“Well,” said Mark, “you sit down and copy the German while I cover you with my broad back. Should the librarian intrude, I will knock on the floor.”
Accordingly, I copied those several pages, and afterwards made the translation Mark wanted.
But for several days Mark didn’t show up at his usual haunts, and even Mr. Phelps, the American Minister in Berlin, didn’t know what had become of him. The telephone was but sparingly used then in the legation offices. However, on the third or fourth day, Mr. Phelps learned that Mark was down with bronchitis at his hotel, the Royal, and that when he wasn’t sneezing or coughing, ennui plagued him sadly.
“Well,” I said, “I have got something to liven him up,” and showed Mr. Phelps the manuscript. He advised me to send it at once to the Royal, but when I called on Mark Twain a week later and inquired sotto voce whether he had received the manuscript, he said:
“Of course not. The wife got it and you know she won’t let me read anything but tracts. I suppose she burnt our MS.”
“Well,” I said, “I have got a carbon and I will let you have that by and by.”
“Not while I’m at home,” he said, “for now she is on the scent, she will watch out. She is dreadfully afraid that some one may corrupt me.”
Mark remained indoors for over a month, the thing was forgotten, and later, when he asked for the manuscript, I couldn’t find it. Other interests came up and Schopenhauer was shelved, though at the time we made the find, Mark speculated on getting a book out of it by amplifying it with other writings of the philosopher, particularly his “Fragments of Philosophy” and his “Pandectes et Spicilegia”; the latter are still in manuscript or, at least, were in manuscript in the early nineties.
If Mark were alive to-day, how happy he would be at the discovery I made quite recently in an old chest of drawers. I had seen a movie play, showing the extravagant amounts of money one can earn by selling old manuscripts—including the rejection slips—and I started cleaning up an old piece of furniture wanted for less ideal purposes. And there I found the long lost Schopenhauer MS. According to the notes, this manuscript belonged to a parcel of handwritten essays willed by the philosopher to the Royal Library at Berlin and dealing with themes and matters that Schopenhauer hoped to work out and improve upon by and by. But death overtook him before he could exploit the problem in hand. Here follows the MS. Mark was not allowed to see:
Schopenhauer’s Tetragamy.