Part 8

Mark and Bamberger had several more interviews and one morning, at the Legation, Clemens announced that his next book would be “The Three Charles’s,” Charles the First and the Second of England and Charles of Brunswick, who was also partly English.

“In all his long life,” said Mark, “the Brunswick Charles did only one decent thing and that was a lie. ‘Here reposes the murdered Queen of England,’ he had chiselled upon the entrance to the mausoleum harboring the remains of Queen Charlotte, wife of George. Now this fellow George knew more about buttons for a waistcoat, or sauce for a partridge, than about kingship, he fought--but certainly did not murder his wife. On the other hand, Bamberger tells me, that the Brunswick Charles poisoned a number of people while playing at kingship. Yet all the punishment he got at the hands of his loving subjects was the dirty kick-out. They burned his palace, besides, but later had to rebuild it at their own cost. In short, get the true picture of Charles and loathe royalty ever afterwards,” recommended Mark.

“You can’t conceive of the meanness of this German kinglet,” said Mark at another time. “Once he had trouble with a courtier, Baron Cramner. The Baron fled to escape a dose of _aqua toffana_, but his wife, who expected her first baby, had to remain in Brunswick. What does Charles do? He forbids all physicians, surgeons and midwives, on pain of imprisonment and loss of license, to attend her Ladyship. And he set spies about her house to be informed of the time of travail. And when she was in agony, he had a huge mass of powder, said Bamberger, five thousand pounds, exploded in the neighborhood of her residence. There are a hundred more stories like that. After he fled from Brunswick, the Duke’s medicine chest was found to be crammed full of poison bottles and powders, the label of each container showing how often employed and how long it took for the poison to work.

“This Diamond Duke got away with eleven million thalers of the people’s money; he left one million thalers behind because he couldn’t get at them. And that notwithstanding, this murderer and thief was allowed to live the life of a distinguished prince in London and Paris. Wait till I get through with him and his namesakes in the royalty business.”

MARK ENJOYED OTHER HUMORISTS

Mark and I were walking through a rather disreputable little street, lined by private hotels, which leads from the Strand to the Playhouse, London, when he suddenly stopped and pointed to a bronze tablet on an old house about the middle of the block.

“Read,” he commanded, but my eyes refused to climb to the second story.

“Why this used to be the abode of the poet who has said:

“‘The English love Liberty as their wife, The French as their Mistress, The Germans as a Granny, long dead.’”

“Heine,” I ventured.

“Come to think of it, I am not absolutely sure, that Heine coined that political document,” admitted Mark, “but it is very much in the manner of an epigram he _did_ write, I believe.

“‘Life’s a yawning Nitchevo, The Shadow of a single nought, The Dream of a Flea, A Drama by Teufelsdroeckh.’”

I confess I heard this, too, for the first time; possibly Mark got off the fireworks all by his loneness, _pour passer le temps_.

“Howells introduced me to Heine,” he explained during the entr’acte. “I am glad he did, for I never found in his writings ‘the bitter Jew who emptied all the insult in his soul on Aryan heads.’ But then I read Heine only for his glittering wit, the scintillating glow of his fancy.”

MARK AND THE ENGLISH HACK-WRITER

A Berlin cartoon paper, “Ulk,” once represented Twain as “an Arthurian Knight, canned up to the neck in armour,” galloping after kill-joys and such, and picking them up with his lance and warhooping like wild. That’s what he would like to have done to the hack of a London publishing house, who had interfered with his copy, striking out sentences, and words, and substituting his own “insular ignorance” wherever Mark’s broad humanity ran amuck of public opinion as he, the hack, understood it.

Mark told me that he spent three days “abolishing that cad” (quoting from Carlyle) and I think he added:

“I gave him at least part of the Hades and brimstone he deserved. There were such moving passages as ‘monumental ass,’ ‘masticator of commonplaces,’ ‘offspring of a court fool,’ ‘clownish idiot,’ etc. All the hatred, all the venom that was in my system I let loose upon that damn’ fool, squirted it into him with all the force that I was capable of. Oh, I laid him out. If he had had the chance to read the letter, his own mother would not have recognized him.

