Part 10

The woman behind the counter looked at him inquiringly. “New paper, Sir? Never heard of it.”

“Never heard of Tay Pay? How long have _you_ been in the business?” asked Mark.

“Ever since I was thirteen, and I’m past sixty now.”

Mark shook his head and started to walk away, when he saw a copy of the paper nailed up on the outside. “I knew you were mistaken,” he said to the woman. “There is the paper I want. See the title: ‘Tay Pay,’ as large as life.”

“Pardon me,” said the newswoman. “We call it Tee Pee’s Weekly here.”

“You do, do you?” cried Mark. “Damned if I ever again try to talk Irish in Ireland.”

THE MAN WHO DIDN’T GET USED TO HANGING

At the Eccentric Club somebody said: “Man gets used to everything except hanging,” when Mark interrupted him: “Hold,” he drawled. “When I was last in London” (this was in 1907) “one of the ‘Savages’ related a yarn to me which flatly contradicts your commonplace idea.

“The incident happened in the good old hanging days, when all London, Glasgow, Brighton, or Edinburgh, etc., turned out before breakfast to see some poor devil dance on air. Henry VIII had two hundred thousand ‘sturdy beggars’ put to death, besides his several wives; I don’t remember now the London average per week or day, but while hanging continued a public amusement it had long ceased being a ‘first-page story’ as far as the metropolitan dailies were concerned.

“Indeed, the papers disdained to send their ‘own correspondents’ or reporters to such small-fry events as the taking of a man’s or, perchance, a woman’s life in public, and entrusted that part of the daily grind to a ‘flimsy man,’ who sent duplicate copies to all the papers, morning and evening. The ‘flimsy man,’ of course, got so used to the dope and to the eternal sameness of the thing, he could dictate a first-rate hanging yarn without leaving his office, or using the phone--beg pardon, there were no phones in those days.

“Well, one Monday morning, at sunrise, a certain ‘Knight of the Road’ was to die by a tight cravat in a town less than fifty miles from London, and the ‘flimsy man’ thought it would hardly pay to go up (or down) and impersonate the eyewitness. Besides, he knew the governor of the jail personally; his Lordship was an obliging man and would gladly assist at a fake.

“So Mr. Flimsy wrote out his story and held it ‘for release.’

“In the meantime, the doomed man went through the usual rigmarole: prayers, whiskey, breakfast, more whiskey--march to the gallows. He found an audience of prize-fight size awaiting him. The prison yard was black with people, all the surrounding roofs, trees and telegraph poles were alive with spectators, and many poor chaps who had stood all night in line for their betters, now sold standing room at a premium.

“Officialdom, too, was well represented: the governor of the jail, his aides and assistants, the chief of police in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, and lots of bobbies” (cops) “--every mother’s son and daughter eager for the hanging, and secretly hoping that no reprieve would spoil the day’s fun, for somehow the story had got abroad that the Home Secretary had almost decided to commute the death sentence of this particular party.

“Meanwhile, preparations proceeded at an encouraging rate: there was the procession headed by the gentlemanly hangman, swinging a rope; then bobbies, jailers, trusties. The doomed man walked rather jauntily at the side of the parson, who was mumbling prayers and looking benign.

“Presently the procession stood under the gallows, all necks craned, and a hush fell upon the expectant crowd as the hangman’s assistant pulled the linen cap down over his victim’s face. As he got busy adjusting the noose, shouts of ‘reprieve!’ ‘reprieve!’ went up. The hangman looked at the governor and the governor turned towards the gate, which had opened to admit a small messenger boy from the telegraph office.

“The boy was waving a yellow envelope over his head, and the governor signalled to the hangman to wait.

“At the same time the telegraph boy was hoisted over the shoulders of the crowd until he reached the place where the governor stood. As the governor received and opened the dispatch, there were more hoarse cries of ‘reprieve!’ and they were not cries of relief or triumph either. Sure, the crowd thought itself cheated. The men and women and children (for there were plenty of children, as usual) thought that they had bet on a horse that didn’t run--a dead horse that wasn’t dead enough, so to speak!

