Part 10

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.

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