Kitabı oku: «From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book», sayfa 12

XIV
"SLINGS AND ARROWS"

One's democracy receives a pretty severe test on the road, and I am indeed sorry for the man who is always so solicitous for his own dignity that the free and easy habits of the American of Today affront him. The lecture platform is no place for what Doctor Johnson's friend Richard Savage would doubtless in these days have characterized as "the tenth transmitter of a foolish pride."

A people like ours, made up of a hundred million sovereigns, and actuated for the most part, in their social intercourse at least, by a spirit of fraternity, mixed with a very decided inclination to be facetious, forms a somewhat bristling environment for the supersensitively self-centered. If such a one contemplates the invasion of the lyceum territory, as a friend and brother let me advise him to spend at least a year in some social settlement where he may be inoculated with sundry useful social germs, as a preventive of much misery ahead. He must get used to much familiarity of a sudden sort, and realize fully that our American world, while it respects ability, and withholds from it no atom of its due appreciation, is in no particular a respecter of mere persons.

In respect to "having to be shown" we are by a large majority "from Missouri," and it will never do for the lyceumite to try to hedge himself about with any fences of false dignity. The palings of those fences may be sharp, and connected with barbed wire; but the American citizens of the hour walk through them, or vault them, as easily as if they were not there. And it is all very harmless too; for no man's real dignity has ever yet suffered from any assaults other than his own.

I recall an incident of my travels in the Dakotas some years ago that brought this situation home to me very vividly. I was on my way to a county seat in one of those vast twin commonwealths on a rather sluggish way train, and found among my fellow travelers three very live human beings who had apparently just met after a long separation. One of them was a rather stout little man, with a fresh, boyish face; another was a tall and spare ferret-eyed individual who might have posed as an acceptable model for a picture of Sherlock Holmes; and the third was a well built young giant, a veritable blond Samson, full of the boisterous spirits of young manhood.

The three sat across the aisle from me, and inasmuch as Nature had not seen fit to supply their vocal organs with soft pedals, or pianissimo stops, I became an unwitting, though not unwilling, listener to their conversation. It was amusing, clean, and bristling with good-fellowship, though not wholly Chesterfieldian in character. Finally the Sherlock Holmes man, turning to the stout little chap, who was sitting next to the car window, observed:

"Well, old man, you're lookin' a heap better than ya did the last time I saw ya."

"Yes," said the stout little man, "I'm feeling better. I've been on a diet for the past six months."

And here the stalwart young blond Samson playfully interposed. "Well, it was about time, ya big, fat stuff!" he said. "Ya had a stummick on ya big enough for sixteen men." Whereupon he proceeded to jam the little man's derby hat down over his eyes.

Ordinarily this would be regarded as a rather commonplace, unenlightened conversation; but its application to my point came the following morning, when, having several hours to spare before departing for other scenes, I went into the county courthouse to watch the litigation in progress there. It was a scene full of interest, and the proceedings were conducted on a plane of dignity quite in keeping with the highest traditions of the bench, everything going on decently and in order. But the interesting and possibly amazing thing about it to me was the sight that greeted my eyes in the person of the Sherlock Holmes man of the day before, conducting an eloquent argument before the stout little man of the train, who was no less a person than —the Presiding Justice! And the young giant who had called him a big, fat stuff, and jammed his hat down over his eyes, was the court stenographer!

I had the pleasure of lunching with all three of them later in the day, and a finer lot of true-blue American citizens I have not met anywhere else, before or since.

If one has any purely physical peculiarity of an obvious nature, he must get reconciled to having it used as a hook for his discomfiture, or his delectation, according as his own attitude toward the slings and arrows of life causes him to take them. In my own case perhaps the most conspicuous personal idiosyncrasy I present physically to the eye of the casual beholder is an almost abnormal lack of hirsute adornment; always a favorite point of attack by facetiously inclined chairmen, by whom I have been eloquently likened to the "imperishable Alps" for that I lacked "vegetation" on my "summit," to a "heliograph on the Hills of Letters," and by one I was called "the legitimate successor of the lamented Bill Nye, the Original Billiard Ball on the Pool Tables of Modern Humor."

