Part 9

“Hold,” he added, “I can give you the recipe of the witch salve, so called. Fisher and I dug it up at the Berlin Royal Library. It was a compound of hemlock, mandragora, henbane and belladonna. No wonder it set persons, thus embalmed all over the naked body, crazy, tickled them to indulge in all sorts of insane antics, that lent themselves to devilish interpretation at a period when every tenth person aspired to boom a religion of his own.”

MARK EXPLAINS DEAN SWIFT

“I wish somebody would kick me for a damned _Treppenwitz_,” said Mark Twain, gazing into a bookseller’s shop window Unter den Linden.

“The Herr _Schutzmann_ (traffic policeman) will oblige; just say--”

Mark glanced at the whiskered giant bestriding his ill-shaped cattle at the intersection of Friedrich Strasse.

“No, thank you, I won’t _lese majeste_ on a Friday,” replied Mark, “besides, I don’t like the cop’s boot.” (In before-1918 days, you need but say, ‘Verdammt Kaiser,’ in Berlin, to get knocked down, arrested, and sent up for months and months.)

“What’s _Treppenwitz_?”

“I didn’t know myself until Harry Thurston Peck told me. It’s the wisdom that comes to you going down the stairs, or the elevator, after making a fool of yourself higher up--an afterthought, as it were.”

“And what’s the afterthought _now_?”

“See that book?” (pointing), “no, not that, the yellowback, by Prof. Borkowsky--one more guy trying to explain Jonathan Swift. I forgot when his Deanship lived and died, but they must have been at it for centuries. And without examining the new volume, I bet I can tell its contents: more highfalutin’ tommyrot about the Dean’s vagaries in erotics and small beer politics. There must be a considerable library on the subject, every new author threshing the old straw a tenth time, and adding mystery trimmings of his own. I always promised myself to submit _my_ theories on Swift and his harem at a first-class insanity shop, but I forgot to ask Krafft-Ebing in Vienna, and now I let Virchow pass.”

I was going to say something obvious, but Mark stopped me. “I know Virchow’s special line, but that man is wise on every conceivable subject, and I am quite sure he would have borne me out, namely, that Swift’s character can be explained on the theory that he was a Sadist and a Masochist in one. If Swift, as he wrote to an acquaintance, ‘died of rage like a poisoned rat in a hole,’ I am sure he enjoyed it. God knows that man gave more pain to his lady loves, Stella, Vanessa and the rest, than all the Romeos in Shakespeare. They say that he killed Vanessa by frightening her to death; he certainly murdered Stella morally by letting her pass for his mistress. Still these two women and others, whose names I forget, were proud of the torments inflicted upon them. I wish I had asked Virchow, when he invited the audience to put questions to him at the end of the lecture.”

MARK IN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

We had lunch with some of the Herald boys at _Cafe des Ambassadeurs_, Champs-Elysees, when Dick Benet, editor of “Dalziel’s News,” joined us. Dick, “contrary to his usual morosity, acted the gay and debonair,” to quote Clemens, who suggested that “he must have given the boss the toothache by managing to get his salary raised a hundred francs per annum.”

There was much hilarity about that, for we all knew “the boss” for a skinflint, and Mark told a succession of funny stories about his own salary grabs on the “Virginia Enterprise” and other impecunious sheets. All were keenly alive to the treat, only Dick seemed absent-minded, pulling out his watch every little while and keeping an eye on the door.

“You are not afraid of a bum-bailiff _now_,” suggested Mark.

“Neither now, nor at any future time,” replied Dick. “Fact is, the wife promised to meet me here and I have an engagement at two o’clock which I mustn’t miss under any circumstances whatever.” Our friend seemed to be lying under some pressure or excitement.

At one-fifteen a tall, stylish Frenchwoman entered, and Dick rushed up to her with outstretched hands. “So glad you came in time,” he murmured. He slurred over the introductions, drew his wife on to the seat next to him, and whispered to her.

At fifteen minutes to two (we adduced the figures later by comparing notes) two strangers in high silk toppers walked up to Dick, saying: “It’s time, Monsieur.”

Dick nodded, rose, bent over his wife and kissed her on the mouth. Then he shook hands all around, and with some more adieux walked away with his friends. We saw him seated in a cabriolet, then leave it abruptly.

