From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book

"To lecture?" she echoed. "Why, your lecture is not to be until a week from to-night!"

"Then I am afraid we shall have to get my astral body to work," said I; "for a week from to-night I shall be at Hiawatha, Kansas. How do you propose to have the lecture delivered – by long distance telephone, or parcels post?"

We gazed into each other's eyes for a moment, and then – we both laughed. It seemed the only thing to do.

Gallantry forbids my saying which of us had made the mistake under the terms of the written contract. Suffice it to say that two months later I returned to that good little town, and was received like a conquering hero by an audience that in its cordiality more than compensated me for the distressing effects of an "unlectured lecture."

What promised to be a more serious complication occurred about a month later in Florida, where in pursuance of instructions from my Southern managers I arrived at Daytona on a Monday, to open the flourishing Chautauqua Course, which has become a permanent feature of life at that attractive Southern resort. The seriousness of the situation grew out of the quality of the genius and the nature of the popularity of the other individual involved, who was no less a personage than the Hon. William Jennings Bryan. Any minor star in the platform firmament who comes into collision with the planetary splendor of this Monarch of Modern Loquacity has about as much chance of escaping unscathed as a tallow-dip would have in a passage at arms with the sun itself.

There is no escaping the fact that Mr. Bryan is the idol of the Chautauqua Circuit, and it is equally true that every bit of the success he has achieved therein he has earned many times over. I am not, never have been, and see no possibility of my ever becoming, a devotee of Mr. Bryan's political fortunes; but as a platform speaker he is far and away the most brilliant and likable personality in the public eye to-day. He is an expert in playing upon the emotions of an audience, large or small – preferably large – as ever was Dudley Buck in the manipulation of the keys and stops of an organ, and he can at will strike chords in the human heart as searchingly appealing as any produced by an Elman or a Kreisler on the violin, or a Paderewski at the piano.

The keynotes of his platform work are a seeming sincerity and a magnetic humanness that are irresistible, and no individual who has ever listened to him in matters outside of political controversy, however reluctant to admit his greatness, has failed to fall beneath the winning spell of man, matter, and method. He is an interesting personality, and has a greater number of points of contact with the general run of humanity than any other public speaker of to-day. It is a stimulating thing to know that in this line of human endeavor he has got his reward in the assured position he holds in a movement at which it is the fashion in some uninformed and cynical quarters to sneer, but which in point of fact has had a supremely awakening effect upon the American people, and for which we are all of us the better off.

"All of which," as a friend of mine once put it after I had expressed myself in similar terms concerning Mr. Bryan, "is some tribute for a narrow-minded, hide-bound, bigoted, old standpat, reactionary, antediluvian Republican to pay to a hated rival!"

I was frankly appalled on arriving at Daytona to find the town placarded from end to end with posters announcing Mr. Bryan's appearance there that evening – my evening, as I had supposed it to be. I did not know exactly what to do. I knew perfectly well what would happen to me if it came to a hand-to-hand contest for possession of the stage. Physically, with Mr. Bryan and myself left to decide the matter for ourselves, after the fashion of a pair of bantam white hopes, I felt that I might have a fairly good chance to win out; for I am not altogether without brawn, and in the matter of handling a pair of boxing gloves am probably quite as expert as the late Secretary of State; but nobody outside of Matteawan would be so blind to commonsense as to expect an audience anywhere either to stand neutral or to indulge in a policy of "watchful waiting" with such a contest going on on the platform.

My first impulse in the circumstances was to get out of town as quickly and as quietly as I could, and forget that there was such a place as Daytona on the map; but a careful scrutiny of my letter of instructions reassured me. The date, according to the supreme managers at Atlanta, was clearly mine, and I decided at least to go down with colors flying. I have never run from my own lithographs, and I saw no reason why I should flee from Mr. Bryan's. I got in touch with the local committee as soon as possible, and soon had at least the solace of companionship in my misery. They were as upset about it as I was.

"But, Mr. Bangs," protested the chairman, almost with tears in his eyes – his voice was full of them – "you aren't due here until to-morrow night."