Most of my delectable misadventures in respect to this deficiency have naturally occurred in the barber shops of the nation, and it has been surprising to me, as an interested student of American humor, to note how full of variety are the spontaneous outbursts of the Knights of the Razor everywhere upon that seemingly barren topic.

One barber in Wisconsin, to whom I facetiously complained that he should not charge me full price for a haircut when there was so little to cut, came back immediately with, "Ah, but you see I had to work overtime to find it!"

Another in Boston, after shaving me, inquired, "Now how do you want your hair brushed?"

"Brush it back like that young man's in the next chair," said I, pointing to a Harvard student with a perfect mop of hair, resembling a huge yellow chrysanthemum, which the neighboring artist was brushing laboriously back from the youthful forehead.

"Humph!" said my friend. "I'll try; but, take it from me, it'll take a blistering long time to brush your hair back!"

But the readiest bit of repartee that I recall in respect to this shortcoming was that of a Philadelphia barber two years ago, who was trying to make me presentable for my audience that night in the Witherspoon Hall University extension course, where I was to deliver a series of lectures on American humorists.

"Now," said he, running his hand over the back of my head after he had attended to my other needs, "how do you want your hair fixed?"

"In silence, and without humor," said I. "I am approaching my fiftieth year in this world, and since thirty I have been as you see me now. In the course of those twenty intervening years I have heard about every joke on the subject of baldness that the human mind has been able to conceive at least fifty thousand times."

"I guess that's right," said he. "You are pretty bald, ain't you?"

"I am, and I am not at all ashamed of it," I returned. "My baldness has been honestly acquired. I have not lost my hair in dissipation, or by foolish speculation, but entirely through generosity of spirit. I have given my hair to my children."

"Gee!" he ejaculated with fervor. "You must have the divvle of a large family!"

I made use of that incident in my lecture that night as a convincing demonstration that whatever had happened to the humor of the professional humorist, as a natural gift of the American people that branch of humor known as repartee was still running strong.

Intentionally or otherwise, I think the best joke ever perpetrated upon me in respect to my lack of capillary attraction occurred at Bellingham, in the State of Washington, up near the Vancouver line, back in 1906, when I made my first trip to the Pacific Coast. I was the victim that season of a particularly distressing window card, got up in a great hurry from a most unsatisfactory photograph, and designed to arouse interest in my coming. It greeted me with grinning pertinacity everywhere I looked.

I am skeptic on the subject of window cards anyhow. I could never convince myself that printed cuts are really effective instruments of publicity, and I vow with all the fervor of which I am capable that they are a nuisance and a trial to what the public call "the talent." I also know that in at least one instance they bade fair to work adversely to my interests, as was shown in a letter received by me many years ago from an unknown correspondent in Kansas City, who addressed me thus:

MY DEAR SIR, – I inclose herewith a copy of a so-called photograph of yourself published in this morning's Kansas City "Star," and I want to know if you really look like that. The reason I write to inquire is that yesterday was my little boy's birthday, and his grandmother presented him with a copy of one of your books. I haven't had time to read the book myself; but I have taken it away from Willie, and shall keep it pending your reply, for if you do look like this, you are no fit person to write for children.

I must confess that a single glance at the muddy reproduction of a long discarded photograph convinced me that my naïve correspondent was not a whit more careful of his parental responsibilities than the situation justified. I might readily have passed, if that photograph were accurate, for a professional gambler, or a highly probable future candidate for the Rogues' Gallery.

But, whether the platform worker is helped or retarded by this indiscriminate plastering of public places with his counterfeit presentment, committees seem to think it necessary, and we therefore provide them with the most pulchritudinous pictorial composition that Art, unrestrained by Nature, can produce.