“Victoire, my love, I am so sorry,” he said, rushing back and covering his wife’s face with kisses--“so sorry to leave you.”

One more lingering kiss and he was gone.

* * * * *

Half an hour later Mark and I passed by Dalziel’s News Bureau, as a man came out of the counting room to paste up “the latest.”

“Let’s see what it is,” said Mark. “Maybe King Leopold is dead, and I mustn’t miss putting on court mourning for HIM.” This is what we read on the bulletin-board:

“Monsieur Richard Benet, the editor of Dalziel’s, was killed in a duel with ---- at 2:15 this afternoon. _R. I. P._”

Mark was visibly affected. “That poor woman,” he kept saying; “a stroke out of the blue. But Dick felt that he was taking leave of her for good; that accounts for his repeated: ‘I’m so sorry.’” And much more to that effect.

To get Clemens’ mind off the melancholy affair, I suggested “Swithin.”

“Done,” said Mark, “and we will take him out to supper, for I bet he hasn’t got a sou marquis in his jeans.”

“Swithin” was Mark’s pet name for a Franco-American writer whose real name happened to recall the legend of a Saint, a groundhog, and several kinds of weather.

Meanwhile the heat had taken on a Sahara hue. “It seems to me we are not walking, we are _dripping_,” remarked Clemens, as we climbed the four stairs to the studio. We had been told to walk right in, and we did, accidentally upsetting the screen that separated the anteroom from the office.

Tableau! Here was “Swithin” and his secretary, the one dictating, the other thumping the typewriter and both--stark naked.

“Don’t mention it,” broke in Mark. “_Puris naturalibus_ is the only way to face this hellish temperature--a white man’s solitary chance to get even with civilization! If there were a bathtub, a few banana trees and a fire-spitting mountain around, I would think myself in the Sandwich Islands.

“Talking of sandwiches,” he added, “hustle into your tailor-mades and come out for a bite. You must be fearfully hungry--working on a day like this?”

“Swithin” didn’t have to be told twice. He dashed into the adjoining room for his clothes, but returned after a little while, still _en nature_, and swearing like the whole Flanders army. He searched presses, drawers, nooks and corners with hands and eyes.

“Anything missing?” mocked Mark.

“Only my duds--I bet those confounded roommates of mine--(followed a string of epithets that wouldn’t look well in print) stole and pawned them, for they had neither cigarette nor lunch money this morning.”

“Come to think,” put in the secretary, “I saw Monsieur Hector leave with a bundle.”

“My jeans, coat and vest,” shrieked “Swithin,” tearing his hair, while Mark writhed with laughter.

“And there were fifteen or twenty sous in an inside pocket besides,” moaned “Swithin.”

“I know Monsieur Hector’s hang-out,” said the secretary, “and if you like I will go and choke the pawn tickets out of the pair.”

“Couldn’t do better if you tried,” opined Mark, “for no doubt by this time they have devoured the proceeds of their brigandage. Hurry, before they sell the tickets.”

We found Hector and his brother-bandit behind a magnum of fake champagne, gourmandizing at the Dead Cat, a newly opened restaurant destined to become famous in Bohemia.

“Sure,” they said, “we _borrowed_ old Swithin’s old clothes, but expected to bring them back before seven. We are now waiting for the angel who promised to relieve our financial distress, which is only momentary, of course.”

They gave up the tickets willingly enough, and we repaired to _Mont de Piété_ in Rue Lepic.

“Mountain of Pity--a queer name for a hock shop,” said Mark when I related the redemption of Swithin’s clothes. “I once knew a three-hundred-pound Isaac in ’Frisco, but that is another story.”

“AMBITION IS A JADE THAT MORE THAN ONE MAN CAN RIDE”

We had been talking about changing one’s luck at the Eccentric Club, London, and Mark said: “All is personal effort, there is no such thing as anything interfering for one’s advantage or the opposite.”

“Guess you are about right,” said Stoker. “There was Loie Fuller, an indifferent soubrette before she became the goddess of beauty and chained Anatole France and the rest to her chariot. I remember meeting her one afternoon in the Strand, looking for a cable office. Only a few hours previous I had heard that poor Loie was on her uppers, her manager having cheated her, leaving her penniless in Berlin. And, worse luck, I didn’t know a thing she could do in London, or even the provinces, just then. That, you can imagine, made me feel quite gawky.”

