Chapter IV: Part 4

“At this moment there was a peremptory knock at the door and a raspy voice bellowed:

“‘Wird’s bald?’ (Aren’t you coming?)

“Now I got real mad and telling Susie to get the revolver we didn’t have in the house, I went to the door.

“‘I am Mr. Clemens,’ I said to the limb of the law. ‘What do you want at this unearthly hour, of an American citizen? More taxes? I have paid taxes on a dog which I don’t own, and I paid church taxes although I never go to church. I am tired of your tax rot. I won’t pay another pfennig.’

“‘Take a care, Herr Clemens,’ warned the mister policeman. ‘I heard you mention the name of our All Gracious Kaiser, and now you talk like an anarchist. We won’t stand for that in Berlin.’

“‘Who are we?’ I asked.

“‘The police,’ he answered.

“‘Well, tell the police to----!’

“And no sooner had I uttered that revolutionary platitude when the mister policeman dumped his helmet on his frowzy bean, knocked his heels together, and put his right hand on his sword hilt and sang out:

“‘Herr, you are under arrest.’

“Whereupon all the women of the household and all the listening neighbors were petrified with terror. But I laughed to beat the band to hide my cowardice. My hilarity took the mister policeman off his perch for the moment, and he said:

“‘What are you laughing at?’

“I answered: ‘I am tickled because you threaten me with jail, with the gallows perhaps, and don’t know enough to state the nature of my crime.’

“‘That’s easy, you are arrested for a breach of the city regulations. You allowed your servants to put the bedclothes near the window, and when I stand on tiptoes on the other side of the street, I can see them.’

“I laughed again. He repeated that I was under arrest, and ordered me to come to court the next morning at nine.

“So next morning at nine I went to court, the legation having furnished me with a lawyer. When the judge came in, I rose like everybody else to salute His Honor, then settled down to watch proceedings, and without wishing to be offensive, of course, I slung one knee over the other. Thereupon, the judge called me to the bar and fined me twenty marks for indecent behavior. In a German court I was expected to bend, not cross, my knees. Next my case was called and, as the court was possibly prejudiced on account of the knee incident, I was fined ten marks for showing perfectly clean linen, and twenty marks for laughing at a mister policeman. It cost me fifty marks ($12.50) all in all and I expected to make about five hundred dollars writing about my disgrace. However, Livy thought the telling of it would deal the family escutcheon a blow from which it could never hope to recover and so I had to stick to my five-cent stogies the same as the mister policeman.”

BOOKS THAT WEREN’T WRITTEN

As every friend of Mark Twain’s writings knows, Mark was never short on literary projects, and at the time of their conception all looked exceedingly good to him. As a rule he would start work on the new subject at once with enthusiasm unlimited, writing, dictating, rewriting, dictaphoning and what not! Small wonder that the waiters at the Hotel Metropole in Vienna called him a “dictator.” However, not infrequently his golden imaginings proved idle dross, or else were put aside for new fancies. During his Berlin season he was very keen, at one time, on writing a book on the Three Charles’s, dealing with a terzetto of crowned rascals, but the project, like so many others, was abandoned or died. If I remember rightly, Clemens told me, either in Vienna or London, that he might have felt stronger on the Three Charles’s if it wasn’t for Thackeray’s Four Georges.

The Three Charles’s idea was born of this slight incident:

We had met at the famous Cafe Bauer, Herr Bamberger, some time private secretary to Charles of Brunswick, better known as the Diamond Duke. Bamberger told us some racy stories about the late Highness who had left a million to a Swiss town on condition that it set up a monument to his memory. The monument was built, but so faultily that after six months or so it tumbled down. And the débris having been carted away, Charles’ dream of glory came to an abrupt end.

Mark and Bamberger had several more interviews and one morning, at the Legation, Clemens announced that his next book would be “The Three Charles’s,” Charles the First and the Second of England and Charles of Brunswick, who was also partly English.

“In all his long life,” said Mark, “the Brunswick Charles did only one decent thing and that was a lie. ‘Here reposes the murdered Queen of England,’ he had chiselled upon the entrance to the mausoleum harboring the remains of Queen Charlotte, wife of George. Now this fellow George knew more about buttons for a waistcoat, or sauce for a partridge, than about kingship, he fought--but certainly did not murder his wife. On the other hand, Bamberger tells me, that the Brunswick Charles poisoned a number of people while playing at kingship. Yet all the punishment he got at the hands of his loving subjects was the dirty kick-out. They burned his palace, besides, but later had to rebuild it at their own cost. In short, get the true picture of Charles and loathe royalty ever afterwards,” recommended Mark.

“You can’t conceive of the meanness of this German kinglet,” said Mark at another time. “Once he had trouble with a courtier, Baron Cramner. The Baron fled to escape a dose of _aqua toffana_, but his wife, who expected her first baby, had to remain in Brunswick. What does Charles do? He forbids all physicians, surgeons and midwives, on pain of imprisonment and loss of license, to attend her Ladyship. And he set spies about her house to be informed of the time of travail. And when she was in agony, he had a huge mass of powder, said Bamberger, five thousand pounds, exploded in the neighborhood of her residence. There are a hundred more stories like that. After he fled from Brunswick, the Duke’s medicine chest was found to be crammed full of poison bottles and powders, the label of each container showing how often employed and how long it took for the poison to work.

“This Diamond Duke got away with eleven million thalers of the people’s money; he left one million thalers behind because he couldn’t get at them. And that notwithstanding, this murderer and thief was allowed to live the life of a distinguished prince in London and Paris. Wait till I get through with him and his namesakes in the royalty business.”

MARK ENJOYED OTHER HUMORISTS

Mark and I were walking through a rather disreputable little street, lined by private hotels, which leads from the Strand to the Playhouse, London, when he suddenly stopped and pointed to a bronze tablet on an old house about the middle of the block.

