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Title: Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field
Tales told by a fellow correspondent
Author: Henry W. Fischer
Release date: October 4, 2024 [eBook #74514]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Nicholas L. Brown
Credits: Carla Foust, Susan E. and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ABROAD WITH MARK TWAIN AND EUGENE FIELD ***
ABROAD WITH
MARK TWAIN
and EUGENE FIELD
_Tales They Told to a Fellow Correspondent_
By
HENRY W. FISHER
[Illustration]
NICHOLAS L. BROWN
NEW YORK MCMXXII
COPYRIGHT, 1922
_by_
NICHOLAS L. BROWN
To
MARIAN PHELPS
(_Mrs. Phelps-Peters_)
whose youth, beauty and cleverness delighted Mark Twain in his troubled
Berlin days.
_EDITOR’S NOTE_
_Along in 1909, Fisher and I were working for the same newspaper,
Fisher as a special writer and I in the art department. We both
subsequently escaped, but that is another story. Just then I happened
to be working on the_ BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN _(Harper, 1910).
Fisher told me that he was going to do some magazine stories on Mark
and promised to let me have proofs, but a week or two later he went
away on one of his periodical trips to Europe, and I lost track of him
for several years._
_Some time in 1921, I met him on Broadway, New York. “Hello, Fisher,”
says I, “where have you been, what are you doing, and where are those
flowing whiskers you used to sport?”_
_“Hello, Johnson,” replied Fisher, peering at me through his thick
glasses, “I am just back from London, the air raids scared off my
whiskers, and my eyesight has become so bad, I am only fit to be a
‘dictator’ now.”_
_“Well,” says I, continuing our conversation of many years ago, “where
are those Mark Twain yarns you promised me?”_
_“In my head,” he said; “never had time to put them on paper.” “You
know,” he added, “old Mark and I spent many weeks and months together
in Berlin and Vienna and frequently met in London and Paris, not to
mention more out-of-the-way places, and if I really put my mind to
it, I can remember reams of Mark Twain’s sayings, while others are
available in notebooks, diaries and such I kept off and on. And come to
think of it, I can tell you about Eugene Field over there as well. I
happened to occupy an editorial position in London, while Gene tried to
set the Thames afire and--failed, poor chap.”_
_“Then,” says I, “come up to the studio any day, to-morrow if you like.
I will have a stenographer there and you can start dictating your
stories and we shall set the world laughing, putting them in a book.”_
_Fisher did, and here’s the book._
* * * * *
_Twain and Field did not expatriate themselves to the extent of
other gifted Americans--Henry James, Bret Harte, Whistler, Abbey and
Sargent--yet Twain settled down for months, and even years, in various
European countries, while Field tried, during a hundred days or more,
to make a go of it in London, before capitulating to climate and
home-hunger._
_Previous glimpses of these two great American humorists during their
several sojourns in Europe have come to us almost wholly through their
letters to friends at home. Of course, a man reveals himself to a great
extent in his private correspondence and diaries, but, even so, the
picture is never complete; he cannot quite see himself as others see
him. How Twain and Field appeared to another American in their strange
environment is here set down for the first time._
_Fisher was in a unique position for contact with these men, both of
whom he had met previously in the United States. He was one of the
most widely known American correspondents in foreign parts; he had
written for the Dalziel News Company (then a sort of United Press,
dealing with the European continent) letters from Paris, Berlin, St.
Petersburg, Copenhagen, Belgrade, Vienna, Budapest, etc., that were
telegraphed all over the world. He had acted as correspondent for the
New York Telegram, the New York World, the New York Sun, the London
Evening News, the Paris Messenger and the St. James Gazette; he had
written special articles for Harper’s Weekly, printed alongside of Mark
Twain’s contributions. He knew, or at least had a smattering knowledge
of, all European languages; he knew every European capital or resort by
eyesight and insight; he had met the great personages of Europe. So it
was quite in the nature of things that Mark and Field ran across Fisher
at the common meeting places in foreign parts, the U. S. Embassies and
Legations; likewise that these American writers accepted his guidance
in the strange world they found themselves in._
_Paine, Twain’s great biographer, speaks of Fisher’s contact with the
famous author (vol. II, p. 935, “Mark Twain: A Biography”). Fisher’s
memory, trained by years of interviewing, when no notes could be taken
in the presence of the interviewed, has retained the substance and the
manner, if not always the exact language, used and exchanged._
_Some writers reveal themselves only in their written, carefully edited
works, but Twain’s unique personality was as eminent, as inspiring and
as lasting in his daily walks and talks as in his books and lectures.
In so far as Fisher reproduces the meaning of Twain’s observations on
persons and things abroad, these anecdotes are of value to all friends
and admirers of the great humorist. The same applies to Eugene Field,
though, of course, in a more limited degree._
_MERLE JOHNSON._
_New York,
January, 1922._
CONTENTS
PAGE
Editor’s Note vii
Author’s Preface xv
How Mark Would Safeguard England 25
Mark Philosophized on Willie 33
Mark--Regicide 34
The Funniest Speech Mark Ever Heard 36
Monarchical Atavism 42
Democratic Mark and the Austrian Aristocracy 43
Phil Sheridan’s Friend 45
“Elizabeth Was a He,” Said Mark 47
Mark, the Sleight-of-hand Man 55
Mark and the Imperial Mistress 57
Mark on Lynch Law 59
Recollections of King Charles and Grant 62
Mark Missed Gallows-land 64
Think of Her Sorrows 66
Breaking the News Gently 67
Dukes and Unborn Car Horses 69
“Pa Used to Be a Terrible Man” 70
Mark on the Berlin Cops 71
The Sausage Room 74
Mark’s Glimpse of Schopenhauer 77
“Murderer” Blucher in Oxford 86
Mark’s Human Side 88
An Australian Surprise 90
Mark in France and Italy 92
Why Mark Wouldn’t Like to Die Abroad 93
The Left Hand Didn’t Know 95
American Humorists 96
Telepathy or Suggestion 97
Trying to Be Serious Didn’t Work 99
Assorted Beauties 100
Mark’s Children Knew Him 101
Mark, Dogs, Dagoes, and Cats 102
The Tragedy of Genius 103
Kilties and the Lassie 105
A Wise Provision of Providence 107
The Awful German Language 108
Artist or Photographer 110
Mark Interviewed the Barber about Harry Thaw 112
His Portrait--a Mirror 115
Mark, Bismarck, Lincoln, and Darwin 116
Mark at the Stock Exchange, Vienna 120
Mark and the Prussian Lieutenant 121
Mark Studies the Costermonger Language 123
That _Beautiful_ Funeral 125
Ada’s Beast of a Man 126
Jealousy in Lowland 127
The Troubles of Liz 128
The French Madame 130
The Great Disappointment 134
Rheumatism and Prodding 137
On Literary Friendships 138
Bayard Taylor’s German 139
Genius in Extremis 140
What May Happen to You after You Are Dead 143
Kings in Their Birthday Suits 146
Mark on Lincoln’s Humanity 147
An English Lover of Kings and a Hater 150
Mark Got Arrested in Berlin 154
Books that Weren’t Written 157
Mark Enjoyed Other Humorists 160
Mark and the English Hack-writer 162
Mark Thought Joan of Arc Was Slandered 164
Running Amuck--Almost 166
Mark’s Idiomatic Gems 167
Mark and the Girls that Love a Lord 168
Mark’s Martyrdom 173
Slang Not in Mark’s Dictionary 175
Mark “No Gentleman” 177
Mark, Poetry, and Art 178
Mark Sheds Light on English History 179
Mark Explains Dean Swift 183
Mark in Tragedy and Comedy 185
“Ambition Is a Jade that More Than One Man Can Ride” 190
Mark as a Translator 192
Mark in England 194
Why Mark Was Uncomfortable in the King of Sweden’s Presence 196
Mark’s Idea of High Art 197
Mark Meets King Leopold--Almost 199
Sizing Up of Aristocracy by Mark 201
The Bald-headed Woman 204
When a Publisher Dines and Wines You 205
Mark in Politics 208
Mark on “Royal Honors” 209
American Women the Prettiest 212
Where Tay Pay Isn’t Tay Pay 213
The Man Who Didn’t Get Used to Hanging 214
Stray Sayings of Mark 218
Eugene Field and His Troubles in Chicago 223
More of Eugene Field’s Trials in London 227
Gene, a “Success of Curiosity” 230
Dire Consequences of American Horseplay 233
Field’s Library of Humor 240
Those German Professors 241
Eugene Field and Northern Lore 243
Little Boy Blue 246
PREFACE
To begin with, of course, I don’t claim that _all_ these stories are
absolutely first hand. I sometimes jotted down what I heard Mark say,
or stored his talk in some compartment of memory, only to hear him
repeat the yarn, after a space, in quite different fashion.
“You remind me of Charles II,” I said to him once, referring to that
confusing habit of his, and was going to “substantiate” when he
interrupted.
“I can guess what you mean, but never mind, for all you know I may be
Charlie’s reincarnation. Charles, you wanted to say, had only three
stories up his sleeve and these he told over and over again for new
ones to Nell and the rest of the bunch. And varied them so cleverly and
disguised them so well, that his audience never got on to the fact that
His Majesty had been chestnutting. As for me, I can only hope that I
will succeed as well as Charlie did.”
In Berlin I once heard Susie Clemens--ill-fated, talented girl, who
died so young--say to her father: “Grouchy again! They _do_ say that
you can be funny when company is around--too bad that you don’t
consider Henry Fisher company.”
“Out of the mouth of sucklings,” quoth Clemens and gave Susie the
twenty marks she was after, and he kissed her: “Good-by, little
blackmailer, and don’t tell your mamma how you worked that fool papa of
yours.”
Indeed, Mark was not always the humorist the public mind pictures him.
Very often, for long hours at a time, in our intercourse extending
over thirty years, he was decidedly serious, while at other times he
grumbled at everything and everybody. His initial object in choosing
me for his “bear-leader” was to add to his stock of knowledge on
foreign affairs and to correct erroneous ideas he might have acquired
from books. Since I had resided many years on the Continent, and had
command of the languages he lacked, he asked me to pilot him around
Berlin, Paris, and Vienna, and on such occasions his talk was more
often deep and learned than laughter-provoking. In an afternoon or
morning’s work--getting atmosphere, _i. e._, “the hang of things”
German or Austrian, as Mark called it--he sometimes dropped two or
three memorable witticisms, but familiar intercourse in the long
run left no doubt of the fact that a very serious vein bordering on
melancholy underlay his mask of bonhomie. On the other hand a closer or
more intelligent student of life never lived. He was as conscientious,
as true, and as simple as Washington Irving.
Those occasional lapses into dejection notwithstanding, it struck
me that Mark extracted his humor out of the bounty and abundance of
his own nature. Hence his tinkling grotesquerie, unconventionality,
whimsicality, play of satire, and shrieking irony, between touches of
deep seriousness.
Really much of Mark’s wisdom began and ended in humor and vice versa.
There was originality and penetration in everything he said. Howells
has said of Mark: “If a trust of his own was betrayed--Clemens was
ruthlessly, implacably resentful.” For my part, in thirty years, I
never heard him speak ill of any living person, except one or two
self-appointed editors.
I first met him in Chicago during the Grant celebration, November,
1879, when I heard him give the toast on babies, but I do not remember
a word of his speech, for while it lasted I was sitting next to Grant
and Grant kept me busy watching and attending his immutable and
eloquent silence.
When Mark and I were fellow correspondents in Berlin, I met his wife
and family frequently at their home, at the Hotel Royal, and on public
occasions. The three girls, Jean, Susie, and Clara, were in their
teens, and both lovely and lively. At that time the late William Walter
Phelps of New Jersey was American minister in Berlin. We had been
friends in America and Phelps had also known Mr. Clemens in the States
socially. Like everybody else, he delighted in Mark’s stimulating
company. Among other distinguished Americans in Berlin, in 1891, was
Ward Hill Lamon, Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield law partner, later
his private secretary, and Marshal of the District of Columbia during
Lincoln’s administration. Lamon was the author of “The Life of Abraham
Lincoln” and “Recollections of Abraham Lincoln.” These books the
Lincoln family did not enjoy.
When the Clemenses went to live in Vienna, six years later, I happened
to be correspondent at the Austrian capital for Dalziel’s News, London,
and Galignani’s Messenger, Paris, and as Mark, used to the Berlin
dialect, found it difficult “to acclimatize his German, making it chime
in with the Vienna variety” (his own description), I was again much in
demand as interpreter, pathfinder, and general cicerone.
In later years I met Mark repeatedly during his several London seasons,
for, liking his society, I called at Brown’s or his apartment whenever
he came to England, myself being engaged in literary work there. We
were never on terms of particular intimacy--hail-fellows-well-met, yes!
“Hello, Mark”--“Hello Henry W.--you here again?” We stuck verbally to
the formula of the old Chicago days, and I was glad to be of use to him
when it suited his fancy. Moreover, I was vastly interested in Mark’s
books, short stories, and essays, but found him rarely inclined to talk
shop unless it was the other fellow’s.
Rudyard Kipling he used to designate “the militant spokesman of the
Anglo-Saxon races,” and he sometimes spoke with near-admiration of
Bernard Shaw, “whose plays are popular from London to St. Petersburg,
from Christiania to Madrid, from Havre to Frisco, and from Frisco to
the Antipodes, while mine are nowhere.”
After I visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana he said to me: “Lucky
dog, you have broken bread with the man who commands, and almost
monopolizes, the thought of the world.”
That the universality of his humor and its humanity made him the peer
of these great writers, of all his contemporaries in fact, seemed to
be far from his thoughts. His verbal humor, like his fancy, was as
simple in form and as direct in application as were the army orders
of the great Napoleon. He liked to hear me say that, for he knew that
some of my forbears had been individually attached to the person of the
Emperor. But the most he ever said concerning his authorship and other
writers in his own line was this:
“I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the
dictionary to get laughs. Like you and Susie” (referring to his oldest
daughter) “I can’t spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a
‘k’ to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged
drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.”
One more of his sayings: At the unveiling of a bronze tablet to Eugene
Field, Mark uttered these words:
“By his life he made bright the lives of all who knew him and by his
books he cheered the thoughts of thousands who didn’t know him.”
Substitute “millions” for thousands and you have Mark Twain the Man and
Mark Twain the Writer.
***
One afternoon, having laughed our fill with the “Belle of New York”
and rejoiced in the London success of the piece (Mark, who while alive
enjoyed scant luck as a playwright, yet loved to see others “win out”),
our friend and the present writer happened to cross Bedford Square.
Seeing the name at a street corner, Mark pulled out his notebook.
“Eugene Field lived somewhere around here in 1889,” he said. I showed
him the house, No. 20 Alfred Street.
“A dark and dismal hole,” said Mark, ruefully shaking his head; “no
wonder he couldn’t find his ‘righteous stomach’ there, even in the
absence of Chicago pies.”
“And _coffee_,” I interpolated. “Yours truly, too, would have died of
dyspepsia if he had stayed in Chicago and continued at Henrici’s coffee
and pie counter, as Gene did.”
Mark remained silent for a block or two. “I’ve got it,” he said at
last, “God gave Gene a good enough stomach, and English hospitality
completely paralyzed what was left of his digestive powers after the
Cook County coffee and pie diet. Did you see much of Gene while he was
in London?”
I told Mark all I knew about Field’s social and literary doings.
“Bennett was right when he refused him a job on the London Herald,”
said Clemens. “For one thing, the Herald didn’t last long, and the
English climate would have cut poor Gene’s life still shorter by two or
three winters and falls.”
Just the same, the desire for a London success, then
common among American writers and artists, killed Eugene
Field, the genial and lovable poet of childhood and
man-about-literature’s-highways-and-byways.
HENRY W. FISHER.
In the last days of
December, 1921.
ABROAD WITH MARK TWAIN
HOW MARK WOULD SAFEGUARD ENGLAND.[A]
“Not on your life,” said Mark Twain, in pajamas and dressing gown,
lolling in his big armchair at Brown’s (“the only subdued and homelike
inn left in London,” he used to call it)--“not if you bring the Bath
Club (and tub) right into this suite so I don’t have to shock my good
English friends by painting the town blue skipping across Dover Street
in my dressing gown. By the way,” he added, winking an eye at Bram
Stoker, “my daughter Clara bought me this--” (he held up the skirts
of his bathrobe with both hands) “a most refined girl! If she wasn’t,
would she have sent me a wire like this?
“‘Much worried by newspapers. Remember proprieties.’”
“And what did you answer?” asked Bram.
“None of your business! You are getting as fresh as a reporter,”
snapped Twain, with mock severity, while looking at me.
In the meanwhile I consulted my notebook. “It’s sixteen years since the
Kaiser--” I reopened the case--
“Oh, I have a notebook too. Wait a minute,” interrupted Twain. He gave
his secretary directions, and presently read from an old, much worn
diary, sustaining my date-line as it were--
“... since this democratic lamb and the Imperial lion laid down
together, a little General providing grub--”
“Sixteen years is a long time, and if the Kaiser imposed silence
upon you then and there, the lid is certainly off now,” I insisted.
“Besides, at present, he’s got Nietzsche on the brain.”
“I don’t care whether Annie Besant and William Jennings Bryan occupy
lofts in his upper story,” said Twain. “I had promised Von Versen” (the
General and Mark’s relation) “not to talk about that jamboree, and the
worms, if interested, will have to turn burglars and jimmy my brain
cells, where memories of the banquet are stored, for I swear I’ll leave
no skeleton key.”
“Pshaw! You are still sore because Willie wouldn’t let you get in a
word edgewise,” said Stoker.
“Man alive!” cried Twain, “his talk was selling books for me. I was in
rotten bad shape then financially, doing syndicate work for ‘The Sun’
and ‘McClure’s’. Could I afford to say, ‘Can your talk, Willie’?--like
poverty, they have you with them always--but I am here for a short time
only--my turn to stir up the animals.”
We agreed that if an emperor climbs the dizzy heights of bookmongerdom
he ought to have all the rope he wants.
“And did you like the British better than the Berlin brand of king?”
was asked.
“They let me do a lot of talking at Windsor,” evaded honest Mark. “I
like these folks immensely. Ed is a manly fellow, despite his Hoboken
accent--no wonder he fought with his ma, who wore the pants while
Albert was alive, and tried to impose her German policies on her
successor-to-be. Ed recalled an indigestion which we both entertained
at Homburg, at the Elizabeth Spa there, which is more kinds of pure
salt than Kissingen even. The blonde Fräulein who had sold us the
liquid caviar advised walking it off, and as stomachache inclines to
democracy the same as toothache, I didn’t mind tramping with Ed, though
I fancied that I would hear more about royal inner works than was
decent for a minister’s son.”
“Did you tell the King any yarns?”
“Well, he referred to my giving out that interview about the news of
my death being greatly exaggerated, and was pleased to call it funny.
When I said that everybody more or less was given to overstatement,
Ed commented, dryly, ‘Especially my nephew of Germany.’ So I told the
story of the Russian Jew who claimed to have been chased by 47 wolves.
“‘You probably were so frightened you saw double,’ suggested the
magistrate.
“‘There were 12 at least,’ insisted Isaac.
“‘Won’t half a dozen do?’
“‘As I live, there were seven.’
“‘Now tell the truth, Isaac. There was one wolf--one is enough to
frighten a little Israelite like you.’
“Isaac, glad of saving one out of 47, nodded.
“‘But maybe the creature wasn’t a wolf at all!’
“‘No wolf!’ cried Isaac, ‘what else could he be? Didn’t he have four
legs, and didn’t he wag his tail?’
“After that Ed turned me over to the Queen and a tribe of Princes and
Princesses, who all seemed much relieved when I solemnly informed them
that I had no intention of buying Windsor Castle this trip. Then we
talked commonplaces until Alexandra commanded me to put on my hat lest
I catch cold, which gave me a chance to tell about Will Penn. Penn,
you’ll remember, insisted on wearing his hat everywhere. When he saw
King Charles, the second of his name, doff his chapeau at a court
function, the future Philadelphian inquired:
“‘Friend Charles, why dost thou take off thy lid?’
“‘Because,’ answered Charles, ‘it is customary at court that only one
may remain covered in the King’s presence.’
“I was ashamed, cracking that chestnut,” said Mark, “but Alexandra and
the youngsters seemed to think it a real side-splitter to judge by the
noise they made.”
“Nice people,” said Bram.
“You bet,” spoke Mark emphatically, “and that’s why I’ll have a word
or two with the War Office of this here realm before I quit. I have
been thinking, you know. When we got through with the grub at General
Versen’s and retired to the smoking room, that Kaiser, in the meantime
reinforced by a lot of his officers that came in for beer, pretzels
and cigars--that Kaiser worked himself up into a fine frenzy about his
U-boats. His Germania Shipyards at Kiel (they were really Krupps, but
he was the principal stockholder) would turn out better and bigger
U-boats, he said, than the French and English could ever hope to build.
And when he had enough of them, with all the improvements science and
technique could provide--then beware, proud Albion!
“Invasion was the least he threatened unless England helped him
exterminate France.
“‘It was the easiest thing in the world,’ boasted William, ‘a hundred
U-boats operating against England, Scotland and Ireland simultaneously
could pull off the trick in a day or two.’”
Mark lit a fresh cigar, tilted his feet as high as the chiffonier
allowed and developed what he was pleased to call his “strategy.”
“You see,” he said, “the waters ’round these islands are charted to
the last half pint. The British Admiralty knows the bottom as well as
the surface and the coast. Now suppose Willie or any other divinely
Appointed One (I don’t think, though, there is another as foolish and
reckless as he) should attempt to carry out that invasion threat. Mind,
its possibilities are not denied by British strategists; I have made
inquiries. Now, to meet invasion in the old orthodox way would cost a
million lives, a thousand millions in treasure, and, after all, the
result would be problematical.
“To make defeat of the invasion plans certain, we must forestall
execution. And the only way to do that is to stew those U-boats in
their own electric fat--juice, I mean. See my point?”
Bram and I said we did, “but--” and Twain, knowing that we were lying
like thieves, explained:
“In time of peace, et cetera.... In this case (I will have the device
patented, of course) we will build a steel fence all around the three
kingdoms, height to be determined by local conditions. In all cases it
will be so graduated as to allow the biggest ocean liner to pass over,
yet high enough to bar the biggest and the smallest U-boat pirate. Are
you on?” asked Mark.
Bram said he was, but I couldn’t tell another lie before luncheon.
“Well, it’s this way, you duffer,” said Mark, “somewhere, everywhere
on the English, Scottish and Irish coasts, immense dynamos will be
established--these with no fancy brushes, mark you--to connect with
certain points of my steel fence by naked cables.
“The British Admiralty will know, of course, when the U-boat armada
sets out, and will turn on the current when and where it will do the
most harm. Now the moment a U-boat touches my fence, out of business it
goes, goes for good, but at the same time its agony will start. For my
fence will be magnetized as well as electrified, and though the U-boat
is momentarily repulsed, it is held, at the same time, captive by a
giant magnet.
“Think of the fine time the enemy crew will have,” chuckled Twain,
“with ten thousands of volts pumped into their vessel at the bottom of
the sea, the magnet preventing its getaway.
“Boys,” he continued, “I would like to sit on top of Big Ben” (in the
tower of Parliament House, London) “and direct the electric strokes
myself.”
“And this epoch-making invention of yours, will you present it to Great
Britain as a free gift?”
“Not I,” said Twain. “I have a family to look after. I intend to get
a round million sterling from the War Office here. And if the British
refuse to pay, why, when you come to think of it, we have quite a long
coast line in the United States--”
While Mark was speaking, Sir Thomas Lipton came in with a newspaper
poster, four days old, that read:
MARK TWAIN ARRIVES ASCOT CUP STOLEN
And that turned the conversation into other channels.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] London, June 24th or 25th, 1907, a few days after the famous Royal
Garden Party at Windsor, where Mark had been lionized. Persons present,
Mark Twain and secretary, Bram Stoker, and author.
MARK PHILOSOPHIZED ON WILLIE
Mark had attended a masked ball at the Berlin Palace and was asked what
he thought of William Hohenzollern dressed up as Frederick the Great.
“He reminded me of the little speech addressed by a Cossack Chief to
Orloff, the lover of Catharine of Russia. Orloff visited the chief
wearing a French court costume. The Cossack began to laugh.
“‘What is there to laugh at?’ demanded Orloff in a rage.
“‘I laugh because you shaved your face to look young and put flour
in your hair to look old--both things at the same time,’ replied the
Barbarian.
“As to William, he reminded me of still another thing; namely, the
thigh-bone of a Saint I was introduced to in Italy and which, they
said, belonged to a famous preacher of old. I turned the bone, which
was encased in glass, gold and precious stones, over and over, yet
could get no notion of the quality of its original owner’s sermons.”
MARK--REGICIDE
“I have been reading up on the laws dealing with regicide,” I heard
Mark Twain tell Minister Phelps one morning in dead seriousness, “and
do you know what they are going to do with me? Three or four things.
“First, they will cut my right hand off, and then hit me on the mouth
with it, by way of reproof, I suppose. Second, they’ll hari-kari me
and build a little fire to do my insides brown--all the time keeping
me alive for the rest of the show. That will take some stimulants, I
reckon.
“Third, they’ll hang me by the neck until I am stone dead. Whether I
will get my inards and my hand back before they send me to wormland, I
don’t know.”
“What _are_ you talking about?” queried Mr. Phelps.
“Why, you made me admit yesterday to Count Seckendorff that the judge
who sent Charles the First to the block was a near relative of mine.
Now, as soon as Willie hears about that, he will have my hands, my
inards or anything else he craves of my anatomy.”
Of course, everybody roared, and Mr. Phelps had to explain that at
dinner the night before, one of the guests, the nobleman mentioned,
who was the favorite of the Empress Frederick, had boasted a lot of
his ancestry; grandfathers and uncles of his had been present at every
great battle the world over and had, of course, always fought on the
winning side. Later, when the company was looking at some engravings,
Mr. Phelps, in a joke, pointed to the figure of a Puritan, saying, with
a merry twinkle in his eye:
“Ancestor of mine.”
The picture happened to illustrate the trial of Charles the First of
England. Now, not to be outdone, Twain pointed to the Lord Judge on the
woolsack, and matched Phelps’ lie.
“_My_ ancestor, if you please.” He made the statement at the very
moment when Count Seckendorff looked at the picture. Hence, Mark’s
awful apprehensions.
“Regicide,” he told us, “is never outlawed by the lapse of time. When
Charles the First’s son was restored to the throne, hundreds of dead
regicides were pulled out of their graves by the ears and hanged and
quartered. As to the living, they were treated as I described, and I
am afraid that if Seckendorff reports me (Willie being half English) I
will be punished just as if I had made Charles a head shorter myself,
yesterday afternoon.”
THE FUNNIEST SPEECH MARK EVER HEARD
“The funniest thing I ever heard was chirped right here in this
neighborhood,” said Mark Twain, snuggling down in his big armchair
before the fire, which wasn’t blazing, and “didn’t mean to--without
kerosene” (he told the maid, warning her not to let the “Missus” know).
The “neighborhood” was Tedworth Square, London, “quite the other side
of Mayfair,” and leading to some queer streetlets and lanes.
“London’s Fifth Avenues,” mused Mark, “remind me of a sable coat (such
as Pauline Bonaparte used to wear) edged with cat-skin: There are
always Hell-kitchens within hailing distance.
“Well, at that time my girls had a friend living in Clapham, and
nightly she walked me ten or more blocks to her bus through one of
those Hell-kitchens lined with fried-fish shops and other ill-smelling
emporiums for acquisitioning lucre.”
