From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book
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Title: From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book
Author: John Kendrick Bangs
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FROM PILLAR TO POST
[Illustration: "I shall have to borrow some of your manly
courage to carry me through."]
FROM PILLAR TO POST
Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book
by
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
Author of "The House-Boat on the Styx," etc.
With Illustrations by Jno. R. Neill
[Illustration]
New York
The Century Co.
1916
Copyright, 1916, by
The Century Co.
Copyright, 1915, by
Associated Sunday Magazines Incorporated
Published, March, 1916
TO
THAT WISE COUNSELLOR
AND STERLING FRIEND
J. HENRY HARPER
PREFATORY NOTE
I could not let these random notes of a delightful experience go forth
into the world without expressing in some way my deep appreciation of
the valued services rendered me in my ten years of platform work by my
friends of the Lyceum Bureaus. In office and in the field they have
labored strenuously, often affectionately, and always loyally, on my
behalf. But for their interest some of the most cherished experiences of
my life would have been beyond my reach. If sometimes in their zeal to
keep me busy they have booked me in Winnipeg on Monday night, in New
Orleans on Tuesday night, with little side-trips to San Diego,
California, and Presque Isle, Maine, on Wednesday and Thursday, not to
mention grand finales at Omaha and Key West on Friday and Saturday, I
view that sequence rather as a tribute to my agility than as a matter to
be unduly captious about. It is a manifestation of a confidence in my
powers to overcome the limitations of time and space that I think upon
with an expanding head, if not with a swelling heart, and whether this
required annihilation of distance has been wholly agreeable or not it
has enabled me to see more of my own country than I otherwise could have
seen, and to that extent, I hope, has made a better American of me.
Wherefore before beginning our ramble from Pillar to Post I record here
in testimony of my gratitude to them the names of Arthur C. Coit, and
Louis J. Alber, of the Coit Lyceum Bureau of Cleveland, Ohio; of Frank
A. Morgan, of the Mutual Lyceum Bureau, of Chicago; of Kenneth M. White,
of the White Entertainment Bureau of Boston; of S. Russell Bridges, of
the Alkahest Lyceum System of Atlanta, Georgia; of J. B. Pond, Jr., and
that tried friend both in the Lyceum field and out of it, William C.
Glass, of the J. B. Pond Lyceum Bureau of New York.
Thanks are due to the publishers of _Every Week_ for courtesies
extended, and finally I desire to inscribe a word of affectionate esteem
for my friends, J. Thomson Willing, and that inspiring editorial guide
and mentor, William A. Taylor, of the Associated Sunday Magazines, under
whose genial direction these papers were first presented to the public.
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I GETTING USED TO IT 3
II SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY 23
III GETTING THE LEVEL 40
IV THE GOOD SAMARITAN 61
V A VAGRANT POET 83
VI BACK-HANDED COMPLIMENTS 98
VII FRIENDS OF THE ROAD 116
VIII CHAIRMEN I HAVE MET 134
IX CHANCE ACQUAINTANCES 155
X HUMORS OF THE ROAD 175
XI MINE HOST 196
XII PERILS OF THE PLATFORM 220
XIII EMBARRASSING MOMENTS 243
XIV "SLINGS AND ARROWS" 266
XV EMERGENCIES 290
XVI A PIONEER MANAGER 318
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
"I shall have to borrow some of your manly courage
to carry me through" _Frontispiece_
"It was indeed a pretty sight to me!" 21
"Yes, and you are fifty years behind us in every other respect!" 28
I knew that I had met a "Southern Gentleman" 31
"The consciously superior person cannot last long on the lecture
platform" 43
"If there's anything you want to know about Darwin's Origin of
Species, you ask me!" 60
"I cannot say that his first remark was wholly cordial" 70
"I'm an Ohio man, and I'll cash the check for you on your looks" 79
In the last stages of poverty 85
"Suffering Centipedes!" he cried. "That man must have been
brought up on the bottle!" 93
"The lecturer must deliver the goods!" 100
"They may 'go to sleep in his face'" 103
"I have been after 'em, suh; but it ain't no use" 122
"These men on the engines are great characters" 130
"Pile it on so thick that the lecturer has to struggle hard
to make good" 136
"The last I saw of my kindly host" 145
"When he got through I could have qualified for a college degree
on the subject of straw hats" 162
"She ast me was you so very comical," said he 171
"If yo're dealin' in brains, hit ain't likely yo' got enough
to gib any away" 185
"A Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Locomotives would
have had them indicted then and there" 191
"If it were possible to sweep a room clean with a welcoming
wave of the hand--" 199
"Cannot sleep comfortably between the sheets of William James's
pragmatic philosophy, dry as they are" 202
"If he had shifted his chewing gum to the other side, we should
have plunged into the river" 227
"Laughter where tears would have been more appropriate" 239
"I found the building wholly dark" 247
"But what was the point of this little joke last night?" 264
"My grinning countenance stared back at me unflinchingly" 276
"I was the sudden recipient of a blow on top of my head" 283
"A craving to settle lingering doubts as to my right
to be there" 298
FROM PILLAR TO POST
I
GETTING USED TO IT
"I cannot imagine a more disagreeable way of qualifying for the income
tax," said one of America's most noted after-dinner speakers to me when
at a chance meeting he and I were discussing the joys and woes of the
lecture platform. I must admit that in a way I sympathized with him; for
I knew something of the sufferings endured for days and nights prior to
one's own public appearance as an after-dinner or platform speaker.
There was a time many years ago, upon which I look back with wonder that
I ever came through it without nervous prostration, when I suffered
those selfsame mental agonies as the hour approached for the fulfilment
of one of those rash promises which men fond of the sound of their own
voices make months in advance to those subtle flatterers who would lure
them from the easy solitudes of silence into the uneasy limelight of
after-dinner oratory. Not without reason has a certain wit, whose name
is unfortunately lost to fame, referred to the chairs behind the guest
table on the raised platform at revelries of this nature as "The Seats
of the Mighty and Miserable."
These sufferings involve a loss of appetite for days in advance of the
event; a complete derangement of the nervous system, with no chance of
recovery for at least ten days preceding the emergent hour, since sleep
either refuses to come to one's relief altogether, or coming brings in
its train a species of nerve-racking dream which leaves the last estate
of the weary slumberer worse than the first. The complication is far
more difficult to handle than that involved in the maturity of a
promissory note which one is unable to meet; for there are conditions
under which a tender-hearted creditor will permit a renewal of the
latter sort of obligation, and this thought provides some sort of rift
in the cloud of a debtor's despair.
But in the matter of public speaking there is no such comforting
possibility. Nothing short of inglorious flight, painful accident, or
serious illness, can save the signer of that promissory note for
twenty-five hundred personally conducted after-dinner words from being
called upon to pay in full the moment the note falls due. He can't even
plead to be permitted the payment of one paragraph on account, and the
balance in thirty days.
The contract can neither be evaded, postponed, nor sublet. It is then or
never with him, and while no great harm would come to the world if
ninety-nine and seven-eighths per cent. of the after-dinner speeches of
the ages had gone unspoken, no man of the right, forward-looking,
upstanding sort, whether his speeches be good, bad, or, like the most of
them, merely indifferent, may wilfully or comfortably permit a promise
of that nature to go to protest.
Yes, I sympathized with that excellent gentleman. I have known him to
take to his bed three days before the ordeal, tremblingly approach the
banquet board, rise to his feet, his nerves taut as a G string, his
knees quaking in the merciful seclusion of the regions under the table,
and then, with hardly a glimmering of consciousness of what he was doing
or saying, his whole being thrilled with terror, acquit himself
brilliantly, to return home at the conclusion of his trial physically
and nervously prostrated.
* * * * *
One of the happiest recollections of my platform work, nevertheless, had
to do with just such a shivering, quivering condition. It was many years
ago--back in the mid-'90's of the last century, that so-called crazy
end-of-the-century period, which inspired Max Nordau's depressing
treatise on Degeneracy, and yet now seems so gloriously sane in contrast
to what is going on in the world at the present time.
In some mysterious fashion I had succeeded in writing what the literary
world is pleased to term a "best seller," and was in consequence
enjoying a taste of that notoriety which inexperienced youth so often
confounds with immortality. One result was a tolerably persistent demand
that I exhibit myself at one of those then popular functions known as
Authors' Readings. This was a form of entertainment almost as
barbarically cruel as those ancient ceremonies in which Christian
martyrs were thrown into an arena to demonstrate their powers in
combatting irritated tigers, and such other blood-thirsty beasts of the
jungle as the ingenious fancy of the management might suggest. It was,
in a manner of speaking, a sort of Literary Hagenbeck Show, whither the
curious among the readers of the day were lured in sweet Charity's name
by the promise of a personal performance by real literary lions, with an
occasional wild goose or two wearing temporarily the gorgeous plumage of
the Birds of Parnassus, thrown in to make the program longer.
Invited to take part in one of these affairs, and feeling that for
posterity's sake it was my duty to rivet my firm grasp upon Fame by
keeping such company as my remotest great-grandchild could wish to have
me known by, I carelessly accepted as if it were easy to comply, and all
in the day's work of a new sun dawning upon the horizon of letters.
But when the fateful evening arrived a "change came o'er the spirit of
my dream." Two dread situations arose which bade fair to drive me either
into the nearest sanatorium, or to the obscurity of the deepest
available jungle. Had I yielded to my immediate impulse, I should have
flown as far afield as the Virginia negro who, upon being advised to
leave town lest he suffer certain extreme penalties for his misdeeds,
replied that he was "gwine, an' gwine so fur it'll cost nine dollars to
send a postal card back."
On one side of the curtain at the great metropolitan hall where the
Readings were to be held sat nearly three thousand hungry readers,
waiting to see six unhappy authors prove whether or no they could read
their own productions and survive; and on the other side of the curtain
were five real Immortals and my sorely agitated self. My fellow
sufferers that night were Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, Dr. Henry Van Dyke,
William Dean Howells, the lamented Frank R. Stockton, and the ever
unforgettable Mrs. Julia Ward Howe.
It was rather godlike company for a mere mortal like myself, and as I
gazed upon them I realized, perhaps for the first time, the magnificent
distances that lie between Yonkers-on-Hudson and Parnassus-by-Helicon.
Frozen from heel to toe by the thought of having to appear before so
vast and critical an audience, the complete refrigeration of my nervous
system was accomplished by the thought of even temporary association
with those fixed stars in the firmament of American Letters. Instead of
a burning torch on the heights of Olympus, I felt myself more of a
possible cinder in the public eye. One might be willing to appear before
a Court of Literary Justice in the company of any one of them, but to
assume equality with five such household words all at once, and
especially before an audience many of whose members had from time
immemorial known me as "Johnny"--well, to speak with frankness, it got
on my nerves.
My condition was like that foreshadowed by a good old neighbor of mine
up on the coast of Maine, who when I asked him one morning if he ever
felt nervous when the thunder was roaring, and the lightning was
striking viciously, replied, "No, I hain't never felt nervous: _I'm jest
plain dam skeert to death!_" If the exits from the stage had not been
guarded, I should have fled; but there was no escape, and while I
awaited my turn to go out upon the platform I paced the back of the
stage, concealed from the public gaze by a drop scene, shaking from head
to foot with a nervous chill. I can scarcely even now bring myself to
believe that there was a seismograph anywhere between the northern and
southern poles so callous as to fail to register my vibrations.
It became evident as the moment approached that I should be utterly
unable to go out upon the platform and do anything but dance: not after
the graceful manner of Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle, but of Saint Vitus
himself. To have held a book, even so light a one as my own, in my
shaking hand would have been physically impossible, and then, just as I
was about to seek out the chairman of the committee of arrangements, and
plead a sudden stroke of some sort, I felt a womanly arm thrust through
my own, and a soft white hand was laid gently and soothingly upon my
wrist. I glanced to my side, and there stood Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, her
lovely eyes full of sympathy, touched with a joyous reassuring twinkle.
"Oh, Mr. Bangs," said she, with a slight catch and tremor in her voice,
"do you know I am so nervous about going out before all those people
to-night that I really believe I shall have to borrow some of your manly
courage and strength to carry me through!"
A marvelous transformation of nervous attitude was the immediate result,
a determination to rush to the aid of a lady flying a signal of distress
summoning all my latent courage to her cause. A realization of the
lovely tactfulness of her approach and its true significance, and the
prompt response of my sense of humor, not yet quite dead, to the exact
facts of the situation, made a man of me for the time being--a man who
would dare the undarable, attempt the unattainable, and if need be, as
the eloquent African preacher once observed, "onscrew the onscrutable."
Nervousness, cowardice, muscular vibrations, and all disappeared like
the mists of the night before the radiance of the dawn in the face of
that gracious woman's tactful humor, and later on I went forth to my
doom so brazenly, and smiling so confidently, that one critic in the
next morning's newspaper intimated without much subtlety of phrasing
that I enjoyed myself far more than my audience did.
It would be too much to say that Mrs. Howe's timely intervention on my
behalf effected a permanent cure of my nervousness in platform work; but
it has helped me much to overcome it; for many a time since, when
through sheer weariness, or for some purely psychological reason, I have
approached my work with uneasy forebodings, the memory of that
delightful incident has come back to me, and I have invariably found
relief from my fears in the smile which it never fails to bring to my
lips, and to my spirit as well.
I do not know that it would be a good thing for any public speaker ever
to approach the emergent hour with entire assurance and utterly
calloused nerves. Such a condition might well bespeak an indifference to
the work in hand which would result either in a purely mechanical
delivery, or one so careless as to destroy the effect of the lecturer's
most valuable asset--a sympathetic personality. I recall far back in my
college days, in the early '80's of the last century, meeting at one of
my fraternity conventions that inspiring publicist, the late Senator
Frye of Maine. In the course of a pleasant chat, having myself to appear
before the convention with a committee report the following morning, and
feeling a trifle uncertain as to how I was going to "come through," I
asked the senator if he was ever a victim to nervousness when making a
public address, and his answer was very suggestive.
"Always, my lad," said he, "always! I have been making public speeches
off and on now for twenty-five or thirty years, and even to-day when I
rise up to speak in the United States Senate, or on the stump, my knees
shake a little under me. And I'm glad they do, Son," he went on
significantly; "for if they didn't, I should begin to feel that the days
of my usefulness were over, for it would mean that I really didn't care
whether I got through safely or not."
So it was that up to a certain point I sympathized with my friend the
distinguished after-dinner speaker when he intimated that the lecture
platform was no bed of roses. For one of his nervous organization and
temperament it would be impossible. It would make a nervous wreck of him
in a short while, and in the end would shorten his life, even as it has
shortened the span of many another robust spirit; such as the late
Alfred Tennyson Dickens, for instance, who in very truth succumbed to
the exactions of travel and of a lovely hospitality that he knew not how
to resist.
But for myself there is so much in the work that is inspiring, so much
that is pleasing in the human relationships it makes possible, that but
for the discomforts of travel I could really feed upon it spiritually,
and seek no happier diet. I defy any man to be a pessimist on the
subject of American character after a season or two on the lecture
platform; provided of course that he is a reasonably sympathetic man,
and is so constituted in matters social that he is what the politicians
call a "good mixer."
To the man who is not interested in the human animal, and insists upon
judging all men by his own rigid and narrow standards, measuring souls
by a yardstick, as it were, the work can never be a joy; but if he is
broad enough to take people as he finds them, looking for the good that
lies inherent in every human being, and judging them by the measure of
their capacity to become what they were designed to be, and are honestly
trying to be, then he will find it full of a living and a loving
interest almost equal to that of the "joy forever."
Pasted in my spiritual hat is a little rime by one whose name modesty
forbids my mentioning, running:
I can't be what Shakespeare was,
I can't do what great folks does;
But, by Ginger, I can be
ME!
And among the folks that love me
Nothin' more's expected of me.
The wandering platform speaker who will heed the intimations of that
little rime, and seize the friendships in kind that surely await his
coming in all parts of this great, genial country of ours, will find a
wondrous store of happiness ready to his hand. If in addition to this he
will cultivate the habit of looking for good in unpromising places, and
of resolutely refusing to admit the power of small irritations to
destroy his peace of mind, he will get along nicely. The latter of
course requires resolution of a kind that is persistent in the face of
unremitting annoyances. To say that these annoyances do not exist would
be idle; but not half so idle as the act of giving them controlling
importance in the making or the unmaking of a day's happiness.
The sooner one who travels the Platform Path learns to suspend judgment
as to his fellow beings, and to suspect the fallacy of the obvious, the
better it will be for him, and for his personal comfort. The first
conspicuous lesson I had in this particular was out in Arizona on my
first extended tour in our wonderful West in 1906. I found myself one
afternoon on my way from Los Angeles to Phoenix. After having satisfied
the inner man with an excellent Fred Harvey luncheon--an edible oasis
always in a desert of indigestibility--I had retired to the smoking car
for that spiritual refreshment which comes from watching the smoke
wreaths curl upward from the end of a good cigar.
Unhappily for the quality of that refreshment, I was no sooner seated in
the smoking room that I perceived that I was surrounded by men who,
judging by surface indications, were hopeless vulgarians. Among them
were three especially whose conversation was even lower than their
brows. I think I can best describe their conversation by saying that in
all probability Boccaccio's lady companions out Fiesole way, at the time
of the plague that drove the Florentine Four Hundred beyond the city
limits, would have fled blushingly before it, taking refuge by
preference in the pure, undefiled Rolloisms of the Decameron itself;
while poor old Rabelais, not always a master of reticence in things
better left unsaid, would, I am sure, have joined a literary branch of
the I. W. W. in sheer rebellion, rather than sully the refinement of his
pen by taking down any part of it.
One has to listen to a great deal of this sort of thing en route, and
pending the discovery of some kind of vocal silencer that shall render
such communications as noiseless as they are corrupting to good manners,
or a portable muffler which the unwilling listener may place over his
ears, the wandering platform performer who has not yet reached a point
where he can give up his cigar and be happy must needs endure them.
Indeed he is doing well if he is not lured into a shamefaced enjoyment
of such talk; for it must be admitted that some of the traveling
companions one meets thus by chance have rare powers as story-tellers,
and pour forth at times most objectionable periods with a smiling
enthusiasm almost fetching enough to tempt a Simeon Stylites down from
the top of his pillar into the lower regions of their alluring good
fellowship.
Neither a prig nor a prude am I; but on this particular occasion the
gross results of the conversation were so very gross as to preclude the
possibility of there being any "net proceeds" of value, and I fled.
On returning to my place in the sleeper I noticed in the section
directly across the aisle a handsome Englishwoman, traveling with no
other companion than a little daughter, a child of about three and a
half years of happy, bubbling youth. The little one was seated on her
mother's lap, and was enjoying a "let's pretend" drive across country,
using the maternal lorgnette chain in lieu of the ribbons wherewith to
guide her imaginary steeds.
An hour passed, when a boisterous laugh from the rear of the car
indicated the approach of the three barbarians of the smoker, who to my
disgust a moment later settled themselves in the section directly in
front of mine, and to my dismay began apparently to take a greater
interest in the lady across the aisle than the ordinary usages of polite
human intercourse warranted, lacking a formal introduction.
I have never posed as a Squire of Dames, and I have a wholesome distaste
for such troubles as an unseeing eye enables a man to avoid; but the
intrusion of these Goths, not to say Vandals, upon the lady's right to
travel unmolested was so obvious that I couldn't help seeing and
inwardly resenting it. The woman herself treated the situation with
becoming coolness and dignity, showing only by a slight change of color,
and now and then a vexed biting of the lips, that she noticed it at
all; but the cooler she became the more strenuous became the efforts of
the barbarians to "scrape an acquaintance."
I held an inward debate with myself as to my duty in the premises. I did
not care to get into a row; but the ogling soon became so pronounced
that it really seemed necessary to interfere. I reached out my hand to
ring for such reinforcements as the porter and the conductor might be
able to bring to our assistance, when to my astonishment the worst
offender of the three rose from his seat, and stepped quickly to the
lady's side--and then there was revealed to me the marvelous wisdom of
the old injunction, "Judge not, that ye be not judged"; for the supposed
ruffian, whom I would a moment before have willingly, and with seeming
justification, thrown bodily from the train, with the manner of a
Chesterfield in the rough lifted his hat and spoke.