But the one I used in 1906 was a most unflattering affair, and I grew heartily sick of it as my tour progressed. At Bellingham it was oppressively omnipresent. It seemed as if I had erupted all over the place. It greeted me in the railway station when I descended from the train. Two of them hung in the hotel office when I entered, and as I walked up the street after luncheon I overheard sundry unregenerate youths remark, "There he goes!" and "That's him!" and "Oh, look who's here!" derisively, until I could almost have wrung every juvenile neck in town. On one corner I found it in a laundry window, labeled, "John Kendrick Bangs at the Normal School Tonight," and placed immediately beneath this was a brown paper placard inscribed in great, red-chalk letters with the words, "HELP WANTED." Farther up the street I found it in a millinery shop window, pinned beneath a composite creation of Bellingham and Paris which was not particularly becoming to my pictorial style.

But the climax was reached when I found it in a drug-store window, where the window dresser had placed it over another placard, the advertisement of a well known patent remedy. My picture covered the whole of the patent medicine placard except its essential advertising line at the bottom, and as I stood there staring at myself through that plate glass window my grinning countenance stared back at me unflinchingly, and underneath it was the legend,

HIRSUTERINE DID THIS AND WE

CAN PROVE IT

In gratitude to the perpetrator of that horrific joke let me say that I have used the incident as the opening anecdote in my Salubrity lecture ever since, and I really believe it has had as much to do with making me persona grata to my audiences as any other feature of my discourse.

A tolerably effective arrow that struck fairly on the bullseye of over-self-appreciation came to me out of the dark, of a well intended compliment in a prominent New Jersey city several years ago. I had lectured before a fairly appreciative audience, seated conspicuously in the midst of which was a young man whom I recognized as the very courteous and affable room clerk of the hotel at which I was stopping. He and his friends formed a nucleus of appreciation which more than compensated me for the barbed glances of one or two unwilling auditors dragged thither reluctantly, probably from more alluring indulgences in bridge or draw poker at their clubs. Both my heart and head expanded under the influence of their continuous enthusiasm, and my emotions of satisfaction were intensified when on my walk back to the hotel I heard the friendly room clerk, stalking just ahead of me, exclaiming enthusiastically:

"Didn't I tell you he'd be good? By George! I read one of his books once, and I've wanted to see him ever since."

It was all very nice, and I hugged the pleasant intimations of his remark to my breast all through my dreams that night. But the morning brought disillusionment, and a mighty poignant shaft entered into the soul of me. After eating my breakfast I stepped to the hotel desk to pay my bill, and was there beamingly greeted by the room clerk.

"Well, Mr. Bangs," said he, with outstretched hand, "that was a fine talk you gave us last night, and I enjoyed every minute of it. But I knew it would be good."

"Thank you," said I, my chest expanding a bit.

"I've only read one of your books," he went on; "but it gave me a lead on you. I don't want to flatter you, but – well, it was the funniest book I ever read, and I've been wondering if you would write your autograph in it for me."

"Surely," said I, not only willing to please him, but quite anxious to see which of my books it was that had filled him with such enthusiasm.

"I have it here," said he, taking the volume out of a drawer.

"Good!" said I. "Let's have it."

He handed it to me, and I glanced at it. It was a copy of Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat, not to Mention the Dog!"

"No flattery at all," said I, my growing conceit falling back to par. "I'm glad you like it."

And then for the first and only time in my life I committed forgery. I took the book to a writing table near at hand, and inscribed the flyleaf with "Appreciatively yours, Jerome K. Jerome." And as I left the hotel the last sight that greeted my eyes was my kindly deputy assistant host studying that inscription with a look of extreme bewilderment on his screwed-up countenance.

Apropos of this incident it is rather curious how frequently my name and that of Jerome K. Jerome have been confounded. I have always considered it a compliment, and I sincerely hope Jerome himself will not mind it. I suppose the identity of our initials J. K. is responsible for it, and possibly the fact also that Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat" and my own "House-Boat on the Styx" were published at about the same time. One of the most amusing incidents based upon this confusion of identity occurred in California last spring. I was spending Easter Sunday at that remarkable hostelry, the Mission Inn at Riverside, feeling that in some way despite of my desserts I had got into heaven, and quite convinced that I could stand an eternity of it if the particular atmosphere of that wonderful Sunday were typical of life there. The inspiring Easter sunrise service on Mount Rubidaux was over, and I was resting comfortably in the office when a young woman paused at my side, and said,

"You will excuse me for speaking to you, sir, but your face bothers me."