He turned to an English friend:
“Maybe ‘lined’ isn’t correct, for the fish shops were all on one side
of the lane, and naturally I ambled along the other. I thought I was
safe there, but of course I wasn’t, for the smells zigzagged across the
pavement and followed me like a rotten conscience. My haven of safety,
or comparative safety, from the rancid oil compost was an undertaker’s
shop at the lane’s extreme end. When I got there, I used to hoist up
my coat-tails and skip across the street right into the Public ’Ouse
opposite for a Scotch. Naturally I took more or less interest in that
cemetery-correspondence school. From a notice posted, I learned that
it was under ‘new management’--I call that an ingenious appeal for
corpses, don’t you?
“Well, it wasn’t merely an office, the carpentry was right at the tail
of the roll topper; there, night after night, an old, sad-faced man
sat, looking for customers. Now, the English metropolis is reputed
the healthiest city in the world, which proves that the legend about
cleanliness being nearest to godliness is blooming rot, for London is
ten times dirtier than Berlin, seven and a half times dirtier than
New York and six times dirtier than the best parts of Paris. Anyhow,
that man-hyena, hungry for worm-food, didn’t enjoy the low rate of
mortality one single bit. I could see that every time I eyed him, and
I lamped him regularly before I waltzed into the gin-mill to drown the
fried-fish smell.”
“And did _one_ Scotch suffice for the operation?” asked Mr. Bell.
Mark looked at Mrs. Clemens and lied brazenly: “Yes, of course.” But as
she had risen to go out and was walking toward the door, he added in
an undertone: “One Scotch was like taking a bottle of perfume from the
ten-cent store into a glue factory to paralyze the Cologne smell of a
four-acre establishment of that sort.”
“To resume,” resumed Mark, “seeing each other nightly for a week or a
week and a half, that undertaker chap and this here yellow journalist
of literature got on famously, and our acquaintance, though by eyesight
only, gradually blossomed into real brotherhood. Whenever I clapped
eyes on the poor devil, I used to think: ‘I _do_ wish some one would
have the heart to die. Why don’t the Gloomy Dean or His Grace of
Canterbury oblige the poor shark?’
“And no doubt, observing my gray locks and general decrepitude, he
calculated: ‘Time for him to kick the bucket--hope his wife will give
me a chance to measure him for a ten-guinea wooden coat--yes, he looks
good for ten guineas.’
“Anyhow,” said Mark, “I felt in my heart of hearts that I was worth
more dead than alive to this person--rotten grammar, I know, but don’t
let that muss up your tempers, gents--and while the idea of suicide was
repugnant (I was making big money then, that is, I expected to rake in
$100.00 or more next week) still I cudgeled my brain for ways and means
to improve his business. It’s easy enough to promote a grocer’s or
butcher’s trade; all you have to do is to get rid of your sour stomach
at some Appetite Cure Factory, and pitch in anew with dill pickles
and strong coffee and frankfurters and sweetbreads and deep-dish
pies. But an undertaker’s! Really, I had no desire to pose for Madame
Toussaud’s dead-uns. At the same time, no doggone friend of mine would
die, giving me the chance to bury him at my expense. Running away from
that fried-fish smell, I always felt like Henry the Eighth, when one of
his half-dozen queens wouldn’t be introduced to the axe-man. Indeed, if
that starving undertaker had been my own best enemy, I couldn’t have
felt more sorry for him. But lo!--the silver lining to the cloud! One
evening, as I approached the carcassery, my startled ears were assailed
by that quaint ditty:
For we are the drunkenest lot
Of the drunken Irish crew--
and, leaping forward like oiled lightning, I saw the undertaker at work
in the rear of the shop.
“‘Bless me, if the ban isn’t broke,’ I thought, ‘and with this dent in
the armor, Fate will waltz up plenty more diseased ones. It’s always
thus.’
“Suiting my action to the classic monologue--‘thus’ is a beautiful
word, isn’t it?--I peered through the side window, expecting the
janitor of tenements-of-clay to be at work on a nine-foot coffin or
thereabout--”
All the merriment fled from Mark Twain’s face and manner when he added:
“Damme, if that God-forsaken corpse-slinger was not planing a _baby
coffin_!
“That night I took three Scotch, and” (looking around) “I don’t care if
Livy knows.”
“I thought you were going to tell a _funny_ one,” said one of us, after
a while. Clemens had got rid of his emotion by that time. “Correct,”
he drawled, “It happened a few days later, when I was working the
fried-fish side of the lane. The street was quite deserted on account
of the lateness of the hour and owing to the burial of herrings and
crab-meat in innumerable stomachs, big and little. As I put on extra
steam to reach the gin-mill before closing time, this pretty legend
wafted across the moonbeams:
“‘I say, my little female doggie’ (as a matter of fact, the shorter and
uglier word was used, but it isn’t good form, though one may mention
‘bull pups’ at Mrs. Van Astorbilt’s tea) ‘I say, my little female
doggie, tell Mother if she has another litter by that crossing sweeper
of hers, to take care to drown ’em before they grow up as big as you.’
“The lady speaking, or rather shrieking, repeated this admonition three
or four times, and followed it up with a succession of oaths that I
frankly envied her. Yes, indeed, her ‘female doggie,’ her ‘crossing
sweeper,’ her ‘litter,’ and her brand of blasphemy filled me with
obscene delight, and I chuckled over them for a week.”
After the laughter had subsided, Richard Harding Davis asked: “And what
is a crossing sweeper, pray?”
“A compound of rags and dirt, fitted with a face and feet and a broom,
who mops up the dirty pavement to save your spats, and curses you for a
curmudgeon if you give him less than a ha’penny for his trouble.”
MONARCHICAL ATAVISM
One day in Berlin, speaking of General Grant, Mark said, “I did not
admire him so much for winning the war as for _ending_ the war.
Peace--happiness--brotherhood--that is what we want in this world.”
“Here comes the Kaiser,” he continued, “and sends me tickets for his
September review. Of course I will go. But I don’t care for military
spectacles, or for militarism. Tolstoy was right in calling army
life ‘a school for murder.’ In Germany to-day there are ten million
men drilled to look upon the Kaiser as a god. And if the Kaiser says
‘kill’--they kill. And if he says ‘die for me’--they go out and get
themselves shot. The blame and shame rest with the big and little war
lords. As to the German people, mere subjects, they have eighteen or
twenty centuries of monarchical atavism in their blood.”
DEMOCRATIC MARK AND THE AUSTRIAN ARISTOCRACY
Mark Twain was essentially a democrat, and the nobles he met in Berlin
and other parts of Germany never cured him of that fine habit. But in
Vienna he grew less exclusive and in the end actually liked to mix
with high aristocrats. “The Prussian noble,” he once explained at the
Metropole, “walks and acts as if he had swallowed the stick they used
to beat him with when a youngster--I stole the simile somewhere, but
never mind--however, the Vienna brand of aristocrat is different. Maybe
Austrian nobles are just as stuck-up on account of their ancestry,
but they have the good sense not to let their pride be seen. They all
treat me cordially, talk agreeably and seem to possess at least a
stock of superficial information. The Princess Pauline Metternich, in
particular, is a bully old girl. If she were to write her memoirs, the
world would gain a book as bright as Mme. de Sévigné’s Letters. For one
thing I would like to have seen her husband’s face when he learned that
she made him sign his own death warrant.
“Prince Metternich, as Austrian ambassador in Paris, used to sign any
and every paper his secretaries put before him, as he was much too
indolent to read them. To cure him of this habit, Pauline one fine
day laid a document on his desk, ordering that he, the Prince, be
taken out and shot at sunrise. Metternich promptly put his name to it
without reading a line. Next morning at five, several male friends of
His Highness rang the bell at the Palace and demanded to be taken up
to the bedroom. They wore Austrian uniforms and made an awful racket
with their swords. Metternich stormed from his bed to see what the row
was and then and there the death warrant was read to him. He fainted.
Indeed they had a big time snatching him from the brink of the grave,
for he was near frightened to death.
“Some jocular wife, eh?” chuckled Mark.
PHIL SHERIDAN’S FRIEND
“Jenny Stubel,” mused Mark over the “Berliner Tageblatt” at the Cafe
Bauer, “Jenny Stu--, there is a yarn about that girl in the back of my
head, but what it is I cannot for the life of me make out.”
“What has she done now?” I queried. “Marriage or divorce, set a theatre
afire, or made away with one of those stupid archdukes flourishing in
Vienna?”
“Half-correct,” said Twain, “an archduke abducted Jenny. But how did
you come so near guessing it?”
“I was Jenny’s manager in the early eighties when she and her sister
Lori headed the Vienna operetta company. In fact, I introduced her to
Grover Cleveland--”
“And Phil Sheridan?” demanded Twain.
“Sheridan, Joaquin Miller, Henry Watterson and the rest.”
“We’ll get this story pat first,” said Mark, shoving the paper over to
me. “Chances are I have it upside down. Let me have the facts and keep
the trimmings for some other day.”
The “facts” told the now well-nigh forgotten story that (some time in
October, 1891) the archduke John Salvator of Austria had renounced
his title and dignities, had assumed the name of John Orth, bought a
four-masted schooner and, as her captain, went sailing the Atlantic and
Pacific in company with Jenny Stubel, the operetta star.
“‘Tall, yellow-haired, lots of quicksilver in her system,’ that’s how
Sheridan sized up Jenny. Right, you say? Well, then, her archduke
wasn’t so very foolish, after all, particularly as she was a sweet
singer, a nimble dancer and all that. Did you say you introduced her to
Grover Cleveland?”
“Sure, at one of the public afternoon receptions, when everybody went
to shake hands with the President.”
“General Sheridan was quite taken with Jenny,” continued Twain. “He
told me he went to the show night after night and didn’t care how
much he applauded her young beauty and fascinating voice. Yes, Phil
was really smitten with Jenny. And now the admired of the most famous
General of Horse defies the world to become an acknowledged royal
mistress, and her sprig of royalty the black sheep of a crowned family
by no means lily-white at that. She reminds me of old Field Marshal
Prince de Ligne, making love to a very young girl and succeeding, or
nearly succeeding, before he had time to reflect.
“‘A million,’ cried the Field Marshal, ‘if I was a lieutenant now.’”
“ELIZABETH WAS A HE,” SAID MARK
“Mark my word, Elizabeth was a _he_,” said Clemens, when I was starting
for London the end of June, 1894, leaving the Clemenses at the
Normandie, Paris, “and when you have a little time in England, I wish
you would look up all that pesky question for me.”
“Not in Westminster Abbey?” I cried in alarm.
“Now, don’t _you_ try to be gay,” said Mark. “It’s bad enough if
_I_ got that reputation when I want to be taken seriously. I know
they haven’t got through ascertaining for the ’teenth time whether
Charles I really lost his head when his overbearing noddle dropped
into the basket on the scaffold opposite the Horse-Guards--you showed
me the spot yourself. I don’t want any ghoulish work done. Just go
to the British Museum and every other library and nose up everything
appertaining to Queen Elizabeth’s manly character. You get the
authorities (for a consideration, of course) and I’ll do the rest.
Then you go down Surrey-way and find a place or castle or summer house
called Overcourt, or something. That’s where Elizabeth lived in her
teens, and metamorphosed into a boy.”
“But the editor will never allow you to write on such a subject. Better
let me do it.”
“Not on your life,” said Mark. “It’s _my_ discovery, and I’m paying
you for the work you do, just as the New York ‘World’ and the ‘Sun’
do. When you come down to hard tacks you will find that there are no
questionable proceedings whatever, just an exchange of babies, as in
the old-time operas, Troubadour and the rest. The Editor will have no
kick coming.”
“The Editor,” of course, was Mrs. Clemens, who as a rule censored
Mark’s manuscript--“tooth-combed it,” as he called it, cutting out such
gems as “the affairs of the Cat who had a family in every Port.”
Mark told me that when he got through with “Joan of Arc” he would
tackle “this here Elizabeth proposition”--“a person full of placid
egotism and obsessed with self-importance,” he called her. “If I do
Elizabeth half as well as I intend to do ‘Joan’ and did ‘The Prince and
Pauper,’ I will have three serious books to my credit, and after that I
will be damned--‘thrice damned,’ Elizabeth would have said--if I allow
anybody to take me for a mere funmaker.”
He gave me some more instructions, talking at random mostly, and paid
me in advance for the work I was to do. Twenty-four hours later I
landed at Victoria Station, London, for, having business in Antwerp, I
had travelled via Holland.
* * * * *
A foreign correspondent (that was my trade then) is shifted merrily
from one place to another; so it happened that I went back to France
after a fortnight in England, or even sooner. The Clemenses were
packing, and I had Mark all to myself for an hour or so.
“What made you first doubt the Virgin Queen’s sex?” I asked.
“Never mind--her gorgeous swearing maybe. What did you find out in
Surrey?”
I duly reported that I had gone to Overcourt with a friend, had
explored the Queen Elizabeth chambers, the woods and countryside, and
had interviewed a lot of old and some young gossips, with this result:
Elizabeth, I was told, came to Overcourt when a child of four or five,
and a young person supposed to be Elizabeth--that is, the daughter
of Ann Boleyn and Henry the Eighth--left there some ten years later.
When the Princess was seven or eight, King Henry, who was attending
Parliament, had promised to come and see his little girl two weeks
hence (Overcourt is within easy riding distance of London). But even
as they were preparing to give Hal--(“Ought to be Hell,” interpolated
Mark)--a rousing reception; to feed the brute in particular, Elizabeth
was suddenly attacked by malignant fever and died. There was only one
“in the know,” her Grace’s governess--I gave her name to Mark, but
have quite forgotten it. I remember, though, that she remained in the
royal service for some forty years afterwards, in fact, that she and
“Elizabeth” never separated while both lived.
“I can imagine how that poor woman felt,” commented Mark--“went through
all the horrors of having her hair bobbed behind, and her neck
shaved--what else was there in store for her but a beheading party if
Hal found his daughter dead? And when, in your mind’s eye, you see
the executioner try the edge of his axe on his thumb nail, life’s
delicatessen--considerations for truth, politics, and common everyday
decency--lose their appeal. The axe-man was coming and that governess
didn’t want to be the chicken.”
“That’s what the gossips told me, and they had it from their
great-great-great-grandmothers, a blessed heritage.”
“Go on,” said Mark.
“Well, that governess knew that her life depended upon finding a
substitute for Elizabeth, and the substitute couldn’t materialize
quickly enough. Briefly, it did materialize in the person of the
late Princess’ boy playmate--here are his name and affiliations, as
Overcourt neighborhood has it.”
“Fine,” said Mark, “the rest I know or can imagine. She dressed up that
kid in Elizabeth’s petticoats and togs and frightened the life out of
him not to betray her or himself with the King or any one else.”
“Quite right,” mused Mark, “for the eighth Henry was an ogre--the very
unborn children of England knew it. Besides, reading up the official
history of Elizabeth, I find that Hal hadn’t seen his daughter for
three or four years previous to his visit in Overcourt. The deception,
then, worked easily enough. _I_ could have done it at a pinch.”
* * * * *
Mark next went into the life history of the great Queen, or supposed
Queen. “She was a male character all over--a thousand acts of hers
prove it,” he insisted. “Now tell me what were the conspicuous Tudor
traits--”
“But you said she wasn’t a Tudor,” I interrupted.
“Precisely, but she had to copy the Tudors as our stage impersonators
imitate Bernhardt and Henry Dixie. Now what were those Tudor traits:
remorselessness, cunning, lying till the cows come home, murder,
robbery, despoliation! All of them Elizabeth, or the man who
impersonated the Queen, practiced to the dotlet on the _i_. Think of
the letters she wrote to Francis Drake, the inventor of fried potatoes,
and to the second Philip of Spain. Wasn’t that a man’s game? Could
woman ever get up anything so misleading and contraband?
“And the way she fooled her English, Spanish, Austrian, German and
French admirers, setting each against the other, never neglecting to
threaten Spain’s flank, and, at the last, throwing them the head of
Mary of Scots as a gage of battle--regular male strumpet’s chicanery, I
tell you.”
From a drawer Mark pulled a highly decorated volume, and turned the
leaves quickly. “Elizabeth’s official lovers,” he explained. “Lord
Seymour, second husband of her stepmother, Queen Catherine Parr.
Catherine, I gather, was in the secret; otherwise she wouldn’t have
allowed Seymour to carry on with ‘Elizabeth’ as he did. And he had
about a yard of whiskers on his face at that. There was Leicester, this
big chap here with the goatee. She had him beheaded, not because he
knew anything against her, or about her real sex, but because he had
the _reputation_ of knowing things. The Virgin Queen made her alleged
lover a head shorter, just to show that she didn’t care what she did.
Henry and Francis, the French Valois brothers, Dukes of something or
other, were likewise large, sinister looking fellows. These, too, she
used, man fashion, like boobs, and as no other crowned harridan ever
used a lover. Think of Catharine (of Russia) and of Josephine and
Marie Louise--to be loved by those ladies was real fun, a treat.” Mark
lowered his voice to add: “I read somewhere that Catharine allowed the
brothers Orloff no less than fifty thousand roubles pajama money--fifty
thousand! One can buy a powerful lot of nighties for that much money,
even at the Louvre, across the way.”
“There’s the Britannica,” continued Mark, jumping up. He found a
paragraph under the caption of “Elizabeth” that tickled him immensely.
“Read this, and call me a liar if you dare.”
The paragraph states that there was “some physical defect” in
Elizabeth’s make-up, that she was “masculine in mind and temperament,”
likewise, that no man ever lost his head over her as they did over Mary
of Scots.
“’Nuff said on the score of love-making and lying,” concluded Mark.
“’Nuff for the present, I mean; but here is another thing. We all know
there is only one Hetty Green, that there never was another. Yet this
here Elizabeth, so called--_i. e._, the man who impersonated her--was
as clever a financier as John D. Rockefeller. As John D. gobbled up all
the oil in creation, or out of it, so Elizabeth, so called, lapped up
all the gold, minted and otherwise. Up to the sixties and seventies (of
the sixteenth century) Spain had an absolute monopoly of the yellow and
white metals, you know. When the person called Elizabeth died, all the
gold of the world was in English hands, and, besides, England dominated
all the ocean trade routes, where formerly the Spanish flag had been
unchallenged.”
“As circumstantial evidence, can’t be beat,” I suggested timidly,
“but--”
“You remind me of the cat that bolted a whole box of Seidlitz powders
and then had no more judgment than to lie under the open hydrant,”
exploded Mark. “Why don’t you ask me to trot out Elizabeth in an Andy
Carnegie Highland costume, kilts and all? There will be missing links,
plenty of them, after all these years, that goes without saying, but
it’s a great story, nevertheless. Needs a hunk of brain, though, to
puzzle it out to its logical conclusion.”
Soon after this conversation, the Clemenses went to Italy, and for
some little time I expected to hear from Mark further on the Elizabeth
legend. But the yarn seems to have slipped his memory, and as I found
him engrossed in matters of the moment, I didn’t try to revive his
interest in one so remote.
But I have often wondered whether, or not, his many unpublished
writings show that he brought “his hunk of brains” to work on unsexing
Elizabeth.
MARK--THE SLEIGHT-OF-HAND MAN
Minister William Walter Phelps gave a dinner to the Clemenses in
Frankfort, when Mark Twain and Livy were staying at a nearby watering
place, but Mrs. Clemens was not well enough to attend--or, as Mark
whispered to Mr. Phelps--was unwilling to go, being afraid that he
might disgrace the family by some practical joke. So Mark had it all
his own way and enjoyed his freedom hugely, keeping all in a roar.
Finally, Dr. Von Something-or-Other tried to get in a word edgewise and
abruptly asked Mark what he thought of the European equilibrium.
(Mark said afterwards: “Knowing my political incompetence, the Doctor
probably tried to inveigle me into making an ass of myself.”)
The Herr Von’s question having been delivered in no sotto voce style,
everybody pricked up ears to hear Mark’s answer.
“I can’t explain in a few words,” he said, “but I’ll demonstrate.” And
turning to Mr. Phelps: “Hand me the Doctor’s plate, please.”
The Doctor looked up “disgusted,” because he had only just commenced
to eat and was “as hungry as a dog.” Plate in hand, Mark stepped to a
space between the window and the table and asked the Doctor to join
him, bringing his knife. “Now,” he said, “I will throw the plate up
to the ceiling and you will catch it, on the end of your knife, but
don’t you spill anything. After catching it, you will please keep it
spinning upon the end of your steel for five minutes, balancing it so
as not to lose a drop of sauce, a chop, or fried murphy. And when you
have performed all these stunts without mishap, you will have gained a
correct idea of what I think of the balance of European power.”
MARK AND THE IMPERIAL MISTRESS
At Vienna, in the late nineties, Clemens one fine day intoxicated
himself with the idea that there would be millions in writing a play
with Kathi Schratt, Emperor Francis Joseph’s acknowledged mistress, as
heroine. He had in mind a collaborator among native playwrights, and
the piece was to be translated into all living tongues. Mark actually
started on the thing, adding to his knowledge of German as he went
along. Matters having gone so far, I persuaded him to go and see Frau
Schratt for local color.
“Bully,” he said. “But you must come along. I would never trust myself
alone with a royal mistress, not I.”
Well, we went, saw, and--wondered at Francis Joseph’s taste. In speech
and manner, though, the Schratt was a fine old girl. Showed us a big
houseful of presents, all gifts from his Majesty, and elaborately so
marked.
We had duly admired the silver bed, the silver folding stool and the
ditto cabinet, likewise other chamber paraphernalia of white metal,
when the Schratt said: “There is one thing more the like of which you
haven’t in America.”
“You don’t say so!” ejaculated Mark, in blasphemous German.
The Schratt pushed a button, a wall panel shot sideways, and the
handsomest silver-gilt bathtub ever came waltzing in, or rather
roller-skated in.
In our homeward bound fiacre, Mark remained silent for fully ten
minutes; then he delivered himself sadly but firmly:
“No, it’s all off with that mellerdrammer. For if I let Schratt
ride down to the footlights in that golden tub, people will want to
see the Empress in it, too; next they will holler for Kaiser Bill,
Sarah Bernhardt, Loie Fuller, and William Jennings Bryan. It won’t
work--people are such hogs!”
And the drama was never proceeded with.
MARK ON LYNCH LAW
They were talking lynch law in Professor Krafft-Ebing’s library in
Vienna--some horrible nightmare that had come in the latest cable--and
as a matter of course Clemens was asked his opinion as an American and
observer of human nature.
“Lynch law means mob-lawlessness, doesn’t it?” he drawled. “Well, what
does it argue? To my mind it argues that men in a crowd do not act as
they would as individuals. In a crowd they don’t think for themselves,
but become impregnated by the contagious sentiment uppermost in the
minds of all who happen to be en masse. While in Paris last, the
family and I toured all the places of horror, made odious during the
White Terror--we followed pretty closely the scent of the ‘Tale of Two
Cities,’ Michelet, Dumas, and others. I was particularly interested
in the ‘Official Gazette’ of the guillotine, ‘The Moniteur,’ and my
girls helped me read and digest many tell-tale pages yellow with age
and tattered by usage. Among other interesting items, I found recorded
that on a certain date the Nobles had voted to forego their feudal
privileges.
“Now, their previous failure to renounce these same rights had been
one of the prime causes of the Revolution. Yet when they acquiesced,
they were put to the knife just the same, for mob-law ruled then.
Another case in the ‘Moniteur’: I read of a deputy named Monge, the
same whom Napoleon in his Saint Helena talks pronounced a most lovable
character, so kind-hearted that he would never eat any fowl if he had
to kill it first. Yet in the Convention, in the midst of the mob of
his fellows, this same Monge vociferated for unlimited bloodshed, for
‘war to the knife.’ He had caught the contagion and, intoxicated with
bloodthirstiness, acted the madman.
“‘I love my children,’ he cried, ‘but if the Convention decrees war
on the enemies of the Republic, I will give my two daughters to the
first two of our countrymen wounded in battle.’ Would he have said that
seated quietly at his fireside? Certainly not. It was the mob that was
talking through his mouth.”
THE TERROR
Mark returned to the subject on another occasion. He said:
“You know I have always been a great admirer of Dickens, and his ‘Tale
of Two Cities’ I read at least every two years. Dickens witnessed my
first holding hands with Livy when I took her to one of his lectures in
New York. Now that I have finished ‘The Two Cities’ for the ’steenth
time, I have come to this conclusion:
“Terror is an efficacious agent only when it doesn’t last. In the long
run there is more terror in threats than in execution, for when you get
used to terror your emotions get dulled. The incarnation of the White
Terror, Robespierre, wasn’t awe-inspiring at all to the general public.
Mention of his name did not send the children to bed, or make them
crawl under the blankets. On the days when he made his great speeches,
the galleries and the aisles of the Convention Hall were thronged with
women, old and young--that does not look as if Robespierre had been an
object of general fear or abomination--does it?”
RECOLLECTIONS OF KING CHARLES AND GRANT
“Now show me the place where that ancestor of mine had King Charlie
beheaded.”
We had been sitting on some chairs which the great Napoleon had used
in Saint Helena--the heaviest sort of mahogany, “and not a rat bite to
be seen,” Mark pointed out, as we went exploring the Army Museum at
Whitehall, London.
Agreeable to his demand, I took Mark by the arm and led him to a window
looking out on the “Horse-Guards,” the famous old barracks, gazed at so
much by American visitors.
“Outside of this window,” I explained, “the Commonwealth built a
platform, and on this platform stood the block where Charles lost his
silly bean.”
“Served the traitor right,” said Mark, “but that reminds me of----”
He thought a while, then repeated:
“Why it reminds me of (let’s see, we are in the second story, are we
not?)--the grandstand in front of the Palmer House, Chicago, for that
was also entered from the windows of the second story. I am speaking
of the Chicago of 1879, welcoming General Grant after his triumphal
journey around the world. What a sight the Windy City was, and what a
grand sight he looked when he stepped upon the platform to review the
Army of the Tennessee.”
“Yes,” I interrupted, “and I saw you on that very platform shake hands
with Grant.”
But Mark Twain could not be tempted to go into his personal history
when General Grant was being discussed.
“Did you ever see a city so magnificently and so patriotically
bedecked?” he cried. “There was not a monument, palace, rookery,
saloon or telegraph pole that was not gay with streamers and bunting,
pictures, garlands, colored lanterns and placards of all sorts.”
“Yes there was,” said one of our friends.
Mark stretched out his hand and grabbed the speaker’s arm.
“No nonsense now.”
“I am as serious as you, and I say that the German Consul, with offices
opposite the Court House, did not have a flag out on the day of Grant’s
entry and reception.”
“Are you sure?” demanded Clemens.
“As sure as you are standing there. And I am proud to-day that I wrote
up the story in the Chicago ‘Times’ and that Guy Magee, the city
editor, headed it: ‘The German Son of a B----.’
“Well done. I could not have written a more accurate head myself.”
MARK MISSED GALLOWS-LAND
“Every time I went to Italy,” Mark Twain once said, “I felt like
crossing over into Monaco.”
“To gamble?”
“Guess again, when billiards and solitaire are the only games I indulge
in. Indeed, I am so ignorant, I would not know a roulette from another
baby circus. I was and I am still crazy to go to Monaco to see a
gallows, or, preferably, a hundred of them.” Mark eyed his audience
curiously. After an impressive pause, he continued:
“Once upon a time, in the days of Louis XV and Mme. du Barry, there
was a Prince of Monaco who was blessed with a very beautiful wife.
