Chapter III: Part 3

“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.’