To make an end of these records as to Clemens’s beliefs, so far as I knew them, I should say that he never went back to anything like faith in the Christian theology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a conscious divinity.  It is best to be honest in this matter; he would have hated anything else, and I do not believe that the truth in it can hurt any one.  At one period he argued that there must have been a cause, a conscious source of things; that the universe could not have come by chance.  I have heard also that in his last hours or moments he said, or his dearest ones hoped he had said, something about meeting again.  But the expression, of which they could not be certain, was of the vaguest, and it was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness.  All his expressions to me were of a courageous, renunciation of any hope of living again, or elsewhere seeing those he had lost.  He suffered terribly in their loss, and he was not fool enough to try ignoring his grief.  He knew that for this there were but two medicines; that it would wear itself out with the years, and that meanwhile there was nothing for it but those respites in which the mourner forgets himself in slumber.  I remember that in a black hour of my own when I was called down to see him, as he thought from sleep, he said with an infinite, an exquisite compassion, “Oh, did I wake you, did I wake, you?” Nothing more, but the look, the voice, were everything; and while I live they cannot pass from my sense.

IX.

He was the most caressing of men in his pity, but he had the fine instinct, which would have pleased Lowell, of never putting his hands on you—­fine, delicate hands, with taper fingers, and pink nails, like a girl’s, and sensitively quivering in moments of emotion; he did not paw you with them to show his affection, as so many of us Americans are apt to do.  Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities that each of us becomes, I should say that Clemens’s central and final personality was something exquisite.  His casual acquaintance might know him, perhaps, from his fierce intensity, his wild pleasure in shocking people with his ribaldries and profanities, or from the mere need of loosing his rebellious spirit in that way, as anything but exquisite, and yet that was what in the last analysis he was.  They might come away loathing or hating him, but one could not know him well without realizing him the most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men.  He was Southwestern, and born amid the oppression of a race that had no rights as against ours, but I never saw a man more regardful of negroes.  He had a yellow butler when I first began to know him, because he said he could not bear to order a white man about, but the terms of his ordering George were those of the softest entreaty which command ever wore.  He loved to rely upon George, who was such a broken reed in some things, though so stanch in