A humpback stood in front of Des Miriltons, a fashionable club of Paris.
Day and night his pathetic figure would be seen, a piteous expression on
his face, as he made his silent appeal to the men going into the
building—some to try their fortune at the gaming table. The French are a
superstitious race and have a thousand little ceremonies to lure the
great god Luck, one of the most efficacious being to rub the hump of an
_enfant d’escalier_—one born on a staircase. I have seen gold pieces
frequently change hands, as a member of this club rushed in or out, so
this particular deformity proved fortunate, for the humpback died
wealthy.
Now a hump, if it be a conspicuous infirmity, is never laughed at. One
is born with it and it is therefore not one’s fault. But deformities are
not all physical. I come of five generations of parsons who talked for a
living; also, at school, as I have said before, it was the habit of the
teacher to give credit to the boy who shouted his lessons the loudest.
This helped along the trouble, and I claim that talking too much is just
as much a mental hump as a twisted back is a physical one, and, as such,
should be pitied.
My brother used to say that any newcomer to the house where we lived
thought at first that everyone was suffering from some throat disease.
After a while however, he found that it was only hoarseness from talking
too much. I remember, as a boy, the sounds in the Old Manse. With mother
upstairs making beds, my sister halfway down, one aunt in the sitting
room, and another in the kitchen, there was a sort of continuous rattle
of words—never stopped, but only interrupted by the opening and shutting
of doors: “Lizzie, when you go downtown, don’t forget to buy—but she
won’t need—oh yes, I will if—it’s forty inches wide, and that—but
Sophie—well, red, if you—think blue will fade terr—in that case you’d
bet—two yards are—why not you see the sleeves will take—oh, let her
alone, she’ll get it all ri—”
There is a story of this disease of mine that Jules Guerin is fond of
telling. Of course, it never happened, but it makes a good tale. There
was to be a contest between the greatest talkers in the East and West. A
man from the Bohemian Club in San Francisco and myself were chosen.
There was money bet; we were put in a locked room with a loaf of bread
and a pitcher of water apiece. After three days the sounds of voices
died down and the anxious listeners broke open the door. The Western
talker was lying dead and I lay beside him, dying and _whispering_ in
his ear.
Sometimes this talk of mine has produced startling results. I had a dear
friend, now dead, whose son was connected with a monthly magazine. One
day I saw in it a botched attempt, as I thought, to tell, as his own, a
wonderful story of Anatole France’s. I was indignant and told everyone I
would make it my business to “call that young man down.” Some time
after, I was sitting at the writing table at The Players when the boy
came up to me, saying:
“I hear you have a bone to pick with me?”
“Yes,” I said. “By what right do you take one of the best stories of
Anatole France’s and give him no credit?”
“This is the first time that I’ve heard it is his,” answered the
youngster. “Why, Mr. Simmons, I got it from dad, who said that you had
told it to him here in the club!”
Rather a stiff “come-back.”
There have been so many criticisms of my talk that I like to remember
the times when I have not been too much of a pest. It has always managed
to put babies to sleep, and several times it has quieted nervous,
distracted invalids. There is a hypnotic quality about it, if used
consciously. Once, when quite young, I amused myself by _willing_ my
mother to lift her hand. She obeyed, and her giggling frightened me
terribly. Another time, much later, I succeeded in swaying a mob of
people in an entirely new direction by jumping on the tail of a cart and
inciting them to action. These incidents taught me to use this power
cautiously, which partly accounts for my inconsequential babbling.
In the St. Botolph Club in Boston I met a very clever man named
Eichberg, a musician of ability who had been a pupil of Liszt. I had
just returned from a week’s absence when I saw him sitting in his
accustomed corner, which I had always avoided, thinking he did not care
for me. This time he called me over.
“I must tell you something,” he said. “When one first meets you, one
feels as if one has moved to a house which gives upon a railway track
and cannot sleep on account of the damnable noise; but you go, and one
finds that he has really moved to a house in the country and cannot
sleep for the damnable silence. I am glad to see you back.”
Much as my friends may laugh at this statement, there _are_ times when I
have listened. Frederick Villiers was the most entrancing talker one
could imagine, and I protest I was dumb in his presence lest I miss one
word of his conversation. Desdemona never heard anything like what I got
from him. This is at least one refutation of the statement of my dear
friend Oliver Herford, who said:
“Anyone can lead Ned (meaning me) up to a pause, but no man can make him
take it.”