Well, evil-minded people said of this prince that he smelled like a
dead horse, and Madame the Princess simply could not endure defunct
‘gee-gee.’ So she decided that she had a perfect right to look for a
soul-mate elsewhere, and be sure she got them by the score. Of course
not in Monaco, as it is such a small country. She went to France, and
particularly to Paris, for her amusements. And every time the Prince
learned of a new lover worshipping at his wife’s shrine, he set up a
gallows and hung the favored one in effigy with frightful ceremonies.
“The country, as remarked, being rather Lilliputian, his Highness
had to go to the frontiers for his gallows planting, and as Madame
the Princess was of a very changeable nature the principality, in
the course of several years, became enclosed in a regular fence of
gallows trees. When Paris heard of this, it laughed boisterously at the
Prince’s strange humor and Madame the Princess’s latest lover swore
that he would go to Monaco, rob the gallows of their manikins and carry
them off to the future Champs Elysées for a marionette show.
“He tried--with a band of companions, but got pinched and was hanged by
the neck in person, and not in effigy. Now, I wondered whether these
gallows are still standing,” concluded Mark, “and if not, I wanted to
find their habitat anyhow--make a map of gallows-land, so to speak.”
Too bad Mark missed writing a book on so promising a subject.
THINK OF HER SORROWS
He read to several friends in Vienna what he had written about the
murdered Empress Elizabeth. “I know it is full of exaggeration,” he
admitted. “I did gown her with virtues she never thought of possessing
and I have denied all her frailties. As I learn now, she was just an
ordinary woman, and her surpassing vanity was the only extraordinary
thing about her. But think how much she suffered and think of the
man she was married to. Re-read, too, that story about the murdered
Rudolph. When Count Something approached her to break the news, she
ran to him wringing her hands and cried: ‘My Rudy is dead. Oh, my
Rudy!’ What told this Niobe among royal women that her son had been
destroyed--killed in a low debauch? When I reflect how she maintained
her self-respect in a life of constant disappointment and tragedy, I
think I did well making her out a noble soul.”
BREAKING THE NEWS GENTLY
Returning to Vienna from a flying trip to Budapest, Mark was full of “a
yarn that would illustrate like a circus and run for five years, every
Sunday a page.” He said he heard the story at the archduke Joseph’s
country place, the same Joseph who, towards the end of the war, tried
to make himself King of Hungary and failed, but the probabilities are
that the story was Mark’s own, with Magyar trimmings. It ran as follows:
A great landowner, after a business trip of several months, returned to
Budapest, and was met at the station by his carriage and pair that was
to take him to his estate in the country.
“Everything well at home?” he asked the coachman.
“Excellently well,” replied the driver, cracking his whip.
After a while the Baron ventured another question:
“Why didn’t you bring my dogs along?” he asked.
“Dogs are sick, your Excellency.”
“My dogs sick? How did that happen?”
“Ate too much fried horse.”
“Fried horse? Where did they get that?”
“Stable burned down.”
“My stable burned down, cattle and all? Awful! What about the castle?”
“Oh, the castle is all right.”
The Baron thought it over for the space of a mile, then said:
“You are sure the castle was not hurt by the fire?”
“Sure, only the two wings burned down.”
“But the family is safe?”
“Yes, the family is all right.”
When the horses entered upon their tenth mile, the Baron resumed his
examination:
“Children all well?”
“All well and happy, except János and Maritzka, who were burned.”
“Burned, oh Lord! And the Baroness, my wife?”
“Oh, she is better off than any of us. God has her in His holy keeping.
She was burned to death. Yes, indeed, she died with her mother and in
her arms.”
“This is what I call breaking the news gently,” said Mark.
DUKES AND UNBORN CAR HORSES
I told Mark Twain of the Princes and Dukes of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, “in
meeting assembled” at London, who had protested against the expulsion
of their kinsman, Dom Pedro, from the throne of Brazil.
“Just as efficacious as if the car horses that remain unbred since the
arrival of the trolley sued the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, or the Third
Avenue electric line, for murder,” snapped Mark.
“PA USED TO BE A TERRIBLE MAN”
With Mark’s daughter Susie, I was walking in the Berlin Thiergarten one
afternoon when we encountered a very rough specimen of the genus tramp.
“Look at him,” said Susie. “You know, Pa, too, was an awful man before
Mamma took him in hand and married him.” And with added seriousness,
she continued: “He used to swear and swear, and then swear again, and
the only thing that he didn’t do that was bad was to let cards and
liquor alone--some kinds of liquor.”
It is too bad that I forget Mark’s comment on the above when I told
him.
MARK ON THE BERLIN COPS
You know, of course, that Mark Twain at one time had a flat in Berlin
and kept it going for a whole month. “I am tired of hotels,” he said,
“and hereafter I am going to take my comfort in my apartment as Dr.
Johnson took his in his inn.” After that he entertained the habitués of
the embassy for a week or longer with stories of the beauties of home
life, until we voted “Koernerstrasse Nr. 7 the jewel.”
But one fine evening I found a note from him at the Hotel de Rome,
asking me to call at the Royal at 8:00. I met him in the lobby with
several sympathizing friends, and he said:
“It’s all up with Koernerstrasse; too much police.”
“Did you have burglars, or the bailiffs, in?” was asked.
“Neither; just social calls from policemen--ten per day. The cops
weren’t exactly unkind, but they annoyed me.”
“What did they do to you?”
“Asked questions.”
“Income queries?”
“Yes, of course, but I don’t mind lying about little things like that.
On the contrary, making a clean breast of it, I confessed that I get a
whole cent a word for every word I do, even for little words like ‘I’
or ‘Manafraidofhismotherinlaw.’ Did they believe me? Not they! They
thought I was exaggerating.”
“What did they ask about next?”
“Craved information about Eliza and Marie. ‘Don’t know any such
females,’ I growled severely.
“‘Mr. Clemens,’ bawled the policeman, ‘if you are trying to hoodwink
the Royal Police of Berlin, there will be trouble. Confess now. You
have an Eliza and a Marie and a Gretchen in this house.’
“‘Oh, you mean the maids,’ said I. ‘I don’t know anything about them.
My Missus hires and bosses them. Ask the girls whether I am stringing
you.’
“That evidently made no hit with the policeman, for he vociferated
respectfully but sternly:
“‘It is your duty (according to paragraph this and that of the Civil
Code) as head of the household (according to paragraph so and so of
the Civil Code) to be informed whether or not these girls have been
properly vaccinated.’
“His ‘head of the household’ made me laugh, but I managed to object:
‘How should I know?’
“‘Don’t you see them around with bare arms?’
“‘Maybe I do, but I never paid enough attention to say offhand whether
they wear cuticle or fur.’
“‘And you didn’t notice vaccination marks on their arms?’
“‘Never. I can swear to that.’
“‘Then you _do_ know, that they are not vaccinated on their arms,’ said
the policeman ever so insinuatingly. I’ll bet he read up the story of
the serpent in Paradise.
“‘On the contrary, I _don’t_ know whether they are vaccinated on
their arms or not,’ I answered truthfully. ‘Maybe they had themselves
vaccinated _under_ their arms. I haven’t looked.’
“‘Some women,’ said the policeman, ‘are so vain that they get
themselves vaccinated on their legs.’
“‘Possibly,’ I said, ‘but I have looked neither under their arms nor
under their petticoats--I presume they have legs. However, I don’t
know anything about them, for sure. And this being their day out, if
you _must_ investigate, they will be back about ten o’clock, and,
returning, you may look for yourself, if the law says so.’”
Mark indulged in one of his impressive pauses, then continued:
“That policeman did return and told the girls that he was authorized by
me to look for their vaccination marks wherever located. Of course, it
caused a row all around, the girls protesting that I was no gentleman.
So, to end it all, I paid the rent for the whole year, eleven months’
rent, and left the flat.”
THE SAUSAGE ROOM
James R. Osgood, the former Boston publisher, later a member of the new
firm of Osgood, McIlvain & Company in London, for whom I was doing the
translation of Field Marshal Count Moltke’s works, had given me a set
of Memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth for Christmas, and when I went
to see Mark Twain at the Royal in Berlin during his illness, I took the
two small volumes along and offered to loan them to the sick man. He
was as pleased as a three-year-old with a new toy.
“I always wanted to read these Memoirs,” he said. “She was a corker,
that sister of the Great Frederick. I most heartily admire her. You
know Howells did this translation while U. S. Consul in Italy and
they say it is the best ever.” He dived into volume one and I left,
to return next day. When he heard me talk in the vestibule to Mrs.
Clemens, he hollered out:
“This way to the sausage room, where Her Royal Highness’ slave keeps.”
I went in.
“I am reading this book for the second time,” he said, “and it actually
makes me forget that I am sick. I forget even coughing my soul out.”
Mrs. Clemens seemed to be annoyed about the “sausage,” but Clemens said
that Heine had had the same sort of chamber when ill so long, and as
the poet was quite contented “with his French Soucisson,” he must be
with his “Frankfurter.” As a matter of fact, for its length, the room
was extremely narrow.
“If it had legs, I would call it a _dachshund_,” suggested Mark, when
Livy kept on grumbling.
I asked whether he had many visitors and he said:
“Yes, a few every day. As many as I can stand. But the women have all
deserted me. There is a bunch of American girls in Berlin just now, but
none find their way to the Royal. I am without a “_Mouche_” (French for
fly)--I mean the human kind--the same as enlivened Heine’s dying days.
What a girl that _Mouche_ was! I think she inspired some of his finest
shorter poems. She was a real comfort to him, too. Maybe she was after
advertising and liked to make Mathilda jealous. But, what of it? She
made Heine laugh and Heine’s songs will make the world happier as long
as it stands.”
While talking, he was groping in the air after flies and at last caught
one. He held it in the hollow of his hand listening to its buzzing for a
while, then asked me to take it in my own hand, never hurt it, open the
window and let it fly out.
“I learned that from Tolstoy,” he said. “Tolstoy, you know, used to
catch lots of mice in his house, but never killed them or gave them to
the cat. He carried them out to the forest and there set them free.
Why should a human being kill little animals? Because a tiger may want
to eat me--that’s no reason why I should turn tiger, is it?”
He returned to the subject of the Margravine Wilhelmina.
“They thought I went to Bayreuth to hear Wagner,” he said. “Nothing
of the kind. I like his Wedding March hugely and very little else he
has done. But, while Livy and the kids went to pieces over Tristan und
Isolde and The Nibelungen, I visited the grave of the Margravine and
looked at the temples and grottoes and houses she built, the statues
and fountains she set up, the beauty she lavished on the landscape!
Ah, Wilhelmina would have been the woman for me--for a week or two, I
mean, even as I would like to have been the Great Frederick’s dinner
companion for a little while.”
MARK’S GLIMPSE OF SCHOPENHAUER
As Mark’s German was getting worse instead of better, and as his
French was nowhere, he asked me to accompany him on his contemplated
exploration of the Berlin Royal Library. I told the librarian about our
great friend, about the interest he took in German affairs, and, in
particular, I recalled that he had met the Kaiser at dinner. Of course
the librarian turned himself inside out to be agreeable to both of us.
After showing us around a good deal, he gave us an alcove to work
in, saying: “In this set of drawers you will find some most private
papers of the royal family that are perhaps of public interest, but
the public, please remember, must learn nothing of them. They are only
to be seen by people of discretion, who value historical knowledge for
history’s sake.”
Most of the books, pamphlets and manuscripts we found dated from the
times of Frederick the Great and of course they were in French, since
Frederick neither read nor wrote German intelligently. There was in
particular a volume of verse by Voltaire addressed to Frederick, with
original illustrations by some French artist, but the poetry was too
grossly indecent to have interest for persons outside of a psychopathic
ward.
I translated some of the verses to Mark, who said: “Too much is
enough. I would blush to remember any of these stanzas except to tell
Krafft-Ebing about them when I get to Vienna.”
I copied one verse for him, and as he put it in his pocket he said:
“Livy is so busy mispronouncing German these days she can’t even
attempt to get at this.”
After some rummaging, Mark pulled out a manuscript that seemed to be of
more recent date.
“German or Chinese laundry tickets?” he asked.
“It’s German,” I said, glancing at it.
There were about ten pages of copy, neatly written and headed “Mein
Briefkasten” (My letterbox). On the line below was the title:
“Tetragamy by Schopenhauer.”
Mark was at once interested.
“Schopenhauer, the arch-misogynist,” he mused, “let me see, physically
he might have been the grandfather of queer Strindberg of the land
where the matches come from. Ever read any of his books or dramas?”
he asked, and before I could deny the implication, he was off talking
again: “I have studied Strindberg’s womankind, hard-faced, sullen,
cold-blooded, cheeky, grasping, vindictive, hell-raising, unvirtuous,
unkind vixens, all of them--a dead give-away on the author’s part, for
a writer who sees no good in women confesses that he was found out by
the sex he wars on and that the female of the species pronounced him n.
g. before he had time to out-Ibsen the Norwegian. If I ever turn over
a new leaf and beat Livy, bet your life I will have naught but honeyed
words and sweet metaphor for the ladies. This fellow Strindberg’s women
are all compounds of vile ingredients--hideous hags with or without
angel-faces--wife-beater Strindberg whipping dead mares. Well, to
return to Schopenhauer (to me as incomprehensible as mutton) what’s
this?” (pointing to the word Tetragamy), “Hebrew or merely Yiddish?”
“Literally it means marrying a fourth wife.” I examined the first page
of the manuscript. “Seems to deal with conditions due to monogamy.”
“Good,” exclaimed Mark, “I have always wanted to reform monogamy, when
my wife isn’t looking. Now let’s have the medicine straight.”
“But,” I said, “I can’t do this long MS. justice here. The librarian
will come in presently and you heard what he told us.”
“Well,” said Mark, “you sit down and copy the German while I cover you
with my broad back. Should the librarian intrude, I will knock on the
floor.”
Accordingly, I copied those several pages, and afterwards made the
translation Mark wanted.
But for several days Mark didn’t show up at his usual haunts, and
even Mr. Phelps, the American Minister in Berlin, didn’t know what
had become of him. The telephone was but sparingly used then in the
legation offices. However, on the third or fourth day, Mr. Phelps
learned that Mark was down with bronchitis at his hotel, the Royal, and
that when he wasn’t sneezing or coughing, _ennui_ plagued him sadly.
“Well,” I said, “I have got something to liven him up,” and showed Mr.
Phelps the manuscript. He advised me to send it at once to the Royal,
but when I called on Mark Twain a week later and inquired _sotto voce_
whether he had received the manuscript, he said:
“Of course not. The wife got it and you know she won’t let me read
anything but tracts. I suppose she burnt our MS.”
“Well,” I said, “I have got a carbon and I will let you have that by
and by.”
“Not while I’m at home,” he said, “for now she is on the scent, she
will watch out. She is dreadfully afraid that some one may corrupt me.”
Mark remained indoors for over a month, the thing was forgotten, and
later, when he asked for the manuscript, I couldn’t find it. Other
interests came up and Schopenhauer was shelved, though at the time
we made the find, Mark speculated on getting a book out of it by
amplifying it with other writings of the philosopher, particularly his
“Fragments of Philosophy” and his “Pandectes et Spicilegia”; the latter
are still in manuscript or, at least, were in manuscript in the early
nineties.
If Mark were alive to-day, how happy he would be at the discovery I
made quite recently in an old chest of drawers. I had seen a movie
play, showing the extravagant amounts of money one can earn by selling
old manuscripts--including the rejection slips--and I started cleaning
up an old piece of furniture wanted for less ideal purposes. And there
I found the long lost Schopenhauer MS. According to the notes, this
manuscript belonged to a parcel of handwritten essays willed by the
philosopher to the Royal Library at Berlin and dealing with themes and
matters that Schopenhauer hoped to work out and improve upon by and by.
But death overtook him before he could exploit the problem in hand.
Here follows the MS. Mark was not allowed to see:
_Schopenhauer’s Tetragamy._
_The Philosopher’s Attempt to reform social conditions due to
Monogamy._
Neither woman’s frailty nor man’s egoism should be held responsible
for those frequent miscarriages of domestic happiness encountered in
married life. Nature itself is to blame. If the state of monogamy, as
some of the philosophers will have it, is the natural one, then nature
disarranged its own scheme beforehand by making woman’s sexual life
twenty or thirty or even forty years shorter than man’s.
At the present time males and females in the civilized world are about
equal in number. This, too, is taken for proof that nature favored
monogamy. It is a fact, on the other hand, observable in practical
life as well as by medical investigation, that a woman is well able
physically to be the wife of two men at the same time.
There are no healthier and more beautiful women, of their kind, than
the Tedas of Asia who marry besides their chief-husband all his
brothers, no matter how many he has got.
We do not go so far as to advocate polyandry. Polyandry is a condition
based on a low state of civilization. But basing our proposition on
physical grounds, we venture to assert that tetragamy, reorganized and
protected by law, would be a married state doing away with most of the
evils of monogamy from the man’s standpoint, while contributing to
woman’s happiness.
We propose the introduction of a new form of marriage on the following
lines. Instead of one man marrying one woman for better or worse, we
propose that two men, friends of course, marry one woman, always a
young and healthy person, with this understanding:
After the woman has reached a certain age, the two friends shall be
at liberty to marry another young woman, but without divorcing or
abandoning the first.
The second woman shall provide the men, if she lives, with a capable
and loving mate for the rest of their lives.
Such a state of things would result in the happiness of two women, both
would be taken care of for life and there would be no rivalry either.
As far as the men are concerned, tetragamy would do away with a passion
leading to so many fatalities: jealousy.
Now let us look at tetragamy, as defined, from an economic standpoint.
At the present time, the average young couple enters into the marriage
state when the man’s capacity as a provider is unequal to the demands
of the average pleasure-loving woman. His meagre resources do not allow
him to supply her with the luxuries she craves, nor has he as much
money for himself as before marriage. It would be a waste of words to
point out that these conditions are responsible for much unhappiness
among married folks.
Take a case of poverty. Many a man who can hardly support himself
tries to support a wife, and not only a wife, but children, numbers of
them! What is the result? The woman, driven by want, for the love of
her children, becomes a breadwinner on her own account. The time she
ought to devote to her little ones, born or unborn, she spends in the
factory, at the washboard or sewing machine.
Is that natural? If nature favored such a state of affairs, nature
would be illogical, and who dare assert so monstrous a thing?
In the state of tetragamy, man has to bear but one-half of the
household’s expenses. This gives him a chance to save money and to do
something for his education, while the children, being supported by two
men, have better clothes, better food, more love, and a better home.
Tetragamy would make for morality, because it would make it easier for
men to get married. It would make for morality because woman, having
two husbands, would not be longing for an affinity. And when old, she
would not suffer from the thought, or from the actual knowledge, that
her husband betrays her.
Things are different to-day. The man who marries young sees the fire of
love extinguished in the woman at his side after a certain number of
years.
As to the average woman, in the state of monogamy, she is only too
often compelled to marry a man physically inferior to her. If she
escapes that fate, then, in the course of time, she must needs come to
the conclusion that she is too old for her husband.
But I am not unaware that there are serious objections.
As to the children, their identity would be determined by their looks.
As to possible differences--they will not be greater than in marriage
as it is to-day. If people are inclined to fight, they will do so under
any conditions, good, bad or indifferent. For my own part I am inclined
to think that there will be less fighting, since jealousy will be
eliminated beforehand.
What about financial affairs? There should be no communism, of course.
Each man could contribute his share and the woman should be allowed
free disposal of her savings.
Of course, the state must take the first woman under its protection.
She can never be abandoned and can be divorced for cause only.
Under the sway of monogamy duties and nature are forever in conflict.
Woman is tempted when young, is abandoned morally or physically or both
when old.
If this be natural, then nature should be reformed and tetragamy
substituted for monogamy.
“MURDERER” BLUCHER IN OXFORD
“Oxford, though you might not think so, has a traffic cop, the same
as Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue,” said Mark in the Savoy
Lounge across the teacups after the excitement over his triumph in the
British University metropolis had cooled down a bit. “He is a smart
guy--actually remembers Holmes’ visit and asked me about the old man.
He spoke of him as ‘Ome’s, Sweet Ome’s.’ When you come to think of it,
it’s a good name, after all.
“Among other interesting things, not connected with the University,
was a public house sign I lit upon at a corner not far from our inn.
It showed a great warrior on a fierce charger. ‘General Blucher’ was
written across the bottom. It gave me quite a start when I learned that
on this spot, in 1816 or 1817, Blucher hollered for a drink and got it
when on his way to the University.”
“What did he want with the University?” I queried.
“He was crowned a doctor there after Waterloo.
“I tell you, that took me down a peg, or rather a whole row of pegs.
Blucher a doctor like myself! I knew him as a foul-mouthed, cruel,
pestiferous, and thieving scoundrel--occasionally lucky in the field.
But now I wanted to know more about him and I have haunted the British
Museum for additional facts. What do you think I learned? Blucher, who
was dirty and slouchy by nature, dressed up on the eve of battle:--best
tunic, fancy sword, gilt lace, feathered hat and what-not! And he had
himself bathed, rouged and powdered, manicured and curry-combed.
“‘I feel like a girl going to her first ball,’ he used to say.
“And people like that, who delight in murder and rapine, receive
honorary degrees!”
MARK’S HUMAN SIDE
Susan, Jean, and Clara Clemens, papa Mark, and myself were having lots
of fun at the famous Salamonski Circus in Berlin--Mark and I laughing
with the children when there was nothing else to interest us. There
was a girl of 16 or 17 doing a stunt on a horse. Mark said: “The poor
child looks as if she had never had a square meal in her life--isn’t
that professional smile of hers too sad for words?” While she was doing
a salto mortale, a clown ran in and dived between the horse’s legs.
The horse got frightened and threw the rider. Of course, the children
thought this part of the program, and laughed heartily. But the girl
didn’t attempt to get up, and when the riding master tried to raise
her, she cried and moaned, and one of her legs hung down lifeless,
while the blood spurted through her white tights.
“Keep still, children,” said Mark. “Don’t you see the poor girl is
hurt?”
A stretcher came and carried off the moaning girl and the performance
proceeded as if nothing had happened. But though the children begged
hard, Mark would not stay.
“Another time, not now,” he insisted.
Just then a gypsy-looking, elderly woman came running from behind the
scenes, looking about wildly. When her eye located the clown, she
rushed up to him and hit him a terrible blow in the face. “You have
ruined my girl. She will never be able to ride again,” she cried.
“Served him right,” said Mark. “I do hope the manager gets a clout on
the jaw, too. For he really is the responsible guy. The clown has to
get laughs, the girl has to risk her limbs, so that the manager may
coin money. What a world this is, what a world! And you and I, too! I
never thought of kicking myself for laughing when that poor girl broke
her leg--nor did you, I bet.”
AN AUSTRALIAN SURPRISE
At the time when Mark was living quietly at Ledworth Square, London,
writing “Around the World,” we met a party of Australians at the
Metropole one afternoon. It was after poor Susie’s death, and the
heartbroken father hadn’t made anyone laugh for months. But those
“Aussies kind of woke me up,” he admitted. “Jolly guys, out there at
the Antipodes,” he said after the first round; “too bad I didn’t know
that when I struck Sydney. As I prepared to step upon the platform
there, I wondered, with some fear and trepidation, whether your people
would take kindly to my brand of humor. If they refused to be tickled
by my first lecture--God have mercy upon my creditors! Of course I
had my story pat. Still, as I climbed those steps, I debated in my
mind whether or not I had better substitute such or such a yarn for
the opening lines planned. I had half decided to risk a change, when
I faced the audience and--the pleasantest, the most overwhelming
surprise of my life! I met a sea, a whole Atlantic, of guffawing heads,
of swaying bodies and shoulders. There wasn’t a titter or a snicker;
there wasn’t any smirking or grinning; all eyes were in flood with
genuine laughter; men, women, and children were crowing and chuckling
aloud, were shouting and hurraying, everybody was convulsed--really I
must have looked the white kangaroo for which I was named. The Sydney
audience laughing at me before I opened my mouth clinched my success at
the Antipodes.”
MARK IN FRANCE AND ITALY
From Paris Mark Twain usually returned disgruntled. His stories did not
go in France, and there was that “Dreyfus affair” that made him sick of
the “frog-eaters forever and a day.” Nor was Mark appreciated in Italy.
“The Dagoes,” he used to say, “like their humor colored with politics,
of which I know nothing, or flavored with risqué stories, which my wife
won’t let me write--there you are. As to France--one critical Madame
gave me to understand that I am ‘lacking in the stupendous task of
interpreting the great tableaux of real American life.’ See? When a wet
blanket of that kind is clapped on to you, what is the use of further
efforts? I am a dead one, according to Madame, and Mark Twain is too
humane to whip a dead horse. I will tell you what is really the matter
with France,” concluded Twain. “Every Frenchman who can read and write
has in his closet a frock coat embroidered with the lilies (or whatever
flower it may be) of the _Académie Française_--hoping against hope that
he may be elected to the Institute like Molière or Zola. Hence Monsieur
is very critical and pronounces everything he doesn’t understand
‘bosh!’ A joke in Chicago, you know, is a riddle in Paris, and, as one
Frenchman put it, ‘I get guffaws out of people by thumping them on the
ribs.’ I would never dare thump a Frenchman, of course--I might bust
him.”
WHY MARK WOULDN’T LIKE TO DIE ABROAD
Mark Twain cracked so many jokes, I thought I would entertain him a bit
myself, and told him about an aunt of mine who, while dying, heard that
she was going to lie in state in the green room.
“Not in the green room,” said auntie. “I always hated that wall paper.
Besides, it’s unhealthy.”
Twain admitted that was good fun, and regretted not having thought of
the green paper himself.
“She must have been a fine old girl,” he said, “to stand up for her
rights even ‘in extremis,’ as the doctors call it.”
“By the way,” he continued, “every time I paddle the Atlantic I say to
myself, ‘Mark, old boy, don’t die on this trip.’ For, of course, folks
have a foolish notion that one’s bones must rest at home. Accordingly,
if I died as United States consul in the Kingdom of Sheba--if there be
such a place--Washington would have to send a warship to fetch my bones
back to America. Again, if I died a plain citizen in London, I would be
shipped back in an ordinary liner. But think of it. Before shipping my
body, it would have to go into an undertaker’s vault, and undertakers’
cellars are dark and mildewed, and nasty smelling. By George, I
wouldn’t like to be in a cellar for a week or two. And afterwards they
would place the casket in the hold of the ship with other boxes, and
the rats come gnawing about, and perhaps the ocean looks in too and
gives you a swim. No, it isn’t pleasant to die abroad. I want to die at
home, in bed and in comfort.”
At another time Mark returned to the theme, saying:
“Remember my story about the body in the morgue? They couldn’t make out
whether the person was dead or merely shamming death, and so they put
a bell-rope in the man’s hand, and later, when the man awoke from his
deathlike sleep and rang the bell, the watchers got so frightened they
ran away, and, it being freezing cold, the man died a real death. When
they next looked upon him, he was as dead as a doornail. No, as I said
before, I want to die at home, without any bell-ropes, or undertakers’
cellars, or rats, or bilge water.”
THE LEFT HAND DIDN’T KNOW
“I saw your protégé in Paris--he is getting along finely with his
painting,” I told Mark, meeting him in the Strand, London.
“I do not know what you mean by protégé,” he said evasively, “but I
am glad to hear that the boy is progressing. Do you know,” he added
quickly, “I hold with that famous English letter-writer, whose name I
forget, that an artist has brush and pencil and that the public will
reward him as it sees fit.”
Of course, Mark didn’t “hold” anything of the sort. He had then
supported that bright American boy in Paris for three years, giving him
the best of teachers and advancing his chances in every way possible,
but he resented my touching upon the subject. I suppose he would have
cut me dead the next time we met, if I had reminded him of the colored
boy whom he was seeing through college in the States.
