March 25 Friday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam wrote to John Y. MacAlister.
I had not the least idea you had been hit in that dreadful way. But thanks be, you are fetching out all right. A friend of 37 years’ standing (Thos. Bailey Aldrich) has just written me that his 2-years’ watch in the snows of the Adirondacks is ended—his son “went away” that night, as you express it. Two years—it is long. But eight! Yes, Miss Merian must let us see her, when she comes. I enclose cards, & she will have to return our visit, you see. There is a Villa Reale di Quarto; she must look out or the cabbie will take her there, a mile or two out of her way.
I wrote you a few days ago—to London. You will have received the letter by this time.
You have made a tremendous picture of that Sanatorium—it is vivid & realizable.
I am lying abed to-day, taking holiday & watching the driving rain through the windows. This is bad weather for Mrs. Clemens, but it will not last.
Health to you—the highest possible! [MTP].
Sam also wrote to Elizabeth Robins (pseudonym: “C.E. Raimond”):
I thank you ever so much. “The Magnetic North” is a great book, & heart-breakingly true. True in so many ways: in the wild strange life depicted; in the characters, feelings & ambitions of the people in the book; in the eternal & frank sordidness of the human race, as forced out of concealment in any get-rich-quick rush anywhere, in any country, in any community; in the tragic & unfulfilled ending of the story—for no life story has ever ended before death, & not many end happily or successfully. And certainly all life is but a quest—a changeable quest, for this thing, that thing & the other, with disappointment every time, particularly when the thing is found.
And now I have bethought me that if we gain that which we seek for, & bear back our lives to our own people . . . . . . . That we shall be as lonely then as we are this hour, & that the folk round about us shall be to us no much & no more than these trees & the wild things that dwell amongst them. / I thank you again [MTP]. Note: The Magnetic North (1904); Gribben p. 584.
Sam also wrote to an unidentified man.
I remember writing the passage, (for print, I think) but that is all. I do not remember when it was, nor any other thing about it.
Certainly “drowsing” palms is rational & descriptive, but a “bowing” palm or a bowing telegraph pole is a revolting suggestion [MTP: Frear 218].
William Dean Howells, now in Bath, England, wrote to Sam that he’d just written an introduction to Sam for “a young Scotch doctor” (John Crawford) who was traveling to Italy. The Howellses planned on going to London on Monday and then would begin their European travels [MTHL 2: 783].
C. Brereton Sharpe for the Plasmon Syndicate wrote to Sam and enclosed a check for £350.0.0 for his 5,000 shares in the Syndicate [MTP].