“Read,” he commanded, but my eyes refused to climb to the second story.

“Why this used to be the abode of the poet who has said:

“‘The English love Liberty as their wife,
The French as their Mistress,
The Germans as a Granny, long dead.’”

“Heine,” I ventured.

“Come to think of it, I am not absolutely sure, that Heine coined that political document,” admitted Mark, “but it is very much in the manner of an epigram he _did_ write, I believe.

“‘Life’s a yawning Nitchevo,
The Shadow of a single nought,
The Dream of a Flea,
A Drama by Teufelsdroeckh.’”

I confess I heard this, too, for the first time; possibly Mark got off the fireworks all by his loneness, _pour passer le temps_.

“Howells introduced me to Heine,” he explained during the entr’acte. “I am glad he did, for I never found in his writings ‘the bitter Jew who emptied all the insult in his soul on Aryan heads.’ But then I read Heine only for his glittering wit, the scintillating glow of his fancy.”

MARK AND THE ENGLISH HACK-WRITER

A Berlin cartoon paper, “Ulk,” once represented Twain as “an Arthurian Knight, canned up to the neck in armour,” galloping after kill-joys and such, and picking them up with his lance and warhooping like wild. That’s what he would like to have done to the hack of a London publishing house, who had interfered with his copy, striking out sentences, and words, and substituting his own “insular ignorance” wherever Mark’s broad humanity ran amuck of public opinion as he, the hack, understood it.

Mark told me that he spent three days “abolishing that cad” (quoting from Carlyle) and I think he added:

“I gave him at least part of the Hades and brimstone he deserved. There were such moving passages as ‘monumental ass,’ ‘masticator of commonplaces,’ ‘offspring of a court fool,’ ‘clownish idiot,’ etc. All the hatred, all the venom that was in my system I let loose upon that damn’ fool, squirted it into him with all the force that I was capable of. Oh, I laid him out. If he had had the chance to read the letter, his own mother would not have recognized him.

“But, as you may have heard, women know these things better, and Livy destroyed that wonderful letter of mine, burned it up or fed it to the chickens--I don’t know which. Anyhow the letter wasn’t mailed and that English fool thinks to this very day that he flabbergasted me.”

MARK THOUGHT JOAN OF ARC WAS SLANDERED

I was telling Mark about some frolic at the Berlin Court, when the sprightly “Lottchen,” Princess of Meiningen, William’s sister, proposed a riddle that puzzled the exalted, but not too quick-witted company--

“Even to the utmost--I know what you want to say. They tell me they are having the charade-fever at the Schloss, is that it?”

“Precisely,” I answered, and went on to tell of the silly rebus competitions in which the Kaiser took special delight. I had my story from the Baroness Von Larisch, a witness, who enjoyed a photographic memory.

“A movie memory,” corrected Mark, “but go on.”

Well, I reported, H. R. H. quoted nine or ten descriptions of the party to be guessed at, and neither the Majesties, nor the Highnesses, nor the Graces, nor the Disgraces came anywhere near the solution. Whereupon Lottchen startled the company by announcing the answer: “Joan of Arc.”

Twain took the cigar out of his mouth and sat up straight, which, as everybody knows, he did only on rare occasions.

“Blasphemy most horrible!” he thundered, “making a joke of Joan of Arc, _my_ Joan of Arc!”

“Your book isn’t out yet,” I said by way of pouring oil on troubled waters. “And until it sees the light of print people _will_ puzzle whether your Joan was saint, witch, man, maid or something else.”

Mark had replaced his cigar and was now chewing it viciously.

“Let’s have the story,” he said. While he read Joan of Arc’s ephemeral epitaph, quoted by Lottchen, the stern lines of his face gradually softened and coming to the end, he laughed outright. “Tiptop,” he chuckled, “I wish I had done these verses myself. But, of course, if I had thought of them fifteen or more years ago, I would never have taken Joan seriously.”

The verses that amused the great humorist, read as follows:

“Here lies Joan of Arc: the which
Some count man, and something more;
Some count maid, and some a bore.
Her life’s in question, wrong or right;
Her death’s in doubt by laws or might.
Oh, innocence! take heed of it,
How thou, too, near to guilt doth sit.
(Meantime, France a wonder saw:
A woman rule, ’gainst Salic law!)
But, reader, be content to stay
Thy censure till the judgment-day;
Then shalt thou know, and not before,
Whether saint, witch, man, maid, or bore.”

RUNNING AMUCK--ALMOST

At one of Mrs. Clemens’ tea parties in Vienna a lady of the Court asked Mark whether he had ever visited a certain town, naming an Austrian health resort.

“Yes, nice place. I left my sour stomach there.”

MARK’S IDIOMATIC GEMS

“Of course you have had no serious quarrel with the Church?” he was asked by Dr. Dryander, the former Kaiser’s body chaplain.

“Oh, my, no--far from it,” vowed Mark. “Such expressions as ‘the duck that runs the gospel mill’ and ‘the boss of the doxology works who waltzed a dead ’un through handsome,’ are idiomatic gems I picked up in the mining camps. They are not meant in derision.

“William was talking with my cousin, General Von Versen,” added Mark, “reporting the case at Mr. Phelps’ office a few days afterwards--otherwise, you may be sure, he would have ordered me flayed alive, for isn’t he the identical gander bossing the German gospel mill?”

MARK AND THE GIRLS THAT LOVE A LORD

Moberly Bell, the last great editor of “The Times,” London, before Northcliffe, was not nearly so Olympian as people thought who had never met him. I often warmed one of the enormous armchairs in his enormous office--Bell was a six-footer, as broad as an ox, and his room at the Thunderer’s office resembled a cathedral rather than the ordinary editorial cubby-hole. I brought over Mark one afternoon and he told Bell of the trouble he had buying “The Times” at “The Times” office.