AMERICAN HUMORISTS
They were talking about humorists in Mr. Jackson’s office. Jackson was
the first secretary of legation, blessed with a very beautiful wife and
money. After a lot of talk, Twain was asked for his opinion.
“Well,” he said, “the greatest American humorist I know of is Mr.
Fox of the ‘Police Gazette’--the fellow who put full evening dress
on sluggers. John L. Sullivan and some of the hard-boiled boys he
licked were, of course, familiar to the American eye in trunks and
undershirts. Reflect on the giant mind that conceived the original idea
of making them look like Kyrle Bellew or Augustin Daly. Fox with that
picture beat us Knights of the Quill easily.”
TELEPATHY OR SUGGESTION
In the nineties Mark had asked me to translate his yarn on telepathy
for the “Berlin Boersen Courier.” The story had caught on, and the
editor kept bothering for more of that sort. Mark had promised again
and again, but nothing came of it. When I asked him for the tenth or
fifteenth time, he said, “Pshaw, telepathy is out of date. I saw some
mental suggestion done at Professor Glossen’s in Zurich that knocked
spots out of telepathy.” He asked the rest of the company to listen,
and continued:
“That there be no room for deception of any kind, the professor asked
me to go to any drug store in town and buy a bottle of distilled water.
We scraped the label off, swathed the bottle in linen, and then buried
it carefully in a box--a sort of fireless cooker arrangement. This was
done before the students began to arrive. When the lecture room was
good and full, the Professor addressed the boys to the effect that he
was on the track of a new chemical, but that his discovery was still
far from complete. The chemical, he continued, had a peculiar odor,
heretofore not classified, and this morning he was anxious to study the
rapidity with which that odor would diffuse itself through the air.
Hence he asked the students to give the utmost attention to what he was
doing. Each student was to raise his hand the moment he perceived the
strange odor.
“The Professor unburied and opened the bottle, turning his head away
so as not to be overcome by the odor, while I watched the proceedings
by a stop-watch. The boys were all ears--nose, I mean. After fifteen
seconds, most of the students in the first row were holding up a hand.
In 40 seconds the odor, which did not exist, had traveled to the
rear benches, and when we counted noses, seventy-five percent of the
students acknowledged perception of the odor and some even went so far
as to be nauseated by it.”
TRYING TO BE SERIOUS DIDN’T WORK
At Brown’s, in London, somebody spoke in glowing terms of Raymond’s
portrayal of Colonel Sellers.
“You needn’t praise him for _my_ sake,” said Mark. “I did not write the
part for an actor like him at all. I wrote it for Edwin Booth. That
is, I had Edwin Booth in mind when I did the play. But Raymond was the
superior money-maker. He had the masses with him--and I was pressed for
funds.
“As a matter of fact, my Colonel Sellers is a portrait study--a
take-off on a fine old Southern gentleman, Colonel Mulberry Sellers,
whom I knew in life. He had some funny traits about him, but these
never counted with me. It was the pathos in his life that got me. And
the pathos, relieved by a few funny things, I intended to put upon the
stage. Raymond caricatured the part, and I often felt like taking it
away from him.”
ASSORTED BEAUTIES
Of the Vienna women Mark Twain used to say that they were so “cussed
pretty a man walking out with his wife feels relieved when he meets a
plain one.”
He was reminded of his visit to the Berlin court and was asked what he
thought of the ladies he met there.
“They were so loaded down with tiaras, necklaces, and sets of jewelry,
my eyes were too dazzled to get a good view of their faces. I am
sure, though, that most of the old ones had enormous backs. And that
recalls a story that I heard at an embassy here, which I must not
name. The ambassadors were talking of the beauty of the women of their
own country, and they all looked with pity on the Korean consular
representative, wondering what he would say, but he was a spunky chap,
and when his turn came, blurted out: ‘Well, gentlemen, as to the fair
sex, there isn’t much to boast of in my country, but I _will_ admit
that the ladies of our court at home are no less ill-favored than
the women of the Berlin Schloss, and they are dirtier, too.’ That
postscript,” said Mark, “was the funniest thing I heard in a long time.
He said it in a right hearty and well-meaning way, too. He evidently
meant it and was proud of it.”
MARK’S CHILDREN KNEW HIM
I congratulated Mark Twain on the fact that he had been mistaken for
the great Mommsen, and, throwing out his chest, he said:
“I feel indeed flattered because somebody thought that I have the whole
Roman world, with Poppæa and Nero and Augustus and all the rest, under
my hat, yet, when I come to think of it, there is some difference
between us two. _My_ children know their papa, and I know Susan, Clara,
and Jean. But think what happened to Mommsen the other day. He was
proceeding to a bus from his residence, when an unmannerly wind carried
off his hat. A boy, playing in the street, picked it up and brought it
to the great man. (By the way, never run after your own hat--others
will be delighted to do it. Why spoil their fun?)
“‘Thank you,’ said Mommsen. ‘I never could have recovered the hat
myself.’ He looked the boy over carefully, and added:
“‘And a nice little boy. Do you live in the neighborhood? Whose little
boy are you?’
“‘Why,’ said the kid, ‘mamma says I am Professor Mommsen’s little boy,
but I never see him. He is always among the Romans, writing in a book.’
“‘Bless your heart, little man,’ said Mommsen. ‘To-night I will surely
be home early; tell your mamma, and ask her to introduce you and the
other children properly.’”
MARK, DOGS, DAGOES, AND CATS
Mark never tired telling of the Italian literary shark who
unsuccessfully tried to blackmail him out of twenty francs.
“He had a peculiar grievance, that Dago,” said Mark. “He vocalized
to the effect that he had done me the honor to call four times at my
villa and that, just as often, he came near losing the seat of his
pants by the actions of my degraded dogs, who drove him off. Hence, he
calculated that I owed him at least five francs per visit, on account
of his trouble and the anxiety he suffered. But as I kept no dogs,
neither degraded nor otherwise, my dogs couldn’t have worried the man.
And he wasn’t on my visiting list anyhow.”
“Somewhere,” continued Mark, “I put on record that I know the business
end of a horse very well, but I never bothered enough about dogs to
make sure of their anatomy. Pussy is the animal for me. You remember
my adventures in Koernerstrasse No. 7, Berlin. The women took that
apartment in Slumland over my head, and lured me to approve of their
choice by having two purring cats on the hearth, when I first saw the
place. I simply can’t resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They
are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know,
outside of the girl you love, of course.”
THE TRAGEDY OF GENIUS
On October 13, 1891, Mark Twain and I went together to the Berlin
University to see the great Virchow lionized and almost deified by his
fellow professors and by the students. Mark was much impressed and
promised to give Virchow a good send-off in his correspondence. And on
the way home he waxed almost sentimental, saying: “Virchow is seventy
years old. In a little while he will either be dead or that great
intellect of his will begin to deteriorate, and what a pity that would
be!
“There was Emerson, who valued impressions and ideas above
everything--in his way as great a man as Virchow and certainly a great
benefactor of his countrymen. But Holmes told me that in the late
seventies of his long life, facts counted no longer with Emerson, for
his memory was gone. At Longfellow’s funeral, which preceded his own
by a few months only, Emerson walked up to the coffin twice, probably
forgetting the second time that he had already gazed upon his late
friend’s face. When he had taken this last farewell, he came back to
his seat and said to the person nearest to him:
“‘That dead man was a sweet and beautiful soul, but I have completely
forgotten his name.’
“For myself,” concluded Twain, “I have forgotten many a thing, but I
will never forget that little speech of poor old Emerson. _Sic transit
gloria mundi_--such is the way of the world, a free translation, I
know, but highly applicable.”
KILTIES AND THE LASSIE
“I heard a good one on a young Scotchman, a fellow who was always
trying to show off in kilties. By the way, Andy Carnegie told me
about him. This young Scot, with some other chaps, went on a tramp of
the lakes of Scotland, and young Douglas had a good time showing off
his fine calves--talked about them and made comparisons with other
well-known legs, of actresses, bishops, dancers, etc. (In England all
bishops wear knickers, you know.)
“At night the boys put up at a rather dilapidated inn, neither clean
nor promising other creature comforts. But the girl who waited on them,
maid or scullion, was a dandy--blonde and blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked and
sturdy of arm and leg.
“As she flitted in and out of the room, bringing whiskey and
water, cheese, bread and dried fish--that was all the bill of fare
afforded--the travelers’ eyes followed her, and when she left the room
there was many a knowing wink. Douglas got jealous of the attention
bestowed on Miriam.
“‘What is there to go daft over?’ he demanded peevishly.
“‘Well,’ said they in chorus, ‘for one thing, she has better legs than
you, Douglas.’
“Douglas hotly denied the imputation. There was an argument, and it was
finally agreed that the two be measured. If Douglas lost, he must pay
for the night’s reckoning.
“Accordingly, Douglas was put to the tape, and the girl also. Miriam
had a few more inches of calf, but the Scotchman was undaunted. ‘Have
you ever seen finer thighs than mine?’ he boasted.
“The lad who had been doing the measuring got flustered, but the girl
laughed:
“‘Don’t be afeerd, Laddie; the higher you go the bigger they grow. I’ll
be the winner.’
“And she was,” said Mark, with a chuckle of evident approval.
A WISE PROVISION OF PROVIDENCE
From a window at the Hotel de Rome, Mark and friends were “reviewing”
the ceremonial entry of the King of Italy in Berlin.
“Fine horse-flesh,” Mark kept saying, “and the gee-gees look better fed
and happier than all that bedizened and beribboned royalty.”
“What’s that string of riders following the ‘four-poster’” (Mark’s
description of a state coach), “tied to the twelve horses? They seem to
sport every conceivable uniform, Horse, Foot, and Artillery!”
“Those are the German kings and kinglets,” it was explained.
“Let’s count them,” said Mark.
They counted some twenty crowned heads, “young, old, and
mouse-colored,” said our friend, as he retired from the window and
attacked the coffee and cake. He sat musing for a while, but when
somebody suggested “billiards,” he became alert as usual.
“I have been thinking,” he said--“thinking of wise Providence. Just
fancy that Providence had run the Equator through Europe, instead of
through the Pacific, or wherever it is now. If the Equator happened to
be located in the Old World, each of the kings we have seen, and more
to be heard from, would be itching and grabbing for it, pouring out
their subjects’ blood like water (saving their own, of course) to get
hold of the blamed thing. I would make them _sit_ on it. Hot dogs.”
THE AWFUL GERMAN LANGUAGE
In the Berlin of 1891, street-car conductors gave you a ticket for
every mile traveled, and you were expected to keep all these tickets or
slips of paper in apple-pie order to show to an inspector who might,
or might not, come around. Mark regularly threw his on the floor, and
dropped cigar ashes on them. Accordingly, he had to pay double fare
every little while, and was abused into the bargain.
One afternoon, going to the Legation, we got into an old, rather narrow
bus, and opposite Mark sat a woman with an enormous bosom.
“What do you bet she takes No. 52. corsets?” he whispered. “She grew
that as a shelf for her bus tickets,” he continued. “If I had a
‘chester’ like that, I could save money.”
After a pause, he turned suddenly on me:
“What is bust in German?”
“Busen,” I translated.
“Male, female, or neuter?”
“Male--der Busen.”
He began slapping his knees with both hands, waggled his head from one
side to the other, and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks. But
he never said another word on that trip.
Two months later the lecture, “The Awful German Tongue,” was delivered.
But at the embassy we knew it almost by heart before he came out with
it, for he was forever talking genitive case, declinations, definite
and indefinite articles, and male, female, or neuter.
ARTIST OR PHOTOGRAPHER
Mr. Clemens had met Lenbach, the eminent German painter, in Vienna,
and when, a year or two afterwards, I ran across Mark in Munich, he
proposed that we call at Lenbach’s studio. So to Akademie Strasse we
went, and duly admired Lenbach’s collections. “Mostly painted kaisers,
kings, and kinglets, also one man, W. K. Vanderbilt,” was Mark’s
estimate. I saw Lenbach eye Clemens with business in his heart. Mark
saw it too. “Wonder if he intends to throw me on the linen, I mean the
canvas,” he whispered, while Lenbach was busy in another part of the
shop.
“It would increase his popularity immensely,” I sotto voce’ed back.
Lenbach returned--with a camera, and as Mark looked puzzled, Lenbach
explained: “I always get every possible angle I can of the persons I
want to paint. Now, if you will just stand still, Mr. Clemens, for a
little while, I will be ever so much obliged.”
And Lenbach made the rounds of Clemens, who had taken off his overcoat,
more than once, photographing every important bit of anatomy, back,
sides, front, arms, legs, ear, full face, back of head, cheeks, hands,
eyes, etc.
“They told me in Vienna that Lenbach was an artist,” commented Mark
when we gained the sidewalk. “As you saw, he is merely a photographer.
Glad I never went to pieces over his art with a capital A.”
Whether the painting was ever undertaken by Lenbach I don’t know,
but it would be immensely interesting to get those plates from the
“photographer’s” studio.
MARK INTERVIEWED THE BARBER ABOUT HARRY THAW
During his last visit to London, Mark called me up one morning and
said: “My arm aches and I can’t do it myself, so for God’s sake, take
me to a barber who can scrape one’s face without taking half the hide
off. I am getting mighty tired of being flayed alive in this here burg.”
Accordingly we drove down to the Cecil in the Strand.
“I understand you are the man who treats a delicate skin like an
American beauty rose,” said Mark to the barber.
“I will treat yours, Mr. Clemens, as if it were a butterfly. For I
have read what you have said about Italian barbers,” was answered. And
the things that happened to Mark’s face, head, hands and feet while in
the chair would fill a column of “The Times” to enumerate. He remained
two hours in the chair, and was not allowed to pay a red penny for the
accommodation.
Later, at a well-known grillroom, we saw the massage artist alone at a
table, and seated ourselves at the same board. The barber talked about
other American celebrities and notorieties he had treated and mentioned
Thaw.
“Oh, you shaved Harry--tell me about it,” said Mark.
When the barber had finished, Mark insisted, looking fiercely at me:
“Not a word of this in New York, or there will be another dozen Thaw
trials.”
As Harry Thaw is now disposed of, temporarily, at least, it won’t do
any harm to print Mark’s interview with the barber.
It seems that Harry and Evelyn occupied a suite at the Cecil before
they made that notorious exhibition of themselves in New York. Harry
was an early riser and Evelyn was not, and when the barber called at
eight, as ordered, Evelyn either had to be put out of bed forcibly by
Harry or remained under the covers (for a time at least).
“And could you do your barbering and currycombing with that pretty
thing within arm’s length?” asked Mark.
“I had to,” said the barber. “I was paid for it; besides, there was a
terrible horsewhip on the bed and a revolver in an open drawer.
“Harry insisted upon smoking while I wielded the razor, and I had the
greatest difficulty in the world not to cut him. He also insisted upon
quarreling with Evelyn or lauding her beauty while my knife played
around his mouth. This sort of thing went on for a week or more, when
one fine morning I saw that Harry had rigged up a shooting stand in the
hall of the apartment.
“‘Close the door,’ he cried, ‘and pull the curtains across. I don’t
want the servants to hear.’ Then he began firing at the target. Evelyn
had been asleep, and hearing shots, jumped out of bed and began
crying: ‘My God!’ and ‘Mamma;’ likewise promised ‘never to do it
again.’”
“Never to do _what_ again?” asked Mark.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“But you were right next to her; why didn’t you ask her?” insisted Mark.
“But it was her private business,” said the barber.
“Sure it was, but that was so much more reason for worming it out of
her. You are a good barber, but a h---- of a reporter.”
“Of course, the floor attendants came trooping to Thaw’s door and the
house telephone and speaking tubes emitted a volley of questions.
“Harry was prepared to give an impertinent though truthful answer. But
Evelyn took the phone in hand and swore that it was an accident, due to
her carelessness--Harry had nothing to do with it, and she was going to
apologize to the management. When things had quieted down, Thaw told me
on the d. q. that he would transfer his revolver practice to a certain
shooting gallery. ‘I want to be an A No. 1 shot when I return to New
York,’ he said. ‘There is a fellow who has deeply wronged my girl and I
am going to have it out with him.’”
HIS PORTRAIT--A MIRROR
“People wonder why I spend so much time abroad,” said Mark Twain at a
little luncheon party in Vienna, where young wine, fresh from the vat,
circulated freely. “One of the reasons is that I have no doubles in
foreign countries, while in the States I had notice served on me twice
a month on the average that I look exactly like Mr. Cobbler Smith or
Mr. Bricklayer Brown. I was told they had the very same warts, in the
very same places, where I sport them--accuracy or imagination, which?
The day before I left New York I got a letter of that sort and, having
booked passage and nothing to fear, I made bold to answer it.
“‘My dear Sir,’ I wrote. ‘I was so much impressed by the resemblance
that I bear your face, feet, hands, mustache, eyelids, ears, hair,
eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, and other things, that I had the portrait of
yourself you so kindly enclosed framed, and hereafter I shall use it in
place of a mirror when I shave.’”
“Wife never saw that letter,” added Mark. “She was packing.”
MARK, BISMARCK, LINCOLN, AND DARWIN
I had been to see Bismarck to help boom Bryan for the Presidency, when
that gentleman happened to get defeated for the Senate.
“And is old Bismarck still reading those trashy French novels?”
inquired Mark.
“Much worse,” I said.
“Started Paul de Kock over again?”
“Worse still. He is reading Mark Twain now.”
“You don’t say. Since when the reform?”
“Since his daughter-in-law, Herbert’s wife, the little Countess Hoyos,
gave him a set for Christmas.”
“Hoyos, Hoyos. I met some people of that name in Italy.”
“Your fair patroness hails from Trieste, or neighborhood.”
“How do you know that Bismarck not only owns, but reads, my books?”
demanded Mark.
“Because he asked me whether there are still steamer loads of Yankees
going picnicking in Palestine with Mark Twain for a bear-leader. The
old Prince told me he read ‘Innocents Abroad’ twice, and memorized the
best things in it to relate to his grandchildren.”
“Quite a compliment--I _do_ wish Bismarck hadn’t been such a rascal--in
politics, I mean--for in private life he was quite a gentleman, I
understand. And it is to laugh how, relying on that, de Blowitz worked
the greatest of scoops during the Berlin Congress. Namely, about that
world-moving affair the ‘London Times’ for weeks could get no more or
better news than, mayhap, the Brighton Enterprise. Finally de Blowitz,
the Thunderer’s international representative, lit upon a fourth-rate
secretary in the German foreign office, who had an exceedingly broad
appetite and a correspondingly narrow pocketbook. De Blowitz offered to
pay for the secretary’s luncheons, provided the young gentleman would
exchange hats with him daily, the Berliner’s chapeau concealing certain
notes about goings on at the foreign office under the hat band. Agreed!
By this ruse de Blowitz gathered the whole Berlin treaty piecemeal and
was able to cable it from Brussels to London even before that famous
document was read in the Congress.”
Mark continued: “If Bismarck had been the ordinary small-minded
statesman, he would have got on to de Blowitz’s game before it was half
finished, but being a gentleman, he saw nothing out of the way in the
association of ‘The Times’ correspondent with one of his secretaries.”
Mark was genuinely proud of Bismarck’s partiality for his books, even
if it came late in the day.
“Do you know,” he once said, “that I gave Charles Darwin the strength
to write some of his most famous and epoch-making volumes? How? I am
told that, when the great scientist was utterly fagged out with study,
investigation, and with the manifold experiments he was carrying
on, he would read my ‘Innocents’ or ‘Tom Sawyer’ or, maybe a Harper
Magazine story, for a half hour or an hour. Then he would go to work
again and later was ready for bed. Only when this here Mark Twain had
lulled his nerves into proper condition, Darwin wooed sleep, I am told,
but I can’t vouch for the truth of this story.”
On another occasion Mark said: “I was born too late to help ease
Lincoln’s hours of worry. Ward Hill Lamon, whom we met in Berlin, told
me more than once that Lincoln would have been a constant reader of my
‘literature’ if he had lived long enough to enjoy my books, and none
knew Lincoln better than Lamon.
“And when my girls admonish me to behave in company, it always recalls
the stories Lamon told me about old Abe’s awkwardness.
“When Abe and he were riding circuit in Illinois, they carried their
office in their hats, and Abe contracted the habit of pulling off his
hat from the back so as not to spill any papers. That was all right
on the circuit, but in the White House it looked undignified. So Mrs.
Lincoln asked Lamon, a most courtly gentleman, to remonstrate with the
President and teach him to take off his hat ‘decently.’ ‘Decently’ was
the word she used, said Lamon. He continued:
“‘I did my best during a night’s smoker, Mr. Seward helping me, and
the President proved a good enough scholar for any high-school of
courtesy. Eight or ten times he took off his hat properly, without
a reminder of any sort. Then, at the good-night, I tried him again.
‘Let’s do it in the right courtly fashion,’ I said, doffing my chapeau
like the Count of Monte Cristo.
“‘Here goes,’ said the President, reached his right hand back, and
pulled off his stovepipe in the old Illinois circuit style.”
“You see,” concluded Mark, “it was no use trying to make a courtier of
Lincoln. The same here.”
MARK AT THE STOCK EXCHANGE, VIENNA
A day or two after I sent Clemens my translation of Field Marshal Count
Moltke’s Letters, he called at my hotel in the forenoon and proposed
that we walk to the stock exchange. The stock exchange, as usual, was
swarming with gentlemen of the Jewish persuasion, and Mark asked me to
pay particular attention to them.
“They are the smartest of the lot here,” he insisted, “and so is
a Jewish peddler smarter than a Christian house-owner--I mean the
average. I say it again; the Jews are the greatest people let loose.
“According to Moltke’s essay in the Letters you sent me, the Jews ate
up Poland. Very well, the storks eat up frogs. Do we blame the storks?”
MARK AND THE PRUSSIAN LIEUTENANT
Mark liked to be taken around to real German places, and one day
I escorted him to a Weinstube Unter den Linden, which had quite a
reputation for liquid and other refreshments. The room we entered was
full of lunchers; we sat down at a small side table that afforded a
good look around. About fifteen feet ahead of us was a pier glass on
the wall between two windows, and in front of it a table where an old
man with his frau were eating the national dish with sausage trimmings.
The old folks were enjoying themselves heartily, and, as Mark put it,
“they ate so you can hear them a mile off, like Chicago millionaires.”
Presently, a young lieutenant strode in, sword trailing, spurs jingling.
“Look at that,” said Mark. “All the stupidity and maliciousness of his
ancestors, male and female, for two hundred years back, is mirrored in
his face.”
The junior war lord stalked up the centre aisle, gave his cap to
a bowing waiter, and stood up in front of the pier glass. Then he
pulled a comb out of one pocket and a brush out of another, and began
“currycombing himself,” as Mark expressed it. Parting his hair all the
way down to the neck, he brushed it sideways both ends--over the old
people’s sauerkraut and sausages. Mark kicked at me under the table
and called me names for not going and knocking the fellow down.
“Don’t you see, he’s peppering those people’s dinner with his
dandruff,” he said. “Be a sport and go and kick him well, young fellow.”
But I knew better. The lieutenant would have spitted me on the end of
his sword before I could say Jack Robinson.
Gradually Mark’s wrath melted away and he saw only the funny side of
the affair. When the lieutenant had taken his seat at the table, he put
one knee over the other and ordered his pea soup on the rough--that is,
with the husks intact.
“Husks are filling, you know,” said Mark, “or perhaps his stomach is
full of chickens. Chicks like husks; that lieutenant is human, after
all.”
I thought we had seen enough and I encouraged him to go home.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I am going to see this circus to the end. Presently
that old woman will vomit when one of the lieutenant’s bristles tickles
her funny bone, and then she will spew all over his boots and pants. I
am waiting for that.”
MARK STUDIES THE COSTERMONGER LANGUAGE
“Funny that we never took to asses in New York and other parts of the
States,” said Mark one afternoon as we were passing through Soho,
London. He was watching the little costermonger carts traveling to
and fro with considerable speed, taking into account the petty draft
animals, the heavy loads and the boy or girl perched on top.
“The donkeys seem well fed,” mused Clemens a block or two further on,
“but I don’t like a whip in the driver’s hand. Hear that,” he cried
indignantly, “the rude way that corduroy-panted chap is talking to his
meek donkey. Let’s listen some more. It’s a scream.”
After the cart had driven away, Clemens said: “The patter of the
costermonger, when you come to think of it, is really a language
within the English language, and one might do worse than give it
printed tongue--_i. e._, raise it above the merely occasional use
British writers accord it. I want to look into that costermongery,” he
continued. “See if you can’t find, hire or steal some coster chap worth
listening to, some one who knows the patter with all the trimmings.”
And at his door he added: “Get an ‘Arriet,’ for the ‘Arry’s’ are too
tough.”
A week or two later Herbert Beerbohm Tree found us such a patter artist
among the employees of Her Majesty’s Theatre--a scrub lady--and here
follow some of the stories she told us, corrected and amended by Mark,
who cut out coster words not generally understood.
MARK AND THE COSTERMONGERS
That _Beautiful_ Funeral
Two Girls Meeting at the Corner of a Street.
“Hullo, I didn’t know you had moved up this way again. Who are you in
black for?”
“Stepfather. Thank Gowd! he _was_ a reg’lar log on the fambly’s leg.
Kept a-ebbing and a-flowing and _wouldn’t_ die. But you know when we
moved to ’Ampsted, that settled him. Those flu winds it was as took ’im
off.
“We ’ad a postmortem and everything on ’im, and when they opened ’im
you know they found he had two ulsters in his inside and there was
’aricot veins in his legs too. But it was the influential winds that
took ’im off, real.
“Of course Mother ’ad ’im insured in all sorts of places. So, poor man,
he real paid for all this beautiful mourning we are having on him. We
all dress alike in this beautiful black.
“On the funeral day we had all our cousins up from up-country and we
had such a _beautiful_ funeral and such a swell party atter. We had a
hotch-bone of beef and blanmanges and jellies and cakes and tarts, and
by Gowd! we did enjoy ourselves.
“Good-by, Maisie, see you another day, for my missus isn’t a
disagreeable old cat like most of ’em. That’s why I ’ave this bit of
talk with you. But I means to better myself soon as I can.”
Ada’s Beast of a Man
“Well, m’am, I feels all over alike. That beast of a ’usband of my
pretty pet of a Ada he wouldn’t let her have a van to move in when she
had all that sweep of furniture that he bought for her at the market
for five pounds ($25) and her chest of drawsers besides. Real, I don’t
feel as if I could eat a bit, I don’t.
“She had to get a barrow, Ada had, and a wheel came hoff and the pretty
pet had to hold it up with the long broom while the man was a-pushing
of it. But I will say, she has improved her rooms in moving.
“But it didn’t look at all like a man of _his_ standing, the governor
of a coal cart. And you can imagine what the neighbors said, seeing the
moving on the barrow and my pretty pet holding of it up.
“But I _must_ say she got blinds, they are those Verinkers (Venetians)
you ’eard of. Sure he is a beast, my pretty pet’s man. He wouldn’t even
put up the indecent lights for her, and she had to pay a man tuppence
to do it for her while she was still a-trembling from holding up the
barrow and that after paying tuppence halfpenny for the indecent
lights.”
Jealousy in Lowland
(Overheard near Billingsgate Market.)
“Hullo, how you gettin’ on and how’s your old man?”
