Part 8

“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.”