“But, presto! another change. The governor, having glanced at the message, made a wry face, then crumpled the paper up in his hand and threw it on the ground, while he motioned the hangman to proceed.

“The wire was from the aforementioned fakir and it read: ‘Please wire (prepaid) whether hanging has come off according to program--Jack.’ But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that the man about to be put to the worst use one can possibly put a living person to, was allowed to think for several minutes that the Home Secretary had commuted his sentence of death, that he, the doomed one, was going to live after all. I am told they actually stripped the cap off his face, so he could breathe freely.

“Had that chap got used to hanging, or the hanging idea, by the time when the cord was once more drawn tight? Did he think with the French wag (or was it an Englishman?) ‘hang me, your Highness? No, that would be the death of me.’

“So in our case; no, a thousand times no, for in the interval the poor soul had got used to _living_ once more, and a thousand-and-one murderous thoughts were in his heart while he was being swung off into eternity.”

STRAY SAYINGS OF MARK

“I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good English words.”--_To Campbell-Bannerman at the Metropole Hotel, Vienna._

* * * * *

“There are no common people except in the highest spheres of society.”--_After attending a court function in Berlin._

* * * * *

“Wit, by itself, is of little account. It becomes of moment only when grounded on wisdom.”--_Talks at the Berlin Legation._

* * * * *

After paying off his creditors (in January, 1898) Mark Twain got, for a while, very gay and wanted to buy everything in sight. He was actually going around looking for “good things to plant money on.” Some friends thought it their duty to warn him, but he shut them up with the remark:

“Don’t alarm your sweet self--no more typesetting and Webster business for me. I never buy anything nowadays that I can’t afford to pay spot cash for.”

* * * * *

“How much time do you suppose you have gained by writing ‘&’ for ‘and’, papa?” asked Jean one afternoon at tea.

“Not enough to waste it on answers to foolish questions,” replied her father severely.

Then he gave her a dollar, kissed her and sent her away rejoicing.

“That little blackmailer,” he said, “was impertinent only to make me mad, knowing full well that later I would chastise myself for being a brute--still with a dollar fine I got off cheap enough.”

* * * * *

“He was a King even in his undershirt and drawers.”--(A verse in one of Grillparzer’s Tragedies--which caused the play to be put on the Index by the censor.) This amused Mark hugely. But he had no sympathy with the author, saying: “He ought to have put pajamas on the cuss.”

* * * * *

Mark Twain, when speaking of a king was fond of quoting Shakespeare’s: “I have an humour to knock you indifferently well.” (Henry V.)

* * * * *

“I have been blowing the heads off frothing pots of porter.”--Mark Twain after writing his Czar’s Soliloquy.

* * * * *

A Hamburg dealer in curiosities offered to sell Clemens two of Bismarck’s hairs for a hundred marks a hair. Mark asked his secretary to write back that, according to the most reliable statistics, Bismarck had rejoiced in the possession of three hairs only and of that trinity enough had been sold already to cover the pates of a whole row full of bald heads on a first night in Broadway, New York.

EUGENE FIELD

EUGENE FIELD AND HIS TROUBLES IN CHICAGO

We had been fellow coffee-drinkers and fellow pie-eaters in Chicago since the early eighties, at a time when beefsteak, fried potatoes, apple pie and cheese constituted an American table d’hote and whiskey was the beverage for Man. Women never touched it in those days, and American wines were so little esteemed, that a bottle was given away free, gratis and for nothing to each guest at Palmer House dinners.

Mike McDonald was king of Chicago, Luther Laflin Mills was State’s Attorney and Carter Harrison was Mayor time and again. All the newspaper men borrowed money from Mike and drank at the expense of Luther Laflin when he ran for office.

Eugene Field, of course, was the Sharps and Flats man of the widely circulated Daily News: I was a writer on foreign affairs for the Chicago Times, the paper “that would set the town by the ears daily or burst.” The Times office was diagonally across from the News office, and from the News office we turned to the left into Randolph Street, where the general hang-out, Henrici’s, was situated.