"You will excuse me for speaking to you, ma'am," he said, and there was
a wistful smile on his lips and a tenderness in his eye worthy of a
seemingly better cause, "but I'm--I'm what they call a drummer, a
traveling man, and I've been away from home for three months. I've got
a little girl of my own at home about the same age as this kid of yours,
and I tell you, ma'am, you'd ease off an awful case of homesickness if
you'd let me play with the little lady just for a few minutes."
The mother's heart seemed to go right out to him, as did mine also. She
smiled graciously, and handed over her little daughter to the tender
mercies of that group whose presence I had fled only a short while
before--and for the rest of the afternoon that Pullman sleeper was
transformed into a particularly bright and joyous nursery that echoed
and reechoed to the merry laughter of happy childhood.
If there is an animal of any kind in the zoos of commerce that those men
did not impersonate during the next two or three hours I do not know its
name, the especially objectionable barbarian transforming himself
instantly on demand into an elephant, a yak, a roaring lion, a tiger, or
a leopard changing its spots as actively as a flea, and all with a
graceful facility that Proteus himself might well have envied. And
later, when night fell, and weariness came with it, in the dusk of the
twilight it was indeed a pretty sight to me, and a sight that smote
somewhat upon my conscience for my over-ready contempt of the earlier
afternoon, when my gaze fell upon the figure of an exhausted drummer,
his eyes half-closed, sleepily humming a tender lullaby to a tired
little golden-haired stranger who lay cuddled up in his arms, fast
asleep, with her head upon his breast.
[Illustration: "It was indeed a pretty sight to me!"]
I like to think that that little incident was a valuable contribution
to my education in the science of brotherhood. It has not perhaps
produced in my soul a larger tolerance of the intolerable in casual
conversation, but it has served to warn me against the dangers of snap
judgments, and has certainly broadened my sympathies in respect to my
fellow man in my chance meetings with him upon the highways and byways
of life, whence sometimes, in the loneliness of my wanderings, I have
gathered much comfort, and reaped harvests in friendliness which
otherwise I might have lost.
II
SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY
In traveling about the country, and especially in the South, I have been
impressed with the wisdom of the character in Owen Wister's delightful
story of "The Virginian," who when another man applied an unspeakable
name to him leveled a revolver in the speaker's face, and said, "When
you call me that, say it with a smile!" (I quote from memory.) A moment
on the road is made cheerful or difficult by the manner in which things
are said, and the wanderer's homesickness is either relieved or deepened
by the manner of a chance remark, which brings cheer if it be smiling,
and a deeper sense of loneliness if it be otherwise.
Throughout the South I have never felt quite so far away from home as in
some parts of New England less than a hundred miles from my own
rooftree, and I think that this is due largely to the positive effort on
the part of the average Southern man or woman to maintain the
traditional courtesy and hospitality of the South toward the stranger
within its gates. It is only semi-occasionally that one finds in some
sour-natured relic of other days any other attitude than that of smiling
welcome, and even with the thermometer ranging close to the zero mark I
have learned why the Southland is in spirit anyhow the "Land of Roses."
It must be admitted, however, that when the departure from the attitude
of cordiality is made it is done thoroughly, and with a sort of reckless
truculence which the wary traveler will be wise to ascribe solely to its
individual source.
In the winter and spring of 1913 there was a great deal of work cut out
for me in the Southern territory, and during my travels there, which
involved the crossing and recrossing of every State in the section
except Kentucky, from the Atlantic coast to the Mexican border, I
encountered much in the way of human experience that is delightful to
remember, and very little that I would rather forget. It was upon this
trip that two incidents occurred which showed very clearly the
difference between a cutting retort smilingly administered and that
other kind of peculiarly rasping repartee, born of a soured nature that
has confirmed its acid qualities by pickling itself in a mixture of
equal parts of gloomy self-sympathy over fancied wrongs, and--well, not
grape juice.
There is a kind of tonic dispensed in certain of our prohibition States
by licensed drugstores and carried by suffering patients in small black
bottles, secreted in their hip pockets, like deadly weapons--which
indeed they are (whence, possibly, we get the term "hipped" as
descriptive of the ailment of the sufferer)--which does not exactly
mellow the disposition of the consumer, whatever glow it may impart to
his countenance.
One morning I found myself on my way from Natchitoches, in Louisiana, a
lovely survival of a picturesque old French trading post, a perfect home
of roses, both human and floral, which will ever remain a garden spot in
my memory, to Shreveport. It was in the middle of May, and the whole
country was a delight to the eye, with its lovely greens and lush spring
coloring. I was returning from a lecture before the State Normal School,
and while sitting in the smoking car enjoying my weed was introduced to
a gentleman (I use the word carelessly, and without positive
conviction) whom everybody had been calling "Judge." I am glad to say
that I did not catch his last name. I do not even know whether or not he
was really a judge, or, if he were, what he was a judge of. He reminded
me more of the judges I have read of in fictional humor than any I have
ever seen on the bench, and from his general attitude toward his fellows
on the train I gained a tolerably clean-cut impression that he tried his
"cases" in solitary state, rather than in that more open fashion which
is such a bad example to the young, and productive of that ruinously
extravagant disease known as "treating." I may be doing the man an
injustice, but I am none the less trying to sketch him as I saw him. He
had the manner and manners of the solitary reveler, and the generally
"oily," but not suave, quality of his makeup confirmed my impression
that any love of temperance he might manifest was purely academic, or,
as one of our leading statesmen might put it, "largely psychological."
Desirous of starting things along pleasantly after my introduction to
the judge, I remarked upon the marvelous beauty of the country.
"Everything is beautifully green about here," I said. "It is a positive
pleasure to look out on those lovely fields."
"Glad you like 'em," said the judge, helping himself to a generous
mouthful of tobacco.
"Well, you see," said I, "I come from Maine, Judge, and I am
particularly fond of the spring, and we don't get ours until late. I
guess," I added, "that in respect to that we are about a month and a
half behind you people down here."
"Yes," said he explosively, "_and, by God! you are fifty years behind us
in every other respect!_"
It was a kindly and tactful remark, and I was duly edified. If he had
said it smilingly, I should have been happier, and would have been
inclined to enter upon a half-hour of jovial banter on the subject of
the respective merits of our several States; but there was a truculent
self-confidence about his honor's "atmosphere" that foreshadowed little
in the way of a satisfactory issue had I ventured to carry the
discussion further. I simply withdrew within myself, like a turtle,
finished my cigar in silence, and returned to my seat in the chair car,
convinced that in whatever line of action the judge was really an
expert--law, history, economics, or what-not--he at least knew how to
put a cork in a bottle, and jam it in so tight that nothing could get
out of it--I being the bottle.
[Illustration: "Yes, and you are fifty years behind us in every other
respect!"]
As I sat for the rest of my journey in that chair car my mind reverted
to another incident that had occurred two months earlier. The inviting
causes were similar; but the party of the second part was a very
different sort of individual. The judge was said to be prosperous, the
owner of many acres of fertile sugar land, and had, or so I was
informed, a professional income of fifteen thousand dollars a year. One
would think he could have afforded to be genial under such conditions.
The other was a man bent and broken under the stress of his years and
his trials, coming home, after a lifetime of failure, to pass his
remaining days, manifestly few in number, amid the scenes of his youth.
What few locks were left him were gray, and he limped painfully when he
walked. He had served on the Confederate side during the war, and still
carried with him the evidences of sacrifice.
I met him on the railway platform at a little junction town in Southern
Tennessee. I was en route to a small college town in Upper Mississippi.
We had had a long and tedious wait upon the fast decaying station
platform, hoping almost against hope that at least day before
yesterday's train would come along and pick us up, whatever might be the
fate of the special combination of wheezy engine and spring-halted cars
due that morning. As I nervously paced the dragging hours away I noticed
this old fellow limping anxiously about, making over and over again of
everybody he met the same inquiry as to the probable arrival or
non-arrival of our train; and now and then he would hobble with
difficulty over to a small soap box, with a slatted top, which stood
just outside the baggage room, in which there was imprisoned a poor,
shivering, and I fancy hungry, little fox terrier, whining to be let
out.
"Never mind, Bobby," the old man would whisper through the slatted top
of the box. "'Taint gwine to be much longer now. We'll be home soon."
The kindly attitude of the old man toward the unhappy little animal
touched me more deeply than his own poverty-stricken condition, and so,
yielding to a friendly impulse, I stood by him for a moment and spoke to
him.
"It's a long wait," said I.
"Oh, well," he said cheerfully, straightening himself up stiffly, "it's
so near the end I ain't complainin'. I been waitin' fohty yeahs for
this, Brother."
"Forty years?" I repeated.
"Yes, suh," he replied, "fohty long yeahs, suh. I ain't been home since
the end o' the wah, suh. An' now I'm comin' back, an' I reckon after I
git thar thar ain't a gwine to be but one mo' journey, suh, befo' I'm
through."
[Illustration: I knew that I had met a "Southern Gentleman."]
"You mean--" I began.
"I'm comin' home to die, suh," he said. "Not that I'm a gwine to be in
any hurry to do it," he added, with a winning smile, "but I'm tiahed o'
wanderin', an' what's left o' my time hyah, suh, 'll pass mo' pleasantly
back among the old scenes."
I endeavored to cover up my emotions by offering the old man a cigar.
"I thank you, suh," he said, taking it. "I'm very fond of a good
seegyar, though I don't git 'em any too often, suh. Are you a Tennessee
man, suh?"
"No," said I. "I come from Maine. That's a good way from here."
And then it came. The old fellow gave a great chuckle, and reached out
his hand and seized me by mine.
"I want to shake your hand, suh," he said with rare cordiality. "_The
last time I see a Maine man, suh, was durin' the wah, an' I was chasin'
him with a gun. He was a darned good runner; but I ketched him, an' I'm
glad I did, fo' he was a dam sight better feller than he was a runner!_"
I must confess that when later in the day I saw the old gentleman get
off the train in the midst of a welcoming multitude of old friends, with
his battered old suitcase in one hand, and the slatted soap box
containing the yelping Bobby in the other--all his earthly
possessions--I was glad to feel that he had come "home"; and as he waved
a feeble but courteous adieu to me from the platform as the train drew
out I knew that I had met a Southern gentleman of a peculiarly true and
lovable sort.
One finds much in these little jaunts in the Southland to appeal to
one's sense of humor; but after all there is much more that appeals to
one's sympathies. I had the pleasure of riding once in Louisiana on a
train in company with an old Confederate soldier, who made me as
completely his prisoner in the shackles of affectionate regard as he
might, because of his powerful build, have made me a prisoner in fact
had we met face to face on the field of battle. He was a man of
convictions; but he was always so thoroughly the honest-hearted
gentleman in presenting his points of view that, although we differed
radically upon almost every matter of present political interest, I
found for the moment, anyhow, a sweet reasonableness in his principles.
His manner was so calm, and gracious, and transparently sincere, that I
found him wholly captivating.
His chance remark that he hoped to attend the great Confederate reunion
shortly to be held at Chattanooga, or Chattanoogy, as he called it
(there is always a soft, caressing accent in the real Southerner's
discourse that changes a mere word or name into a term of endearment),
naturally brought up a reference to the great conflict, and I took a
certain amount of human pleasure out of the old man's present content
with the general situation, as shown in the naive statement with which
he began to talk on the subject.
"You know, suh," said he, "I feel pretty well satisfied with the way
things turned out, even though at the time, suh, I didn't want 'em to
turn out just that a-way."
"We are undoubtedly stronger as a nation to-day than if it had turned
out differently," I ventured.
"Yes, suh," he said. "If we'd got away, suh, it wouldn't ha' been long
befo' the principle o' the right o' secession havin' been established,
we'd all ha' been secedin' from each othah, suh; and after the States
had done all the secedin' they could the parishes would ha' begun
secedin' from the States; an' the towns would ha' seceded from the
parishes--until the whole damn country would ha' landed in Mexico!"
"I never thought of it in that light before," I smiled; "but I guess
you're right."
"An' that ain't all, neither, suh," he went on. "I'd ha' felt a great
sight worse about it if we'd been licked, suh. If we'd been licked in
that great fight, suh, I don't think I'd evah have got ovah it, suh."
I maintained a discreet silence; for I could not but feel that I was on
the verge of a great philosophical discovery.
"When a fellah's licked, suh," the old man went on, "he just natcherly
kain't help feelin' sore, suh; _but if he's merely ovahpowahed, suh--why
that's very different_."
There may be minds to which that distinction is too subtle to be either
obvious or convincing; but the more I have thought it over since the
more has it seemed to me to involve a profound philosophy which would
make the world happier were it more widely accepted by those suffering
from reverses of fortune. To me there was a whole sermon in that brief
utterance, and the difference between being "licked" and being "merely
overpowered" has been one out of which I have derived no end of comfort
myself in hours of difficulty. To be whipped is one thing; to be merely
overcome is indeed another!
Nor was the old man's kindly feeling concerning the God of Things as
They Are, as expressed in words, mere lip service; for in the course of
our morning's chat other things developed which I am glad enough to put
upon record for Northern eyes.
"I wish," said he, "that you might stay ovah hyah at my home a day or
two, suh, and let me take you to one of our Post meetin's, suh. We'd
make you more than welcome."
"Yank though I be, eh?" I laughed.
"Yes, indeed, suh," he replied. "We ain't got anything against you on
that score, suh. My first meetin' with Yanks in a not strictly fightin'
capacity was once when a half a dozen of 'em took me prisoner. I found
myself surrounded by 'em one day durin' the wah when I was doin' picket
duty, and the way they run me in was a caution, suh. They bein' six to
one, I just let on that I was satisfied if they was."
"And what did they do to you?" I asked.
"They near killed me, suh, with seegyars, and mo' real food than I'd
seen in six months," he said with a chuckle. "The' wasn't anything they
had, from plug tobacker and seegyars up to a real meat dinner that I
didn't git mo' 'n my faiah share of."
"And how long did they keep you?" I queried.
"Fo' as long as I was willin' to stay, suh," was his reply. "The minute
they see I was beginnin' to feel oneasy they run me back to the line
again, and turned me loose. Speakin' about Yanks," he went on, "we've
got five of 'em buried in our own Confederate graveyard in the cemetery,
suh; and I'm kind of afraid it won't be long befo' they's six of 'em.
One of yo' old soldiers from up No'th come down here fo' his health last
year; but he's gone down steadily, and I reckon it ain't for long that
he'll be with us. When we heard he was an old soldier our Post sent him
to the hospital, and he's dyin' there now. He seemed to feel so bad
about the idee o' bein' buried in the Potter's Field that we voted to
give him a grave with the rest of the boys, and when he goes he'll lie
with soldiers, like he's allers wanted to do."
I could not find any words in the languages known to me, dead or alive,
to express what I felt, and so I kept silent.
"He won't be forgotten, neither, after he gits there," the old fellow
went on. "We have our Memorial Day, just as you have your Decoration
Day, and every year we go up to the lot and decorate the graves of 'em
all, Yank or Johnny, just the same. We put a little Confederate flag at
the head of every grave that holds one of our own; and every one o' them
Yanks has a little flag at the head of his grave too, only his is the
flag he fought for, just as ours is the flag we fought for. It's a
pretty sight, my friend," he added softly, "with them five little
American flags flutterin' away among the sixty or seventy others."
Verily this Southern hospitality is no vain thing, no mere empty show,
or ingratiating veneer to make a spurious article seem real. Personal
interest may sometimes rest at the basis of a seeming courtesy.
Selfishness may lie often at the bottom of a superficial graciousness of
manner assumed for the moment to conceal that very selfishness; but the
hospitality that leads a body of old soldiers to grant at their own
cost, and to take care of with their own loving hands, a green resting
place, a last sanctuary, for a former foe, that indeed is an unselfish,
genuine kind of hospitality which, like the peace of God, passeth all
understanding.
III
GETTING THE LEVEL
One of the more serious dangers confronting the platform speaker is the
presumption that his audience will not prove sufficiently intelligent to
grasp him when he is at what he thinks is his best. I use the word
"presumption" advisedly; for it is sheer presumption and nothing else,
and I may add that if my experience has taught me anything, it is that
it does not pay to be so presuming. If there is trouble anywhere in
"getting one's stuff over," as the saying is, the fault will be found in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred to be with the lecturer, and not with
his audience.
My most earnest advice to those platform speakers who feel it necessary
to "get _down_ to the level" of an audience, instead of feeling an
inward urge to climb _up_ to it, is that they give up the platform
altogether, and take up some other occupation where conscious
superiority really counts; say that of head waiter in a New York
restaurant, for instance, or possibly that of literary critic on the
staff of a periodical, whose chief concern is pink socks, lavender
neckties, and the mysteries of lingerie. In these occupations conscious
superiority is an essential of success; but on the lecture platform the
consciously superior person cannot in the very nature of things last
very long: not in this country, anyhow; for, as I have studied the
American people face to face for the past ten years in every State of
the Union, I have learned that their capacity for pricking a bubble of
pretense on sight is surpassed only by their high appreciation of a
speaker who immediately gets into the atmosphere of the special occasion
confronting him.
For my own part, I have come to believe that each occasion establishes
its own "best," and that the chief duty confronting me is to measure up
to the "best" demanded by that occasion if I can. For this reason one's
lecture should be a moderately flexible affair, which can be so adjusted
to each and every occasion that it fits an audience as nicely as a
tailor-made garment. A lecture written out beforehand and committed to
memory can never quite fulfil these requirements. It becomes not a
lecture, but an essay; not platform work, but literary work; should be
read, not heard; and in its delivery becomes not a sympathetic talk, man
to man, but a mere recitation.
No one would be so foolish as to deny, however, that audiences do vary
materially in their capacity to take in the subtler points of a lecture
"fired" at them from the platform. I should not think of using the same
phrases in a talk before a gathering in an East Side settlement house in
New York that I would use before the ladies of a Browning Club in the
vicinity of Boston, or before a body of college professors, or vice
versa. But if I were fortunate enough to be asked to address all three,
I should endeavor to vary the wording of my discourse according to the
several needs of each, and base my notion of my "best" upon the demands
of those particular needs. I confess also that if in one single audience
all three classes of listeners were represented, I should not hesitate
to put my thought into the language required by the capacity of the East
Siders to understand, and be fairly assured of pleasing everybody; for
it is my observation of the ways of ladies addicted to Browning, and of
gentlemen of the academic kind, that they are after all very human, and
enjoy simplicity of discourse quite as much as the other sort.
[Illustration: "The consciously superior person cannot last long on the
lecture platform."]
There is greater sincerity in "playing to the gallery" than most of the
critics of that habit dream of, and personally I would rather fall short
of the expectations of the boxes than fail in the eyes of the gallery,
where reticence in the expression of critical opinion is not exactly a
conspicuous virtue. To put it more plainly, I should infinitely prefer
the humiliation of seeing a highborn lady falling asleep in an orchestra
chair because of the bromidic quality of my talk, than be reminded of
the same by flying vegetable matter consigned to me by some dissatisfied
individual sitting up among the "gods."
An amusing, if somewhat radical, contrast in audiences befell my lot
several years ago in the brief space of sixteen hours. In that time I
successively addressed the Harvard Union at Cambridge on a Tuesday
evening, and the ladies of a Woman's Club in a Boston suburb the
following morning. The audience at the Union was gathered in the
wonderfully beautiful auditorium of Memorial Hall, and contained not
less than twelve hundred particularly live wires, undergraduates mostly,
almost fresh from the football field, or at least still under the
influence of its system of expressing approval.
As I mounted the rostrum bedlam broke loose: not necessarily as a
tribute to myself, but because frenzy is the modern collegiate way of
making a visitor feel welcome. Thunderous noises never yet classified
shook the rafters--noises ranging from the hoarse clamor of an excited
populace at the finish of some great Olympian event, to the somewhat
uncertain cackle of a freshman voice changing from soprano to bass.
Pandemonium did not reign: it poured. Not since I visited the London Zoo
and witnessed there a fight between two caged lions to the excited,
clamorous interest of all the other beasts imprisoned there, have I
heard such a variegated din as greeted me on that occasion, and I
realized sympathetically for the first time perhaps the true
significance of Theodore Roosevelt's "dee-lighted" smile when as
President of the United States he took his annual stroll across the
football field at a Harvard and Yale game, and listened to the "voice of
the people." So contagious was it that I had all I could do to keep from
joining in myself and only the necessity of saving my voice for my
lecture prevented me from being myself heard above the din.