In the earliest ’nineties, Herford and I had rooms beside each other in
the St. Botolph Club in Boston. In front of our doors was a card printed
in scarlet, indicating the direction of the fire escape. One day, seeing
his chance, Oliver took this sign into his room and, blotting out the
word “fire,” skillfully lettered in my name in its place and hung it up
again. Shortly after that a man came rushing downstairs, boiling over
with mirth, yelling for all to come up to the top story. There was the
sign, as brilliantly red as ever, but reading:
“Escape in case of Simmons!”
Stories of Oliver Herford come crowding to memory, topsy-turvy, one over
another, and although perhaps they should have no place here among
recollections of those long since passed away, his type of wit is mellow
when it is born and does not need time to soften its edge. Oliver is the
child of Whimsey; the eternal Puck or the Peter Pan; he has no age and
is of no age; like Topsy, I believe he just “growed.” His fun is full of
naïveté and childlike subterfuges; no task is too arduous for him if
there be a joke at the end; and he pokes that droll mind of his into the
oddest crooks and corners in the daintiest way.
I recall being with him in a restaurant when a man much the worse for
liquor approached our table and almost kissed him in his desire to be
friendly. Finally getting it into his drunken head that he was receiving
no response to his advances, he said.
“I don’t believe that you remember me, Mr. Herford.”
“I don’t recognize your face,” said Oliver, “but your manner is damn
familiar.”
I was in Oliver’s studio one day when a strange knock came at the
door—three long ones and two short raps. “S-h-h-h!” he said, and we both
kept quiet. After a sufficient time had elapsed for the person to have
departed, I asked him for an explanation. It seemed that —— was in the
habit of calling and boring Oliver terribly, so he told him that in the
future he intended opening the door only to his special friends, to whom
he would give a private knock.
It needs some uncommon quirk for a man’s mind to work in this fashion.
Instead of giving the private signal to his friends, he gave it to his
one particular aversion, so that he could recognize it instantly and get
rid of him quite neatly and without malice.
Another time, Oliver invited me to dine with him. We took a cab at the
door of The Players. On the way to the restaurant he went through his
pockets and found he hadn’t a cent. As I was broke myself, I decided we
were in a pickle. Not so Oliver. We alighted at the door of a prominent
café and Oliver approached the cabman:
“Say, dear fellow,” he began, and the driver, thinking he was going to
be held up for the fare, was disposed to be cross. But this was too
trifling a matter for Oliver to even mention.
“Say, dear fellow,” he continued, in his most confiding way, “I have
invited my friend here to dine and I find I have forgotten my money.
Could you—now I wonder if you could be a good chap and lend me ten
dollars?”
To my astonishment, the man, taken completely unawares, pulled out a
roll of bills and handed Oliver one of them.
One cannot be naïve by will power; the danger in consciously striving to
be childlike is that one becomes childish, and that is a very different
matter. I always think of Oliver Herford when I recall what Guy De
Maupassant said upon being challenged to make a new Beatitude—
“Thrice blessed are the naïve, for they shall never see _but_ God.”
One of the brightest and most witty men I knew in the old days was the
actor, Maurice Barrymore, father of the present galaxy of stage folk of
that name. A beautiful body—I was told that he had been the amateur
champion middleweight of England—a face more Celtic than Saxon, Barry
was the originator of _bons mots_ that have gone all over the country. I
do not remember much about his acting, but I remember his delightful
companionship late at night (for he was a highly sensitive man who
burned the candle at both ends), his brilliant conversation, his great
intelligence and love of the fine things of life, his finesse, and his
swiftness of thinking.
Barry and I were sitting together one night at the Lambs’ Club when a
big fellow came up to our table and, hammering on it, said:
“Maurice Barrymore, you are a —— —— liar!”
“Oh no,” said Barry, quietly, “not if _you_ say so.”
Once at the old Fifth Avenue Hotel he was taking a drink with some
friends, when he heard a voice mumbling behind him something about a
blankety, blank actor. He immediately turned and told the man to shut
up, adding a well-known phrase which indicated that he was the son, on
his maternal side, of a domestic animal we all know. The man rose and
came forward, swinging his arms and shouting wildly:
“You call me that? By God! I wish I had you in Louisville! You wouldn’t
dare to call me that in Louisville!”
Barry knew that he was not really dangerous, and, besides, he was afraid
of no one, so he calmly walked up to the stranger and, putting his arm
affectionately about him, said:
“Oh, if your mother’s reputation is a question of geography, come and
have a drink.”
The extreme delicacy of Barry was shown in many ways—chiefly in his
kindness to any young actor who was trying to get ahead. He was not the
type to help by a lot of talk, but by little attentions quietly shown.