Philip Henrici, the owner of the restaurant, had started life as a journeyman baker, and was a Socialist or near-Socialist. He would gladly extend credit to any writer who talked Karl Marx to him. So Gene and I, towards the end of each week, when there was hardly enough money left for car fare--ourselves had passes, but the women needed coin--talked socialism by the ream, according to the extent of our appetite, asserting loudly that “Property was Theft,” one of Gene’s bright ideas, purloined, I suppose.

Gene’s palate addressed itself almost exclusively to pies and coffee and that worked his undoing in the end. For Henrici’s coffee was stewing all day, which made it no healthy drink, and they served a big chunk of cheese with every ten-cent parcel of pie--a diet that would have given indigestion to an ostrich in the long run.

And Gene’s stomach was “as touchy as his bank account,” he used to say.

I said good-by to him in January, 1888.

“First thing you do when you strike London, get me a job there,” he said. “The pay envelope in this here town is too small for words, let alone a man with a growing family. If I once get into London and establish a reputation there, I can lay down the law to Lawson (publisher of the News) and squeeze this bunch here as they have been squeezing me.”

That wasn’t meant as viciously as it sounded. The News paid as well, or a little better, than the other Chicago papers, but the Chicago newspaper man that made from forty to fifty dollars a week was a crackerjack-first-rater in those days.

One trouble with Eugene Field was that, at his office, he devoted too much time to practical jokes, private versifying and general tomfoolery. So when he had to do his column, his fagged brain needed the stimulant of coffee or whiskey, or he thought it did. And black coffee was usually sent for across the street. Moreover, he was very fond of the theatre and wasted much time chatting behind the scenes, in the auditorium and with the managers in front. In short, he could have done much more work than he did, but it’s doubtful whether that would have increased his compensation, which was as high as the paper thought it could afford--i. e., as low as could in decency be offered to a man with Field’s following.

In New York, I heard of Eugene’s health-troubles off and on, but thought little of these reports since I had never known him otherwise than active and laughing at the ills human flesh is heir to.

If I had known, or suspected, that Eugene had a tendency to lung trouble, I would have written to Mrs. Field warning her against the British climate in winter time, for I had lived in London during several winters and knew what rain and sleet and fog meant there, while Gene’s Chicago friends had not the slightest notion of English weather conditions.

In 1889 I had been in Paris for a couple of weeks, helping to establish an English news service there, when Davison Dalziel, afterwards British M. P., but in our Chicago days editor of the News Letter there, told me that Eugene Field had come to London with his family and meant to set the Thames on fire with his jokes and verses.

“He lives at 20 Alfred Street, Bedford Square,” said Davison Dalziel, “and doesn’t live well, I am afraid. Three boys, a wife and a female relative into the bargain--it’s too much for one poor pencil-pusher, a stranger to London ways.”

To show how Gene was forever hampered by the lack of funds, it is only necessary to point out that his salary was paid over to Mrs. Field week after week, and that Gene had the time of his life persuading the cashier to let him have a few dollars in advance. I don’t know whether the News sent Gene’s salary to Mrs. Field while they were in London. At any rate, what Gene got out of it was entirely inadequate and he had no chance to add to his salary in England.

MORE OF EUGENE FIELD’S TRIALS IN LONDON

When I saw Gene in London about November, or the end of October, 1889, his enthusiasm for life in highbrow Grubb Street was already on the wane. Funds were low, so were his spirits, and the hopes he had set on James Gordon Bennett’s enterprise had come to naught.

Mr. Bennett had been running the--or a--New York Herald in London for some time, kidding himself that London would accept a daily with so incongruous a title as a rival to the Morning Post, Daily Telegraph and so forth. And Eugene Field tried to persuade Bennett’s representative, that it could be done _provided_ that he had a column or a column and a half on the editorial page. His London Sharps and Flats were to be syndicated in America, the Chicago Daily News having the preference. And Gene hoped to get at least two hundred and fifty dollars a week out of the enterprise.