That noise was the keynote of the evening. I think I may say with due
modesty that my lecture had one or two touches of humor in it--three or
four, in fact--varying in character from the "scarcely perceptible
subtle" to the "inevitably obvious," with other sorts sandwiched in
between, and none of them was lost; although I was not permitted to
finish many of my sentences. The audience seemed to get in ahead of me
every time.
The situation reminded me in a way of the grandstand finish of a poor
paralyzed old darky named Joe, of whom I was once told by a Pullman car
porter on my way through Montana. Joe had been a famous sportsman in his
day; but now misfortune had overtaken him, and he lay bedridden, wholly
unable to use his legs, and awaiting the end. Several of his friends,
taking pity on him, resolved to give him the joy of one last glorious
coon hunt.
They put him on a stretcher and carried him out into the country where
that luscious creature "abounded and abutted." The dogs were let loose,
and finally showed unusual activity at the base of a tall tree; but, to
the dismay of all, the game turned out to be no coon, but a particularly
hungry, sore-headed, old she-bear.
As the roaring beast clambered down after her tormentors, Joe's litter
bearers, terrified, dropped their burden and made off down the road in
coward flight, and it was not until an hour after they had reached home
in safety that they thought of the possible fate of their paralytic
friend. Conscience-stricken, they resolved to go to Joe's home and
break the news of their cowardly behavior to the presumable widow. The
good woman met them at the door.
"What yo' niggahs want round here dis time o' night?" she demanded.
"We come to tell yo' 'bout Joe, Mis' Johnsing," said the embarrassed
spokesman.
"Yo' kain't tell me nothin' 'bout Joe what Ah don' know a'ready,"
replied Mrs. Johnson coldly.
"Yas'm; but yo' don' know whar Joe is, Mis' Johnsing," persisted the
speaker. "We done--"
"Yas, Ah do know whar Joe is," retorted the lady. "He's upstairs in he
bed."
"In he bed?" echoed the astonished visitors.
"Yass," said Mrs. Johnson. "Joe come in ovah an hour ago hollerin' like
a bullgine fohty yahds ahead o' de dawgs."
I think I may say without exaggeration that that Harvard Union audience
even beat Joe's record; for they were twice "fohty yahds ahead o' de
dawgs" all the way through, and as for "hollerin'" they were not so much
like one single "bullgine" as like a whole roundhouse full of them,
aided and abetted by a couple of boiler factories in full blast.
And then, only sixteen hours later, came the address at the Woman's Club
ten miles out of Boston; the same lecture, in a quiet drawing room,
before forty ladies who embroidered and crocheted while I talked, and
here the point that had raised the roof and shaken the foundations of
the Harvard Union was greeted by the _tapping of a thimble against the
wooden frame of an embroidery hoop_!
I cannot say which of the two varieties of approval pleased me more; but
I will say that no idea of talking "up" or "down" to my audience
occurred to me on either occasion: it was rather a matter of "getting
across."
One never can tell save by the "feel" of things in the hour of action
how they are going to turn out. Only this last season I found myself,
through a misapprehension of the character of my engagement, standing
before an audience in a New England amusement park on a Sunday
afternoon. I will say frankly that if I had known that I was to be a
sideshow to a Ferris Wheel and a scenic railway, with pink lemonade on
tap everywhere, and "all for ten cents," I should not have accepted the
engagement. While I have admired them at a respectful distance, I have
never envied the wild man of Borneo or the bearded lady their
opportunities for personal enrichment; but on this occasion in some way
or other I had gained an impression that my date had been arranged by,
and was to be under the auspices of, a combination of church interests,
designed to offset the evils of Sunday afternoon idleness in a
manufacturing town. It was a misunderstanding, however, that I now
rejoice in; for, amusement park or not, sideshow or main ring, I found
it an enjoyable and educating experience.
I approached it in fear and trembling, especially when I noticed as I
was awaiting my "turn" the vast quantities of chewing gum that were
being sold to my audience by the inevitable boy with the basket. There
is always something disconcerting to a public speaker in the constant,
simultaneous, and automatic movement of other jaws than his own, and in
the face of a collective jaw, made up of sixteen hundred lowers that
chewed as one, I feared that mine, singly and alone, would find the odds
against it overpowering. Strange to say, however, my real fear on this
occasion was not on the score of my audience, but whether I should be
able to acquit myself creditably before them. I have fondly hoped that
my little talk contained a message, and as I observed these seekers
after pleasure slowly gathering, and taking their places on tiers of
pine benches under the kindly shade of a row of noble pines, it occurred
to me that if there was any fruitful soil for my message anywhere it was
in the hearts of just such people as sat before me--toilers, the humbler
folk, the men and women whose lives had been too busy with
bread-and-butter problems for the acquirement of culture, and whose sole
opportunity for amusement, uplifting or otherwise, came on these very
Sunday afternoons.
There were men and boys there who under other conditions might have been
idling on street corners. I counted three Chinese, several Japanese, and
a half-dozen Negroes in my audience. A dozen women had their babies with
them, and many a small kiddie, too young to chew gum without exposure to
the peril of swallowing it, nibbled and absorbed ginger cookies as I
watched them. The question became _not_ were they good enough for me,
but could I convince them that I was good enough for them. It was not a
question of "getting down to their level," but of my own ability to
climb up to the level of my opportunity. For the time being whatever
superiority there was was altogether on their side, and the point was
how I could prove myself the real thing, and not the artificial; how I
could find the common denominator which would enable us to get on "like
a house afire" together.
As I was speaking the solution came--and a mighty simple one it turned
out to be; for it lay wholly in the simplest possible use of the English
language. "Cut out the big words," I said to myself. "Cut out all
unfamiliar terms. Get right down to good old Anglo-Saxon. Drop such
jawbreakers as _differentiate_, _terminology_, _intimations_,
_implications_, and _psychological_." My chief hope became that I might
once more at least measure up to that condition which was clearly set
forth a great many years ago by a Western chairman, at a time when I was
too much of a novice to do my work even passably well, who said to me as
we walked to my hotel after the lecture was over:
"We don't care so much for your lecture, Mr. Bangs; but we like you, and
we're going to have you back."
Whether or not my plan was successful I shall not attempt to say; but I
may be pardoned, perhaps, for recording here one of the most delightful
compliments I have ever had, paid me by a threadbare workingman who came
up behind me as I was leaving the park that afternoon, and put his arm
through mine as he spoke.
"Are you goin' to speak here to-night, Brother?" he said.
"No," said I. "I am hurrying off to Boston on the five o'clock train."
"Well, I'm sorry," said he. "I wanted to come out and hear ye again."
Bearing upon the cultivation, or lack of it, of the average American
audience, I recall a remark made to me several years ago by a well-known
poet from the shores of Britain, who had come here to lecture on the
Celtic Renaissance.
"I have had a most delightful surprise," said he, "in the wonderful
amount of real culture that I have found in the United States, and
especially in the smaller communities. Why, do you know," he added,
"when I first started in on my work I supposed that I should have to
spend at least half of my time explaining to my audiences just what a
Renaissance was, and the rest in consideration of the Irish movement;
but I hadn't been here a week before I discovered that for the most part
the people I was to talk to knew quite as much as I did about the
history of the movement, and I had all I could do to shed any new light
on it whatsoever."
He had, fortunately for himself, made the discovery at a critical part
of the "lecture game," as some people delight to call it, that it was up
to him to keep climbing, and not waste any of his valuable time trying
to descend to a lower level, if he wished his discourse to be favorably
regarded in this country--a discovery that I devoutly wish some of our
modern editors and theatrical managers, who think they must cater
exclusively to a "lowbrow" audience, as they call it, a clientele made
up out of the whole cloth of their own imaginings, might make.
Our wonderful West frequently affords illuminating incidents
demonstrating the real truth, as discovered by our distinguished
visitor. I remember going a few years ago into a small community in
Iowa, where possibly the English lecturer would have looked for very
little in the way of what he would consider learning. When sitting in
the office of the chairman of the lecture committee, a particularly
alert young man, a lawyer, and a graduate of the Harvard Law School, the
door opened, and a splendid specimen of physical manhood, a typical
pioneer in appearance, stalked in. The chairman introduced me to him.
"Mr. Bangs," said he, "I want you to know my father."
The caller gave my hand a grip that even now makes my fingers ache every
time I think of it. He then led me to a comfortable, leather-covered arm
chair, and, after almost shoving me into its capacious depths, seated
himself directly in front of me.
"Sit down, young man," said he. "I want to talk to you."
"Fire ahead!" said I. "And thank you for calling me a young man. I've
been feeling a trifle old for a couple of days."
"Well, you are young compared to me," he said. "I'm eighty."
"Good Lord!" said I. "You don't look over sixty, anyhow."
"No," he smiled, "I don't--but that's Ioway. I've been farmin' out here
for nigh onto seventy years, and we're all too busy to grow old. We live
forever in Ioway. It's the grandest country on the footstool."
I didn't feel at all inclined to dispute him, considering his more than
six feet of towering height, the fresh, healthful hardness of his
weather-beaten face, the breadth of his shoulders, and depth of his
chest. I contented myself with agreeing with him. And I didn't have to
work hard to do that, either; for I have known magnificent Iowa as a
most salubrious State for many years.
"Well, you see, sir," I said, "we can't all pick out our birthplaces. I
was born in New York through no choice of my own. Some are born at
birthplaces, some achieve birthplaces, and others have birthplaces
thrust upon them--which last was my case."
"Same here," said he. "I was born in Ohier; but my folks moved out here
when I was a babby. I've lived here ever since--and I'm glad of it. Of
course I hain't had your advantages in gettin' an eddication--most o'
mine's in my wife's name--but I've got some, and I've had to work so dam
hard to get it that sometimes I think I appreciate it just a leetle more
than you Eastern boys do who have it served to you on a silver platter.
I didn't know how to read till I was twenty-five."
"I congratulate you," said I. "Considering the sort of things the
greater part of our young people are reading to-day, I wish that
condition might prevail a little more widely than it does."
"That's it," said he. "When a thing comes too easy we're not likely to
make the best of it. When I think of how I had to sweat to learn to read
you don't ketch me wastin' any o' my talents in that direction on
trash."
"Then," I put in, "the chances are you've never read any of my books."
"Not many of 'em," he answered; "but one or two folks I know has read
'em, and they tell me there's nothin' deelyterious about 'em. But I tell
ye it was some work for me to get the knack o' readin'; but when it come
it come! Ye see, when I first come out here they wasn't any schools, and
they wasn't any too much help around in those days, either. What with
farmin', and diggin' food out o' the ground, and fightin' Injuns, they
wasn't much spare time for children to spend in schools, even if we'd a
had 'em. But along about the time I was twenty-three years old we
started one. We built a little schoolhouse, and then we sent East for a
schoolmarm, and when she come she boarded up at our house, and I
celebrated by fallin' head over heels in love with her."
"Good work!" said I.
"You bet it was good work!" he blurted out, with an admiring glance at
his son. "It was the best work I ever done, and the best part of it was
she liked me, and the first thing we knew we got married. Well, sir, do
you know what happened then? You're a smart man, and you won't need many
guesses. It was the very thing we might ha' foreseen. The idee o' me,
the husband o' the schoolmarm, not knowin' how to read--why,
it--was--simply--pree--posterous!"
I don't believe Colonel Roosevelt ever put more syrupy electricity into
the first syllable of his famous "dee-lighted" than that old gentleman
got into the _pre_ of his "preeposterous."
"Yes, sir," he ran on, "and there was no way out of it but that she
should teach me to read. _And she did!_ It was a tough proposition for
that wonderful teacher of mine; but her patience finally pulled us
through, and at the end of about a year I was ready to tackle 'most any
kind of stunt in the way of a printed page. And then the burning
question arose. Now that I know how, what in Dothan shall I read? That's
a big problem, my friend, to a young feller that has earned his right to
literature by the sweat of his brow. I wasn't goin' to waste any of my
new gift on flashy stuff. What I wanted was the real thing, and one
mornin' the problem was solved. A copy of a weekly paper come to the
house, with an advertisement in it of a book called 'The Origin of the
Species,' by a feller named Darwin, costin' two dollars and a half. That
was some money in those days; but somehow or other that title sounded
good and hefty, and I sent my little two-fifty by mail to the publisher,
and within a week or two 'The Origin of the Species' was duly received,
and I went at it."
"And what did you make out of it?" I asked, my interest truly aroused.
"Nothin'--not the first dam thing at first," said the old gentleman;
"except it made me wonder if I hadn't lost my mind, or something. I sat
down to read the thing, and by thunder, sir, I couldn't make head nor
tail out of it! I'd always thought I knew something about the English
language; but this time I was stumped, and it made me mad.
"'There's something happened to me,' I said to my wife. 'I've read this
darned first page here over five times, and I'm blest if I can get a
glimmer of anythin' out of it.' She smiled and advised me to try
something easier; but, '_Not--on--your--life!_' says I. 'I've been
through fire and famine and wind and blizzard in my day. I've seen the
roof over my head burnt to a cinder by savages, and I've fit Injuns, and
come nigh bein' scalped by 'em, and in all my life, my dear,' says I, 'I
hain't never been stumped yit, and I don't preepose to begin now,
specially by a page o' printed words, said to be writ in the English
language--_not--on--your--life!_'
"So I went at it again. I read it, and I reread it. I wrastled with
every page, paragraph, and sentence in that book. Sometimes I had to put
as much as five days on one page--but by Gorry, son, _when_ I got it I
got it good, and when it come it come with a rush--and _now_--"
The old man paused, drew himself up very straight, and squaring his
shoulders he leaned forward and put his hands on my knees.
[Illustration: "If there's anything you want to know about Darwin's
Origin of Species, you ask me!"]
"And _now_, my friend," he said, his eye flashing with the joy of
victory, "_if there's anything you want to know about Darwin's Origin of
the Species--you--just--ask--me!_"
IV
THE GOOD SAMARITAN
If there is any man in this wide world who doubts the beauty and heart
significance of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, he need only go out
upon the lecture platform to have his eyes opened. I know of no workers
in the whole field of human effort this side of tramphood itself who
need more often the intervention of the Good Samaritan to get them out
of trouble than the followers of that same profession.
Indeed, I shall not even except the profession of the Hobo; for there is
a certain license granted to this latter sort of Knight of the Road that
is denied to us of the Lyceum Circuit. We are prone to forgive a hungry
tramp for breaking into a casual hencoop in search of the wherewithal to
satisfy the cravings of an empty stomach, and when his weary bones
demand a bed there are numerous expedients to which he may resort
without loss of dignity. I doubt, however, that if Dr. Hillis, or the
Hon. Champ Clark, or my humble self, were ever caught red-handed with a
farmer's fowls dangling by their legs from our fists, or were to be
discovered stealing a nap in the soft seclusion of a convenient hayloft,
we should get off quite so easily as do poor old Dusty Rhodes and his
famous colleague Weary Waggles.
Even as do our less loquacious brothers who foot it across country, and
earn their living by making after-dinner speeches to sympathetic
farmers' wives, so also do we more advanced members of the Fraternity of
Wanderers have often to throw ourselves upon the tender mercies of
others to get us out of the unexpected scrapes into which the most
careful of us sometimes fall. Life is ordinarily no very simple thing,
even to the man who lives all his days in one spot, and knows every
curve, crook, and corner of his special surroundings. How much more
complicated must it become, then, to him who has to change his spots
every twenty-four hours, and day after day, night in and night out,
readjust himself to new and unfamiliar conditions!
For the most part our troubles, such as they are, have to do with the
natural perversity of train schedules, or unexpected visitations of
Nature which will disarrange the most carefully forecast calculations of
men. In the machinery of our existence there are probably more human
cogs involved, which require our own individual attention, than in any
other known mechanism. Even the actor on the road is better looked after
than are we; for he has a manager to arrange for his transportation, to
look after his luggage, and to attend to all the little things that go
to make or mar the comfort of travel while we of the platform go out
wholly upon our own, unattended, and compelled at all times to shift for
ourselves.
I have been in many a scrape en route myself; but so far none of them
has found me without some personally devised expedient for my relief, or
the aid of a chance Good Samaritan, whose constant nearness in the hour
of need has convinced me that there are many more of his kind in
existence than most people are willing to admit. I have almost gone so
far at times as to believe in the "intervention of Providence," and
would quite do so did I not feel the idea somewhat belittling to the
Divine Intelligence that orders our goings out and our comings in.
On one occasion in the Far West I was so close to a scene of actual
murder that I might readily have been held as a material witness, and
escaped that great inconvenience only by pursuing the exceedingly
difficult policy of holding my tongue--always an arduous proposition for
a professional talker. I have faced starvation on a delayed train in
Oklahoma, starvation setting in in my case after fifteen hours without
food, and been suddenly relieved by the wholly chance appearance, at the
tail end of the train, dropping seemingly out of the mysterious regions
of Nowhere, of an Italian driving a wagonload of bananas across the
track, just as the train was starting along on another interminably
foodless stretch; an Italian who with remarkably quick wit--in response
to the lure of a new, shining silver dollar tossed into his
wagon--heaved a bunch of his stock large enough to feed an orphan asylum
on to the back platform.
I have even been threatened with complete annihilation, physical and
spiritual alike, by a man big enough to carry out his threat, unless I
would join him in a cocktail at six o'clock in the morning, and escaped
my doom, not as a great many readers may think, by accepting the
invitation, but only through the timely intervention on my behalf of
the blessed gift of sleep, which descended suddenly, and without
apparent cause, upon my convivial adversary before he had time to carry
out his amiable intentions looking toward my removal from the face of
the earth.
But there have been other times when nothing short of the sudden
appearance of the Good Samaritan himself has saved me from disaster. Two
of these instances I recall with feelings of gratitude, and I record
them here with sincere pleasure, since it may be that my willing helpers
may read what I have written about them, and learn from the record
something of the lasting quality of my grateful appreciation of their
courtesy.
The first of these incidents occurred in the distant city of Los Angeles
on a memorable afternoon when I was to all intents and purposes
stranded; not for the lack of ready money, but for the want of
transportation necessary to get me from where I was to the haven where I
was critically needed at that moment. It was a matter of making a train
or losing a whole chain of profitable engagements, arranged in such
sequence that if one were lost the others would in all probability go
also.
I was due to lecture in the beautiful California city on a Wednesday
evening, and was to go thence to Salt Lake City for a Friday night
lecture. Unfortunately for me it happened that on Tuesday I was booked
at Tucson, Arizona, and with a strange carelessness of consequences
somebody had thrown a glass of water on the tracks of the Southern
Pacific Railroad, and thereby completely demoralized the roadbed. I do
not wish to libel that useful railway system; but at that time the
casual impression of the traveler on the Southern Pacific was that its
rails had been laid on water, and were ballasted with quicksand. It
should be added in justification of the conditions that the
irrepressible Salton Sea, a body of water that has no known parentage in
the matter of sources, or real destiny in the matter of utility, and
acts accordingly, had been on one of its periodic rampages, the proper
handling of which had taxed to the uttermost the ingenuity of the
engineers on whose shoulders the responsibility for the line rested. It
was Nature who was to blame, and not the authorities.
At any rate, however, there were such serious delays on my way from
Tucson to Los Angeles that, scheduled to lecture at the latter city at
eight P.M. on Wednesday evening, I did not arrive there until four
o'clock on Thursday morning, and even a Western audience will not submit
to any such delay as that. Thanks to the quick wit of my principals, who
stood to lose a considerable stake by my failure to appear, another
lecture was arranged for Thursday afternoon at one o'clock, although my
train for Salt Lake was scheduled to leave at two-forty-five. The plan
was for me to take a carriage out to the lecture hall, about forty
minutes' drive from the center of activity, to go upon the platform
promptly at one o'clock, to condense my talk into one hour, to leave the
platform at two, and drive hurriedly over to the San Pedro station, and
catch my train with five minutes to spare.
