January 27 Monday – At the Princess Hotel in Hamilton, Bermuda Sam wrote to daughter Clara .
Clara dear, we arrived early this morning, after a voyage which began in good form but soon degenerated into storm and turmoil.
We are very comfortably located, in the new addition to the Princess, with private bathroom, etc. The weather is balmy and sunny and altogether satisfactory. The hotels are full of people, and a shark has been seen in the Bay. There is no other society-news, therefore nothing further to report to you. I am getting ready to catch the shark, and will send him when I get him. / With love and kisses, / Marcus [MTP].
Sam also wrote to daughter Jean.
Jean dear, we have arrived, & have been housed in the hotel an hour. There are many tourists here, & I know some of them—among others, Woodrow Wilson, Admiral Upshur, & Miss Sloan, of Long Island. The sun is brilliant & the temperature soft & balmy.
A beautiful dog has come in, uninvited, & has gone to sleep in a chair. He is a bow-legged brindle, & his underjaw sticks out so far that it breaks the fall of his tears when he weeps.
There isn’t anything to write about, dear Jean, so I close with love & kisses / Father [MTP]. Note: Admiral John Henry Upshur (1823-1917), veteran of the Mexican War and Civil War.
Sam’s A.D. of Feb. 13 revisited this first full day in Bermuda:
My first day in Bermuda paid a dividend—in fact a double dividend—it broke the back of my cold and it added a jewel to my collection. As I entered the breakfast-room the first object I saw in that spacious and far-reaching place was a little girl seated solitary at a table for two. I bent down over her and patted her check and said, affectionately and with compassion,
“Why you dear little rascal—do you have to eat your breakfast all by yourself in this desolate way” She turned up her face with a sweet friendliness in it and said, not in a tone of censure, but of approval,
“Mamma is a little slow, but she came down here to get rested.”
“She has found the right place, dear. I don’t seem to remember your name; what is it?”
By the sparkle in her brown eyes, it amused her. She said,
“Why you’ve never known it, Mr. Clemens, because you’ve never seen me before.”
“Why that is true, now that I come to think; it certainly is true and it must be one of the reasons why I have forgotten your name. But I remember it now perfectly—it’s Mary.”
She was amused again; amused beyond smiling; amused to a chuckle, a musical gurgle, and she said,
“Oh no it isn’t, it’s Margaret.”
I feigned to be ashamed of my mistake, and said,
“Ah well, I couldn’t have made that mistake a few years ago, but I am old now, and one of age’s earliest infirmities is a damaged memory; but I am clearer now—clearer-headed—it all comes back to me; I remember your whole name now, just as if it were yesterday. It’s Margaret Holcomb.”
She was surprised into a laugh this time; the rippling laugh that a happy brook makes when it breaks out of the shadow into the sunshine, and she said,
“Oh you are wrong again; you don’t get anything right. It isn’t Holcomb, it’s Blackmer.”
I was ashamed again, and confessed it; then
“How old are you, dear?”
“Twelve, New Year’s. Twelve and a month.”
“Ah, you’ve got it down fine, honey; it belongs to your blessed time of life; when we get to be seventy-two we don’t reckon by months any more.”
She said, with a fine complimentary surprise in her innocent eyes,
“Why you don’t look old, Mr. Clemens.”
I said I wasn’t, except by the almanac—otherwise I was only fourteen. I patted her dainty brown hand and added,
“Good-bye dear, I am going to my table now; but after breakfast—Where are you going to wait for me?”
“In the big general room.”
“I’ll be there.”
We were close comrades—inseparables in fact—for eight days. Every day we made pedestrian excursions—called them that any way, and honestly they were intended for that, and that is what they would have been but for the persistent intrusion of a gray and grave and rough coated little donkey by the name of Maude. Maude was four feet long; she was mounted on four slender little stilts, and had ears that doubled her altitude when she stood them up straight. Which she seldom did. Her ears were a most interesting study. She was always expressing her private thoughts and opinions with them, and doing it with such nice shadings, and so intelligibly, that she had no need of speech whereby to reveal her mind. This was all new to me. The donkey had always been a sealed book to me before, but now I saw that I could read this one as easily as I could read coarse print. Sometimes she would throw those ears straight forward, like the prongs of a fork; under the impulse of a fresh emotion she would lower the starboard one to a level; next she would stretch it backward till it pointed nor’-nor’east; next she would retire it to due east, and presently clear down to southeast-by—south—all these changes revealing her thoughts to me without her suspecting it.
