Part 7

Some of the biographers of Mark Twain have made a lot of his sufferings by rheumatism while in Berlin. I saw him almost daily, except when he was down with bronchitis, and I heard very few complaints from him _re_ rheumatism. Occasionally he said, “My damned arm has done some howling in the night.” But when out of bed, it never “howled” badly enough to prevent him from writing or holding a book. He was scribbling most of the time, when not talking or riding, or walking, and when I saw him in his “Mattress Mausoleum” (as he called his bed), he handled pipe, papers, knife and books freely. I honestly believe much of that rheumatism scare was put on. For Mark liked leisure above all things. When he did not feel like writing, he told Livy he “had it bad,” and escaped a scolding. “Livy” was an excellent wife to him, but she had the commercial spirit that Mark lacked--and God knows he needed prodding once in a while.

ON LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS

Mark Twain always liked to talk about “La Mouche, Heine’s girl-friend-to-the-death.” One morning, at the British Museum, he made me hunt through dozens of books, French, German and Italian, for her real name: Camille Seldon.

“So she wasn’t German,” he said. “I thought so, for a German girl, by her innate heaviness, might have spoiled that nimbleness of language we admire in Heine. Goethe’s girls, as their portraits show, were all beefy things--no, not all, I except Gretchen--hence Goethe’s Olympian periods, his ponderous style. It’s wrong, I think, to credit Camille with mere physical influence on Heine. Her limpid French conversation, I take it, aided in imparting to his French verse that airy, fairy lightness which a foreigner rarely commands.”

Some one reminded Clemens that Camille also had been the friend of Taine.

“A lucky girl! The most poesy-saturated of poets and the Father of English literature! I call him the Father,” he added, “because he made so many people read serious books which without his advice and encouragement they would never have tackled.”

BAYARD TAYLOR’S GERMAN

“No, I haven’t got an ounce of envy in me. I once tried hard to get envious, but happily my wife interfered. I had to forget about it and turn my mind into other, cleaner channels. That was on our first trip to Europe, in 1878. On the ship we met Bayard Taylor, the poet, bound for Berlin, as ambassador to Bismarck. That, I believe, states the case more correctly than the official ‘ambassador to the Court of Berlin.’

“Well, Bayard made me feel pretty cheap by his display of German. That fellow was forever talking, thinking and writing German. Compared with his, my own miserable German vocabulary was an ant-hill facing Chimborazo. And when I heard him recite whole acts of his metric translation of Faust, I wished myself in his shoes, for I certainly did envy the man his Teuton knowledge. However, when I told Livy about it, she warned me and made me promise to suppress the nasty habit. Well done, for Bayard Taylor died within five or six months, at the age of fifty-three.”

GENIUS IN EXTREMIS

When we were about to pass the French Embassy in Berlin one afternoon, Mark dragged me across the street, saying:

“See those horses? That Kaiser is in there, making love to the Ambassador’s wife. I don’t want to meet him as he comes out or when he is thrown out, as he ought to be.”

At that moment a very distinguished English-looking gentleman passed us in a cab, raising his hat to Mark.

“Do you know him?” asked Mark.

“I have seen him in Fleet Street, I believe, but I don’t know where to put him. As you know, my eyes don’t travel far these days.”

“Why,” said Mark, “this is ‘Labby’ (Labouchère) of London ‘Truth,’ the Baron-maker. I call him that because he actually put hundreds of barons into the world, if not into the peerage--namely, when he acted as Secretary of the British Embassy in Paris and had the issuing of passports in hand. Suppose John Smith and Mary Smith, British subjects, toddled in and asked for their papers. Labby would look them over carefully and if their persons and address lent itself to the scheme, would make out the paper for ‘Sir John’ and ‘Lady Mary.’ Of course the people stuck to the title, acquired under the government seal, for the rest of their lives. Indeed, most of the Labby-created nobles by and by gained popular recognition as the real thing--baronets and baronesses. On Labby’s part it was all fun--burlesque pure and simple. Himself a noble by birth, he thought the nobility a stupid and useless institution these days, and if the prime minister--a commoner--could make dukes and princes, why could not he, Labby, at least make Sirs and Ladies? But of course when the government got wise to it, Labby got the sack. Just the same, he’s the smartest Englishman I’ve met. By Jingo, I would like to hear his last words on this planet of ours even as I would like to have heard Heine’s grand: ‘Never mind my sins, God will forgive them. Forgiving is his business.’”