“I offered my sixpence across the counter, saying ‘Today’s paper, please,’” he drawled, “but was quickly put to the right-about. ‘You will find the commissioner outside, at the door; he will fetch the paper and accept payment if you are not a regular subscriber,’ I was rebuked.

“Well I looked outside and instead of a commissioner found a field marshal, as big as a house, hung with medals, and festooned with silver lace.

“‘Your excellency,’ I murmured distractedly, ‘I was ordered to find the commissioner to fetch me a paper. May I be so bold as to ask whether you have seen that individual?’

“The field marshal touched his three-cornered hat and replied in the most stately and dignified manner: ‘Why, of course, I will get you a paper, Mr. Clemens, if you will deign to wait five or six minutes.’

“Then it was _my_ turn to put on airs,” concluded Mark. “‘I am going to see Mr. Moberly Bell,’ I said; ‘fetch me the paper upstairs and keep the change.’”

We were still laughing when a copy boy entered with a trayful of dispatches. “Allow me,” said Mr. Bell. “It will take but a minute to skim over these wires.” But he interrupted himself immediately.

“There’s a job for you, Fisher,” he said, handing me a Paris dispatch. “Blowitz cables that your Aunt Rosine is dying. Hope she will leave you a lot of money. ‘The Times’ will take eight hundred words on Rosine, sixpence a word, you know. Let me have them by seven to-night.”

“My, I wish I had an aunt that I could make sixpence a word out of,” said Mark, as we were going down the lift, which is British for elevator. “Who is, or was, this relative of yours in which ‘The Times’ is interested to the extent of eight hundred words?”

“Why Rosine Stoltz, whom Verdi called ‘his divine inspiration,’ the creator of Aida and of the title roles of most of Rossini’s Grand Operas.”

“That’s a jolly mouthful,” assented Mark, “but couldn’t she do anything but sing?”

“She was not only the solitary rival ever recognized by Jenny Lind, but the greatest collector of titles ever,” I replied. “De Blowitz calls her the Duchess of L’Esignano, but she was also the Spanish Princess of Peace, the Princess Godoy, the Marchioness of Altavilla and the Countess and Baroness of Ketchendorff.”

“In that case,” said Mark, “that story about her dying is vastly exaggerated, for she has six lives coming to her before she is finally through. But how and where did she get all those high-sounding names?”

“Bought ’em, of course. Her last husband, the Prince Godoy, was a racetrack tout in Paris and they were married on his highness’ deathbed, Auntie engaging to pay the funeral expenses. L’Esignano and Altavilla she likewise married _in extremis_, as lawyers have it. The Barony and the Countship she acquired through her lover, the saintly Prince Albert, husband of Victoria.”

“She was a Frenchwoman, you said?”

“Born in Paris as Victoire Noel.”

Mark Twain stood still in the midst of Printing House Square and laid a heavy hand upon my arm. “What you tell me is a great relief,” he said. “I thought American girls were the only damn’ fools paying for titles.”

The much-titled Aunt Rosine didn’t die till a year later, but I believe that the false alarm about her demise, set down, was responsible, in part at least, for Mark’s: “Do They Love a Lord?” He maintained: “They all do,” dwelling in particular upon the courtesies shown to Prince Henry in the U. S. After the appearance of his essay in “The North American Review,” I told Clemens of the following incident, witnessed in Philadelphia.

I happened to visit the City of Brotherly Love the same day as Henry and was crossing one of the downtown squares, when a considerable commotion arose behind: clatter of horses’ hoofs, jingling of metal, tramp of oncoming masses. Somebody shouted: “There he is, going to the Mayor’s office,” as I was passing by an office building in course of construction.

The masons, hodcarriers and other workmen heard the cry and crowded onto the scaffolding outside the walls. Some of them seemed ready to take up the shouts of welcome emitted here and there by the crowd.

But the enthusiasm for royalty was cut short by a brawny Irishman, planting himself, trowel in hand, on the edge of the main scaffold.

“None of that chin music here,” he hollered; “the first wan that hollers hooray for owld Vic’s grandson gets a throwl full of cement down his red lane,” and he swung the loaded tray defiantly.

Just then the Pennsylvania Hussars came trotting up in picturesque disorder, the Prince and city officials following in an open landau.

“And you could _hear_ the silence, I bet,” said Mark. “I wish I had been there to _see_ it too, particularly if one of the chaps had attempted to mutiny against Pat’s order. Pat, I dare say, would have licked him until he couldn’t tell himself from a last year’s corpse.”

MARK’S MARTYRDOM

“Well, how did you like your reception in England?” Mark was asked during his last visit there.

“Overwhelming, indescribable! There are no other words for it,” he said, “but let me get hold of Andy (Carnegie). His country, Scotland, used truly fiendish means for humiliating me, though I spent a whole day riding across the blamed island--couldn’t do better, for the train between Edinburgh and London wouldn’t, or couldn’t, go slower.

“Well, at Edinburgh I crept into one of those rat-cages they call railway carriage, first class, and opened the ‘Irish Times,’ that I bought at the station. I kidded myself, hoping that the unfurling of that paper would promote conversation, or trouble or something, with fellow passengers. But there was only one, and he got even with me in the most awful and bloodthirsty style. Namely, he pulled out of his valise a copy of the ‘Innocents,’ in two volumes, and after lighting a pipe, began reading. I watched him, first out of a corner of my eye, then with the whole eye, then with the pair of them. Nothing doing--that horse thief didn’t crack a single smile over the first two hundred and fifty pages.

“After luncheon--even the excellent salmon was gall and the other thing to me--Mr. Scotchman repeated his torture, heaping more red-hot coals on my mane, the insides of my hands and of my shoes--that is, he read the second story through likewise without as much as a squint.”

And Mark got up and left without another word.

