Part 6

“How do you know that Bismarck not only owns, but reads, my books?” demanded Mark.

“Because he asked me whether there are still steamer loads of Yankees going picnicking in Palestine with Mark Twain for a bear-leader. The old Prince told me he read ‘Innocents Abroad’ twice, and memorized the best things in it to relate to his grandchildren.”

“Quite a compliment--I _do_ wish Bismarck hadn’t been such a rascal--in politics, I mean--for in private life he was quite a gentleman, I understand. And it is to laugh how, relying on that, de Blowitz worked the greatest of scoops during the Berlin Congress. Namely, about that world-moving affair the ‘London Times’ for weeks could get no more or better news than, mayhap, the Brighton Enterprise. Finally de Blowitz, the Thunderer’s international representative, lit upon a fourth-rate secretary in the German foreign office, who had an exceedingly broad appetite and a correspondingly narrow pocketbook. De Blowitz offered to pay for the secretary’s luncheons, provided the young gentleman would exchange hats with him daily, the Berliner’s chapeau concealing certain notes about goings on at the foreign office under the hat band. Agreed! By this ruse de Blowitz gathered the whole Berlin treaty piecemeal and was able to cable it from Brussels to London even before that famous document was read in the Congress.”

Mark continued: “If Bismarck had been the ordinary small-minded statesman, he would have got on to de Blowitz’s game before it was half finished, but being a gentleman, he saw nothing out of the way in the association of ‘The Times’ correspondent with one of his secretaries.”

Mark was genuinely proud of Bismarck’s partiality for his books, even if it came late in the day.

“Do you know,” he once said, “that I gave Charles Darwin the strength to write some of his most famous and epoch-making volumes? How? I am told that, when the great scientist was utterly fagged out with study, investigation, and with the manifold experiments he was carrying on, he would read my ‘Innocents’ or ‘Tom Sawyer’ or, maybe a Harper Magazine story, for a half hour or an hour. Then he would go to work again and later was ready for bed. Only when this here Mark Twain had lulled his nerves into proper condition, Darwin wooed sleep, I am told, but I can’t vouch for the truth of this story.”

On another occasion Mark said: “I was born too late to help ease Lincoln’s hours of worry. Ward Hill Lamon, whom we met in Berlin, told me more than once that Lincoln would have been a constant reader of my ‘literature’ if he had lived long enough to enjoy my books, and none knew Lincoln better than Lamon.

“And when my girls admonish me to behave in company, it always recalls the stories Lamon told me about old Abe’s awkwardness.

“When Abe and he were riding circuit in Illinois, they carried their office in their hats, and Abe contracted the habit of pulling off his hat from the back so as not to spill any papers. That was all right on the circuit, but in the White House it looked undignified. So Mrs. Lincoln asked Lamon, a most courtly gentleman, to remonstrate with the President and teach him to take off his hat ‘decently.’ ‘Decently’ was the word she used, said Lamon. He continued:

“‘I did my best during a night’s smoker, Mr. Seward helping me, and the President proved a good enough scholar for any high-school of courtesy. Eight or ten times he took off his hat properly, without a reminder of any sort. Then, at the good-night, I tried him again. ‘Let’s do it in the right courtly fashion,’ I said, doffing my chapeau like the Count of Monte Cristo.

“‘Here goes,’ said the President, reached his right hand back, and pulled off his stovepipe in the old Illinois circuit style.”

“You see,” concluded Mark, “it was no use trying to make a courtier of Lincoln. The same here.”

MARK AT THE STOCK EXCHANGE, VIENNA

A day or two after I sent Clemens my translation of Field Marshal Count Moltke’s Letters, he called at my hotel in the forenoon and proposed that we walk to the stock exchange. The stock exchange, as usual, was swarming with gentlemen of the Jewish persuasion, and Mark asked me to pay particular attention to them.

“They are the smartest of the lot here,” he insisted, “and so is a Jewish peddler smarter than a Christian house-owner--I mean the average. I say it again; the Jews are the greatest people let loose.

