A Ruck of Rags (The Tale of Lost Essentials) (1896)
Chapter 62 of "Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain's Hidden Memoirs"
Chapter 62
A Ruck of Rags (The Tale of Lost Essentials) (1896)I was in Guildford, England, in our rented house, pacing slowly around the room, deep in thought but about nothing in particular when a telegram was placed into my hands. When I first glanced at it, I could not quite discern just what intelligence it was conveying to me. When the meaning of the words reached home, I knew what a soldier feels when a shell strikes his chest. That a person can suffer that sort of shock and live is a marvel.
This was a new low for me. Prior to this, the deepest depths of despair and loss for me had been first the loss of my sister Margaret; then my brother Ben; years later, my brother Henry, and then in 1890 my mother. Those events stood for many years as the most tragic of my life.
But now, with the death of Susy, my grief and guilt descended to a new abyss. This would remain the devastatingest loss of my life, being perhaps even worse than the loss of Livy some eight years later—because Livy had never been very healthy, and had been gradually declining for years. But Susy was only twenty-four! And I had not seen her for a year at the time of her death; now nothing of her was left but a heartbreak, and memories.
I was alone when I received that telegram. Livy and Clara were already aboard a ship bound for America, to see about Susy. You see, we had gotten a telegram from home saying that Susy was sick, and that it would be a long but sure recovery.
This news was distressing to us, of course, but was ameliorated by the assurance of recovery. Livy and Clara, though, were still inclined to worry, and sailed the next day for America, to assist in the nursing of Susy. I remained behind in England, having been calmed by the false prophecy of a certain recovery.
On getting news of Susy’s dire condition, Twichell cut short his vacation and raced to the house in Hartford, where Susy was lying on what turned out to be her deathbed. Also present were Susy’s namesake Aunt Susan Crane, and our housekeeper of many decades, Katy Leary. Katy would also be there at Livy’s death, was the one to discover Jean when she died, and would be the one to inform me about both tragedies, too.
Susy had died of spinal meningitis. Although her mother and Clara were too late to be with her at the end, she was in such delirium that, on seeing a dress once worn by her mother, thought that she was looking at the former wearer of the garment herself, and spoke to it as if such were the case.
How utterly inconsolable I was. Yet I knew I must somehow continue on, for the sake of those who remained.
EDITOR’S NOTES: After at first declining to join the family on the worldwide lecture tour, Susy, on seeing photos of them on the trip, regretted not going along. In a letter to Clara, she wrote: “If I ever can be with you again, I shall stick like a burr indeed! There will be no extricating and separating me from you again. We are such a congenial family. It seems that no one ever understands us as we understand each other. We do belong together. … I am missing you all so terribly!—how, how, why, why did I ever let you go? I do not dare to think but rarely of going to meet you in England, for the thought makes me kind of insane. To leave Elmira and all its bores to rejoin you, brilliant, experienced, adorable people, to whom I belong, and to rejoin you in Europe!!! Oh quel bonheur can it ever come true?”As he could not speak to Livy after hearing of Susy’s death—because she was on the ship bound for America—Twain poured out his feelings in a series of letters to her. In one of them, he wrote:I have spent the day alone—thinking; sometimes bitter thoughts, sometimes only sad ones. Reproaching myself for laying the foundation of all our troubles. …Reproaching myself for a million things whereby I have brought misfortune and sorrow to this family. …Be comforted, remembering how much hardship, grief, pain, she is spared; and that her heart can never be broken, now, for the loss of a child. …Give my love to Clara and Jean. We have that much of our fortune left.In another, Twain wrote the following:I am always hiding my feelings; but my heart was wrung yesterday. I could not tell you how deeply I loved you nor how grieved I was for you, nor how I pitied you in this awful trouble that my mistakes have brought upon you. You forgive me, I know, but I shall never forgive myself while the life is in me.Later, after being filled in on the details of Susy’s demise, Twain wrote the following about her death:On August 15th, the doctor diagnosed Susy’s illness as meningitis. That evening she ate for the last time. Next morning, a Sunday, she walked about a bit in pain and delirium, then felt very weak and returned to bed, but before doing so, rummaging in a closet, she came across a gown she had once seen her mother wear. She thought the gown was her dead mother and, kissing it, began to cry. At about noon she became blind. She spoke for the last time about an hour later when, groping with her hands and finding Katy Leary, she caressed Katy’s face and said, “Mama.”How gracious it was that in that forlorn hour of wreck and ruin, with the night of death closing around her, she should have been granted that beautiful illusion—that the latest vision which rested upon the clouded mirror of her mind should have been the vision of her mother, and the latest emotion she should know in life the joy and peace of that dear imagined presence.That was the 15th of August, 1896. Three days later, when my wife and Clara were about halfway across the ocean, I was standing in our dining room, thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, ‘Susy was peacefully released today.’It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their full import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss—that is all…The 18th of August brought me the awful tidings. The mother and the sister were out there in mid-Atlantic, ignorant of what was happening, flying to meet this incredible calamity. All that could be done to protect them from the full force of the shock was done by relatives and good friends. They went down to the Bay and met the ship at night but did not show themselves until morning, and then only to Clara. When she returned to the stateroom she did not speak and did not need to. Her mother looked at her and said, ‘Susy is dead.’In her book My Father, Mark Twain, Clara recounted the events this way:...we thought of nothing but the pleasure of seeing Susy and Jean