SLANG NOT IN MARK’S DICTIONARY

Seldom or never did I hear Mark use slang--whether he thought himself above it in the matter of provoking laughter, or whether he disliked it, I can’t tell. He used to keep the Berlin or Vienna embassy, or whatever the resort happened to be, in a roar by telling of billiard balls “the size of walnuts” and of a billiard table “as big as the State of Rhode Island,” but such a word as “Biggity” never escaped him.

An American “slangy” person says: “I’ll be jiggered” or something. Mark put that phrase differently: “_You_ be damned if I didn’t scream like a wet peacock with all his tail feathers mussed.”

The ordinary run of humorists delight in fussing about hotel bills. Mark affected to “be mad clean through” at impositions practiced upon him by foreigners, and clenched both fists as he remarked: “We paid the heavy bill, about _six cents_.”

If Mark had used the slang loved by the vaudevillians he would be as widely unread in the Scandinavian countries, in modern Greece and in Russia as are the latter. “I never liked riddles and jaw-breakers,” he said to a member of the firm of Chatto and Windus in London one day, after the gentleman “had caught another foreign country for him,” “but I guess cannibals and Pollacks alike love to be surprised, and the grotesque, always unexpected, is surprising.”

“During my stay in Stockholm some one read the following from one of my books (translated): ‘The solemn steadfastness of the deep made the ship roll sideways.’ Great laughter. ‘And she kicked up behind!’ At that the house shook and rocked and quivered with merriment and my fame was firmly established in Sweden. If I had told the audience that ‘Her Majesty’s dress crept along the floor for three minutes (count ’em) after the queen had gone,’ they would have risen to a man and kissed me.”

MARK “NO GENTLEMAN”

Mark didn’t resort to profanity when he wanted to lambaste man or measure. I once heard him say to Mrs. Clemens: “I will write him that ‘his mind is all caked up, that as an idiot he is simply immeasurable.’

“And I will call him a snug person full of pedantic proclivities; and further, ‘a long-eared animal’ (and striking an attitude)--‘a mule hostler with his pate full of axle grease.’”

“All right,” said gentle Mrs. Livy, “do so by all means, but take care not to send the letter.”

“Livy, dear, let me get it off my chest,” pleaded Mark, “for ‘Hotel Normandie, Paris,’ would be just the place to date such an epistle from. Don’t you remember the ‘Madame’s screech’ to the effect that ‘one must expect neither tact nor delicacy from Mark Twain?’”

The “Madame” referred to was Madam Blanc, the critic of one of the chief French reviews, already mentioned.

“The vagabond and adventurer, who from crown to sole remained a gentleman” (I forget from which magazine this is quoted) fairly reveled “in the French Madame’s abomination of his lowly self.”

MARK, POETRY, AND ART

Like other authors, Mark was not indifferent to praise. I think he liked best an essay in a Vienna review which hailed him as “the journalist of _belles-lettres_ who has made the commonplaces literary, even as Emerson rendered the commonplaces philosophic.” “A French writer has accused him of denying that there was any poetic feeling in the middle ages,” continues the essay, “yet his Joan of Arc is the most wonderfully lyric-dramatic prose I can recall.”

“There are lots of people who know me better than I do myself,” was Mark’s comment on the above, and followed it up with a yarn on life in “old Nevada,” when he rode several miles behind a prairie schooner “because of a red petticoat fluttering in the breeze at the tail end.”

“That is, I thought it was a petticoat, but when I caught up with the wagon on that spent mud turtle of mine (my gee-gee went by that poetic name) I found it was only a piece of burlap displayed for art’s sake.”

“Did I curse ART?” demanded Mark, looking around the circle.

MARK SHEDS LIGHT ON ENGLISH HISTORY

We had set out to look at the rich collections of jewels, curiosities and “other loot” (Mark’s description) hoarded by the (late) Hapsburgs in the immense pile called _Hofburg_, when the author of “Joan of Arc,” then in the making, switched me off to another room.

“Let’s go and dig out the Witch Hammer,” he said. “Wonder whether they have a new edition at the Imperial Library.”

I forget now which edition of that murderous book we examined, but I do remember some of the figures we jotted down at the librarian’s suggestion. The Witch Hammer, that is, a voluminous “treatise for discovering, torturing, maiming and burning witches,” was first published, we learned, in 1487, and twenty-eight editions were put through the press during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Later Mark listened to my reading from the Latin text with so stern a mien I suggested that he looked like a Grand Inquisitor.

“I pity your ignorance,” he drawled, “Torquemada and the rest didn’t think of being unhappy _re_ those auto-da-fes, for every witch-fire lit by their orders meant a warm jingle in their own pockets. When they tortured an accused person, the cost of the proceedings was collected by the sheriff, ditto when they burned some old lady, or a child maybe--it was all grist to their mill, for the Grand Inquisitor got a rake-off on all prosecutions, and in those good old days it cost more to break a human being on the wheel than to feed him and care for him in jail. The great Napoleon, you once told me, found some three hundred crowned leeches infesting Germany when he started to break up their little game. What do you suppose they lived on, those kinglets, princes, graves and dukes--on the dog tax? No, most of them lived on the interest of the fortunes their ancestors had accumulated by prosecuting and burning witches.”

Some years later Mark related the story of our search for the Witch Hammer before a motley crowd of litterateurs at Brown’s Hotel, London. “Fine,” said Bram Stoker, “tell us some more; I have a short story on witchcraft in hand.”

“In that case,” said Mark, “don’t forget Henry VIII, Elizabeth and the first James. Wife-killing Henry started the witch-burning business in ‘merry’ England, Elizabeth revived the sport, and the son of Mary Stuart, whose Bible lies on every drawing-room table at home, used both pen and axe to exterminate witches and ‘demons.’ I read up closely on the subject when I got down to Joan of Arc’s trial.”

Some of our English friends didn’t seem pleased with Mark’s reminiscences of British intolerance. “What about Salem?” asked one of them.

