my citizenship was not hardly equal to it. If it had only been Ashcroft! That would have been another matter, & my citizenship would have stood the strain most elegantly.

It is time to peruse Ashcroft’s majestic oratory again:

It is time to insert the midnight letter I wrote to Clara in those March days when I still believed in the honesty of the Ashcrofts, heart & soul, & still wanted to keep my precious Ashcroft & not lose him. :

That first date is March 11, two days before the grand Cleaning-Up Day, the Diarrhea of Contracts, March 13th of sacred memory; the postscript is dated the day after that spectacular flux:Ⓐtextual note

Indeed, yes, I believed in those people thoroughly.

I didn’t even glance at the notes offered me by Ashcroft. It fretted me, shamed me, to be put in the attitude of dickering with a devoted & affectionate old servant like Miss Lyon on that paltry sum—a sum which I had no intention of ever collecting or accepting. I told Ashcroft to keep the notes himself; that if I took them I should lose them. He put them in his pocket, & nothing more was said. That is, nothing more was said until his imagination supplied some more in a newspaper about five months afterwardsⒺexplanatory note.

The birds had flown. This was not discovered until a while after the event. They had slipped away very privately. Ashcroft’s office man was not able to furnish particulars; he said he didn’t know what ship they had sailed by, he was only able to say their objective point was England, where Ashcroft needed to see Sir Thomas Lipton on business connected with the P Milk F Products Company (Ashcroft’s new name for the wrecked & robbed & ruined old Plasmon Company.)

A search of the passenger registers of the big English lines failed to produce any Ashcrofts. Apparently they had sailed under fictitious names. But they hadn’t. They had been smarter than that: They had gone by way of Holland in per a Dutch line not heard of before. They were fleeing from arrest; that is, fleeing from a spectre—Mr. Stanchfield [begin page 400] would not a have arrested Miss Lyon, because she was a woman. Not much of a woman, still a woman.

I was not troubled about Sir Thomas Lipton, for I had not endorsed Ashcroft to him, but had only formally introduced the two to each other one day in an English railway train; but the case was different with Lord NorthcliffeⒺexplanatory note. He had visited me at Stormfield in the winter when the Ashcrofts were practically members of my family, & I had strongly praised Ashcroft to him, & had as uncompromisingly endorsed him. So I sent I was now afraid Ashcroft would try to use Northcliffe & all his 58 newspapers; so I sent him word by a private hand that I was not endorsing Ashcroft now.

Mr. Stanchfield now suggested that we attach Miss Lyon’s “Summerfield” in part payment of the money she had stolen from me to repair it with. Not the borrowed money, but money stolen by her before anything was said about borrowing. So we attached the said “Lobster pot.”

The sheriff wasted no time, but conveyed the fact to the newspapers right away. It went straight to the London journals by cable, & made a large personage of A Ⓐtextual note the little Ashcrofts immediately. The interviewers & correspondents flocked in. Ashcroft knew them all, through me. He had gone over with me in the summer of 1907 when I was summoned by Oxford University to receive a degree, & during all the six weeks of our stay he received the newspaper men & photographers daily, in my place, & was never so proud & happy in his life before. And they treated him well; treated him as a gentleman, which was kind of them, for they knew, by certain signs, that he was not a gentleman according to British standards. Certain words of his gave him away. For instance he always said “anythin,” like a costermonger, whereas the British gentleman adds the g.

When the Ashcrofts fled, Mr. Weiss, the expert had not finished his examination of Miss Lyon’s book-keeping. He had found that she had filched money for house-repairs, & that she had tried to cover up some of the filchings by altering the check-stubs with all-too-recent ink.

We had further claims against her, but not all of these had been examined when she fled. They were for money stolen by her & entered in the stub as “house money.” House money was cash. It was used only for trifling expenses which could not be paid by check. We never needed more than $300 or $400 cash in a year. This was provable by the check-books of many years; provable also by the check-books of 1906—a sorrowful witness against Miss Lyon, for she was in charge of those check-books then, & got along quite well with $25 to $30 a month house-money. But there was a jump, as soon as Ashcroft needed a support, in 1907, & taught her to steal.

In a year & ten months she drew nearly ten thousand dollars, house-moneyⒺexplanatory note! Also she drew various other cash-amounts and charged them to “C. C.,”Ⓔexplanatory note—that is, Clara Clemens—& stole 90 per cent of that. In one cash she drew $500 & charged it to Clara when Clara was away down South at the time, & living upon checks drawn upon her own bank account.

[begin page 401]

And now the cable began to twang. Thus:

We wondered how “Miss Clemens” came to be talking about this matter to newspaper people. It is against the rule of the house to discuss our matters in print; & so this was an astonishing breach, & wholly unexpected.

Alas & alas! it was not Miss Clemens, it was Jean!

She had long been an exile in the sanitariums; she had forgotten the rule of the house, & she was caught off her guard. She happened, most unfortunately, to be the only person around when the telephone bell rang; instead of declining to talk, she talked.

It was a great pity. It gave the Ashcrofts their chance. It lifted them out of obscurity & insignificantce, & made them objects of interest & importance for a moment in a far country. What a dear & welcome opportunity it afforded the little lioness to whet up with half a pint or so of puissant old Scotch, & air her sweet-sixteen dramatics & listen to herself gabble! To be called on, by metropolitan newspapers, to spread her little “Lobster pot” affairs before the thronged millions of the world’s capital! Well, a-well, I can see her at it, just as plain!—I know her every trick & gesture & intonation, I know all those machine-made enchantments of hers, & that bewitching die-away light that she turns on, at the climaxes, from her handsome black eyes. I know that that little thing swelled, & swelled, & swelled until she felt as big & tall & imperial as our Goddess of Liberty Enlightening the World with her extinguished torch down yonder in New York harbor. Wasn’t it the proudest day of her life? Oh, sure.

I don’t know why Jean’s “charges” should have stirred up so much virtue in Miss Lyon. She was a thief; & she knew she was a thief; she believed that the proof was in the hands of the expert when she ran away—(for her “health’s” sake, as Ashcroft put it.) Now why did she get into such a virtuous frenzy, & want to rush back & “vindicate her position”?—& she so sick, according to Ashcroft.

How could she be so illogical? What was her “position”? She hadn’t any. She couldn’t vindicate what she hadn’t, could she? But there it is, you see: going to illogically fly right back, at deadly peril to her “health” & go to vindicating like Sam Hill! Vindicating what? She didn’t know. It was a noble large word & she had to heave it out, she couldn’t help it. Well, it was just like her, she was always that way—born so. Always ready to do a spectacular thing when she had an audience, & explain it to herself later when the whisky got out of her head.

She was always a kind & willing liar, but she had no gift. She would do the best she [begin page 403] could, but her best had no considerable value, because, with all its art it was so artless, so transparent, so undeceptive. Now in the present case she wrought poorly, when she had the opportunity of her life; the opportunity to make a European reputation, a planetarian reputation; a reputation which could set her away up high, and bracket her her with the most revered & illustrious liars of history; but she wasted it.

Look at her effort! The eyes of the world upon her, everlasting renown waiting upon her impending words: AndⒶtextual note when they come, oh, how disappointing! Begin with her fourth paragraph, & read to the end.

Although each & every statement is a separate & distinct lie, that is no merit—anybody can tell lies: there is no merit in a mere lie, it must po exhibit art possess art, it must exhibit a persuasiveness, splendid & plausible & convincing probability; that is to say, it must be powerfully calculated to deceive.

If she had been a real artist she would have reflected—like this: Mr. Clemens is known, I am not; he has a reputation to watch over & take care of, I have not; if I charge him with misconduct, furnishing no evidence but my word, will that convince a nation that knows him favorably & knows me not at all? won’t these people say “it is not a bit like Clemens to do these things wantonly; without a doubt he has a reason for it, & a good one?”