“But, as you may have heard, women know these things better, and Livy destroyed that wonderful letter of mine, burned it up or fed it to the chickens--I don’t know which. Anyhow the letter wasn’t mailed and that English fool thinks to this very day that he flabbergasted me.”

MARK THOUGHT JOAN OF ARC WAS SLANDERED

I was telling Mark about some frolic at the Berlin Court, when the sprightly “Lottchen,” Princess of Meiningen, William’s sister, proposed a riddle that puzzled the exalted, but not too quick-witted company--

“Even to the utmost--I know what you want to say. They tell me they are having the charade-fever at the Schloss, is that it?”

“Precisely,” I answered, and went on to tell of the silly rebus competitions in which the Kaiser took special delight. I had my story from the Baroness Von Larisch, a witness, who enjoyed a photographic memory.

“A movie memory,” corrected Mark, “but go on.”

Well, I reported, H. R. H. quoted nine or ten descriptions of the party to be guessed at, and neither the Majesties, nor the Highnesses, nor the Graces, nor the Disgraces came anywhere near the solution. Whereupon Lottchen startled the company by announcing the answer: “Joan of Arc.”

Twain took the cigar out of his mouth and sat up straight, which, as everybody knows, he did only on rare occasions.

“Blasphemy most horrible!” he thundered, “making a joke of Joan of Arc, _my_ Joan of Arc!”

“Your book isn’t out yet,” I said by way of pouring oil on troubled waters. “And until it sees the light of print people _will_ puzzle whether your Joan was saint, witch, man, maid or something else.”

Mark had replaced his cigar and was now chewing it viciously.

“Let’s have the story,” he said. While he read Joan of Arc’s ephemeral epitaph, quoted by Lottchen, the stern lines of his face gradually softened and coming to the end, he laughed outright. “Tiptop,” he chuckled, “I wish I had done these verses myself. But, of course, if I had thought of them fifteen or more years ago, I would never have taken Joan seriously.”

The verses that amused the great humorist, read as follows:

“Here lies Joan of Arc: the which Some count man, and something more; Some count maid, and some a bore. Her life’s in question, wrong or right; Her death’s in doubt by laws or might. Oh, innocence! take heed of it, How thou, too, near to guilt doth sit. (Meantime, France a wonder saw: A woman rule, ’gainst Salic law!) But, reader, be content to stay Thy censure till the judgment-day; Then shalt thou know, and not before, Whether saint, witch, man, maid, or bore.”

RUNNING AMUCK--ALMOST

At one of Mrs. Clemens’ tea parties in Vienna a lady of the Court asked Mark whether he had ever visited a certain town, naming an Austrian health resort.

“Yes, nice place. I left my sour stomach there.”

MARK’S IDIOMATIC GEMS

“Of course you have had no serious quarrel with the Church?” he was asked by Dr. Dryander, the former Kaiser’s body chaplain.

“Oh, my, no--far from it,” vowed Mark. “Such expressions as ‘the duck that runs the gospel mill’ and ‘the boss of the doxology works who waltzed a dead ’un through handsome,’ are idiomatic gems I picked up in the mining camps. They are not meant in derision.

“William was talking with my cousin, General Von Versen,” added Mark, “reporting the case at Mr. Phelps’ office a few days afterwards--otherwise, you may be sure, he would have ordered me flayed alive, for isn’t he the identical gander bossing the German gospel mill?”

MARK AND THE GIRLS THAT LOVE A LORD

Moberly Bell, the last great editor of “The Times,” London, before Northcliffe, was not nearly so Olympian as people thought who had never met him. I often warmed one of the enormous armchairs in his enormous office--Bell was a six-footer, as broad as an ox, and his room at the Thunderer’s office resembled a cathedral rather than the ordinary editorial cubby-hole. I brought over Mark one afternoon and he told Bell of the trouble he had buying “The Times” at “The Times” office.

“I offered my sixpence across the counter, saying ‘Today’s paper, please,’” he drawled, “but was quickly put to the right-about. ‘You will find the commissioner outside, at the door; he will fetch the paper and accept payment if you are not a regular subscriber,’ I was rebuked.

“Well I looked outside and instead of a commissioner found a field marshal, as big as a house, hung with medals, and festooned with silver lace.

