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

"Glad to serve yo', Admiral," said he with deep gravity.

"And now, Bishop," said I, resolved to keep at it until I scored a victory, "suppose – "

"Hol' on, mistuh!" he retorted instantly. "Hol' on! Dey ain't mo'n one puhson in de Universe whut's higher 'n a bishop, an' I knows mighty well yo' ain't Him!"

Our dusky brothers not infrequently fill me with a sense of consolation in difficult moments. Two such cases occur to me at this writing; one in my own experience, and the other in a story I heard in the South last winter, the mere thought of which has many times since served to soften my woes in troublesome moments.

The first occurred several years ago, when the steel passenger cars first came into commission. Being myself of a somewhat inflammable nature, I make it a rule to travel on these in preference to the old-fashioned tinder boxes of ten years ago whenever I can. On this particular occasion, however, on a hurried midwinter night run, I found myself in a highly ornate, lumbering Pullman of the vintage of '68. It was an essentially mid-Victorian affair, and in the matter of decoration was a flamboyant specimen of the early A. T. Stewart period of American interior embellishment.

Those whose memories hark back that far will remember that the Pullman Company's money at that time was largely expended on lavish ornamentation of a peculiarly assertive rococo style, consisting for the main part of an eruption of gew-gaws which ran riot over the exposed surfaces of the car like a rash on the back of a baby. The external slant of the upper berth in these cars was ever a favorite surface for this particular kind of gew-gawsity, and no occupant of a lower berth known to me ever succeeded in getting safely into bed, or out of it, without having one or more of these lovely patterns imprinted on the top of his head with more force than delicacy. In collisions the occupant of one of these varnish-soaked orgies of fretwork had about as much chance of escaping unscathed as what a dear clerical friend of mine in a lay sermon once characterized as "a celluloid dog chasing an asbestos cat through the depths of purgatory." Whenever I find myself on one of these cars I think instinctively of just three things, and in this order – my past life, my possible permanent future, and my accident insurance policy – and try to comfort myself by playing both ends against the middle.

In my haste on this occasion I had not particularly noticed the characteristics of the car until I attempted to remove my shoes to retire. As I sat up after untying the laces I was brought to a painful realization of the old-time nature of the vehicle by having impressed most forcibly upon the top of my head the convolutions of an empire wreath, carved out of pine splints, and embossed with gold leaf, which served to give Napoleonic dignity to the upper berth when not in use. The jar, plus the ensuing association of ideas, brought to my mind an uneasy realization of the probable truth that the car was of antique pattern, about as solid as any other box of potential toothpicks, and as fireproof as a ball of excelsior soaked with paraffin. At the moment the porter happened to be passing with the carpet-stepped ladder to assist a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound traveling man into the berth overhead, and I addressed him.

"See here, porter!" said I. "What kind of car do you call this, anyhow? Isn't this the car Shem, Ham, and Japhet took when they moved back to town from Ararat?"

"Yas, suh," he answered. "She suttinly am an ol' timah, suh."

"Well, I don't feel exactly safe, George," said I. "Aren't there any steel cars on this train?"

"Oh, we's all safe enough, suh," said George, with the assurance of one who is so well intrenched that no foe on earth could possibly get at him. "De cyar behind an' de cyar in front, dey's bofe steel, suh."

I had never expected to enjoy in this life the sensations that I suspect are those of a mosquito when he finds himself caught between the avenging palms of a horny-fisted son of toil, who has at last got a pestiferous nuisance where he wants him; but I must confess that such were my sensations that night; and every time the train came to a sudden stop in its plunging through the dark I had a not too comfortable sense that when the steel front of the car behind finally came to meet the iron end of the car ahead, through the unresisting mass of splinters and Empire wreaths between, I would personally, in all likelihood, more closely resemble a cubist painting of a sunset on the Barbary Coast than a human being. I imagine that what really carried me uninjured through the nervous ordeal of that night was the amused view I took of good old George's notions as to what constituted absolute safety.