Without any doubt she did me great injury in England. Without any doubt, old & dear & valued friends & admirers of mine over there were saddened, & said—

“This person was under Clemens’s personal tuition for seven years, yet —& look at the result: she exhibits no more art than if she had been under a bishop. She is a mere blundering, unscientific, ignorant amateur, & Clemens is to blame.”

But what could I do? she couldn’t learn, it wasn’t in her.

Another thing: she hasn’t any presence of mind; she breaks out with a heroic irruption just because it sounds grand & fine, & there she is—committed! Many’s the time she has cursed herself for saying she was coming back to go vindicating around; for she hadn’t the least notion of coming back & risking the jail; but she was committed, & she had to come.

And when she came, she s told that lie again—said she had come back vindicating. She didn’t stir in the matter: we had to place the subject before her ourselves. And we even had to crowd her! Yes, she was that unwilling to face us.

Very well, she came. In three ships. Three are mentioned, at any rate, as undertaking the exodus; or the leviticus, or whatever the proper name for it is. She came, poor mistaught, inartistic little abuser of facts, & resumed relations with the newspaper lads on the pier. We saved two or three of her interviews; & now that they are a month old I find them freshly interesting—partly because of things which have happened since; things which do not allow me to be sorry for her, much as she stands in need of compassion. Without greatly deserving it. This is from the Evening Telegram of (apparently) July 13Ⓔexplanatory note:

[begin page 404]

Don you notice? At last she emits one bright little ray of artistic invention—she turns her scramble out of the country, where the jail’s jaws were gaping, to a honeymoon trip! But is that really her work? It seems a pity to take it away from her, & yet it may be that reporter’s performance.

Jean gets Clara’s share of notice, & it serves her right. It was she that emptied Miss Lyon into the London papers & gave her the chance of her life.

When it comes to grinding out historical elevations, depressions, inflations, extinctions, & other discrepancies, I will back Miss Lyon to beat anybody in the profession, except her husband. Let me see: I lent her $1500 about Xmas of last year, (rehabilitation-money), she concealing the fact that she had already filched about $2,000 from me & spent it on her house. Now she enlarged s these sums to $4,000 & says id I “advanced” it to her.

[begin page 406] I think our adventure with the burglars, the 18th of last September, has disordered her financial disctionary a little. I “advanced” the burglars some silverware, but I didn’t know it. I was asleep up stairs at the time.

The $4,000 “was to be paid back at my leisure.” I think she is the foolishest creature I know, except myself. And Ashcroft. She had only $50 a month salary; wouldn’t allow me to increase it, according to her own story; was supporting her mother “entirely” out of that $50, according to her written statement. It would have required about seventy-five years of her leisure to pay it back. She was foolish in not telling me she had spent $3,500, & would like to make it a charge against her share of the royalties on “Mark Twain’s Letters”—the book she & Clara were to prepare. That security would have been ample.

But why should she care about a little matter like $4,000? At that very time she & Ashcroft had had the forged Power of Attorney up their sleeve five weeks, & were ready & waiting to rob the Clemens family of its last farthing the moment I should fall gravely ill. Why should she care for a fifteen or twenty thousand dollar share in a book, when she knew she had a secret & unsuspected death-grip upon my entire remains?

She quite well knew the value of her share in that book. I was astonished when she threw it away on the 13th of March. But I seems to understand it now. Ashcroft despised it, & called it “petty”—which greatly surprised me. But it doesn’t now.

How sure they were of their undislodgeable grip upon me in those days! And how insolent was their manner & attitude, & how calmly & masterfully dictatorial was their phrasing in the impertinent contracts they brought me to sign! They were my Piers GavestonsⒺexplanatory note, my pets, my idols, & they were feeling absolutely sure they could turn me against Clara, drive her off the place, & reign over Stormfield & me in autocratic & sovereignty. I am aware now, just lately, by the testimony of a trustworthy witness, that in one of their indiscreet outbursts they said Jean wouldn’t be allowed to ever cross my threshold again. I know Miss Lyon has a cruel nature & is unforgiving & unrelenting—but Ashcroft? Yes, I think he is just about her match in these particulars.

Miss Lyon looks sad in that picture. I think I pity her, but I hope to be damned if I want to.

The next of my prepserved clippings seems to be from the American: Ⓔexplanatory note

[begin page 407]

I enjoy the vigorous head-lines. “She will make Twain explain.” Oh, that she will! I can just see that little bantam stepping threatingly fiercely around with her feathers ruffled up, & making the blood of those reporters run cold in their veins with apprehent sion—just perfectly sickening apprehension. I doubt if even the most excited & bloody-minded butterfly could inspire a more ghastly terror.

[begin page 409] But when we come to think of it there is something fine, something gallant, something heroic in her brave defiance, something that compels our admiration. Compels it because we know that in her circumstances we couldn’t do it. We should meanly want to hide. The haunting consciousness of being a detected thief, an exposed fraud, a social ruin, an outcast, would weakenⒶtextual note us, & take the noise out of us.

Her closing paragraph is rich enough in lies, but they are clumsy, loose, inartistic. She never never never will learn. Evidently she makes no preparation, but always trusts to inspiration, & lies upon the spur of the moment. As a result, she spews up any lie that occurs to her, & nine times in ten it isn’t the best one for the emergency, & is sure to lack grace & finish besides.

Still, there is one agreeable feature about these lies—novelty. They are fresh, they are not shopworn. Also they have a an easy & breezy inconsistency which tastes good. She has “often refused his offer to consider the costs of the renovation a present from him.” The dear thing! she had only one chance, (the $500-one) & she didn’t refuse that one. She was never offered the rest of the borrowed $1500.

And that other one: “Mr. Clemens told me to take what money I needed for the repairs.”

Naughty Isabel! she had already stolen two thousand dollars before there was ever any conversation about the repairs. We had only the one conversation upon the subject. She named the sum she would need (“about $1500”) & I said borrow it of me. Just before Xmas 1908 she said her house was done & the cost had fallen a few pennies within the $1500. But she forgot to say anything about the two thousand (nearly) which she had stolen.

Isabel is a little unfair, in one particular: she puts upon Clara’s shoulders the crime of bringing the suit; whereas she knows I am the person to blame. I am I am to blame I didn’t bring it until I knew she was a thief & had run away to avoid the jail. It was my duty as a citizen to put her in jail, but for my sake I haven’t done it. Not for hers, only for mine.

There’s “never been any request to her for repayment.” Says it with such a fine air! an air which indicates, & practically asserts, that all I needed was to ask for the money & get it. That is just wild! Why she hadn’t a penny in the world—an unstolen one, I mean—& her opportunity to pay me back with my own check was gone, gone for good & all. She ad says, her own self, that she can’t return to her blatherskite over the water because “we can’t afford it.”

“I am sure. . . . I can disprove every one of these charges.”

She certainly is not a good liar. The more I see of her efforts, the more I am discouraged about her.

She thinks there are “enemies” of hers who persuaded Clara. That is a distinct & definite slap at Paine. I am sorry for Paine; sorry for any one upon whom the blight of our angel’s disapproval has fallen. I don not know what to compare such a calamity to, so I will leave it alone & not strain myself.

Another one with some attractive display-heads:

[begin page 410]

I “must” explain. Certainly. She is coming right up here to Stormfield to take me by the scruff of the neck & squeeze the explanation out of me. I never saw such a violent pterodactyl.

As literary discharges, all of these unpremeditated interviews are interesting to me, because they contain so much variety. They all play substantially the same tune, but it isn’t monotonous, because the prodigal variations save it.

She is “at a loss to understand.” However, that isn’t a new lie, she has told that before.

And

But that about lending her money with which to “furnish” her house hasn’t been used before. It is fresh from the factory. She filched money to furnish with, but I didn’t lend her any for that purpose.