The first part of the program was carried out to the letter, and at five
minutes after two I was at the entrance of the hall ready for my drive
to the station. But there was no carriage or vehicle of any other known
sort in sight. Through some misunderstanding either on my part or on
that of the local managers, the carriage that brought me out had not
waited, and there was no substitute to be had within reach. What to do
became a most embarrassing question. The succeeding dates had been
arranged in such a way that if I failed to catch that train to Salt Lake
City my whole tour would come down with a crash.
Fortunately there was a rather fine boulevard running in front of the
hall, a rare temptation to speeders both in motors and with horseflesh;
and as my managers and I were standing on the curb, expressing our
opinion as to the intelligence of hackmen in general and ourselves in
particular, and hopelessly scanning the horizon in search of relief,
there suddenly emerged out of the gloom, coming along at a rapid pace, a
horse lover, seated in a light wagon, and driving a big bay trotter of
no mean abilities. He was striking nothing poorer than a two-forty gait,
and as he loomed bigger and bigger as he drew nearer he looked like a
runaway avalanche; but as he came the idea flashed across my mind that
here was my only salvation. I therefore sprang out into the middle of
the road, directly in his path, and waved my arms violently at him. The
driver drew in his reins with a jerk, and man, horse, buggy, and all
came to a sliding, grinding stop. I cannot say that his first remark was
wholly cordial.
"What the dash is the matter with you?" he roared.
I panted out my explanation--how my carriage had not come, how much
depended on my catching my train, and how completely I had relied on
him.
"Oh, that's it, eh?" he said, amiably calming down. "I thought you'd
escaped from a lunatic asylum or something. Jump in. I can't take you
all the way to the station, because I've got an engagement myself at
two-fifteen; but I'll land you at the hotel in a jiffy."
I needed no second bidding, and in a moment we were bounding along at
breakneck speed in the direction of the city. We covered the distance
that had consumed forty minutes before the lecture in twelve minutes,
and all seemed well--only it was not well; for, arriving at the hotel, I
found myself still fifteen minutes distant from the railway station, and
not a taxi or other kind of cab to be had. What was more, the electric
roads were blocked by a fire or something farther up the street. I was
as badly off as ever--and then entered the Good Samaritan!
As I stood there in front of the hotel making sundry observations, most
of them unprintable, concerning the quality of my luck, a man of fine
appearance came out of the hotel and stepped quickly across the sidewalk
to a large touring car that stood awaiting him by the curb. He opened
the door, and after seating himself in the tonneau leaned forward to
give his instructions to his chauffeur, when I was seized with the
inspiration that here indeed was truly my White Hope. Again I took my
chances. I sprang forward, laid my hand gently on his arm, and blurted
out:
[Illustration: "I cannot say that his first remark was wholly cordial."]
"Excuse me, sir, but my name is Bangs--John Kendrick Bangs. I am out
here lecturing, and if I don't catch that two-forty-five train for Salt
Lake City I shall lose half a dozen engagements. If you have ever read
any of my books and liked them, sir, you will be willing to do me a
service. If you've read 'em and not liked them, you'll be glad to get me
out of town. Won't you be a Good Samaritan and give me a lift to the
station? _You're my only hope!_"
"Sure thing!" he answered without an instant's hesitation, opening the
door. "Get in--and, James," he added, turning to the chauffeur, "the San
Pedro station, and never mind the speed limit."
I clambered into the car as quickly as I could, and the car fairly
leaped forward.
"It's mighty good of you," said I breathlessly as we sped along.
"Don't mention it, Mr. Bangs," said my host. "Glad to be of service to
you. I read your 'House-Boat-on-the-Styx' once with a great deal of
pleasure; but there's one thing about you that I like a great sight
better than I do your humor."
"What's that?" I asked.
"_Your nerve, sir_," he replied, handing out a cigar.
We caught the train with eight minutes to spare, and as it drew out of
the station I realized possibly for the first time in my life that in my
particular line of business _nerve_ is a vastly better asset than
_nerves_, and I have faithfully cultivated the one and resolutely
refused to admit the existence of the other ever since, to my very great
advantage.
It may not be without interest to record here that in spite of all my
trials and tribulations at Los Angeles, the Salt Lake City engagement
was lost. Our engine broke down in the wilds of Nevada, and we did not
reach Salt Lake until long after midnight the following night.
Nevertheless I kept my hand in; for in response to the request of some
of my fellow passengers I delivered my lecture that night in the
observation car of the stalled train in the Nevada hills, to an audience
made up of fifteen fellow travelers, the train crew, and a half-dozen
Pullman porters.
I hesitate to think of what might have been my fate had I employed
similar tactics to get me out of such troubles in New York or Boston, or
some other of our Eastern cities. The chances are that my name would
have been spread upon the blotter of some police court as a disorderly
person; but in our great West--well, things seem somehow very different
out there. There are not so many sky-scrapers in that part of the
country, and the horizon of humanity may therefore be a little broader;
and perhaps too the strugglers out there are closer to the period of
their own trials and tribulations than we are here in the East, and
become in consequence more instantly sympathetic when they see the
signal of distress flying before them.
The second incident occurred nearer home. It was in Ohio, at the time of
the floods that wrought such havoc in Dayton and thereabouts in the
spring of 1913. I had lectured the night before at Ironton, and on my
way to Cleveland was to all intents and purposes marooned at Columbus.
Much doubt existed as to whether traffic out of Columbus was at all
possible, so completely demoralized were all the railroads centering
there. It is a cardinal principle with lyceum workers, however, to make
every possible effort to get through to their engagements at whatever
inconvenience or cost. So in spite of the warnings of subordinate
officials I took my chances and went out on a morning train which
passengers took at their own peril, through scenes of dreadful
desolation, and over a disquietingly soggy roadbed, until the train
reached an Ohio city which I shall not identify by name here. While I
have no hard feelings against it, or against any of its citizens, I
cannot bring myself to speak of it in terms of "endearment," as I should
much prefer to do.
At this point our train came to a standstill, and the announcement was
made that it would be impossible to get through to Cleveland because all
the bridges had been washed away. Motoring over for the same reason was
out of the question, and the engagement was lost. I immediately repaired
to the telegraph office and sent off several despatches--to the
Cleveland people, announcing my inability to get through; to my agents,
telling them of my plight; and to my family, assuring them of my safety.
These telegrams broke my "financial back"; for when I had paid for them
I found myself with only forty cents left in my pocket, marooned
possibly for days in wettest Ohio, hungry as a bear, and not a friend in
sight.
I did not worry much over the situation, however; for on several other
occasions when I found myself penniless in the West and in the South I
had not found any trouble in getting some one to cash my check. So,
after assuring myself that my train would be held there for at least two
or three hours before returning to Columbus, I set off blithe-heartedly
to secure the replenishment of my pocket. In the heavy rain I walked up
the main thoroughfare of the little city, and to my great relief espied
a national bank on one of the four corners of its square. I walked
boldly in and addressed the cashier, telling him my story with a few
"well chosen words."
"I thought possibly," said I, as he listened without too great a display
of interest, "that in view of all these circumstances you would be
willing to take a chance on me, and cash my check for twenty-five
dollars."
"Why, my dear sir," he replied, "_this is a bank_!"
I restrained a facetious impulse to tell him that I was surprised to
hear it, having come in under the impression that it was a butcher shop,
where I could possibly buy an umbrella, or a much needed eight-day
clock.
"I know," I contented myself with saying, smiling the while. "That's why
I came here for money."
"Well, you've come to the wrong place," he blurted out. "_We are not
running an asylum to give first aid to the injured!_"
"Thank you, sir," I replied. "You are quite right, and perhaps I should
not have asked such a favor--but I'll tell you one thing," I added.
"To-morrow or next day when the Governor of this State issues his appeal
for aid for the stricken, as he surely will, you will find that the
financial men in that part of the world where I come from are running
just such institutions, and when that golden horde for the relief of
your people pours in from mine I hope it will make you properly ashamed
of yourself, if you are not so already."
It was as fruitless as reading a Wordsworth sonnet on nature to a
rhinoceros; for all he did was to grunt.
"Humph!" said he, and I walked out.
Another bank was soon found, where I secured not accommodation but a
more courteous refusal. The president of the bank was one of the most
sympathetic souls I have ever met, and would gladly cash anybody's draft
for me; but my own check, that was out of the question. He was a trustee
of the funds in his charge--poor chap, apparently without a cent of his
own on deposit. However, he was courteous, and vocally sympathetic. He
realized very keenly the difficulties of my position, and actually
escorted me as far as the door to see me safely to the perils of the
pave, expressing the hope that I would soon find some way out of my
difficulty. I returned to the train, ate thirty cents' worth of sardines
in the dining car, gave the waiter a ten-cent tip, and repaired to the
smoking compartment absolutely penniless. A number of others were
gathered there, and we naturally fell into discussing the day's
adventures.
"Well," said I, "I've just had one of the strangest experiences of my
life. I've been in all parts of the United States in the last eight
years, and never until to-day have I found a place so poor in sympathy,
and easy money, that I couldn't get my check cashed if I happened to
need the funds. Why, I've known a Mississippi hotelkeeper who was so
poor that his wife had to do all the chambermaid's work in the house, to
go out at midnight to _borrow_ twenty-five dollars from a neighbor to
help me out; but here, with this flood knocking everything galley west,
I can't raise a cent!"
And I went on and narrated my experience with the two national banks as
recorded here.
"Well, by George!" ejaculated one of the men seated opposite to me,
slapping his knee vigorously as I finished. "I'm an Ohio man, sir, and
I blush for the State. I'll cash your check for you on your looks. How
much do you want?"
"Twenty-five dollars," said I.
"All right," he said, pulling a well-filled wallet from his pocket, and
counting out five five-dollar bills. "There's the stuff."
I thanked him, and drawing my check handed it over to him. He took it,
and glanced at the signature.
"_What?_" he exploded. "_The Idiot?_"
This was the title of one of my books.
"Guilty!" said I.
"Here, you!" he cried, pulling his wallet again from his pocket, and
holding it wide open, displaying a tempting bundle of ten-dollar bills
within. "_Here--just help yourself!_"
And yet there are people in this world who ask if "literature" pays!
About the most Samaritan of the Good Samaritans I ever encountered I met
in February last in one of the most flourishing of our northwestern
cities. He was a Samaritan with what the modern critic would call a
"kick" to him--or at least it struck me that way. As I made my way
northward from Minneapolis to fill my engagement there I was seized
with a terrific toothache which for the time being destroyed pretty
nearly all my interest in life. The offending molar was far back in the
region of the wisdom section, and inasmuch as it had been somewhat loose
in its behavior for several days I decided to be rid of it. All my
efforts to extract it myself were unavailing, and finally after a last
desperate effort to pull it out myself I returned to my chair in the
Pullman car and informed the Only Muse who upon this trip was Seeing
America with me that our first duty on reaching our destination was to
find a dentist and get rid of it.
[Illustration: "I'm an Ohio man, and I'll cash the check for you on your
looks."]
"I hope you will be careful to get the right kind of a man," said she.
"We can't afford any quack doctors, you know."
At this moment a charming woman seated on the opposite side of the car
leaned over and said, "I do not wish to intrude, but I have seen how you
were suffering, and I just overheard your remark. Now my son-in-law is a
dentist, and we think he is a good one. He is coming to meet me at the
station, and I think possibly he will be willing to help you."
I thanked the lady, and expressed the hope that he would.
On our arrival at the station the young man appeared as was expected,
and my kindly chaperone presented the case.
"He has been suffering dreadfully, James," she said, "and I told him you
would pull his tooth out for him."
"But, my dear mother," said the young man, "we are in a good deal of a
hurry. We have an engagement for to-night. My office is closed, and we
are not dressed for--"
"Thanks just the same," said I. "I am sure you would help me if you
could--maybe you will do the next best thing. I can't lecture unless I
have this confounded thing out."
"Lecture?" said he. "You are not John Kendrick--"
"Yes--I am," said I.
"Oh," said he, "that's different. You are our engagement. Come up to my
office, and I'll fix you up in a jiffy."
So we marched five long blocks up to his office, where I was soon
stretched out, and the desired operation put through with neatness and
despatch.
"Well, doctor," said I as he held the offending molar up before me
tightly gripped in his forceps, "you have given me the first moment of
relief I have had all day. My debt in gratitude I shall never be able to
repay, but the other I think I can handle. How much do I owe you?"
"Nothing at all, Mr. Bangs," he replied. "Nothing at all."
"Oh, that's nonsense, doctor," I retorted. "You are a professional man,
and I am a stranger to you--you must charge something."
"Oh, no, Mr. Bangs," said he, smilingly. "You are no stranger to me. I
have been reading your books for the past twenty years, and _it's a
positive pleasure to pull your teeth_."
V
A VAGRANT POET
The inimitable and forever to be lamented Gilbert, in one of his
delightful songs in Pinafore, bade us once to remember that--
Things are seldom what they seem--
Skim-milk masquerades as cream;
Highlows pass as patent-leathers;
Jackdaws strut in peacock's feathers.
The good woman who sang this song--little Buttercup, they called
her--was in a pessimistic mood at the moment; for had she not been so
she would have reversed the sentiment, showing us with equal truth how
sometimes cream masquerades as skim milk, and how underneath the wear
and tear of time what outwardly appears to be a "high low" still
possesses some of the glorious polish of the "patent leather."
Everywhere I travel I find something of this latter truth; but never was
it more clearly demonstrated than when on one of my Western jaunts I
came unexpectedly upon an almost overwhelming revelation of a finely
poetic nature under an apparently rough and unpromising exterior.
It happened on a trip in Arizona back in 1906. My train after passing
Yuma was held up for several hours. Ordinarily I should have found this
distressing; but, as the event proved, it brought to me one of the most
delightfully instructive experiences I have yet had in the pursuit of my
platform labors. As the express stood waiting for another much belated
train from the East to pass, the door of the ordinary day coach--in
which I had chosen to while away the tedium of the morning, largely
because it was fastened to the end of the train, whence I could secure a
wonderful view of the surrounding country--was opened, and a man
apparently in the last stages of poverty entered the car.
He was an oldish man, past sixty, I should say, and a glance at him
caused my mind instinctively to revert to certain descriptions I had
heard of the sad condition of the downtrodden Westerner, concerning
whose unhappy lot our friends the Populists used to tell us so much. He
looked so very poor and so irremediably miserable that he excited my
sympathy. Upon his back there lay loosely the time-rusted and threadbare
remnant of what had once in the days of its pride and freshness been a
frock coat, now buttonless, spotted, and fringing at the edges. His
trousers matched. His neck was collarless, a faded blue polka-dotted
handkerchief serving as both collar and tie. His hat suggested service
in numerous wars, and on his feet, bound there for their greater
security with ordinary twine, were the uppers and a perforated part of
the soles of a one-time pair of congress gaiters. As for his face--well,
it brought vividly to mind the lines of Spenser--
His rawbone cheekes, through penurie and pine,
Were shronke into his jawes, as he did never dyne.
[Illustration: In the last stages of poverty.]
The old fellow shambled feebly to the seat adjoining my own, gazing
pensively out of the window for a few moments, and then turning fixed a
pair of penetrating blue eyes upon me. "Pretty tiresome waiting," he
ventured, in a voice not altogether certain in its pitch, as if he had
not had much chance to use it latterly.
"Very," said I carelessly. "But I suppose we've got to get used to this
sort of thing."
"I suppose so," he agreed; "but just the same for a man in your business
I should think it would be something awful. Don't it get on your
nerves?"
"What do you know about my business?" I asked, my curiosity aroused.
"Oh," he laughed, "I know who you are. I read one of your books once.
I've forgotten what it was about; but it had your picture in the front
of it, and I knew you the minute I saw you. Besides I was down in Tucson
the other day, and--you're going to lecture at Tucson Tuesday night,
aren't you?"
"I am if I ever get there," said I. "At this rate of speed I'm afraid
it'll be season after next."
"Well, they'll be ready for you when you arrive," he chuckled. "They've
got your picture plastered all over the place. It's in every drug-store
and saloon window in the town. They've got it tacked onto every tree,
hydrant, hitching post, billboard, and pump, from the railway station
out to the university and back. I ain't sure that there ain't a few of
'em nailed onto the ash barrels. You can't look anywhere without seeing
John Kendrick Bangs staring out at you from the depths of a
photographer's arm chair. Fact is," he added with a whimsical wink, "I
left Tucson to get away from the Bangs rash that's broken out all over
the place, and, by Jehosaphat! I get aboard this train, and _there sets
the original_!"
I laughed and handed the old fellow a cigar, which he accepted with
avidity, biting off at least a quarter of it in his eagerness to get
down to business.
"I'm not so bad as I'm lithographed," I said facetiously.
"So I see," he replied, "and it must be some comfort to you to realize
that if you ever get down and out financially you've got a first-class
case for libel against the feller that lithographed you."
He puffed away in silence for a minute or two, and then leaning over
the arm of his seat he re-opened the conversation.
"I say, Mr. Bangs," he said, rather wistfully, I thought, "you must read
a great deal from one year's end to another--maybe you could recommend
one or two good books for me?"
It was something of a poser. Somehow or other he did not suggest at
first glance anything remotely connected with a literary taste, and I
temporized with the problem.
"Why, yes," I answered cautiously. "I do run through a good many books
in the course of a year; but I don't like to prescribe a course of
literary treatment for a man unless I have had time to diagnose his
case, and get at his symptoms. You know you mightn't like the same sort
of thing that I do."
"That may be so too," he observed coolly. "But we've got some time on
our hands--suppose you try me and find out. I'm willin' to testify. Fire
ahead--nothin' like a few experiments."
"Well," said I, "personally I prefer biography to any other kind of
reading. I like novels well enough; but after all I'd rather read the
story of one real man's life, sympathetically presented, than any
number of absorbing tales concerning the deeds and emotions of the
fictitious creatures of a novelist's fancy. I like Boswell better than
Fielding, and Dr. Johnson is vastly more interesting to me than Tom
Jones."
"Same here," said my new friend. "That's what I've always said. What's
the use of puttin' in all your time on fiction when there's so much
romance to be found in the real thing? The only trouble is that there
ain't much in the way of good biography written these days--is there?"
"Oh, yes, there is," said I. "There's plenty of it, and now and then we
come upon something that is tremendously stimulating. I don't suppose it
would interest you very much, but I have just finished a two-volume life
of a great painter--it is called 'Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones,'
written by his wife."
The old man's face fairly shone with interest as I spoke, and reaching
down into the inner pocket of his ragged coat he produced a
time-smeared, pocket-worn envelop upon which to make a memorandum, and
then after rummaging around in the mysterious recesses of an over-large
waistcoat for a moment or two he brought forth the merest stub of a
pencil.
"Who publishes that book?" he asked, leaning forward and gazing eagerly
into my face.
"Why--the Macmillan Company," I replied, somewhat abashed. "But--would
_you_ be interested in that?"
And then came the illuminating moment--I fear its radiance even affected
the color of my cheeks when I thought of my somewhat patronizing manner
of a moment before.
"I guess I would be interested in that!" he replied with a real show of
enthusiasm. "_I've always been interested in that whole Preraphaelite
movement!_"
I tried manfully to conceal my astonishment; but I am very much afraid
that in spite of all my efforts my eyes gave my real feelings away. I
swallowed hard, and stared, and the old man chuckled as he went on.
"They were a great bunch, that crowd," he observed reflectively, "and I
don't suppose the world realizes yet what we owe to them and their
influence. Burne-Jones, William Morris, Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, and
Rossetti--I suppose you know your Rossetti like a book?"
I tried to convey the impression that I was not without due familiarity
with and appreciation of my Rossetti; but I began to feel myself getting
into deeper water than I had expected.
"There's a lot of fine things in poetry and in paint we'd never have had
if it hadn't been for those fellows," the old man went on. "Of course
there's a lot of minds so calloused over with the things of the past
that they can't see the beauty in anything that takes 'em out of a rut,
even if it's really old and only seems to be new. That's always the way
with any new movement, and the fellow that starts in at the head of the
procession gets a lot of abuse. Take poor old Rossetti, for instance,
how the critics did hand it to him, especially Buchanan--the idea of a
man like Robert Buchanan even daring to criticize Rossetti's 'Blessed
Damozel'! It's preposterous! It's like an elephant trying to handle a
cobweb to find out how any living thing could make a home of it. Of
course the elephant couldn't!"