“See ’ere, you remembers ’ow I looked atter ’im when he was that damn’
ill and all the nourishments I got ’im. Well ’e got that strong again
but ’e wouldn’t go to work. So I says to ’im yesterday mornin’ w’en ’e
was a-sittin’ over the fire smokin’ his dirty pipe, ‘Ain’t you _ever_
to go work no more?’
“What d’you think ’e says?
“‘Ere,’ he says, ‘I ’ave bin a-thinkin’. Where did you get all dese
’ere nourishments from while I was sick? I _do_ believe you had a boy.
’Ho is the man? I’ll knock ’is damn’ block off.’
“Now remember, maid, ’e never said a word while ’e was gettin’ the
nourishment down ’is gut, the beast, but afterwards ’e says dis ’ere to
me. ’Ere’s a beast for yer, girl.”
_Lady No. 2_--“’Ere ’e’s a-comin’ along the corner. Let’s scoot,
maidie. ’E doesn’t look good-natured at all, at all, this mornin’.”
The Troubles of Liz
Liz, the maid-of-all-work, has overstayed her furlough, and is very
emphatic, putting the blame on Kate.
“Oh, I won’t go out with that there Kate no more, m’am. That Kate
do know a lot of fast chaps. She interdooced me to one and he kept
a-cuddlin’ of me round the neck and near pushed my hat off, you see
it’s all awry. And he kept a-pinching of me about and arsked if it was
all my own figger. But he did say _Dear_ to me.”
Liz’s next place was with a butcher’s, but there they “were real rude”
to her, and she left, of course. This is her report of what happened:
“‘Here, Liz,’ said one of the helpers to me, ‘there’s two kidneys for
my tea. Take a care, you got two like that.’ Oh, I can’t stay in a
place where they talk as fast as that, just as if I had kidneys like a
cow.
“And the other chap comes and brings me a bit of liver to cook for
_his_ tea, and he says: ‘Liz, you know you’ve got a liver just like
that?’ I just ran upstairs and told the missus. And in the evening one
brings me a pig’s head with a squint in his eye and he says, ‘Liz, this
is what you do to the boys--give ’em the glad eye.’ No, I won’t stop,
as true as there is Gowds in ’eaven.”
Her next place was with a benevolent old spinster. Liz left her
service, saying: “I had no wages, and what do you think she did? Why,
she has locked up the tarts. And the other day I was making myself a
bit of toast and margarine and the old cat caught me at it and she
said, ‘Isn’t dripping not good enough for you, Liz?’”
THE FRENCH MADAME
One night in his dressing-room, Sir Herbert Tree introduced us to
another promising story-teller, namely, the French madame who looked
after “the ladies of the chorus, who raise a shapely leg before us.”
(That was a popular sing-song then and Mark heartily enjoyed it.) She
told Clemens of a stroke of good luck that had befallen her and he
declared himself tickled to death with her French-English, which, he
said, was every bit as good as his own English-French. Tree kindly lent
us “Basil,” his stenographer and “memory,” to jot down the yarn.
“Louisa, Be Brave”
At Madame Raymond’s house.
“Ah, Madame, how do you? Will you have a drink or are you too proud
already?”
“_Mais non_, Madame, we will have ze leedle drink as usual. And how
have you been getting on, Madame?”
“Ah, no at all well, I have been worried, _ma chère_, for my ’usband he
did join ze Lib’ral Club.
“Ah, after I tell you my leedle experience, _mon Dieu!_ you won’t let
Alphonse join ze damn Lib’ral Club.
“Listen. As M. Raymond stayed till 1, 3, 4th o’clock in the morning at
the Lib’ral Club, I was told one or two or three leedle things about
him, but of course I did not think or believe at ze time. But ze three
time he did not come at ze 4th in the morning, I get up and dress
myself and go arounds to ze Lib’ral Club and does bash bangs at zat
door.
“And presently a head comes out of ze window upstairs and he says:
‘What you want down there at this hour of ze evening, Madame?’
“‘I want M. Raymond, my ’usband.’
“‘He is not ’ere, Madame. Ze Club always closes at eleven ze clock.’
“‘I thank you, Monsieur, sorry to trouble you.’ So I put zese leedle
things together that I had been told and I jus’ go rounds ze corner and
I listen down ze aria and hear sounds of reverie.
“A policeman he stood at ze corner. I says to ze policeman: ‘Here is
two shillings, you go rounds ze corner and you sees notings. Ze madame
here has decoys my ’usband to dance with the girls.’
“And ze policeman is off and sees notings.
“Then I goes close to ze door and bash bangs at ze door. And a
Frenchwoman like myself comes up and she says, ‘What you want, Madame?’
“I said, ‘I want my ’usband, M. Raymond. Zat is all.’
“She says, ‘Your ’usband not ’ere, Madame.’
“I says, ‘Yes, I ’ear ’im downstairs.’
“Then quick she calls me lair and I gives her a bash bang down into ze
passage. She cried and up comes ze madame’s ’usband.
“He says, ‘What you do to my wife, you bad madame?’
“I says, ‘She will not give me my ’usband.’
“He says, ‘You are a bad madame. I turn you out of my ’ouse. Your
’usband not ’ere.’
“Then just comes up M. Raymond.
“‘Ah,’ says I, ‘this is all I jus’ want. So you come along wiz me.’
“Ah, my dear, we _did_ ’ave a leedle words on ze road ’ome and M.
Raymond says, ‘A pretty ting you done for yourself; you will be
sermonized for knocking that madame down.’
“But I patted me on the chest and I said to me, ‘Louisa, be brave.’
“A day or two after dis, a sermon came from the South Western Police
Court. Ah, _mon Dieu_, I was jus’ a leedle frightened, but I said to
me: ‘Louisa, you have been ze brave woman and you mus’ be brave all ze
time.’
“_Eh bien_, you remember ze _chapeau_ I bought in ze leedle Soho shop
and also that pretty gown in ze Chapelle Blanche--_très chic_?
“_Eh bien_, I put on ze _chapeau_ and ze pretty dress and ze nice
gloves that come to ze elbows, and I had a cab with four wheels and I
did go to ze police court.
“Ah, _ma chère_, when I get to ze police court, dere was a very fine
tall handsome Inspector and he jus’ hands me out of ze cab and I jus’
go into ze court and ze case was called.
“And ze judge he was dere and I bows to ze judge and ze judge bows to
me. And ze people, _ma chère_, zey were _ze big cowards_. Dey did not
turn up.
“So when I tells ze judge my leedle story, he does dismiss ze case.
“I goes outside and sees ze fine tall handsome Inspector. Ze Inspector,
he says: ‘You ’ave got off very well to-day, but ze excitement! You
mus’ come wiz me and ’ave a leedle someting.’
“Well, my dear, I did go and ze Inspector he give me the winner of a
’orse and I jus’ win forty pounds, _ma chère_.
“And ze people w’ere my ’usband was dancing came to me in ze evening
and apologized, and he says: ‘I’m very sorr’, madame, we did not say
your ’usband was zere. He did no ’arm. I bring you a leedle present. I
am chef at ze ---- Hotel and ’ere is a big basin of drippin’ for you,
Madame.’
“He was a very good chef, that monsieur, and so was the dripping.”
THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT
This story was told by Clemens at the American Embassy, Vienna.[B]
“She was the littlest, the sweetest maiden of about ten I have ever
seen, and she came dancing up to me with a smile and wink that was
simply bewitching. I was going home to 27 Fifth Avenue after a tiresome
dinner where I had to make a speech (_had_ to--God bless the organizer
of the dinner, for I won’t), and I was as tired as two dogs and as
grumpy as seven bears, when this vision suddenly burst upon me. I saw
at once that the little one was as happy as a lark, and naturally I
beamed on her, for I love children.
“As she was tripping along just as if I had been her grandpa--trusting
me with little confidences and petting my arm, she prattled about the
moon that would soon come up and the bogies and the bats and about the
fright they gave her, and I said:
“‘Little maid, hadn’t you better go home? Your mother may be anxious
about you.’
“‘Oh, no,’ she said; ‘mamma knows I am out and she is at the window
watching. She knows that I am walking with you, for I wanted to a lot
of times.’
“Well, I felt as proud as Pierpont Morgan on discovering a Fifteenth
Century missal and buying it for five dollars. And in my mind I patted
myself on the back, and said: ‘Mark, old boy, they _do_ love you, all
of them.’ Really, I felt tickled all over, and I don’t know how many
thousands of words at fifty cents ‘per’ that kid wheedled out of me by
way of answers to her questions and by way of compliments. She was a
princess kid, I tell you. When we arrived at No. 27, I insisted upon
taking her back to her home and there formally saying good-by to her.
Indeed I would have liked to kiss that little lady, but as her mother
was at the window I didn’t dare. And that kid kept on talking. If her
words had been buns, single handed she could have beaten Fleischman
with all his hundreds of bakers. But what puzzled me was that she was
forever talking about selling tickets and how nice it must be to take
so much cash for tickets. I thought, of course, she was referring to
tickets at church festivals and, to increase my credit with her, I said
that I bought lots of them and that people took chances on my books
and sometimes I took chances myself and got burdened with some to cart
home.”
“‘Oh, you write books, too?’ she said.
“‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I am a sort of bookworm, and here is your home and
now you must go in, for it is getting late and the bats and the bogies
are coming. Good-night, little lady, and sleep well, and when you are a
big girl and have a husband and a house and a motor car, then you can
tell your friends that once you walked with Mark Twain----”
“‘Mark Train! I never heard of him.’
“As I looked at my adoring and adorable little friend her lip began to
quiver. It quivered still more, her blue eyes filled--could not hold
the tears--they dropped down on her face and on my flattered hand.
“‘Oh, sir,’ she sobbed, drawing away from me (I thought she was
broken-hearted because she had to leave me)--‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought
you were Buffalo Bill.’”
FOOTNOTES:
[B] Miss Lucy Cleveland, the author, heard Mr. Clemens tell the same
story at a dinner party in New York.
RHEUMATISM AND PRODDING
Some of the biographers of Mark Twain have made a lot of his sufferings
by rheumatism while in Berlin. I saw him almost daily, except when he
was down with bronchitis, and I heard very few complaints from him
_re_ rheumatism. Occasionally he said, “My damned arm has done some
howling in the night.” But when out of bed, it never “howled” badly
enough to prevent him from writing or holding a book. He was scribbling
most of the time, when not talking or riding, or walking, and when I
saw him in his “Mattress Mausoleum” (as he called his bed), he handled
pipe, papers, knife and books freely. I honestly believe much of that
rheumatism scare was put on. For Mark liked leisure above all things.
When he did not feel like writing, he told Livy he “had it bad,” and
escaped a scolding. “Livy” was an excellent wife to him, but she
had the commercial spirit that Mark lacked--and God knows he needed
prodding once in a while.
ON LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS
Mark Twain always liked to talk about “La Mouche, Heine’s
girl-friend-to-the-death.” One morning, at the British Museum, he made
me hunt through dozens of books, French, German and Italian, for her
real name: Camille Seldon.
“So she wasn’t German,” he said. “I thought so, for a German girl, by
her innate heaviness, might have spoiled that nimbleness of language
we admire in Heine. Goethe’s girls, as their portraits show, were all
beefy things--no, not all, I except Gretchen--hence Goethe’s Olympian
periods, his ponderous style. It’s wrong, I think, to credit Camille
with mere physical influence on Heine. Her limpid French conversation,
I take it, aided in imparting to his French verse that airy, fairy
lightness which a foreigner rarely commands.”
Some one reminded Clemens that Camille also had been the friend of
Taine.
“A lucky girl! The most poesy-saturated of poets and the Father of
English literature! I call him the Father,” he added, “because he
made so many people read serious books which without his advice and
encouragement they would never have tackled.”
BAYARD TAYLOR’S GERMAN
“No, I haven’t got an ounce of envy in me. I once tried hard to get
envious, but happily my wife interfered. I had to forget about it and
turn my mind into other, cleaner channels. That was on our first trip
to Europe, in 1878. On the ship we met Bayard Taylor, the poet, bound
for Berlin, as ambassador to Bismarck. That, I believe, states the case
more correctly than the official ‘ambassador to the Court of Berlin.’
“Well, Bayard made me feel pretty cheap by his display of German. That
fellow was forever talking, thinking and writing German. Compared
with his, my own miserable German vocabulary was an ant-hill facing
Chimborazo. And when I heard him recite whole acts of his metric
translation of Faust, I wished myself in his shoes, for I certainly did
envy the man his Teuton knowledge. However, when I told Livy about it,
she warned me and made me promise to suppress the nasty habit. Well
done, for Bayard Taylor died within five or six months, at the age of
fifty-three.”
GENIUS IN EXTREMIS
When we were about to pass the French Embassy in Berlin one afternoon,
Mark dragged me across the street, saying:
“See those horses? That Kaiser is in there, making love to the
Ambassador’s wife. I don’t want to meet him as he comes out or when he
is thrown out, as he ought to be.”
At that moment a very distinguished English-looking gentleman passed us
in a cab, raising his hat to Mark.
“Do you know him?” asked Mark.
“I have seen him in Fleet Street, I believe, but I don’t know where to
put him. As you know, my eyes don’t travel far these days.”
“Why,” said Mark, “this is ‘Labby’ (Labouchère) of London ‘Truth,’
the Baron-maker. I call him that because he actually put hundreds of
barons into the world, if not into the peerage--namely, when he acted
as Secretary of the British Embassy in Paris and had the issuing of
passports in hand. Suppose John Smith and Mary Smith, British subjects,
toddled in and asked for their papers. Labby would look them over
carefully and if their persons and address lent itself to the scheme,
would make out the paper for ‘Sir John’ and ‘Lady Mary.’ Of course the
people stuck to the title, acquired under the government seal, for
the rest of their lives. Indeed, most of the Labby-created nobles
by and by gained popular recognition as the real thing--baronets and
baronesses. On Labby’s part it was all fun--burlesque pure and simple.
Himself a noble by birth, he thought the nobility a stupid and useless
institution these days, and if the prime minister--a commoner--could
make dukes and princes, why could not he, Labby, at least make Sirs and
Ladies? But of course when the government got wise to it, Labby got the
sack. Just the same, he’s the smartest Englishman I’ve met. By Jingo,
I would like to hear his last words on this planet of ours even as I
would like to have heard Heine’s grand: ‘Never mind my sins, God will
forgive them. Forgiving is his business.’”
Of the pair of geniuses, Mark died first (April 21, 1910), and both
left characteristic utterances. Mark said to his physician:
“Good-by. _If_ we meet----”
Labouchère, shortly before his end, had been lectured by a sister or
brother on the godless life he had led and had been assured that, if
God didn’t take pity on him, he would certainly go to a hot place. An
hour or so after listening to these comforting remarks, Labouchère had
what Twain called on another occasion a “fair wind for Paradise,” _i.
e._, he was dying and knew it. Now it happened that during the last
half-minute of his life a spirit lamp in the next room exploded with a
loud bang. Labouchère raised his head a bit and said feebly:
“What--_already_?”
One more gasp and he was dead. How Mark would have enjoyed Labby’s:
“What, already?”
WHAT MAY HAPPEN TO YOU AFTER YOU ARE DEAD
With Richard Harding Davis I had covered the coronation of the Czar
in Moscow and Mark could never get enough of that trip, asking me
a thousand questions about the country and people. But what most
interested him was the fact that they had taken Carlyle’s Cromwell away
from me at the frontier. “You can have it back when you return,” said
the Russian customs people, but they stuck to my book just the same.
“Maybe they will start a revolution on the strength of Carlyle,” said
Mark. “I hope they will.”
“Talking of Cromwell--I am glad they have no Westminster Abbey in the
States. And here is why. This man Cromwell was alternately an anarchist
and an autocrat. More powerful than any king, he refused the crown, yet
made Parliament accept his imbecile son as his successor. They buried
him in Westminster Abbey with all the honors due a king and after two
years dragged his body out and beheaded the poor carcass, then stuck
the head on a pike, mounted on Parliament House. You say even if we had
a Westminster Abbey in America and I was buried there, yet the things
that happened to Cromwell could never happen to me. But I don’t know
about that. When I was in Paris last, somebody offered me a tooth
out of the head of Turenne, who had been buried two hundred years
or more. How did he get that tooth? Why, during the revolution the
Jacobins--ancestors of our present-day anarchists--smashed the royal
graves at Saint Denis and flung the royal bones to the winds. Turenne
happened to have been buried among his peers at the feet of Louis XIV.
That is the reason why he was dispossessed. Now comes a commercially
inclined Frenchman who had read that Turenne had been blessed with
exceptionally fine molars. So he breaks all the teeth out of the dead
man’s jaws and sells them to the highest bidder. I was told there
was only one left and I could have it for 100 francs. But I was more
interested in my own teeth than in Turenne’s and refused to do business
with the antiquarian. However, to have my little joke I said to him,
‘If you had the “Henri Quatre” of the 4th Henry I might buy.’
“‘The Jacobins plucked that out, too,’ he replied, ‘but there isn’t
a hair left for sale nowadays. However, I may locate one or more by
diligent hunting and I’ll let you know if I succeed.’
“Think of it! Henri Quatre’s Henri Quatre torn out by the roots and
sold at so much per hair! That mustache and goatee that was next to
so many sweet lips--the sweetest in France. I have seen the originals
of some of his letters in the Musée de Cluny, Paris, and had some of
those little masterpieces of grace translated for me.”
Mark took out his Paris notebook and read:
“‘My true heart,’ he wrote at one time to Diane de Poitiers, ‘you have
lied. I shall not see you for ten days. It is enough to kill me. I will
not tell you how much I care, it would make you too vain, and I think
you love me, so with a happy heart I finish.’
“In answer Diane wrote back, ‘If I die, have me opened and you will
find your image engraved on my heart.’”
KINGS IN THEIR BIRTHDAY SUITS
Two things Mark Twain was especially concerned about--the success
of his “Joan of Arc,” which he considered his best work, and the
possibility of getting King Leopold hanged.
Leopold and the Czar were his special bêtes noires. “I’d like to see
these two fellows face their people naked except for their whiskers.
Let them face public opinion in their birthday suits and see what will
happen to them.”
MARK ON LINCOLN’S HUMANITY
When Ida M. Tarbell’s “Life of Lincoln” was running in McClure’s
during the late nineties, Mark said at luncheon at the Cafe Ronacher,
Vienna, one afternoon: “That woman is writing a wonderfully good and
accurate, intimate and comprehensive book and I _do_ hope that, in the
end, she will give the same prominence to Lincoln’s correspondence on
pardons as to other state papers of his. When you come to think of it,
a lot of nonentities have got credit for able state papers, but it
takes humanity to commute a sentence of death and Lincoln has commuted
thousands. The only one he didn’t and couldn’t commute was one imposed
by our friend, Ward Hill Lamon.
“Lamon, then Marshal of the District of Columbia, had seen Lincoln
safely home and then made his usual rounds of the White House grounds.
All seemed well, no cause for suspicion, Ward told me, and he was about
to retire, when he thought he saw some movement amid a clump of green
foliage. It looked as if a body was rising from the ground.
“‘I reached the spot by three leaps, faced a dark figure and, without
ado, dealt him a blow square between the eyes, knocking him down,’ said
the Marshal.
“Well,” continued Mark, “you know Lamon as he looks now, still a
commanding figure, though worried and weakened by diabetes. In the
early sixties he was a giant, a John L. Sullivan as a hitter. That blow
of his killed the stranger in the White House grounds and when the body
was carried to the Secret Service offices and searched, they found it
to be that of a Southern gentleman of distinguished family. He had
two pistols and two heinous looking knives on him--undoubtedly Ward
had stopped short the career of one of the forerunners of John Wilkes
Booth, postponing the great tragedy several months--I have forgotten
the date. Wait, it happened during the night when Lamon brought the
President back from the Soldiers’ Home, outside of Washington.
“Lincoln’s visit to the Soldiers’ Home was not on the schedule, Lamon
told me, and he was surprised and angered when, calling at the White
House, he heard of his riding away all by himself, for it was just such
opportunities as would-be assassins were looking for.
“At the stables Lamon learned that the President came there in person,
ordered ‘Old Abe,’ his favorite army mule, saddled and, half an hour
ago, rode away as carelessly as any private citizen might do. There was
a grain of comfort in the character of the mount selected, for ‘Old
Abe’ wouldn’t go faster than a dogtrot if you beat him to death. So
Lamon selected the fastest horse he could borrow and in a twinkling was
en route for the Soldiers’ Home. As calculated, he met the President
half-way down the road and Lincoln, far from suspecting that the
Marshal was on his trail, invited him to come along and have some fun.
Well, the President had a jolly time at the Soldiers’ Home, swapping
stories with veterans and boys, listening to the singing, declaiming
poetry and forgetting the care of his exalted office.
“And he kept up the fun on the way home, talking to his mule and
explaining to ‘Old Abe’ what a ‘Misery’ Hill was. (He always used to
call Lamon by his second name.) Hill, the President told his namesake,
was always looking for danger, always suspecting somebody, never
content with the troubles one couldn’t escape, etc., etc. But while
Lamon laughed at the President’s sallies and encouraged his carefree
humor, he kept both eyes open and if anything or anybody had stirred
in front, back or at the sides of the road, his revolver was ready for
emergency.”
AN ENGLISH LOVER OF KINGS AND A HATER
“Look at those fools going to pieces over old Doc Johnson--call
themselves Americans and lick-spittle the toady who grabbed a pension
from the German King of England that hated Americans, tried to flog us
into obedience and called George Washington traitor and scoundrel.”
Thus spoke Mark Twain in the Doctor Johnson room of the Cheshire
Cheese, the Strand, where the old thoroughfare becomes “the Street of
Ink” or Newspaper Row, and while we were enjoying the famous meat pie
served there on certain days of the week.
“You are pleased to occupy Miss Evelyn’s seat,” whispered James the
waiter, looking at Mark.
“Miss Evelyn--what?” demanded our friend.
James blushed. “Miss Evelyn, why--Miss Evelyn, the beautiful young
American lady who came with the millionaire, Mr. Harry Thaw. While she
was in London I always had to keep for her the seat under the Doctor’s
portrait on pie-day.”
“Not because she loved Johnson better, but because she liked being in
the limelight worse,” commented Mark.
“Of course,” he continued, “no Englishman misses doing the kowtow to
Johnson when he’s got half a chance, but of our own people, coming
to the Cheese, ninety-nine per cent. do so because they don’t know
the man, and the others because they feel tickled to honor a writer a
hundred and fifty years or so after he is good and rotten.”
“Read Johnson plentifully, I suppose,” mocked Bram Stoker, famous as
author, critic, barrister and Henry Irving’s associate.
“Not guilty--never a written word of his,” answered honest Mark. “I
gauge Johnson’s character by his talks with that sot Bozzy, whom
foolish old Carlyle called the greatest biographer ever because, I
suppose, Bozzy interviewed Johnson on such momentous questions as:
‘What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in the Tower with a
baby?’”
“Well, what would _you_ do,” asked Bram.
“Throw it out of the window to a passing milkman, if it was weaned and
if there was no cow around,” said Mark.
When the merriment had subsided, Mark continued the slaughter of
Johnson: “Why, he was a man who would have called brother a cannibal
island king who had eaten a Jesuit, while he would have mobilized the
whole British fleet against savages who dined off an Episcopalian.”
“And if they had fried a Bishop of the established Church down in the
Pacific?”
“Ask me something easier,” answered Mark. “For all I know Johnson may
have been the guy who invented a seething lake of fire and brimstone
de luxe for married couples who had loved wisely and too well on a
Christian holiday.”
“Boldly stolen from Voltaire,” suggested Bram.
“No, I read about the lake in one of Anatole France’s weekly essays in
‘Le Temps,’ but there was no reference to Johnson, of course.
“Speaking of Voltaire--I don’t remember that he mentioned Johnson in
his English Letters, though he did take the trouble (in Eighteenth
Century French ignorance) to call Shakespeare ‘a drunken savage,’ ‘an
amazing genius’ and ‘an indecent buffoon who had rendered English taste
a ruined lady for two hundred years to come.’”
“Date’s quite correct, as I once pointed out to poor Gene Field,”
interrupted Stoker. He called for a slate--they had no paper at the
Cheese--and scrawled:
Opening of the Lyceum Theatre under Henry Irving and Bram
Stoker 1878
Death of Shakespeare 1616
----
Interval 262
“As you see,” added Bram, “Voltaire was out only a little more than
half a century. And what’s half a century when the Oxford Dodo--if the
moths hadn’t eaten him--would now be seven and twenty trillions years
old? But go on with your Voltaire, Mark.”
“You mean Johnson,” said Mark; “how he would have cackled had he known
that Voltaire got his start in literature by the library he bought as
a youngster out of Ninon de l’Enclos’ two thousand livres bequest.
‘Authorship reared on a wench’s patrimony,’ I hear him expectorate, and
George Rex would have been tickled to death, for Johnson, he would have
argued, has now extracted the sting from the Frenchman’s description of
Kings, as ‘a pack of rogues and highwaymen.’”
As he was speaking Mark grabbed hold of his elbow, indulging in a
grimace of pain. “What’s the date?” he demanded abruptly.
“August 25th.”
“Late, as usual,” said Mark with mock mournfulness. “True friends of
mankind and haters of intolerance have their rheumatism or colic on
August 24th, the day of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Voltaire
always timed his boils so and got a rash or the itch on May 14th for
good measure.”
“What happened on May 14th?”
“Why, you ignoramus, on May 14th, in the year I have forgot, the
humanest and royalest of kings, Henri IV, was assassinated by a damned
monk.”
MARK GOT ARRESTED IN BERLIN
It was in Koernerstrasse No. 7, of course, and it happened in this way.
Mark, his wife, Mrs. Crane, the three children, and the governess were
having breakfast when Gretchen came in, excitement written all over
her face; as Mark said: “You could hear her heart beat. There was a
frightful commotion under her shirtwaist.”
“‘Gracious Lord,’ she said, addressing me, ‘there is a Mister Policeman
outside who wants to see you, Gracious Lord.’
“‘Tell him to go to blazes,’ I said, Susan translating the American
classic into even more classic German.
“‘My God,’ groaned Gretchen, ‘I could never say anything like that to
a Mister Policeman. He is a Mister _Policeman_, don’t you understand,
Gracious Lord?’
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘I haven’t had any breakfast, and if the Kaiser
himself called I would throw him out.’
“At this moment there was a peremptory knock at the door and a raspy
voice bellowed:
“‘Wird’s bald?’ (Aren’t you coming?)
“Now I got real mad and telling Susie to get the revolver we didn’t
have in the house, I went to the door.
“‘I am Mr. Clemens,’ I said to the limb of the law. ‘What do you want
at this unearthly hour, of an American citizen? More taxes? I have paid
taxes on a dog which I don’t own, and I paid church taxes although I
never go to church. I am tired of your tax rot. I won’t pay another
pfennig.’
“‘Take a care, Herr Clemens,’ warned the mister policeman. ‘I heard you
mention the name of our All Gracious Kaiser, and now you talk like an
anarchist. We won’t stand for that in Berlin.’
“‘Who are we?’ I asked.
“‘The police,’ he answered.
“‘Well, tell the police to----!’
“And no sooner had I uttered that revolutionary platitude when the
mister policeman dumped his helmet on his frowzy bean, knocked his
heels together, and put his right hand on his sword hilt and sang out:
“‘Herr, you are under arrest.’
“Whereupon all the women of the household and all the listening
neighbors were petrified with terror. But I laughed to beat the band to
hide my cowardice. My hilarity took the mister policeman off his perch
for the moment, and he said:
“‘What are you laughing at?’
“I answered: ‘I am tickled because you threaten me with jail, with the
gallows perhaps, and don’t know enough to state the nature of my crime.’
