Part 2

“You see,” he said, “the waters ’round these islands are charted to the last half pint. The British Admiralty knows the bottom as well as the surface and the coast. Now suppose Willie or any other divinely Appointed One (I don’t think, though, there is another as foolish and reckless as he) should attempt to carry out that invasion threat. Mind, its possibilities are not denied by British strategists; I have made inquiries. Now, to meet invasion in the old orthodox way would cost a million lives, a thousand millions in treasure, and, after all, the result would be problematical.

“To make defeat of the invasion plans certain, we must forestall execution. And the only way to do that is to stew those U-boats in their own electric fat--juice, I mean. See my point?”

Bram and I said we did, “but--” and Twain, knowing that we were lying like thieves, explained:

“In time of peace, et cetera.... In this case (I will have the device patented, of course) we will build a steel fence all around the three kingdoms, height to be determined by local conditions. In all cases it will be so graduated as to allow the biggest ocean liner to pass over, yet high enough to bar the biggest and the smallest U-boat pirate. Are you on?” asked Mark.

Bram said he was, but I couldn’t tell another lie before luncheon.

“Well, it’s this way, you duffer,” said Mark, “somewhere, everywhere on the English, Scottish and Irish coasts, immense dynamos will be established--these with no fancy brushes, mark you--to connect with certain points of my steel fence by naked cables.

“The British Admiralty will know, of course, when the U-boat armada sets out, and will turn on the current when and where it will do the most harm. Now the moment a U-boat touches my fence, out of business it goes, goes for good, but at the same time its agony will start. For my fence will be magnetized as well as electrified, and though the U-boat is momentarily repulsed, it is held, at the same time, captive by a giant magnet.

“Think of the fine time the enemy crew will have,” chuckled Twain, “with ten thousands of volts pumped into their vessel at the bottom of the sea, the magnet preventing its getaway.

“Boys,” he continued, “I would like to sit on top of Big Ben” (in the tower of Parliament House, London) “and direct the electric strokes myself.”

“And this epoch-making invention of yours, will you present it to Great Britain as a free gift?”

“Not I,” said Twain. “I have a family to look after. I intend to get a round million sterling from the War Office here. And if the British refuse to pay, why, when you come to think of it, we have quite a long coast line in the United States--”

While Mark was speaking, Sir Thomas Lipton came in with a newspaper poster, four days old, that read:

MARK TWAIN ARRIVES ASCOT CUP STOLEN

And that turned the conversation into other channels.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] London, June 24th or 25th, 1907, a few days after the famous Royal Garden Party at Windsor, where Mark had been lionized. Persons present, Mark Twain and secretary, Bram Stoker, and author.

MARK PHILOSOPHIZED ON WILLIE

Mark had attended a masked ball at the Berlin Palace and was asked what he thought of William Hohenzollern dressed up as Frederick the Great. “He reminded me of the little speech addressed by a Cossack Chief to Orloff, the lover of Catharine of Russia. Orloff visited the chief wearing a French court costume. The Cossack began to laugh.

“‘What is there to laugh at?’ demanded Orloff in a rage.

“‘I laugh because you shaved your face to look young and put flour in your hair to look old--both things at the same time,’ replied the Barbarian.

“As to William, he reminded me of still another thing; namely, the thigh-bone of a Saint I was introduced to in Italy and which, they said, belonged to a famous preacher of old. I turned the bone, which was encased in glass, gold and precious stones, over and over, yet could get no notion of the quality of its original owner’s sermons.”

MARK--REGICIDE

“I have been reading up on the laws dealing with regicide,” I heard Mark Twain tell Minister Phelps one morning in dead seriousness, “and do you know what they are going to do with me? Three or four things.

“First, they will cut my right hand off, and then hit me on the mouth with it, by way of reproof, I suppose. Second, they’ll hari-kari me and build a little fire to do my insides brown--all the time keeping me alive for the rest of the show. That will take some stimulants, I reckon.

“Third, they’ll hang me by the neck until I am stone dead. Whether I will get my inards and my hand back before they send me to wormland, I don’t know.”