“Oh, Salem,” replied Mark, drawing out the word like a rubber band, “you needn’t get cocky about Salem. The Massachusetts witchcraft delusion was only an echo of your own English persecutions, and a flash in the pan at that. I have the data in my booklet here. Admitted we fool Americans _did_ hang twenty-two and tortured some fifty people under the English-German-Spanish witchcraft acts--to our shame and disgrace--compare these figures with the records of man and woman burnings ordered by your ‘bloody Mary’ alone. On the very morning of the day when the old cat died, seven or eight Britishers were billed to be reduced to cinders at Smithfield (where you buy your steak nowadays), and if the devil hadn’t made room for her Majesty in hell before noon, there would have been so many more martyrs.”

He turned to Stoker. “Bram,” he said, “the only satisfactory way to do a witchcraft story is to filch it bodily from Balzac. The Frenchman got the thing down to perfection in one of his Droll yarns--I know a shop in the Strand where you can buy a pirated edition--reproduced by the camera--for half a crown.”

“Hold,” he added, “I can give you the recipe of the witch salve, so called. Fisher and I dug it up at the Berlin Royal Library. It was a compound of hemlock, mandragora, henbane and belladonna. No wonder it set persons, thus embalmed all over the naked body, crazy, tickled them to indulge in all sorts of insane antics, that lent themselves to devilish interpretation at a period when every tenth person aspired to boom a religion of his own.”

MARK EXPLAINS DEAN SWIFT

“I wish somebody would kick me for a damned _Treppenwitz_,” said Mark Twain, gazing into a bookseller’s shop window Unter den Linden.

“The Herr _Schutzmann_ (traffic policeman) will oblige; just say--”

Mark glanced at the whiskered giant bestriding his ill-shaped cattle at the intersection of Friedrich Strasse.

“No, thank you, I won’t _lese majeste_ on a Friday,” replied Mark, “besides, I don’t like the cop’s boot.” (In before-1918 days, you need but say, ‘Verdammt Kaiser,’ in Berlin, to get knocked down, arrested, and sent up for months and months.)

“What’s _Treppenwitz_?”

“I didn’t know myself until Harry Thurston Peck told me. It’s the wisdom that comes to you going down the stairs, or the elevator, after making a fool of yourself higher up--an afterthought, as it were.”

“And what’s the afterthought _now_?”

“See that book?” (pointing), “no, not that, the yellowback, by Prof. Borkowsky--one more guy trying to explain Jonathan Swift. I forgot when his Deanship lived and died, but they must have been at it for centuries. And without examining the new volume, I bet I can tell its contents: more highfalutin’ tommyrot about the Dean’s vagaries in erotics and small beer politics. There must be a considerable library on the subject, every new author threshing the old straw a tenth time, and adding mystery trimmings of his own. I always promised myself to submit _my_ theories on Swift and his harem at a first-class insanity shop, but I forgot to ask Krafft-Ebing in Vienna, and now I let Virchow pass.”

I was going to say something obvious, but Mark stopped me. “I know Virchow’s special line, but that man is wise on every conceivable subject, and I am quite sure he would have borne me out, namely, that Swift’s character can be explained on the theory that he was a Sadist and a Masochist in one. If Swift, as he wrote to an acquaintance, ‘died of rage like a poisoned rat in a hole,’ I am sure he enjoyed it. God knows that man gave more pain to his lady loves, Stella, Vanessa and the rest, than all the Romeos in Shakespeare. They say that he killed Vanessa by frightening her to death; he certainly murdered Stella morally by letting her pass for his mistress. Still these two women and others, whose names I forget, were proud of the torments inflicted upon them. I wish I had asked Virchow, when he invited the audience to put questions to him at the end of the lecture.”

MARK IN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

We had lunch with some of the Herald boys at _Cafe des Ambassadeurs_, Champs-Elysees, when Dick Benet, editor of “Dalziel’s News,” joined us. Dick, “contrary to his usual morosity, acted the gay and debonair,” to quote Clemens, who suggested that “he must have given the boss the toothache by managing to get his salary raised a hundred francs per annum.”

There was much hilarity about that, for we all knew “the boss” for a skinflint, and Mark told a succession of funny stories about his own salary grabs on the “Virginia Enterprise” and other impecunious sheets. All were keenly alive to the treat, only Dick seemed absent-minded, pulling out his watch every little while and keeping an eye on the door.

“You are not afraid of a bum-bailiff _now_,” suggested Mark.

“Neither now, nor at any future time,” replied Dick. “Fact is, the wife promised to meet me here and I have an engagement at two o’clock which I mustn’t miss under any circumstances whatever.” Our friend seemed to be lying under some pressure or excitement.

At one-fifteen a tall, stylish Frenchwoman entered, and Dick rushed up to her with outstretched hands. “So glad you came in time,” he murmured. He slurred over the introductions, drew his wife on to the seat next to him, and whispered to her.

At fifteen minutes to two (we adduced the figures later by comparing notes) two strangers in high silk toppers walked up to Dick, saying: “It’s time, Monsieur.”

Dick nodded, rose, bent over his wife and kissed her on the mouth. Then he shook hands all around, and with some more adieux walked away with his friends. We saw him seated in a cabriolet, then leave it abruptly.

“Victoire, my love, I am so sorry,” he said, rushing back and covering his wife’s face with kisses--“so sorry to leave you.”

One more lingering kiss and he was gone.

* * * * *

Half an hour later Mark and I passed by Dalziel’s News Bureau, as a man came out of the counting room to paste up “the latest.”

“Let’s see what it is,” said Mark. “Maybe King Leopold is dead, and I mustn’t miss putting on court mourning for HIM.” This is what we read on the bulletin-board:

“Monsieur Richard Benet, the editor of Dalziel’s, was killed in a duel with ---- at 2:15 this afternoon. _R. I. P._”

Mark was visibly affected. “That poor woman,” he kept saying; “a stroke out of the blue. But Dick felt that he was taking leave of her for good; that accounts for his repeated: ‘I’m so sorry.’” And much more to that effect.

