From Pillar to Post Part 18

"There you are, General," said I, smiling, "that's what!"

He gazed at the Martinis a moment, and then he fixed his handsome eyes on me. There was a merry twinkle in them, and after he had swallowed the object lesson he leaned over with a broad smile and spoke.

"I am very much afraid, Mr. Bangs," said he, "that that idea you Americans have that we British are sometimes a trifle sluggish in our perception of the subtler points of an American jest, bristling as they often do with latent significance, is not altogether without justification. In order to show you how completely, how fully, I appreciate the excellence of your witticism I would suggest that _we have two more_."

I draw no conclusions of an invidious nature from this little episode; for I recall with pain, and some contrition, an American audience in a prohibition section of one of our Eastern States before whom I had the hardihood to tell that story on a hot summer night three years ago, only one of whose six hundred members saw the point, and he didn't dare laugh for fear that by doing so he might risk his reputation for sobriety--or so he informed me for my consolation later in the evening as he and I zig-zagged together down an ice-covered mountain-road to the railway station in a rattling motor car driven by a chauffeur who had apparently confounded his own stomach with the gasoline tank.

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 a.s.saults 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 att.i.tude 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 nave correspondent was not a whit more careful of his parental responsibilities than the situation justified. I might readily have pa.s.sed, 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 gla.s.s window my grinning countenance stared back at me unflinchingly, and underneath it was the legend,

HIRSUTERINE DID THIS AND WE CAN PROVE IT.

In grat.i.tude 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "My grinning countenance stared back at me unflinchingly."]

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.