“What _are_ you talking about?” queried Mr. Phelps.

“Why, you made me admit yesterday to Count Seckendorff that the judge who sent Charles the First to the block was a near relative of mine. Now, as soon as Willie hears about that, he will have my hands, my inards or anything else he craves of my anatomy.”

Of course, everybody roared, and Mr. Phelps had to explain that at dinner the night before, one of the guests, the nobleman mentioned, who was the favorite of the Empress Frederick, had boasted a lot of his ancestry; grandfathers and uncles of his had been present at every great battle the world over and had, of course, always fought on the winning side. Later, when the company was looking at some engravings, Mr. Phelps, in a joke, pointed to the figure of a Puritan, saying, with a merry twinkle in his eye:

“Ancestor of mine.”

The picture happened to illustrate the trial of Charles the First of England. Now, not to be outdone, Twain pointed to the Lord Judge on the woolsack, and matched Phelps’ lie.

“_My_ ancestor, if you please.” He made the statement at the very moment when Count Seckendorff looked at the picture. Hence, Mark’s awful apprehensions.

“Regicide,” he told us, “is never outlawed by the lapse of time. When Charles the First’s son was restored to the throne, hundreds of dead regicides were pulled out of their graves by the ears and hanged and quartered. As to the living, they were treated as I described, and I am afraid that if Seckendorff reports me (Willie being half English) I will be punished just as if I had made Charles a head shorter myself, yesterday afternoon.”

THE FUNNIEST SPEECH MARK EVER HEARD

“The funniest thing I ever heard was chirped right here in this neighborhood,” said Mark Twain, snuggling down in his big armchair before the fire, which wasn’t blazing, and “didn’t mean to--without kerosene” (he told the maid, warning her not to let the “Missus” know).

The “neighborhood” was Tedworth Square, London, “quite the other side of Mayfair,” and leading to some queer streetlets and lanes.

“London’s Fifth Avenues,” mused Mark, “remind me of a sable coat (such as Pauline Bonaparte used to wear) edged with cat-skin: There are always Hell-kitchens within hailing distance.

“Well, at that time my girls had a friend living in Clapham, and nightly she walked me ten or more blocks to her bus through one of those Hell-kitchens lined with fried-fish shops and other ill-smelling emporiums for acquisitioning lucre.”

He turned to an English friend:

“Maybe ‘lined’ isn’t correct, for the fish shops were all on one side of the lane, and naturally I ambled along the other. I thought I was safe there, but of course I wasn’t, for the smells zigzagged across the pavement and followed me like a rotten conscience. My haven of safety, or comparative safety, from the rancid oil compost was an undertaker’s shop at the lane’s extreme end. When I got there, I used to hoist up my coat-tails and skip across the street right into the Public ’Ouse opposite for a Scotch. Naturally I took more or less interest in that cemetery-correspondence school. From a notice posted, I learned that it was under ‘new management’--I call that an ingenious appeal for corpses, don’t you?

“Well, it wasn’t merely an office, the carpentry was right at the tail of the roll topper; there, night after night, an old, sad-faced man sat, looking for customers. Now, the English metropolis is reputed the healthiest city in the world, which proves that the legend about cleanliness being nearest to godliness is blooming rot, for London is ten times dirtier than Berlin, seven and a half times dirtier than New York and six times dirtier than the best parts of Paris. Anyhow, that man-hyena, hungry for worm-food, didn’t enjoy the low rate of mortality one single bit. I could see that every time I eyed him, and I lamped him regularly before I waltzed into the gin-mill to drown the fried-fish smell.”

“And did _one_ Scotch suffice for the operation?” asked Mr. Bell.

Mark looked at Mrs. Clemens and lied brazenly: “Yes, of course.” But as she had risen to go out and was walking toward the door, he added in an undertone: “One Scotch was like taking a bottle of perfume from the ten-cent store into a glue factory to paralyze the Cologne smell of a four-acre establishment of that sort.”

