February 13 Thursday – In Calcutta during the morning Sam attended the Supreme Legislative Council, and noted “the Viceroy (Lord Elgin) in the chair” [NB 36 TS 43-4]. The Englishman reported on Feb. 14 that the Council “had a distinguished visitor in the person of Mark Twain at its weekly meeting yesterday morning. Mr Clemens seemed to take considerable interest in the proceedings, which struck him as practical and businesslike” [Ahluwalia 15].

At 5:30 p.m. Sam gave his “At Home” lecture at the Theatre Royal to another packed house, his last in Calcutta. Sam’s notebook:

Packed house — jammed. Read Punch, McWilliams, Sandpile, German, 1.10. [hr+10 min.].

Didn’t do the Golden Arm — saved it for next Tuesday.

Barney [servant] is slow & not sure, Mausie [servant] is quick and not sure. Barney was to put a glass of water on my stage-table….What he finally did was to put a vast empty glass on the stage & a full one behind the scenes…. [NB 36 TS 43-4].

Note: Reviews published Feb. 14: Calcutta Englishman; Calcutta Indian Daily News; The Statesman [Ahluwalia 22]. The following is from a reproduction in Rodney, next to p.182 in the Feb.14 Calcutta Indian Daily News:

MARK TWAIN’S LAST LECTURE

MARK TWAIN gave his last, “At Home,” yesterday afternoon [Feb. 13], and if one is to judge from the packed state of the Theatre Royal (many being turned away for want of space), our genial humourist might go on talking to crowded houses for an indefinite period. Anyway there was no lack of appreciation last evening, for every now and then, after an interval of intense silence, there would arise a burst of laughter and applause. Our visitor yesterday commenced by giving his excruciating experiences of learning a doggerel, composed as he put it, by a newspaper man who had nothing better to do, although personally he did not think there was such a thing as a newspaper man who had nothing to do. With a view to get the particular doggerel (the refrain of which was “Punch in the presence of the passenjare,” and which had reference to tram car tickets) out of his head, he took a ten-mile walk with a clerical friend — he always liked walking with clerical people: it was respectable: it reflected respectability on both.

Parsons writes of the Calcutta campaign:

Each of Mark’s three At Homes was in a “packed house — jammed” with the most responsive listeners of his Indian tour. His eyes half shut, his voice a monotone which sank “at times almost to a stage whisper,” he threw everyone off guard before slipping into intricate asides and afterthoughts. Under his magic, the Mississippi seemed to flow through the Garden of Eden. He resurrected his own past in order to prove that “a moral lesson might be deduced from every crime” and expatiated on “the foibles of man — and woman.” …But his greatest hit, “one in fact that brought down the house,” was a poem on the anomalies of the ornithorhynchus, an egg-laying mammal. “I wrote it in haste while traveling in Australia as I knew the poetlaureateship was vacant, but I have since found that I was too late. However, I am reconciled to having lost the laureateship, for it has been given to a good poet like me….The present Laureate is just the same kind of poet as I am.” This ribbing of Tennyson’s feeble successor, Alfred Austin, caused laughter to roll “for some minutes” [“MT India” 87-8]. (Editorial emphasis.)