“‘Your excellency,’ I murmured distractedly, ‘I was ordered to find the commissioner to fetch me a paper. May I be so bold as to ask whether you have seen that individual?’

“The field marshal touched his three-cornered hat and replied in the most stately and dignified manner: ‘Why, of course, I will get you a paper, Mr. Clemens, if you will deign to wait five or six minutes.’

“Then it was _my_ turn to put on airs,” concluded Mark. “‘I am going to see Mr. Moberly Bell,’ I said; ‘fetch me the paper upstairs and keep the change.’”

We were still laughing when a copy boy entered with a trayful of dispatches. “Allow me,” said Mr. Bell. “It will take but a minute to skim over these wires.” But he interrupted himself immediately.

“There’s a job for you, Fisher,” he said, handing me a Paris dispatch. “Blowitz cables that your Aunt Rosine is dying. Hope she will leave you a lot of money. ‘The Times’ will take eight hundred words on Rosine, sixpence a word, you know. Let me have them by seven to-night.”

“My, I wish I had an aunt that I could make sixpence a word out of,” said Mark, as we were going down the lift, which is British for elevator. “Who is, or was, this relative of yours in which ‘The Times’ is interested to the extent of eight hundred words?”

“Why Rosine Stoltz, whom Verdi called ‘his divine inspiration,’ the creator of Aida and of the title roles of most of Rossini’s Grand Operas.”

“That’s a jolly mouthful,” assented Mark, “but couldn’t she do anything but sing?”

“She was not only the solitary rival ever recognized by Jenny Lind, but the greatest collector of titles ever,” I replied. “De Blowitz calls her the Duchess of L’Esignano, but she was also the Spanish Princess of Peace, the Princess Godoy, the Marchioness of Altavilla and the Countess and Baroness of Ketchendorff.”

“In that case,” said Mark, “that story about her dying is vastly exaggerated, for she has six lives coming to her before she is finally through. But how and where did she get all those high-sounding names?”

“Bought ’em, of course. Her last husband, the Prince Godoy, was a racetrack tout in Paris and they were married on his highness’ deathbed, Auntie engaging to pay the funeral expenses. L’Esignano and Altavilla she likewise married _in extremis_, as lawyers have it. The Barony and the Countship she acquired through her lover, the saintly Prince Albert, husband of Victoria.”

“She was a Frenchwoman, you said?”

“Born in Paris as Victoire Noel.”

Mark Twain stood still in the midst of Printing House Square and laid a heavy hand upon my arm. “What you tell me is a great relief,” he said. “I thought American girls were the only damn’ fools paying for titles.”

The much-titled Aunt Rosine didn’t die till a year later, but I believe that the false alarm about her demise, set down, was responsible, in part at least, for Mark’s: “Do They Love a Lord?” He maintained: “They all do,” dwelling in particular upon the courtesies shown to Prince Henry in the U. S. After the appearance of his essay in “The North American Review,” I told Clemens of the following incident, witnessed in Philadelphia.

I happened to visit the City of Brotherly Love the same day as Henry and was crossing one of the downtown squares, when a considerable commotion arose behind: clatter of horses’ hoofs, jingling of metal, tramp of oncoming masses. Somebody shouted: “There he is, going to the Mayor’s office,” as I was passing by an office building in course of construction.

The masons, hodcarriers and other workmen heard the cry and crowded onto the scaffolding outside the walls. Some of them seemed ready to take up the shouts of welcome emitted here and there by the crowd.

But the enthusiasm for royalty was cut short by a brawny Irishman, planting himself, trowel in hand, on the edge of the main scaffold.

“None of that chin music here,” he hollered; “the first wan that hollers hooray for owld Vic’s grandson gets a throwl full of cement down his red lane,” and he swung the loaded tray defiantly.

Just then the Pennsylvania Hussars came trotting up in picturesque disorder, the Prince and city officials following in an open landau.

“And you could _hear_ the silence, I bet,” said Mark. “I wish I had been there to _see_ it too, particularly if one of the chaps had attempted to mutiny against Pat’s order. Pat, I dare say, would have licked him until he couldn’t tell himself from a last year’s corpse.”

