May 12 Friday - At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria, Sam began a letter to William Dean Howells that he finished on May 13. In his first paragraph at 11 a.m. he apologized for Howells not being selected to write the Introduction for Sam’s Uniform Edition and castigated Frank Bliss for his “stupid uneconomical economy” in refusing to pay Howells’ price ($1,500).
“Damn these human beings; if I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag.”
Sam’s second paragraph was headed, “Mid-afternoon”:
Meantime I have answered a part of the accumulation of letters; for we are removing to England and Mrs. Clemens is thrashing around among the milliners & cannot attend to her household duties; & as for the children concerned they never seem to have time to answer anybody’s letters but their own, & what they are in the world for I don’t know, for they are of no practical value as far as I can see. If I could beget a typewriter—but no, our fertile days are over. —However, I mustn’t stop to play now, or I shall never get those helfiard letters answered. (That is not my spelling, but Mrs. Clemens’s: I have told her the right way a thousand times, but it does no good, she cannot remember; a person who is not born to spell cannot learn— & in time, association with that kind of people rots one’s own spelling.)
4 p.m. I have done 6 letters since; & I did a raft of them yesterday [MTHL 2: 694-9]. Note: no raft of letters from this date extant.
Sam then related his May 11 reading Howells’ current story (see entry), and interrupted the letter for 5 o’clock tea for Mr. and Mrs. Charlemagne Tower arriving with “plenty of Americans.” The Towers were leaving to take a diplomatic post in Russia. After the tea Sam returned to this letter:
715 p.m. It’s over; 30 nice people & rather creditable to the human race: Mr & Mrs Tower; the new Minister & his wife; the Secretary of Legation; the Naval (& Military) Attaché; several English ladies; an Irish lady; a Scotch lady; an English newspaper-heifer (who is a good soul—a damned good soul, in fact—but wasn’t invited & didn’t know it was a private orgy); a particularly nice young Austrian baron who wasn’t invited but came & went supposing it was the usual thing & wondered at the unusually large gathering; two other Austrians & several Americans who were also in his fix; the old Baronin Langenau, the only Austrian invited;—the rest were Americans. It made just a comfortable crowd in our parlor, with an overflow into Clara’s through the folding doors. I don’t enjoy teas, & am daily spared them by Mrs. Clemens, but this was a pleasant one. I had only one accident. The old Baronin Langenau is a person I have a strong fondness for, for we violently disagree on some subjects & as violently agree upon others: for instance, she is temperance & I am not; she has religious beliefs & feelings & I have none; (she’s a Methodist!) she is a democrat & so am I; she is woman’s rights & so am I; she is laborers’ rights & approves trade unions & strikes, & that is me. And so-on. After she was gone an English lady whom I greatly like, began to talk sharply against her for contributing money, time, labor, & public expression of favor to a strike that is on (for an 11-hour day) in the silk factories of Bohemia—& she caught me unprepared & betrayed me into over-warm argument. I am sorry; for she didn’t know anything about the subject, & I did; & one should be gentle with the ignorant, for they are the chosen of God [MTHL 2: 694-9]. Note: Baroness Langenau of Amelie (née Haffner) (1833-1902). Charlemagne Tower was replaced by Addison Harris of Indianapolis.