The other incident, as narrated to me by a fellow traveler, has given me much comfort in exasperating moments. In sections of the South and West the engineers have not as yet mastered the art of stopping or starting their trains gently. When they stop they stop grindingly, with jolts and jars sudden and violent enough to send a snoring traveler full of stored up impetus head first through a stone wall; or, if it be in the daytime, with a jerk of such a nature as would snap his head off completely if the latter were not so firmly fastened to his neck. It is a method that may do very well for freight, but for passengers and dynamite it has its disadvantages.

It was on a line renowned for its jarring methods that the incident of which my friend told me is alleged to have occurred. A train made up of day coaches and Pullman sleepers broke through a wooden trestle and landed in a frightful mass of twisted wreckage on the bottom of a ravine some eighty feet below. The wrecking crew worked nobly, and after several hours of heroic effort came to a crushed and splintered sleeper at the base of the ruin. There amid the debris, sleeping peacefully, with a beam across his chest, lay the porter, wholly unhurt, and dreaming. He was even snoring. The foreman of the wrecking crew, with suitable language expressing his amazement at the miracle, finally succeeded in getting Sambo half awake.

"Wh-whut's de mattah?" stammered Sambo, sitting up, and gazing dazedly at the ruin on every side.

"Matter?" echoed the foreman. "Why, Jumping Jehoshaphat, man! Don't you know that this whole dod-gasted train has fallen through the trestle? It's a wonder you weren't killed. Didn't you feel anything?"

"Why, yas, boss," said Sambo. "I did feel sumpin' kind o' jolty; but I t'ought dey was jes' a-puttin' on de dinah at Jackson."

So it is that nowadays when these jolting, jarring notes come along to vex my soul I no longer lose my temper as I used to do, but think rather of that old darky and "de dinah at Jackson," and wax mellow, feeling that that story alone, true or not, is a full justification of all the sufferings I or others have had to endure at the ungentle hands of the freight engineer at the passenger throttle.

These men on the engines are great characters, and whenever I can get into touch with them I do so. In some of my zigzagging trips hither and yon in the Middle and Northwest I often find myself back to-day on some train or other that has carried me along on some previous trip, and it is frequently much like a family reunion when I meet the crew for a third or fourth time. "Glad to see you back," is a familiar greeting from conductors, engineers, flagmen, and porters alike. There is one diner on a Western run that I have visited so frequently that I receive all the kindly special attention one used to look for at an inn to which he was a constant visitor; and I think it all grew out of the fact that the first time I traveled on that particular car I summoned the man in charge to complain of the pie.

"I don't like to complain," said I; "but this pie – "

"What's the matter with the pie?" he asked, bristling a little.

"Why," said I, "it's so confoundedly good that even a whole one couldn't satisfy me!"

Ever since the registry of that complaint I have really had more than the law allows on that particular car. Preferential treatment that would fill the Interstate Commerce Commission with anguish is always mine. Neither the rack nor all the fires of the Inquisition could extract from me its precise identity, lest its kindly crew be fined for overcourtesy to a specific individual.

But to return to the engineers: I have always cherished the memory of a stolid old graybeard in command of a special train circumstances once compelled me to hire in order to meet an Arizona date for which there was no possible regular connection by rail. My special started from Phœnix shortly after midnight of a stormy day, to carry me down to Maricopa, there to connect with an early morning express into Tucson. The train consisted of an engine and a single day coach. Inasmuch as it was mine for the time being, and at considerable cost, I decided to exercise my proprietary rights and ride on the engine. A heavy rain which had been falling all day had changed the dry, sandy beds of the Salt and Gila rivers to torrential streams, to the great disadvantage of the roadbeds. We literally seemed to be feeling our way along in the dark, until suddenly the clouds broke away and a glorious moon shed its radiance over everything. Just at this point the engineer with a startled exclamation seized the throttle and brought us to a disquietingly abrupt stop. He whispered a word or two to the fireman, who immediately descended from the cab and ran on ahead along the track until he was completely lost to sight.