“Well, you had a right to be a sob sister,” interpolated Mark.

“She didn’t give me the chance, not she,” emphasized Bram, “for, grabbing me by the arm, with tears rolling down her cheeks, she whispered in a choked voice: ‘Father is dead, Father is dead! Lend me ten shillings to cable to New York, please.’ She added: ‘Poor Father. But now I _will_ succeed, _I swear it, Father_.’

“And two or three weeks later she created the serpentine dance, earning such blurbs as ‘the chastest and most expressive of dancers, who restored to us the lost wonders of Greek mimicry.’”

“I hear she is about to open her own theatre in Paris now,” announced the Standard critic.

“That’s the stuff,” said Mark. “Loie, like myself--both red-headed--knew that ambition is a horse that more than one can ride. I grabbed that idea ’way back in the seventies when Artemus Ward came down lecturing Virginia way. Art was a success and I liked the lordly nonchalance with which he spent two or three hundred dollars on a tear. I helped him spend plenty, I assure you, but when Art and the brown taste in my mouth had gone, I took stock.

“‘Sam,’ I said to myself, quite familiar-like, ‘Sam, your mental adipose is as good as his, and in originality you can beat him dead.’

“After these encouraging remarks, I set to work making good,” concluded Mark.

MARK AS A TRANSLATOR

Mark conquered Germany before he became one of the favorite literary sons of Austria. “I often wonder that they take to my brand of humor so well,” he told me more than once in Vienna--“I mean AFTER MY GERMAN TRIUMPHS, for if Vienna Bookland hates anything worse than German Bookland, I haven’t come across the likes of it. Each capital thinks itself a Boston and each calls the other Kalamazoo, or dead Indian Town.

“But I’m not ungrateful,” continued Mark, “and to prove it, I studied hard and established the identity of the fatherlandish author whom both Vienna and Berlin admired (though nobody reads him, of course): Goethe.”

“Goethe was Englished before I tackled him, but I happened on a passage in Faust that, it seemed to me, was not done justice to. So I summoned the family to a powwow and between us, and a heap of dictionaries, we rendered the disputed and immortal lines ‘thus classic’:

“‘What hypocrites and such can’t do without-- Cheese it--ne’er mention it aloud.’

“Bayard” (Taylor) “would have burst with envy if he had lived long enough to see how happily I interpreted Goethe without itching for translator’s laurels or royalties.”

“Let’s see the original, Mark.”

“Here it is:

“‘Man darf es nicht vor keuschen Ohren nennen, Was keusche Hertzen nicht entbehren können.’

“_Vers libre_ with a vengeance, eh?” chuckled Mark. “And why in thunder shouldn’t that mean verse liberally handled?”

“If I translated your version of Goethe back into German, do you suppose the Fatherlanders would understand it?”

“No,” said honest Mark, “but I do understand _their_ translations of _my_ lingo--I am told they make me appear like a native German writer, in fact Moritz Busch called me the most translatable of foreign authors, to my face--but Goethe was a poet, and a prose man, like me, can never do justice to a poetry man of Goethe’s distinction. Look at these German translations of Shakespeare--they think them classic--they get my eyes in flood with laughter.”

MARK IN ENGLAND

On another page I have jotted down some sayings of Mark’s relating why he “steadfastly refused” to bull the French and Italian literary markets. That in England it was different, goes without saying, and George Moore once explained Mark’s English popularity to me.

“It’s his peculiar power of presenting pathetic situations without slush,” insisted “the last Victorian” in his manner of finality.

Mark was visibly tickled when I read the Moore estimate from the cuff on which I had jotted it down.

He pondered a short while on “the adjectives,” then drawled slowly: “The English are good sports, you know.”

Here are a few more opinions of English men of letters which I gathered off and on.

Davison Dalziel, M. P., editor of “The Standard,” London: “I agree with ‘The Spectator’ that Mark Twain is the most popular writer in the English tongue because he added more plentifully and more generously to the gayety of the empire of our language than any other author, living or dead.”

