Part 7

“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.’

“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