From Pillar to Post Part 11

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 a.s.sa.s.sination, 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 flouris.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed 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 qua.s.sia, 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, ba.s.so-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 pa.s.s 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "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 a.s.sistance 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 d.a.m.ned comical, but he's a h.e.l.l 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 a.s.sertion 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 rus.h.i.+ng in from the street.

"Anybody round hyah knows what it costs to beat up a n.i.g.g.ah 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."