Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  Since writing the above paragraph the need of a telephone has come into evidence again. We are to pack up everything and begin a sea-voyage seventeen days hence, and must remove from this house eight days from now. Experience has taught us that if we want things done in other countries, that is one thing: in England it is another. In London you must not try to hurry the doer, you must give him time to turn around—time to turn around a good many times; time to turn around until he is dizzy; he cannot do anything until he is in condition. So we wrote the Army and Navy, three days ago, and asked them if they could send us a packer by 10 a.m. to-day. We mailed the letter at 3 p.m., within a mile of their establishment, and they probably had it before 5, for there are as many as eighteen postal-deliveries a day in their part of London. No answer the next morning. No answer the following day—yesterday. In the afternoon we telegraphed, asking an answer at our expense. No answer in the evening. All arrangements came to a standstill, and there was much of that kind of language which one only thinks, but does not utter, for piety’s sake. There being no telephone, nothing could be done. At last a written answer came this morning, dated yesterday. They might have taken the trouble to send us a telegram of a single word, and thus saved us some of our language for next occasion, but they didn’t. The letter was from their “Removals and Warehousing Department,” as per its heading, and it confessed that “the pressure of quarter-day removals” had suffocated that Department; and that it would therefore “not be practicable to send a packer until after the 1st.” A delay of thirteen days! This was serious. There being no telephone, we hitched up and took as prompt measures as we could, hurrying a messenger off to Harrod’s. If it shall turn out that Harrod’s, too, is smothered by the quarter-day pressure, what is to become of this family?

  Fifteen minutes later—1.20 p.m. Telegram from the Army and Navy Stores: “Official calling this afternoon re packing.”

  Evidently something has happened; the suffocation of the Removals Department has been relieved, and thirteen days of it have vanished in a breath. “Official” coming; probably the Admiral himself. It was not as important as all that; a common packer from the anchor-watch would answer my purpose, and be less embarrassing, for I have nothing to do a salute with, and no way to pipe him over the side. Moreover, there will be two packers and two bills, now, for of course Harrod’s man will come, he not being really expected but only invited.

  7 p.m. Telegram from the Army and Navy to say that after all, they find it impossible to spare a packer before the 1st of October.

  I shall probably have to pack that satchel myself.

  Later. Probably not. Harrod’s is going to send a competent person to-morrow, if possible; will send one anyhow, possible or impossible, if we cannot wait. We said we couldn’t, and furnished reasons, some of which were true; the others I furnished, myself. So the packer is coming in the morning.

  Next day. He came.

  That we have had this bother and worry is our own fault, and is the fruit of heedlessness. We knew that London’s “moving” days were like any other city’s moving days—paralysing to all the transporting industries; and that one must do, here, what he would do in any other city: make arrangements well in advance, or suffer when the rush comes. When London moves, it is a world moving. For a month a million wise people have been engaging packers and movers and making dates, while we the unwise, have sat still and allowed them to corner the market. We should have done the same thing in New York in a May-“moving,” and would have found the market cornered there, when we were ready to start.

  It may be that we have imported the World-Provider since I have been away from home. I hope so, for he is a public benefactor, and a trustworthy one.

  He is seldom “out” of anything; his goods are worth but a shade more than he asks for them; his time-limited things, such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, meats, eggs, bread, cakes, pastry, etc., are not stale, but fresh; he delivers everything at your door, and although you have to give him liberal time on your order when you are far away, it will at least arrive with certainty at the time promised—you can set your watch by his wagon. He has relieved life in London of four or five-sixths of its difficulties. After you have worn yourself out with a fortnight’s railroading around London hunting for the right country house by help of an estate-agency, and are at last in despair, you go to the Army and Navy and they look at their list and find you a Dollis Hill in fifteen minutes. Also, the World-Provider furnishes you house-servants; also, carriage, coachman, horse and harness; also, the several kinds of horse-feed; and the supply is kept up from week to week without your knowing when it happens. We have had long experience of the Army and Navy, and Harrod’s, and Whiteley’s, and have come to regard them as the best friends the helpless and improvident can have. Each country has ideas that are worth borrowing by the others, and the world-provider idea is one which I think ought to be adopted and naturalised in all great cities.

  The Army and Navy Co-operative Stores is an institution which was started by a small group of naval and military men thirty or forty years ago on a handful of capital—not as a speculation, but with the design of cheapening their current expenses. From that small seed it has grown, through its merits, to its present giant proportions and vast wealth. If the founders kept their stock they are well off now, even those who contributed but a month’s pay. The small group of stockholders of their day has expanded to twenty thousand now, and their few dozen guineas have multiplied to millions.