Of the pair of geniuses, Mark died first (April 21, 1910), and both left characteristic utterances. Mark said to his physician:

“Good-by. _If_ we meet----”

Labouchère, shortly before his end, had been lectured by a sister or brother on the godless life he had led and had been assured that, if God didn’t take pity on him, he would certainly go to a hot place. An hour or so after listening to these comforting remarks, Labouchère had what Twain called on another occasion a “fair wind for Paradise,” _i. e._, he was dying and knew it. Now it happened that during the last half-minute of his life a spirit lamp in the next room exploded with a loud bang. Labouchère raised his head a bit and said feebly:

“What--_already_?”

One more gasp and he was dead. How Mark would have enjoyed Labby’s: “What, already?”

WHAT MAY HAPPEN TO YOU AFTER YOU ARE DEAD

With Richard Harding Davis I had covered the coronation of the Czar in Moscow and Mark could never get enough of that trip, asking me a thousand questions about the country and people. But what most interested him was the fact that they had taken Carlyle’s Cromwell away from me at the frontier. “You can have it back when you return,” said the Russian customs people, but they stuck to my book just the same.

“Maybe they will start a revolution on the strength of Carlyle,” said Mark. “I hope they will.”

“Talking of Cromwell--I am glad they have no Westminster Abbey in the States. And here is why. This man Cromwell was alternately an anarchist and an autocrat. More powerful than any king, he refused the crown, yet made Parliament accept his imbecile son as his successor. They buried him in Westminster Abbey with all the honors due a king and after two years dragged his body out and beheaded the poor carcass, then stuck the head on a pike, mounted on Parliament House. You say even if we had a Westminster Abbey in America and I was buried there, yet the things that happened to Cromwell could never happen to me. But I don’t know about that. When I was in Paris last, somebody offered me a tooth out of the head of Turenne, who had been buried two hundred years or more. How did he get that tooth? Why, during the revolution the Jacobins--ancestors of our present-day anarchists--smashed the royal graves at Saint Denis and flung the royal bones to the winds. Turenne happened to have been buried among his peers at the feet of Louis XIV. That is the reason why he was dispossessed. Now comes a commercially inclined Frenchman who had read that Turenne had been blessed with exceptionally fine molars. So he breaks all the teeth out of the dead man’s jaws and sells them to the highest bidder. I was told there was only one left and I could have it for 100 francs. But I was more interested in my own teeth than in Turenne’s and refused to do business with the antiquarian. However, to have my little joke I said to him, ‘If you had the “Henri Quatre” of the 4th Henry I might buy.’

“‘The Jacobins plucked that out, too,’ he replied, ‘but there isn’t a hair left for sale nowadays. However, I may locate one or more by diligent hunting and I’ll let you know if I succeed.’

“Think of it! Henri Quatre’s Henri Quatre torn out by the roots and sold at so much per hair! That mustache and goatee that was next to so many sweet lips--the sweetest in France. I have seen the originals of some of his letters in the Musée de Cluny, Paris, and had some of those little masterpieces of grace translated for me.”

Mark took out his Paris notebook and read:

“‘My true heart,’ he wrote at one time to Diane de Poitiers, ‘you have lied. I shall not see you for ten days. It is enough to kill me. I will not tell you how much I care, it would make you too vain, and I think you love me, so with a happy heart I finish.’

“In answer Diane wrote back, ‘If I die, have me opened and you will find your image engraved on my heart.’”

KINGS IN THEIR BIRTHDAY SUITS

Two things Mark Twain was especially concerned about--the success of his “Joan of Arc,” which he considered his best work, and the possibility of getting King Leopold hanged.

