Part 41

“Well,” he said, “why am I like the Pacific Ocean?”

Several guesses were made, but none satisfied him. Finally all gave it up.

“Tell us, Mark, why are you like the Pacific Ocean?”

“I don’t know,” he drawled. “I was just asking for information.”

At another time, when a young man insisted on singing a song of eternal length, the chorus of which was, “I’m going home, I’m going home, I’m going home tomorrow,” Mark Twain put his head in the window and said, pleadingly:

“For God’s sake go to-night.”

But he was also fond of quieter society. Sometimes, after the turmoil of a legislative morning, he would drop in to Miss Keziah Clapp’s school and listen to the exercises, or would call on Colonel Curry—“old Curry, old Abe Curry”—and if the colonel happened to be away, he would talk with Mrs. Curry, a motherly soul (still alive at ninety-three, in 1910), and tell her of his Hannibal boyhood or his river and his mining adventures, and keep her laughing until the tears ran.

He was a great pedestrian in those days. Sometimes he walked from Virginia to Carson, stopping at Colonel Curry’s as he came in for rest and refreshment.

“Mrs. Curry,” he said once, “I have seen tireder men than I am, and lazier men, but they were dead men.” He liked the home feeling there —the peace and motherly interest. Deep down, he was lonely and homesick; he was always so away from his own kindred.

Clemens returned now to Virginia City, and, like all other men who ever met her, became briefly fascinated by the charms of Adah Isaacs Menken, who was playing Mazeppa at the Virginia Opera House. All men—kings, poets, priests, prize-fighters—fell under Menken’s spell. Dan de Quille and Mark Twain entered into a daily contest as to who could lavish the most fervid praise on her in the Enterprise. The latter carried her his literary work to criticize. He confesses this in one of his home letters, perhaps with a sort of pride.

I took it over to show to Miss Menken the actress, Orpheus C. Ken’s wife. She is a literary cuss herself.

She has a beautiful white hand, but her handwriting is infamous; she writes fast and her chirography is of the door-plate order—her letters are immense. I gave her a conundrum, thus:

“My dear madam, why ought your hand to retain its present grace and beauty always? Because you fool away devilish little of it on your manuscript.”

But Menken was gone presently, and when he saw her again, somewhat later, in San Francisco, his “madness” would have seemed to have been allayed.

XLV A COMSTOCK DUEL

The success—such as it was—of his occasional contributions to the New York Sunday Mercury stirred Mark Twain’s ambition for a wider field of labor. Circumstance, always ready to meet his wishes, offered assistance, though in an unexpected form.

Goodman, temporarily absent, had left Clemens in editorial charge. As in that earlier day, when Orion had visited Tennessee and returned to find his paper in a hot personal warfare with certain injured citizens, so the Enterprise, under the same management, had stirred up trouble. It was just at the time of the “Flour Sack Sanitary Fund,” the story of which is related at length in ‘Roughing It’. In the general hilarity of this occasion, certain Enterprise paragraphs of criticism or ridicule had incurred the displeasure of various individuals whose cause naturally enough had been espoused by a rival paper, the Chronicle. Very soon the original grievance, whatever it was, was lost sight of in the fireworks and vitriol-throwing of personal recrimination between Mark Twain and the Chronicle editor, then a Mr. Laird.

A point had been reached at length when only a call for bloodshed—a challenge—could satisfy either the staff or the readers of the two papers. Men were killed every week for milder things than the editors had spoken each of the other. Joe Goodman himself, not so long before, had fought a duel with a Union editor—Tom Fitch—and shot him in the leg, so making of him a friend, and a lame man, for life. In Joe’s absence the prestige of the paper must be maintained.

Mark Twain himself has told in burlesque the story of his duel, keeping somewhat nearer to the fact than was his custom in such writing, as may be seen by comparing it with the account of his abettor and second—of course, Steve Gillis. The account is from Mr. Gillis’s own hand:

When Joe went away, he left Sam in editorial charge of the paper. That was a dangerous thing to do. Nobody could ever tell what Sam was going to write. Something he said stirred up Mr. Laird, of the Chronicle, who wrote a reply of a very severe kind. He said some things that we told Mark could only be wiped out with blood. Those were the days when almost every man in Virginia City had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated duels. I had been in several, but then mine didn’t count. Most of them were of the impromptu kind. Mark hadn’t had any yet, and we thought it about time that his baptism took place.

He was not eager for it; he was averse to violence, but we finally prevailed upon him to send Laird a challenge, and when Laird did not send a reply at once we insisted on Mark sending him another challenge, by which time he had made himself believe that he really wanted to fight, as much as we wanted him to do. Laird concluded to fight, at last. I helped Mark get up some of the letters, and a man who would not fight after such letters did not belong in Virginia City—in those days.

Laird’s acceptance of Mark’s challenge came along about midnight, I think, after the papers had gone to press. The meeting was to take place next morning at sunrise.

Of course I was selected as Mark’s second, and at daybreak I had him up and out for some lessons in pistol practice before meeting Laird. I didn’t have to wake him. He had not been asleep. We had been talking since midnight over the duel that was coming. I had been telling him of the different duels in which I had taken part, either as principal or second, and how many men I had helped to kill and bury, and how it was a good plan to make a will, even if one had not much to leave. It always looked well, I told him, and seemed to be a proper thing to do before going into a duel. So Mark made a will with a sort of gloomy satisfaction, and as soon as it was light enough to see, we went out to a little ravine near the meeting-place, and I set up a board for him to shoot at. He would step out, raise that big pistol, and when I would count three he would shut his eyes and pull the trigger. Of course he didn’t hit anything; he did not come anywhere near hitting anything. Just then we heard somebody shooting over in the next ravine. Sam said:

“What’s that, Steve?”

“Why,” I said, “that’s Laud. His seconds are practising him over there.”

It didn’t make my principal any more cheerful to hear that pistol go off every few seconds over there. Just then I saw a little mud-hen light on some sage-brush about thirty yards away.

“Mark,” I said, “let me have that pistol. I’ll show you how to shoot.”

He handed it to me, and I let go at the bird and shot its head off, clean. About that time Laird and his second came over the ridge to meet us. I saw them coming and handed Mark back the pistol. We were looking at the bird when they came up.