“‘That’s easy, you are arrested for a breach of the city regulations.
You allowed your servants to put the bedclothes near the window, and
when I stand on tiptoes on the other side of the street, I can see
them.’
“I laughed again. He repeated that I was under arrest, and ordered me
to come to court the next morning at nine.
“So next morning at nine I went to court, the legation having furnished
me with a lawyer. When the judge came in, I rose like everybody else
to salute His Honor, then settled down to watch proceedings, and
without wishing to be offensive, of course, I slung one knee over the
other. Thereupon, the judge called me to the bar and fined me twenty
marks for indecent behavior. In a German court I was expected to bend,
not cross, my knees. Next my case was called and, as the court was
possibly prejudiced on account of the knee incident, I was fined ten
marks for showing perfectly clean linen, and twenty marks for laughing
at a mister policeman. It cost me fifty marks ($12.50) all in all
and I expected to make about five hundred dollars writing about my
disgrace. However, Livy thought the telling of it would deal the family
escutcheon a blow from which it could never hope to recover and so I
had to stick to my five-cent stogies the same as the mister policeman.”
BOOKS THAT WEREN’T WRITTEN
As every friend of Mark Twain’s writings knows, Mark was never
short on literary projects, and at the time of their conception all
looked exceedingly good to him. As a rule he would start work on the
new subject at once with enthusiasm unlimited, writing, dictating,
rewriting, dictaphoning and what not! Small wonder that the waiters at
the Hotel Metropole in Vienna called him a “dictator.” However, not
infrequently his golden imaginings proved idle dross, or else were
put aside for new fancies. During his Berlin season he was very keen,
at one time, on writing a book on the Three Charles’s, dealing with
a terzetto of crowned rascals, but the project, like so many others,
was abandoned or died. If I remember rightly, Clemens told me, either
in Vienna or London, that he might have felt stronger on the Three
Charles’s if it wasn’t for Thackeray’s Four Georges.
The Three Charles’s idea was born of this slight incident:
We had met at the famous Cafe Bauer, Herr Bamberger, some time private
secretary to Charles of Brunswick, better known as the Diamond Duke.
Bamberger told us some racy stories about the late Highness who had
left a million to a Swiss town on condition that it set up a monument
to his memory. The monument was built, but so faultily that after six
months or so it tumbled down. And the débris having been carted away,
Charles’ dream of glory came to an abrupt end.
Mark and Bamberger had several more interviews and one morning, at the
Legation, Clemens announced that his next book would be “The Three
Charles’s,” Charles the First and the Second of England and Charles of
Brunswick, who was also partly English.
“In all his long life,” said Mark, “the Brunswick Charles did only one
decent thing and that was a lie. ‘Here reposes the murdered Queen of
England,’ he had chiselled upon the entrance to the mausoleum harboring
the remains of Queen Charlotte, wife of George. Now this fellow George
knew more about buttons for a waistcoat, or sauce for a partridge, than
about kingship, he fought--but certainly did not murder his wife. On
the other hand, Bamberger tells me, that the Brunswick Charles poisoned
a number of people while playing at kingship. Yet all the punishment he
got at the hands of his loving subjects was the dirty kick-out. They
burned his palace, besides, but later had to rebuild it at their own
cost. In short, get the true picture of Charles and loathe royalty ever
afterwards,” recommended Mark.
“You can’t conceive of the meanness of this German kinglet,” said Mark
at another time. “Once he had trouble with a courtier, Baron Cramner.
The Baron fled to escape a dose of _aqua toffana_, but his wife, who
expected her first baby, had to remain in Brunswick. What does Charles
do? He forbids all physicians, surgeons and midwives, on pain of
imprisonment and loss of license, to attend her Ladyship. And he set
spies about her house to be informed of the time of travail. And when
she was in agony, he had a huge mass of powder, said Bamberger, five
thousand pounds, exploded in the neighborhood of her residence. There
are a hundred more stories like that. After he fled from Brunswick, the
Duke’s medicine chest was found to be crammed full of poison bottles
and powders, the label of each container showing how often employed and
how long it took for the poison to work.
“This Diamond Duke got away with eleven million thalers of the people’s
money; he left one million thalers behind because he couldn’t get at
them. And that notwithstanding, this murderer and thief was allowed to
live the life of a distinguished prince in London and Paris. Wait till
I get through with him and his namesakes in the royalty business.”
MARK ENJOYED OTHER HUMORISTS
Mark and I were walking through a rather disreputable little street,
lined by private hotels, which leads from the Strand to the Playhouse,
London, when he suddenly stopped and pointed to a bronze tablet on an
old house about the middle of the block.
“Read,” he commanded, but my eyes refused to climb to the second story.
“Why this used to be the abode of the poet who has said:
“‘The English love Liberty as their wife,
The French as their Mistress,
The Germans as a Granny, long dead.’”
“Heine,” I ventured.
“Come to think of it, I am not absolutely sure, that Heine coined that
political document,” admitted Mark, “but it is very much in the manner
of an epigram he _did_ write, I believe.
“‘Life’s a yawning Nitchevo,
The Shadow of a single nought,
The Dream of a Flea,
A Drama by Teufelsdroeckh.’”
I confess I heard this, too, for the first time; possibly Mark got off
the fireworks all by his loneness, _pour passer le temps_.
“Howells introduced me to Heine,” he explained during the entr’acte.
“I am glad he did, for I never found in his writings ‘the bitter Jew
who emptied all the insult in his soul on Aryan heads.’ But then I
read Heine only for his glittering wit, the scintillating glow of his
fancy.”
MARK AND THE ENGLISH HACK-WRITER
A Berlin cartoon paper, “Ulk,” once represented Twain as “an Arthurian
Knight, canned up to the neck in armour,” galloping after kill-joys
and such, and picking them up with his lance and warhooping like
wild. That’s what he would like to have done to the hack of a London
publishing house, who had interfered with his copy, striking out
sentences, and words, and substituting his own “insular ignorance”
wherever Mark’s broad humanity ran amuck of public opinion as he, the
hack, understood it.
Mark told me that he spent three days “abolishing that cad” (quoting
from Carlyle) and I think he added:
“I gave him at least part of the Hades and brimstone he deserved.
There were such moving passages as ‘monumental ass,’ ‘masticator of
commonplaces,’ ‘offspring of a court fool,’ ‘clownish idiot,’ etc. All
the hatred, all the venom that was in my system I let loose upon that
damn’ fool, squirted it into him with all the force that I was capable
of. Oh, I laid him out. If he had had the chance to read the letter,
his own mother would not have recognized him.
“But, as you may have heard, women know these things better, and Livy
destroyed that wonderful letter of mine, burned it up or fed it to the
chickens--I don’t know which. Anyhow the letter wasn’t mailed and that
English fool thinks to this very day that he flabbergasted me.”
MARK THOUGHT JOAN OF ARC WAS SLANDERED
I was telling Mark about some frolic at the Berlin Court, when the
sprightly “Lottchen,” Princess of Meiningen, William’s sister, proposed
a riddle that puzzled the exalted, but not too quick-witted company--
“Even to the utmost--I know what you want to say. They tell me they are
having the charade-fever at the Schloss, is that it?”
“Precisely,” I answered, and went on to tell of the silly rebus
competitions in which the Kaiser took special delight. I had my story
from the Baroness Von Larisch, a witness, who enjoyed a photographic
memory.
“A movie memory,” corrected Mark, “but go on.”
Well, I reported, H. R. H. quoted nine or ten descriptions of the
party to be guessed at, and neither the Majesties, nor the Highnesses,
nor the Graces, nor the Disgraces came anywhere near the solution.
Whereupon Lottchen startled the company by announcing the answer: “Joan
of Arc.”
Twain took the cigar out of his mouth and sat up straight, which, as
everybody knows, he did only on rare occasions.
“Blasphemy most horrible!” he thundered, “making a joke of Joan of Arc,
_my_ Joan of Arc!”
“Your book isn’t out yet,” I said by way of pouring oil on troubled
waters. “And until it sees the light of print people _will_ puzzle
whether your Joan was saint, witch, man, maid or something else.”
Mark had replaced his cigar and was now chewing it viciously.
“Let’s have the story,” he said. While he read Joan of Arc’s ephemeral
epitaph, quoted by Lottchen, the stern lines of his face gradually
softened and coming to the end, he laughed outright. “Tiptop,” he
chuckled, “I wish I had done these verses myself. But, of course, if I
had thought of them fifteen or more years ago, I would never have taken
Joan seriously.”
The verses that amused the great humorist, read as follows:
“Here lies Joan of Arc: the which
Some count man, and something more;
Some count maid, and some a bore.
Her life’s in question, wrong or right;
Her death’s in doubt by laws or might.
Oh, innocence! take heed of it,
How thou, too, near to guilt doth sit.
(Meantime, France a wonder saw:
A woman rule, ’gainst Salic law!)
But, reader, be content to stay
Thy censure till the judgment-day;
Then shalt thou know, and not before,
Whether saint, witch, man, maid, or bore.”
RUNNING AMUCK--ALMOST
At one of Mrs. Clemens’ tea parties in Vienna a lady of the Court asked
Mark whether he had ever visited a certain town, naming an Austrian
health resort.
“Yes, nice place. I left my sour stomach there.”
MARK’S IDIOMATIC GEMS
“Of course you have had no serious quarrel with the Church?” he was
asked by Dr. Dryander, the former Kaiser’s body chaplain.
“Oh, my, no--far from it,” vowed Mark. “Such expressions as ‘the duck
that runs the gospel mill’ and ‘the boss of the doxology works who
waltzed a dead ’un through handsome,’ are idiomatic gems I picked up in
the mining camps. They are not meant in derision.
“William was talking with my cousin, General Von Versen,” added
Mark, “reporting the case at Mr. Phelps’ office a few days
afterwards--otherwise, you may be sure, he would have ordered me flayed
alive, for isn’t he the identical gander bossing the German gospel
mill?”
MARK AND THE GIRLS THAT LOVE A LORD
Moberly Bell, the last great editor of “The Times,” London, before
Northcliffe, was not nearly so Olympian as people thought who had never
met him. I often warmed one of the enormous armchairs in his enormous
office--Bell was a six-footer, as broad as an ox, and his room at the
Thunderer’s office resembled a cathedral rather than the ordinary
editorial cubby-hole. I brought over Mark one afternoon and he told
Bell of the trouble he had buying “The Times” at “The Times” office.
“I offered my sixpence across the counter, saying ‘Today’s paper,
please,’” he drawled, “but was quickly put to the right-about. ‘You
will find the commissioner outside, at the door; he will fetch the
paper and accept payment if you are not a regular subscriber,’ I was
rebuked.
“Well I looked outside and instead of a commissioner found a field
marshal, as big as a house, hung with medals, and festooned with silver
lace.
“‘Your excellency,’ I murmured distractedly, ‘I was ordered to find the
commissioner to fetch me a paper. May I be so bold as to ask whether
you have seen that individual?’
“The field marshal touched his three-cornered hat and replied in the
most stately and dignified manner: ‘Why, of course, I will get you a
paper, Mr. Clemens, if you will deign to wait five or six minutes.’
“Then it was _my_ turn to put on airs,” concluded Mark. “‘I am going to
see Mr. Moberly Bell,’ I said; ‘fetch me the paper upstairs and keep
the change.’”
We were still laughing when a copy boy entered with a trayful of
dispatches. “Allow me,” said Mr. Bell. “It will take but a minute to
skim over these wires.” But he interrupted himself immediately.
“There’s a job for you, Fisher,” he said, handing me a Paris dispatch.
“Blowitz cables that your Aunt Rosine is dying. Hope she will leave you
a lot of money. ‘The Times’ will take eight hundred words on Rosine,
sixpence a word, you know. Let me have them by seven to-night.”
“My, I wish I had an aunt that I could make sixpence a word out of,”
said Mark, as we were going down the lift, which is British for
elevator. “Who is, or was, this relative of yours in which ‘The Times’
is interested to the extent of eight hundred words?”
“Why Rosine Stoltz, whom Verdi called ‘his divine inspiration,’ the
creator of Aida and of the title roles of most of Rossini’s Grand
Operas.”
“That’s a jolly mouthful,” assented Mark, “but couldn’t she do anything
but sing?”
“She was not only the solitary rival ever recognized by Jenny Lind, but
the greatest collector of titles ever,” I replied. “De Blowitz calls
her the Duchess of L’Esignano, but she was also the Spanish Princess
of Peace, the Princess Godoy, the Marchioness of Altavilla and the
Countess and Baroness of Ketchendorff.”
“In that case,” said Mark, “that story about her dying is vastly
exaggerated, for she has six lives coming to her before she is finally
through. But how and where did she get all those high-sounding names?”
“Bought ’em, of course. Her last husband, the Prince Godoy, was
a racetrack tout in Paris and they were married on his highness’
deathbed, Auntie engaging to pay the funeral expenses. L’Esignano and
Altavilla she likewise married _in extremis_, as lawyers have it. The
Barony and the Countship she acquired through her lover, the saintly
Prince Albert, husband of Victoria.”
“She was a Frenchwoman, you said?”
“Born in Paris as Victoire Noel.”
Mark Twain stood still in the midst of Printing House Square and laid a
heavy hand upon my arm. “What you tell me is a great relief,” he said.
“I thought American girls were the only damn’ fools paying for titles.”
The much-titled Aunt Rosine didn’t die till a year later, but I believe
that the false alarm about her demise, set down, was responsible, in
part at least, for Mark’s: “Do They Love a Lord?” He maintained: “They
all do,” dwelling in particular upon the courtesies shown to Prince
Henry in the U. S. After the appearance of his essay in “The North
American Review,” I told Clemens of the following incident, witnessed
in Philadelphia.
I happened to visit the City of Brotherly Love the same day as Henry
and was crossing one of the downtown squares, when a considerable
commotion arose behind: clatter of horses’ hoofs, jingling of metal,
tramp of oncoming masses. Somebody shouted: “There he is, going to the
Mayor’s office,” as I was passing by an office building in course of
construction.
The masons, hodcarriers and other workmen heard the cry and crowded
onto the scaffolding outside the walls. Some of them seemed ready to
take up the shouts of welcome emitted here and there by the crowd.
But the enthusiasm for royalty was cut short by a brawny Irishman,
planting himself, trowel in hand, on the edge of the main scaffold.
“None of that chin music here,” he hollered; “the first wan that
hollers hooray for owld Vic’s grandson gets a throwl full of cement
down his red lane,” and he swung the loaded tray defiantly.
Just then the Pennsylvania Hussars came trotting up in picturesque
disorder, the Prince and city officials following in an open landau.
“And you could _hear_ the silence, I bet,” said Mark. “I wish I had
been there to _see_ it too, particularly if one of the chaps had
attempted to mutiny against Pat’s order. Pat, I dare say, would have
licked him until he couldn’t tell himself from a last year’s corpse.”
MARK’S MARTYRDOM
“Well, how did you like your reception in England?” Mark was asked
during his last visit there.
“Overwhelming, indescribable! There are no other words for it,” he
said, “but let me get hold of Andy (Carnegie). His country, Scotland,
used truly fiendish means for humiliating me, though I spent a whole
day riding across the blamed island--couldn’t do better, for the train
between Edinburgh and London wouldn’t, or couldn’t, go slower.
“Well, at Edinburgh I crept into one of those rat-cages they call
railway carriage, first class, and opened the ‘Irish Times,’ that I
bought at the station. I kidded myself, hoping that the unfurling of
that paper would promote conversation, or trouble or something, with
fellow passengers. But there was only one, and he got even with me in
the most awful and bloodthirsty style. Namely, he pulled out of his
valise a copy of the ‘Innocents,’ in two volumes, and after lighting
a pipe, began reading. I watched him, first out of a corner of my
eye, then with the whole eye, then with the pair of them. Nothing
doing--that horse thief didn’t crack a single smile over the first two
hundred and fifty pages.
“After luncheon--even the excellent salmon was gall and the other thing
to me--Mr. Scotchman repeated his torture, heaping more red-hot coals
on my mane, the insides of my hands and of my shoes--that is, he read
the second story through likewise without as much as a squint.”
And Mark got up and left without another word.
SLANG NOT IN MARK’S DICTIONARY
Seldom or never did I hear Mark use slang--whether he thought himself
above it in the matter of provoking laughter, or whether he disliked
it, I can’t tell. He used to keep the Berlin or Vienna embassy, or
whatever the resort happened to be, in a roar by telling of billiard
balls “the size of walnuts” and of a billiard table “as big as the
State of Rhode Island,” but such a word as “Biggity” never escaped him.
An American “slangy” person says: “I’ll be jiggered” or something. Mark
put that phrase differently: “_You_ be damned if I didn’t scream like a
wet peacock with all his tail feathers mussed.”
The ordinary run of humorists delight in fussing about hotel bills.
Mark affected to “be mad clean through” at impositions practiced upon
him by foreigners, and clenched both fists as he remarked: “We paid the
heavy bill, about _six cents_.”
If Mark had used the slang loved by the vaudevillians he would be as
widely unread in the Scandinavian countries, in modern Greece and in
Russia as are the latter. “I never liked riddles and jaw-breakers,” he
said to a member of the firm of Chatto and Windus in London one day,
after the gentleman “had caught another foreign country for him,” “but
I guess cannibals and Pollacks alike love to be surprised, and the
grotesque, always unexpected, is surprising.”
“During my stay in Stockholm some one read the following from one of
my books (translated): ‘The solemn steadfastness of the deep made the
ship roll sideways.’ Great laughter. ‘And she kicked up behind!’ At
that the house shook and rocked and quivered with merriment and my fame
was firmly established in Sweden. If I had told the audience that ‘Her
Majesty’s dress crept along the floor for three minutes (count ’em)
after the queen had gone,’ they would have risen to a man and kissed
me.”
MARK “NO GENTLEMAN”
Mark didn’t resort to profanity when he wanted to lambaste man or
measure. I once heard him say to Mrs. Clemens: “I will write him that
‘his mind is all caked up, that as an idiot he is simply immeasurable.’
“And I will call him a snug person full of pedantic proclivities; and
further, ‘a long-eared animal’ (and striking an attitude)--‘a mule
hostler with his pate full of axle grease.’”
“All right,” said gentle Mrs. Livy, “do so by all means, but take care
not to send the letter.”
“Livy, dear, let me get it off my chest,” pleaded Mark, “for ‘Hotel
Normandie, Paris,’ would be just the place to date such an epistle
from. Don’t you remember the ‘Madame’s screech’ to the effect that ‘one
must expect neither tact nor delicacy from Mark Twain?’”
The “Madame” referred to was Madam Blanc, the critic of one of the
chief French reviews, already mentioned.
“The vagabond and adventurer, who from crown to sole remained a
gentleman” (I forget from which magazine this is quoted) fairly reveled
“in the French Madame’s abomination of his lowly self.”
MARK, POETRY, AND ART
Like other authors, Mark was not indifferent to praise. I think he
liked best an essay in a Vienna review which hailed him as “the
journalist of _belles-lettres_ who has made the commonplaces literary,
even as Emerson rendered the commonplaces philosophic.” “A French
writer has accused him of denying that there was any poetic feeling in
the middle ages,” continues the essay, “yet his Joan of Arc is the most
wonderfully lyric-dramatic prose I can recall.”
“There are lots of people who know me better than I do myself,” was
Mark’s comment on the above, and followed it up with a yarn on life
in “old Nevada,” when he rode several miles behind a prairie schooner
“because of a red petticoat fluttering in the breeze at the tail end.”
“That is, I thought it was a petticoat, but when I caught up with the
wagon on that spent mud turtle of mine (my gee-gee went by that poetic
name) I found it was only a piece of burlap displayed for art’s sake.”
“Did I curse ART?” demanded Mark, looking around the circle.
MARK SHEDS LIGHT ON ENGLISH HISTORY
We had set out to look at the rich collections of jewels, curiosities
and “other loot” (Mark’s description) hoarded by the (late) Hapsburgs
in the immense pile called _Hofburg_, when the author of “Joan of Arc,”
then in the making, switched me off to another room.
“Let’s go and dig out the Witch Hammer,” he said. “Wonder whether they
have a new edition at the Imperial Library.”
I forget now which edition of that murderous book we examined, but
I do remember some of the figures we jotted down at the librarian’s
suggestion. The Witch Hammer, that is, a voluminous “treatise for
discovering, torturing, maiming and burning witches,” was first
published, we learned, in 1487, and twenty-eight editions were put
through the press during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
Later Mark listened to my reading from the Latin text with so stern a
mien I suggested that he looked like a Grand Inquisitor.
“I pity your ignorance,” he drawled, “Torquemada and the rest didn’t
think of being unhappy _re_ those auto-da-fes, for every witch-fire
lit by their orders meant a warm jingle in their own pockets. When
they tortured an accused person, the cost of the proceedings was
collected by the sheriff, ditto when they burned some old lady, or a
child maybe--it was all grist to their mill, for the Grand Inquisitor
got a rake-off on all prosecutions, and in those good old days it cost
more to break a human being on the wheel than to feed him and care for
him in jail. The great Napoleon, you once told me, found some three
hundred crowned leeches infesting Germany when he started to break up
their little game. What do you suppose they lived on, those kinglets,
princes, graves and dukes--on the dog tax? No, most of them lived
on the interest of the fortunes their ancestors had accumulated by
prosecuting and burning witches.”
Some years later Mark related the story of our search for the Witch
Hammer before a motley crowd of litterateurs at Brown’s Hotel, London.
“Fine,” said Bram Stoker, “tell us some more; I have a short story on
witchcraft in hand.”
“In that case,” said Mark, “don’t forget Henry VIII, Elizabeth and the
first James. Wife-killing Henry started the witch-burning business
in ‘merry’ England, Elizabeth revived the sport, and the son of Mary
Stuart, whose Bible lies on every drawing-room table at home, used both
pen and axe to exterminate witches and ‘demons.’ I read up closely on
the subject when I got down to Joan of Arc’s trial.”
Some of our English friends didn’t seem pleased with Mark’s
reminiscences of British intolerance. “What about Salem?” asked one of
them.
“Oh, Salem,” replied Mark, drawing out the word like a rubber band,
“you needn’t get cocky about Salem. The Massachusetts witchcraft
delusion was only an echo of your own English persecutions, and a flash
in the pan at that. I have the data in my booklet here. Admitted we
fool Americans _did_ hang twenty-two and tortured some fifty people
under the English-German-Spanish witchcraft acts--to our shame and
disgrace--compare these figures with the records of man and woman
burnings ordered by your ‘bloody Mary’ alone. On the very morning of
the day when the old cat died, seven or eight Britishers were billed
to be reduced to cinders at Smithfield (where you buy your steak
nowadays), and if the devil hadn’t made room for her Majesty in hell
before noon, there would have been so many more martyrs.”
He turned to Stoker. “Bram,” he said, “the only satisfactory way to do
a witchcraft story is to filch it bodily from Balzac. The Frenchman got
the thing down to perfection in one of his Droll yarns--I know a shop
in the Strand where you can buy a pirated edition--reproduced by the
camera--for half a crown.”
“Hold,” he added, “I can give you the recipe of the witch salve, so
called. Fisher and I dug it up at the Berlin Royal Library. It was a
compound of hemlock, mandragora, henbane and belladonna. No wonder it
set persons, thus embalmed all over the naked body, crazy, tickled
them to indulge in all sorts of insane antics, that lent themselves to
devilish interpretation at a period when every tenth person aspired to
boom a religion of his own.”
MARK EXPLAINS DEAN SWIFT
“I wish somebody would kick me for a damned _Treppenwitz_,” said Mark
Twain, gazing into a bookseller’s shop window Unter den Linden.
“The Herr _Schutzmann_ (traffic policeman) will oblige; just say--”
Mark glanced at the whiskered giant bestriding his ill-shaped cattle at
the intersection of Friedrich Strasse.
“No, thank you, I won’t _lese majeste_ on a Friday,” replied Mark,
“besides, I don’t like the cop’s boot.” (In before-1918 days, you need
but say, ‘Verdammt Kaiser,’ in Berlin, to get knocked down, arrested,
and sent up for months and months.)
“What’s _Treppenwitz_?”
“I didn’t know myself until Harry Thurston Peck told me. It’s the
wisdom that comes to you going down the stairs, or the elevator, after
making a fool of yourself higher up--an afterthought, as it were.”
“And what’s the afterthought _now_?”
“See that book?” (pointing), “no, not that, the yellowback, by Prof.
Borkowsky--one more guy trying to explain Jonathan Swift. I forgot
when his Deanship lived and died, but they must have been at it for
centuries. And without examining the new volume, I bet I can tell its
contents: more highfalutin’ tommyrot about the Dean’s vagaries in
erotics and small beer politics. There must be a considerable library
on the subject, every new author threshing the old straw a tenth time,
and adding mystery trimmings of his own. I always promised myself to
submit _my_ theories on Swift and his harem at a first-class insanity
shop, but I forgot to ask Krafft-Ebing in Vienna, and now I let Virchow
pass.”
I was going to say something obvious, but Mark stopped me. “I know
Virchow’s special line, but that man is wise on every conceivable
subject, and I am quite sure he would have borne me out, namely, that
Swift’s character can be explained on the theory that he was a Sadist
and a Masochist in one. If Swift, as he wrote to an acquaintance, ‘died
of rage like a poisoned rat in a hole,’ I am sure he enjoyed it. God
knows that man gave more pain to his lady loves, Stella, Vanessa and
the rest, than all the Romeos in Shakespeare. They say that he killed
Vanessa by frightening her to death; he certainly murdered Stella
morally by letting her pass for his mistress. Still these two women and
others, whose names I forget, were proud of the torments inflicted upon
them. I wish I had asked Virchow, when he invited the audience to put
questions to him at the end of the lecture.”
MARK IN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY
We had lunch with some of the Herald boys at _Cafe des Ambassadeurs_,
Champs-Elysees, when Dick Benet, editor of “Dalziel’s News,” joined us.
Dick, “contrary to his usual morosity, acted the gay and debonair,”
to quote Clemens, who suggested that “he must have given the boss the
toothache by managing to get his salary raised a hundred francs per
annum.”
There was much hilarity about that, for we all knew “the boss” for a
skinflint, and Mark told a succession of funny stories about his own
salary grabs on the “Virginia Enterprise” and other impecunious sheets.
All were keenly alive to the treat, only Dick seemed absent-minded,
pulling out his watch every little while and keeping an eye on the door.
“You are not afraid of a bum-bailiff _now_,” suggested Mark.
“Neither now, nor at any future time,” replied Dick. “Fact is, the wife
promised to meet me here and I have an engagement at two o’clock which
I mustn’t miss under any circumstances whatever.” Our friend seemed to
be lying under some pressure or excitement.
At one-fifteen a tall, stylish Frenchwoman entered, and Dick rushed
up to her with outstretched hands. “So glad you came in time,” he
murmured. He slurred over the introductions, drew his wife on to the
seat next to him, and whispered to her.
At fifteen minutes to two (we adduced the figures later by comparing
notes) two strangers in high silk toppers walked up to Dick, saying:
“It’s time, Monsieur.”
Dick nodded, rose, bent over his wife and kissed her on the mouth. Then
he shook hands all around, and with some more adieux walked away with
his friends. We saw him seated in a cabriolet, then leave it abruptly.
“Victoire, my love, I am so sorry,” he said, rushing back and covering
his wife’s face with kisses--“so sorry to leave you.”
One more lingering kiss and he was gone.
* * * * *
Half an hour later Mark and I passed by Dalziel’s News Bureau, as a man
came out of the counting room to paste up “the latest.”