Leopold and the Czar were his special bêtes noires. “I’d like to see these two fellows face their people naked except for their whiskers. Let them face public opinion in their birthday suits and see what will happen to them.”

MARK ON LINCOLN’S HUMANITY

When Ida M. Tarbell’s “Life of Lincoln” was running in McClure’s during the late nineties, Mark said at luncheon at the Cafe Ronacher, Vienna, one afternoon: “That woman is writing a wonderfully good and accurate, intimate and comprehensive book and I _do_ hope that, in the end, she will give the same prominence to Lincoln’s correspondence on pardons as to other state papers of his. When you come to think of it, a lot of nonentities have got credit for able state papers, but it takes humanity to commute a sentence of death and Lincoln has commuted thousands. The only one he didn’t and couldn’t commute was one imposed by our friend, Ward Hill Lamon.

“Lamon, then Marshal of the District of Columbia, had seen Lincoln safely home and then made his usual rounds of the White House grounds. All seemed well, no cause for suspicion, Ward told me, and he was about to retire, when he thought he saw some movement amid a clump of green foliage. It looked as if a body was rising from the ground.

“‘I reached the spot by three leaps, faced a dark figure and, without ado, dealt him a blow square between the eyes, knocking him down,’ said the Marshal.

“Well,” continued Mark, “you know Lamon as he looks now, still a commanding figure, though worried and weakened by diabetes. In the early sixties he was a giant, a John L. Sullivan as a hitter. That blow of his killed the stranger in the White House grounds and when the body was carried to the Secret Service offices and searched, they found it to be that of a Southern gentleman of distinguished family. He had two pistols and two heinous looking knives on him--undoubtedly Ward had stopped short the career of one of the forerunners of John Wilkes Booth, postponing the great tragedy several months--I have forgotten the date. Wait, it happened during the night when Lamon brought the President back from the Soldiers’ Home, outside of Washington.

“Lincoln’s visit to the Soldiers’ Home was not on the schedule, Lamon told me, and he was surprised and angered when, calling at the White House, he heard of his riding away all by himself, for it was just such opportunities as would-be assassins were looking for.

“At the stables Lamon learned that the President came there in person, ordered ‘Old Abe,’ his favorite army mule, saddled and, half an hour ago, rode away as carelessly as any private citizen might do. There was a grain of comfort in the character of the mount selected, for ‘Old Abe’ wouldn’t go faster than a dogtrot if you beat him to death. So Lamon selected the fastest horse he could borrow and in a twinkling was en route for the Soldiers’ Home. As calculated, he met the President half-way down the road and Lincoln, far from suspecting that the Marshal was on his trail, invited him to come along and have some fun. Well, the President had a jolly time at the Soldiers’ Home, swapping stories with veterans and boys, listening to the singing, declaiming poetry and forgetting the care of his exalted office.

“And he kept up the fun on the way home, talking to his mule and explaining to ‘Old Abe’ what a ‘Misery’ Hill was. (He always used to call Lamon by his second name.) Hill, the President told his namesake, was always looking for danger, always suspecting somebody, never content with the troubles one couldn’t escape, etc., etc. But while Lamon laughed at the President’s sallies and encouraged his carefree humor, he kept both eyes open and if anything or anybody had stirred in front, back or at the sides of the road, his revolver was ready for emergency.”

AN ENGLISH LOVER OF KINGS AND A HATER

“Look at those fools going to pieces over old Doc Johnson--call themselves Americans and lick-spittle the toady who grabbed a pension from the German King of England that hated Americans, tried to flog us into obedience and called George Washington traitor and scoundrel.”

Thus spoke Mark Twain in the Doctor Johnson room of the Cheshire Cheese, the Strand, where the old thoroughfare becomes “the Street of Ink” or Newspaper Row, and while we were enjoying the famous meat pie served there on certain days of the week.

“You are pleased to occupy Miss Evelyn’s seat,” whispered James the waiter, looking at Mark.

“Miss Evelyn--what?” demanded our friend.