“To resume,” resumed Mark, “seeing each other nightly for a week or a week and a half, that undertaker chap and this here yellow journalist of literature got on famously, and our acquaintance, though by eyesight only, gradually blossomed into real brotherhood. Whenever I clapped eyes on the poor devil, I used to think: ‘I _do_ wish some one would have the heart to die. Why don’t the Gloomy Dean or His Grace of Canterbury oblige the poor shark?’

“And no doubt, observing my gray locks and general decrepitude, he calculated: ‘Time for him to kick the bucket--hope his wife will give me a chance to measure him for a ten-guinea wooden coat--yes, he looks good for ten guineas.’

“Anyhow,” said Mark, “I felt in my heart of hearts that I was worth more dead than alive to this person--rotten grammar, I know, but don’t let that muss up your tempers, gents--and while the idea of suicide was repugnant (I was making big money then, that is, I expected to rake in $100.00 or more next week) still I cudgeled my brain for ways and means to improve his business. It’s easy enough to promote a grocer’s or butcher’s trade; all you have to do is to get rid of your sour stomach at some Appetite Cure Factory, and pitch in anew with dill pickles and strong coffee and frankfurters and sweetbreads and deep-dish pies. But an undertaker’s! Really, I had no desire to pose for Madame Toussaud’s dead-uns. At the same time, no doggone friend of mine would die, giving me the chance to bury him at my expense. Running away from that fried-fish smell, I always felt like Henry the Eighth, when one of his half-dozen queens wouldn’t be introduced to the axe-man. Indeed, if that starving undertaker had been my own best enemy, I couldn’t have felt more sorry for him. But lo!--the silver lining to the cloud! One evening, as I approached the carcassery, my startled ears were assailed by that quaint ditty:

For we are the drunkenest lot Of the drunken Irish crew--

and, leaping forward like oiled lightning, I saw the undertaker at work in the rear of the shop.

“‘Bless me, if the ban isn’t broke,’ I thought, ‘and with this dent in the armor, Fate will waltz up plenty more diseased ones. It’s always thus.’

“Suiting my action to the classic monologue--‘thus’ is a beautiful word, isn’t it?--I peered through the side window, expecting the janitor of tenements-of-clay to be at work on a nine-foot coffin or thereabout--”

All the merriment fled from Mark Twain’s face and manner when he added: “Damme, if that God-forsaken corpse-slinger was not planing a _baby coffin_!

“That night I took three Scotch, and” (looking around) “I don’t care if Livy knows.”

“I thought you were going to tell a _funny_ one,” said one of us, after a while. Clemens had got rid of his emotion by that time. “Correct,” he drawled, “It happened a few days later, when I was working the fried-fish side of the lane. The street was quite deserted on account of the lateness of the hour and owing to the burial of herrings and crab-meat in innumerable stomachs, big and little. As I put on extra steam to reach the gin-mill before closing time, this pretty legend wafted across the moonbeams:

“‘I say, my little female doggie’ (as a matter of fact, the shorter and uglier word was used, but it isn’t good form, though one may mention ‘bull pups’ at Mrs. Van Astorbilt’s tea) ‘I say, my little female doggie, tell Mother if she has another litter by that crossing sweeper of hers, to take care to drown ’em before they grow up as big as you.’

“The lady speaking, or rather shrieking, repeated this admonition three or four times, and followed it up with a succession of oaths that I frankly envied her. Yes, indeed, her ‘female doggie,’ her ‘crossing sweeper,’ her ‘litter,’ and her brand of blasphemy filled me with obscene delight, and I chuckled over them for a week.”

After the laughter had subsided, Richard Harding Davis asked: “And what is a crossing sweeper, pray?”

“A compound of rags and dirt, fitted with a face and feet and a broom, who mops up the dirty pavement to save your spats, and curses you for a curmudgeon if you give him less than a ha’penny for his trouble.”

MONARCHICAL ATAVISM

One day in Berlin, speaking of General Grant, Mark said, “I did not admire him so much for winning the war as for _ending_ the war. Peace--happiness--brotherhood--that is what we want in this world.”