“According to Moltke’s essay in the Letters you sent me, the Jews ate up Poland. Very well, the storks eat up frogs. Do we blame the storks?”

MARK AND THE PRUSSIAN LIEUTENANT

Mark liked to be taken around to real German places, and one day I escorted him to a Weinstube Unter den Linden, which had quite a reputation for liquid and other refreshments. The room we entered was full of lunchers; we sat down at a small side table that afforded a good look around. About fifteen feet ahead of us was a pier glass on the wall between two windows, and in front of it a table where an old man with his frau were eating the national dish with sausage trimmings. The old folks were enjoying themselves heartily, and, as Mark put it, “they ate so you can hear them a mile off, like Chicago millionaires.”

Presently, a young lieutenant strode in, sword trailing, spurs jingling.

“Look at that,” said Mark. “All the stupidity and maliciousness of his ancestors, male and female, for two hundred years back, is mirrored in his face.”

The junior war lord stalked up the centre aisle, gave his cap to a bowing waiter, and stood up in front of the pier glass. Then he pulled a comb out of one pocket and a brush out of another, and began “currycombing himself,” as Mark expressed it. Parting his hair all the way down to the neck, he brushed it sideways both ends--over the old people’s sauerkraut and sausages. Mark kicked at me under the table and called me names for not going and knocking the fellow down.

“Don’t you see, he’s peppering those people’s dinner with his dandruff,” he said. “Be a sport and go and kick him well, young fellow.”

But I knew better. The lieutenant would have spitted me on the end of his sword before I could say Jack Robinson.

Gradually Mark’s wrath melted away and he saw only the funny side of the affair. When the lieutenant had taken his seat at the table, he put one knee over the other and ordered his pea soup on the rough--that is, with the husks intact.

“Husks are filling, you know,” said Mark, “or perhaps his stomach is full of chickens. Chicks like husks; that lieutenant is human, after all.”

I thought we had seen enough and I encouraged him to go home.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I am going to see this circus to the end. Presently that old woman will vomit when one of the lieutenant’s bristles tickles her funny bone, and then she will spew all over his boots and pants. I am waiting for that.”

MARK STUDIES THE COSTERMONGER LANGUAGE

“Funny that we never took to asses in New York and other parts of the States,” said Mark one afternoon as we were passing through Soho, London. He was watching the little costermonger carts traveling to and fro with considerable speed, taking into account the petty draft animals, the heavy loads and the boy or girl perched on top.

“The donkeys seem well fed,” mused Clemens a block or two further on, “but I don’t like a whip in the driver’s hand. Hear that,” he cried indignantly, “the rude way that corduroy-panted chap is talking to his meek donkey. Let’s listen some more. It’s a scream.”

After the cart had driven away, Clemens said: “The patter of the costermonger, when you come to think of it, is really a language within the English language, and one might do worse than give it printed tongue--_i. e._, raise it above the merely occasional use British writers accord it. I want to look into that costermongery,” he continued. “See if you can’t find, hire or steal some coster chap worth listening to, some one who knows the patter with all the trimmings.” And at his door he added: “Get an ‘Arriet,’ for the ‘Arry’s’ are too tough.”

A week or two later Herbert Beerbohm Tree found us such a patter artist among the employees of Her Majesty’s Theatre--a scrub lady--and here follow some of the stories she told us, corrected and amended by Mark, who cut out coster words not generally understood.

MARK AND THE COSTERMONGERS

That _Beautiful_ Funeral

Two Girls Meeting at the Corner of a Street.

“Hullo, I didn’t know you had moved up this way again. Who are you in black for?”

“Stepfather. Thank Gowd! he _was_ a reg’lar log on the fambly’s leg. Kept a-ebbing and a-flowing and _wouldn’t_ die. But you know when we moved to ’Ampsted, that settled him. Those flu winds it was as took ’im off.

