September 14 Wednesday – In Kaltenleutgeben, Austria, Sam replied to John Y. MacAlister in London, whose recent invitation (not extant) to speak or preside at a meeting of the Savage Club in November had arrived. Sam couldn’t go unless business also demanded, for it took him six days to travel to London since he wouldn’t travel at night. And by no means would he preside:
“I haven’t ever presided at a dinner in my life. It’s a grand gift; I don’t possess it, & I’ve not seen six men that did. The president is usually a man who introduces a person with a hatful of compliments—& then sits down, leaving him the impossible contract of knocking a speech out of that kind of a text” [MTP].
Sam also wrote to H.H. Rogers, figuring Rogers would have been back home by now. He’d had some strange offers of fortunes, one “too agricultural,” and the other a collection of paintings (or a museum full of them, to be smuggled out of Italy), and Sam thought John D. Rockefeller might be interested in the latter to add to his benefactions for the University of Chicago. He inquired about a “cheap two- hundred dollar article” he’d sent to the Forum (“About Play-Actors”) which he supposed got lost (it ran in the Oct. issue). He then told of the atmosphere in Vienna since the assassination of Empress Elisabeth:
The Austrian Empire is hung in black. The lamentings (particularly in Hungary) are deep & universal. I have not seen anything like it since General Grant died. The French mourning for President Carnot was a mild thing compared with it.
The Bliss-Harper documents have not come yet, but I am very glad you succeeded in appeasing that conflict and arranging a bargain. I hope Bliss is in earnest, and I am persuaded that he is. He gets nothing out of the old books; so I think he believes he can mend his fortunes with the Uniform.
An artist here has painted a perfectly superb portrait of Clara, and has given it to us. And so I am going to sit to him myself. Not that I expect him to give me the result, for he couldn’t afford it; and not that I expect to buy it, for I can’t afford it; but because I want to see one stunning portrait of myself before I get homely
[MTHHR 362]. Note: Ignace Spiridon did the portraits—see Sept. 26 to Rogers.