“Here comes the Kaiser,” he continued, “and sends me tickets for his September review. Of course I will go. But I don’t care for military spectacles, or for militarism. Tolstoy was right in calling army life ‘a school for murder.’ In Germany to-day there are ten million men drilled to look upon the Kaiser as a god. And if the Kaiser says ‘kill’--they kill. And if he says ‘die for me’--they go out and get themselves shot. The blame and shame rest with the big and little war lords. As to the German people, mere subjects, they have eighteen or twenty centuries of monarchical atavism in their blood.”

DEMOCRATIC MARK AND THE AUSTRIAN ARISTOCRACY

Mark Twain was essentially a democrat, and the nobles he met in Berlin and other parts of Germany never cured him of that fine habit. But in Vienna he grew less exclusive and in the end actually liked to mix with high aristocrats. “The Prussian noble,” he once explained at the Metropole, “walks and acts as if he had swallowed the stick they used to beat him with when a youngster--I stole the simile somewhere, but never mind--however, the Vienna brand of aristocrat is different. Maybe Austrian nobles are just as stuck-up on account of their ancestry, but they have the good sense not to let their pride be seen. They all treat me cordially, talk agreeably and seem to possess at least a stock of superficial information. The Princess Pauline Metternich, in particular, is a bully old girl. If she were to write her memoirs, the world would gain a book as bright as Mme. de Sévigné’s Letters. For one thing I would like to have seen her husband’s face when he learned that she made him sign his own death warrant.

“Prince Metternich, as Austrian ambassador in Paris, used to sign any and every paper his secretaries put before him, as he was much too indolent to read them. To cure him of this habit, Pauline one fine day laid a document on his desk, ordering that he, the Prince, be taken out and shot at sunrise. Metternich promptly put his name to it without reading a line. Next morning at five, several male friends of His Highness rang the bell at the Palace and demanded to be taken up to the bedroom. They wore Austrian uniforms and made an awful racket with their swords. Metternich stormed from his bed to see what the row was and then and there the death warrant was read to him. He fainted. Indeed they had a big time snatching him from the brink of the grave, for he was near frightened to death.

“Some jocular wife, eh?” chuckled Mark.

PHIL SHERIDAN’S FRIEND

“Jenny Stubel,” mused Mark over the “Berliner Tageblatt” at the Cafe Bauer, “Jenny Stu--, there is a yarn about that girl in the back of my head, but what it is I cannot for the life of me make out.”

“What has she done now?” I queried. “Marriage or divorce, set a theatre afire, or made away with one of those stupid archdukes flourishing in Vienna?”

“Half-correct,” said Twain, “an archduke abducted Jenny. But how did you come so near guessing it?”

“I was Jenny’s manager in the early eighties when she and her sister Lori headed the Vienna operetta company. In fact, I introduced her to Grover Cleveland--”

“And Phil Sheridan?” demanded Twain.

“Sheridan, Joaquin Miller, Henry Watterson and the rest.”

“We’ll get this story pat first,” said Mark, shoving the paper over to me. “Chances are I have it upside down. Let me have the facts and keep the trimmings for some other day.”

The “facts” told the now well-nigh forgotten story that (some time in October, 1891) the archduke John Salvator of Austria had renounced his title and dignities, had assumed the name of John Orth, bought a four-masted schooner and, as her captain, went sailing the Atlantic and Pacific in company with Jenny Stubel, the operetta star.

“‘Tall, yellow-haired, lots of quicksilver in her system,’ that’s how Sheridan sized up Jenny. Right, you say? Well, then, her archduke wasn’t so very foolish, after all, particularly as she was a sweet singer, a nimble dancer and all that. Did you say you introduced her to Grover Cleveland?”

“Sure, at one of the public afternoon receptions, when everybody went to shake hands with the President.”

“General Sheridan was quite taken with Jenny,” continued Twain. “He told me he went to the show night after night and didn’t care how much he applauded her young beauty and fascinating voice. Yes, Phil was really smitten with Jenny. And now the admired of the most famous General of Horse defies the world to become an acknowledged royal mistress, and her sprig of royalty the black sheep of a crowned family by no means lily-white at that. She reminds me of old Field Marshal Prince de Ligne, making love to a very young girl and succeeding, or nearly succeeding, before he had time to reflect.

