Clemens, but the vast
remaining sum was due to banks, to printers, to binders, and to dealers
in various publishing materials. Somehow it must be paid. As for their
assets, they looked ample enough on paper, but in reality, at a time like
this, they were problematical. In fact, their value was very doubtful
indeed. What he was to do Clemens did not know. He could not even send
cheerful reports to Europe. There was no longer anything to promise
concerning the type-setter. The fifty machines which the company had
started to build had dwindled to ten machines; there was a prospect that
the ten would dwindle to one, and that one a reconstruction of the
original Hartford product, which had cost so much money and so many weary
years. Clemens spent a good part of his days at The Players, reading or
trying to write or seeking to divert his mind in the company of the
congenial souls there, waiting for-he knew not what.
Yet at this very moment a factor was coming into his life, a human
element, a man to whom in his old age Mark Twain owed more than to any
other of his myriad of friends. One night, when he was with Dr. Clarence
C. Rice at the Murray Hill Hotel, Rice said:
"Clemens, I want you to know my friend, Mr. H. H. Rogers. He is an
admirer of your books."
Clemens turned and was looking into the handsome, clean-cut features of
the great financier, whose name was hardly so familiar then as it became
at a later period, but whose power was already widely known and felt
among his kind.
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