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.”