"I don't see how that can be," I replied unfeelingly. "You know perfectly well that I am not twins, and only twins can appear in two places at once. I am to lecture at Miami to-morrow night."

I handed the gentleman my letter of instructions, confirming my statement. It was all down in black and white.

"It's a perfectly terrible situation," said the chairman, tears even springing from his brow, "and I'm blest if I know what to do!"

"There is only one of three things to be done," said I. "The first is to let me sit in the audience to-night and listen to Mr. Bryan, collecting my fee on the ground that I have earned it by holding my tongue – which is some job for a man primed with unspoken words. The second is to let Mr. Bryan and myself go out on the platform and indulge in a lecture Marathon, he at one side of the stage, I at the other, talking simultaneously, the one that gets through first to get the gate money. The third and best is for you to telegraph Mr. Bryan and find out direct from him what his understanding is as to the date."

The first or the last of the propositions would have suited me perfectly; for I should have been delighted to listen to Mr. Bryan whether I was paid for it or not – and most assuredly had Mr. Bryan himself laid claim to the date no power on this earth could have lured me into a dispute over its possession. I am too proud of this life to risk its uncertain tenure for the brief glory of an hour on a preëmpted platform.

I am glad to say that before dusk the complication was cleared off; for, the third alternative having been accepted by the committee, Mr. Bryan was caught on the wire, and replied instantly to the effect that he was to lecture that night on some such subject as "The Curse of Wealth" at Palm Beach, where many sufferers from that particular blight are annually gathered together in large numbers. The skies immediately cleared, and I went out that night before a packed house, the unwitting beneficiary of widespread advertising on Mr. Bryan's behalf, and enjoyed myself very much; although as I sped along I could "spot" here and there in the audience individuals who, having come to hear Mr. Bryan, like Rachel weeping for her children, "refused to be comforted."

My only lasting regret was that my contract did not call for the payment to me of fifty per cent. of the boxoffice receipts. I have no doubt there were people there that night who thought, and possibly still think, that I stole that audience. And perhaps I did; but I was no more responsible for the theft than was poor little Oliver Twist, who found himself at unexpected places at unlooked for hours through the efforts of those "higher up." I may add too in all sincerity that if Mr. Bryan himself feels, or felt, in any way aggrieved over what he might call my "unearned increment" in listeners, I will gladly exchange fees with him. I will unhesitatingly, at his request, and by return mail, send him my check for the full amount received by me on that somewhat nervous occasion if he will send me a postoffice order for the amount received by him the evening after.

Embarrassments of a less poignant character frequently arise in the matter of unexpected calls for service, for which the public generally assumes the platform speaker to be necessarily always prepared, but for which as a matter of fact no amount of preparation could adequately fit any man built on the old-fashioned plan in respect to his nervous organization. One of these affairs came into my experience a decade ago, when, crossing the Atlantic Ocean on that high-rolling ocean greyhound, the Lucania, I was drafted by an overzealous committee of arrangements to preside over one of those impromptu entertainments got up on shipboard for the benefit of the widows and orphans of those who go down into the sea in ships. To these more than worthy enterprises gratitude for benefits received has always made me a willing contributor; but to participate in them has ever been a trial. I would rather lecture before the inmates of a deaf and dumb asylum with a sore thumb.

The company aboard a transatlantic liner is always, to say the least, "mixed" in the matter of nationality; and, while one might be willing to "make a stab" at being witty before a gathering all English, all French, all German, or Pan-American, woe be unto him who vaingloriously attacks the risibles of a multitude made up of all these widely varying racial elements! Their standards of humor are as widely divergent as are their several racial strains, and one might as well try to sit on four stools at once with perfect composure as expect to find the "Chair" under such conditions comfortable. One has to acquiesce in such demands, however, or be set down as disagreeable, and when the committee approached me in the matter they received a much readier yes than I really wished to give them.