“It was understood between us that I should return him the money as soon as I could possibly do so.” That is new, too; she hasn’t said that before. “Possibly” is a good strong word. It indicates that I was anxious about that money, & wasn’t willing to be deprived of it long. Also, the lieⒶtextual note in this fresh form furnishes the suggestion that I was uneasy about that money, & that she flew back to soothe me & reassure me—sweet girl! Flew back to hearten me, flew back to revive my fainting courage, flew back to save me from despair—darling bird! Damnation, she’s improving—this is almost art!

“I intend to do everything possible to clear myself.” That is an improvement. Heretofore she has been too blustery; she gave the world the impression that she was an escaped hurricane & was going to come blasting & blighting & lashing & thrashing & crashing up here, destroying everything that opposed her course & leaving the leveled hills & forests smoking in her wake—& restore her purity absolutely. Absolutely & sudden. But now she is only going to try. Trying is better. It is a distinct improvement. This is much better than violence. We can chain up the dog again, now.

Once more it is Jean who is to blame, not Clara. It is Jean’s “highly artistic temperament” that has made the trouble. It is another improvement, for it is in the line of delicacy. A year ago she told all these farmers around here that Jean was exiled to [begin page 412] sanitariums—for life—because she was “crazy.” It is much kinder to change it to a highly artistic temperament. It isn’t true, for Jean is not artistic, but eminently business-like & practical, but I like the new lie better than the old one. It isn’t permanent, though; she only made the change for the occasion; she will resume the other one when occasion shall require it; she made the present change to get another swipe at Paine. Paine is the bad adviser. He is the jealous one.

However, Jean didn’t take any “steps.” The lawyers did it. It was the lawyers that siezedⒶtextual note “Summerfield,” otherwise the “Lobster pot,” to partly make good the thefts Miss Lyon had perpetrated. Miss Lyon was aware of that.

Very well, Miss Lyon did come up here, but she didn’t “prove, to the satisfaction of every one every charge that had been made.” Moreover, she didn’t try. There wasn’t any way to do it, & there wasn’t any place to begin.

Naturally those interviews woke up the reporters & they flocked to us by every train—day-trains & night-trains both. But we gave them nothingⒶtextual note. I did not care to make important people of the Ashcrofts. , & they couldn’t do it themselves, without my help. They were unknown & insignificant adventurers, & the only reason a newspapers would make room for their grievances was because there might be a chance that I would reply.

I didn’t reply, of course. But every time a reporter applied, I sent him away empty, & then eased my anger against the Ashcrofts by putting on paper what I would have liked to say. It is the best way to quiet your indignant soul. It is efficient. I have practised it for forty years.

Sample.

Sample. Written, & laid aside:

“It is a case for lawyers & expert accountants to examine, & for Courts to decide, not newspapers. The verdict will be in my favor; no other is possible.

“There was is nothing romantic about it, the case, nothing sentimental, no pathos, no tears, nothing for the gallery; it dealt s merely with graft. a gross Ⓐtextual note an unsavory business matter; the attempts made to pump sentiment into it were are out of place.”

Another Sample:

“This Mrs. A’s matter is too serious for trial by newspaper; it can only be competently adjudicated by the grand jury & a court. And so, where is the profit in talking about it? I have nothing to say.

“If it suits Mrs. A’s ideas of propriety to wash her private linen in public, let her do it, it is her privilege; I never wash mine at all.” And so, where is the profit in talking about it?

SLC wrote the two previous paragraphs on a penciled note from Jean,
folded and addressed to ‘Monsieur’ on the outside of the folder:

[begin page 413]

Another Sample:

“I have refrained from talking about the Ashcroft matter in the newspapers. I have nothing to say, except that I have been generous to Mrs. Ashcroft, because she is a woman. She belongs in jail, if the evidences in my hands are as damning as lawyers & expert-accountants think they are. In sparing her I have been false to my duty as a citizen, & have had no thanks for it.”

Another Sample. I was very strongly moved to send the following one to the Chief Manager of the Associated Press for publication all over the world, but I held my grip on myself, & didn’t do it:

(To be given to the Associated Press only. Send it to
　　　　　　　Melville Stone.)

“The case between Mrs. Ashcroft & me has been in the hands of the lawyers for several months, & it is her Mrs. Ashcroft’s  own fault that it was not settled privately by them without publicity in June. Apparently she wants to try it in the newspapers. To this end she has unloaded upon them many statements—mainly falsehoods. I have not responded in print, but perhaps I ought to abandon that policy & say a word or two publicly.

“The case is simple, there is nothing complex or difficult about it. For several years she signed checks for me. I never watched her, I had full confidence in her. Last spring, however, circumstances moved me to inquire into her stewardship. The examination of her accounts for the preceding two years was begun by an expert accountant. Evidences of crookedness appeared. She proposed to go abroad, but was requested to remain & face the result of the expert’s work. The promise was given—by her husband—on the 8th of June, accompanied by the remark that the pair had not taken passage-tickets. Nevertheless they fled to vanished to   fled to departed for England immediately. This fact was not discovered until some days later.

“According to the newspapers she has come back, now, to rehabilitate her character. She had the opportunity to try to do it before she went away; she has the opportunity once more. All that is asked of her is, that she explain why she told me the work on her house was finished & had cost $1482.47 (money borrowed of me), & forgot to tell me & refrained from telling me that the money-part of this statement [begin page 414] was deliberately untrue. She had spent a couple of thousands more, & this fact she concealed. She went on concealing it; & when it was at last discovered, the dis unearthing was accomplished without any help or thanks or conversation from her or encouragement from her.

“It is also desirable that she explain why she drew from my bank account $9,970 in two years lacking a month— an unprecedented amount of “house money,” as she called it in the check-stubs. She had We had no use for any more than about one-tenth of that cash—for stamps, railway tickets, express charges, car fares & one or two other trifles. The other expenses were paid by check.

“There are other details that need explaining, such as “doctored”Ⓐtextual note check-stubs—emergency check-stubs, so to speak—check-stubs doctored to meet the exigencies of an expert-inquest.

“Mrs. Ashcroft has more than once endeavored to relieve me of the responsibility of inviting her to allow submit to an investigation of her stewardship by transferring it to my daughter. This is kind, but it is not quite fair. I am the responsible person, not my daughter.

SLC tore away the bottom half of the page, removing as many as 75 words

“I consider that I have been very patient with this noisy lady, up to now; & very charitable, in that I have not instituted criminal proceedings against her for acts committed on the 16th of October, 1907. & Jan. 3, 1908, May 22, 1908 & July 2, 1908 as it was my duty as a citizen to do. Nov. 18, 1907, Aug. 31, 1908, & July 2, 1908. Ⓐtextual note I have spared her because of her sex; I would not have spared a man.”

S L. Clemens

S L. Clemens

“P. S. There are ‸ other details that need explaining. She has her opportunity.

“At present I have nothing to say about her husband, except this. On the 31st of March & the 3d of April he was guilty of two or three sly & underhand treacheries, perfidies, & shameless & pathetically small dishonesties—the smallest & shabbiest that have been practised upon me in my lifetime. The average thimble-rigger would be ashamed of them. While he was doing these things against me he was in my employ & serving me for payⒺexplanatory note. Also he was my trusted & familiar friend. He earned a month in jail, that time, & he ought to have had it.”

S L C

Miss Lyon & her mother came straight up to “Summerfield”—in order to make good her boast to the reporters? Perhaps so. We couldn’t know that that was all she had in mind. Possibly she might really be intending to arrange a settlement with us. So Mr. Lark came up from New York to conduct our end of it.

But Miss Lyon had gotten over her ferocious eagerness to “make” Mark Twain answer [begin page 415] to her for the outrage he had been committing in siezingⒶtextual note her property under the false pretence that she had been feloniously appropriating money belonging to him; yes, & she had gotten over her desire to “beard him in his den”—that was one of the phrases—& find out the nature of the “misunderstanding” & how it had originated. She didn’t come to us, she didn’t send any ambassadors. All day long she didn’t. Next day she didn’t. Up to luncheon she hadn’t. At 2 p.m. she still hadn’t. Nor at night.

