The Autobiography of Mark Twain Mark Twain (best beach reads .TXT) 📖

him. I have never been so great as that, and I have not known another who was. I have never approached it; it belongs among the loftiest of human attributes. This is a world where you get nothing for nothing; where you pay value for everything you get and 50 percent over; and when it is gratitude you owe, you have to pay a thousand. In fact, gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating, like blackmail; the more you pay, the more is exacted. In time you are made to realize that the kindness done you is become a curse and you wish it had not happened. You find yourself situated as was Mr. W., a friend of friends of mine, years ago. He was rich and good-hearted and appreciative. His wife’s life was saved by a grocer’s young man, who stopped her runaway horses. Her husband was grateful beyond words. For he supposed gratitude was a sentiment; he did not know it had a price and that he was not the one to determine the rate. But by and by he was educated. Then he said to the grocer’s young man, “Take this five hundred dollars and vanish; I have had you and your tribe on my back three years, and if ever another man saves my wife’s life, let him buy a coffin, for he will need it.”

Mr. Rogers was a great man. No one denies him that praise. He was great in more ways than one⁠—ways in which other men are great, ways in which he had not a monopoly; but in that fine trait which I have mentioned he was uniquely great; he held that high place almost alone, almost without a sharer. If nobilities of character were accorded decorations symbolizing degrees of merit and distinction, I think this one could claim rank, unchallenged, with the Garter and the Golden Fleece.

But what I am trying to place before unfamiliar eyes is the heart of him.

When the publishing house of Webster & Company failed, in the early ’90s, its liabilities exceeded its assets by 66 percent. I was morally bound for the debts, though not legally. The panic was on, business houses were falling to ruin everywhere, creditors were taking the assets⁠—when there were any⁠—and letting the rest go. Old business friends of mine said: “Business is business, sentiment is sentiment⁠—and this is business. Turn the assets over to the creditors and compromise on that; other creditors are not getting 33 percent.” My wife said, “No, you will pay a hundred cents on the dollar.” Mr. Rogers was certainly a business man⁠—no one doubts that. People who know him only by printed report will think they know what his attitude would be in the matter. And they will be mistaken. He sided with my wife. He was the only man who had a clear eye for the situation, and could see that it differed from other apparently parallel situations. In substance he said this: “Business has its laws and customs, and they are justified; but a literary man’s reputation is his life; he can afford to be money poor, but he cannot afford to be character poor; you must earn the cent percent, and pay it.” My nephew, the late Samuel E. Moffett⁠—himself a literary man⁠—felt in the same way, naturally enough; but I only mention him to recall and revivify a happy remark which he made, and which traveled around the globe: “Honor knows no statute of limitations.”

So it was decided. I must cease from idling and take up work again. I must write a book; also I must return to the lecture platform. My wife said I could clear off the load of debt in four years. Mr. Rogers was more cautious, more conservative, more liberal. He said I could have as many years as I wanted⁠—seven to start with. That was his joke. When he was not in the humor for pleasantry, it was because he was asleep. Privately I was afraid his seven might be nearer the mark than Mrs. Clemens’s four.

One day I got a shock⁠—a shock which disturbed me a good deal. I overheard a brief conversation between Mr. Rogers and a couple of other seasoned men of affairs.

First Man of Affairs. “How old is Clemens?”

Mr. Rogers. “Fifty-eight.”

First Man of Affairs. “Ninety-five percent of the men who fail at fifty-eight never get up again.”

Second Man of Affairs. “You can make it ninety-eight percent and be nearer right.”

Those sayings haunted me for several days, troubling me with melancholy forebodings, and would not be reasoned away by me. There wasn’t any room for reasoning, anyway, so far as I could see. If, at fifty-eight, ninety-eight men in a hundred who fail never get up again, what chance had I to draw No. 99 or No. 100? However, the depression did not last; it soon passed away, because Mrs. Clemens took her always-ready pencil and paper, when she learned my trouble, and clearly and convincingly ciphered out the intake of the four years and the resultant success. I could see that she was right. Indeed, she was always right. In foresight, wisdom, accurate calculation, good judgment, and the ability to see all sides of a problem, she had no match among people I have known, except Mr. Rogers.

Necessarily it took a good while to arrange the details and make the engagements for a lecture trip around the globe, but this labor was completed at last, and we made our start in the middle of July, 1895, booked ahead for twelve months.

Meantime he was in command, in the matter of the creditors⁠—and had been from the beginning. There were ninety-six creditors. He had meetings with them, discussions, arguments, persuasions, but no quarrels. Mrs. Clemens wanted to turn over to the creditors the house she had built in Hartford, and which stood in her name, but he would not allow it. Neither would he allow my copyrights to go to them. Mrs. Clemens had lent the Webster firm $65,000 upon its notes, in its perishing days, in the