The night came, and I found myself at the head table in the dining saloon working for dear life to keep the thing going. There was a pretty slim array of talent, and from one end of the program to the other there was nobody to hang a really good joke on, even if I had had one to hang. A chairman can always be facetious at the expense of distinguished people like Chauncey M. Depew, Henry James, or Mr. Caruso, and "get away with it"; but the obscure amateur cannot be handled with brutal impunity. I think I may say truthfully that no man ever worked harder at the pumps of a sinking ship than I did that night. And to make matters worse there was a heavy rolling sea on, and, while I never suffer from seasickness, the combination of motion and nerves made me uncomfortably conscious of an insurgent midst as I forged hopelessly ahead.

Finally, however, there came a rift in the cloud of my despair. A pleasant little cockney ballad singer who was coming over to America for a season in vaudeville volunteered to sing a ballad. It was well sung, and most pathetic. It depicted in dramatic fashion the delirium of an old British veteran, who, as the hour of death approached him, was fighting over again in fancy the battles of his youth. The refrain of the ballad was Bring me the old Martini, and I shall die in peace!– referring of course to the rifle that for a period of years up to 1890 had been the official weapon of Tommy Atkins. I made the most of so obvious a lead, and before introducing the next number on the program thanked the singer for his dramatic rendering of so fine a story.

"But, my friends," said I, "that ballad saddens me in more respects than one. I have long believed in international brotherhood. In common with my friend Conan Doyle and others who have advocated the hands stretched across the sea, I have been in sympathetic accord with the idea of universal brotherhood; but now and then certain little things crop up that, insignificant in themselves, show us none the less how radically far apart we really are. This splendid old British warrior calling for his Martini is a case in point, and I am sure my own compatriots here to-night at any rate will realize the vast gulfs of separation that exist between the Britons and ourselves when I ask them what they would bring to a dying American soldier, delirious or otherwise, if he were to call for a Martini."

The point took with the Americans; but the others, charming Frenchmen, delightful Germans, cultivated Englishmen, stared at me in stolid silence, and one or two of them shook their heads as if bewildered. It was a hard situation, and I slammed the rest of the evening through without further attempts at playfulness, retiring to the seclusion that my cabin granted an hour later, resolved never again to serve as presiding elder at a vaudeville show either on land or sea.

I felt almost as solemnly embarrassed as I did one evening in Pennsylvania, later, when my lecture was opened with prayer and I heard a good clergyman begging the Lord to "show His mercy upon the audience gathered here," to "protect them from all suffering, and in His infinite wisdom, if it were His will, to enable the speaker of the evening to rise to his opportunity."

But there was an after result of that Martini jest which more than made up for the depression that followed its failure to strike home. I write of it, however, with some diffidence; for I am convinced that some reader somewhere will observe that the incident is only another variation of Senator Depew's famous tale of the Englishman who wanted to know what really was the matter with the mince pie. As a matter of fact it is the twin brother of that famous anecdote; but, while I am perfectly willing to think the Depew story really happened, I know that mine did, and I therefore record it.

The morning following the impromptu concert I was pacing the deck of the steamer when one of the more distinguished passengers aboard, an English army officer, who occupied at that time, and still holds, an important post in British military circles, stopped me.

"Mr. Bangs," he said, holding out his hand, "I want to thank you for a charming evening last night, and to express my admiration for the delightful way in which you carried off your difficult honors. It was really most interesting."

"Thank you, General," said I. "That is very nice to hear. I thought it fell rather flat."

"Not at all, not at all," he rejoined; "though, to speak quite frankly, there was one of your jests that I – I – I didn't really get. What humor you have, sir, I think I appreciate. During a period of convalescence in the Transvaal somebody sent me a copy of your 'House Boat on the Styx,' and I – I – I found it very amusing; but this joke last night – after the little chap had sung that ballad – about the dying veteran you know – it quite escaped me. Er —what would they bring an American soldier who called for a Martini?"

"Well, General," said I, restraining an impulse to be amused, "I might explain, and explain and explain the point to you, giving you a chart in full detail, exploiting the theory of the thing as fully as possible, without satisfactory results. It is a case where an object lesson will demonstrate in a minute what no amount of abstract argument could convey in a year. If you will come with me into the smoking room, I'll show you exactly what nine out of ten people in America would give to a soldier crying aloud for a Martini."

We repaired accordingly to the smoking room, and in response to my order the steward shortly placed two misty Martini cocktails before us.

"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 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.