Evidently she had been “bluffing” all the while, to fool reporters & other innocents; evidently she didn’t want a settlement. And why should she? She had no case, she hadn’t a leg to stand on; she had stolen money, we had the proofs, & the settlement we wanted was a deed of her property, to extinguish a part of her debt.

Next morning the cond situation remained unchanged. Mr. Lark said we must take the initiative ourselves. He proposed to go to “Summerfield” & open the negotiations. But he wanted a witness, he did not wish to go alone. The wary man! He was quite right; for his mission was to a woman who couldn’t put five sentences together that didn’t contain a lie; a woman who could get fifteen lies into five sentences when she had her hand it inⒶtextual note; a liar who hadn’t her match under petticoats; nor in breeches either, if you except her husband.

Yes, Lark must have a witness. Paine? Oh, hell no! Me? Oh, hell no! It wouldn’t be a conference, it would be a riot, right at the start. And who would get the worst of it? Paine & me. That cat would scratch our eyes out.

Then where were we to get that witness? Would Jean go? I hoped she would say yes; & she for she would maintain her dignity, whatever might happen; she would carry with her the best head & the sanest & fairest, except Mr. Lark’s; & she would remember what was done & what was said, & be able to state it in a court without in a plain & simple & straightforward words free from embellishments or & exaggerations. There couldn’t be a better witness. She despised Miss Lyon, but she did not hate her, there not being enough of Miss Lyon for a self-respecting person to hate. Miss Lyon hated Jean, & that was natural, for she had been merciless to Jean, cruel to her, brutal to her, when Jean was suffering from an awful malady & was exiled from home and friends (chiefly friends by Miss Lyon’s machinations & falsehoods & treacheries. And Miss Lyon had boasted, when she was at the height of her power under my roof, that Jean should never cross my threshold again during life. Yes, she hated Jean. She had hated her long ago; do you imagine the feeling had diminished any, now that she was down & out & in disgrace, & Jean was invested with the sovereignty she had been criminally planning for herself? Not likely.

I told Jean to take sharp note of everything, for she might have to go into court some day as a witness concerning this matter; also I should want her to write it out before it got dim in her memory, & read that in court when called upon to testify.

She & Lark went down to the Lobster pot on foot. together.

Here is her narrative. She wrote it next out in the rough next day, & made clean copy for me a week later. I will paste it in, in this place:

[begin page 416]

Mr. Lark & Jean call her “Mrs. Ashcroft.” It is an unfamiliar sound. Ever since the marriage the countryside have continued to call her Miss Lyon; likewise my family & my servants; likewise Ashcroft himself. Apparently nobody was impressed with the idea that the marriage was a real one—not even the husband himself. Meantime, what has become of that aristocratic high-flying hyphenated name? It seems to have died an early death. In those newspaper interviews Miss Lyon has discarded it herself.

In them she is plain undecorated “Mrs. Ashcroft.” It is good wisdom; it is best to go before a democratic public unhyphenated when a person has returned from a foreign flight to patch-up & poultice a damaged character.

When Miss Lyon chose the hyphenated name she said it was because she was not [begin page 420] willing to sink her own well known name (Lyon) out of sight of a name the world had never heard of (Ashcroft.) She certainly was known to all the newspapers of the country as my secretary. She was proud of her celebrity & often said so. She mistook it for fame, which was an error. It was perishable, it was evanescent; it dropped out of use only three months ago, yet it is already forgotten. She is become “Mrs. Ashcroft,” the cipher, the unknown, the unpetted, the uninvited. It is a pity, too for she dearly loved notoriety.

She was sick when Jean & Lark made their forenoon visit. I used to believe in her sicknesses, but I have my doubts about them now. She could always get over them expeditiously—more expeditiously then anybody I ever encountered before—& then she was straightway just as sound & spry & good as new. It was because she had been drinking, & had slept off her “jag. ,” but I didn’t know that, in those bygone days. Nobody told me. And I wouldn’t have listened, anyway, & would have shut the slanderer up. They all knew that, & they did not choose to instruct me & get no thanks for it. But there are plenty of witnesses now: Katy, our ancient maid; also Katy the laundress; the contractors & a dozen or so of their men; the architect’s assistant; the Lounsburys; Paine; Clara. Finally Claude, the French butler—whom Miss Lyon always said didn’t know what dishonesty was, with either his tongue or his pen. He says she emptied two quarts of Scotch whisky in her room, per week, (& sometimes three), besides what she drank in the evening down stairs. Also that she drank two & sometimes three bottles of cocktails in her room per week, besides the cocktails she drank before dinner down stairs. Katy endorses these statements, & says Miss Lyon was so addicted to robbing the guestrooms, both here & in New York, that she (Katy) had to watch those roomsⒶtextual note, & visit them when guests arrived—as a precaution. A necessary precaution, for she generally found that Miss Lyon had been there & created a drouth.

Miss Lyon often came to my room away in the night, both here & in New York to get whisky—she being sick again. Once, & possibly oftener—but once anyway, I flew out at her & said, “Why in the nation don’t you keep whisky in your room, when you are so often ill & need it in the night?” These whisky-raids of hers would certainly have attracted the attention of an intelligent person, but they never attracted mine. John Stanchfield (as I have remarked some score or so of pages back) told me he saw her drink three cocktails one after the other & walk off erect & steady; Mrs. Stanchfield has since told me that that was right after Miss Lyon had refreshed her works with a glass of straight whisky.

It was Miss Lyon that introduced the cocktail to us. This was five years ago, after we came back from Italy. We never had any real use for that deadly drink, nor any desire for it; & since Miss Lyon went away, four months ago, we have never seen a cocktail — Ⓐtextual notenor asked for one. She left a supply behind her, but we have it yet. When she didn’t know she was going to be dismissed, she laid in wine, whisky & cocktails enough to start a saloon with—oh, an astonishing invoice! & the first thing she did when she retired to the Lobster pot was to order twelve quarts of Scotch whisky, with cocktails, brandy, etc., in proportion. At that time Lounsbury carted five barrels of liquor bottles away from our cellar. He had carted away ten barrels of empties earlier.

[begin page 421] I think I have spoken of the fact that in July & August of last year (with only three drinkers among the guests, & they not present more than three days in the two months) we consumed 48 quarts of Scotch whisky! Since Miss Lyon departed, one bott quart a week has sufficed for the household & the guests. The bottle that stands upon my night table shows no perceptible decline—which is natural enough, for I have taken but three drinks from it in five weeks. A bottle used to last me a week or ten days; I expect the present one to last me several months. Miss Lyon’s departure has been a valuable moral investment for us.

Yes, when Lark & Jean paid their forenoon visit, she was sick.

I like Jean’s account very much; it is simply-worded & direct, & it not only furnishes facts, but pictures, also. At least for me; for I know that sofa & that house, & I know the actors & their characteristics; & so when they do a thing, I see them do it. I can see that shrewd, & wise, & alert—but courteous & self-possessed—young fellow, Lark; I can see that slender & little & shapely Miss Lyon, outwardly merely vicious & angry, but with hellfire boiling & raging inside; I can see Jean, grave, attentive, compassionate; & I can see—& pity—that gentle, shrinking, timid, meek little mother, that worthy, esteemed, respected, blemishless little fat commonplace thing who is miserable, wretched, ashamed, hurt to the heart by her daughter’s disgrace, & in fact is doing about ten times as much suffering over the situation as is the said daughter that brought it about.

The idea of that humble little thing, that soft little thing, clouding up, cold, & queenly & sombre, & rebuking that young stranger—that I am notⒶtextual note able to see! that picture is lost to me. I have seen a worm turn, & so I know what it is like—but Mrs. Lyon? No, it is beyond me.