To get Clemens’ mind off the melancholy affair, I suggested “Swithin.”

“Done,” said Mark, “and we will take him out to supper, for I bet he hasn’t got a sou marquis in his jeans.”

“Swithin” was Mark’s pet name for a Franco-American writer whose real name happened to recall the legend of a Saint, a groundhog, and several kinds of weather.

Meanwhile the heat had taken on a Sahara hue. “It seems to me we are not walking, we are _dripping_,” remarked Clemens, as we climbed the four stairs to the studio. We had been told to walk right in, and we did, accidentally upsetting the screen that separated the anteroom from the office.

Tableau! Here was “Swithin” and his secretary, the one dictating, the other thumping the typewriter and both--stark naked.

“Don’t mention it,” broke in Mark. “_Puris naturalibus_ is the only way to face this hellish temperature--a white man’s solitary chance to get even with civilization! If there were a bathtub, a few banana trees and a fire-spitting mountain around, I would think myself in the Sandwich Islands.

“Talking of sandwiches,” he added, “hustle into your tailor-mades and come out for a bite. You must be fearfully hungry--working on a day like this?”

“Swithin” didn’t have to be told twice. He dashed into the adjoining room for his clothes, but returned after a little while, still _en nature_, and swearing like the whole Flanders army. He searched presses, drawers, nooks and corners with hands and eyes.

“Anything missing?” mocked Mark.

“Only my duds--I bet those confounded roommates of mine--(followed a string of epithets that wouldn’t look well in print) stole and pawned them, for they had neither cigarette nor lunch money this morning.”

“Come to think,” put in the secretary, “I saw Monsieur Hector leave with a bundle.”

“My jeans, coat and vest,” shrieked “Swithin,” tearing his hair, while Mark writhed with laughter.

“And there were fifteen or twenty sous in an inside pocket besides,” moaned “Swithin.”

“I know Monsieur Hector’s hang-out,” said the secretary, “and if you like I will go and choke the pawn tickets out of the pair.”

“Couldn’t do better if you tried,” opined Mark, “for no doubt by this time they have devoured the proceeds of their brigandage. Hurry, before they sell the tickets.”

We found Hector and his brother-bandit behind a magnum of fake champagne, gourmandizing at the Dead Cat, a newly opened restaurant destined to become famous in Bohemia.

“Sure,” they said, “we _borrowed_ old Swithin’s old clothes, but expected to bring them back before seven. We are now waiting for the angel who promised to relieve our financial distress, which is only momentary, of course.”

They gave up the tickets willingly enough, and we repaired to _Mont de Piété_ in Rue Lepic.

“Mountain of Pity--a queer name for a hock shop,” said Mark when I related the redemption of Swithin’s clothes. “I once knew a three-hundred-pound Isaac in ’Frisco, but that is another story.”

“AMBITION IS A JADE THAT MORE THAN ONE MAN CAN RIDE”

We had been talking about changing one’s luck at the Eccentric Club, London, and Mark said: “All is personal effort, there is no such thing as anything interfering for one’s advantage or the opposite.”

“Guess you are about right,” said Stoker. “There was Loie Fuller, an indifferent soubrette before she became the goddess of beauty and chained Anatole France and the rest to her chariot. I remember meeting her one afternoon in the Strand, looking for a cable office. Only a few hours previous I had heard that poor Loie was on her uppers, her manager having cheated her, leaving her penniless in Berlin. And, worse luck, I didn’t know a thing she could do in London, or even the provinces, just then. That, you can imagine, made me feel quite gawky.”

“Well, you had a right to be a sob sister,” interpolated Mark.

“She didn’t give me the chance, not she,” emphasized Bram, “for, grabbing me by the arm, with tears rolling down her cheeks, she whispered in a choked voice: ‘Father is dead, Father is dead! Lend me ten shillings to cable to New York, please.’ She added: ‘Poor Father. But now I _will_ succeed, _I swear it, Father_.’

“And two or three weeks later she created the serpentine dance, earning such blurbs as ‘the chastest and most expressive of dancers, who restored to us the lost wonders of Greek mimicry.’”

“I hear she is about to open her own theatre in Paris now,” announced the Standard critic.

“That’s the stuff,” said Mark. “Loie, like myself--both red-headed--knew that ambition is a horse that more than one can ride. I grabbed that idea ’way back in the seventies when Artemus Ward came down lecturing Virginia way. Art was a success and I liked the lordly nonchalance with which he spent two or three hundred dollars on a tear. I helped him spend plenty, I assure you, but when Art and the brown taste in my mouth had gone, I took stock.

“‘Sam,’ I said to myself, quite familiar-like, ‘Sam, your mental adipose is as good as his, and in originality you can beat him dead.’

“After these encouraging remarks, I set to work making good,” concluded Mark.

MARK AS A TRANSLATOR

Mark conquered Germany before he became one of the favorite literary sons of Austria. “I often wonder that they take to my brand of humor so well,” he told me more than once in Vienna--“I mean AFTER MY GERMAN TRIUMPHS, for if Vienna Bookland hates anything worse than German Bookland, I haven’t come across the likes of it. Each capital thinks itself a Boston and each calls the other Kalamazoo, or dead Indian Town.

“But I’m not ungrateful,” continued Mark, “and to prove it, I studied hard and established the identity of the fatherlandish author whom both Vienna and Berlin admired (though nobody reads him, of course): Goethe.”

“Goethe was Englished before I tackled him, but I happened on a passage in Faust that, it seemed to me, was not done justice to. So I summoned the family to a powwow and between us, and a heap of dictionaries, we rendered the disputed and immortal lines ‘thus classic’:

“‘What hypocrites and such can’t do without--
Cheese it--ne’er mention it aloud.’