“We ’ad a postmortem and everything on ’im, and when they opened ’im you know they found he had two ulsters in his inside and there was ’aricot veins in his legs too. But it was the influential winds that took ’im off, real.

“Of course Mother ’ad ’im insured in all sorts of places. So, poor man, he real paid for all this beautiful mourning we are having on him. We all dress alike in this beautiful black.

“On the funeral day we had all our cousins up from up-country and we had such a _beautiful_ funeral and such a swell party atter. We had a hotch-bone of beef and blanmanges and jellies and cakes and tarts, and by Gowd! we did enjoy ourselves.

“Good-by, Maisie, see you another day, for my missus isn’t a disagreeable old cat like most of ’em. That’s why I ’ave this bit of talk with you. But I means to better myself soon as I can.”

Ada’s Beast of a Man

“Well, m’am, I feels all over alike. That beast of a ’usband of my pretty pet of a Ada he wouldn’t let her have a van to move in when she had all that sweep of furniture that he bought for her at the market for five pounds ($25) and her chest of drawsers besides. Real, I don’t feel as if I could eat a bit, I don’t.

“She had to get a barrow, Ada had, and a wheel came hoff and the pretty pet had to hold it up with the long broom while the man was a-pushing of it. But I will say, she has improved her rooms in moving.

“But it didn’t look at all like a man of _his_ standing, the governor of a coal cart. And you can imagine what the neighbors said, seeing the moving on the barrow and my pretty pet holding of it up.

“But I _must_ say she got blinds, they are those Verinkers (Venetians) you ’eard of. Sure he is a beast, my pretty pet’s man. He wouldn’t even put up the indecent lights for her, and she had to pay a man tuppence to do it for her while she was still a-trembling from holding up the barrow and that after paying tuppence halfpenny for the indecent lights.”

Jealousy in Lowland

(Overheard near Billingsgate Market.)

“Hullo, how you gettin’ on and how’s your old man?”

“See ’ere, you remembers ’ow I looked atter ’im when he was that damn’ ill and all the nourishments I got ’im. Well ’e got that strong again but ’e wouldn’t go to work. So I says to ’im yesterday mornin’ w’en ’e was a-sittin’ over the fire smokin’ his dirty pipe, ‘Ain’t you _ever_ to go work no more?’

“What d’you think ’e says?

“‘Ere,’ he says, ‘I ’ave bin a-thinkin’. Where did you get all dese ’ere nourishments from while I was sick? I _do_ believe you had a boy. ’Ho is the man? I’ll knock ’is damn’ block off.’

“Now remember, maid, ’e never said a word while ’e was gettin’ the nourishment down ’is gut, the beast, but afterwards ’e says dis ’ere to me. ’Ere’s a beast for yer, girl.”

_Lady No. 2_--“’Ere ’e’s a-comin’ along the corner. Let’s scoot, maidie. ’E doesn’t look good-natured at all, at all, this mornin’.”

The Troubles of Liz

Liz, the maid-of-all-work, has overstayed her furlough, and is very emphatic, putting the blame on Kate.

“Oh, I won’t go out with that there Kate no more, m’am. That Kate do know a lot of fast chaps. She interdooced me to one and he kept a-cuddlin’ of me round the neck and near pushed my hat off, you see it’s all awry. And he kept a-pinching of me about and arsked if it was all my own figger. But he did say _Dear_ to me.”

Liz’s next place was with a butcher’s, but there they “were real rude” to her, and she left, of course. This is her report of what happened:

“‘Here, Liz,’ said one of the helpers to me, ‘there’s two kidneys for my tea. Take a care, you got two like that.’ Oh, I can’t stay in a place where they talk as fast as that, just as if I had kidneys like a cow.

“And the other chap comes and brings me a bit of liver to cook for _his_ tea, and he says: ‘Liz, you know you’ve got a liver just like that?’ I just ran upstairs and told the missus. And in the evening one brings me a pig’s head with a squint in his eye and he says, ‘Liz, this is what you do to the boys--give ’em the glad eye.’ No, I won’t stop, as true as there is Gowds in ’eaven.”