Treat her daughter “as “like a lady.” There is something pathetic about that appeal, it was so irrelevant & so conspicuously premature, seeing that poor little Lark hadn’t done a thing, & the daughter wasn’t a lady anyhow. No, I can’t see that picture, but I can see, vividly, the next picture—Miss Lyon, with snapping eyes, turning insolently upon her poor little champion & shutting her up! Yes, I can see that—I know exactly how Miss Lyon looked. And I can see her mother wilt. I can see it quite plainly; for I saw Miss Lyon wilt her mother once, in New York. It was by accident. They didn’t know I saw it, but I did.

It didn’t hurt me, grieve me, shame me as it ought to have done. I suppose, because I had an aversion for Mrs. Lyon—merely because she was so meek & harmless. Characterless, you know. It was not a strong aversion, but just an aversion; about the aversion an emperor would feel for a doughnut; mere indolent disfavor, without passion, without fire, without malignity; in fact, just the way any large-minded person would feel about a doughnut. Well, Mrs. Lyon is a doughnut; just a humble, unassuming Christian doughnut, it is all you can say for her.

Her case is pitiful, poor little woman. The Ashcrofts have been in hell for several months, & she has been in it with them, most undeservedly.

Another picture I can see: Miss Lyon, defeated, silenced, staring across the intervening Jean at Mr. Lark, with her wicked eyes, trying to look him out of countenance. I know [begin page 422] that exhibition; she treated me to it more than once. I recognize the “long, pathetic, absolutely unwinking gaze.” Pathetic. Yes, she was doing the pathetic by art; the kind of art that fools no one.

Miss Lyon’s remark that there was “no paper” (no writing) showing that the place was to revert to my daughters upon her death & her mother’s is a startling instance of the influence of environment upon a person’s morals. Until she fell under Ashcroft’s influence I am quite sure she would have felt outraged & indignant if any one had suggested that her spoken promise wasn’t a sufficient security, without being backed up by writings.

I am glad to know that Mr. Lark was frank & truthful about my main reason for bringing the suit—“to get her out of the neighborhood.” He was representing me, & that is what I would have said, myself.

She must have been hard pushed to account for “house-money” outgo when she said she had to pay Stormfield furnishing-bills at Macy’s in cash! Macy’s people would have taken her check.

The “complaint” referred to as having been made out by the grand juror had been hanging over Miss Lyon’s head several days; it was the first step toward sending her to jail. It was my duty as a citizen to send her to jail, but I was doing what any other weak man would do—shirking it.

Tearing up the dollar bill & squealing—that is Miss Lyon! Miss Lyon under the “influence.” I believe that that creature is just as sensitive to insult, & as sharply pained by it, as even an actual lady could be. And yet she is a brute; just a plain, simple, heartless brute, & rotten to the spine.

Paine went down to New York yesterday (which was the 24th of August) to remove my stuff to the Lincoln Deposit, which is in 42d street & handier. In the train, on his way back, he saw Mr. & Mrs. PeckⒺexplanatory note, who have that big place over yonder on c top of the ridge, the other side of our valley. Peck said he had seen Miss Lyon drink astonishingly, here at Stormfield; & Mrs. Peck said she had seen her in a Pullman car when she was stupid with liquor, & smelling of it, too. I must be miraculously dull, & miraculously unsuspicious, never to have noticed these things—at the time. Evidently WhenⒶtextual note she was drunk to everybody else, I took it for hysterics—which was Ashcroft’s name for it. If I had known how heavy our liquor bills were, I should have been obliged to suspect Ashcroft or Miss Lyon, one or the other, but I never looked at bills of any kind. Consequently I knew nothing of these liquor-freshets until the expert’s investigation of Miss Lyon’s checks revealed them.

To return to the subject of digging the Ashcroft’s out of the Lobsterpot (“Summerfield.”) Mr. Lark was suspicious of the Ashcrofts. Mrs Miss Lyon, by deeding back the property, had clearly & unequivocally confessed her thefts. Upon reflection she might regret that confession & try to nullify it by endeavoring to get the deed set aside. So he proposed to go down & clinch the matter by giving her a lease of the place until the 1st of September, which would further validate the transfer.

Clara was to go with him, as a witness. Not a pleasant errorⒶtextual note, since (according to the [begin page 423] interviews) this whole trouble had arisen out of Clara’s “jealousyⒶtextual note” of Miss Lyon. Jealousy based upon what? However, Miss Lyon had to find an explanation of some kind, & one explanation would answer as well as another, as long as for her reputation’s sake Miss Lyon couldn’t afford to furnish the real one. The interviews indicated that Miss Lyon’s mind had been in a condition of pretty wild disorder, for more than once she named Jean as the jealous one! Whereas Jean had never even been on the place, & w the insurrection was under full headway two months & a half before Jean she had a chance to hear of it.

I asked Clara to make a narrative of her visit to the Lobster pot while the details were fresh in her memory, to be used on the witness stand if this matter ever got into Court. She did it.

It is pitiful. That poor old mother had done no harm, & yet she is doing the main part of the suffering. The Ashcrofts have the relief of cursing me (Miss Lyon knows that art) & planning vengeances with me for the as victim, but Mrs. Lyon hasn’t any relief to resort to. Malignities & vengeances are not for her; she is more gently made.

It was like Miss Lyon’s heartlessness to stay up stairs & leave her mother to fight her [begin page 427] battle for her. It is true that she was up stairs, & doubtless “sick”—in the usual way—but she was not in bed. Lounsbury saw her at a window, looking down upon the fracas.

Clara’s report, as far as it goes, agrees with Mr. Lark’s, but his goes further. Mrs. Lyon said her daughter would not accept the lease; that her daughter had signed the deed without knowing what it was, & it was therefore without value in law, & that she would take measures with her lawyer to annul that paper.

Pretty wild talk, in view of the fact that the notary read the deed aloud, from beginning to end, to Miss Lyon before she signed it. I tell you a body needs to be well fortified with witnesses when he deals with the Ashcroft firm of professional liars.

So Mr. Lark’s lease-scheme didn’t work, but he was not troubled. He said Miss Lyon’s lawyer would not be at all likely to allow her to try to annul the deed. He believed the tribe would vacate the Lobster pot the 1st of September, & drop the idea of resistance.

Very well, we have arrived this far: that Miss Lyon, in recstoring the property & handing back the mortgage-money ($1500) has quite definitely concretely acknowledged herself a thief, while denying it in the abstract with her mouth.

I wonder if she agrees with her mother that if a person signs a paper without knowing what the paper it contains, the paper is invalid & of no force? If so, I wonder what she thinks of the formidable Power of AttorneyⒶtextual note which purports to have been signed by me?—a paper which I never saw norⒶtextual note heard of until six & a half months after the date on which I (ostensibly) signed it.

In one of those interviews poor Mrs. Lyon makes one remark of a rather striking sort; where, in her despair & sense of forlornness, & referring to her daughter, she finds refuge & solace in this blessed fact: “We have each other.” It would have been inexcusable cruelty if Lounsbury had added, aloud instead of to himself, “and our dear Ashcroft.”

For without a doubt they have had enough & more than enough of the dear Ashcroft long before this. Indeed they began to realize the hole they had sprung into straightway after their marriage their panic fright had driven them into. They came from New York in the train with my niece & her husband, Julia & Edward Loomis, & they stayed apart not only in the train but after they reached this house. They addressed no remarks to each other at dinner; they kept well apart during the evening, & all of the next two days. They could not have been a colder pair if they had been on the ice a week. The room next to mine had been prepared for them, because it had a double bed in it; but they provoked further remark by taking separate rooms. They continued this as long as they remained slept in the house, which was ten or twelve nights.

Ten or twelve days Shortly after Miss Lyon re-deeded the property, her husband arrived in New York from England. He called on Mr. Lark, some days later, & wanted a settlement arranged, & was evidently anxious about it & eager to get it accomplished & done with. He said he would do anything in reason & was willing to put trifles aside & deal with essentials only.

That was on the 3d of August—& Miss Lyon was on her way down, that same afternoon. , to meet him. Mr. Lark telephoned us the pleasant news, & said everything would be amicably & satisfactorily settled next day & the long wrangle ended.

