January 26 Sunday – After traversing stormy seas, the Bermudian docked in Hamilton Harbor, Bermuda in the morning [D. Hoffman 89]. Note: The passage took 45 hours; Sam left shortly after a ten-inch snowstorm in NYC [A.D. of Feb. 12].
Woodrow Wilson, at that time President of Princeton, arrived in Bermuda on Jan. 20, and wrote his wife, Ellen Axson Wilson on Jan. 26:
Now I am cut out by Mark Twain! He arrived on the boat this morning, and Mrs. Peck at once took possession of him. They are old friends. Indeed, she seems to know everybody that is worth knowing. She has been coming down here a great many winters, and everybody turns up here sooner or later, it would seem. I have not yet found out where Mr. Clemons [sic] is staying. I hoped he was coming to the Hamilton, but he went off in the other direction. I did not get a chance to speak to him, and do not now whether he would remember me or not [D. Hoffman 95]. Note: Mary Allen Hulbert Peck (Mrs. Hulbert). Of course Clemens would have remembered attending Wilson’s inauguration as Princeton’s President on Oct. 25, 1902, and possibly Wilson’s honorary degree at Yale’s Bicentennial on Oct. 23, 1901.
Wilson later became the subject of rumors about Mrs. Peck, with whom it seems evident that he had a brief extra-marital affair. Mrs. Peck’s Bermuda residence was a sort of social hub for luminaries who visited the islands. Theodore Roosevelt, in a political battle with Wilson, refused to use the scandal or to question Wilson’s morals. Roosevelt said that using such rumors wouldn’t work—“You can’t cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts so much like the apothecary’s clerk.” [Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House, by Phyllis Lee Levin (2001), p. 131].
D. Hoffman writes of the habit of children at the hotel to leave for the harbor whenever a cruise ship was docking, and quotes from Elizabeth Wallace’s memoir, Mark Twain and the Happy Island.
The road to the hotel wound upward, and on either side of it palmettos rustled noisily beside still and somber cedars.
Out from under their shadows stepped a gray figure with a crown of glistening white hair. He walked lightly and looked about him with an air of interested and unconscious expectancy. As he came nearer the hotel veranda we recognized the shaggy eyebrows, the delicately arched nose, the drooping moustache…
As a usual thing Margaret [Blackmer] and I felt but a languid interest in the passengers who came, for they did not invade our world. But on the morning that Mark Twain arrived, we felt an unusual thrill…
Margaret’s table was not far from ours, and that day she was sitting alone. Presently Mark Twain came in, and as he reached her table he stopped and spoke to her. He not only spoke to her, but had a conversation with her. I knew, then, that he had recognized her as one of the choice souls of the earth [90-1]. Note: Margaret Gray Blackmer (1897-1987), “a lovely looking child of twelve,” was traveling with her invalid mother. She would become an Angelfish in Sam’s collection. Wallace was a professor of French literature and dean at the University of Chicago [89]. See Jan. 27 entry.
Isabel Lyon’s journal: Today I got out of bed to call up Tino [Paine] in Redding & to ask about letters that I am missing & that the King & Santa would hold me responsible for. He was cross & answered in a burst of ill temper that he had many letters & would take them when he wanted to. This is not quite right of Tino—& is a new & regrettable attitude, & my anxiety over it is making me ill [MTP: IVL TS 16].