"I am very sorry, Madame," said I, "but it has bothered me too for over fifty years."

"Oh, I don't mean that way," she answered quickly. "I mean that I can't place it."

"Well," said I, trying to smile, "you really don't have to. It is already located."

"But I don't know where I have seen it before," she pleaded.

"Nor do I," said I, "but I think I can reassure you on that point. Knowing myself as I do I can assure you that it must have been in a perfectly respectable place."

"I wish you would stop fooling," she retorted, a trifle impatiently. "I want to know who you are. You see I'm of a rather nervous temperament, and when I see a familiar face and cannot remember the name of the individual who – er – who goes with it, sometimes it keeps me awake all night."

"It would be too bad to have that happen," said I, "and inasmuch as I am not at all ashamed of my name I shall be delighted to tell you what it is. It is Bangs – John Kendrick Bangs."

"Oh – I know," she cried, her perplexity fading away, "You are the man who wrote 'Three Men in a Boat.'"

And the dear lady seemed to be so pleased over the honor of meeting so distinguished an author that I really hadn't the heart to undeceive her.

I have always thought of my young friend the room-clerk far more kindly than of another New Jersey host whose airy nonchalance in what was to me a moment of some seriousness struck me as being almost arctic in its frigid non-acceptance of responsibility for untoward conditions. I had put up overnight in his jerry-built hostelry, and all had gone well until breakfast time. I was seated at table enjoying my frugal repast, when without warning from anybody I found myself the sudden recipient of a heavy blow on the top of my head, and upon emerging from the rather dazed psychological condition in which the blow left me discovered that I was covered from head to foot with plaster, and that my poor but honest poached egg had become a scrambled one, mixed with the impalpable dust of a shattered bit of molding.

A glance heavenward showed whence my trouble had come. A section of the ceiling about four feet square had come loose, and had landed upon me. I could think of no better way to voice my protest against such an intolerable intrusion upon my rights of privacy at mealtimes than by giving the hotel manager an object lesson then and there of what was going on under his roof. So I rose from the table and walked directly to the office just as I was.

"Great Scott!" said my host, as I loomed up before him like a glorified ash heap. "What's happened to you?"

"A part of your condemned old ceiling has fallen on me, that's what!" I sputtered somewhat wrathfully.

"Oh, that's it, eh?" he replied, with a smiling grace which I hardly appreciated at the time. "Well, we don't do that for everybody, Mr. Bangs," he added; "but seeing it's you we won't make any extra charge."

I thanked him for his consideration. "I'd like to buy this hotel," I added.

"Well, it's for sale," said he. "Like to run it yourself?"

"No," said I. "I thought it might be some fun to buy a Panama fan and blow it down."

With which we parted forever. I have returned to the gentleman's bailiwick several times since; but never again have I entered the portals of that hostelry, for fear that by the careless dropping of my tooth-brush or a cake of soap I might cause the complete collapse of the structure, with the possible destruction of innocent lives; though if I were assured that in falling it would land only on that landlord's head I think I would willingly go out of my way to hire an aëroplane some night and drop a pebble upon its roof from a height of three or four feet. This is not so vindictive as it seems, either; for it would not hurt that landlord over-severely. You could drop a much heavier weight than that hotel upon any bit of solid ivory within reach without hurting the ivory unduly.

A less sordid, and indeed wholly inspiring, incident along similar lines occurred three years ago at Georgetown, Texas, when on a terrific night in February, which I shall never forget, I stood for a few minutes face to face with what might have proved an appalling tragedy. As I look back upon the incident now it seems to me to have been at once the most thrilling, and at the same time the most stimulating, moment of my life.

I had arrived at Georgetown early in the afternoon, and simultaneously with my coming – and, as some of my critics may intimate, possibly because of it – there arrived also one of those dreaded windstorms known in that section of the world as a norther. Perhaps the Texans are so used to these outbursts of Nature that they take them as all in the day's work; but to myself, unused to anything more boreally disturbing than an occasional nor'easter on the Maine Coast, it was extremely disturbing. I did not dare walk on any of the sidewalks, fearing that the loudly rattling signboards of commerce might be precipitated upon me. One of the best liked literary friends of my younger days had passed from intellectual brilliance of a most promising sort into permanent mental darkness through the falling upon his head of a swinging sign in New York, and I had come to regard such possibilities with dread.

