The London theaters are almost absolutely empty these nights. Nobody goes, hardly. The managers are being ruined. The streets for miles are crammed with people waiting whole long hours for a chance glimpse of the Shah. I never saw any man “draw” like this one.
Is there any truth in the report that your bureaus are trying to get the Shah to go over there and lecture? He could get $100,000 a night here and choose his own subject.
I know a showman who has got a pill that belonged to him, and which for some reason he did not take. That showman will not take any money for that pill. He is going to travel with it. And let me tell you he will get more engagements than he can fill in a year.
IV
MARK TWAIN HOOKS THE PERSIAN OUT OF
THE ENGLISH CHANNEL
London, June 26, 1873.
I suppose I am the only member of the Shah’s family who is not wholly broken down and worn out; and, to tell the truth, there is not much of me left. If you have ever been limited to four days in Paris or Rome or Jerusalem and been “rushed” by a guide you can form a vague, far-away sort of conception of what the Shah and the rest of us have endured during these late momentous days. If this goes on we may as well get ready for the imperial inquest.
When I was called at five o’clock the other morning to go to Portsmouth, and remembered that the Shah’s incessant movements had left me only three hours’ sleep that night, nothing but a sense of duty drove me forth. A cab could not be found, nor a carriage in all London. I lost an hour and a half waiting and trying, then started on foot and lost my way; consequently I missed one train by a good while, another one by three minutes, and then had more than half an hour to spare before another would go. Most people had had a similar experience, and there was comfort in that. We started at last, and were more than three hours going seventy-two miles. We stopped at no stations, hardly, but we halted every fifteen minutes out in the woods and fields for no purpose that we could discover. Never was such an opportunity to look at scenery. There were five strangers in our car, or carriage, as the English call it, and by degrees their English reserve thawed out and they passed around their sherry and sandwiches and grew sociable.
One of them had met the Russian General of Police in St. Petersburg, and found him a queer old simple-hearted soldier, proud of his past and devoted to his master, the present Tsar, and to the memory of his predecessor, Nicholas. The English gentleman gave an instance of the old man’s simplicity which one would not expect in a chief of police. The general had been visiting London and been greatly impressed by two things there--the admirable police discipline and the museum. It transpired that the museum he referred to was not that mighty collection of marvels known to all the world as the British Museum, but Mme. Toussaud’s Waxworks Show; and in this waxwork show he had seen a figure of the Emperor Nicholas. And did it please him? Yes, as to the likeness; for it was a good likeness and a commanding figure; but--“Mon Dieu! try to fancy it, m’sieu--dressed in the uniform of a simple colonel of infantry!--the great Nicholas of Russia, my august late master, dressed in a colonel’s uniform!”
The old general could not abide that. He went to the proprietor and remonstrated against this wanton indignity. The proprietor was grieved; but it was the only Russian uniform he could get, and----
“Say no more!” said the general. “May I get you one?”