[begin page 428] But he didn’t know Miss Lyon was on her way down! On her way down, & ravenous to take a hand! But he knew it the first thing next morning, when the New York Times came out with another Ashcroftian interviewⒺexplanatory note. The Times was just the place for it, for it keeps the standing sign at its head, “All the news that’s fit to print.” And whenever it can get hold of any that isn’t fit to print, it prints that, too. For example:

That shell surprised Mr. Stanchfield & Mr. Lark when it fell in their camp. They were familiar with converted criminals, but this was new: they had never seen one get unconverted again so suddenly. Still, it did not surprise them so much as it would have done a matter of three weeks earlier: the time Ashcroft tacitly promised that he & his century plant would stay & face the investigation, then clandestinely ran away to Europe the same night.

I enjoy this interview, because it is such a matchless portrayal of Ashcroft’s charatcter. And so innocent, too; so unconscious. He is not aware that he is exposing himself. He thinks the reader will be admiring him.

At last we know why Clara Clemens was jealous of little Miss Lyon! she was jealous of Miss Lyon’s “achievements” as my secretary. It is definite, but it has a defect: it lacks adequacy. And it has another defect: it puts forward a weak reason, when there was a strong one in stock. I think Clara could, or might, or maybe ought, to be jealous of Miss Lyon’s achievements as a house-decorator, & deviser of charming & eloquent & effe c tive harmonies in color, for that woman’s achievements in that line are real achievements—soft, delicate, dainty, unobtrusive, caressing, inviting, enchanting—damnation, Howells, they are achievements, it’s the right name for them!

And yet this dull & blind ass leaves them unnoticed, unmentioned, unpraised, to bray about her “achievements” as my secretary! Whereas, there weren’t any. He knew, long ago, what I didn’t know, to-wit, that she deliberately & persistently left every duty of her secretaryship undone that she could shirk. He also knew, & confesses, that she adopted my loose & systemless fashion of keeping my accounts, & made no effort to institute better methods—as any other secretary not idiotic & not lazy would have done. He knew, what I didn’t know, that when I wrote the private letter to my daughter which he has come by dishonestly & has dishonorably used in print, it contained not a single compliment that was deserved, save one—her soothing & ingenious & successful ways with reporters & interviewers. He knew, what I didn’t know, that the Tuxedo people disliked her, & were not thankful to me for pushing her into their social life. He knew, [begin page 432] what I didn’t know, that from the beginning of her life with us to the end of it, she made enemies, not friends. He knew, what I didn’t know, that he and Miss Lyon worked hard during three years—through lies told to Drs. Hunt & Peterson—to keep Jean exiled from her father’s house, & still kept her exiled during the third year when she was well enough, all that year, to come home. (She has now—August 30—been under my roof more than four months & is the healthiest person on the place.) He knew, what I didn’t know, that he & she told friends of ours that Jean would be a trouble at home & that they should keep her away the rest of her life—for my sake! He knew, what I didn’t know, that we have never had a servant that didn’t detest Miss Lyon. And he knew, what I didn’t know, that during the last two years Miss Lyon spent in my house she was stealing money from me by the handful & supporting him with it.

It is an error to say I have not charged dishonesty upon Miss Lyon. Ashcroft knows I have charged it everywhere except in print. He knows I can’t say anything in print; for, he is aware a Major General cannot waive rank & dispute in public with a sutler’s clerk.

Ashcroft says, “Mark Twain well has said of her: ‘I know her better than I have known any one on this planet, except Mrs. Clemens.’ ”

He does not explain that this is from a private letter of mine, & that he came by it by theft. Stolen in this way: that Miss Lyon copied it before mailing it. No—that is not the crime—keeping a copy of it was of no consequence; but letting him have it to for publication was a crime; a crime of such baseness, too, that it puts the final stamp of treachery upon her character, & is ample evidence that she is capable of any dishonorable act that has a place in the list of human shabbinesses.

Ashcroft is curiously illogical. He is apparently defending & reinstating Miss Lyon’s character; & as an argument in her favor he uses my former high opinion of her. My later opinion of her is the only one that has value now, & can be worth quoting as evidence now—& that one accuses her of being a thief; & she, by reconveying her house to me, has distinctly & definitely confessed the at the charge. is true.

When it comes to lying, Ashcroft seems to have no reserves, no modesties. “Mr. Ashcroft declares that it was without the knowledge of the humorist’s New York lawyers that the cottage was attached.”

He was saying this right after his talk with Mr. Lark; & so, when he said it he knew it was Mr. Lark himself who had had the cottage attached.

Ashcroft is even shabby enough put ◇ Ⓐtextual note to drag the dead out of the grave to give false evidence. “Mr. Rogers said to me, etc., etc.” It is a plain simple lie; Mr. Rogers said nothing of the kind. Read it, Howells! You knew the grave, ungushing, unexcitable Chief of the Standard Oil—try to imagine him losing his cool & placid self-control & breaking out with a volcanic & adoring eulogy like that, about anybody! It would have been as impossible to him to do that, as it was impossible to him to say one thing to Clara;—on about Miss Lyon—on a Monday, say for instance—& then say the opposite to Ashcroft on the Tuesday. He had known & liked Clara for sixteen years, & he talked to her without reserve. He said he had never liked Miss Lyon, & had always been suspicious [begin page 433] of her; & that if she & Ashcroft came out of the investigation clean & honest it would surprise him.

Mr. Rogers saw Ashcroft after his talk with Clara; & according to Ashcroft, he faced clear around the other way!

Howells, you knew Mrs. Clemens, from the fall of 1871 until her death in 1904, & I wonder if you are able to believe I could ever find a person who would seem to me to be her match, & thus be moved to marry again? Would it occur to you that if I found such a person it might, would or could be Miss Lyon? In all my (nearly) seventy-four years I have seen only the one person whom I would marry, & I have lost her. Miss Lyon compares with her as a buzzard compares with a dove. (I say this with apologies to the buzzard.)

Thus we arrive at yet one more reason why Clara & Jean were “jealous” of that little old superannuated virgin—they were “afraid I would marry her!” We have now reached the absolute limit of burlesque; burlesque cam canⒶtextual note go no further than that. What a fine & large & splendid & radiant & rotten imagination that Liverpool bastard has! Miss Lyon is good company, agreeable company, delightful company, drunk or sober, but there is nothing about her that invites to intimate personal contact; her caressing touch—& she was always finding excuses to apply it—arch girly-girly pats on the back of my hand & playful little spats on my cheek with her fan—& these affectionate attentions always made me shrivel uncomfortably—much as happens when a frog jumps down my bosom. Howells, I could not go to bed with Miss Lyon, I would rather have a waxwork.

Was I unaware that before the middle of 1906 she had made up her mind to marry me? No—I was aware of it. I am uncommonly lacking in insight, uncommonly unobservant, but I was able to see that. So were the servants, & Jean & Clara, & some of the friends—Mrs. H. H. Rogers, for instance, & Mr. Broughton & Mr. Benjamin (sons-in-law) who noticed it in Bermuda & spoke of it. But I didn’t bite. Then, when Ashcroft escorted me to England in the summer of 1907, a paragraph appeared in an English paper reporting a rumor that I was engaged to my secretary Miss Lyon. Ashcroft brought it to me eagerly. I had introduced him to a few dozen London reporters, & I suspected that the report was his work & had been done by Miss Lyon’s request. I think so yet. By that time Miss Lyon was stealing money from me every day, so to speak, & she was in deep enough to be getting afraid scared——& Ashcroft too, perhaps, for without doubt he was living on her thefts, & she would naturally be afraid of him, as knowing him much better than I did, & being therefore aware that if her contributions failed he would betray her at any moment that he could get an advantage out of it. The report was cabled to America & circulated in the newspapers, & I began to be waylaid by reporters & correspondents who wanted the factsⒺexplanatory note. So I departed from my custom & furnished them. To-wit that the report was untrue.