If he only had the money to go to Paris and stay there long enough to plead with James Gordon in person! But James Gordon, already a middle-aged man, continued to play the young buck and was seldom in his office for two consecutive days.

At one time, when Eugene had a hundred dollars laid aside for Paris, he received word, just in the nick of time, that the “Commodore” was off on his yacht for Monte Carlo, and would probably stay there--“until they kick him out,” snapped Eugene savagely. “I hope they do.”

And a week later he was much elated because they had done so. At the Eccentric Club he let the yarn loose before an audience dying with laughter.

“My unwilling Chief,” he began, “James Gordon, I mean, went to the Casino in Monte Carlo in a high state of intoxication, and raised Hades with all the trimmings imaginable, until thrown out. Then, still yelling for ‘the frog-eaters’’ blood and Monsieur Blanc’s in particular, he was carried to the yacht, relieved of his clothes, and treated to a cold bath, his usual medicine under like circumstances. After the bath he put on a kimona and airs and bawled for his secretary. That individual was yanked out of bed by the ears and Bennett dictated to him a proclamation in the style of a South American general starting a revolution.

“‘Monsieur Blanc and his associates,’ demanded the proclamation, ‘must send three of the directors to Mr. Bennett’s yacht, making abject apology for the insults heaped upon Mr. Bennett. And unless this apology is forthcoming without evasion or delay, the Commodore will be pleased to blow the Casino into smithereens--he has the guns, powder and shot.’

“At nine o’clock in the morning the directors were handed this ultimatum and they had to act by eleven or prepare to meet their maker, roulettes and all.

“Naturally the directors thought it a drunken joke, but at eleven sharp, Bennett began bombarding the Casino--with blank cartridges. Hence at eleven-ten, five directors instead of three raced to the Harbor in carriages, and tumbled head over heels into a white-flagged steam-pinnace.

“Well,” said Field, “Bennett kept them maneuvering around his yacht for a good fifteen minutes, while clearing decks and with much ostentation making ready for bombardment. When he finally _did_ admit the directors, he exacted even harder terms than he had first proposed, namely: A perpetual card of admission for James Gordon Bennett and friends and, for the present, a solemn invitation to Bennett to come to the Casino and do as he liked there.

“After this,” concluded Eugene, “I suppose these directors lent him their best grand piano for the uses he put Phil May’s mother’s piano to.”

The above was a good story, but unprintable at the time, and it was all Eugene ever got out of Bennett. So most other London enterprises, Gene tried to float, proved barren.

GENE, A “SUCCESS OF CURIOSITY”

The fact was, poor Eugene was no business man and, unlike Mrs. Clemens, pretty Mrs. Field, as far as I could make out, had no eye or head for business either. His London writings hardly ever appealed to a more international audience than Chicago and the West, willy-nilly, furnished. Syndicating was in its infancy and the papers printed nothing but news and again news. Even the New York Herald’s Sunday edition contained hardly a line unconnected with the news of the day. And Eugene said himself he was no newsmonger. Then London society, or near-society, tried to make him out a funny man. He was much in demand as a diner-out, and like an honest man, paid for his dinners and suppers in “his own coin,” stories and jokes.

These stories were all extravaganzas of the most extravagant kind. “I talked to the duchesses as I talk to my children when in pinafores,” he used to tell me, “and the harder I lie, the more natural my American yarns sound to them, for their ignorance of America is as profound as mine of Mars.”

Poor Gene, I am afraid, often accepted dinner invitations “to save grubbing at home,” for his finances were on the downgrade most of the time. In his talks with American friends he often regretted having left Chicago, “where one can always make a touch, if not at the office, then in the Clark Street Emporium” (meaning Mike McDonald’s saloon). And all the time his health severely suffered from the damp and wet, the sleet and raw winds, the river fogs and the smoke fogs.

“I thought if I got away from coffee and Chicago pies, my stomach would act decently again,” he moaned sometimes; “but the eternal tea of Britain is as bad as our coffee, and its meat pies are even more alluring and digestion-disturbing. I will never get well until I can pay a cook a hundred dollars a week and a doctor fifty to tell me what to avoid.”