  I suppose it was a madman who invented the London system of indicating addresses. Obscuring them, is the exacter phrase. I suppose it must cause many cabmen and postmen to lose their reason every year. The town is a vast planless cobweb of criss-cross and helter-skelter streets which begin nowhere, end nowhere, and travel in no particular direction, but wander around aimless and indifferent. There are scores and scores of miles of them, and as a rule each of them is only three hundred yards long, and changes its name every time it turns a corner—which it is always doing. The tangle and confusion are bewildering beyond imagination; a stranger of my calibre cannot walk a quarter of a mile and find his way back again. There are eleven Queen streets, two or three dozen King streets, a library of Duke streets, and so on, and they are distributed far and wide over the town; so, if you want a particular one out of a litter of streets which bear the same name, you can go home and give it up, for you will never know where to look for it.

  In some of the streets the houses are numbered, but there are great areas where the houses are merely named—like Dollis Hill House—not numbered. Sometimes a street is called a terrace, sometimes a lane, sometimes an alley, sometimes a place, sometimes a court, sometimes a garden, sometimes a crescent, sometimes a square, sometimes a circus, sometimes an avenue, and so on—anything that can protect it from being identified. One may wander block after block down a street of dwellings which display names only—no numbers: Idlewild, Horsechestnut Hall, Leslie Villa, Hollyhock Retreat, The Elms, The Oaks, The Pines, Windermere, Strawberry Cottage, Inglenook, Seafield House, Sanctified Rest, and so on. The postman has to learn all those names. Thousands of new ones are added annually. The cabman is worse off than the postman, for he has to know the whole town. He really does know it, though this seems unbelievable when one examines the map of London. To know it as he knows it must require a smart memory and an unusually retentive one, for there must be regions of it which he hardly sees twice a year. It is said that he cannot get a license until he has passed an examination. This must of course be so—one would know that, without being told it. I suppose that few pass and many fail. The cabman does know London, but he can never know the whole of its details—that is beyond the human possibilities. For instance, there are several cabmen who get into trouble when they try to find No. 7 Cromwell Gardens. They drive patiently up and down that great avenue hunting for No. 7, but they do not find it. This is because No. 7 Cromwell Gardens is not in Cromwell Gardens at all—it is around the corner, down another street. And
when they try to find Albert Gate Mansions they are likely to fail, because that building is not in Albert Gate, it is in Knightsbridge. When they try to find Wellington Court they seek a court, quite naturally; but they are on the wrong scent, for it isn’t a court, it is a house. You must learn to pronounce names as cabmen and policemen pronounce them—otherwise you create confusion. Cromwell is a name in point. You say “2 Cromwell Houses.” The cabman looks dazed, but starts. By and by you find he is hailing other cabmen, as he goes along—asking questions evidently—and apparently not getting informing answers. Presently he stops and questions a policeman, and you put your head out and listen—noticing, at the time, that you are in a part of London which you have not seen before. The cabman tenders a name which vaguely resembles Cromwell, but is not familiar to you. The officer says there is no such place in London; then he steps forward and asks you to name the address. You say “2 Cromwell Houses.” He studies a minute, then his face lights, and he says to the driver, “He means Krumml—Krummlowzez.” In time I learned how to pronounce it properly, and was respected after that. If you wish to go to No. 9 Harley Gardens, you may start promisingly enough, but you will not arrive. You will arrive at Airley Gardens. I get this from experience. You must learn to distribute your h’s properly, then you will fare well, and have the driver’s respect, besides. It is easy and simple: you ask for Airley when you want Harley, and for Harley when you want Airley.

  Thursday, February 28, 1907

  The Thaw trial, and Stanford White’s character—Colonel Harvey’s parable concerning the case, copied from Harper’s Weekly.

  The most lurid cause célèbre of modern ages is still before the court, but the most spectacular feature of it came to an end day before yesterday. This feature was the testimony of Mrs. Thaw, the slender and illustriously beautiful girl-wife of young Thaw, the fast youth who is charged with the murder of the gifted and famous architect, Stanford White. Daily, for many days, the girl has been under fire on the witness-stand, and hour after hour she has answered the questions of the lawyers, with the result that the whole Christian world is now as intimately acquainted with the past six years and a half of her life as she is herself. From the time that she was fifteen and a half, and was setting all the scoundrels of New York crazy with her matchless beauty, until now, when she is twenty-two, all the details of her comings and her goings have gone into print; in all the Christian communities of the globe these details have appeared daily in interminable cablegrams and Associated Press dispatches, and have been devoured by everybody, and commented upon by all the newspapers; no such banquet of cowardly crime and mephitic filth has ever before been spread before the world; the like banquets have always been local, before, and hardly heard of outside of the local limits—but all the kings and emperors, all the high and all the low, all the clean and all the unclean, have fed at this horrible Thaw banquet and passed their plates for more.