“Let’s see what it is,” said Mark. “Maybe King Leopold is dead, and I
mustn’t miss putting on court mourning for HIM.” This is what we read
on the bulletin-board:
“Monsieur Richard Benet, the editor of Dalziel’s, was killed in a duel
with ---- at 2:15 this afternoon. _R. I. P._”
Mark was visibly affected. “That poor woman,” he kept saying; “a stroke
out of the blue. But Dick felt that he was taking leave of her for
good; that accounts for his repeated: ‘I’m so sorry.’” And much more to
that effect.
To get Clemens’ mind off the melancholy affair, I suggested “Swithin.”
“Done,” said Mark, “and we will take him out to supper, for I bet he
hasn’t got a sou marquis in his jeans.”
“Swithin” was Mark’s pet name for a Franco-American writer whose real
name happened to recall the legend of a Saint, a groundhog, and several
kinds of weather.
Meanwhile the heat had taken on a Sahara hue. “It seems to me we are
not walking, we are _dripping_,” remarked Clemens, as we climbed the
four stairs to the studio. We had been told to walk right in, and we
did, accidentally upsetting the screen that separated the anteroom from
the office.
Tableau! Here was “Swithin” and his secretary, the one dictating, the
other thumping the typewriter and both--stark naked.
“Don’t mention it,” broke in Mark. “_Puris naturalibus_ is the only way
to face this hellish temperature--a white man’s solitary chance to get
even with civilization! If there were a bathtub, a few banana trees and
a fire-spitting mountain around, I would think myself in the Sandwich
Islands.
“Talking of sandwiches,” he added, “hustle into your tailor-mades and
come out for a bite. You must be fearfully hungry--working on a day
like this?”
“Swithin” didn’t have to be told twice. He dashed into the adjoining
room for his clothes, but returned after a little while, still _en
nature_, and swearing like the whole Flanders army. He searched
presses, drawers, nooks and corners with hands and eyes.
“Anything missing?” mocked Mark.
“Only my duds--I bet those confounded roommates of mine--(followed a
string of epithets that wouldn’t look well in print) stole and pawned
them, for they had neither cigarette nor lunch money this morning.”
“Come to think,” put in the secretary, “I saw Monsieur Hector leave
with a bundle.”
“My jeans, coat and vest,” shrieked “Swithin,” tearing his hair, while
Mark writhed with laughter.
“And there were fifteen or twenty sous in an inside pocket besides,”
moaned “Swithin.”
“I know Monsieur Hector’s hang-out,” said the secretary, “and if you
like I will go and choke the pawn tickets out of the pair.”
“Couldn’t do better if you tried,” opined Mark, “for no doubt by this
time they have devoured the proceeds of their brigandage. Hurry, before
they sell the tickets.”
We found Hector and his brother-bandit behind a magnum of fake
champagne, gourmandizing at the Dead Cat, a newly opened restaurant
destined to become famous in Bohemia.
“Sure,” they said, “we _borrowed_ old Swithin’s old clothes, but
expected to bring them back before seven. We are now waiting for the
angel who promised to relieve our financial distress, which is only
momentary, of course.”
They gave up the tickets willingly enough, and we repaired to _Mont de
Piété_ in Rue Lepic.
“Mountain of Pity--a queer name for a hock shop,” said Mark when
I related the redemption of Swithin’s clothes. “I once knew a
three-hundred-pound Isaac in ’Frisco, but that is another story.”
“AMBITION IS A JADE THAT MORE THAN ONE MAN CAN RIDE”
We had been talking about changing one’s luck at the Eccentric Club,
London, and Mark said: “All is personal effort, there is no such thing
as anything interfering for one’s advantage or the opposite.”
“Guess you are about right,” said Stoker. “There was Loie Fuller, an
indifferent soubrette before she became the goddess of beauty and
chained Anatole France and the rest to her chariot. I remember meeting
her one afternoon in the Strand, looking for a cable office. Only a
few hours previous I had heard that poor Loie was on her uppers, her
manager having cheated her, leaving her penniless in Berlin. And,
worse luck, I didn’t know a thing she could do in London, or even the
provinces, just then. That, you can imagine, made me feel quite gawky.”
“Well, you had a right to be a sob sister,” interpolated Mark.
“She didn’t give me the chance, not she,” emphasized Bram, “for,
grabbing me by the arm, with tears rolling down her cheeks, she
whispered in a choked voice: ‘Father is dead, Father is dead! Lend me
ten shillings to cable to New York, please.’ She added: ‘Poor Father.
But now I _will_ succeed, _I swear it, Father_.’
“And two or three weeks later she created the serpentine dance, earning
such blurbs as ‘the chastest and most expressive of dancers, who
restored to us the lost wonders of Greek mimicry.’”
“I hear she is about to open her own theatre in Paris now,” announced
the Standard critic.
“That’s the stuff,” said Mark. “Loie, like myself--both
red-headed--knew that ambition is a horse that more than one can ride.
I grabbed that idea ’way back in the seventies when Artemus Ward came
down lecturing Virginia way. Art was a success and I liked the lordly
nonchalance with which he spent two or three hundred dollars on a tear.
I helped him spend plenty, I assure you, but when Art and the brown
taste in my mouth had gone, I took stock.
“‘Sam,’ I said to myself, quite familiar-like, ‘Sam, your mental
adipose is as good as his, and in originality you can beat him dead.’
“After these encouraging remarks, I set to work making good,” concluded
Mark.
MARK AS A TRANSLATOR
Mark conquered Germany before he became one of the favorite literary
sons of Austria. “I often wonder that they take to my brand of humor
so well,” he told me more than once in Vienna--“I mean AFTER MY GERMAN
TRIUMPHS, for if Vienna Bookland hates anything worse than German
Bookland, I haven’t come across the likes of it. Each capital thinks
itself a Boston and each calls the other Kalamazoo, or dead Indian Town.
“But I’m not ungrateful,” continued Mark, “and to prove it, I studied
hard and established the identity of the fatherlandish author whom both
Vienna and Berlin admired (though nobody reads him, of course): Goethe.”
“Goethe was Englished before I tackled him, but I happened on a passage
in Faust that, it seemed to me, was not done justice to. So I summoned
the family to a powwow and between us, and a heap of dictionaries, we
rendered the disputed and immortal lines ‘thus classic’:
“‘What hypocrites and such can’t do without--
Cheese it--ne’er mention it aloud.’
“Bayard” (Taylor) “would have burst with envy if he had lived long
enough to see how happily I interpreted Goethe without itching for
translator’s laurels or royalties.”
“Let’s see the original, Mark.”
“Here it is:
“‘Man darf es nicht vor keuschen Ohren nennen,
Was keusche Hertzen nicht entbehren können.’
“_Vers libre_ with a vengeance, eh?” chuckled Mark. “And why in thunder
shouldn’t that mean verse liberally handled?”
“If I translated your version of Goethe back into German, do you
suppose the Fatherlanders would understand it?”
“No,” said honest Mark, “but I do understand _their_ translations
of _my_ lingo--I am told they make me appear like a native German
writer, in fact Moritz Busch called me the most translatable of foreign
authors, to my face--but Goethe was a poet, and a prose man, like me,
can never do justice to a poetry man of Goethe’s distinction. Look at
these German translations of Shakespeare--they think them classic--they
get my eyes in flood with laughter.”
MARK IN ENGLAND
On another page I have jotted down some sayings of Mark’s relating
why he “steadfastly refused” to bull the French and Italian literary
markets. That in England it was different, goes without saying, and
George Moore once explained Mark’s English popularity to me.
“It’s his peculiar power of presenting pathetic situations without
slush,” insisted “the last Victorian” in his manner of finality.
Mark was visibly tickled when I read the Moore estimate from the cuff
on which I had jotted it down.
He pondered a short while on “the adjectives,” then drawled slowly:
“The English are good sports, you know.”
Here are a few more opinions of English men of letters which I gathered
off and on.
Davison Dalziel, M. P., editor of “The Standard,” London: “I agree
with ‘The Spectator’ that Mark Twain is the most popular writer in the
English tongue because he added more plentifully and more generously to
the gayety of the empire of our language than any other author, living
or dead.”
Moberly Bell, late editor of “The Times,” London (in winter of 1899):
“Mark Twain succeeded with us because he is a fearless upholder of all
that is clean, honest, noble and straightforward in letters as well
as in life. He once told me that he ‘qualified as the first yellow
journalist.’ I wish to God he had remained the first and only one.”
That was before Mr. Bell negotiated for the sale of “The Times” to Lord
Northcliffe.
William Heinemann, the late famous London publisher, who could never
get hold of any of Mark Twain’s books for publication:
“An author as well beloved as he is popular and famous. Wit, scholar,
orator, millionaire perhaps” (that was before the Webster period), “yet
I have seen a letter of his in which he stated point blank: ‘I would
rather be a pilot than anything else in the world,’ and that letter was
penned after two hundred thousand copies of ‘Innocents Abroad’ had been
sold.”
WHY MARK WAS UNCOMFORTABLE IN THE KING OF SWEDEN’S PRESENCE
“And how did you like the King of Sweden?” I heard Lord Roberts ask
Clemens at the Army and Navy Club, one afternoon.
“Well, frankly, if I must suffer myself to have intercourse with kings,
I prefer the Prince of Wales,” replied Mark.
Then somebody told a story about the Swedish Majesty’s last sojourn in
Norway. There, at a railway station, Oscar ran against a crusty old
farmer who thought himself a lot better than a mere king and kept his
hat on.
“Don’t you know enough to bare your head in the presence of the King?”
demanded Oscar.
“You bare your head and I’ll bare mine,” replied the farmer. “My family
has been here a great many hundred years longer than yours.”
Thereupon Oscar got so enraged he knocked the farmer’s hat off with a
sweep of his cane and if bystanders hadn’t interfered the King would
have been pummeled “handsome” then and there.
“I am glad I doffed my hat before Oscar came in,” said Mark.
MARK’S IDEA OF HIGH ART
“This here earth is governed like a military despoty,” said Mark Twain
when we were sitting outside a Ringstrasse restaurant in Vienna one
afternoon. He was eyeing the procession of army officers, with pretty
girls upon their arms, passing to and fro.
“And if you had the ordering of things, would your soul have meandered
into one of these jackanapes in monkey jackets and corsets, and czackos
and busbies and things?” inquired Susan, the wit’s witty young daughter.
“No, darling, but I would have loved to live in the time of Shakespeare
and Queen Elizabeth, the best dressed period of the world. You
know I like color and flummery and all such things--I was born
red-headed--maybe that accounts for my passion for the gorgeous and
ornamental.”
“Tell the company about the riot of colors you delight in,” said Susan.
“I saw it only once,” replied Mark, “and it was rather uncomfortable,
even painful, to the other creature, namely, a tortoise-shell cat that
accidentally had dropped into a tomato stew. As pussy tried to get
out, pawing like the baby after the Ivory soap, there was a display of
rainbows, spectrums, chromatics, prisms, pigments, and plain everyday
paints and stains such as I have run across in a few Italian picture
galleries only.”
He picked up a copy of the “New York Herald,” lying on the table.
“There’s our friend George in New York,” he said, “having more trouble
with that pesky French brother-in-law of his. The little Paris
fortune hunter has already cost his wife’s estate fifteen or twenty
million francs and--no returns outside of a few babies. Yet French
brother-in-law could make a tall income if he were put to ‘work right,’
as they say in the wild and woolly, for he has a most tremendous eye
for color effects, that chap. If he were my brother-in-law, I would
starve the cuss into becoming a man-milliner, the first of the world.
That’s what he could be, and ought to be with clever management.
“My word,” continued Mark, “you ought to see him drive in state in
the Bois de Boulogne. When I first clapped eyes on his flunkies and
outriders, in their liveries, rich yet soft in color effects, I almost
yearned to be one of them for the sake of their fine togs.”
Indeed, sensational clothes were always Mark’s hobby. Hence the white
suits he wore in his reclining days, and the sealskin coat, with the
fur outside, that adorned him in his days of youthful glory. I am quite
sure he would have gone to bed in his Oxford mantle and cap if he had
had more than one of each, and the passing of his red hair was a real
grievance to him, he told Gyp, the French novelist whom he called,
“warm, yet not torrid.”
MARK MEETS KING LEOPOLD--ALMOST
A man with a top hat, long gray whiskers and a rapid-looking young
woman on his arm came out of the Metropole Hotel in Paris as we passed.
“Poor seedy beggar,” said Mark, “I wonder whether he would object to a
five-sous piece?” And he put his hand in his pocket.
“Hold,” I said. “That’s King Leopold and Cleo de Merode.”
“Impossible, with that get-up,” objected Mark.
“Get-up?” I repeated. “Kings always wear frayed jeans when they travel
incog.”
“In that case, go and smash the old beast. You are younger than I, and
heavier, too.”
At the moment when Mark extended this thoughtful invitation, Swithins
of the “New York Herald” hailed us. “Look at that chap,” he said,
pointing to the person I had called his Belgian Majesty; “he is the
model who sat for L’Assiette au Beurre’s caricature of King Leopold as
Saint Anthony. Let’s go inside and get a copy.”
Mark bought a dozen or more to send to American friends. The caricature
by D’Ostoya, if I recollect rightly, was an excellent likeness of both
the King and of the beggar we had run across.
“Neither would take his hat off to Rothschild,” said Mark; “Leopold,
because his Congo savageries had made him enormously rich, the beggar
because he wouldn’t know the richest man from a mere million-pauper,
like me.”
D’Ostoya’s cartoon represented Leopold in monk’s habit, undergoing one
of the several temptations immortalized by Flaubert’s great novel. But
it wasn’t the Queen of Sheba who called--rather Mrs. Fat-and-Forty
minus furbelows and things. No wonder Leopold, being artistically
inclined, looks annoyed.
“Watch the virtuous indignation oozing out of the old rascal,” said
Mark. “The editor of the ‘Ladies’ Home Journal,’ asked to do an essay
on bruisers for the ‘Police Gazette,’ couldn’t be shocked any harder.”
When I told him about an article on Leopold I had done for the “New
York World,” which caused a Montreal editor, who stole it, to be jugged
for libel (“Six months,” said the judge of literature), Mark grew
enthusiastic.
“Was that yours?” he cried. “Good boy! Come along and I will buy you
dinner at one of those places where they are ashamed to put the price
of dishes à la carte because they hate to confess that they charge less
than 1,000 francs a pea.”
SIZING UP OF ARISTOCRACY BY MARK
At one of the many splendid dinner parties at the house of Minister
Walter Phelps, the strange case of Prince and Princess XXX of a
once sovereign family had come in for a lot of discussion. Their
highnesses stood convicted of hotel looting, yet on account of the
imaginary coronet that topped their escutcheon, they were expected to
go scot-free, “for everybody agreed that her ‘Grace’ was plainly a
kleptomaniac.”
“Don’t you think so, Mr. Clemens?” demanded an old countess, coquetting
with the last tooth in her mouth.
“I am no expert,” replied Mark. “All I know is that the disease attacks
only the high born, as you call them, and the well-to-do.”
As on this occasion all of Mr. Phelps’ native guests were more or less
“high born,” and impecunious, that remark of the Sage of a Hundred
Stories put the quietus on aristocracy-propaganda during the rest of
the dinner and later, in the smoking room, Mr. Phelps’ American guests
were left quite to themselves.
“I hope I wasn’t rude to that blue-blooded one,” said Mark, “but
excusing thievery because the thief happens to have a handle to his
or her name, gets my goat on the instant. Now” (looking at me) “give
us the real story of that looting business by High Lifers, so we can
discuss it intelligently. Its general gist I got from the German
papers, but lack details.”
I gave the latter as follows: The Prince XXX was a second son,
consequently always hard up. The Princess had no money of her own
either, but in place of that a soaring ambition. Food positively
disagreed with her every time she took it off mere china or stoneware.
She must have silver--
“Or bust--” said Mark. “I made out that much.”
Well, to get the plate and plenty of it, their highnesses engaged in a
coaching tour of the Fatherland, stopping nightly at a different hotel.
And at each hostelry her Grace swiped all the silver she could carry
off, milk jugs, souvenir spoons and forks and dish covers, napkin rings
and similar knicknacks.
“And these swipings she sent to her ancestral halls, Castle
Teufelsdroekh,” added Mark, “where, under the skillful stylus of an
engraver, the low hotel markings disappeared to make room for the
princely coat-of-arms. But here’s the pretty how-do-you-do about the
scapegoat:
“A servant caught her Grace at the game and gave information to the
police. The police promptly arrested the informant as a material
witness and submitted to their highnesses that, at some future date,
they might graciously deign to appear in court to answer the wretch’s
foul insinuations.”
Followed a lengthy discussion, embroidered with execrating reflections
on justice as handled in the Fatherland, Mark quite surpassing himself
in juicy invectives. After a while other subjects came up, and Clemens
retired to a desk in the corner and began writing furiously on the
backs of stray envelopes he fished from the wastebasket. He scribbled
and scratched for about ten minutes, then got up and read us the
following:
POETIC SUMMARY OF THE CASE OF THE PRINCE, THE PRINCESS AND THE WAITER
The Prince knew naught of wifey’s doings.
The Princess is a kleptománic;
But their accuser, waiter Muller,
To jail with that low brute satánic!
THE BALD-HEADED WOMAN
Mark called at the “New York Herald” office in London one day when a
cable came over the wire, describing the awful punishment visited by
the Czar (Alexander) on the mistress of one of the Grand Dukes. The
lady had been ambushed, carried off to a hairdressing establishment
during the dark hours of the night and there robbed of her abundant
locks. In fact, her head was shaved à la billiard ball.
“Very ingenious,” mused Mark, “for who would, or could, love a
bald-headed woman? They do things neatly in Russia, anyhow. I remember
a devilish joke the great Catharine played on a rival. She had her
yanked out of a quadrille, muzzled, and spirited into the basement.
There she was whipped good and hard with switches soaked twelve hours
in vinegar and salt. Then back to the ballroom and ‘dance, you hussy,
and smile, or you get another dose.’”
WHEN A PUBLISHER DINES AND WINES YOU
Mark, unlike many authors, was always on excellent terms with his
publishers. He always had a good word for the Harpers, particularly
“the scholarly Henry J.” (since dead), Chatto and Windus, George
Harvey, Baron Tauchnitz and the rest, but James R. Osgood of Boston
(later of London) he loved.
“You lucky dog,” he said to me during my first visit to the “sausage
room,” at the Hotel Royal, Berlin. “To pal up with Osgood is a stroke
of good luck that you hardly deserve. Why--” (speaking very slowly, as
if hunting for words), “Osgood is that rara avis among publishers who
will invite you to lunch or dinner or to a box at the Gaiety without
tampering in the least with your royalty accounts.
“It isn’t always thus in the ‘profesh,’ you know. Speaking of _the_
profesh in particular, there was Jimmy Powers in New York, a rising
comedian, indeed rising very rapidly. He had jumped from 200 a week
to 500, when a new managerial aspirant came along, and offered him a
tremendous raise, a sort of Chimborazo article, it was to be.
“Jimmy cottoned to the man’s palaver like a donkey scenting a barrel
full of nice, juicy thistles, a pincushion perfecto, each one, and
promised to go eating with him, a great concession on his part, for
Jimmy had lost his own appetite, found a boa constrictor’s, and was
ashamed of his big, lumbering appetite.
“Well, they rendezvoused at old Martin’s on Tenth Street and Fifth
Avenue, then the most _recherché_ meal joint in town. It happened, by
the way, at the period when the deadly table d’hote imposition was just
beginning to sprout.
“Jimmy had never faced that sort of jaw music and knew no more about
‘_entrees_,’ ‘_poisson_,’ ‘_legumes_,’ etc., than the average Irish
waiter’s wife. Up to then his dinner had consisted invariably of steak,
murphies and pie--the embarrassment of courses described in more or
less pigeon-French on the Martin menu, therefore, bewildered and
frightened him. When he heard the new manager say over the anchovies,
cold slaw and pickled sardines: ‘Well, Jimmy, how would a thousand
a week suit you?’ Powers had only strength to ejaculate: ‘The Lord
preserve us!’
“The fried ‘English’ sole de-Long-Branch with drawn butter and capers
on the side was so delicious, Jimmy didn’t perceive the slight
discrepancy in figures when the manager repeated the question in this
fashion: ‘How would you like to draw a cool nine hundred a week, Jimmy?’
“‘It’s done,’ said Jimmy, attacking his third tumbler of red ink. ‘I
can keep a hoss on that, can’t I?’
“‘And marry Lillian Russell--what a team you two would make,’ seconded
the manager.
“Well, to cut a long story short, that rascally manager did the boy
out of a hundred with every succeeding course, and when finally he
pulled a fountain pen on him, Jimmy signed his laughter-provoking
powers away for five hundred and twenty-five dollars a week. Subtract
five-twenty-five from a thousand and you will find that Jimmy’s one
dollar meal netted the manager exactly $24,700 per annum. Neat piece of
work, eh?”
Mark’s admiration for the fair-dealing Osgood was reflected in his own
treatment of General Grant. He not only paid Grant double the royalties
a rival publisher had offered, but actually wrote out to Grant the
largest check any author ever received from a publishing house up to
that time.
Yet in the numerous discussions of royalties, authorship and the
publishing business which he conducted in my hearing, he never
mentioned the generosity he had displayed towards the old boy. Poetry
was Mark’s weakness, or rather his ambition to dabble in poetry was; he
had no other small vices to shock his friends.
MARK IN POLITICS
The chief regret of Mark’s literary life was that “folks felt
disappointed unless tickled” by his writings. Joan of Arc was his
first serious attempt, but when he entered national and New York City
politics--against Blaine and Tammany respectively--he was so much in
earnest they had to hire Bob Davis to follow up his speeches with a few
funny remarks.
“Throwing acorns before the swine,” Mark called it. (“Acorn” was the
name of the anti-Tammany organization). “Bob had better can that stuff
and sell it to the Saturday Evening Post. They will fall for it, all
right.”
MARK ON “ROYAL HONORS”
Mark and I were walking down the Linden, Berlin, when a royal carriage,
easily distinguished for its well-known breed of horses and livery,
passed us. When it drew near the “Foot Guards,” a drum and fife corps
and half a hundred soldiers, under a lieutenant, rushed out, stood at
attention and made a frightful racket.
Mark remained glued to the spot at the first sound of the “royalist
propaganda”--his description--and eyed the spectacle with a mixture of
amazement and disgust written all over his genial face.
“That carriage was _empty_,” he observed, after a lot of staring and
pulling at his moustache.
“What’s the difference? If it were full of princes there would be a
void--somewhere,” I replied.
“Thanks awfully,” said Mark, impatiently. “_I_ was once greeted by
fife and drums and thought it the most tremendous honor ever paid to a
writing person. And now I see they do as much for an empty carriage,
when there is a coat of arms on the door.
“Yes, I got so inflated with the reverse of modesty when the boys in
red were tickling the veal-skin for me and worked their merry flutes,
I well nigh bust off the buttons of my Prince Albert. It happened in
Ottawa when I was visiting the Governor General, the Marquis of Lorne,
and come to think of it, I was riding in one of Lorne’s carriages. When
we neared the Government House, the guards tumbled out like mad, the
drummer boys worked like windmills in a gale and the fifes like steam
calliopes. Sure, I felt like a hundred and fifteen degrees in the shade
and I must have walked into the hall with the strut of Larry Barrett
playing the Ghost in Hamlet. It was the proudest moment of my life
then--and now I see it was all bosh and balderdash.”
Speaking of those Canadian days, Mark vehemently rebuked me when I
suggested that the Marquis of Lorne was “a prosy ass.”
“But I admit it’s embarrassing to visit in a family where the head of
the house is a mere Lord, while the wife is kowtowed to as her Royal
Highness. Mixes one up so, and I think that in my perplexity I once or
twice said a Lord too many, namely, ‘Oh Lord, Oh Lord.’ I never was
boss in my own house, but I like other men to be the he-brute for fair.
At Ottawa I recalled a hundred times Lola Montez, the girl who started
the revolution in Munich by wearing the breeches at the Palace.
“‘I am the master here,’ shouted King Louis, during one of their rows.
“‘And I am the _mistress_, don’t you forget that,’ replied Lola.
“Now, Lola was only a common baggage, strolling actor-folks’ bairn,”
added Mark. “Think of the advantages royal birth gives to a woman. Such
a one, even if born without legs, would wear the breeches and boss the
show.”
AMERICAN WOMEN THE PRETTIEST
In another place I have recorded Mark’s high opinion of the beauty of
the Vienna women and of the lack of beauty he encountered at the Berlin
court.
As we were walking home from a reception given by Mr. and Mrs. John
Jackson (John Jackson, of New Jersey, first secretary of the Berlin
Legation) Mark said: “It’s like looking up at the Horse Shoe in the
Metropolitan Opera House to see those pretty American girls, Mrs.
Jackson, Mrs. Bingham (wife of Captain, later General Bingham) and
Marion Phelps (daughter of Minister William Walter Phelps). Marion is
blonde and inclined to be statuesque, like the native women here, but
oh, the difference! As in the case of Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Bingham,
one sees at a glance that Nature squandered more refinement on her than
on a thousand Berlin women, royal and otherwise.
“They say God made man in his effigy. I don’t know about that, but I’m
quite sure that he put a lot of divinity into the American girl.”
WHERE TAY PAY ISN’T TAY PAY
“Tay Pay’s Weekly,” said Mark, proffering sixpence at a Cork news stand.
The woman behind the counter looked at him inquiringly. “New paper,
Sir? Never heard of it.”
“Never heard of Tay Pay? How long have _you_ been in the business?”
asked Mark.
“Ever since I was thirteen, and I’m past sixty now.”
Mark shook his head and started to walk away, when he saw a copy of the
paper nailed up on the outside. “I knew you were mistaken,” he said to
the woman. “There is the paper I want. See the title: ‘Tay Pay,’ as
large as life.”
“Pardon me,” said the newswoman. “We call it Tee Pee’s Weekly here.”
“You do, do you?” cried Mark. “Damned if I ever again try to talk Irish
in Ireland.”
THE MAN WHO DIDN’T GET USED TO HANGING
At the Eccentric Club somebody said: “Man gets used to everything
except hanging,” when Mark interrupted him: “Hold,” he drawled. “When I
was last in London” (this was in 1907) “one of the ‘Savages’ related a
yarn to me which flatly contradicts your commonplace idea.
“The incident happened in the good old hanging days, when all London,
Glasgow, Brighton, or Edinburgh, etc., turned out before breakfast to
see some poor devil dance on air. Henry VIII had two hundred thousand
‘sturdy beggars’ put to death, besides his several wives; I don’t
remember now the London average per week or day, but while hanging
continued a public amusement it had long ceased being a ‘first-page
story’ as far as the metropolitan dailies were concerned.
“Indeed, the papers disdained to send their ‘own correspondents’
or reporters to such small-fry events as the taking of a man’s or,
perchance, a woman’s life in public, and entrusted that part of the
daily grind to a ‘flimsy man,’ who sent duplicate copies to all the
papers, morning and evening. The ‘flimsy man,’ of course, got so used
to the dope and to the eternal sameness of the thing, he could dictate
a first-rate hanging yarn without leaving his office, or using the
phone--beg pardon, there were no phones in those days.
“Well, one Monday morning, at sunrise, a certain ‘Knight of the Road’
was to die by a tight cravat in a town less than fifty miles from
London, and the ‘flimsy man’ thought it would hardly pay to go up (or
down) and impersonate the eyewitness. Besides, he knew the governor of
the jail personally; his Lordship was an obliging man and would gladly
assist at a fake.
“So Mr. Flimsy wrote out his story and held it ‘for release.’