Her next place was with a benevolent old spinster. Liz left her service, saying: “I had no wages, and what do you think she did? Why, she has locked up the tarts. And the other day I was making myself a bit of toast and margarine and the old cat caught me at it and she said, ‘Isn’t dripping not good enough for you, Liz?’”

THE FRENCH MADAME

One night in his dressing-room, Sir Herbert Tree introduced us to another promising story-teller, namely, the French madame who looked after “the ladies of the chorus, who raise a shapely leg before us.” (That was a popular sing-song then and Mark heartily enjoyed it.) She told Clemens of a stroke of good luck that had befallen her and he declared himself tickled to death with her French-English, which, he said, was every bit as good as his own English-French. Tree kindly lent us “Basil,” his stenographer and “memory,” to jot down the yarn.

“Louisa, Be Brave”

At Madame Raymond’s house.

“Ah, Madame, how do you? Will you have a drink or are you too proud already?”

“_Mais non_, Madame, we will have ze leedle drink as usual. And how have you been getting on, Madame?”

“Ah, no at all well, I have been worried, _ma chère_, for my ’usband he did join ze Lib’ral Club.

“Ah, after I tell you my leedle experience, _mon Dieu!_ you won’t let Alphonse join ze damn Lib’ral Club.

“Listen. As M. Raymond stayed till 1, 3, 4th o’clock in the morning at the Lib’ral Club, I was told one or two or three leedle things about him, but of course I did not think or believe at ze time. But ze three time he did not come at ze 4th in the morning, I get up and dress myself and go arounds to ze Lib’ral Club and does bash bangs at zat door.

“And presently a head comes out of ze window upstairs and he says: ‘What you want down there at this hour of ze evening, Madame?’

“‘I want M. Raymond, my ’usband.’

“‘He is not ’ere, Madame. Ze Club always closes at eleven ze clock.’

“‘I thank you, Monsieur, sorry to trouble you.’ So I put zese leedle things together that I had been told and I jus’ go rounds ze corner and I listen down ze aria and hear sounds of reverie.

“A policeman he stood at ze corner. I says to ze policeman: ‘Here is two shillings, you go rounds ze corner and you sees notings. Ze madame here has decoys my ’usband to dance with the girls.’

“And ze policeman is off and sees notings.

“Then I goes close to ze door and bash bangs at ze door. And a Frenchwoman like myself comes up and she says, ‘What you want, Madame?’

“I said, ‘I want my ’usband, M. Raymond. Zat is all.’

“She says, ‘Your ’usband not ’ere, Madame.’

“I says, ‘Yes, I ’ear ’im downstairs.’

“Then quick she calls me lair and I gives her a bash bang down into ze passage. She cried and up comes ze madame’s ’usband.

“He says, ‘What you do to my wife, you bad madame?’

“I says, ‘She will not give me my ’usband.’

“He says, ‘You are a bad madame. I turn you out of my ’ouse. Your ’usband not ’ere.’

“Then just comes up M. Raymond.

“‘Ah,’ says I, ‘this is all I jus’ want. So you come along wiz me.’

“Ah, my dear, we _did_ ’ave a leedle words on ze road ’ome and M. Raymond says, ‘A pretty ting you done for yourself; you will be sermonized for knocking that madame down.’

“But I patted me on the chest and I said to me, ‘Louisa, be brave.’

“A day or two after dis, a sermon came from the South Western Police Court. Ah, _mon Dieu_, I was jus’ a leedle frightened, but I said to me: ‘Louisa, you have been ze brave woman and you mus’ be brave all ze time.’

“_Eh bien_, you remember ze _chapeau_ I bought in ze leedle Soho shop and also that pretty gown in ze Chapelle Blanche--_très chic_?

“_Eh bien_, I put on ze _chapeau_ and ze pretty dress and ze nice gloves that come to ze elbows, and I had a cab with four wheels and I did go to ze police court.