I quite agreed that the average elephant of my acquaintance would have
found the average cobweb a rather insecure retreat in which to stretch
his weary length.
"Do you remember," he went on, "what Buchanan said about those lines?--
"And still she bowed herself and stooped
Out of the circling charm
_Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm._
He said those lines were bad, and that the third and fourth were quite
without merit, and _almost without meaning_! Fancy that!--
"_Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm_
_almost without meaning_! Suffering Centipedes!" he cried indignantly.
"That man must have been brought up on the bottle!"
I think I may truthfully say that from that point on I listened to the
old man breathlessly. Buchanan's monograph on "The Fleshly School of
Poetry" though wholly out of sympathy with my own views has long been a
favorite bit of literary excoriation with me, comparable to Victor
Hugo's incisive flaying of Napoleon III, and to have it spring up at me
thus out of the alkali desert, through the medium of this beloved
vagabond, was indeed an experience. Instead of conversing with my
friend, I turned myself into what theatrical people call a "feeder" for
the time being, putting questions, and now and then venturing a remark
sufficiently suggestive to keep him going. His voice as he ran on
gathered in strength, and waxed tuneful and mellow, until, if I had
closed my eyes, I could almost have brought myself to believe that it
was our much-loved Mark Twain who was speaking with that musical drawl
of his, shot through and through with that lyrical note which gave his
voice such rare sweetness.
[Illustration: "Suffering Centipedes!" he cried. "That man must have
been brought up on the bottle!"]
From Rossetti my new-found friend jumped to Whistler--to whom he
referred as "Jimmy"--thence to Watts, and from Watts to Ruskin; from
Ruskin he ran on to Burne-Jones, and then harked back to Rossetti again.
Rossetti now seemed to become an obsession with him; only it was
Rossetti the poet instead of Rossetti the painter to whom he referred.
In a few moments the stillness of that sordid coach was echoing to the
sonnet of "Lost Days":
"The lost days of my life until to-day,
What were they, could I see them on the street
Lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat
Sown once for food but trodden into clay?
Or golden coins squander'd and still to pay?
Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet?
Or such spill'd water as in dreams must cheat
The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway?
I do not see them here; but after death
God knows I know the faces I shall see--
Each one a murder'd self, with low last breath;
'I am thyself--what hast thou done to me?'
'And I--and I--thyself' (lo! each one saith)--
'And thou thyself to all eternity.'"
His voice trembled as he finished, and a long silence followed.
"Pretty good stuff, that, eh?" he said, at length.
"Fine!" said I, suddenly afflicted with a poverty of language quite
comparable to his own in the way of worldly goods.
"Takes you here, however," said he, tapping his forehead. "Makes you
think--and somehow or other I--I don't like to think. I'd rather
feel--and when it comes to that it's Christina Rossetti that takes you
here." He tapped his left breast over his heart. "She's got all the rest
of 'em skinned a mile, as far as I'm concerned. I love that 'Up Hill'
thing of hers--remember it?--
"Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
"But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for where the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that Inn.
"Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at the door.
"Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labor you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
"Ah, me!" he said. "I've got a deal of heartening out of that, and then
some day when things don't seem to go just right, I sing for my comfort
that song of hers:
"When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me,
With showers and dew-drops wet,
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
"I shall not see the shadows.
I shall not feel the rain.
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget."
The train had long since started on toward our destination, the old
fellow discoursing gloriously as we ran along, I utterly unconscious of
everything save the marvelous contrasts of that picture--a seemingly
wretched vagabond, held in the grip of a relentless poverty, pouring
forth out of the depths of a rich mind as rare a spiritual disquisition
as I ever remember to have enjoyed. Our destination finally reached, I
held out my hand to bid him good-by.
"I can't thank you sufficiently," I said, "for a wonderful hour. I want
you to do something for me. You see you have the advantage of me. You
know who I am; but I don't know who you are. Won't you tell me your
name, that I may add it to the list of my friends?"
The old fellow's eyes filled with tears. He laid his hand gently on my
shoulder. "My young friend," he said, his voice growing hoarse and husky
again, "_who_ I am is one of the least important things on the face of
God's beautiful green earth. What is really important is the kind of man
I am. _I am one of those unfortunates who started in life at the top of
the ladder and moved in the only direction he thought was left open to
him._"
He seized my hand, gave it a soft, seemingly affectionate pressure, and
walked away, leaving me standing alone, and I have not seen nor heard
from him since.
VI
BACK-HANDED COMPLIMENTS
In a previous chapter of these rambling reminiscences I have said that I
defied any really human man to return from a lecture season in this
country in a pessimistic frame of mind. To this defiance I would add
another. I defy any man possessed of a hide anywhere short of that of a
rhinoceros, or a head of a thickness less than solid ivory, to return
from a tour of our country with any greater sense of his own importance
than he is entitled to.
There are a good many plain truths spoken in the presence of the
lecturer by the good people to whom he is consigned, especially in our
delightfully frank West, where they seem to have acquired the knack of
drawing a clean-cut distinction between the lecturer as a man and the
lecturer as a lecturer. Discourtesy is never encountered anywhere. At
least in the ten years of my platform experience, with nearly a thousand
public appearances to my credit, I have met with it only twice, and on
both occasions in Eastern communities; a proportion so negligible as to
amount really to nothing. Hospitality to the man has always been
cordial; the attitude toward the lecturer respectful. But in the showing
of this respect there is no slopping over, though now and then there is
an atmosphere of reserve in its manifestation which serves the lecturer
better in the line of criticism, if he is capable of sensing its
significance, than any amount of outspoken condemnation.
There is one element in the work of the Man on the Platform that is in
itself of the highest disciplinary value, and that is that in all
circumstances _he must deliver his goods himself_. There is nothing
vicarious about the operation. No substitute can relieve him of that
necessity. The man who writes books, or makes shoes or motor-cars, can
sit apart and let others face whatsoever blame may be visited upon a
middle man for defects of workmanship; but for the lecturer there is no
such happy shifting of responsibility. If people find his discourse
dull, they either get up and walk out, or, as the saying is, they "go to
sleep in his face."
[Illustration: "The lecturer must deliver the goods!"]
Occasionally, however, an ostentatiously emphatic expression of
disapproval gives the man on the platform a chance to redeem himself. It
is told of Henry Ward Beecher that on one occasion something he had said
proved so offensive to one of his auditors, who happened to be sitting
in the front row of a large and reverberant auditorium, that the
individual rose bruskly and walked out. As a sort of underscoring of his
disapproval the protesting soul was aided by a pair of new shoes that
squeaked so audibly as he strode down the aisle that they distracted the
attention of everybody. Mr. Beecher immediately stopped short, and
waited until the dissatisfied person had faded through the doorway and
the last echo of his suffering boots had died away, and then, with a
benignant smile, recited that good old nursery rime so dear to the
hearts of our childhood:
Rings on his fingers,
And bells on his toes;
He shall have music
Wherever he goes.
It was a bit of ready repartee that captivated the audience, and if
there were present any others who later found themselves in a protesting
mood it is pretty certain that they waited for a safer occasion upon
which to manifest it. Mr. Beecher on his feet was never a man to be
trifled with.
On a stumping campaign myself a number of years ago I was confronted by
a somewhat similar condition. An allusion to a statesman whom I greatly
admired elicited a decided hiss from a group of hostiles seated under
the gallery of a rural opera house. I silenced the hiss by pausing in my
remarks and appealing to the janitor to "turn off that steam radiator,"
since the hall was evidently already too hot for the comfort of some of
the audience. It was not particularly deft, but it served the purpose,
and we heard no more from that particular quarter for the rest of the
evening.
It is a safer rule, however, for the speaker to try to conciliate the
hostile element, and it has been a rule of mine for the last five years
to endeavor to locate such centers of frigidity as may be found before
me, and then direct all my energies toward "thawing them out." Popular
as the platform is in all parts of the country to-day, there is always
present in every community a small leaven of at least reluctant men who
are dragged unwillingly to the lecture halls by their enthusiastic
wives, when, if they were only permitted to have their own way, they
would be resting tranquilly at home, slippers on feet, feet on fender,
book or favorite newspaper in hand, and a sweet-scented briarwood pipe
for company. It is not difficult to locate these sufferers. They are
such conscious martyrs that they immediately betray themselves, and as a
rule while my chairmen are introducing me to my audiences I scan the
rows of faces before me in search of them.
They have certain unmistakable earmarks that betray them to the
sympathetic eye--which, with all due modesty, I may claim mine to be;
for, while I love lecturing, being lectured to or at, as the case may
be, bores me to extinction. I am like those doctors who rejoice in the
opportunity to amputate another man's leg, but would not give seven
cents to cut off one or both of their own.
The first of these earmarks is the expression of the face, which is
either one of hopeless resignation, or full of lowering, one might
almost say vengeful, contempt, as if the owner of the face were calling
down inwardly all the wrath of Heaven upon the lecturer in particular,
and the whole lyceum movement in general. With both these expressions go
arms tightly folded across the breast, as though the sufferer were
really trying hard to hold himself in.
[Illustration: "They may 'go to sleep in his face.'"]
The second almost certain manifestation is in the physical relation of
the sufferer to the chair in which he sits. He makes it bear the heavy
material burden of his despair by sitting not as Nature intended that he
should sit, but as nearly upon the small of his back as the available
space at his disposal will permit. If he occupy an aisle seat, he sits
wholly on the small of his back, with his legs crossed, and his hands
tightly clasped across his freer knee.
Once located, this man is the special person that I go after. It becomes
my persistent effort, and in so far as I can master the situation my
determination, to win his reluctant heart. If I can only get him sitting
up like a vertebrate animal, using his spine like a prop instead of like
a hammock, and returning my gaze with a gleam of interest, I am happy.
If I can get him not only to sit up but to lean forward with his head
cocked to one side, much as a horse will cock its ears when something
unexpected comes within the range of its vision, I feel that I have
scored a triumph. I should say that at a rough guess in eight cases out
of ten the effort is successful, although there have been ninth and
tenth cases that have chilled me to the marrow, and sent me home with
an uncomfortable sense of failure.
My lamented friend, the late R. K. Munkittrick, an American humorist who
never really received the full measure of appreciation to which his
delicious humor entitled him, once when we were "reading" together one
night at Albany, scoring a fiasco so complete that we could only laugh
over it, put the situation before me in terms so wholly comprehensive
that I have never forgotten it.
"See that red-headed chap in the fourth row?" he whispered, as the
chairman was indulging in some extended remarks concerning our greatness
to which we could never hope to live up.
"You mean the pall bearer with the green necktie?" I asked.
"Yes," said Munkittrick, "he's the one."
"Well--what of him?" said I.
"Oh, nothing," grinned Munkittrick, "but I'll bet you seven dollars and
forty-seven cents he's bet the boxoffice fifty cents we can't make him
laugh."
I may record with due humility that if good old Munkittrick's surmise
was correct our highly chromatic but otherwise funereal friend won his
bet. I doubt we could have moved him with dynamite.
But these gentlemen serve a highly useful purpose. They keep us with our
feet on the earth, and prevent us from soaring too high in our own
estimation.
Another effective factor in this disciplinary element in platform work
is the "back-handed" compliment that leaves the party of the second part
suspended like Mahomet's coffin, midway between heaven and earth, and in
some uncertainty as to exactly where "he is going to get off." I have
rejoiced in several such. The great State of Pennsylvania, which has
"officially" done so much for the platform by its liberal appropriations
for teachers' institutes, enabling the school centers to secure the
services of speakers of high cost who would otherwise be beyond their
reach, is responsible for one of these.
It occurred some three years ago, and grew out of an unexpected summons
by wire from one of the largest cities of the Quaker State asking me to
"fill in" for Dr. Griggs, who because of sudden indisposition was
unable to meet his engagement in a large and important course there. It
was an emergency call, which fortunately found me disengaged, and
willing to serve.
The chairman of the occasion was a delightful individual, with a
considerable fund of dry humor, and his introduction was a gem of subtle
wit. It occupied about fifteen minutes, the first five of which were
devoted to matters pertaining to the course; the second five to a well
deserved eulogy of Dr. Griggs for his inspiring lectures and the
uplifting nature of his work, coupled with an expression of the intense
disappointment which he, the chairman, knew the audience must feel on
learning that the good doctor could not be present. I thought he rather
rubbed the "disappointment" idea in a little too vigorously; but I tried
not to show it, and sat through that part of the chairman's remarks with
the usual stereotyped smile of satisfaction at hearing a colleague so
highly spoken of. This done, the chairman launched himself upon a
four-minute discourse upon what he called "The Age of Substitution."
"You know, my friends," said he, "that this great age in which we live
is so rich in resources that at times when we cannot immediately lay
our hands on some particular article we happen to want there is always
to be found somewhere a _just as good as_ article to take its place.
If you desire a particular kind of porous plaster to soothe an
all-too-self-conscious spine, and the druggist you call upon for aid
does not chance to have it in stock, he invariably has another at
hand which he assures you will do quite as well. So it is with the
nerve foods, breakfast foods, corn plasters, face powders, facial
soaps, suspenders, corsets, liver pills, and lecturers. If we
haven't what you want, we have something just as good in this Age of
Substitution. So is it with us to-night. While we may not receive the
all-wool-and-a-yard-wide spiritual uplift that Dr. Griggs would have
given us, we are privileged to listen to the near-silk humor of a
substitute, who, the committee in charge venture to hope, will prove
to be _just as good as_ the other. We of course don't know that it
will be; but we live in hope as well as on it, and, lacking the great
satisfaction that I had expected to be mine in presenting Dr. Griggs to
you this evening, it still gives me a certain melancholy pleasure to
introduce to this audience that highly mercerized near-speaker, Mr.
Just-as-Good-as K. Bangs, on whose behalf I bespeak your charity and
your tolerance."
As a rule I like to play a little with my chairmen; but I deemed it
unwise on this occasion to "monkey with a buzz saw," and plunged
directly into the work in hand without venturing upon the usual
facetious preliminaries. I felt that I had enough work cut out for me
already, and for an hour and a half exerted myself strenuously to be
_just as good as_ I could be, neither more nor less. Then, when it was
all over, and my case was in the hands of the jury, a charming woman,
with a delectable smile on her face, came rushing up to the platform.
She seized my hand and shook it vigorously as she spoke.
"Oh, Mr. Bangs," she said with an enthusiasm so delightful that I
listened eagerly for the honeyed words to come, "we are so glad you
came! _You have made our disappointment complete!_"
Another incident I prefer not to locate other than by saying that it was
in the West--and where the West begins no man may say. I know a New York
lady to whom it begins at the Cortlandt street opening of Mr. McAdoo's
Hudson River tubes, who has no notion at all that anything lies beyond
save the names of a few cities that mean nothing to her, and the Rocky
Mountains. With others it begins on the banks of the Mississippi. Once
in the heart of Iowa, when I was speaking to a young college student
there on the glorious opportunities of the West, in the hope of making
him see how much I appreciated the wonderful country in which he lived,
the young man staggered me with the reply:
"Yes, sir, I believe you are right. _My father wants me to go West when
I get through with my work here._"
So it would seem that the old rime about the little insect--
Every flea has a little flea to bite him,
And so it goes ad infinitem--
may very well be adapted to the uses of those good souls who now and
then try to reach the infinity of westernness. But there is another poem
more directly applicable to some conclusion as to the problem, which I
like to think of in moments when I am reflecting upon its cordial
welcome to me:
Out where the hand clasp's a little stronger,
Out where a smile dwells a little longer--
That's where the West begins.
Out where the sun is a little brighter,
Where the snows that fall are a trifle whiter,
Where the bonds of home are a wee bit tighter--
That's where the West begins.
Out where the world is in the making,
Where fewer hearts with despair are aching--
That's where the West begins.
Where there's more of singing and less of sighing;
Where there's more of giving and less of buying,
And a man makes friends without half trying--
That's where the West begins.
The author of those lines, who was, I believe, Arthur Chapman of Denver,
seems to me to have come closer to a solution of the problem than any
other. For our own purposes just now, however, let us say that the
incident to which I wish to refer took place in that part of the West
which lies between Sandy Hook and the Golden Gate.
My audience in this particular spot was delightfully responsive; so much
so that I was all of two hours in the delivery of a lecture that
ordinarily takes me an hour and a quarter to deliver. It was as
exhilarating as a cross-country run, with turf and skies just right. But
for the pauses made necessary by the interruptions in appreciation I
should have galloped across the finish line in less than an hour. So
stimulating in fact was the readiness of the good people before me to
take what I had to say and run away with it, that, while I was
immortally tired when I went out upon the platform, when I finished I
could have started in and done it all over again with zest.
But even with so pleasing a background of responsiveness, there was one
young man seated in the front row who was a source of particular
pleasure to me. He was a rather distinguished looking youth, with
flashing eyes, and somewhat longish blond hair, and a physique that
suggested a modern Viking. There was something in his face that
suggested the scholarly habit--occasionally his expression was wistfully
questioning. His eyes never left my face while I was speaking, and his
physical attitude, forward-leaning, and a trifle tense, seemed to
betoken an interest in what I had to say that was more than gratifying,
and his mouth was kept half open, ever ready for action. If there was to
be anything to laugh at, he at least was not going to be caught napping,
or in any way unprepared, if by keeping his mouth open he could remove
all obstacles that would have prevented the easy flow of his mirth.
And his laugh! I wish I might have a rubber record of that laugh to
secrete in an automatic machine located somewhere in the middle of my
lecture halls, so that in response to the pressure of an electric button
it could be let loose at certain psychological moments. It was as
infectious a laugh as I ever listened to, and there were times when its
contagion brought me perilously close to seeming to laugh at my own
jokes--which is a dangerous thing for a lecturer to do, and contrary to
the technic of the "business," which requires humorous periods to be
delivered with a face solemn to the point of the funereal. It had really
musical modulations, rising from pianissimo to fortissimo on the wings
of nicely graded crescendos, and returning whence it had come with a
sort of rippling gurgle that was mighty fetching.
Finally not only was nothing I had in mind lost upon him, but he
actually appeared to discover subtleties of wit in my discourse of whose
presence I had not myself had the slightest suspicion. It is hardly
necessary to say that he was pleasing unto my soul, and naturally
enough I spoke of him afterward to my chairman.
"Well, Mr. Bangs," said the chairman as we walked back to the hotel
together after the lecture was over, "what did you think of your
audience to-night? Some responsiveness there, all right, eh?"
I was impulsively enthusiastic enough to say that I thought it was a
"corking good audience." "If they were all like that," said I, "this
work would be as easy as cutting calves-foot jelly with an ax."
"I thought you liked them," said he. "Our people here are appreciative,
and they believe the laborer is worthy of his hire in showing it."
"I'll put Blanksville down in my red-letter book," said I. "But tell me
who and what is that rather distinguished looking young man with the
longish blond hair and snappy eyes, who sat in the aisle seat of the
front row next to the white-haired old lady with an audiphone? He had a
wistful sort of face, and--"
"Oh, I know who you mean," said the chairman. "He's So-and-So. What
about him--he didn't bother you, I hope?"
"On the contrary," said I, "I loved him. He was about the most
appreciative chap I ever talked to. He fairly hung on every word I
spoke, and when it came to a funny point I'm blest if he didn't meet me
more than halfway!"
"Yes," said the chairman, "he would. He's half-witted."
My swelling head immediately resumed its normal proportions, and when I
left Blanksville the following morning the only discomfort I found in
wearing my regular hat was that in some way or other it seemed to have
grown a little too large for me, and showed a tendency to settle down
over my ears. I have nevertheless comforted myself with the thought that
sometimes the difference between half-wittedness and genius is so slight
to the eye of the familiar beholder that wise men are not infrequently
believed by their neighbors to be fools. My young friend after all may
have been a poet, and, like some prophets, "without honor in his own
country."
VII
FRIENDS OF THE ROAD
In the days of my cynicism I used to laugh in my sleeve, and
occasionally in print, at the ways of the politicians and statesmen en
route, who have their pictures taken hobnobbing with locomotive
engineers, trainmen, and Pullman porters. Since I have myself become a
professional wanderer and have come into closer, somewhat enforced,
fellowship with these individuals I laugh at the politicians and
statesmen no more. On the contrary I commend them, and I think with
appreciation and gratitude of a poem by George Sterling, one of our real
voices to-day calling down blessings on the heads of these "workers of
the night" to whose watchful care we who travel intrust our lives.