“Bayard” (Taylor) “would have burst with envy if he had lived long enough to see how happily I interpreted Goethe without itching for translator’s laurels or royalties.”

“Let’s see the original, Mark.”

“Here it is:

“‘Man darf es nicht vor keuschen Ohren nennen,
Was keusche Hertzen nicht entbehren können.’

“_Vers libre_ with a vengeance, eh?” chuckled Mark. “And why in thunder shouldn’t that mean verse liberally handled?”

“If I translated your version of Goethe back into German, do you suppose the Fatherlanders would understand it?”

“No,” said honest Mark, “but I do understand _their_ translations of _my_ lingo--I am told they make me appear like a native German writer, in fact Moritz Busch called me the most translatable of foreign authors, to my face--but Goethe was a poet, and a prose man, like me, can never do justice to a poetry man of Goethe’s distinction. Look at these German translations of Shakespeare--they think them classic--they get my eyes in flood with laughter.”

MARK IN ENGLAND

On another page I have jotted down some sayings of Mark’s relating why he “steadfastly refused” to bull the French and Italian literary markets. That in England it was different, goes without saying, and George Moore once explained Mark’s English popularity to me.

“It’s his peculiar power of presenting pathetic situations without slush,” insisted “the last Victorian” in his manner of finality.

Mark was visibly tickled when I read the Moore estimate from the cuff on which I had jotted it down.

He pondered a short while on “the adjectives,” then drawled slowly: “The English are good sports, you know.”

Here are a few more opinions of English men of letters which I gathered off and on.

Davison Dalziel, M. P., editor of “The Standard,” London: “I agree with ‘The Spectator’ that Mark Twain is the most popular writer in the English tongue because he added more plentifully and more generously to the gayety of the empire of our language than any other author, living or dead.”

Moberly Bell, late editor of “The Times,” London (in winter of 1899): “Mark Twain succeeded with us because he is a fearless upholder of all that is clean, honest, noble and straightforward in letters as well as in life. He once told me that he ‘qualified as the first yellow journalist.’ I wish to God he had remained the first and only one.”

That was before Mr. Bell negotiated for the sale of “The Times” to Lord Northcliffe.

William Heinemann, the late famous London publisher, who could never get hold of any of Mark Twain’s books for publication:

“An author as well beloved as he is popular and famous. Wit, scholar, orator, millionaire perhaps” (that was before the Webster period), “yet I have seen a letter of his in which he stated point blank: ‘I would rather be a pilot than anything else in the world,’ and that letter was penned after two hundred thousand copies of ‘Innocents Abroad’ had been sold.”

WHY MARK WAS UNCOMFORTABLE IN THE KING OF SWEDEN’S PRESENCE

“And how did you like the King of Sweden?” I heard Lord Roberts ask Clemens at the Army and Navy Club, one afternoon.

“Well, frankly, if I must suffer myself to have intercourse with kings, I prefer the Prince of Wales,” replied Mark.

Then somebody told a story about the Swedish Majesty’s last sojourn in Norway. There, at a railway station, Oscar ran against a crusty old farmer who thought himself a lot better than a mere king and kept his hat on.

“Don’t you know enough to bare your head in the presence of the King?” demanded Oscar.

“You bare your head and I’ll bare mine,” replied the farmer. “My family has been here a great many hundred years longer than yours.”

Thereupon Oscar got so enraged he knocked the farmer’s hat off with a sweep of his cane and if bystanders hadn’t interfered the King would have been pummeled “handsome” then and there.

“I am glad I doffed my hat before Oscar came in,” said Mark.

MARK’S IDEA OF HIGH ART

“This here earth is governed like a military despoty,” said Mark Twain when we were sitting outside a Ringstrasse restaurant in Vienna one afternoon. He was eyeing the procession of army officers, with pretty girls upon their arms, passing to and fro.

“And if you had the ordering of things, would your soul have meandered into one of these jackanapes in monkey jackets and corsets, and czackos and busbies and things?” inquired Susan, the wit’s witty young daughter.

“No, darling, but I would have loved to live in the time of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, the best dressed period of the world. You know I like color and flummery and all such things--I was born red-headed--maybe that accounts for my passion for the gorgeous and ornamental.”

“Tell the company about the riot of colors you delight in,” said Susan.

“I saw it only once,” replied Mark, “and it was rather uncomfortable, even painful, to the other creature, namely, a tortoise-shell cat that accidentally had dropped into a tomato stew. As pussy tried to get out, pawing like the baby after the Ivory soap, there was a display of rainbows, spectrums, chromatics, prisms, pigments, and plain everyday paints and stains such as I have run across in a few Italian picture galleries only.”

He picked up a copy of the “New York Herald,” lying on the table. “There’s our friend George in New York,” he said, “having more trouble with that pesky French brother-in-law of his. The little Paris fortune hunter has already cost his wife’s estate fifteen or twenty million francs and--no returns outside of a few babies. Yet French brother-in-law could make a tall income if he were put to ‘work right,’ as they say in the wild and woolly, for he has a most tremendous eye for color effects, that chap. If he were my brother-in-law, I would starve the cuss into becoming a man-milliner, the first of the world. That’s what he could be, and ought to be with clever management.

“My word,” continued Mark, “you ought to see him drive in state in the Bois de Boulogne. When I first clapped eyes on his flunkies and outriders, in their liveries, rich yet soft in color effects, I almost yearned to be one of them for the sake of their fine togs.”

Indeed, sensational clothes were always Mark’s hobby. Hence the white suits he wore in his reclining days, and the sealskin coat, with the fur outside, that adorned him in his days of youthful glory. I am quite sure he would have gone to bed in his Oxford mantle and cap if he had had more than one of each, and the passing of his red hair was a real grievance to him, he told Gyp, the French novelist whom he called, “warm, yet not torrid.”