Moberly Bell, late editor of “The Times,” London (in winter of 1899): “Mark Twain succeeded with us because he is a fearless upholder of all that is clean, honest, noble and straightforward in letters as well as in life. He once told me that he ‘qualified as the first yellow journalist.’ I wish to God he had remained the first and only one.”

That was before Mr. Bell negotiated for the sale of “The Times” to Lord Northcliffe.

William Heinemann, the late famous London publisher, who could never get hold of any of Mark Twain’s books for publication:

“An author as well beloved as he is popular and famous. Wit, scholar, orator, millionaire perhaps” (that was before the Webster period), “yet I have seen a letter of his in which he stated point blank: ‘I would rather be a pilot than anything else in the world,’ and that letter was penned after two hundred thousand copies of ‘Innocents Abroad’ had been sold.”

WHY MARK WAS UNCOMFORTABLE IN THE KING OF SWEDEN’S PRESENCE

“And how did you like the King of Sweden?” I heard Lord Roberts ask Clemens at the Army and Navy Club, one afternoon.

“Well, frankly, if I must suffer myself to have intercourse with kings, I prefer the Prince of Wales,” replied Mark.

Then somebody told a story about the Swedish Majesty’s last sojourn in Norway. There, at a railway station, Oscar ran against a crusty old farmer who thought himself a lot better than a mere king and kept his hat on.

“Don’t you know enough to bare your head in the presence of the King?” demanded Oscar.

“You bare your head and I’ll bare mine,” replied the farmer. “My family has been here a great many hundred years longer than yours.”

Thereupon Oscar got so enraged he knocked the farmer’s hat off with a sweep of his cane and if bystanders hadn’t interfered the King would have been pummeled “handsome” then and there.

“I am glad I doffed my hat before Oscar came in,” said Mark.

MARK’S IDEA OF HIGH ART

“This here earth is governed like a military despoty,” said Mark Twain when we were sitting outside a Ringstrasse restaurant in Vienna one afternoon. He was eyeing the procession of army officers, with pretty girls upon their arms, passing to and fro.

“And if you had the ordering of things, would your soul have meandered into one of these jackanapes in monkey jackets and corsets, and czackos and busbies and things?” inquired Susan, the wit’s witty young daughter.

“No, darling, but I would have loved to live in the time of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, the best dressed period of the world. You know I like color and flummery and all such things--I was born red-headed--maybe that accounts for my passion for the gorgeous and ornamental.”

“Tell the company about the riot of colors you delight in,” said Susan.

“I saw it only once,” replied Mark, “and it was rather uncomfortable, even painful, to the other creature, namely, a tortoise-shell cat that accidentally had dropped into a tomato stew. As pussy tried to get out, pawing like the baby after the Ivory soap, there was a display of rainbows, spectrums, chromatics, prisms, pigments, and plain everyday paints and stains such as I have run across in a few Italian picture galleries only.”

He picked up a copy of the “New York Herald,” lying on the table. “There’s our friend George in New York,” he said, “having more trouble with that pesky French brother-in-law of his. The little Paris fortune hunter has already cost his wife’s estate fifteen or twenty million francs and--no returns outside of a few babies. Yet French brother-in-law could make a tall income if he were put to ‘work right,’ as they say in the wild and woolly, for he has a most tremendous eye for color effects, that chap. If he were my brother-in-law, I would starve the cuss into becoming a man-milliner, the first of the world. That’s what he could be, and ought to be with clever management.

“My word,” continued Mark, “you ought to see him drive in state in the Bois de Boulogne. When I first clapped eyes on his flunkies and outriders, in their liveries, rich yet soft in color effects, I almost yearned to be one of them for the sake of their fine togs.”

Indeed, sensational clothes were always Mark’s hobby. Hence the white suits he wore in his reclining days, and the sealskin coat, with the fur outside, that adorned him in his days of youthful glory. I am quite sure he would have gone to bed in his Oxford mantle and cap if he had had more than one of each, and the passing of his red hair was a real grievance to him, he told Gyp, the French novelist whom he called, “warm, yet not torrid.”

MARK MEETS KING LEOPOLD--ALMOST

A man with a top hat, long gray whiskers and a rapid-looking young woman on his arm came out of the Metropole Hotel in Paris as we passed.