When he was playing Rawdon Crawley with Mrs. Fiske in “Becky Sharp,”
there was a young countryman of his, newly come over from England, who
had the part of Dobbin. Barry was notoriously careless of his appearance
on the stage, but in this case he groomed himself to the eyes just to
give the younger man a chance to shine by contrast. He was perfectly
willing to be what in vaudeville parlance is called a “feeder,” if it
were for the good of the play or anyone in it.
Englishmen sometimes twitted Barry for his love of America, and he often
had to stand quips from us about his British parentage. An American once
stuck a coin in his eye and, in a leering manner, walked up to Barry,
singing that famous song of Henry Dixey’s called, “It’s English, You
Know.” Thinking to add a little flavor and more insult, the man made a
vulgar remark. Barry turned to him quietly and said:
“No, it is not the English I know.”
Once a crowd of English actors started to have some fun with Barry about
his long residence in America and his American marriage. Then they
started on the American language.
“Why you see the way they spell over here,” they cried. “Good old
_humour_ and _honour_ have become _humor_ and _honor_.”
“Yes,” said Barry. “You see, they don’t think they have to come to you
for either one of these qualities, so in such matters they leave “u”
out.
Speaking of “humor,” I like to think of Anatole France’s brilliant
illumination of the word, which, paraphrased, runs something like this:
“The Angel of Humor is sent us that she may teach us to laugh at the
wicked and foolish, whom, without her aid, we might have the weakness to
hate.” In my reading of funny stories, the really good ones have an
element of sadness; also I have watched the development of the faces of
the humorists I have known. As they grow older the lines of mirth are
sure to be backed by signs of very deep feeling. Humor is distinct from
wit (which is the joyousness of childhood) and comes after suffering,
proving a man to have graduated from the cave-dweller class. Savages are
bitter and yell when hurt, but a gentleman keeps quiet. Humor, to me, is
the cry of a well-bred man in pain.
When we New Englanders tell stories of ourselves and our forbears, they
are generally based fundamentally on the hard lives, or the
characteristic qualities that resulted from the hard lives, which those
first settlers on the coast of the Atlantic were forced to lead. Their
sense of humor conceals an infinitude of suffering, as does that of the
men who live in the hills of Kentucky. Professor Shaler of Harvard told
me that he had found them very much alike in their laconicism and
understatement—two parents of humor.
To illustrate what I mean—my mother’s sewing woman in Concord, the
dried-up individual who made my breeches, always with a mouthful of
pins—was asked by the neighbors when her mother died:
“Was she willin’ to go?”
“Willin’! My dear, she was obleeged.”
“Did she leave anythin’?”
“Yes, she left everythin’. Didn’t take nothin’ with her.”
A story which gives a picture of the drudgery so great that they were
always careful to save themselves the smallest extra task is of the old
farmer sitting with his wife beside the kitchen table in the evening. A
newspaper is in his hand, a kerosene lamp illuminates the room, and his
feet, incased in woolen stockings, are in the cooling oven. The
grandfather’s clock strikes nine.
“Time to go to bed, Maria.”
“Yes, Eben.”
She precedes him with the lamp, and he follows with his shoes in his
hand. At the foot of the staircase he stops and says:
“Did you wipe the sink, Maria?”
“Why, of course!”
They proceed. When she is at the top and he is half way up, she leans
over the balustrade, saying:
“What made you ask me that, Eben?”
“Well, I _did_ feel as if I’d like a drink of water, but if you’ve wiped
the sink I guess I’ll put it off till to-morrer.”
There are many stories of the Yankee thrift, but one very old one is
hard to beat. A farmer, in the days when a grocer also kept a bar,
drives up to the country store and says:
“How much are yer givin’ fer eggs?”
“Cent apiece,” says the grocer.
“My wife wants a darnin’ needle. What do yer ask fer ’em?” “Cent
apiece,” again from the grocer.
The farmer gets off his seat, takes out a weight, ties it to the horse’s
head, and drops it on the road. Going to the back of the wagon, he
reaches into a basket and takes out one egg, carrying it carefully into
the grocery.
“I’ll swap yer this fer a darnin’ needle.”
The grocer gives him the needle and takes the egg. The farmer lingers.
“Don’t yer treat on a trade?”
The grocer looks at him curiously, swears, and then says:
“What’ll yer have?”
“Guess I’ll hev an egg flip.”
The grocer takes the egg, which is still on the counter, breaks it into
the glass, and—two yolks appear.
“Hold on!” yells the farmer, “that’s a double yoker. Give me another
darning needle!”