The Muse and I consequently spent the afternoon indoors in a quivering but substantial and well kept hotel, whose courteous landladies neither the Muse nor I will ever fail to remember with affectionate esteem. As I rode in an omnibus to the lecture hall that night, I rejoiced in the heaviness of the vehicle, which otherwise must have been overturned by the heavy blasts to which it was subjected.

When I reached the college I found the auditorium on the third floor of the main building in almost total darkness, the only light coming from an oil lamp standing on a piano at one end of the stage. The wind had put the electric lighting apparatus temporarily out of commission; but students were at work upon it, and I was assured that all would be well if I would defer my lecture for a little while. To this of course I consented; for, however pleasing it may be to talk to one person in the dark, there is no pleasure in addressing a multitude of people into whose eyes one is unable to look.

After fifteen minutes of waiting the electric lights suddenly gleamed forth, and I was gratified to see before me an audience of substantial size, made up for the most part of students, with a fair proportion of the townspeople scattered about here and there. The college was a coeducational institution, and the boys and girls were in fair measure paired off in congenial fashion.

With the restoration of the light the president of the college stepped to the front of the platform and presented me to the audience, after which I rose and approached the footlights to begin. But never a word was I permitted to speak; for as I started in the howling wind outside seemed to re-double in its fury and intensity. There came a sudden loud grinding and ripping sound, and a huge part of the roof was lifted bodily upward, and then dropped back with a crash. One heavy beam fell squarely in one of the aisles without injury to any one, though two feet off on either side it would have killed the occupants of the aisle seats, and from all parts of the great room big chunks of plaster and lathing fell in upon the audience.

There was present every element of a tragedy of fearful proportions; but from that assembled multitude of young people came not even a scream, and on every side I saw stalwart young Texans of To-day and To-morrow rise up from their seats, and lean over the girls sitting crouched in the chairs beside them, taking all the weight and woe of that falling ceiling upon their own manly shoulders! It was a magnificent exhibition of readiness of resource, self-control, and unselfish chivalry. Almost instantly with the first shock the president of the college, with a calmness at which I still marvel, rose from the chair behind me and confronted the gathering.

"Now, my young friends," said he, speaking with amazing rapidity, each word enunciated as incisively as though spoken with lips of chilled steel, "remember – this is one of the emergencies you are supposed to be trained to meet. There is no telling how serious this situation is; but let us have no panic. Rise and walk out quietly, and without too much haste."

The youngsters rose and marched out of the hall in a fashion that would have delighted the soul of a martinet among drill masters, down three flights of stairs to the campus, silently, and without the slightest outward manifestation of the fear that must have been in the hearts of every one of them.

There had appeared in one of America's best magazines only a few months previously a scathing arraignment of the young American of To-day, in which the girls were indicted as being frivolous, lacking in self-control, and full of selfishness, and the American boy was held up to public scorn as knowing naught of respect for authority, and wholly deficient in the quality of chivalry for which the youth of other times had been noted. I wished then and I wish now that the good lady who spoke so witheringly on that subject could have witnessed what I looked upon that night in Texas. I think she would have modified her utterance at least, if indeed she would not have changed her point of view completely. She would have made her assertions less sweeping, I am convinced; for she would have learned from that episode, as I have learned from my contact with the youth of this land, not only in Texas but elsewhere, that save for a superficial element, fortunately not very large, the American youth of to-day, boy or girl, is in the main a strong-fibered, self-controlled, unselfish, chivalrous product which would be a credit to any nation, anywhere, at any time, past, present, or future.

In conclusion let me say that when I returned to Georgetown the following season to deliver my undelivered lecture I was introduced to practically the same audience as "the man who brought down the house without even opening his mouth."

Which shows that not only are youthful chivalry and self-control not dead in Texas, but that American humor likewise is in flourishing condition in that truly imperial State of our Union.