MARK’S MARTYRDOM

“Well, how did you like your reception in England?” Mark was asked during his last visit there.

“Overwhelming, indescribable! There are no other words for it,” he said, “but let me get hold of Andy (Carnegie). His country, Scotland, used truly fiendish means for humiliating me, though I spent a whole day riding across the blamed island--couldn’t do better, for the train between Edinburgh and London wouldn’t, or couldn’t, go slower.

“Well, at Edinburgh I crept into one of those rat-cages they call railway carriage, first class, and opened the ‘Irish Times,’ that I bought at the station. I kidded myself, hoping that the unfurling of that paper would promote conversation, or trouble or something, with fellow passengers. But there was only one, and he got even with me in the most awful and bloodthirsty style. Namely, he pulled out of his valise a copy of the ‘Innocents,’ in two volumes, and after lighting a pipe, began reading. I watched him, first out of a corner of my eye, then with the whole eye, then with the pair of them. Nothing doing--that horse thief didn’t crack a single smile over the first two hundred and fifty pages.

“After luncheon--even the excellent salmon was gall and the other thing to me--Mr. Scotchman repeated his torture, heaping more red-hot coals on my mane, the insides of my hands and of my shoes--that is, he read the second story through likewise without as much as a squint.”

And Mark got up and left without another word.

SLANG NOT IN MARK’S DICTIONARY

Seldom or never did I hear Mark use slang--whether he thought himself above it in the matter of provoking laughter, or whether he disliked it, I can’t tell. He used to keep the Berlin or Vienna embassy, or whatever the resort happened to be, in a roar by telling of billiard balls “the size of walnuts” and of a billiard table “as big as the State of Rhode Island,” but such a word as “Biggity” never escaped him.

An American “slangy” person says: “I’ll be jiggered” or something. Mark put that phrase differently: “_You_ be damned if I didn’t scream like a wet peacock with all his tail feathers mussed.”

The ordinary run of humorists delight in fussing about hotel bills. Mark affected to “be mad clean through” at impositions practiced upon him by foreigners, and clenched both fists as he remarked: “We paid the heavy bill, about _six cents_.”

If Mark had used the slang loved by the vaudevillians he would be as widely unread in the Scandinavian countries, in modern Greece and in Russia as are the latter. “I never liked riddles and jaw-breakers,” he said to a member of the firm of Chatto and Windus in London one day, after the gentleman “had caught another foreign country for him,” “but I guess cannibals and Pollacks alike love to be surprised, and the grotesque, always unexpected, is surprising.”

“During my stay in Stockholm some one read the following from one of my books (translated): ‘The solemn steadfastness of the deep made the ship roll sideways.’ Great laughter. ‘And she kicked up behind!’ At that the house shook and rocked and quivered with merriment and my fame was firmly established in Sweden. If I had told the audience that ‘Her Majesty’s dress crept along the floor for three minutes (count ’em) after the queen had gone,’ they would have risen to a man and kissed me.”

MARK “NO GENTLEMAN”

Mark didn’t resort to profanity when he wanted to lambaste man or measure. I once heard him say to Mrs. Clemens: “I will write him that ‘his mind is all caked up, that as an idiot he is simply immeasurable.’

“And I will call him a snug person full of pedantic proclivities; and further, ‘a long-eared animal’ (and striking an attitude)--‘a mule hostler with his pate full of axle grease.’”

“All right,” said gentle Mrs. Livy, “do so by all means, but take care not to send the letter.”

“Livy, dear, let me get it off my chest,” pleaded Mark, “for ‘Hotel Normandie, Paris,’ would be just the place to date such an epistle from. Don’t you remember the ‘Madame’s screech’ to the effect that ‘one must expect neither tact nor delicacy from Mark Twain?’”

The “Madame” referred to was Madam Blanc, the critic of one of the chief French reviews, already mentioned.

“The vagabond and adventurer, who from crown to sole remained a gentleman” (I forget from which magazine this is quoted) fairly reveled “in the French Madame’s abomination of his lowly self.”