Mark Twain’s mind was a treasure house of hundreds of stories of this
type—his humor was so essentially American. My most vivid memory of Sam
Clemens is being with him around the billiard table in The Players. He
thought he could play Chicago pool, and in the earlier ’nineties used to
choose me for an adversary. I was younger and a better player than he.
One day, having beaten him one game, I dared to be winning another. He
swore at me for some shot I had made, so I said over my shoulder:
“Don’t be profane.”
Simulating great anger (he was funniest when he pretended gruffness) his
mustache bristled, his eyes glared, his chest stuck out, and he marched
up to me, his cue banging on the floor to emphasize each word:
“Young man, you do not even know what profanity is. Profanity, sir, is
the unnecessary use of profane words and, applied to you, no such use is
unnecessary. Go on with your —— —— game.”
Mr. Clemens was very individual in his tastes. He was fond of bread and
had missed it in Europe. He used to say that the British bread was putty
and the French bread all crust. His drinks were always made for him in
exactly the same way. His habits were not those of a fussy old man, but
rather of a monogamous person who, having fallen in love once, remained
true all his life. I never saw him the least bit intoxicated, but he
certainly was not an abstainer. The hottest day of summer would see him
with a steaming pitcher before him from which he poured a hot punch of
Scotch, always mixed in the same way.
He was a genial fellow in a crowd of people and would undoubtedly have
made a wonderful politician. I was hailed by him at the Grand Central
Station one day. It was in the winter and he was clothed in the pure
white that he affected in his later years. With his white hair and pink
face, this made him so conspicuous that we were soon the center of an
interested group of people, exactly as if we had been a dog fight. This
always acted a stimulant upon Clemens, and he began to hold forth in the
most extravagant fashion. At last he said:
“Now I must get my train—but let me see—I have forgotten something. Oh,
I know! I have forgotten my wife.” Then appealing to the crowd, he
called: “Does anyone here happen to know where Mrs. Clemens is?”
A dozen voices answered in the affirmative, and some one ran to fetch
her. Mark Twain stood perfectly still until she was escorted to his side
by an admiring bystander. I can imagine Roosevelt doing this, but Mr.
Emerson or Woodrow Wilson—never.
A deep sense of civic responsibility was one of Mr. Clemens’s most
marked characteristics. His idea was that every man in a community
should consider himself responsible if things did not go well, and not
be too lazy to raise a kick. He told me of dining in a Pullman car once
where the menu stated there was a selection of roast beef or chicken. He
ordered the chicken, was told there was none left, so made up his mind
to be contented with the roast beef. Before he had finished, the
conductor of the car came in and the negro waiter served him with
chicken.
“He was a servant of the company and I was a patron,” Clemens said, “and
I rose and proclaimed that that was my roast chicken. I did not get it,
but when I arrived home I wrote to the company president and received an
apology. If you have a complaint, do not write to a small official, for
it will never penetrate upward, but if you write to the highest, it may
leak down.”
Another time, coming from Hartford with his daughter, he took a green
car at the station. It was very crowded and they had to stand. Mr.
Clemens protested at the conductor pushing them about and punching his
daughter in the ribs as he collected the fares. Whereupon he said:
“Jesus Christ! Do you think you own this car?”
“_I_ don’t mind being called that,” said the humorist, “but my daughter
lives in Hartford and is not used to such language. Her feelings were
hurt.”
They got off at the car barn and, looking about for some one with whom
to register a “kick,” met Billy Laffan (part owner and editor of the
_Sun_), who advised them to let the newspaper do the kicking.
Sam wrote his troubles to the _Sun_. The next day the _Tribune_ (it was
an august sheet in those days) came out with an editorial saying that it
was bad taste on the part of Mark Twain to make fun of the Holy Name;
that they had looked up the matter and found that it was all a figment
of his imagination. This was answered, the following day, with a letter
from the president of the car line, saying that the story _was_ true,
that the offending conductor had been discharged, and that he (the
president) wished to thank Mr. Clemens publicly for having helped them
in the matter.
The sequel to the occurrence was told me by Mr. Clemens himself.
“Some time after, I was at my home in Hartford, when my maid came into
my study to say that there was a man calling upon me. She showed in a
fellow I did not recognize. He began by saying:
“‘Mr. Clemens, I am the man who called you Jesus Christ.’”
“‘Admit your mistake?’ I asked.”
