Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field/Mark and the Girls that Love a Lord
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."