“In the meantime, the doomed man went through the usual rigmarole:
prayers, whiskey, breakfast, more whiskey--march to the gallows. He
found an audience of prize-fight size awaiting him. The prison yard was
black with people, all the surrounding roofs, trees and telegraph poles
were alive with spectators, and many poor chaps who had stood all night
in line for their betters, now sold standing room at a premium.
“Officialdom, too, was well represented: the governor of the jail, his
aides and assistants, the chief of police in their Sunday-go-to-meeting
clothes, and lots of bobbies” (cops) “--every mother’s son and daughter
eager for the hanging, and secretly hoping that no reprieve would spoil
the day’s fun, for somehow the story had got abroad that the Home
Secretary had almost decided to commute the death sentence of this
particular party.
“Meanwhile, preparations proceeded at an encouraging rate: there was
the procession headed by the gentlemanly hangman, swinging a rope;
then bobbies, jailers, trusties. The doomed man walked rather jauntily
at the side of the parson, who was mumbling prayers and looking benign.
“Presently the procession stood under the gallows, all necks craned,
and a hush fell upon the expectant crowd as the hangman’s assistant
pulled the linen cap down over his victim’s face. As he got busy
adjusting the noose, shouts of ‘reprieve!’ ‘reprieve!’ went up.
The hangman looked at the governor and the governor turned towards
the gate, which had opened to admit a small messenger boy from the
telegraph office.
“The boy was waving a yellow envelope over his head, and the governor
signalled to the hangman to wait.
“At the same time the telegraph boy was hoisted over the shoulders of
the crowd until he reached the place where the governor stood. As the
governor received and opened the dispatch, there were more hoarse cries
of ‘reprieve!’ and they were not cries of relief or triumph either.
Sure, the crowd thought itself cheated. The men and women and children
(for there were plenty of children, as usual) thought that they had bet
on a horse that didn’t run--a dead horse that wasn’t dead enough, so to
speak!
“But, presto! another change. The governor, having glanced at the
message, made a wry face, then crumpled the paper up in his hand and
threw it on the ground, while he motioned the hangman to proceed.
“The wire was from the aforementioned fakir and it read: ‘Please wire
(prepaid) whether hanging has come off according to program--Jack.’
But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that the man about
to be put to the worst use one can possibly put a living person to,
was allowed to think for several minutes that the Home Secretary had
commuted his sentence of death, that he, the doomed one, was going to
live after all. I am told they actually stripped the cap off his face,
so he could breathe freely.
“Had that chap got used to hanging, or the hanging idea, by the time
when the cord was once more drawn tight? Did he think with the French
wag (or was it an Englishman?) ‘hang me, your Highness? No, that would
be the death of me.’
“So in our case; no, a thousand times no, for in the interval the
poor soul had got used to _living_ once more, and a thousand-and-one
murderous thoughts were in his heart while he was being swung off into
eternity.”
STRAY SAYINGS OF MARK
“I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good
English words.”--_To Campbell-Bannerman at the Metropole Hotel, Vienna._
* * * * *
“There are no common people except in the highest spheres of
society.”--_After attending a court function in Berlin._
* * * * *
“Wit, by itself, is of little account. It becomes of moment only when
grounded on wisdom.”--_Talks at the Berlin Legation._
* * * * *
After paying off his creditors (in January, 1898) Mark Twain got, for a
while, very gay and wanted to buy everything in sight. He was actually
going around looking for “good things to plant money on.” Some friends
thought it their duty to warn him, but he shut them up with the remark:
“Don’t alarm your sweet self--no more typesetting and Webster business
for me. I never buy anything nowadays that I can’t afford to pay spot
cash for.”
* * * * *
“How much time do you suppose you have gained by writing ‘&’ for ‘and’,
papa?” asked Jean one afternoon at tea.
“Not enough to waste it on answers to foolish questions,” replied her
father severely.
Then he gave her a dollar, kissed her and sent her away rejoicing.
“That little blackmailer,” he said, “was impertinent only to make me
mad, knowing full well that later I would chastise myself for being a
brute--still with a dollar fine I got off cheap enough.”
* * * * *
“He was a King even in his undershirt and drawers.”--(A verse in one of
Grillparzer’s Tragedies--which caused the play to be put on the Index
by the censor.) This amused Mark hugely. But he had no sympathy with
the author, saying: “He ought to have put pajamas on the cuss.”
* * * * *
Mark Twain, when speaking of a king was fond of quoting Shakespeare’s:
“I have an humour to knock you indifferently well.” (Henry V.)
* * * * *
“I have been blowing the heads off frothing pots of porter.”--Mark
Twain after writing his Czar’s Soliloquy.
* * * * *
A Hamburg dealer in curiosities offered to sell Clemens two of
Bismarck’s hairs for a hundred marks a hair. Mark asked his secretary
to write back that, according to the most reliable statistics, Bismarck
had rejoiced in the possession of three hairs only and of that trinity
enough had been sold already to cover the pates of a whole row full of
bald heads on a first night in Broadway, New York.
EUGENE FIELD
EUGENE FIELD AND HIS TROUBLES IN CHICAGO
We had been fellow coffee-drinkers and fellow pie-eaters in Chicago
since the early eighties, at a time when beefsteak, fried potatoes,
apple pie and cheese constituted an American table d’hote and whiskey
was the beverage for Man. Women never touched it in those days, and
American wines were so little esteemed, that a bottle was given away
free, gratis and for nothing to each guest at Palmer House dinners.
Mike McDonald was king of Chicago, Luther Laflin Mills was State’s
Attorney and Carter Harrison was Mayor time and again. All the
newspaper men borrowed money from Mike and drank at the expense of
Luther Laflin when he ran for office.
Eugene Field, of course, was the Sharps and Flats man of the widely
circulated Daily News: I was a writer on foreign affairs for the
Chicago Times, the paper “that would set the town by the ears daily or
burst.” The Times office was diagonally across from the News office,
and from the News office we turned to the left into Randolph Street,
where the general hang-out, Henrici’s, was situated.
Philip Henrici, the owner of the restaurant, had started life as a
journeyman baker, and was a Socialist or near-Socialist. He would
gladly extend credit to any writer who talked Karl Marx to him. So
Gene and I, towards the end of each week, when there was hardly enough
money left for car fare--ourselves had passes, but the women needed
coin--talked socialism by the ream, according to the extent of our
appetite, asserting loudly that “Property was Theft,” one of Gene’s
bright ideas, purloined, I suppose.
Gene’s palate addressed itself almost exclusively to pies and coffee
and that worked his undoing in the end. For Henrici’s coffee was
stewing all day, which made it no healthy drink, and they served a big
chunk of cheese with every ten-cent parcel of pie--a diet that would
have given indigestion to an ostrich in the long run.
And Gene’s stomach was “as touchy as his bank account,” he used to say.
I said good-by to him in January, 1888.
“First thing you do when you strike London, get me a job there,” he
said. “The pay envelope in this here town is too small for words,
let alone a man with a growing family. If I once get into London
and establish a reputation there, I can lay down the law to Lawson
(publisher of the News) and squeeze this bunch here as they have been
squeezing me.”
That wasn’t meant as viciously as it sounded. The News paid as well,
or a little better, than the other Chicago papers, but the Chicago
newspaper man that made from forty to fifty dollars a week was a
crackerjack-first-rater in those days.
One trouble with Eugene Field was that, at his office, he devoted
too much time to practical jokes, private versifying and general
tomfoolery. So when he had to do his column, his fagged brain needed
the stimulant of coffee or whiskey, or he thought it did. And black
coffee was usually sent for across the street. Moreover, he was very
fond of the theatre and wasted much time chatting behind the scenes, in
the auditorium and with the managers in front. In short, he could have
done much more work than he did, but it’s doubtful whether that would
have increased his compensation, which was as high as the paper thought
it could afford--i. e., as low as could in decency be offered to a man
with Field’s following.
In New York, I heard of Eugene’s health-troubles off and on, but
thought little of these reports since I had never known him otherwise
than active and laughing at the ills human flesh is heir to.
If I had known, or suspected, that Eugene had a tendency to lung
trouble, I would have written to Mrs. Field warning her against the
British climate in winter time, for I had lived in London during
several winters and knew what rain and sleet and fog meant there, while
Gene’s Chicago friends had not the slightest notion of English weather
conditions.
In 1889 I had been in Paris for a couple of weeks, helping to establish
an English news service there, when Davison Dalziel, afterwards British
M. P., but in our Chicago days editor of the News Letter there, told me
that Eugene Field had come to London with his family and meant to set
the Thames on fire with his jokes and verses.
“He lives at 20 Alfred Street, Bedford Square,” said Davison Dalziel,
“and doesn’t live well, I am afraid. Three boys, a wife and a female
relative into the bargain--it’s too much for one poor pencil-pusher, a
stranger to London ways.”
To show how Gene was forever hampered by the lack of funds, it is only
necessary to point out that his salary was paid over to Mrs. Field
week after week, and that Gene had the time of his life persuading the
cashier to let him have a few dollars in advance. I don’t know whether
the News sent Gene’s salary to Mrs. Field while they were in London. At
any rate, what Gene got out of it was entirely inadequate and he had no
chance to add to his salary in England.
MORE OF EUGENE FIELD’S TRIALS IN LONDON
When I saw Gene in London about November, or the end of October, 1889,
his enthusiasm for life in highbrow Grubb Street was already on the
wane. Funds were low, so were his spirits, and the hopes he had set on
James Gordon Bennett’s enterprise had come to naught.
Mr. Bennett had been running the--or a--New York Herald in London for
some time, kidding himself that London would accept a daily with so
incongruous a title as a rival to the Morning Post, Daily Telegraph and
so forth. And Eugene Field tried to persuade Bennett’s representative,
that it could be done _provided_ that he had a column or a column and
a half on the editorial page. His London Sharps and Flats were to be
syndicated in America, the Chicago Daily News having the preference.
And Gene hoped to get at least two hundred and fifty dollars a week out
of the enterprise.
If he only had the money to go to Paris and stay there long enough
to plead with James Gordon in person! But James Gordon, already a
middle-aged man, continued to play the young buck and was seldom in his
office for two consecutive days.
At one time, when Eugene had a hundred dollars laid aside for Paris,
he received word, just in the nick of time, that the “Commodore” was
off on his yacht for Monte Carlo, and would probably stay there--“until
they kick him out,” snapped Eugene savagely. “I hope they do.”
And a week later he was much elated because they had done so. At the
Eccentric Club he let the yarn loose before an audience dying with
laughter.
“My unwilling Chief,” he began, “James Gordon, I mean, went to the
Casino in Monte Carlo in a high state of intoxication, and raised
Hades with all the trimmings imaginable, until thrown out. Then,
still yelling for ‘the frog-eaters’’ blood and Monsieur Blanc’s in
particular, he was carried to the yacht, relieved of his clothes, and
treated to a cold bath, his usual medicine under like circumstances.
After the bath he put on a kimona and airs and bawled for his
secretary. That individual was yanked out of bed by the ears and
Bennett dictated to him a proclamation in the style of a South American
general starting a revolution.
“‘Monsieur Blanc and his associates,’ demanded the proclamation, ‘must
send three of the directors to Mr. Bennett’s yacht, making abject
apology for the insults heaped upon Mr. Bennett. And unless this
apology is forthcoming without evasion or delay, the Commodore will be
pleased to blow the Casino into smithereens--he has the guns, powder
and shot.’
“At nine o’clock in the morning the directors were handed this
ultimatum and they had to act by eleven or prepare to meet their maker,
roulettes and all.
“Naturally the directors thought it a drunken joke, but at eleven
sharp, Bennett began bombarding the Casino--with blank cartridges.
Hence at eleven-ten, five directors instead of three raced to the
Harbor in carriages, and tumbled head over heels into a white-flagged
steam-pinnace.
“Well,” said Field, “Bennett kept them maneuvering around his yacht
for a good fifteen minutes, while clearing decks and with much
ostentation making ready for bombardment. When he finally _did_ admit
the directors, he exacted even harder terms than he had first proposed,
namely: A perpetual card of admission for James Gordon Bennett and
friends and, for the present, a solemn invitation to Bennett to come to
the Casino and do as he liked there.
“After this,” concluded Eugene, “I suppose these directors lent him
their best grand piano for the uses he put Phil May’s mother’s piano
to.”
The above was a good story, but unprintable at the time, and it was all
Eugene ever got out of Bennett. So most other London enterprises, Gene
tried to float, proved barren.
GENE, A “SUCCESS OF CURIOSITY”
The fact was, poor Eugene was no business man and, unlike Mrs. Clemens,
pretty Mrs. Field, as far as I could make out, had no eye or head
for business either. His London writings hardly ever appealed to a
more international audience than Chicago and the West, willy-nilly,
furnished. Syndicating was in its infancy and the papers printed
nothing but news and again news. Even the New York Herald’s Sunday
edition contained hardly a line unconnected with the news of the day.
And Eugene said himself he was no newsmonger. Then London society,
or near-society, tried to make him out a funny man. He was much in
demand as a diner-out, and like an honest man, paid for his dinners and
suppers in “his own coin,” stories and jokes.
These stories were all extravaganzas of the most extravagant kind. “I
talked to the duchesses as I talk to my children when in pinafores,” he
used to tell me, “and the harder I lie, the more natural my American
yarns sound to them, for their ignorance of America is as profound as
mine of Mars.”
Poor Gene, I am afraid, often accepted dinner invitations “to save
grubbing at home,” for his finances were on the downgrade most of the
time. In his talks with American friends he often regretted having left
Chicago, “where one can always make a touch, if not at the office,
then in the Clark Street Emporium” (meaning Mike McDonald’s saloon).
And all the time his health severely suffered from the damp and wet,
the sleet and raw winds, the river fogs and the smoke fogs.
“I thought if I got away from coffee and Chicago pies, my stomach
would act decently again,” he moaned sometimes; “but the eternal tea
of Britain is as bad as our coffee, and its meat pies are even more
alluring and digestion-disturbing. I will never get well until I can
pay a cook a hundred dollars a week and a doctor fifty to tell me what
to avoid.”
There was a tendency in London then, among literary people and others,
to treat American men of letters not with scant courtesy exactly, but
as successes of curiosity. Eugene felt that after a while and it made
him sore on London and made him long still more for the fleshpots of
Chicago. Of course he returned a broader-minded and a better informed
man, but consider the cost to him! The English climate, so healthful
to Londoners as to make the town’s death rate the lowest in Europe,
wrecked what was left of Eugene’s frail health. But for London he
might have lived ten or more years longer. Yet he never could forgive
Bennett for turning him down, though I often explained to him that his
application may have never reached Bennett’s own desk.
In a measure, too, Eugene Field was responsible for many of his
discomforts in London, for he allowed a friend to select most dismal
quarters for him and stuck to them instead of getting out and moving
to one of the suburbs. “Richmond would be the place for you,” we often
told him.
“I am the Duke of Bedford’s tenant,” he joked, “and his Grace is
pleased to have my name on his rent roll, so what can I do?” And then
he would go into the Bedford family history and count up its fortunes,
its land, and estates, in London and out. “Ah,” he would say, “it
stands to reason that among Bedford’s ancestors were no penny-a-liners
or blue stockings.”
DIRE CONSEQUENCES OF AMERICAN HORSEPLAY
At the time when Eugene Field was in London, Oscar Wilde and Henry
Irving were undoubtedly leaders of the intellectual circles, and with
both of these men Gene had quarreled. No open rupture, but he had
played practical jokes on them--during their American tours--something
an Englishman never forgives. And if he wanted to, his friends and
compatriots wouldn’t let him.
It may be true or not that Henry Irving laughed at Gene’s caricatures
of himself, done before his very eyes, as well as behind his back in
Chicago, but that doesn’t argue that Irving did not resent Gene’s
merrymaking. Irving had many eccentricities in person and speech, but
still more dignity. And the dignity of his profession was very dear to
his heart. Hence there was no companionship between the Chicago writer
and the great English actor-manager while Gene was trying to establish
himself in London. If he had come to London under an engagement as
critic or editorial writer, it would have been different, but Gene was
only a struggling literary man like so many others. So the Henry Irving
literary circles were closed against the Chicago newspaper man as a
matter of course.
But that didn’t sour Gene’s judgment of Irving’s art. I remember a
Macbeth night at the Lyceum Theatre. As a production, Irving’s Macbeth
was the last word in stage effects. I reminded Gene of the sensation
caused in Chicago by the red velvet draw curtain which Irving had
brought from London. Up to that time Chicago had only known paper or
canvas curtains, variously painted.
“Look at the scenery,” Gene kept on saying at the Lyceum. “It’s all
solid, vast, monumental. Chicago would go crazy about that set piece.”
In the lobby we met several critics, among them the critic of the
Standard. The Standard man repeated his published charge, namely, that
Irving was sinning against tradition, that Macready and Kemble alone
had understood how to present Macbeth. Irving, this critic insisted,
ought to know “that his Macbeth was unacceptable to the best judgment.”
“Best judgment--fiddlesticks! You merely state your personal opinion.
We all do so. For my part I like Irving’s reading with its poetry
and romanticism,” said Field hotly. “The King of Scots was full of
irresolution, but was often dejected in spirits--Irving’s portrait of
a shrinking, faltering King is what it ought to be, since it holds the
mirror up to history. As to tradition--that be damned--it is largely in
the critic’s mind and nowhere else, except perhaps with some dotard,
gabbing about old times.”
That was Gene all over. If the cause was just he would as lief fight
the battles of a man like Irving, who ignored him, as of his best
friend.
Here is another illustration of that golden rule--by contrary.
He liked Ellen Terry, liked her immensely, but he did not fail to
criticise her severely. You may remember Macbeth’s line:
“What if we fail?”
Lady Macbeth answers:
“We fail--”
Now Terry pronounced these two words as if she meant to indicate--well
if we fail there’s an end to it.
“All wrong,” said Gene. “She ought to pronounce it:
“_We_ fail!”
“It ought to sound like: ‘Failure is a thing not to be thought of.’”
“I will tell Terry about it when I see her,” he said. Whether he
carried out that intention or not I don’t know. He always spoke about
Ellen Terry as the wonderful woman on the stage. “Think what she makes
her body do, how she makes it respond to the demands of every role. Her
eyes are pale, her nose is too long, her mouth is only ordinary, yet
she makes these faulty features tell on the stage, and the audience
never knows how deficient she is as to mouth, eyes and nose. And her
complexion isn’t good--naturally that doesn’t matter so much. Her hair
is an indecent tow color. And how she makes that lean and bony figure
of hers cut ice is wonderful. I forgot about her feet. But her hands
are too large for a woman. Indeed they are masculine, yet her audience
is never allowed to see that. She gets you, and she entrances you by
her innate grace--such grace as graces the world only once in a hundred
years.”
His troubles in America with Oscar Wilde closed another set of literary
salons in Eugene’s face while in London. For it must be remembered that
Oscar’s disgrace took place years later, in 1895, and that until his
quarrel with Lord Queensbury, he was a figure to be reckoned with in
London society. He was at least as important in certain social circles
as Lillie Langtry, and was a Mason-brother of the Prince of Wales.
“What a fool I was, estranging Oscar,” Gene confessed. “At the time I
thought it exquisitely funny, but the British can’t see through our
American horseplay. They think it undignified and that’s enough to kill
even the loudest laugh.”
“What did you do to Oscar?” I asked.
“The day before his arrival in Denver, where I was doing the Tribune
Primer, I impersonated Oscar in the mask of Bunthorne of Patience,
driving through Denver in an elegant landau and pair, and creating a
riot of mirth. Oscar thought it a good advertisement for his lecture,
and as a matter of fact it was, but as to the humor of the thing, he
hadn’t the slightest notion, and treated me, who had made hundreds for
him, with studied coldness.”
“Yet,” continued Gene, “for all I know he may be living on the proceeds
of my joke even now, for they say he earns next to nothing and depends
on the money he saved in the United States, from the proceeds of his
tour. But give the devil his due, Oscar does the Prince-chap business
in great style. His game is to impress ordinary folks, the grocer and
the glovemaker, that a litterateur is not necessarily a Bohemian living
in a garret, sporting frayed collars, having no money for cigarettes
in the morning and no dinner money in the evening. And to demonstrate,
he dines at the swellest hotels and restaurants and tries to cut a big
swath everywhere.”
On another occasion, Gene told a few things about Oscar that he had
heard at the Herald office. “Our fine American girl, Mary Anderson, has
given that fop Oscar a commission, duly signed, to write a drama for
her. It’s going to be called ‘The Duchess of Padua.’ Oscar may make
five or ten thousand dollars out of it. If I wasn’t by nature so much
inclined to humor, I might get an honorable commission like that. But
people think I am only fit for cracking jokes and writing jocular and
sentimental poetry.”
“Well,” I said, “Gene, everybody to his groove. While Oscar does the
highfalutin’, you make people laugh. If you really want to make money
you ought to go on the stage. There your gift of mimicry and imitation
ought to get you big returns, for you could hold your own with Goodwin
and Henry Dixey.”
“I have been told that before,” said Gene; “they drummed it into my
head in Denver and in Chicago, but somehow or other I prefer the
writing game to any other, even if it keeps one on a level with
proletarians.”
Though not mixing with Oscar Wilde’s crowd, Gene heard a lot of
gossip concerning the author of “Salome,” and “Lady Windermere’s
Fan.” Likewise some stories about Lady Wilde, Oscar’s mother, a most
eccentric woman, whose motto was said to be: “Only shopkeepers are
respectable.”
“Why, in his own mother’s house, Oscar started a ‘Society for the
Suppression of Virtue,’” vowed Gene.
Then there was the famous yarn about original sin that we heard right
off the griddle. It ran this way:
Said a Famous Beauty, friend of the Prince of Wales, to Wilde:
“Is it not a fact that original sin began with Adam and came down
direct to you, Oscar?”
Oscar, shielding his mouth with his hand, for he had bad teeth,
responded:
“No, my dear, sin commenced with Eve, Cleopatra carried it on and with
our dear Lillie the future of sin may be safely left, being in expert
hands.”
FIELD’S LIBRARY OF HUMOR
While in Germany, Gene had read up on ideas of humor, and entertained
the notion that a “History of Humor” would prove a good seller.
The book was to start with “The Smile,” such chapters to follow
as: “Feeling Good;” “Pleasant Thoughts;” “Why We Laugh Over the
Ridiculous;” “Whims;” “Practical Jokes;” “Fixed Ideas;” “_Naiveté_;”
“Blue-stockings;” “Old Maids,” and so forth.
He jotted these chapters down on the marble top of our table in
the Cafe Royal, and I copied the list. I think the above is pretty
complete.
THOSE GERMAN PROFESSORS
When Gene Field returned from Hanover, where he had placed his children
in school, he was full of the German professors he had met.
I reminded him that Lord Palmerston had called Germany “that damned
land of Professors.”
“I know the woods are full of them. I have seen them in droves,
good, bad and indifferent, but I put my kids with the human kind of
professor, and, besides, those youngsters can take care of themselves.
I am told of a private tutor who, on applying for a job at a country
house, thought his future paymaster as big a brute as himself.
Accordingly, while the rich man was drawing up a contract, this tutor
fell upon the boys, his future charges, as he thought, and began to
thrash them without any cause whatever in the most cruel and barbarous
fashion.
“The children’s howls brought the father to the scene, who seized the
scoundrel by the neck and demanded what he meant by assaulting his boys.
“‘Well,’ answered the tutor, ‘I meant to show them right away that I am
master.’
“‘And I will show you who is master here,’ shouted the father, and gave
that tutor the licking of his life. Then he kicked him out of doors,
and said: ‘Now run, for in five minutes I will loose my dogs, and if
they catch you, God have mercy upon your soul.’”
EUGENE FIELD AND NORTHERN LORE
While in London Eugene Field was always talking about the Orkney
Islands, the dreariest, foggiest, most uninteresting patches of land
in the wet you want to see. He had discovered somehow that Queen Mary
of Scots had created that brute Bothwell, duke of Orkney, a title
reserved for members of the reigning family. Hence her bestowal of the
title helped to emphasize still more the hatred of the nobles against
her husband. He chewed the matter over for a month, then one rainy
afternoon, at the Cafe Royal, he got it off his chest.
“I want to go to the Orkney Islands to find traces of Bothwell and
perhaps get a new angle on that fearless lass--as fearless as she was
vindictive--Mary. When the Queen was taken prisoner, Bothwell made
for the Orkneys and chose one of the smaller islands to assemble a
piratical navy. Instead of stealing queens, he meant to steal goods
and chattels of merchantmen passing the Northern Seas and the Channel.
He had been a pirate before Mary took him up and was a robber baron by
birth. Wonder if his remains rest in the Orkneys or at the bottom of
the sea.”
“He was buried in some small Danish seaboard town and in a church at
that.”
“Perhaps he died in the odor of sanctity,” laughed Gene; “that would
make it only the more interesting. Anyhow from the Orkneys I can
easily get to Denmark and from there I can almost swim over to Sweden.
I want to dig deep into Northern lore--there are unexplored tons of it,
full of the most sublime poetry, and when I return to America and have
time to look over my notes, there will be something doing, I promise
you, my boy.”
Returning to Bothwell, Field asked:
“By the way, I read somewhere that Mary was divorced from Bothwell
while in English captivity.”
“If you can get hold of the Vatican records about that divorce,” I
answered, “the fortune of your book amongst scholars is made. What do
you suppose was the cause of the divorce granted by the Roman Court?”
“Why, the murder of Mary’s second husband, the Earl of Darnley, at
which she and Bothwell had connived.”
“Wrong.”
“Or the fact that Bothwell was a Protestant, a heretic.”
“Wrong again.”
“Then because Bothwell was still the husband of Ann Thorssen when he
married the Queen.”
“Wrong the third time. The divorce was granted on evidence that
Bothwell had intercourse with Mary before marriage.”
One of these Northern lore stories Field wrote for a little book of
Christmas tales, but having been unable to carry out his intention as
above set forth, the yarn was of small account. It lacked local color
and the naturalness that made most of his stories so delightful.
LITTLE BOY BLUE
It has been forgotten by this time that Gene lost a son while the boy
was at school in Hanover--the most promising of his boys, it was said.
But at the time when the grieving father brought the body of his boy
home, a great many lovers of his poetry associated the child’s death
with the famous “Little Boy Blue.”
As a matter of fact, however, “Little Boy Blue” was not the echo of
a fond parent’s sorrow, but was written when all his children were
flourishing. At the time Gene was simply in a sentimental mood. Maybe,
too, some newspaper story he read was responsible. At any rate, “Little
Boy Blue” was published and admired and beloved a year or two, or
longer, before Gene went to Europe, and while all his children enjoyed
good health.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation
has been standardized. Spelling has been retained as in the original
except for the following:
Page xi: “Think of Her Sorrow” “Think of Her Sorrows”
Page xi: “Blücher in Oxford” “Blucher in Oxford”
Page 33: “of Catherine of Russia” “of Catharine of Russia”
Page 141: “Indeed, most of th” “Indeed, most of the”
Page 159: “Duke's mediicine chest” “Duke's medicine chest”
Page 162: “MARK TWAIN AND THE ENGLISH” “MARK AND THE ENGLISH”
Page 179: “Troquemada and the rest” “Torquemada and the rest”
Page 183: “MARK TWAIN EXPLAINS DEAN” “MARK EXPLAINS DEAN”
Page 189: “to _Mont de Piétè_” “to _Mont de Piété_”
Page 204: “great Catherine played” “great Catharine played”
Page 233: “an Englishmen never” “an Englishman never”
Page 238: “Lady Windemere's Fan” “Lady Windermere's Fan”
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