Time and again he attempted to smoke, or in his drowse simulated the motion of placing a cigar to his lips and puffing in the old way.
Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which the title-role of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. The other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at me searchingly and asked:
"Isn't there something I can resign and be out of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't want it." Then realizing, he said: "I am like a bird in a cage: always expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires." And, somewhat later: "Oh, it is such a mystery, and it takes so long."
Toward the evening of the first day, when it grew dark outside, he asked:
"How long have we been on this voyage?"
I answered that this was the end of the first day.
"How many more are there?" he asked.
"Only one, and two nights."
"We'll never make it," he said. "It's an eternity."
"But we must on Clara's account," I told him, and I estimated that Clara would be more than half-way across the ocean by now.
"It is a losing race," he said; "no ship can outsail death."
It has been written--I do not know with what proof--that certain great dissenters have recanted with the approach of death--have become weak, and afraid to ignore old traditions in the face of the great mystery. I wish to write here that Mark Twain, as he neared the end, showed never a single tremor of fear or even of reluctance. I have dwelt upon these hours when suffering was upon him, and death the imminent shadow, in order to show that at the end he was as he had always been, neither more nor less, and never less than brave.
Once, during a moment when he was comfortable and quite himself, he said, earnestly:
"When I seem to be dying I don't want to be stimulated back to life. I want to be made comfortable to go."
There was not a vestige of hesitation; there was no grasping at straws, no suggestion of dread.
Somehow those two days and nights went by. Once, when he was partially relieved by the opiate, I slept, while Claude watched; and again, in the fading end of the last night, when we had passed at length into the cold, bracing northern air, and breath had come back to him, and with it sleep.
Relatives, physicians, and news-gatherers were at the dock to welcome him. He was awake, and the northern air had brightened him, though it was the chill, I suppose, that brought on the pains in his breast, which, fortunately, he had escaped during the voyage. It was not a prolonged attack, and it was, blessedly, the last one.
An invalid-carriage had been provided, and a compartment secured on the afternoon express to Redding--the same train that had taken him there two years before. Dr. Robert H. Halsey and Dr. Edward Quintard attended him, and he made the journey really in cheerful comfort, for he could breathe now, and in the relief came back old interests. Half reclining on the couch, he looked through the afternoon papers. It happened curiously that Charles Harvey Genung, who, something more than four years earlier, had been so largely responsible for my association with Mark Twain, was on the same train, in the same coach, bound for his country-place at New Hartford.
Lounsbury was waiting with the carriage, and on that still, sweet April evening we drove him to Stormfield much as we had driven him two years before. Now and then he mentioned the apparent backwardness of the season, for only a few of the trees were beginning to show their green. As we drove into the lane that led to the Stormfield entrance, he said:
"Can we see where you have built your billiard-room?"
The gable showed above the trees, and I pointed it out to him.
"It looks quite imposing," he said.
I think it was the last outside interest he ever showed in anything. He had been carried from the ship and from the train, but when we drew up to Stormfield, where Mrs.