There was a tendency in London then, among literary people and others, to treat American men of letters not with scant courtesy exactly, but as successes of curiosity. Eugene felt that after a while and it made him sore on London and made him long still more for the fleshpots of Chicago. Of course he returned a broader-minded and a better informed man, but consider the cost to him! The English climate, so healthful to Londoners as to make the town’s death rate the lowest in Europe, wrecked what was left of Eugene’s frail health. But for London he might have lived ten or more years longer. Yet he never could forgive Bennett for turning him down, though I often explained to him that his application may have never reached Bennett’s own desk.

In a measure, too, Eugene Field was responsible for many of his discomforts in London, for he allowed a friend to select most dismal quarters for him and stuck to them instead of getting out and moving to one of the suburbs. “Richmond would be the place for you,” we often told him.

“I am the Duke of Bedford’s tenant,” he joked, “and his Grace is pleased to have my name on his rent roll, so what can I do?” And then he would go into the Bedford family history and count up its fortunes, its land, and estates, in London and out. “Ah,” he would say, “it stands to reason that among Bedford’s ancestors were no penny-a-liners or blue stockings.”

DIRE CONSEQUENCES OF AMERICAN HORSEPLAY

At the time when Eugene Field was in London, Oscar Wilde and Henry Irving were undoubtedly leaders of the intellectual circles, and with both of these men Gene had quarreled. No open rupture, but he had played practical jokes on them--during their American tours--something an Englishman never forgives. And if he wanted to, his friends and compatriots wouldn’t let him.

It may be true or not that Henry Irving laughed at Gene’s caricatures of himself, done before his very eyes, as well as behind his back in Chicago, but that doesn’t argue that Irving did not resent Gene’s merrymaking. Irving had many eccentricities in person and speech, but still more dignity. And the dignity of his profession was very dear to his heart. Hence there was no companionship between the Chicago writer and the great English actor-manager while Gene was trying to establish himself in London. If he had come to London under an engagement as critic or editorial writer, it would have been different, but Gene was only a struggling literary man like so many others. So the Henry Irving literary circles were closed against the Chicago newspaper man as a matter of course.

But that didn’t sour Gene’s judgment of Irving’s art. I remember a Macbeth night at the Lyceum Theatre. As a production, Irving’s Macbeth was the last word in stage effects. I reminded Gene of the sensation caused in Chicago by the red velvet draw curtain which Irving had brought from London. Up to that time Chicago had only known paper or canvas curtains, variously painted.

“Look at the scenery,” Gene kept on saying at the Lyceum. “It’s all solid, vast, monumental. Chicago would go crazy about that set piece.”

In the lobby we met several critics, among them the critic of the Standard. The Standard man repeated his published charge, namely, that Irving was sinning against tradition, that Macready and Kemble alone had understood how to present Macbeth. Irving, this critic insisted, ought to know “that his Macbeth was unacceptable to the best judgment.”

“Best judgment--fiddlesticks! You merely state your personal opinion. We all do so. For my part I like Irving’s reading with its poetry and romanticism,” said Field hotly. “The King of Scots was full of irresolution, but was often dejected in spirits--Irving’s portrait of a shrinking, faltering King is what it ought to be, since it holds the mirror up to history. As to tradition--that be damned--it is largely in the critic’s mind and nowhere else, except perhaps with some dotard, gabbing about old times.”

That was Gene all over. If the cause was just he would as lief fight the battles of a man like Irving, who ignored him, as of his best friend.

Here is another illustration of that golden rule--by contrary.

He liked Ellen Terry, liked her immensely, but he did not fail to criticise her severely. You may remember Macbeth’s line:

“What if we fail?”

Lady Macbeth answers:

“We fail--”

Now Terry pronounced these two words as if she meant to indicate--well if we fail there’s an end to it.

“All wrong,” said Gene. “She ought to pronounce it:

“_We_ fail!”

“It ought to sound like: ‘Failure is a thing not to be thought of.’”