James blushed. “Miss Evelyn, why--Miss Evelyn, the beautiful young American lady who came with the millionaire, Mr. Harry Thaw. While she was in London I always had to keep for her the seat under the Doctor’s portrait on pie-day.”

“Not because she loved Johnson better, but because she liked being in the limelight worse,” commented Mark.

“Of course,” he continued, “no Englishman misses doing the kowtow to Johnson when he’s got half a chance, but of our own people, coming to the Cheese, ninety-nine per cent. do so because they don’t know the man, and the others because they feel tickled to honor a writer a hundred and fifty years or so after he is good and rotten.”

“Read Johnson plentifully, I suppose,” mocked Bram Stoker, famous as author, critic, barrister and Henry Irving’s associate.

“Not guilty--never a written word of his,” answered honest Mark. “I gauge Johnson’s character by his talks with that sot Bozzy, whom foolish old Carlyle called the greatest biographer ever because, I suppose, Bozzy interviewed Johnson on such momentous questions as: ‘What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in the Tower with a baby?’”

“Well, what would _you_ do,” asked Bram.

“Throw it out of the window to a passing milkman, if it was weaned and if there was no cow around,” said Mark.

When the merriment had subsided, Mark continued the slaughter of Johnson: “Why, he was a man who would have called brother a cannibal island king who had eaten a Jesuit, while he would have mobilized the whole British fleet against savages who dined off an Episcopalian.”

“And if they had fried a Bishop of the established Church down in the Pacific?”

“Ask me something easier,” answered Mark. “For all I know Johnson may have been the guy who invented a seething lake of fire and brimstone de luxe for married couples who had loved wisely and too well on a Christian holiday.”

“Boldly stolen from Voltaire,” suggested Bram.

“No, I read about the lake in one of Anatole France’s weekly essays in ‘Le Temps,’ but there was no reference to Johnson, of course.

“Speaking of Voltaire--I don’t remember that he mentioned Johnson in his English Letters, though he did take the trouble (in Eighteenth Century French ignorance) to call Shakespeare ‘a drunken savage,’ ‘an amazing genius’ and ‘an indecent buffoon who had rendered English taste a ruined lady for two hundred years to come.’”

“Date’s quite correct, as I once pointed out to poor Gene Field,” interrupted Stoker. He called for a slate--they had no paper at the Cheese--and scrawled:

Opening of the Lyceum Theatre under Henry Irving and Bram Stoker 1878 Death of Shakespeare 1616 ---- Interval 262

“As you see,” added Bram, “Voltaire was out only a little more than half a century. And what’s half a century when the Oxford Dodo--if the moths hadn’t eaten him--would now be seven and twenty trillions years old? But go on with your Voltaire, Mark.”

“You mean Johnson,” said Mark; “how he would have cackled had he known that Voltaire got his start in literature by the library he bought as a youngster out of Ninon de l’Enclos’ two thousand livres bequest. ‘Authorship reared on a wench’s patrimony,’ I hear him expectorate, and George Rex would have been tickled to death, for Johnson, he would have argued, has now extracted the sting from the Frenchman’s description of Kings, as ‘a pack of rogues and highwaymen.’”

As he was speaking Mark grabbed hold of his elbow, indulging in a grimace of pain. “What’s the date?” he demanded abruptly.

“August 25th.”

“Late, as usual,” said Mark with mock mournfulness. “True friends of mankind and haters of intolerance have their rheumatism or colic on August 24th, the day of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Voltaire always timed his boils so and got a rash or the itch on May 14th for good measure.”

“What happened on May 14th?”

“Why, you ignoramus, on May 14th, in the year I have forgot, the humanest and royalest of kings, Henri IV, was assassinated by a damned monk.”

MARK GOT ARRESTED IN BERLIN

It was in Koernerstrasse No. 7, of course, and it happened in this way. Mark, his wife, Mrs. Crane, the three children, and the governess were having breakfast when Gretchen came in, excitement written all over her face; as Mark said: “You could hear her heart beat. There was a frightful commotion under her shirtwaist.”

“‘Gracious Lord,’ she said, addressing me, ‘there is a Mister Policeman outside who wants to see you, Gracious Lord.’