Before that—no, before it or after it, I don’t remember which, Miss Lyon threw out a feeler: she came, looking ever so arch, & girly-girly & engaging, & gave me one of those little love-pats, & said—

“What do you reckon they say?”

[begin page 434] “Well, what do they say?”

“That we are going to get married!” 〚Burst of girly-girly stage-laughter to indicate howⒶtextual note killingly funny & wildly absurd an idea it was.〛

“Who say it?”

“Everybody. It’s all over the town!”

“Oh, well, it isn’t any matter. It wasn’t started for fun, it was started for a purpose. We don’t know what the purpose was, we only know that the person that started it is going to get left, as the slang phrase goes.”

I have stopped the press to call Clara in & ask her if she & Jean were ever afraid sh I would marry Miss Lyon.Ⓐtextual note

“No, we were not; but we were afraid she would marry you.”

“Really & truly afraid, Clara?”

“Yes, really & truly.”

“When?”

“When you came back to New York from Tuxedo—& in Tuxedo, too. We knew—& so did the friends—that she was aiming to marry you, & she seemed to have gotten such a hold upon you that she could make you do whatever she pleased. She was supreme. She had everything her own way in the house. She had stopped making requests, she only gave orders. You never denied her anything. Very well, as we knew she was intending to marry you, we were afraid you would submit—in fact, we expected you to submit. Mary Lawton, the psychist, said y she had hypnotised you, & it certainly looked like it.”

Clara went on & cited some other instances:

“Twice you allowed me to arrange with Mr. Jackson the lawyer for the Ashcrofts to be investigated by him; both times the Ashcrofts got around you & hypnotised you into breaking up the arrangement & stopping the inquest. Mr. Jackson had one interview with Ashcroft, & he said Ashcroft was so frightened he couldn’t talk coherently. He couldn’t furnish a single rational reason against the investigation, but was full of distress because it would reveal to you how expensive I had been!—as if I must go to him for protection from my father!

“The very same thing happened in the case of Mr. Rogers. Twice I was to see Mr. Rogers at his house about our difficulties, & both times you told the Ashcrofts & they talked you out of it & broke it up. Hypnotised you, we all thought, & think yet. We never could depend on you to stick to a purpose, they always talked you out of it. You were putty in their hands, father, & they could mould you to any shape they pleased. That had not been your way, before; you had a will of your own before the Ashcrofts came. When I made my third engagement with Mr. Rogers, I kept it secret from you. If you had known about it you would have told the Ashcrofts & they would have squelched it.”

She added:

“Once you wrote a letter to Jean—& it was probably a real letter—a letter from father to daughter—a letter with some feeling in it, some sympathy, not a page or two of empty & unexcitable commonplaces such as Miss Lyon was accustomed to dictate to you as replies to that poor friendless exile’s appeals—”

[begin page 435] “By God I can’t stand it, Clara! it makes me feel like a dog—like the cur I was; if I could land Miss Lyon in hell this minute, I hope to be damned if I wouldn’t do it—& it’s where I belong, anyway. Go on.”

“It was probably a real letter. I think so for this reason. It had been your custom to write merely a few empty lines to Jean & hand the result to Miss Lyon to edit; to edit out of it such suggestions of feeling & affection as might have intruded into it, under impulse. You then rewrote the vacuum & returned it to Miss Lyon for the post. But this time you forsook that custom. You wrote a thick letter. Also, you sealed it. Also, you didn’t give it to Miss Lyon to mail with the other letters. You waited for a chance to get it out of the house clandestinely. You saw—from your bedroom window—Mr. Lounsbury approaching the house, & you ran down & overhauled him in the hall & gave him the letter & asked him to mail it. Miss Lyon was in the telephone closet & overheard it all. You went back up stairs. Lounsbury passed on, to the kitchen. He was there a quarter of an hour, & when he came out Miss Lyon was standing at the foot of the stairs, looking as if she had been sent down on an errand. : She said—

“ ‘I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Lounsbury. Mr. Clemens says he has given you a letter, & he wants it again, to add something to it which he forgot.’ ”

“She took the letter, & Lounsbury went away, saying ‘there’s a nigger in that woodpile somewhere’—for him b Lounsbury saw through Miss Lyon the first day she was ever in this region—the night she slept at his house & said she was dying with sick headache & must have whisky, & he gave her a quart & she drank it all up in two hours & was as drunk as a porter, & rolled over off the sleeping couch onto the floor, & he & his wife heard the noise & went in there & inspected her; & from that night until now, the Lounsburys have had their own opinion of Miss Lyon, & it is not a complimentary one. Very well; Lounsbury didn’t see the letter any more. Of course Jean doesn’t know whether she ever got it or not, it is so long ago; but she is of the opinion that she never got a real letter & a fat one until this insurrection broke out & you discovered that Miss Lyon had been Jean’s enemy for three years & had by her lies to Dr. Peterson had kept her out of this house a whole year after she was sound in her body & clear in her head, & hadn’t any further use for sanitariums & their privations & social horrors & distresses. Do you think that that letter ever reached Jean, father?”

“No, I don’t think it. I think that that misgotten gutter-rat destroyed it.”

Well, that’s all. I don’t want Clara to come in here any more. I like the truth sometimes, but I don’t care enough for it to hanker after it. And besides, I have lived with liars so long that I have lost the tune, & a fact jars upon me like a discord.

My, but that Ashcroft is fertile in surprises! This one interview contains one—a masterpiece in its way. Necessarily it is prefaced with a lie or two. Because Ashcroft had to open his mouth. When he opens his mouth there can be but one result. He says my lawyers didn’t know he & I had “made an agreement regarding the money advanced” by me for the rehabilitation of Miss Lyon’s cottage. Then he prints the “agreement.”

There you have it, all written out, & dated, & signed by me!

[begin page 436] Why, Howells, I hope I may land in perdition before I finish this sentence if I ever heard of that piece of writing until I saw it in that interview in the Times, on the afternoon of the 4th of August. Never heard of it, never heard it mentioned, never saw it, never signed it.

Isn’t it admirable “cheek,” as the vulgar say?

At first I thought he had built it & forged my name to it on the 3d of August for use in the interview, but I now think that it didn’t happen in that way. I think he had the little document with him when he brought the four notes on the famous Cleaning-Up Day—the 13th of MarchⒺexplanatory note.

I didn’t take the notes, & didn’t look at them, but told him to keep them himself & preserve them with the rest of my business papers. He probably was not expecting that, & it nonplussed him for the moment & he didn’t quite know what to do next.

It may be that he did not attach my signature at that time, but later; most probably on the 3d of August, when he wanted to print the little paper in his interview. I wonder if he forged the signature? Perhaps he took a safer way: removed, with acids, my writing from a letter-page (above my genuine signature), & then filled the vacancy with his rascally “agreement.” Mr. Lark is going to ask him for a sight of it. He certainly won’t get it.

The paragraph that follows the alleged “agreement” is interesting. There was an “amicable settlement” between Mr. Lark & Ashcroft on the 3d of August; the papers were to be drawn & signed on the 4th, & everybody was to drop the matter then & there, & shut up for the future. One of our main desires was to get Ashcroft to hand in his resignation as manager of the Mark Twain Company; to dismiss him by formal vote of the board of directors would start the newspaper-chatter again. He agreed to do it, & he & Lark parted well content with their interview’s results.

But as I have remarked before, Miss Lyon was at that moment momentⒶtextual note on her way down to New York. Yes, & full of suppressed shame, & wrath & the spirit of vengeance! Full of a determination, no doubt, to smash any agreement that had been arrived at if a certain couple of requirements happened to be absent from it. Well, they were not in it. Ashcroft had offered them, & had tried to get them inserted, but had failed. I reckon she was the author of them, & she may have been insane enough to imagine they would be conceded, for she is pretty damned insane, Howells, by reason of these many weeks of exasperation, & whisky, & bad dreams & troubled sleep; & in these seven years she has come to know me so well that she would have to be insaner than normal before her imagination could get so out of control, & so wild & so reckless as to beguile her into the notion that I would concede those two things. Why, dear me, I couldn’t concede them; I couldn’t dream of such a thing.