“‘A million,’ cried the Field Marshal, ‘if I was a lieutenant now.’”

“ELIZABETH WAS A HE,” SAID MARK

“Mark my word, Elizabeth was a _he_,” said Clemens, when I was starting for London the end of June, 1894, leaving the Clemenses at the Normandie, Paris, “and when you have a little time in England, I wish you would look up all that pesky question for me.”

“Not in Westminster Abbey?” I cried in alarm.

“Now, don’t _you_ try to be gay,” said Mark. “It’s bad enough if _I_ got that reputation when I want to be taken seriously. I know they haven’t got through ascertaining for the ’teenth time whether Charles I really lost his head when his overbearing noddle dropped into the basket on the scaffold opposite the Horse-Guards--you showed me the spot yourself. I don’t want any ghoulish work done. Just go to the British Museum and every other library and nose up everything appertaining to Queen Elizabeth’s manly character. You get the authorities (for a consideration, of course) and I’ll do the rest. Then you go down Surrey-way and find a place or castle or summer house called Overcourt, or something. That’s where Elizabeth lived in her teens, and metamorphosed into a boy.”

“But the editor will never allow you to write on such a subject. Better let me do it.”

“Not on your life,” said Mark. “It’s _my_ discovery, and I’m paying you for the work you do, just as the New York ‘World’ and the ‘Sun’ do. When you come down to hard tacks you will find that there are no questionable proceedings whatever, just an exchange of babies, as in the old-time operas, Troubadour and the rest. The Editor will have no kick coming.”

“The Editor,” of course, was Mrs. Clemens, who as a rule censored Mark’s manuscript--“tooth-combed it,” as he called it, cutting out such gems as “the affairs of the Cat who had a family in every Port.”

Mark told me that when he got through with “Joan of Arc” he would tackle “this here Elizabeth proposition”--“a person full of placid egotism and obsessed with self-importance,” he called her. “If I do Elizabeth half as well as I intend to do ‘Joan’ and did ‘The Prince and Pauper,’ I will have three serious books to my credit, and after that I will be damned--‘thrice damned,’ Elizabeth would have said--if I allow anybody to take me for a mere funmaker.”

He gave me some more instructions, talking at random mostly, and paid me in advance for the work I was to do. Twenty-four hours later I landed at Victoria Station, London, for, having business in Antwerp, I had travelled via Holland.

* * * * *

A foreign correspondent (that was my trade then) is shifted merrily from one place to another; so it happened that I went back to France after a fortnight in England, or even sooner. The Clemenses were packing, and I had Mark all to myself for an hour or so.

“What made you first doubt the Virgin Queen’s sex?” I asked.

“Never mind--her gorgeous swearing maybe. What did you find out in Surrey?”

I duly reported that I had gone to Overcourt with a friend, had explored the Queen Elizabeth chambers, the woods and countryside, and had interviewed a lot of old and some young gossips, with this result:

Elizabeth, I was told, came to Overcourt when a child of four or five, and a young person supposed to be Elizabeth--that is, the daughter of Ann Boleyn and Henry the Eighth--left there some ten years later. When the Princess was seven or eight, King Henry, who was attending Parliament, had promised to come and see his little girl two weeks hence (Overcourt is within easy riding distance of London). But even as they were preparing to give Hal--(“Ought to be Hell,” interpolated Mark)--a rousing reception; to feed the brute in particular, Elizabeth was suddenly attacked by malignant fever and died. There was only one “in the know,” her Grace’s governess--I gave her name to Mark, but have quite forgotten it. I remember, though, that she remained in the royal service for some forty years afterwards, in fact, that she and “Elizabeth” never separated while both lived.

“I can imagine how that poor woman felt,” commented Mark--“went through all the horrors of having her hair bobbed behind, and her neck shaved--what else was there in store for her but a beheading party if Hal found his daughter dead? And when, in your mind’s eye, you see the executioner try the edge of his axe on his thumb nail, life’s delicatessen--considerations for truth, politics, and common everyday decency--lose their appeal. The axe-man was coming and that governess didn’t want to be the chicken.”