Around the World With Mark Twain by Robert Cooper

Author:Robert Cooper [Cooper, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-648-6
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2011-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-seven

NEITHER IN AUSTRALASIA nor in India did the Clemenses manage without a servant. A maid accompanied them through Australia and New Zealand. When the family arrived at a station, she would take charge of the trunks and bags and ensure their safe arrival at the hotel. She would help with the constant packing and unpacking. Before a performance, she would brush and lay out Clemens’s evening clothes, and place the buttons and studs in his clean shirt. The Clemenses did not take her to India because of the expense.

Even if you were not an international celebrity on tour, it was essential to hire a servant in India. Clemens wrote that “you hire him as soon as you touch Indian soil; for no matter what your sex is, you cannot do without him. He is messenger, valet, chambermaid, table-waiter, lady’s maid, courier — he is everything.” All three Clemenses commented on the custom of being waited on, at a hotel dining room, by one’s own servants. British residents in India were accustomed to seeing at a dinner party not only their own household waiters but also their own crockery. Their host’s steward would have organized both in advance.

Your servant, Clemens asserted, should be hired with care “because as long as he is in your employ he will be about as near to you as your clothes.” The Clemens party of four traveled throughout India with two servants, who slept on the floor outside the party’s rooms unless they were on a train, when the servants would find space in the third-class carriages.

According to Clemens’s account in Following the Equator, the first servant they engaged proved to be slow, forgetful, inefficient, unskilled as a waiter, and incomprehensible and uncomprehending in English, so they dismissed him after a week’s trial. His successor was fast, efficient, and bright. “All my heart, all my affection, all my admiration, went out spontaneously to this frisky little forked black thing, this compact and compressed incarnation of energy and force and promptness and celerity and confidence, this smart, smily, engaging, shiny-eyed little devil, feruled on his upper end by a gleaming fire-coal of a fez with a red-hot tassel dangling from it.” Clemens considered the servant’s name, Mousa, as “out of character; it was too soft, too quiet, too conservative; it didn’t fit his splendid style.” Clemens referred to him in his journal as Mousa or Mouza, although if we are to believe his account in Following the Equator, Clemens asked and received permission to call him “Satan.” “He was always busy,” Clemens reported in Following the Equator, “kept the rooms tidied up, the boots polished, the clothes brushed, the wash-basin full of clean water, my dress-clothes laid out and ready for the lecture-hall an hour ahead of time; and he dressed me from head to heel in spite of my determination to do it myself, according to my life-long custom.”

He served them at table with great style, “in a swell hotel or in a private house

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