From Pillar to Post Part 19

"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 a.s.sistant 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 ident.i.ty 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 ident.i.ty 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 rea.s.sure you on that point.

Knowing myself as I do I can a.s.sure 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I was the sudden recipient of a blow on top of my head."]

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 a.s.sured 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 aeroplane 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sured 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 mult.i.tude 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 inst.i.tution, and the boys and girls were in fair measure paired off in congenial fas.h.i.+on.

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 a.s.sembled mult.i.tude 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 a.s.sertions 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 flouris.h.i.+ng condition in that truly imperial State of our Union.

XV

EMERGENCIES

Quick thinking on and off the platform is quite essential to the happiness of the man on the road. The sniping fates are always after him, in small ways as well as in large, and he must keep himself in a state of constant readiness either to dodge their flying shafts, or with some suddenly devised s.h.i.+eld of resourcefulness to render himself arrow proof.

Sometimes the successful warding off of a flying missile sped from the bow of some malign G.o.ddess of mischance becomes the making of the man, as in a case once reported to me by a gentleman in Montana when after my lecture at Billings he and I were laughing over the complete capture of my audience by a big gray tomcat that had entered the lists against me.

This privileged creature had leaped into the chair immediately behind me, and begun ma.s.saging his face in true feline fas.h.i.+on, to the intense delight of a most amiable gathering.

I suppose that if I had known what was going on behind me, I should have tried to rise to the occasion on the spur of the moment; but not knowing it I read on, in blissful unconsciousness of the fact that a series of living pictures was flas.h.i.+ng across the vision of my audience directly to the rear. The only sensation experienced at the time by my innocent self was one of supreme pleasure and satisfaction that my audience had at last awakened to the beauty of my discourse, and was manifesting in most gratifying fas.h.i.+on its appreciation of even the subtlest of my points. When at the close of the reading the real truth was revealed to me I merely smiled, and never for a moment let on that until the chairman spoke of the animal I had not suspected its presence.

"We admired your composure, Mr. Bangs," said the chairman. "A good many men would have been rattled by such an intrusion as that; but you went right on without a break. In fact, if you don't mind my saying so, you were better after the cat than you were before he came."

"Oh, well," said I, "we have to get used to that sort of thing. The trained lecturer really ought to be able to go on even if a young earthquake were to fall upon him. Do you always try your lecturers on a cat?" I added.

"Well, I hadn't thought of it that way," he laughed; "but as a matter of fact we most generally do. That cat belongs to our janitor, and he's pretty sure to turn up somewhere during the evening. One year we had a man out here giving some recitations, and I tell you old Tom helped him out considerably. He was rolling along through some funny speech or other, when the cat jumped upon the platform, washed his face two or three times, scratched his ear for a minute, and then with his eye fixed on the audience he walked straight over the electric footlights to the other side of the stage and disappeared. The audience roared and the recitationist stopped, gazed with mock indignation at the people for a second or two, and then addressing me he said, '_Mr. Chairman, I understood that this was to be a monologue--not a catalogue_.' Of course it brought down the house, and ever since then that man has been about the most popular number our lecture course has ever had."