One who makes only occasional journeys by rail is not likely to think
very much about the man at the throttle; but when one has practically
lived on the rail for two or three months running, not only the man at
the throttle, but the man at the switch, the flagman, the fireman, the
conductor, and the Pullman porter as well, come to be in a very real
sense members of his family.
Mr. Carnegie's hero medals are often bestowed, and worthily, upon men
who on sudden impulse have performed some deed of heroism and
self-sacrifice for the benefit of others; but I have yet to hear of one
of these desirable possessions being bestowed upon the flagman who, in
the face of a raging blizzard, at midnight, the thermometer at zero,
leaves the comparative comfort of the rear car, and walks, whistling for
company, back some four or five hundred yards along the icy track, and
stands there with his red lantern in hand to warn a possibly advancing
train behind of danger ahead.
When the ice-incased wires are down, and the signal and switch towers
are out of commission because of the rampageous elements, how many of us
who lie comfortably asleep in the warm berths of our stalled trains give
so much as a thought to the man outside in the freezing cold of the
night, keeping the switches clear that we may proceed, or to the
flagman at the rear, shelterless before the storm, who stands between us
and disaster? Most of us, I fancy, do not think of them at all, and I
fear that many of us so occupy ourselves with self-sympathy on these
occasions that we find no words of commendation in our hearts for
anybody connected with the whole railway system; but rather words of
condemnation for that system and everybody connected with it, from the
innocent stockholder looking for dividends, all the way down to those
poor devils who have forgotten under the stress of demoralizing
conditions to fill the water tanks that we may drink and get our fair
share of the nation's supply of typhoid germs.
For myself, I can truthfully say that the remark of a railway official
made to me many years ago in response to one of my complaints has of
late years gathered considerable force and significance. This gentleman
was a neighbor of mine, and one Christmas he presented me with an annual
pass on the Hudson River Railroad. It was a delightful gift, and I used
it with enthusiasm. One morning, however, as he and I sat together on a
local train that had in some mysterious way managed to lose four hours
on a thirty-minute run, I turned to him and said:
"Charlie, sometimes I wish I had never accepted that confounded old pass
of yours. I've bartered my freedom of speech for a beggarly account of
empty minutes. If it wasn't for that blankety-blank pass, I could tell
you what I think of your blinkety-blink old road. Here we are four hours
late on a thirty-minute run!"
"Why, my dear boy," he replied with an amiable smile, "you are
dingety-dinged lucky to get in at all!"
Individually I have experienced so much kindliness and courtesy at the
hands of the personnel of our railroads in all parts of the United
States that I sometimes get real satisfaction out of sharing with them
the discomforts of travel. I have discovered without half trying that
there are profound depths of friendliness in them which need to be given
only half a chance to manifest themselves. Rarely indeed have I met with
discourtesy at their hands, and many a weary hour has been cheered by
their native wit. For the most part, naturally, my contact has been with
the station agent and the conductor--and the Pullman porter.
While I deplore the abuses of tipping in this and other countries, I
have rarely grudged the Pullman porter his well earned extra quarter.
Perhaps the general run of us have not had the time, nor the
inclination, to acquaint ourselves with the difficulties of the Pullman
porter's job. We don't realize that with a car full of people ten
passengers will want the car cooled off, ten others will want a little
more heat, five will complain that there is too much air, five others
will complain that there is too little; and poor Rastus, ground between
the two millstones of complaint, has to make a show of pleasing
everybody. He above all others would be justified in announcing as his
favorite poem those fine old lines:
As a rule a man's a fool:
When it's hot he wants it cool;
When it's cool he wants it hot--
Always wanting what is not.
I recall one fine old darky once on a train running into Cleveland, who
was very unhappy over a complaint of mine that, with a car crowded to
the limit with women and children, some cigarette fiend had vitiated
what little air there was in the car by smoking in his berth. I was
awakened at three o'clock in the morning by the oppressive odor of
burning paper and near-perique. There is no mistaking the origin of that
aromatic nuisance, and my gorge rose at the boorish lack of
consideration that the smoker showed for the comfort and convenience of
his fellow travelers. I pressed the button alongside my berth, and a
moment later the porter was peering in at me through the curtains.
"Look here, John," said I in a stage whisper, "this is a little too
much! Somebody in this car is smoking cigarettes, and I think it's a
condemned outrage. With all these ladies on board it seems to me that
you ought to insist that the man who can't restrain his passion for
cigarettes should get off at the next stop and take the first cattle car
he finds running to where he thinks he is going."
"Yas, suh," returned the porter sadly. "It's too bad, suh, an' I've
tried my bes' to stop 'em twice, suh."
"Well, by George!" said I, sitting up. "If they won't stop for you,
maybe they will for me. If any man aboard this car thinks he can get
away with a nuisance like this--"
"Yas, suh," said the porter; "but that's jest whar de trouble comes in,
suh. I been after 'em, suh; but it ain't no use. In bofe cases, suh, it
was de ladies deirsefs dat was a-doin' all de smokin', suh."
And he grinned so broadly as I threw myself back on my pillow that when
I finally got to sleep again I dreamed of the opening to the Mammoth
Cave, through a natural association of ideas.
[Illustration: "I have been after 'em, suh; but it ain't no use."]
Occasionally one finds some trouble in keeping ahead of the Pullman
porter in the matter of repartee. There used to be on the night run to
Boston a venerable chap, black as the ace of spades, but patriarchal in
his dignity, of whom I was very fond. He was as wide awake at all hours
of the day and night as though sleep had not been invented. Like most of
his class, he was inclined to bestow titles on his charges.
"Yo' got enough pillows, Cap'n?" he asked on one occasion, after he had
fixed my berth.
"Yes, Major," I replied, putting him up a peg higher. "But it's a cold
night, and I think another blanket might come in handy."
"All right, Cunnel," said he, adding to my honors. "I'll git hit right
away."
"Thank you, General," said I, as he returned with the desired article.
"Glad to serve yo', Admiral," said he with deep gravity.
"And now, Bishop," said I, resolved to keep at it until I scored a
victory, "suppose--"
"Hol' on, mistuh!" he retorted instantly. "Hol' on! Dey ain't mo'n one
puhson in de Universe whut's higher 'n a bishop, an' I knows mighty well
yo' ain't Him!"
Our dusky brothers not infrequently fill me with a sense of consolation
in difficult moments. Two such cases occur to me at this writing; one in
my own experience, and the other in a story I heard in the South last
winter, the mere thought of which has many times since served to soften
my woes in troublesome moments.
The first occurred several years ago, when the steel passenger cars
first came into commission. Being myself of a somewhat inflammable
nature, I make it a rule to travel on these in preference to the
old-fashioned tinder boxes of ten years ago whenever I can. On this
particular occasion, however, on a hurried midwinter night run, I found
myself in a highly ornate, lumbering Pullman of the vintage of '68. It
was an essentially mid-Victorian affair, and in the matter of decoration
was a flamboyant specimen of the early A. T. Stewart period of American
interior embellishment.
Those whose memories hark back that far will remember that the Pullman
Company's money at that time was largely expended on lavish
ornamentation of a peculiarly assertive rococo style, consisting for the
main part of an eruption of gew-gaws which ran riot over the exposed
surfaces of the car like a rash on the back of a baby. The external
slant of the upper berth in these cars was ever a favorite surface for
this particular kind of gew-gawsity, and no occupant of a lower berth
known to me ever succeeded in getting safely into bed, or out of it,
without having one or more of these lovely patterns imprinted on the top
of his head with more force than delicacy. In collisions the occupant of
one of these varnish-soaked orgies of fretwork had about as much chance
of escaping unscathed as what a dear clerical friend of mine in a lay
sermon once characterized as "a celluloid dog chasing an asbestos cat
through the depths of purgatory." Whenever I find myself on one of these
cars I think instinctively of just three things, and in this order--my
past life, my possible permanent future, and my accident insurance
policy--and try to comfort myself by playing both ends against the
middle.
In my haste on this occasion I had not particularly noticed the
characteristics of the car until I attempted to remove my shoes to
retire. As I sat up after untying the laces I was brought to a painful
realization of the old-time nature of the vehicle by having impressed
most forcibly upon the top of my head the convolutions of an empire
wreath, carved out of pine splints, and embossed with gold leaf, which
served to give Napoleonic dignity to the upper berth when not in use.
The jar, plus the ensuing association of ideas, brought to my mind an
uneasy realization of the probable truth that the car was of antique
pattern, about as solid as any other box of potential toothpicks, and as
fireproof as a ball of excelsior soaked with paraffin. At the moment the
porter happened to be passing with the carpet-stepped ladder to assist a
two-hundred-and-fifty-pound traveling man into the berth overhead, and I
addressed him.
"See here, porter!" said I. "What kind of car do you call this, anyhow?
Isn't this the car Shem, Ham, and Japhet took when they moved back to
town from Ararat?"
"Yas, suh," he answered. "She suttinly am an ol' timah, suh."
"Well, I don't feel exactly safe, George," said I. "Aren't there any
steel cars on this train?"
"Oh, we's all safe enough, suh," said George, with the assurance of one
who is so well intrenched that no foe on earth could possibly get at
him. "De cyar behind an' de cyar in front, dey's bofe steel, suh."
I had never expected to enjoy in this life the sensations that I suspect
are those of a mosquito when he finds himself caught between the
avenging palms of a horny-fisted son of toil, who has at last got a
pestiferous nuisance where he wants him; but I must confess that such
were my sensations that night; and every time the train came to a sudden
stop in its plunging through the dark I had a not too comfortable sense
that when the steel front of the car behind finally came to meet the
iron end of the car ahead, through the unresisting mass of splinters and
Empire wreaths between, I would personally, in all likelihood, more
closely resemble a cubist painting of a sunset on the Barbary Coast than
a human being. I imagine that what really carried me uninjured through
the nervous ordeal of that night was the amused view I took of good old
George's notions as to what constituted absolute safety.
The other incident, as narrated to me by a fellow traveler, has given me
much comfort in exasperating moments. In sections of the South and West
the engineers have not as yet mastered the art of stopping or starting
their trains gently. When they stop they stop grindingly, with jolts and
jars sudden and violent enough to send a snoring traveler full of stored
up impetus head first through a stone wall; or, if it be in the
daytime, with a jerk of such a nature as would snap his head off
completely if the latter were not so firmly fastened to his neck. It is
a method that may do very well for freight, but for passengers and
dynamite it has its disadvantages.
It was on a line renowned for its jarring methods that the incident of
which my friend told me is alleged to have occurred. A train made up of
day coaches and Pullman sleepers broke through a wooden trestle and
landed in a frightful mass of twisted wreckage on the bottom of a ravine
some eighty feet below. The wrecking crew worked nobly, and after
several hours of heroic effort came to a crushed and splintered sleeper
at the base of the ruin. There amid the debris, sleeping peacefully,
with a beam across his chest, lay the porter, wholly unhurt, and
dreaming. He was even snoring. The foreman of the wrecking crew, with
suitable language expressing his amazement at the miracle, finally
succeeded in getting Sambo half awake.
"Wh-whut's de mattah?" stammered Sambo, sitting up, and gazing dazedly
at the ruin on every side.
"Matter?" echoed the foreman. "Why, Jumping Jehoshaphat, man! Don't you
know that this whole dod-gasted train has fallen through the trestle?
It's a wonder you weren't killed. Didn't you feel anything?"
"Why, yas, boss," said Sambo. "I did feel sumpin' kind o' jolty; but I
t'ought dey was jes' a-puttin' on de dinah at Jackson."
So it is that nowadays when these jolting, jarring notes come along to
vex my soul I no longer lose my temper as I used to do, but think rather
of that old darky and "de dinah at Jackson," and wax mellow, feeling
that that story alone, true or not, is a full justification of all the
sufferings I or others have had to endure at the ungentle hands of the
freight engineer at the passenger throttle.
These men on the engines are great characters, and whenever I can get
into touch with them I do so. In some of my zigzagging trips hither and
yon in the Middle and Northwest I often find myself back to-day on some
train or other that has carried me along on some previous trip, and it
is frequently much like a family reunion when I meet the crew for a
third or fourth time. "Glad to see you back," is a familiar greeting
from conductors, engineers, flagmen, and porters alike. There is one
diner on a Western run that I have visited so frequently that I receive
all the kindly special attention one used to look for at an inn to which
he was a constant visitor; and I think it all grew out of the fact that
the first time I traveled on that particular car I summoned the man in
charge to complain of the pie.
"I don't like to complain," said I; "but this pie--"
"What's the matter with the pie?" he asked, bristling a little.
"Why," said I, "it's so confoundedly good that even a whole one couldn't
satisfy me!"
[Illustration: "These men on the engines are great characters."]
Ever since the registry of that complaint I have really had more than
the law allows on that particular car. Preferential treatment that would
fill the Interstate Commerce Commission with anguish is always mine.
Neither the rack nor all the fires of the Inquisition could extract from
me its precise identity, lest its kindly crew be fined for overcourtesy
to a specific individual.
But to return to the engineers: I have always cherished the memory of a
stolid old graybeard in command of a special train circumstances once
compelled me to hire in order to meet an Arizona date for which there
was no possible regular connection by rail. My special started from
Phoenix shortly after midnight of a stormy day, to carry me down to
Maricopa, there to connect with an early morning express into Tucson.
The train consisted of an engine and a single day coach. Inasmuch as it
was mine for the time being, and at considerable cost, I decided to
exercise my proprietary rights and ride on the engine. A heavy rain
which had been falling all day had changed the dry, sandy beds of the
Salt and Gila rivers to torrential streams, to the great disadvantage of
the roadbeds. We literally seemed to be feeling our way along in the
dark, until suddenly the clouds broke away and a glorious moon shed its
radiance over everything. Just at this point the engineer with a
startled exclamation seized the throttle and brought us to a
disquietingly abrupt stop. He whispered a word or two to the fireman,
who immediately descended from the cab and ran on ahead along the track
until he was completely lost to sight.
"What's the trouble?" said I somewhat apprehensively, as the engineer
began examining his machinery.
"Oh, nothing," said he. "I've just sent Bill ahead to see if the bridge
is still there."
"Bridge? Still there?" I queried. "There's nothing wrong with the
bridges, I hope."
"Well--I dunno," said he. "Look over there," he added with a wave of his
hand off to the left of us. I peered across the stream in the direction
he had indicated, and there in the bright light of the moon I could see
that two huge iron spans of the Santa Fe bridge had been completely
undermined by the fierce flow of the waters, and now lay flat on their
sides in midstream.
"Ooo-hoo! All right!" came the voice of the fireman from the dark ahead.
I sat transfixed and speechless as the engineer started slowly ahead and
moved at a snail's pace along the soggy road. We came to the bridge,
which was still standing, in a few moments; but oh how it swayed as we
inched our way across! I should have felt safer if that train and I
were lying together in a hammock. We fairly lurched across it, and I
should not have been at all surprised if at any moment the whole
structure had collapsed under our weight. Finally we got across in
safety, and my heart condescended to emerge from my boots.
"By George, Mr. Engineer!" said I. "If there's any more like that, I
guess I'll get off and walk the rest of the way."
"All right, mister," said the engineer cheerfully. "If you prefer the
company of rattlesnakes and Gila monsters to mine, go ahead--and may the
Lord have mercy on your soul!"
I decided to remain.
VIII
CHAIRMEN I HAVE MET
Sometimes the Gentleman in the Chair is a Lady, but more often he is a
man, and, strange to relate, contrary to the general impression of the
comparative methods of the sexes, the ladies are vastly more direct in
their introductions than their Brothers in Suffering. Women are seldom
oratorically inclined. Men are invariably so--or at least chairmen are.
And as a result an introduction to an audience by a woman is likely to
become more of an "identification of the remains" than an illuminating
explanation of the speaker's right to be where he is; while the men
"pile it on" to such an extent that the lecturer has often to struggle
immortally to make good the chairman's kindly declarations on his
behalf.
Personally, with all due respect to the Lady Chairman, I prefer the
masculine method: not because I like to hear myself exalted to the
tipmost point of the blue vault above; for I do not. It is hard work to
sit still before five hundred people with a smug expression of
countenance and hear oneself compared to Dickens and Thackeray, and
Shakespeare and Moses, to the distinct disadvantages of that noble
quartet of literary strugglers; and I have never ceased to sympathize
with Anthony Hope, who on a postprandial occasion some years ago when I
was sitting next to him, after listening to a few eulogistic remarks by
a speaker in which he was made to appear the greatest Light of
Literature since the beginning of time, lifted the tablecloth, glanced
under it, and in a muffled tone murmured, "My God, Bangs! Isn't there
any way out of here? I cawn't live up to all this!"
Nevertheless, I do prefer the men's method, because it gives me more
time in which to study my audience, and, in so far as I may, adjust
myself and my discourse to the special problem confronting me. In the
one case (introductions by women) it is as if one were suddenly seized
by the scruff of the neck and thrown overboard without even time to say
one's prayers; in the other the victim is slowly and pleasantly carried
upward from the level of fact on the wings of kindly fancy to a
pinnacle of unearned increment of glory, and left there to shift for
himself: to soar higher if he have afflatus enough to attain loftier
heights, or to slide back to where he belongs as gracefully as may be.
[Illustration: "Pile it on so thick that the lecturer has to struggle
hard to make good."]
I have often thought as I have sat and listened to these delightful
flights of eulogy--so like the obituary notices we read in the
newspapers after a great man dies--of the great disadvantages of those
upper realms. It is very lonely and cold up there, and while the old saw
is undoubtedly correct, and there _is_ plenty of room at the top, let it
be recorded by one who has more than once been summarily hauled thither
as involuntarily as undeservedly, that it is elbow room only, with
mighty little solid earth on which to rest one's feet. The poet who
invented the expression "the giddy heights" knew what he was talking
about, and one has but to go out on the lecture platform and try to
stand gracefully on those abstract peaks to have it proved to his entire
satisfaction.
But there is another reason why I prefer the chair-_man_ to the
chair-_woman_, and it has to do solely with the technic of lecturing. No
one who has ever lectured can deny the apprehension of the first five
minutes of the effort. Those five minutes are perhaps the most critical
period of the evening. If the attack is not right, the whole affair is
likely to come down with a crash; for first impressions count perhaps
more than they should with the average audience. If the attack is good,
and the lecturer can "make himself solid" with his audience at the very
beginning, structural weaknesses and an occasional dull or dragging
moment will be forgiven later, because those who listen have come to
like the speaker personally, and decline to let him fail unless he
really insists upon doing so.
Now the technic of this attack, I should say if I were retained to write
a Primer for Lecturers, involves the chairman most materially. He is
the tangible hook on which the alert lyceumite almost invariably either
hangs or supports himself in those first five minutes. Human nature is
so constituted that people like a pleasantry at the expense of some
person or of some thing with which they are personally familiar. It
grows out of the love of the concrete--which is a failure of us all, I
fancy--and in every community there are always at least two concrete
things that are sure winners for the lecturer--the chairman of the
evening, and the railway system upon which the inhabitants of the
community depend. Jests broad or subtle at the expense of either are
received with howls of joy.
On my first transcontinental trip, made ten years ago, I never failed to
receive an immediate response from my audiences when I referred to the
letters N. P. R. R., the abbreviated form for the Northern Pacific
Railroad, as really signifying a "Not Particularly Rapid Route"; and in
other sections of the country served by those charming corporations the
shortest cut I know to the affections of the people is through a bald or
ribald jest at the expense of the Erie or the Baltimore & Ohio
Railroad.
The chairman, however, is an equally safe proposition. He is either a
very popular man in town, or directly the reverse, and in either case
his neighbors enjoy a little joke at his expense. Naturally the joke, to
be successful, must have to do with something peculiar to the moment,
which the lecturer must find in the chairman's opening remarks.
Obviously one cannot be so freely facetious with a woman as with a man,
and if he has been properly brought up does not even wish to be so. So
that the Lady Chairman invariably leaves the speaker with a restricted
field of operations at the outset.