MARK, POETRY, AND ART

Like other authors, Mark was not indifferent to praise. I think he liked best an essay in a Vienna review which hailed him as “the journalist of _belles-lettres_ who has made the commonplaces literary, even as Emerson rendered the commonplaces philosophic.” “A French writer has accused him of denying that there was any poetic feeling in the middle ages,” continues the essay, “yet his Joan of Arc is the most wonderfully lyric-dramatic prose I can recall.”

“There are lots of people who know me better than I do myself,” was Mark’s comment on the above, and followed it up with a yarn on life in “old Nevada,” when he rode several miles behind a prairie schooner “because of a red petticoat fluttering in the breeze at the tail end.”

“That is, I thought it was a petticoat, but when I caught up with the wagon on that spent mud turtle of mine (my gee-gee went by that poetic name) I found it was only a piece of burlap displayed for art’s sake.”

“Did I curse ART?” demanded Mark, looking around the circle.

MARK SHEDS LIGHT ON ENGLISH HISTORY

We had set out to look at the rich collections of jewels, curiosities and “other loot” (Mark’s description) hoarded by the (late) Hapsburgs in the immense pile called _Hofburg_, when the author of “Joan of Arc,” then in the making, switched me off to another room.

“Let’s go and dig out the Witch Hammer,” he said. “Wonder whether they have a new edition at the Imperial Library.”

I forget now which edition of that murderous book we examined, but I do remember some of the figures we jotted down at the librarian’s suggestion. The Witch Hammer, that is, a voluminous “treatise for discovering, torturing, maiming and burning witches,” was first published, we learned, in 1487, and twenty-eight editions were put through the press during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Later Mark listened to my reading from the Latin text with so stern a mien I suggested that he looked like a Grand Inquisitor.

“I pity your ignorance,” he drawled, “Torquemada and the rest didn’t think of being unhappy _re_ those auto-da-fes, for every witch-fire lit by their orders meant a warm jingle in their own pockets. When they tortured an accused person, the cost of the proceedings was collected by the sheriff, ditto when they burned some old lady, or a child maybe--it was all grist to their mill, for the Grand Inquisitor got a rake-off on all prosecutions, and in those good old days it cost more to break a human being on the wheel than to feed him and care for him in jail. The great Napoleon, you once told me, found some three hundred crowned leeches infesting Germany when he started to break up their little game. What do you suppose they lived on, those kinglets, princes, graves and dukes--on the dog tax? No, most of them lived on the interest of the fortunes their ancestors had accumulated by prosecuting and burning witches.”

Some years later Mark related the story of our search for the Witch Hammer before a motley crowd of litterateurs at Brown’s Hotel, London. “Fine,” said Bram Stoker, “tell us some more; I have a short story on witchcraft in hand.”

“In that case,” said Mark, “don’t forget Henry VIII, Elizabeth and the first James. Wife-killing Henry started the witch-burning business in ‘merry’ England, Elizabeth revived the sport, and the son of Mary Stuart, whose Bible lies on every drawing-room table at home, used both pen and axe to exterminate witches and ‘demons.’ I read up closely on the subject when I got down to Joan of Arc’s trial.”

Some of our English friends didn’t seem pleased with Mark’s reminiscences of British intolerance. “What about Salem?” asked one of them.

“Oh, Salem,” replied Mark, drawing out the word like a rubber band, “you needn’t get cocky about Salem. The Massachusetts witchcraft delusion was only an echo of your own English persecutions, and a flash in the pan at that. I have the data in my booklet here. Admitted we fool Americans _did_ hang twenty-two and tortured some fifty people under the English-German-Spanish witchcraft acts--to our shame and disgrace--compare these figures with the records of man and woman burnings ordered by your ‘bloody Mary’ alone. On the very morning of the day when the old cat died, seven or eight Britishers were billed to be reduced to cinders at Smithfield (where you buy your steak nowadays), and if the devil hadn’t made room for her Majesty in hell before noon, there would have been so many more martyrs.”

He turned to Stoker. “Bram,” he said, “the only satisfactory way to do a witchcraft story is to filch it bodily from Balzac. The Frenchman got the thing down to perfection in one of his Droll yarns--I know a shop in the Strand where you can buy a pirated edition--reproduced by the camera--for half a crown.”