From Pillar to Post Part 22

The service of the manager of the Major Pond type was not a mere perfunctory business service only, but was of a more or less intimate personal nature as well. The major was not content to make a booking for a celebrity at some distant, well nigh inaccessible point, and then shoot him out into the dark unknown to take care of himself, and get along as best he might. On the contrary, he went along himself when he could, and what hards.h.i.+ps were to be faced he shared, and those that might be staved off by a little kindly care and foresight he s.h.i.+elded his people from. It was thus that he built up not only the most notable list of lecturers the world has yet known, but at the same time surrounded himself with a circle of gallant friends, who came to think of him with rare affection.

This intimate personal contact with men of unusual distinction gave him a fund of reminiscence that was a never-failing source of delight to his friends. To Mr. Gladstone, Pond's stories were so tremendously appealing that during one of the major's visits to London the great British statesman requested permission to have a stenographer take them down just as they fell from the lips of the picturesque old American.

Concerning Henry Ward Beecher and Mark Twain the major could talk forever, and the little sidelights his fund of anecdote concerning them cast upon the personality of these two men were invariably appealing.

Worn by the nervous strain of a hard bit of lecturing before the major's own friends and neighbors one night many years ago, I was privileged to sit and gather refreshment and peace of mind in the joy of one of the major's reminiscent monologues lasting well into the early hours of the morning, with which he regaled me upon my return to his hospitable house. I was unhappily conscious of not having done my work particularly well that night--in fact I had had to lecture from a ma.n.u.script, which is always fatiguing both to speaker and to audience, and I hardly dared ask the major what he thought of my performance--but after awhile in his fatherly way he broached the subject himself.

"It was a good lecture, Bangs," he said, "and some day, maybe, _you will find time to make it shorter_."

"What is a good lecture, Major, anyhow?" I asked, hoping that from such an authority as he must by now have become I should get some clue to a possible short cut, if not to success, at least away from failure.

He threw himself back in his chair and laughed. "That reminds me, Bangs," said he. "Maybe you'd like to know what Horace Greeley considered a good lecture--at any rate it is the only answer to your question that I know. Greeley and Henry Ward Beecher and I were on our way to Boston once, and as we pa.s.sed through Bridgeport, Connecticut, Greeley, glancing out of the car window, said, 'h.e.l.lo, here's Bridgeport, the home of P. T. Barnum! Nice town, Beecher. I gave a successful lecture here once.'

"'What do you call a successful lecture, Greeley?' asked Mr. Beecher.

"'Why,' said Greeley, '_a successful lecture is where more people stay in than go out_.'"

As for the major's relations with Mark Twain, there was always so much of the spirit of pranksome boyhood in them both that their days together, when Clemens was so bravely working to clear off the indebtedness of the publis.h.i.+ng house that he had unnecessarily but chivalrously a.s.sumed as his own, must have been something of a romp, despite the unquestioned hards.h.i.+ps of such persistent travel.

As a specimen of the playful spirit in which the two men went at their work I recall a story told me that night by the major of how in a far western State, owing to a delayed train, they were kept waiting on a railway station platform for several hours.

"Look here, Pond!" said Clemens after much dreary waiting. "You may not know it, but this is a violation of our contract. You agreed to keep me traveling, and this ain't traveling: it's just nothing but pure, cussed condemned loafing!"

"All right, Mark," said the major. "Just a second and I'll fix you out."

The major walked up to the end of the platform, where there was an empty baggage truck standing in front of the baggage room door. This he pushed along to where Clemens was standing, and then picking the humorist up in his arms he put him on board the truck and wheeled him up and down the platform, to the astonishment of the gathered natives, until the train came in, thus filling his contract to the letter, as was his invariable custom.

Nor shall I ever forget the major's delightful characterization of the platform work of Matthew Arnold.

"Arnold spoke from a ma.n.u.script," said he. "It was a printed affair, done in large letters on ordinary cap paper, and bound up in a portfolio. This he insisted on having on an easel at his right hand.

After bowing to his audience he would fasten his eyes on the ma.n.u.script and then turn and recite a sentence from it to the people in front. Then he would go back to the ma.n.u.script again, corral another sentence, and recite that. _And so it went to the end of the show--and all in a voice that n.o.body could hear!_"

The major paused a moment, and chuckled.

"General and Mrs. Grant attended the first Arnold lecture at Chickering Hall," he said. "The place was packed; but I got them seats, well back, but the best there were. After Arnold's lips had been moving without a sign of a word that anybody could hear for ten or fifteen minutes the General turned to Mrs. Grant and said, 'Well, my dear, we've _seen_ the British Lion at least; but inasmuch as we cannot hear him roar I guess we'd better go home!' Grant was known as the silent man," continued the major; "but Arnold gave him a pointer on how a man could be silent and talking at the same time."

The major was a great believer in the value of Author's Readings by what he used to call "running mates,"--teams, as the vaudevillains have it.

He had had great success with such combinations as Mark Twain and George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page and F. Hopkinson Smith, and Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley. Trotting in double harness had proved in these cases most profitable for everybody concerned, and the major was constantly in search of new alliances. How his ordinarily sane judgment ever came to be warped to such point that he could think of me in such a connection I cannot even pretend to surmise; but it did happen that in the mid-nineties of the last century he began singing a siren song in my ears, to which in an hour of greed and weakness I yielded, the burden of whose refrain was that R. K. Munkittrick of Puck, a man with a rare gift of buoyant humor, and I could make a fortune for everybody if we would only consent to "trot" together.