Of course in all these reflections I am speaking merely of the lecturer
who seeks popular rather than academic favor, which is frankly my own
case. I should infinitely prefer to find myself liked by a miscellaneous
audience rather than by a limited company of scientificos who are
professionally more interested in things of the head than of the heart.
It is better to be human than great, and I care more for Humanity than
for the Humanities.
At a rough estimate I should say that in the last ten years I have been
the beneficiary of the services of not less than eight hundred
chairmen, and in that whole list I can recall but one that I did not
like, and no doubt he was a most likable fellow. He was a clergyman and
a man of information, if not education; but he seemed to think that
because somebody had once intimated that I was a "humorist" (a title
that I have neither laid claim to, nor specially desired to win) I must
naturally be reached only by a downward climb from his own dignified
heights. There are individuals in this world who conceive humor to be a
somewhat undignified pursuit, their own education in that branch of
human action having been confined to a study of the antics of the circus
clown, and they are likely to deny to humorists even the right to the
use of correct English.
"Well," said this special chairman unctuously when we met for the first
time, "you are from New York, I understand."
"I have been a New Yorker," I said noncommittally.
"I suppose you know Howells, and Mark Twain, and all that _bunch_?" he
went on, condescending to use the kind of language with which he of
course assumed I was most familiar.
And it was just there that I took a violent dislike to the man. The word
_bunch_, as applied to Mr. Howells and Mark Twain by one of his presumed
education was not pleasing to my soul, though I should have loved it
from a cowboy. It was as if somebody had referred to "those talented
_cusses_, Carlyle and Emerson," and I simmered slightly within.
"Well," I replied, "I've known Howells and his gang for ages--bunked
with the whole kit and caboodle of 'em for nearly twenty years--and you
can take it from me they're a nifty herd! But the other--who was the
other man?"
"Mark Twain," said he.
"I seem to have heard the name somewhere," said I; "but I don't think
I've ever met him, or at least I don't remember it. New York's a pretty
big place, you know, and you can't be expected to know everybody. What
was his line?"
I am not sure, but I think the reverend gentleman woke up at that point.
At any rate he gave me no clue as to Mark Twain's identity. He turned
away, and excused himself on the ground that he wanted to see if the
audience was "all in."
"Don't bother," I called after him. "It will be _all in_ when I get
through with it."
But he never cracked a smile. I presume there were refinements of slang
with which he was not familiar.
As to the others, however, I find as I run the noble army over in
retrospect that many have won their way into my affections, and none are
remembered save pleasantly. Several of them stand out preeminently for
acts of self-sacrificing kindness on my behalf; notably one gentleman in
Iowa who drove me over a distance of eighteen miles after midnight
through a raging blizzard, requiring the unremitting efforts of four
sturdy horses to pull us through, in order that I might catch a train
back East and be with my children at Christmas time, and he was not a
particularly emotional man, or anything of a sentimentalist, at that.
I shall never forget the spur of his answer to a remark I made to him
that night on our way from the hotel to the lecture hall. The snow was
falling lightly when he arrived, but the distance to the hall was so
short that we walked it. As we came to the public square I noticed that
hitched to the white railing about the county courthouse that stood in
the middle thereof were some thirty or forty teams, harnessed to farm
wagons of various types, large and small. It was already after eight
o'clock, and I was surprised to find the wagons there at so late an
hour.
"Your people work late, Mr. Robb," said I, as we sauntered along.
"What do you mean by that?" he inquired.
"Why," said I, "those wagons over there. Isn't it a trifle late for your
farmers to be in town?"
"Oh," he said, "those wagons--why no, Mr. Bangs. Those wagons are here
for pleasure, not on business. They have brought in a good part of your
audience. Some of your people to-night have driven in from as far as
twenty miles to hear you."
My heart sank. "Great Scott!" I ejaculated. "Twenty miles, eh? On a
night like this--I--I hope I'll be good enough for that."
"_I hope so!_" was his laconic response.
The rejoinder was as the prick of a spur, and by its aid, as well as
with the assistance of a delightfully receptive gathering of listeners
who had traveled far to have a good time, and meant to have it
anyhow--a characteristic of your Westerner--we pulled through in good
condition.
When all was over this noncommittal Iowan bundled me up in a borrowed
fur overcoat, and insisted on taking that all-night drive with me
through the raging storm that I might be sent safely and rejoicing back
to my youngsters awaiting my coming on the Atlantic coast. It was
shortly after four in the morning when my train drew out of the distant
station, and the last I saw of my kindly host he was standing on the
railway platform, knee deep in the snow, in the spotlight of a solitary
white electric lamp, hat in hand, and waving his farewells and good
wishes for me and mine.
I rejoice to say that he has remained my friend over the eight or nine
years that have since elapsed, and if by any chance he shall read these
lines I trust they will serve to prove to him that my affection, as
frequently expressed in my letters to him, is still quite as strong and
as deep as one with his capacity for friendliness could possibly wish it
to be. And I wish to add that his figure as it stands out in my memory
has become a symbol to me of the kindness, and courtesy, and
friendliness of the great-hearted people who dwell in what he and his
fellows properly and pridefully refer to always as "God's Own Country."
[Illustration: "The last I saw of my kindly host."]
Another Iowa chairman, whose charming companionship and courtesy I shall
always remember, will not mind, I am sure, if I record here a most
amusing "break" that he made at our first meeting, which, I hasten to
add, he more than redeemed afterward when the stress and strain of the
evening relaxed. He dwelt in what appeared to be a most flourishing
little city in the northern part of the State. I had arrived there early
in the afternoon, and was so much impressed by the clean-cut appearance
of everything I saw that I lingered upon the streets long after I
should have sought my couch to rest up for the evening. The streets were
as clean as a whistle. The dwellings were attractive in design and
setting, and the business blocks were of a dignified if not massive
style of architecture. Best of all, if I could judge from those I saw
to-ing and fro-ing upon the streets, the people themselves were alert
and active.
In view of all this apparent prosperity I was a trifle surprised when
the chairman arrived at the hotel to find him rather depressed. He was a
clergyman, and at first glance seemed to be suffering from profound
melancholy; so very profound indeed that I deemed it my duty to try to
cheer him up.
"What a fine, prosperous little city you have here, Doctor," said I with
genuine enthusiasm. "I've put in the greater part of the afternoon
looking the place over, and I tell you it has filled me with joy."
"Humph!" said he gloomily. "It looks prosperous, but--_it ain't_! It's a
bank-made town. The banks got here first, and induced people to come and
settle on easy terms, and the terms haven't turned out quite so easy as
they might. There's hardly a man in this town that isn't up to his chin
in debt."
"Oh, well, what of that?" said I, still resolved to win out on a
tolerably hopeless proposition. "Of course debt is a bad thing; but
sometimes it acts as a spur. Your people are a bright and brainy looking
lot. It won't take them long to settle up."
"Oh, they look bright and brainy," he returned sadly; "but _they ain't_!
There isn't one man in ten 'll understand a half of what you say to them
to-night."
"Look here, Doctor!" said I, beginning to wax a trifle chilly myself,
especially in the regions of my pedal extremities. "What are you trying
to do, discourage me?"
"Oh, no," he replied, with a mournful shake of his head. "If I'd been
trying to discourage you, I'd have told you about our lecture hall. It's
without any exception the meanest thing of its kind on the American
continent. Why," he added, holding out his hands in a gesture of utter
despair, "why, if we had a lecture hall that was only halfway decent,
_we could afford to have somebody out here to talk to us that
would be worth listening to!_"
The chairman who in the exuberance of his own eloquence forgets the name
of the individual he is introducing, even though he has announced that
that name is a "household word," is no creature of the imagination, and
if the stories that are told of him seem hackneyed, it is not because
they are so frequently told, but because they happen so frequently in
the experience of all platform speakers, and in almost identical manner.
Even so well known a man as Mr. Bryan has suffered from this, one
enthusiastic admirer in New York having once, after a skyscraping
peroration, led up with climacteric force to the name of "our Peerless
Leader, _William J. Brennings_."
In my own platform experience I have had chairmen come to me at the last
moment and confess with most childlike frankness that they have never
heard of me before, asking me to help them out because they really
didn't know "what in Tophet to say." One individual out on the Pacific
Coast approached me one night about ten minutes before the lecture was
scheduled to begin, and revealed to me his terrible embarrassment over
this latter situation.
"I didn't know until half an hour ago that I was to present you to our
people to-night," said he, "and to tell the honest truth, Mr. Bangs, _I
never heard of you before_. Will you please tell me who you are, and
_what_ you are, and _why_ you are? And is there anything pleasant I can
say about you in introducing you to your audience?"
"Well," said I, "if I had known I was to have the privilege of preparing
the obituary notice you are to deliver over my prostrate remains while I
lie in state upon the platform to-night, I should have written out
something that would have been mighty proud reading for the little
Bangses when I sent marked copies of to-morrow morning's papers back
East to show them what a great man their daddy is in the West. But I
haven't time to tell you the whole story of my past life, and there are
certain sections of it I wouldn't tell you if I had. I have been a
Democrat in New York and a Republican in Maine."
"You might at least make a suggestion or two to help me out, though," he
pleaded.
"Oh, yes," said I, "there are plenty of pleasant things you can say
about me. In the first place, you can tell that audience that--"
"Hold on a moment, Mr. Bangs," he interrupted, raising his hand to stop
me. "Just one minute, please! _You've got to remember that I am a
clergyman and must speak the truth!_"
I resolved to let him go his own gait, and comforted him by telling him
he could say whatever he pleased, and that I would "stand for it."
And I must confess he acquitted himself nobly. In his hands I became one
of the Princes of Letters, the titles of whose many books were too well
known to need any enumeration of them there, and as for my name--why, it
would be an impertinence for him even to mention it, "because, my
friends," said he, "I am perfectly well aware that that name is _as
familiar to you as it is to me_."
Another good gentleman in the South, summoned to do duty as chairman at
the last moment, sought no aid either from myself or from "Who's Who,"
trusting, like the good Christian he was, utterly to Holy Writ. He began
most impressively with selections from the Book of Genesis. "In the
beginning God created the earth," said he, and then he ran lightly over
the sequences of created things until he had ushered the birds of the
air, the beasts of the field, and the fishes of the sea on to the stage,
and thence with an easy jump he came to myself.
"And then, my friends," he said, with an impressive pause, "the Creator
felt that He should create something to have dominion over all these
things that He knew were good--a creature of heart, a creature of soul,
a creature of in-till-ect, and so He made man. My friends, it is such a
one that we have with us to-night who will speak to you upon his own
subject as only he can do. It gives me great pleasure to introduce to
you the speaker of the evening, who is too well known to you all to need
any further eulogy on my part."
The good gentleman then retired to a proscenium box at the right of the
stage, where he at once proceeded to fall asleep, and snored so lustily
that everybody in the house was delighted, including myself--although,
to tell the truth, I envied him his nap, for I was immortally tired.
One of the dearest of my chairmen was a fine old gentleman in West
Virginia, to meet and know whom was truly an inspiration. He was a
profound scholar, and had enjoyed the rare privilege in a long and
useful life of knowing intimately some of the demigods of American
literature. His reminiscences of Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and
Longfellow, and Hawthorne, and others of our most brilliant literary
epoch, were a delight to listen to, and I was sorry when the time came
for us to go out upon the platform. It would have been a greater treat
for that audience to listen to him than to me, and I heartily wished we
might exchange places for the moment. Like a great many others of my
chairmen, this gentleman experienced some difficulty in getting the
title of my lecture, "Salubrities I Have Met," straight in his mind.
More than once during our little chat together he would pause and say:
"What is the title of your talk again? It has slipped my mind."
"Sal-u-bri-ties I Have Met," I would say.
"Tell me again--is it Salubrities or Celebrities?" he would ask.
"Salubrities," I would reply. And then I would spell it out for him,
"S-A-L-U-B-R-I-T-I-E-S, Salubrities. Not in any case Celebrities, or you
will spoil my opening."
"I'll try to remember it," he would say, with a mistrustful shake of
his head as if he feared it was impossible. "It's rather elusive, you
know."
"Perhaps I had better write it down on a slip of paper," I said at the
last.
"Oh, no," he replied. "I think I have it now--Salubrities, Salubrities,
Salubrities--yes--I--I think I have it."
We walked out upon the platform, and the dear old gentleman began a
short address so filled with witty and pleasant things that I have ever
since wished I could have had a stenographer present to take it down in
shorthand. It would have formed an excellent standard of conduct and
achievement worthy of any man's striving. And then he came to my
subject.
"And to-night, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "Mr. Bangs has come to us
to give us his famous lecture on--ahem--on--er--he has come, I say, to
give us his inimitable talk on--er--on--er--"
I leaned forward, and tried to give it to him in a stage whisper; but
was too late. His impetus carried him on to destruction.
"--his delightful talk on Lubricators He Has Met," said he.
Without any jealousies let me confess that that observation was truly
the hit of the evening. The bulk of the audience had been themselves so
mystified by the possible significance of the word Salubrities that they
knew the title by heart, and we began the evening with a roar of
laughter that made us all friends at once. And as a matter of fact no
harm was done; for "Lubricators I Have Met" was quite as good a title as
the other, for my Salubrities are men and women who have made the world
happier, and better, and sweeter, by their kindliness and graciousness,
and what in the world could be more fitting than that the people who do
that should be called Lubricators?
IX
CHANCE ACQUAINTANCES
The delightful author of that most appealing story, "The Friendly Road,"
had only to scratch the surface of things a little to find many a golden
nugget of friendliness and courtesy in the mines of the human spirit. As
I look back on my many thousands of miles of travel in this country I
find myself able to say with equal confidence that on the Roads of
Steel, and the lanes tributary thereto, where few of us would think to
look for such things, I too have found my golden nuggets without more
than half-trying to find them. I have already spoken of my friends among
the trainmen, to whose fidelity and watchful care I have owed my safe
transit and my comfort in many a long and weary stretch. They have been
an abundant source of happiness to me; but there have been others still,
in whose wit and fraternal companionship, and illuminating discourse, I
have found both pleasure and profit. Many of these have been the chance
acquaintances of the smoker and the observation car en route.
It does not happen often here in the East that we make friends "by
rail." Possibly it is because the distances traversed are comparatively
short. Perhaps too it is due to the Eastern Reserve, which is a State of
Mind, just as the Western Reserve has become several States of Being. I
know that the democratic Westerner traveling in the East finds us
apparently cold and unresponsive; though I doubt we are really so. We
are merely hurried, and possibly worried; too preoccupied to notice the
many little opportunities for friendly intercourse that a railway
journey presents.
It is my own impression that the distance to be traveled has largely to
do with this difference of manner between the Eastern man and his
brother from the West. The average Easterner who has never penetrated
the West farther than Sandy Hook has no real conception of the
magnificence of those distances about and beyond the Mississippi Valley.
At times when for reasons of business or pleasure I have gone from my
home in Maine to my encampment in New York, between the hours of six
P.M. on a Tuesday, say, and six A.M. of the following Wednesday, I have
passed through six separate American commonwealths: but in those Far
Western stretches I have time and again spent my full twenty-four hours
upon the road without in any wise finding myself subject to the rules
and regulations of the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Out of this rises, naturally enough, a difference in attitude toward
one's fellow travelers. There comes to be a greater sense of a settled
community interest on the longer journey, which brings with it greater
inclination for social intercourse with one's neighbors of the sleeper.
One of the conspicuous results of my contact with humanity on the road
has been that I have come to hold a very high respect for the traveling
man; so high indeed that where ten years ago I should probably have
spoken of him in the terms of our American vernacular as a drummer, I
have now definitely ejected that word from my vocabulary, save in its
narrower meaning as applied to that overnoisy person who beats that most
unmusical musical instrument, the drum, in our modern bands. These
commercial travelers average high in character and in intellect, and
the man who keeps his ears open while in their company can hardly fail
to learn much from their discourse. The best of them know their own
special lines from the ground up, and if my observation of them is
correct the very least of them are authorities on human nature.
I do not wish to boast, but I think that if some emergency should arise
requiring me to prepare offhand an article on suspenders, straw hats,
automobiles, or canned tomatoes, I could qualify as an apparent
authority, anyhow, from things I have heard directly from the good
fellows pursuing those particular lines, or have overheard in their
chats with others, in the smoking cars. More than once I have left a
symposium conducted by a group of these gentlemen almost obsessed with
the notion that our universities might be better qualified to do their
real work in life if the average college professor were able to "get his
stuff over" as humanly, as clearly, as entertainingly, and as
effectively as do the bulk of these advance agents of the American
industrial world. They are, according to their several capacities, full
of their subject, saturated with it, enthusiastic over it, and wholly
unreluctant when they get even half a chance to reveal their knowledge
to a ready listener.
I have met men on the road who were as eloquent on the subject of men's
underwear as I should like to be on the necessity of a cheerier spirit
in meeting the trials of life, and one effervescent soul on a Pacific
Coast trip once held me and mine spell-bound by his remarkable
disquisition on the spiritual influence of comfortable shoes, talking
for a longer time than I have ever yet listened willingly to a sermon on
some seemingly less homely topic. And as authorities on the state of the
nation, political, commercial, and spiritual--well, any kind of
administration, Republican, Democratic, Progressive, would not do badly
were it to summon a congress of these individuals to meet annually at
Washington, to confer with it, to inform it, and to lay before it
anything having directly or remotely to do with "things as is."
They are by nature diplomats, by instinct orators, and of necessity they
are profound students of human nature. They have to be adaptable to
circumstance, ready of resource, and full of tolerance. I take off my
hat to them, and heartily congratulate the business interests of the
United States to-day upon the high character and quality of manhood of
this splendid army in the field of commerce.
One of these good fellows several years ago enlivened me for many weary
hours on a tedious journey from Kansas City to Minneapolis. The journey
was full of annoying mishaps, thanks to a habit some of our Southern and
Western railway people have, lacking roses and other fresh flowers, of
strewing freight wrecks in my path. It is an expensive tribute; but I
would willingly go without it.
On this occasion my friend and I dined together, breakfasted together,
characterized our luck in a beautiful commingling of strong language
together, and together we watched the painfully slow operations of the
train wreckers removing that tributary debris from the tracks. He was
buoyant and undismayed by trial, and for hours he orated eloquently upon
his subject, which happened to be straw hats. When he got through, had I
taken notes, I could have qualified for a University degree upon that
subject if I had sought an S. T. D. (Doctor of Straw Tiling).
The vast gulf that separates the near-Panama from the real thing became
perfectly clear to me then, if it had never been so before, and I knew
how it had come about that a New Yorker could buy a Panama hat for two
dollars and fifty cents on Eighth avenue which on Fifth avenue would
cost him ten dollars; and why a three-dollar Leghorn purchased in
Chicago was inferior to a ninety-five dollar Leghorn manufactured in
Newark, New Jersey, was made so obvious that I have worn neither since.
His discourse was lucid, picturesque, convincing, and so completely
comprehensive that women's hats became no more of a mystery to me than
are those which our truck horses wear in midsummer with their ears
sticking up through holes in the crown. As we drew near our destination
I suddenly observed a smile breaking out on his lips, and a decided
twinkle in his eye.
"Good Lord!" said he. "I've only just realized that I have been talking
you deaf, dumb, and blind for nearly twenty-four straight hours, without
giving you a chance to slide in a word edge-wise. I hope I haven't made
you think life's nothing but a hat to me?"
"On the contrary," said I, "I've learned a lot. You've made life worth
living."
"I get so infernally interested in my business," said he
apologetically, "that sometimes I don't realize that maybe the other
fellow has something to say too. I meant to have asked you this morning,
but I forgot. What's your line?"
I was seized with a jocular impulse, and I answered instantly "Natural
gas."
He looked at me with a puzzled expression. "Natural gas?" he repeated.
"That's a queer business. How do you make deliveries?"
[Illustration: "When he got through I could have qualified for a college
degree on the subject of straw hats."]
"Come around to the lecture hall with me to-night and I'll show you,"
said I.
He threw his head back and roared with laughter. "By George! the
dinner's on me!" he said.
He accompanied me to the hall that evening, and sitting in the front row
gazed at me quizzically all through my labors--full of sympathy and
understanding, however--and after the affair was over and he joined me
for my return journey to the hotel he slapped me hard on the back.