  The girl’s testimony exposes six years of Stanford White’s career also. The witness charges the middle-aged architect—who was rich, of the first renown in his profession, and possessed of a middle-aged wife and a grown-up son—with eagerly and diligently and ravenously and remorselessly hunting young girls to their destruction. These facts have been well known in New York for many years, but they have never been openly proclaimed until now. On the witness-stand, in the hearing of a court room crowded with men, the girl told in the minutest detail the history of White’s pursuit of her, even down to the particulars of his atrocious victory—a victory whose particulars might well be said to be unprintable; yet, with the exception of four abnormally hideous descriptive sentences, they were put in type in the daily newspapers and exhibited to the world.

  New York has known for years that the highly educated and elaborately accomplished Stanford White was a shameless and pitiless wild beast disguised as a human being; and few, if any, have doubted that he ought to have been butchered long ago, by some kindly friend of the human race.

  Under our infamous laws the seducer is not punished, and is not even disgraced, but his victim and all her family and kindred are smirched with a stain which is permanent—a stain which the years cannot remove, nor even modify. Our laws break the hearts and ruin the lives of the victim and of her people, and let the seducer go free. I am not of a harsh nature—I am the reverse of that—and yet if I could have my way the seducer should be flayed alive in the middle of the public plaza, with all the world to look on.

  I have come into casual contact with Stanford White, now and then, in the course of the past fifteen or twenty years. He had a very hearty and breezy way with him, and he had the reputation of being limitlessly generous—toward men—and kindly, accommodating, and free-handed with his money—toward men; but he was never charged with having in his composition a single rag of pity for an unfriended woman. Notwithstanding his high and jovial spirits and his cordial ways, there was a subtle something about him that was repellent. I was not the only one that felt this; in times past others have mentioned this feeling to me. That splendid human being, Tom Reed, was one of these. When we were yachting in the West Indies with Henry Rogers several years ago, and were in the great lobby of the hotel in Nassau one day, the majestic figure of Stanford White appeared among the crowd, and he marched past with his gray-haired wife on his arm. Tom Reed said,

  “He ranks as a good fellow, but I feel the dank air of the charnel-house when he goes by.”

  The question now before the country is, ought the newspapers to be allowed to print the dreadful particulars of such a trial as the one which I have been speaking of? Good arguments have been put forth on both sides, and I have read them thoughtfully, but I find myself unable to settle upon an opinion as yet. Therefore, for lack of a view of my own, I will here transfer from Harper’s Weekly Colonel Harvey’s parable, which I like because it justly and properly characterizes Stanford White.

  The Man Who Ate Babies

  THE President of the United States thinks that the papers that give “the full, disgusting particulars of the THAW case” ought not to be admitted to the mails. Perhaps not. Perhaps the country at large does not need all the particulars, but in our judgment New York does need most of them, and it would be not a gain, but an injury, to morals if the newspapers were restrained from printing them.

  We will try to explain.

  Once there was a man who had the incomparable misfortune to be afflicted with a mania for eating babies. He was an extraordinary man, of astonishing vigor, of remarkable talents, of many engaging qualities, and of prodigious industry. He had education and social position; he could earn plenty of money; and the diligent exercise of his intellectual gifts made him valuable to society. There was nothing within reasonable reach of a man of his profession which he could not have, but over what should have been a splendid career hung always the shadow of his remarkable propensity. The precise dimensions and particulars of it were not definitely known to many persons. A few men who had a mania like his doubtless knew absolutely; a good many other men knew well enough; and there was practically a public property in the knowledge that he had, and gratified, cannibalistic inclinations of much greater intensity and more curious scope than those that commonly obtained among careless men. There was an honest prejudice against him. Persons of considerable indulgence to eccentricities of deportment disliked to be in the same room with him. Sensitive stomachs instinctively rose against him. Yet he was tolerated, for, after all, nobody had ever seen him eat a baby.

  One day another man—quite a worthless person—knocked him on the head, and let his pitiable spirit escape from its body. It made a great stir, for the man who was killed was very widely known, and his assailant was also notorious. There followed profuse discussion of the dead man’s character, qualities, and achievements. His record was assailed, but it was also warmly extenuated. When it was averred that he was an ogre, the retort was that he was not a materially worse ogre than a lot of other men, and that we must take men as we find them, and make special
allowances for men of talent. When it was whispered that he ate babies the answer was that that was absurd; that whatever his failings, he was the helpfulest, best-natured man in the world, and particularly fond of children and good to them; and that if he ever did eat babies he was always careful where he got them, avoiding the nurseries of his acquaintances, and selecting common babies of ordinary stock, who were born to be eaten, anyway, and would never be missed, and who, besides, were in many cases not so young as they made out.