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.