again. They were to be brought to London by the faithful maid, Katie, early in August. . . . As we began to count the days before their expected arrival, a letter came saying that Susy was ill and their sailing date postponed. This was a bitter disappointment. After exchanging cables about her condition we received the news that, though her recovery was certain, it would be long. Mother decided that she and I should go to America. . . . We could not rid ourselves of a heavy depression all the way across the unending Atlantic Ocean, although no warning note had been evident in the cables or letters. The days dragged on, but at last we could say, “Tomorrow we shall hug that darling girl and start to nurse her back to health!”The morrow dawned and with the new day stalked the herald of grief. On my way to the saloon for letters, I was told the captain wished to speak to me. We met in the companionway. He handed me a newspaper with great headlines: “Mark Twain’s eldest daughter dies of spinal meningitis.” There was much more, but I could not see the letters. The world stood still. All sounds, all movements ceased. Susy was dead. How could I tell Mother? I went to her stateroom. Nothing was said. A deadly pallor spread over her face and then came a bursting cry, “I don’t believe it!” And we never did believe it.In a letter to Twichell in early 1897, Twain wrote the following lines to his friend: “You have seen us go to sea, a cloud of sail, and the flag at the peak. And you see us now, chartless, adrift—derelicts, battered, water-logged, our sails a ruck of rags, our pride gone. For it is gone. And there is nothing in its place. The vanity of life was all we had, and there is no more vanity left in us. We are even ashamed of that we had, ashamed that we trusted the promises of life and builded high—to come to this!”Twain likened the loss to a burned-down home:A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go by, he misses first this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential—there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. … It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.Half a year after the sad event, in early 1897, Twain poured out his heartache to his friend Joe Twichell:I did know that Susy was part of us. I did not know that she could go away. I did not know that she could go away and take our lives with her, yet leave our dull bodies behind. And I did not know what she was. To me she was but treasure in the bank, the amount known, the need to look at it daily, handle it, weigh it, count it, realize it, not necessary. And now that I would do it, it is too late. They tell me it is not there, has vanished away in a night, the bank is broken, my fortune is gone. I am a pauper. How am I to comprehend this? How am I to have it? Why am I robbed, and who is benefited?In a February 1897 letter to William Dean Howells, Twain wrote of he and Livy’s ongoing sadness:The mood will pass some day—there is history for it—but it cannot pass until my wife comes up out of the submergence. She was always so quick to recover herself before, but now there is no rebound and we are dead people who go through the motions of life.Exactly one year after Susy’s death, in the summer of 1897, Twain wrote a poem which he entitled In Memoriam Olivia Susan Clemens. It contains the stanza:And then when they were nothing fearing, and God’s peace was in the air, And none was prophesying harm—The vast disaster fell: Where stood the temple when the sun went down, Was vacant desert when it rose again!Soon after the first anniversary of Susy’s death, Twain alluded to it in a letter to Twichell from Lucerne, Switzerland:This is paradise here—but of course we have got to leave it by and by. The 18th of August has come and gone, Joe, and we still seem to live.In early 1898, Susy was still very much on Twain’s mind and in his heart. In a letter to Howells, who had lost his young daughter “Winnie” (Winifred), he wrote:“If you were here I think we could cry down each other’s necks, as in your dream. For we are a pair of old derelicts drifting around now, with some of our passengers gone and the sunniness of the others in eclipse.”Twain devoted several chapters of his autobiography to Susy. He wrote much about Livy, too, and an entire essay on Jean following her death. Of Langdon he wrote little, likely because he felt an even more direct and immediate guilt as regards his son’s death, and didn’t want to think about it any more than he had to, let alone speak or write about it.Nevertheless, Twain doubtless had Langdon in mind when he wrote the following in late 1891 in the article MARK TWAIN AT AIX-LES-BAINS):Mighty has been the advance of the nations and the liberalization of thought. A result of it is a changed Deity, a Deity of a dignity and sublimity proportioned to the majesty of his office and the magnitude of his empire, a Deity who has been freed from a hundred fretting chains and will in time be freed from the rest by the several ecclesiastical bodies who have these matters in charge. It was, without doubt, a mistake and a step backward when the Presbyterian Synods of America lately decided, by vote, to leave him still embarrassed with the dogma of infant damnation. Situated as we are, we cannot at present know with how much of anxiety he watched the balloting, nor with how much of grieved disappointment he observed the result.Twain eulogized his other close family members who died in his adulthood (his mother, his brothers Henry and Orion, and his sister Pamela), but did not write as much about Clara, who outlived them all by several decades. Twain’s reluctance to commit thoughts of Clara to paper and posterity were probably due to that very fact (that she was still living). Her “career” was not yet over, so he couldn’t really sum up her life as yet.Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was published in 1896, shortly before Susy’s death. Susy at age seventeen was the model for Joan.Twain had begun writing “Joan of Arc” late in 1892, then set it aside until 1894 (the year his last American novel, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, was published), and finished the manuscript the following year. After serializing an abridged version for magazine publication, the full-length book was published in 1896. Twain said of it:Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing—it was written for love.The amazon page for “Rebel With a Cause: Mark Twain's Hidden Memoirs” is here.
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Beautiful…….but I am still sniffling,could not stop the tears as I read this.