Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field/More of Eugene Field's Trials in London
MORE OF EUGENE FIELD'S TRIALS IN LONDON
When I saw Gene in London about November, or the end of October, 1889, his enthusiasm for life in highbrow Grubb Street was already on the wane. Funds were low, so were his spirits, and the hopes he had set on James Gordon Bennett's enterprise had come to naught.
Mr. Bennett had been running the—or a—New York Herald in London for some time, kidding himself that London would accept a daily with so incongruous a title as a rival to the Morning Post, Daily Telegraph and so forth. And Eugene Field tried to persuade Bennett's representative, that it could be done provided that he had a column or a column and a half on the editorial page. His London Sharps and Flats were to be syndicated in America, the Chicago Daily News having the preference. And Gene hoped to get at least two hundred and fifty dollars a week out of the enterprise.
If he only had the money to go to Paris and stay there long enough to plead with James Gordon in person! But James Gordon, already a middle-aged man, continued to play the young buck and was seldom in his office for two consecutive days.
At one time, when Eugene had a hundred dollars laid aside for Paris, he received word, just in the nick of time, that the " Commodore" was off on his yacht for Monte Carlo, and would probably stay there—"until they kick him out," snapped Eugene savagely. "I hope they do."
And a week later he was much elated because they had done so. At the Eccentric Club he let the yarn loose before an audience dying with laughter.
"My unwilling Chief," he began, "James Gordon, I mean, went to the Casino in Monte Carlo in a high state of intoxication, and raised Hades with all the trimmings imaginable, until thrown out. Then, still yelling for 'the frog-eaters' blood and Monsieur Blanc's in particular, he was carried to the yacht, relieved of his clothes, and treated to a cold bath, his usual medicine under like circumstances. After the bath he put on a kimona and airs and bawled for his secretary. That individual was yanked out of bed by the ears and Bennett dictated to him a proclamation in the style of a South American general starting a revolution.
"'Monsieur Blanc and his associates,' demanded the proclamation, 'must send three of the directors to Mr. Bennett's yacht, making abject apology for the insults heaped upon Mr. Bennett. And unless this apology is forthcoming without evasion or delay, the Commodore will be pleased to blow the Casino into smithereens—he has the guns, powder and shot.'
"At nine o'clock in the morning the directors were handed this ultimatum and they had to act by eleven or prepare to meet their maker, roulettes and all.
"Naturally the directors thought it a drunken joke, but at eleven sharp, Bennett began bombarding the Casino—with blank cartridges. Hence at eleven-ten, five directors instead of three raced to the Harbor in carriages, and tumbled head over heels into a white-flagged steam-pinnace.
"Well," said Field, "Bennett kept them maneuvering around his yacht for a good fifteen minutes, while clearing decks and with much ostentation making ready for bombardment. When he finally did admit the directors, he exacted even harder terms than he had first proposed, namely: A perpetual card of admission for James Gordon Bennett and friends and, for the present, a solemn invitation to Bennett to come to the Casino and do as he liked there.
"After this,*' concluded Eugene, "I suppose these directors lent him their best grand piano for the uses he put Phil May's mother's piano to."
The above was a good story, but unprintable at the time, and it was all Eugene ever got out of Bennett. So most other London enterprises. Gene tried to float, proved barren.