“Poor seedy beggar,” said Mark, “I wonder whether he would object to a five-sous piece?” And he put his hand in his pocket.

“Hold,” I said. “That’s King Leopold and Cleo de Merode.”

“Impossible, with that get-up,” objected Mark.

“Get-up?” I repeated. “Kings always wear frayed jeans when they travel incog.”

“In that case, go and smash the old beast. You are younger than I, and heavier, too.”

At the moment when Mark extended this thoughtful invitation, Swithins of the “New York Herald” hailed us. “Look at that chap,” he said, pointing to the person I had called his Belgian Majesty; “he is the model who sat for L’Assiette au Beurre’s caricature of King Leopold as Saint Anthony. Let’s go inside and get a copy.”

Mark bought a dozen or more to send to American friends. The caricature by D’Ostoya, if I recollect rightly, was an excellent likeness of both the King and of the beggar we had run across.

“Neither would take his hat off to Rothschild,” said Mark; “Leopold, because his Congo savageries had made him enormously rich, the beggar because he wouldn’t know the richest man from a mere million-pauper, like me.”

D’Ostoya’s cartoon represented Leopold in monk’s habit, undergoing one of the several temptations immortalized by Flaubert’s great novel. But it wasn’t the Queen of Sheba who called--rather Mrs. Fat-and-Forty minus furbelows and things. No wonder Leopold, being artistically inclined, looks annoyed.

“Watch the virtuous indignation oozing out of the old rascal,” said Mark. “The editor of the ‘Ladies’ Home Journal,’ asked to do an essay on bruisers for the ‘Police Gazette,’ couldn’t be shocked any harder.”

When I told him about an article on Leopold I had done for the “New York World,” which caused a Montreal editor, who stole it, to be jugged for libel (“Six months,” said the judge of literature), Mark grew enthusiastic.

“Was that yours?” he cried. “Good boy! Come along and I will buy you dinner at one of those places where they are ashamed to put the price of dishes à la carte because they hate to confess that they charge less than 1,000 francs a pea.”

SIZING UP OF ARISTOCRACY BY MARK

At one of the many splendid dinner parties at the house of Minister Walter Phelps, the strange case of Prince and Princess XXX of a once sovereign family had come in for a lot of discussion. Their highnesses stood convicted of hotel looting, yet on account of the imaginary coronet that topped their escutcheon, they were expected to go scot-free, “for everybody agreed that her ‘Grace’ was plainly a kleptomaniac.”

“Don’t you think so, Mr. Clemens?” demanded an old countess, coquetting with the last tooth in her mouth.

“I am no expert,” replied Mark. “All I know is that the disease attacks only the high born, as you call them, and the well-to-do.”

As on this occasion all of Mr. Phelps’ native guests were more or less “high born,” and impecunious, that remark of the Sage of a Hundred Stories put the quietus on aristocracy-propaganda during the rest of the dinner and later, in the smoking room, Mr. Phelps’ American guests were left quite to themselves.

“I hope I wasn’t rude to that blue-blooded one,” said Mark, “but excusing thievery because the thief happens to have a handle to his or her name, gets my goat on the instant. Now” (looking at me) “give us the real story of that looting business by High Lifers, so we can discuss it intelligently. Its general gist I got from the German papers, but lack details.”

I gave the latter as follows: The Prince XXX was a second son, consequently always hard up. The Princess had no money of her own either, but in place of that a soaring ambition. Food positively disagreed with her every time she took it off mere china or stoneware. She must have silver--

“Or bust--” said Mark. “I made out that much.”

Well, to get the plate and plenty of it, their highnesses engaged in a coaching tour of the Fatherland, stopping nightly at a different hotel. And at each hostelry her Grace swiped all the silver she could carry off, milk jugs, souvenir spoons and forks and dish covers, napkin rings and similar knicknacks.

“And these swipings she sent to her ancestral halls, Castle Teufelsdroekh,” added Mark, “where, under the skillful stylus of an engraver, the low hotel markings disappeared to make room for the princely coat-of-arms. But here’s the pretty how-do-you-do about the scapegoat:

“A servant caught her Grace at the game and gave information to the police. The police promptly arrested the informant as a material witness and submitted to their highnesses that, at some future date, they might graciously deign to appear in court to answer the wretch’s foul insinuations.”