I had no particular illusions as to my abilities; but the fact that Major Pond believed I could do it was enough for me. If the Gaekwar of Baroda should ever a.s.sure me that a cracked bit of Pittsburg plate gla.s.s was a diamond of fairest ray serene, I should be inclined to think there was something in it so long as he wasn't trying to sell it to me, and so when Major Pond was willing to stake his professional reputation on it that Munkittrick and I would make a highly acceptable platform constellation it was not for me to refuse to twinkle.

I shall never forget the experience. The horrors of it were such that the Day of Judgment itself have possessed small terrors for me since. We were tried out at Albany, New York, before an audience of sixty people, in an auditorium capable of seating three thousand. Everything seemed to go wrong, and on our way up to Albany Munkittrick managed to catch a cold which left him terribly hoa.r.s.e upon our arrival at the old Delavan House in New York's capital city. To overcome this hoa.r.s.eness Munkittrick bought a box of troches of a well known brand, but instead of taking one or two of them he devoured the whole box in about twenty minutes, as if they had been gumdrops or marshmallows, with the result that his tongue began to swell up, and by eight o'clock when we were due on the platform that essential factor of clarity of enunciation was "too big for the job," if I may so put it, occupying not less than seven-eighths of the available s.p.a.ce inside of Munkittrick's mouth, all of which, combined with the natural nervousness of a debut, put us quite out of commission.

As a matter of fact we should never have gone out upon the platform; but we did, and while the chairman was announcing to the scattered mult.i.tude in front that we were the greatest combination of wit, eloquence, and humor the world had ever known, not even excepting Nye and Riley, who had so often delighted Albany audiences in the past, Munkittrick and I sat there quivering with fear, not even daring to look at each other. I do not believe that even the Babes in the Wood themselves looked upon their prospects with greater dread. It was an awful evening; so awful that before it was over a frivolous reaction set in which I truly think was the only thing that enabled us to push it through to the bitter end.

Of course it was a failure. We knew that almost before we began; but it was borne in upon us at the end by the fact that the chairman, who had invited us to join him in a little supper afterward to meet a few of his friends, vanished as if the earth had opened up and swallowed him, and not a crumb of his supper or the hem of his garment did either of us ever see again. Fortunately we had been paid in cash before we went out upon the stage. If it had not been so, or had we been paid by a check on which payment could have been stopped, I doubt if either of us would have realized a penny on the transaction. Moreover, I did not venture to call upon the major for at least a week, and even then my meeting with him was merely casual. I b.u.mped against him on the street in front of his office in the Everett House.

"h.e.l.lo, Bangs!" said he. "Have a good time at Albany?"

"Fine!" said I. "The town is full of charming people."

"Well--I'm _glad somebody enjoyed it_," said the major.

"Any more bookings?" said I.

"No," said the major, with a far-away look in his eye. "Fact is, old man, times are sort o' hard, and after thinking the matter over I've decided that I guess we'd better put off our drive for new business until--well, _until some other season_."

And that was all the chiding I received from that kindly soul!

Several years elapsed before I resumed professional relations with Major Pond, and the incident that brought about that resumption has always seemed to me to be most amusing, and to bring out in vivid colors the quality of the major's temper. Indeed it was about as illuminating a little farce-comedy as one would care to see.

It happened that somewhere about the beginning of this century I was invited to prepare for a New York newspaper syndicate a series of satirical biographies of prominent personages of the day. The series was called "Who's What and Why in America." I was doing a great deal of other work at the time, and the managers of the syndicate fell in readily with my expressed view that lest my name should seem to appear too frequently, and in too many competing quarters, it would be best that for this venture I should use a pseudonym. I therefore did the work over the pen name of Wilberforce Jenkins. The series was very well received, and for over a year was one of the most popular syndicate features running, as a result of which Wilberforce Jenkins began to receive a great many letters from a great many people--so many as almost to make me personally jealous of his growing fame. Among other communications received was one from Major Pond, which ran somewhat like this:

New York, March 12, 1901.

WILBERFORCE JENKINS, Esq.

Dear Sir.--I have been reading with a great deal of interest your sparkling biographies of the Men of To-day in the New York "Blank."

I don't want to flatter you, but you have more real humor in your thumb than all the rest of the funny men of the day rolled into one have in their million and a half fingers. Have you ever considered the desirability of using your gifts on the lecture platform? If you have, let me know. If you can talk half as well as you write, you will be a winner. Come and see me some day and talk it over. I think we can do business together.

Very truly yours, JAMES B. POND.

The situation was too rich to neglect, and I resolved to have a little innocent fun with the major. I repaired almost immediately to the telephone and rang him up. The connection made, I inquired:

"Is this Major Pond?"

"Yes," was the reply. "Who are you?"

"Major J. B. Pond of the Pond Lyceum Bureau?" I continued.

"Yes, I'm Major Pond. Who's this talking?" he answered.

"I am Wilberforce Jenkins, the Who's What and Why man, Major," said I.

"Well--say, old man," said he, with a pleasant touch of enthusiasm in his voice, "I'm mighty glad to hear from you. That's A-1 stuff you are running in the _Blank_. Did you get my letter?"

"Yes," said I. "That's why I am ringing you up."

"Good!" said he. "Ready to talk turkey, are you?"

"Well--I don't know about that, Major," said I hesitatingly. "Of course I know who you are, and the kind of things you do; but--well, to be quite frank with you, I don't know whether I want to do business with you or not."

"Oh!" said the major. "That's it, is it? Well--what seems to be the matter?"

"Oh, nothing much," said I. "Only I was talking with a man about you the other day, and from one or two things he said--"

"What did he say?" the major blurted out.

"Well, to begin with, he said you were an old palaverer," said I. "He intimated that there was a good deal of what you might call hatwork in the quality of your conversation. He said he'd done business with you once, and while he liked you personally you were not all you seemed to think you were as an impresario."

"Who the deuce ever told you that?" demanded the major. "You say he did business with me once?"