“Ah, _ma chère_, when I get to ze police court, dere was a very fine tall handsome Inspector and he jus’ hands me out of ze cab and I jus’ go into ze court and ze case was called.

“And ze judge he was dere and I bows to ze judge and ze judge bows to me. And ze people, _ma chère_, zey were _ze big cowards_. Dey did not turn up.

“So when I tells ze judge my leedle story, he does dismiss ze case.

“I goes outside and sees ze fine tall handsome Inspector. Ze Inspector, he says: ‘You ’ave got off very well to-day, but ze excitement! You mus’ come wiz me and ’ave a leedle someting.’

“Well, my dear, I did go and ze Inspector he give me the winner of a ’orse and I jus’ win forty pounds, _ma chère_.

“And ze people w’ere my ’usband was dancing came to me in ze evening and apologized, and he says: ‘I’m very sorr’, madame, we did not say your ’usband was zere. He did no ’arm. I bring you a leedle present. I am chef at ze ---- Hotel and ’ere is a big basin of drippin’ for you, Madame.’

“He was a very good chef, that monsieur, and so was the dripping.”

THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT

This story was told by Clemens at the American Embassy, Vienna.[B]

“She was the littlest, the sweetest maiden of about ten I have ever seen, and she came dancing up to me with a smile and wink that was simply bewitching. I was going home to 27 Fifth Avenue after a tiresome dinner where I had to make a speech (_had_ to--God bless the organizer of the dinner, for I won’t), and I was as tired as two dogs and as grumpy as seven bears, when this vision suddenly burst upon me. I saw at once that the little one was as happy as a lark, and naturally I beamed on her, for I love children.

“As she was tripping along just as if I had been her grandpa--trusting me with little confidences and petting my arm, she prattled about the moon that would soon come up and the bogies and the bats and about the fright they gave her, and I said:

“‘Little maid, hadn’t you better go home? Your mother may be anxious about you.’

“‘Oh, no,’ she said; ‘mamma knows I am out and she is at the window watching. She knows that I am walking with you, for I wanted to a lot of times.’

“Well, I felt as proud as Pierpont Morgan on discovering a Fifteenth Century missal and buying it for five dollars. And in my mind I patted myself on the back, and said: ‘Mark, old boy, they _do_ love you, all of them.’ Really, I felt tickled all over, and I don’t know how many thousands of words at fifty cents ‘per’ that kid wheedled out of me by way of answers to her questions and by way of compliments. She was a princess kid, I tell you. When we arrived at No. 27, I insisted upon taking her back to her home and there formally saying good-by to her. Indeed I would have liked to kiss that little lady, but as her mother was at the window I didn’t dare. And that kid kept on talking. If her words had been buns, single handed she could have beaten Fleischman with all his hundreds of bakers. But what puzzled me was that she was forever talking about selling tickets and how nice it must be to take so much cash for tickets. I thought, of course, she was referring to tickets at church festivals and, to increase my credit with her, I said that I bought lots of them and that people took chances on my books and sometimes I took chances myself and got burdened with some to cart home.”

“‘Oh, you write books, too?’ she said.

“‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I am a sort of bookworm, and here is your home and now you must go in, for it is getting late and the bats and the bogies are coming. Good-night, little lady, and sleep well, and when you are a big girl and have a husband and a house and a motor car, then you can tell your friends that once you walked with Mark Twain----”

“‘Mark Train! I never heard of him.’

“As I looked at my adoring and adorable little friend her lip began to quiver. It quivered still more, her blue eyes filled--could not hold the tears--they dropped down on her face and on my flattered hand.

“‘Oh, sir,’ she sobbed, drawing away from me (I thought she was broken-hearted because she had to leave me)--‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought you were Buffalo Bill.’”

FOOTNOTES:

[B] Miss Lucy Cleveland, the author, heard Mr. Clemens tell the same story at a dinner party in New York.

RHEUMATISM AND PRODDING