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.”
“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?”