"Some gas, all right!" said he. "I wouldn't blow that out if I could!"
Which I took to be one of the most genuine compliments I have ever
received.
I have never in any of my trips felt myself in danger of assassination,
and yet one of these chance acquaintances of mine involved me by his
love of practical joking in an implied ultimatum from a stranger of a
most awe-inspiring nature. In leaving a California city some years ago I
found myself seated with a group of other travelers just inside the rear
door of the observation car. The train had come to a sudden standstill
alongside a row of flourishing olive trees, and the traveling man (if I
remember correctly he was to Suspenders what Darwin was to the Origin of
Species) jumped from the platform and plucked a handful of their fruit
from branches overhanging the border of the road. Three of these he
passed in to me, and in the innocence of my young heart I immediately
plumped one of them into my mouth, and bit into it.
The result I shall not attempt to describe. Our dictionaries have at
least a dozen separate and distinct terms signifying that which is
bitter, no single one of which is adequate even to intimate the taste of
that olive. There are such expressions as "gall and wormwood"; there are
adjectives involving such qualifications of taste as "acrid,"
"nauseous," "sharp," "tangy," "stinging," "rough," and "gamy." None
suffices. I have tasted rue, I have tasted aloes, I have tasted quassia,
and I have nearly died of squills. As a small boy I once started in to
chew a four-grain quinine pill that had been rolled with no ameliorating
ingredient to take off the tang of it. But never in my life before or
since have I tasted anything comparable to that olive for pure,
unadulterated acerbity. It was an Ossa of Gall piled on a Pelion of
Wormwood--I might say that it represented the complete reunion of that
Gall which the historians of the past have told us was "divided into
three parts"--and I suffered accordingly.
But when I saw that traveling man's eye full of twinkling joy fixed upon
me I resolved not to let him know that the horrid thing was not the most
exquisite bit of ambrosial sweetness that had ever been perpetrated upon
my paralyzed palate. I simply chewed quietly ahead, externally as calm
and as placid as any cow that ever fletcherized her cud.
"How is it?" asked another traveler, sitting alongside me.
"Delicious!" said I. "Have one."
And I handed him over one of my two remaining olives. He was as innocent
as I, but not quite so self-controlled. Even as I had done, he too
plumped the olive into his mouth, bit into it--and forthwith exploded. I
shall not repeat here the appeal to Heaven that issued from his lips
along with the offending olive itself. Suffice it to say that although
there were several ladies present it was verbally adequate. And then out
of the depths of the car, from a physical giant lolling at ease in a
plush-covered arm chair, came a deep, basso-profundo voice.
"_I'd kill any man who did that to me!_" it said, with a vicious
aspirate at the beginning of the word kill.
But there was no murder done, and before night as our train rolled over
into Nevada we were as happy a family as one will be likely to find
under any kind of roof in the far-off days of the millennium.
It is not often that we look for fine literary and other distinctions in
the minds of men engaged in the humbler pursuits of life, and yet from
two of my chance acquaintances en route, both barbers, I have gathered
subtleties of line that have remained with me impressively ever since.
The first of these worthy toilers and subconscious philosophers I
discovered in a Chicago hotel in 1905. I was on my way into Iowa for a
week of one-night stands, having come almost directly from one of the
most delightful of my literary opportunities--Colonel George Harvey's
dinner in honor of Mark Twain's seventieth birthday.
The stains of travel needed to be removed, and I sought the aid of the
hero of my tale, a stocky little chap, whose face suggested an ancestry
part Spanish and part East Side New York. I will say that judged
externally I should not have cared to meet him in a dark alley after
midnight; but inwardly he turned out to be a pretty good sort of fellow.
His speech was pure vernacular.
As he was cutting my hair I glanced over the supplement to that week's
issue of "Harper's Weekly," at that time under Harvey's control, devoted
to a full account of the Mark Twain dinner both in picture and in text.
In turning over the leaves to see what kind of melon-shaped head the
flashlight photographer had given me I came upon the counterfeit
presentment of the group of which I had been a member, and was relieved
to find that the print had treated me fairly well, and that instead of
looking like a cross between a professional gambler and a train robber,
as most of my published portraits have made me appear, the thing was
recognizable, and in certain unsuspecting quarters might enable me to
pass as a reputable citizen. The snipping of the scissors back of my ear
suddenly ceased as I gazed upon my alleged "liniments"--as an old friend
of mine used to call them--and the barber's voice broke the stillness.
"Say," he said, pointing with the scissors point to the portrait of
myself, "that guy looks sump'n like you, don't he?"
"He ought to," said I. "Me and him's the same guy."
"Well whaddyer know about that!" he ejaculated. "Really?"
"Yep," said I.
"And you're from New York, eh?" he went on, resuming his labors. "What's
the name?"
I enlightened him, and received the inevitable question.
"Whaddyer think of Chicago?"
It had happened that every visit I had made to Chicago for several years
had shown that city almost completely hidden beneath a pall of sooty
cloud and lake fog; so I answered him accordingly.
"Why, I like Chicago very much," said I, "very much indeed; but there is
room for improvement here, of course. For instance, Chicago is dark, and
gloomy, and cold. Now over in New York," I added, "we have a little
round, yellow ball that is hauled up into the sky out of the wilds of
Long Island every morning, and it is so arranged that it moves in a
perfect semicircle through the sky at the rate of about sixty seconds a
minute. It is a wonderful invention. It sheds light on everything, on
everybody, and sort of warms things up for us, and unlike most things in
New York it doesn't cost anybody a cent. Best of all, when the day is
over, and we want things darkened up a bit so that we can go to sleep,
the little ball sinks out of sight over on the western side of the
city."
"Aw go wan!" he put in. "I know what you mean--you mean the sun."
"Yes," said I; "that's just what we call it. You've evidently heard of
it before--but why don't you have something of the kind out here?"
His reply was a mixture of a snort and a sniff.
I then went on my journey into Iowa, and at the end of about ten days
was back in Chicago once more, and in need of further renovation I again
sought the assistance of my tonsorial friend. After a cordial greeting
he said:
"Say--I told my wife how I'd fixed you up the other day, and _she'd
heard of you before_. You wrote a book called 'Tea and Coffee' once,
didn't cha?"
"Something like that," I replied. "It was called 'Coffee and
Repartee.'"
"Well, anyhow, whatever the thing was called, she'd read it," said the
barber.
"I have met two other people who have done the same thing and lived; so
don't worry," I observed.
"Whaddyer suppose she ast me?" he queried.
"I give it up," said I. "What?"
"She ast me," said he, "was you so very comical, and I told her no, _he
ain't so damned comical, but he's a hell of a kidder_!"
I may be wrong, but it has ever since seemed to me that there was a
particularly nice distinction involved in this spontaneous estimate of
my character, and it may be that a great many of our American humorists,
so called, would be more aptly described as _kidders_. Our guying
propensities, and the tongue-in-the-cheek style of humor so prevalent
to-day, suggest the thought anyhow that the term _kidder_ is more
discriminating than that of _humorist_, as signifying the qualities of a
Cervantes, a Rabelais, a Swift, or a Mark Twain.
It was in a South Carolina barber shop that the second nicety came
unexpectedly upon me. I had looked for a certain quaint philosophy and
humor among the negroes of the South, and must confess to considerable
disappointment in not finding much of it. The picturesque article in
the African line that has so delighted us in the fiction of our masters
of the pen from the South seems either to have vanished completely from
the face of the earth or to be a trifle shy in the revelation of itself
to outsiders. At any rate I found little of it in my wanderings in that
territory; although a somewhat disagreeable amount of self-conscious
quaintness, "for revenue only," was not wanting among negroes
encountered.
[Illustration: "She ast me was you so very comical," said he.]
But this white barber, an anemic little man, whose lazy drawl and
languid manner bespoke anything but independence of spirit, and in whose
presence I instinctively thought of the term "white trash," gave me in
full measure what I had looked for in the sons of Ham. After sitting in
his chair for a few minutes I mentioned casually that South Carolina
had a "fine Governor," referring to an individual named Blease, who at
that time, occupied the high seat at Columbia, and of whose gyroscopic
talents I had yet to find a South Carolinian of standing who was proud.
"I ain't got no use fo' _Mistuh_ Blease, suh," the man replied, stroking
his razor up and down the strop with a vigor entirely out of keeping
with his presumed character. If I had been a blind man, I should have
felt sure he was a negro, such was his accent.
"I am sorry to hear that," said I. "It would be pleasant to find
somebody in the State who has some use for him; but so far it all seems
to be the other way."
"No, suh, I ain't got no use fo' him, suh," continued the barber. "I
don't like his kind, suh. I have shaved _Mistuh_ Blease many a time,
suh, an' when he was runnin' fo' Governah he came in hyere most every
day, suh. One mornin' I says to him, 'Mistuh Blease,' says I, 'you'd
ought to be a mighty proud man, suh, runnin' fo' Governah of South
Cyarolina, suh, an' sure to git it. That's an honah, suh,' I says, 'fo'
yo' and yo' children and yo' children's children to be proud of.' And
what do you suppose he answered, suh? 'To Blank with the honah!' says
he. 'What the blank do yo' suppose I caiah fo' the honah?'
"_And I've nuvver give him the honah, suh; no, suh._ _Mis_-tuh Blease
done got elected, and I've shaved him twenty times since, suh; _but he's
nuvver had the honah from me, suh. I've nuvver called him Governah yit,
suh; but it's been Mistuh Blease every time, suh!_"
It was when I was recovering from this loyal assertion of the little
man's respect for the Commonwealth of his birth that the stillness of
the shop was broken by the excited voice of a tall, lantern-jawed
individual with a distinct type of accent, who came rushing in from the
street.
"Anybody round hyah knows what it costs to beat up a niggah in this hyah
State?" he cried.
I gasped, and the barber paused languidly in his ministrations, holding
his razor poised like the sword of Damocles over my head, while he
reflected.
"Why," said he, "I dunno aigsactly; but the las' time the co'hts decided
the question I think it was ten dollahs, suh."
"All right," said the intruder, starting to the door. "If it don't come
to no moh'n ten dollahs, I'll do it. Up home in Ferginia, where I come
from, it never costs moh'n five; but I'm willin' to go as high as
fifteen. A coon down hyah at my bohdin' house done give my wife some
back talk this mornin', _an if it don't cost moh'n fifteen dollahs I'm
gwine to throw the critter outen de winder_!"
X
HUMORS OF THE ROAD
It appears to be the habit of every age to lament its own dearth of
humor, and in our own time we have not been exempt from the charge that
we have no humorists. It is my own candid opinion in respect to this
matter that we are confronted by a paradox in that we have so many
humorists that in effect we seem to have none; so much of humor that in
the very surfeit of it its brilliance does not appear; in short, that
because of the trees we cannot see the wood.
A period that has produced a Dooley, and an Ade, and an Irvin Cobb, and
a Bert Leston Taylor, is surely not poor in humorous possessions of a
scintillating character, whether we demand that our humor shall be a
product of pure fun or of profoundly serious thinking. J. Montgomery
Flagg in picture and in text is as much a master of effervescent foolery
as ever was either John Phoenix or Artemas Ward; and in the humor that
is designed to interpret life itself I find an endless store of it in
the works of Wallace Irwin, of Montague Glass, of Miss Edna Ferber, and
of Mrs. Alice Regan Rice; the last two, by the way, forming a complete
refutation of the preposterous notion that women are devoid of the
sentiment that cheers but does not inebriate. And as for the wits, if
Oliver Herford were as lonely among wits as he is unique, I should still
feel that we were rich beyond measure in that form of humor which is for
the most part intellectual, of the mind rather than of the emotions.
But even if the charge were true--which of course it is not--that we no
longer have any purveyors of humor of the first class upon whom we may
rely for a service as regular as is our supply of milk, butter, and
eggs, we could still lay the flattering unction to our souls that
American life is full of humor. If any one doubts the fact, let him
throw himself headlong into the Lyceum Seas and find out from personal
contact. To me it seems to crop up everywhere, and whether I travel
north, south, east, or west I find it in great abundance--humor
conscious, and humor unconscious; humor of the mind, and humor of the
heart, or pathos; humor of situation, and the humor involving a mere
play upon words; humor in all its infinitely varied qualities, and of a
character most appealing. Writing a short while ago of an alleged
similar condition in another field of letters, that of lyric poetry, I
permitted myself the following rather sentimental reflections:
No singers great are here to-day?
Perhaps! Let the indictment stand.
I hear no strong voice on the way,
No lilt from some immortal hand;
And yet as on the silver mere
I float, and towering hillsides scan,
Deep in my heart I seem to hear
Again the merry pipes of Pan.
No lyrics worthy of the name
Are sung to-day by living men?
Perhaps! Yet naught is there of shame
That we have not old Herrick's pen,
For as I wander 'neath these skies
As fairly blue as skies can be
And gaze into two special eyes,
All life a lyric is to me.
With equal truth and sincerity I could say much the same in respect to
humor, and indeed I might properly even go further. I could not perhaps
say that all Americans, or even many Americans, are lyrists; but I
should not fall far short of the mark were I to say that most Americans
are humorists. In my travels I come across occasional "nonconductors,"
as a clever woman of my acquaintance once called a certain social light
who was as impervious to wit as is the rhinoceros to the sting of a
gnat; but they are few and far between. For the most part I have found
natural born humorists on nearly every bush.
In a previous chapter I have confessed to some disappointment in the
quality of the humor of the negro as I have encountered it in Southern
climes; but there have been, nevertheless, delightful rifts in that
cloud. I recall an aged son of Ethiopia who called for me one wintry
morning at four o'clock to drive me from my hotel at Greenville, South
Carolina, to the railway station. He was a ragged old fellow, and with
his snowy, wool-covered head composed a study in black and white worthy
of the brush of any of our best limners of character. He was as
communicative as he was ragged, and confided to me at the very beginning
of our acquaintance that he had moved away from Charleston to become a
resident of Greenville because down in Charleston he couldn't eat
"pohk" (which I took to be pork) without having to take to his bed;
while in the more salubrious climate of Greenville he could "swaller a
whole ham at a settin', an' nebber hyear a woid from dat old ham
forebber after." His name, he told me, was "mos' gin'rally George"; but
he "warn't biggetty" about what people called him, since he was willin'
to come "ef dey on'y jes' whistled."
The early morning hours were cold and dreary, and I found my fur-lined
horse blanket, as I have come to call my faithful winter overcoat, none
too warm. Noting George's rather inadequate provision against the chill
winds, I advised him to wrap his dilapidated old lap-robe about his
shoulders.
"Ah'm all right, Boss," he replied. "Don't yo' worry erbout me. Dis yere
old obercoat o' mine ain't much to look at; but hit's on de job jes' de
same." He gave a most amusing chuckle. "Yo'd ought to hyear mah fambly
takin' on erbout dis yere old obercoat!" he said. "Dey's kind o' proudy
folks, an' dey don't like it. Dey says hit don't look neat; but Ah tell
'um Ah'm a gwine t' wear hit jes' de same, neat er no neat--_de
undahtakah, he mek yo' look neat_!"
From which I deduced that George was not only a humorist, but in a fair
way to qualify as a philosopher as well.
Two days later I happened to be at Atlanta, Georgia, over Lincoln's
Birthday, and it pleased me beyond measure to find printed on the first
page of one of the prominent daily newspapers of that beautiful city a
three-column cut of Abraham Lincoln, with a suitable tribute in verse
from one of America's leading syndicate poets. I had myself for reasons
of taste, and in order to give no offense to my kindly hosts throughout
the Southland, omitted from my discourse passing references to certain
great figures of the Civil War; but on seeing this very notable
recognition by his old-time adversaries of the great virtues of our
martyred President, I hesitated no longer in respect to these
references, and from that time on reverted to the original form of my
talk.
After eating my breakfast on this morning of the eleventh I dallied for
awhile in the office of the massive Georgian Terrace Hotel, smoking my
cigar, and glancing over the news in the paper. As I was about to toss
the paper aside a fine old type of your Southern gentleman seated
himself on the divan alongside of me, and in the usual courteous
fashion of the country gave me a morning salutation. I responded in
kind, and then tapping my paper observed:
"That is a fine picture of Lincoln."
"Yes, suh, a verruh fine picture, suh," he replied. "I never had the
honah of seein' Mistuh Lincoln, suh; but from all I hyear, suh, he must
have resembled that picture pretty close, suh."
"It is a delight to me to find it in one of your Southern newspapers,"
said I, "especially in one so influential in the South as this."
"Yes, suh," he answered. "It shows that the South is not slow to
recognize genius, suh, wherever it is found, suh. But," he added, "there
is no occasion for surprise, suh. We have always appreciated Mr.
Lincoln's greatness down hyear, and we have admiahed him, suh; _though
we have had reason to believe that durin' the late onpleasantness, suh,
he was consid'rable of a No'thern sympathizah, suh_."
Conspicuous in my memory for both his conscious wit and his unconscious
humor is a strapping negro I encountered at a junction down in Alabama
last winter. I was marooned there for five weary hours, receiving at
the hands of its natives as high a courtesy and as fearful food as I
have ever yet had presented to me. The colored porter at the hotel had a
face as black as the ace of spades, and as childlike and bland as it was
black. He seemed to take a tremendous interest in me, especially in my
fur overcoat, which he appeared to think must "ha cost as much as eight
dollahs," and he plied me with questions as we stood on the railway
platform waiting for my train into Birmingham for a full hour that
nearly drove me to despair. I have not space for that illuminating
interchange of ideas in all its verbal fullness; but part of it ran in
this wise:
"Whar yo' come from?"
"Maine," said I.
"Maine?" he repeated. "What's Maine?"
"Why, Maine--Maine is a State," said I. "And it's a nice one too," I
added.
"Oh, yaas," he said. "Hit's ober yander, ain't it?" he continued, with a
wave of his hand sweeping enough to take in the whole universe.
"Yes," said I, "away over yonder. It's down East."
"Got any children?" he queried.
"Yes," said I, "I've got two sons in Detroit, and--"
"Dee-troit, eh?" he interrupted. "Yaas, suh, Ah've heerd o' Dee-troit.
Dee-troit's a nice State too--a mighty nice State--a nice State to have
two sons at, Ah reckon. So yo' was born in Dee-troit, was yuh?"
"No," I replied, "I wasn't born at Detroit; I was born at Yonkers--"
"O-o-oh! So yo' was born at Yonkers, was yuh? Yaas, suh--Yonkers! Ah
don't know much erbout Yonkers; but Ah guess Yonkers is a nice State
too, ain't it?"
"Well," I laughed, "yes--Yonkers is a pretty nice State too--what you
might call a Comatose State; but--"
"Yaas, suh--Ah've heern tell dat Yonkers was one o' dem cummytoe States,
an' Ah guess dat's a pretty good kind ob a State to be bohn in. What yo'
sellin'?" This with a hasty glance at my suitcase.
"Brains," said I.
"Lawsy me! Sellin' brains, eh?" said he. "Waal, suh, Ah'm sorry. Yo'
look so kind o' set up Ah thought yo' was a-sellin' seegyars. Yaas,
suh--Ah'd hoped yo' was." He gazed wistfully along the shining rails.
"Dem seegyar drummahs is mighty free wid deir samples, suh," he
continued, "and Ah been a hopin' yo'd be able to spar' me a han'ful like
de res' ob 'em does. But ef yo're dealin' in brains, hit ain't _likely
yo' got enough to gib any away_."
I may add that his disappointment was short-lived; for before we parted
I took him across to the general store that fronted on the railroad
track, and by the judicious expenditure of a quarter bought him a supply
of his favorite brand large enough to last him a week. A single one of
them would have done for me forever.
Repartee has always been a characteristic gift of the American people,
due no doubt to a political system that turns almost every community
into a debating society at least once a year, and sometimes oftener.
Readiness of verbal retort has thereby become an inheritance that grows
richer in the squandering of it. It has been a quality so conspicuous
that it has led a great many people, justly or otherwise, to assert that
there are more really good jokes to be found in the course of a year in
the columns of the "Congressional Record" than in the cleverest of the
world's comic papers. However this may be, I know that one of the
zestful things about a lecturer's life is the jestful thing that lurks
at h
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