“‘Tell him to go to blazes,’ I said, Susan translating the American classic into even more classic German.

“‘My God,’ groaned Gretchen, ‘I could never say anything like that to a Mister Policeman. He is a Mister _Policeman_, don’t you understand, Gracious Lord?’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘I haven’t had any breakfast, and if the Kaiser himself called I would throw him out.’

“At this moment there was a peremptory knock at the door and a raspy voice bellowed:

“‘Wird’s bald?’ (Aren’t you coming?)

“Now I got real mad and telling Susie to get the revolver we didn’t have in the house, I went to the door.

“‘I am Mr. Clemens,’ I said to the limb of the law. ‘What do you want at this unearthly hour, of an American citizen? More taxes? I have paid taxes on a dog which I don’t own, and I paid church taxes although I never go to church. I am tired of your tax rot. I won’t pay another pfennig.’

“‘Take a care, Herr Clemens,’ warned the mister policeman. ‘I heard you mention the name of our All Gracious Kaiser, and now you talk like an anarchist. We won’t stand for that in Berlin.’

“‘Who are we?’ I asked.

“‘The police,’ he answered.

“‘Well, tell the police to----!’

“And no sooner had I uttered that revolutionary platitude when the mister policeman dumped his helmet on his frowzy bean, knocked his heels together, and put his right hand on his sword hilt and sang out:

“‘Herr, you are under arrest.’

“Whereupon all the women of the household and all the listening neighbors were petrified with terror. But I laughed to beat the band to hide my cowardice. My hilarity took the mister policeman off his perch for the moment, and he said:

“‘What are you laughing at?’

“I answered: ‘I am tickled because you threaten me with jail, with the gallows perhaps, and don’t know enough to state the nature of my crime.’

“‘That’s easy, you are arrested for a breach of the city regulations. You allowed your servants to put the bedclothes near the window, and when I stand on tiptoes on the other side of the street, I can see them.’

“I laughed again. He repeated that I was under arrest, and ordered me to come to court the next morning at nine.

“So next morning at nine I went to court, the legation having furnished me with a lawyer. When the judge came in, I rose like everybody else to salute His Honor, then settled down to watch proceedings, and without wishing to be offensive, of course, I slung one knee over the other. Thereupon, the judge called me to the bar and fined me twenty marks for indecent behavior. In a German court I was expected to bend, not cross, my knees. Next my case was called and, as the court was possibly prejudiced on account of the knee incident, I was fined ten marks for showing perfectly clean linen, and twenty marks for laughing at a mister policeman. It cost me fifty marks ($12.50) all in all and I expected to make about five hundred dollars writing about my disgrace. However, Livy thought the telling of it would deal the family escutcheon a blow from which it could never hope to recover and so I had to stick to my five-cent stogies the same as the mister policeman.”

BOOKS THAT WEREN’T WRITTEN

As every friend of Mark Twain’s writings knows, Mark was never short on literary projects, and at the time of their conception all looked exceedingly good to him. As a rule he would start work on the new subject at once with enthusiasm unlimited, writing, dictating, rewriting, dictaphoning and what not! Small wonder that the waiters at the Hotel Metropole in Vienna called him a “dictator.” However, not infrequently his golden imaginings proved idle dross, or else were put aside for new fancies. During his Berlin season he was very keen, at one time, on writing a book on the Three Charles’s, dealing with a terzetto of crowned rascals, but the project, like so many others, was abandoned or died. If I remember rightly, Clemens told me, either in Vienna or London, that he might have felt stronger on the Three Charles’s if it wasn’t for Thackeray’s Four Georges.

The Three Charles’s idea was born of this slight incident:

We had met at the famous Cafe Bauer, Herr Bamberger, some time private secretary to Charles of Brunswick, better known as the Diamond Duke. Bamberger told us some racy stories about the late Highness who had left a million to a Swiss town on condition that it set up a monument to his memory. The monument was built, but so faultily that after six months or so it tumbled down. And the débris having been carted away, Charles’ dream of glory came to an abrupt end.