She always worked the port ear for a quite different set of emotions, and sometimes she would fetch both ears rearward till they were level and became a fork, the one prong pointing southeast the other southwest. She was a most interesting little creature, and always self- possessed, always dignified always resisting authority; never in agreement with anybody, and if she ever smiled once during the eight days I did not catch her at it. Her tender was a little bit of a cart with seat room for two in it, and you could fall out of it without knowing it, it was so close to the ground. This battery was in command of a nice grave, dignified, gentle-faced little black boy whose age was about twelve, and whose name, for some reason or other, was Reginald. Reginald and Maud—I shall not easily forget those names, nor the combination they stood for once I reproached Reginald. I said,
“Reginald, what kind of morals do you sport? You contracted to be here with the battery yesterday afternoon-on the Sabbath Day, mind you—at two o’clock, to assist in the usual pedestrian excursion to Spanish Point and Paradise Vale, and you violated that contract. What is the explanation of this conduct—this conduct which in my opinion is criminal?”
He was not flurried, not affected in any way; not humiliated, not disturbed in his mind. He didn’t turn a feather, but justified his course as calmly and as comprehensively as Maud could have done it with her ears:
“Why I had to go to Sunday school.”
I said with severity,
“So it is Bermudian morals, is it, to break contracts in order to keep the Sabbath? What do you think of yourself, Reginald?”
The rebuke was lost; it didn’t hit him anywhere he said, easily and softly and contentedly, “Why I couldn’t keep ‘em both; I had to break one of ‘em.” I dropped the matter there. There’s no use in arguing against a settled conviction.
The excursioning party always consisted of the same persons: Miss W., [Wallace] Mr. Ashcroft, Margaret, Reginald, [in handwriting: Misses Elizabeth Wallace.]
A bright and charming lady with a touch of gray in her hair, head of a college in the University of Chicago, Margaret’s most devoted friend, if I except myself, Maud and me. The trip, out + return, was five or six miles, and it generally took us three hours to make it. This was because Maud set the pace. Sometimes she kept up with her own shadow, but mostly she didn’t. She had the finest eye in the company for an ascending grade; she could detect an ascending grade where neither water nor a spirit-level could do it, and whenever she detected an ascending grade she respected it; she stopped and said with her ears,
“This is getting unsatisfactory. We will camp here.”
Then all the vassals would get behind the cart and shove it up the ascending grade, and shove Maud along with it. The whole idea of these excursions was that Margaret and I should employ them for the gathering of strength, by walking—yet we were oftener in the cart than out of it. She drove and I superintended. In the course of the first excursion I found a beautiful little shell on the beach at Spanish Point; its hinge was old and dry, and the two halves came apart in my hand. I gave one of them to Margaret and said,
“Now dear, sometime or other in the future I shall run across you somewhere, and it may turn out that it is not you at all, but will be some girl that only resembles you. I shall be saying to myself ‘I know that this is a Margaret, by the look of her but I don’t know for sure whether this it is my Margaret or somebody else’s; but no matter, I can soon find out, for I shall take my half shell out of my pocket and say ‘I think you are my Margaret, but I am not certain; if you are my Margaret you will be able to produce the other half of this shell’”.
Next morning when I entered the breakfast-room and saw the child sitting solitary at her two- seated breakfast-table I approached and scanned her searchingly all over, then said sadly,
“No, I am mistaken; she looks like my Margaret, but she isn’t, and I am so sorry, I will go away and cry, now.”
Her eyes danced triumphantly, and she cried out,
“No, you don’t have to. There!” and she fetched out the identifying shell.
I was beside myself with gratitude and joyful surprise, and revealed it from every pore. The child could not have enjoyed this thrilling little drama more if we had been playing it on the stage. Many times afterward she played the chief part herself, pretending to be in doubt as to my identity and challenging me to produce my half of the shell. She was always hoping to catch me without it, but I always defeated that game—wherefore she came at last to recognize that I was not only old, but very smart [MTP; D. Hoffman in part, 93-4 ].
Note: Elizabeth Wallace, dean of women at the University of Chicago on vacation, saw Sam’s love of girls between ten and sixteen as a desire to retrieve the loss of daughter Susy [94]. Margaret Gray Blackmer (1897-1987) was the daughter of lawyer and financier Henry Myron Blackmer and his first wife Helen Kerr. Henry had made his wealth financing railroads, and in banking and oil. He was known as a free-spender.
Isabel Lyon’s journal: The King throws such a new strong light, such a delighting original light on every subject that is brought up that when he is away we move through letter parade of conversation in darkness.
Lounsbury came in today to talk about the telephone line & poles & closing up the gates that let the cattle in to wander over the King’s land, & the cess pool & the gas. Some of those men have been so slow. He says that the 3 big windows out of the dining room are outlined in red stucco—& that they don’t quite like it. Lounsbury is touching, for his devotion to the King’s place takes up all his thought & he sat here with the tears running down his cheeks when he told how he had sat up all night to keep the furnaces going so that the plastering wouldn’t freeze. The men take turn about. Then he said that when Sunderland came up to figure up for the speaking tube that runs from the King’s room to the kitchen & found the cost of it, because it isn’t in the contract, then struck his pencil through the figures saying, “It’s the only thing he has asked for, & I guess we can make him [a] present of that” [MTP: IVL TS 16-17].