They are gems! Examine them.

1. Ashcroft will resign the post of manager & director of the Mark TwainⒶtextual note Company; provided I write a note regretting the loss of his services in those capacities; and also

2. Provided I will write a note clearing  Mrs iss  R. W. L Mrs. Ashcroft of dishonesty & regretting that by an unfortunate mistake she has been wrongly charged with it.

Sho, I can tell literary lies as fast as anybody, & of standard size, too; but when it [begin page 437] comes to lying a couple of thieves and blatherskites into the confidence of an unoffending public, I’m not equal to it. I am under the deadly reputation of being a man whose word, in serious matters, is worth par; & if you had such a reputation, Howells, you would know what a slave it makes of a person, & how useless it is to repine—it can’t be helped, you’ve got to stand by that reputation, there is no getting around it. May you never be in my situation, Howells, dear old friend of my long-vanished youth! However, there is no use in my going into hysterics about it, you are not in any danger I reckon.

My lawyers—backed by Paine,—who knew what my f Ⓐtextual note answer would be—declined to entertain that pair of provisos, & that paralysed the◇ agreement-proceedingsⒺexplanatory note.

I did write a note of regret, just to see if I could do it & not seem to be artificial & insincere, but Lark did not think it would be satisfactory to Ashcroft, so it was suppressed, & I only insert here to show I had good intentions:

What a delightful thing a coincidence is! There isn’t anybody to whom that mysterious conjunction which we call a coincidence is a matter barren of interest. Well, one has just been hatched out in my own nest, here in these closing days of August.

We were discussing the Ashcrofts in the evening. We are usually discussing the Ashcrofts. The question came up—how did they come to get such an ascendancy over me? It was strange, exceedingly strange, for all the chief requirements w necessary to the creation and maintenance of an infatuation were lacking, & only a lot of minor ones present. I greatly liked to have Miss Lyon around, yet I had never much liked her; she was artificial, insincere, vain, gushy, & full of foolish affectations—& I had an aversion for these things; she was an old, old virgin, & juiceless, whereas my passion was for the other kind. To nearly everybody but me she was a transparent fraud, but to me she was not. I believed utterly in her honesty & in her loyalty to me & to my interests. She was master, & I was slave. She could make me do anything she pleased. In time—& no long time—she would have become permanently supreme here, & Clara & Jean would not have been able to stay in the house, nor Jean to enter it. By a s Ⓐtextual note means of the forged Grand [begin page 438] Power of Attorney, she & Ashcroft would by & by have stripped the children bare, when I died—a purpose which they unquestionably had in view.

And look at Ashcroft! A sneaky little creature, with beady, furtive, treacherous little eyes, & all the ways of a lackey—obsequious, watchful, attentive, and looking as if he wanted to lick somebody’s boots. I was never able to get to my room in time to take my clothes off unassisted—he was always at my heels, he always stripped me, he put my night-shirt upon me, he laid out my clothes for next day, & there was no menial service which he omitted. I despised him, yet I liked him, & liked his company. I was always ready to say yes to anything he proposed; & do it without reflection, too. The thing I would promptly refuse to nearly any other friend of mine, I would as promptly grant to him.

No one was able to influence me against these people. Efforts in that direction were essayed but once, & not repeated.

When Dr. Quintard called Clara to a serious consultation & said that that pair were robbing me & must be investigated, I was perfectly willing to mention the matter to Ashcroft, & was sure he & the Lyon would be glad to be investigated. And I think the first real jolt I got was when I discovered by Ashcroft’s manner that the prospect of being investigated did not fill him to the chin with joy—as I had thought it was going to do.

So, as I say, were wereⒶtextual note discussing these Ashcrofts, & trying to account for the mastership they had acquired over me. Clara finally said—

“It’s hypnotism! it accounts for it all.”

I had never thought of that. The suggestion looked reasonable—particularly since no other plausible way had been discovered of accounting for the enslaved condition I had been in for the past two or three years.

The “coincidence” heretofore referred to, was this: the first piece of print my eye fell upon when I went up to bed, was an article in the September number of The World’s Work Ⓔexplanatory note on hypnotic suggestion, & the paragraph my eye first fell upon was this one—which did certainly seem to fit my case to admiration!

It describes my case with minutely, exactly, vividly, & with most humiliating truthfulness. It is odd that I should have come upon it just when I did—which was just the right time—just when that talk was fresh & hot in my mind. If I had read it a day earlier it would probably have roused no interest in me & made no impression upon me.

Some more gossip. Paine met Z. at the PlayersⒺexplanatory note the other day, & they talked. I cannot [begin page 439] recall any of Z’s name but the initial, but no matter, I used to know him slightly in Hartford eighteen or twenty years ago, where he had a good character, & was of some prominence. He told Paine Miss Lyon & his wife are good friends from away back—many many years, but that Mrs. Z. is aware that she came near getting into difficulties, once, when she was manager of the Exchange, for the Hartford ladies.—the institution for which she used to make pin cushions when she came with us in 1902. (And didn’t make any more pin cushions after she got to signing checks for me.) She got short in her accounts, & Mrs. Z., & the Whitmores & other friends got the lacking money together & saved her, when there was imminent danger of a scandal.

Miss Lyon started a bank account when she had been with us a little while, & I have a transcript of it, procured from the bank. On a wage of $50 a month she deposited $700 in the first 7 months. It proves nothing against her honesty, but nothing in favor of it. Two years Three years later she was pilfering, in a small way, according to the testimony of Miss Hobby, my stenographer, & she finally made me discharge Miss Hobby—because Miss Hobby knew too muchⒺexplanatory note, Miss Hobby says.

I have not been able to believe—quite—that Miss Lyon was never a thief until she fell under the influence of Ashcroft; & the Woman’s Exchange incident half persuades me that she began as much as ten years earlier than that. However, I guess it was Ashcroft that made a large thief out of her.

And how tactless she was! When she got married, she sent a twelve-dollar cablegram to Paine, in EgyptⒺexplanatory note, to announce the fact! It was a week’s wages.

And when she went to Hartford, last spring to rest & get back her strength, she took up her quarters at Heublein’s hotel, where she couldn’t live for anything short of ten dollars a day! And she bragged to Paine that she would have work for Miss Banks the dressmaker the whole winter! If I had been H. H. Rogers, instead of myself, these extravagancies would have looked suspicious, & there would have been an immediate overhauling of her accounts. But moi?—I was hypnotised, & it never occurred to me.

---

MEMORANDUM.

September 7, 1909. Five Six days ago Dr. Cook sent a telegram from the Arctic regions announcing his discovery of the North Pole on the 21st of April 1908, & his name has been thundering around the whole globe ever since. During the past five days he has been the guest of the King of Norway, while the newspapers of all Christendom have been shouting his glories, not in columns, but by whole pages of costly telegraphic clatter.

And now, last night comes a telegram from Commander Peary, from up among the icebergs, saying he has discovered the North Pole! Discovered it a year later than Cook, according to the dates.

Half the world believed Cook, the other half didn’t. But the entire world believes Peary. I believe both are speaking the truth.

[begin page 440] Well, it is a pity that two men did it. While it was the achievement of one man it placed him alongside of Columbus, away up in the very sky—apparently to remain there forever—discoverers whose feat could never be repeated, there being no more worlds to discover, & no more poles worth discovering. But now that the honor is divided—well, the bulk of the value is gone.

Apparently Dr. Cook sat down among the icebergs to waste a year—in writing aboutⒶtextual note the discovery? If he really was so foolish as all that, he deserves to take second place—along with Adams, who didn’t push his discovery of Neptune, but let Leverrier get in ahead of him & take first place for good & allⒺexplanatory note.

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