MARK MEETS KING LEOPOLD--ALMOST

A man with a top hat, long gray whiskers and a rapid-looking young woman on his arm came out of the Metropole Hotel in Paris as we passed.

“Poor seedy beggar,” said Mark, “I wonder whether he would object to a five-sous piece?” And he put his hand in his pocket.

“Hold,” I said. “That’s King Leopold and Cleo de Merode.”

“Impossible, with that get-up,” objected Mark.

“Get-up?” I repeated. “Kings always wear frayed jeans when they travel incog.”

“In that case, go and smash the old beast. You are younger than I, and heavier, too.”

At the moment when Mark extended this thoughtful invitation, Swithins of the “New York Herald” hailed us. “Look at that chap,” he said, pointing to the person I had called his Belgian Majesty; “he is the model who sat for L’Assiette au Beurre’s caricature of King Leopold as Saint Anthony. Let’s go inside and get a copy.”

Mark bought a dozen or more to send to American friends. The caricature by D’Ostoya, if I recollect rightly, was an excellent likeness of both the King and of the beggar we had run across.

“Neither would take his hat off to Rothschild,” said Mark; “Leopold, because his Congo savageries had made him enormously rich, the beggar because he wouldn’t know the richest man from a mere million-pauper, like me.”

D’Ostoya’s cartoon represented Leopold in monk’s habit, undergoing one of the several temptations immortalized by Flaubert’s great novel. But it wasn’t the Queen of Sheba who called--rather Mrs. Fat-and-Forty minus furbelows and things. No wonder Leopold, being artistically inclined, looks annoyed.

“Watch the virtuous indignation oozing out of the old rascal,” said Mark. “The editor of the ‘Ladies’ Home Journal,’ asked to do an essay on bruisers for the ‘Police Gazette,’ couldn’t be shocked any harder.”

When I told him about an article on Leopold I had done for the “New York World,” which caused a Montreal editor, who stole it, to be jugged for libel (“Six months,” said the judge of literature), Mark grew enthusiastic.

“Was that yours?” he cried. “Good boy! Come along and I will buy you dinner at one of those places where they are ashamed to put the price of dishes à la carte because they hate to confess that they charge less than 1,000 francs a pea.”

SIZING UP OF ARISTOCRACY BY MARK

At one of the many splendid dinner parties at the house of Minister Walter Phelps, the strange case of Prince and Princess XXX of a once sovereign family had come in for a lot of discussion. Their highnesses stood convicted of hotel looting, yet on account of the imaginary coronet that topped their escutcheon, they were expected to go scot-free, “for everybody agreed that her ‘Grace’ was plainly a kleptomaniac.”

“Don’t you think so, Mr. Clemens?” demanded an old countess, coquetting with the last tooth in her mouth.

“I am no expert,” replied Mark. “All I know is that the disease attacks only the high born, as you call them, and the well-to-do.”

As on this occasion all of Mr. Phelps’ native guests were more or less “high born,” and impecunious, that remark of the Sage of a Hundred Stories put the quietus on aristocracy-propaganda during the rest of the dinner and later, in the smoking room, Mr. Phelps’ American guests were left quite to themselves.

“I hope I wasn’t rude to that blue-blooded one,” said Mark, “but excusing thievery because the thief happens to have a handle to his or her name, gets my goat on the instant. Now” (looking at me) “give us the real story of that looting business by High Lifers, so we can discuss it intelligently. Its general gist I got from the German papers, but lack details.”

I gave the latter as follows: The Prince XXX was a second son, consequently always hard up. The Princess had no money of her own either, but in place of that a soaring ambition. Food positively disagreed with her every time she took it off mere china or stoneware. She must have silver--

“Or bust--” said Mark. “I made out that much.”

Well, to get the plate and plenty of it, their highnesses engaged in a coaching tour of the Fatherland, stopping nightly at a different hotel. And at each hostelry her Grace swiped all the silver she could carry off, milk jugs, souvenir spoons and forks and dish covers, napkin rings and similar knicknacks.

“And these swipings she sent to her ancestral halls, Castle Teufelsdroekh,” added Mark, “where, under the skillful stylus of an engraver, the low hotel markings disappeared to make room for the princely coat-of-arms. But here’s the pretty how-do-you-do about the scapegoat:

“A servant caught her Grace at the game and gave information to the police. The police promptly arrested the informant as a material witness and submitted to their highnesses that, at some future date, they might graciously deign to appear in court to answer the wretch’s foul insinuations.”

Followed a lengthy discussion, embroidered with execrating reflections on justice as handled in the Fatherland, Mark quite surpassing himself in juicy invectives. After a while other subjects came up, and Clemens retired to a desk in the corner and began writing furiously on the backs of stray envelopes he fished from the wastebasket. He scribbled and scratched for about ten minutes, then got up and read us the following:

POETIC SUMMARY OF THE CASE OF THE PRINCE, THE PRINCESS AND THE WAITER

The Prince knew naught of wifey’s doings.
The Princess is a kleptománic;
But their accuser, waiter Muller,
To jail with that low brute satánic!

THE BALD-HEADED WOMAN

Mark called at the “New York Herald” office in London one day when a cable came over the wire, describing the awful punishment visited by the Czar (Alexander) on the mistress of one of the Grand Dukes. The lady had been ambushed, carried off to a hairdressing establishment during the dark hours of the night and there robbed of her abundant locks. In fact, her head was shaved à la billiard ball.

“Very ingenious,” mused Mark, “for who would, or could, love a bald-headed woman? They do things neatly in Russia, anyhow. I remember a devilish joke the great Catharine played on a rival. She had her yanked out of a quadrille, muzzled, and spirited into the basement. There she was whipped good and hard with switches soaked twelve hours in vinegar and salt. Then back to the ballroom and ‘dance, you hussy, and smile, or you get another dose.’”

WHEN A PUBLISHER DINES AND WINES YOU