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

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.