“‘Yes, and I have come to ask a favor. Don’t you think the public is as
much to blame as I am? When I get tired I begin to get hasty, and I have
never been called down before. If the public had done its duty in the
beginning, I would not have gotten into trouble. I have a wife and four
children to support and the president of the company will not take me
back unless you write a letter and ask him.’
“Of course, I wrote the letter.”
I often heard Mr. Clemens expatiate on his well-known subject—the
Almighty Dollar. He had been out West where gold was struck in
abundance, and he could not see any difference between the nationalities
in the scramble to get there first. The English were always twitting us
about our love of money, but, as he said:
“I admit we are hunting for the almighty dollar, but the Englishman is
hunting just as hard for the almighty penny.”
As to fear, Roosevelt was talking in the club shortly after the Spanish
War, saying that every man’s experience is the same, that he is always
horribly afraid before his first battle, but that it wears off. Then he
appealed to Clemens, asking him if it were not his feeling during the
Civil War.
“Yes,” Clemens answered, “I was scared to death at my first battle, but
it seems to have been different with you. Yours wore off. My fear stuck
to me during the whole war.”
Whatever his physical fear, his mental bravery was phenomenal. It
requires a particular kind of courage for a man to start all over again,
as he did, in his later years. After losing all his money in the
publishing business, he picked up the pieces and traveled about the
world, lecturing, to get the money to pay back his indebtedness, sixty
per cent of which was to his wife. This made no difference to a
gentleman, and he treated her exactly as if she were a strange creditor.
He used to come to The Players while he was going through his bankruptcy
proceedings. It seemed to be a good place to get rid of his troubles.
When he wasn’t being funny, he pretended to be cross; but when he was
quiet, I noticed his face was very sad. He was an intensely American
type in looks, and it was hard to get beyond the barrier he made for
himself; but once he chose to let you in, his eyes said, “Down to you,
sir,” and you saw the superman.
It was more his manner of saying than what he said that made Mr. Clemens
so amusing. I was told he sat at a dinner table and talked for twenty
minutes upon the name Brander Matthews, with everyone exploding in
laughter. He spoke through his nose slowly and with curious drawl, and
repeated his thoughts many times, each variation being funnier than the
preceding one, until he worked up to a screaming climax.
But when he wanted to be serious he made you feel (as Priam says of
Ulysses), “Words, like winter snowflakes, fell from his mouth. Then
might no man compare with Ulysses.” One afternoon a crowd of us were in
the club, drinking and making frivolous talk. Clemens was doing more
than holding his own with the best of us, when suddenly a thought seemed
to strike him. He left for a moment, and when he returned, the
expression of his eyes was changed. He had a book in his hand and he sat
down, saying:
“I will now read you the greatest piece of prose since the days of
Marlowe.”
And then, his nasal twang gone, his voice attaining a beautiful
sonority, he read, as no one else could have done it—the Gettysburg
Speech. It was one of the big moments of my life.
I remember well a comment he made afterward:
“If any one of you men ever have a class in English,” he said, “give
them this. Let them try to put an adverb after the word _here_. No one
but Lincoln could have thought of using, ‘That we here _highly_
resolve.’ No! No! No one!”
The last time I saw Mark Twain was at a luncheon at Delmonico’s, given
by one of my friends in honor of a British army attaché. I got there
rather early and my host was worried for fear his guest of honor would
be disappointed in Mr. Clemens. He was getting old and did not perform
readily. I said:
“Will you leave it to me? I’ll make him show off; but you must promise
not to be surprised at anything and to back me up, however foolish I may
act.”
He promised.
I went to the butler and asked him to see that there was a man behind
Mr. Clemens to refill his glass as soon as he took a sip. He did not
drink much in those days, so it was important he must not be given a
chance to refuse. Before the chill of the beginning of the lunch had
passed off, I rose and said to my host:
“I want to tell a story.”
Derision from the others: “He talks all the time!” “Shut up!” They even
threw bread at me to keep me quiet. But I insisted in a silly way, as if
I were drunk, and my host backed me up. Then I began to tell one of Mr.
Clemens’s pet stories in such a manner that no one but he would
recognize it. I mixed it all up and finally missed the point altogether,
sitting down with a fatuous grin.
He couldn’t stand it. His face grew red, he bristled and glared, reached
for his cocktail, downed it, and rose.
“That was a good story,” he said, indignantly, “but _he_ can’t tell it.
This is the way it should go.” And he told it in his inimitable way.
After that nothing could stop him. He was witty, clever, and the life of
the lunch. The old Clemens girded on his armor and went out again
arrayed for battle; but I often wonder if he went to his grave thinking
I was as much of an ass as I appeared that day.