Part 9

“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

Mark, unlike many authors, was always on excellent terms with his publishers. He always had a good word for the Harpers, particularly “the scholarly Henry J.” (since dead), Chatto and Windus, George Harvey, Baron Tauchnitz and the rest, but James R. Osgood of Boston (later of London) he loved.

“You lucky dog,” he said to me during my first visit to the “sausage room,” at the Hotel Royal, Berlin. “To pal up with Osgood is a stroke of good luck that you hardly deserve. Why--” (speaking very slowly, as if hunting for words), “Osgood is that rara avis among publishers who will invite you to lunch or dinner or to a box at the Gaiety without tampering in the least with your royalty accounts.

“It isn’t always thus in the ‘profesh,’ you know. Speaking of _the_ profesh in particular, there was Jimmy Powers in New York, a rising comedian, indeed rising very rapidly. He had jumped from 200 a week to 500, when a new managerial aspirant came along, and offered him a tremendous raise, a sort of Chimborazo article, it was to be.

“Jimmy cottoned to the man’s palaver like a donkey scenting a barrel full of nice, juicy thistles, a pincushion perfecto, each one, and promised to go eating with him, a great concession on his part, for Jimmy had lost his own appetite, found a boa constrictor’s, and was ashamed of his big, lumbering appetite.

“Well, they rendezvoused at old Martin’s on Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue, then the most _recherché_ meal joint in town. It happened, by the way, at the period when the deadly table d’hote imposition was just beginning to sprout.

“Jimmy had never faced that sort of jaw music and knew no more about ‘_entrees_,’ ‘_poisson_,’ ‘_legumes_,’ etc., than the average Irish waiter’s wife. Up to then his dinner had consisted invariably of steak, murphies and pie--the embarrassment of courses described in more or less pigeon-French on the Martin menu, therefore, bewildered and frightened him. When he heard the new manager say over the anchovies, cold slaw and pickled sardines: ‘Well, Jimmy, how would a thousand a week suit you?’ Powers had only strength to ejaculate: ‘The Lord preserve us!’

“The fried ‘English’ sole de-Long-Branch with drawn butter and capers on the side was so delicious, Jimmy didn’t perceive the slight discrepancy in figures when the manager repeated the question in this fashion: ‘How would you like to draw a cool nine hundred a week, Jimmy?’

“‘It’s done,’ said Jimmy, attacking his third tumbler of red ink. ‘I can keep a hoss on that, can’t I?’

“‘And marry Lillian Russell--what a team you two would make,’ seconded the manager.

“Well, to cut a long story short, that rascally manager did the boy out of a hundred with every succeeding course, and when finally he pulled a fountain pen on him, Jimmy signed his laughter-provoking powers away for five hundred and twenty-five dollars a week. Subtract five-twenty-five from a thousand and you will find that Jimmy’s one dollar meal netted the manager exactly $24,700 per annum. Neat piece of work, eh?”

Mark’s admiration for the fair-dealing Osgood was reflected in his own treatment of General Grant. He not only paid Grant double the royalties a rival publisher had offered, but actually wrote out to Grant the largest check any author ever received from a publishing house up to that time.

Yet in the numerous discussions of royalties, authorship and the publishing business which he conducted in my hearing, he never mentioned the generosity he had displayed towards the old boy. Poetry was Mark’s weakness, or rather his ambition to dabble in poetry was; he had no other small vices to shock his friends.

MARK IN POLITICS

The chief regret of Mark’s literary life was that “folks felt disappointed unless tickled” by his writings. Joan of Arc was his first serious attempt, but when he entered national and New York City politics--against Blaine and Tammany respectively--he was so much in earnest they had to hire Bob Davis to follow up his speeches with a few funny remarks.

“Throwing acorns before the swine,” Mark called it. (“Acorn” was the name of the anti-Tammany organization). “Bob had better can that stuff and sell it to the Saturday Evening Post. They will fall for it, all right.”

MARK ON “ROYAL HONORS”

Mark and I were walking down the Linden, Berlin, when a royal carriage, easily distinguished for its well-known breed of horses and livery, passed us. When it drew near the “Foot Guards,” a drum and fife corps and half a hundred soldiers, under a lieutenant, rushed out, stood at attention and made a frightful racket.

Mark remained glued to the spot at the first sound of the “royalist propaganda”--his description--and eyed the spectacle with a mixture of amazement and disgust written all over his genial face.

“That carriage was _empty_,” he observed, after a lot of staring and pulling at his moustache.

“What’s the difference? If it were full of princes there would be a void--somewhere,” I replied.

“Thanks awfully,” said Mark, impatiently. “_I_ was once greeted by fife and drums and thought it the most tremendous honor ever paid to a writing person. And now I see they do as much for an empty carriage, when there is a coat of arms on the door.

“Yes, I got so inflated with the reverse of modesty when the boys in red were tickling the veal-skin for me and worked their merry flutes, I well nigh bust off the buttons of my Prince Albert. It happened in Ottawa when I was visiting the Governor General, the Marquis of Lorne, and come to think of it, I was riding in one of Lorne’s carriages. When we neared the Government House, the guards tumbled out like mad, the drummer boys worked like windmills in a gale and the fifes like steam calliopes. Sure, I felt like a hundred and fifteen degrees in the shade and I must have walked into the hall with the strut of Larry Barrett playing the Ghost in Hamlet. It was the proudest moment of my life then--and now I see it was all bosh and balderdash.”

Speaking of those Canadian days, Mark vehemently rebuked me when I suggested that the Marquis of Lorne was “a prosy ass.”

“But I admit it’s embarrassing to visit in a family where the head of the house is a mere Lord, while the wife is kowtowed to as her Royal Highness. Mixes one up so, and I think that in my perplexity I once or twice said a Lord too many, namely, ‘Oh Lord, Oh Lord.’ I never was boss in my own house, but I like other men to be the he-brute for fair. At Ottawa I recalled a hundred times Lola Montez, the girl who started the revolution in Munich by wearing the breeches at the Palace.

“‘I am the master here,’ shouted King Louis, during one of their rows.

“‘And I am the _mistress_, don’t you forget that,’ replied Lola.

“Now, Lola was only a common baggage, strolling actor-folks’ bairn,” added Mark. “Think of the advantages royal birth gives to a woman. Such a one, even if born without legs, would wear the breeches and boss the show.”

AMERICAN WOMEN THE PRETTIEST

In another place I have recorded Mark’s high opinion of the beauty of the Vienna women and of the lack of beauty he encountered at the Berlin court.

As we were walking home from a reception given by Mr. and Mrs. John Jackson (John Jackson, of New Jersey, first secretary of the Berlin Legation) Mark said: “It’s like looking up at the Horse Shoe in the Metropolitan Opera House to see those pretty American girls, Mrs. Jackson, Mrs. Bingham (wife of Captain, later General Bingham) and Marion Phelps (daughter of Minister William Walter Phelps). Marion is blonde and inclined to be statuesque, like the native women here, but oh, the difference! As in the case of Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Bingham, one sees at a glance that Nature squandered more refinement on her than on a thousand Berlin women, royal and otherwise.

“They say God made man in his effigy. I don’t know about that, but I’m quite sure that he put a lot of divinity into the American girl.”

WHERE TAY PAY ISN’T TAY PAY

“Tay Pay’s Weekly,” said Mark, proffering sixpence at a Cork news stand.