"What's the trouble?" said I somewhat apprehensively, as the engineer began examining his machinery.

"Oh, nothing," said he. "I've just sent Bill ahead to see if the bridge is still there."

"Bridge? Still there?" I queried. "There's nothing wrong with the bridges, I hope."

"Well – I dunno," said he. "Look over there," he added with a wave of his hand off to the left of us. I peered across the stream in the direction he had indicated, and there in the bright light of the moon I could see that two huge iron spans of the Santa Fé bridge had been completely undermined by the fierce flow of the waters, and now lay flat on their sides in midstream.

"Ooo-hoo! All right!" came the voice of the fireman from the dark ahead.

I sat transfixed and speechless as the engineer started slowly ahead and moved at a snail's pace along the soggy road. We came to the bridge, which was still standing, in a few moments; but oh how it swayed as we inched our way across! I should have felt safer if that train and I were lying together in a hammock. We fairly lurched across it, and I should not have been at all surprised if at any moment the whole structure had collapsed under our weight. Finally we got across in safety, and my heart condescended to emerge from my boots.

"By George, Mr. Engineer!" said I. "If there's any more like that, I guess I'll get off and walk the rest of the way."

"All right, mister," said the engineer cheerfully. "If you prefer the company of rattlesnakes and Gila monsters to mine, go ahead – and may the Lord have mercy on your soul!"

I decided to remain.

VIII

CHAIRMEN I HAVE MET

Sometimes the Gentleman in the Chair is a Lady, but more often he is a man, and, strange to relate, contrary to the general impression of the comparative methods of the sexes, the ladies are vastly more direct in their introductions than their Brothers in Suffering. Women are seldom oratorically inclined. Men are invariably so – or at least chairmen are. And as a result an introduction to an audience by a woman is likely to become more of an "identification of the remains" than an illuminating explanation of the speaker's right to be where he is; while the men "pile it on" to such an extent that the lecturer has often to struggle immortally to make good the chairman's kindly declarations on his behalf.

Personally, with all due respect to the Lady Chairman, I prefer the masculine method: not because I like to hear myself exalted to the tipmost point of the blue vault above; for I do not. It is hard work to sit still before five hundred people with a smug expression of countenance and hear oneself compared to Dickens and Thackeray, and Shakespeare and Moses, to the distinct disadvantages of that noble quartet of literary strugglers; and I have never ceased to sympathize with Anthony Hope, who on a postprandial occasion some years ago when I was sitting next to him, after listening to a few eulogistic remarks by a speaker in which he was made to appear the greatest Light of Literature since the beginning of time, lifted the tablecloth, glanced under it, and in a muffled tone murmured, "My God, Bangs! Isn't there any way out of here? I cawn't live up to all this!"

Nevertheless, I do prefer the men's method, because it gives me more time in which to study my audience, and, in so far as I may, adjust myself and my discourse to the special problem confronting me. In the one case (introductions by women) it is as if one were suddenly seized by the scruff of the neck and thrown overboard without even time to say one's prayers; in the other the victim is slowly and pleasantly carried upward from the level of fact on the wings of kindly fancy to a pinnacle of unearned increment of glory, and left there to shift for himself: to soar higher if he have afflatus enough to attain loftier heights, or to slide back to where he belongs as gracefully as may be.

I have often thought as I have sat and listened to these delightful flights of eulogy – so like the obituary notices we read in the newspapers after a great man dies – of the great disadvantages of those upper realms. It is very lonely and cold up there, and while the old saw is undoubtedly correct, and there is plenty of room at the top, let it be recorded by one who has more than once been summarily hauled thither as involuntarily as undeservedly, that it is elbow room only, with mighty little solid earth on which to rest one's feet. The poet who invented the expression "the giddy heights" knew what he was talking about, and one has but to go out on the lecture platform and try to stand gracefully on those abstract peaks to have it proved to his entire satisfaction.

But there is another reason why I prefer the chair-man to the chair-woman, and it has to do solely with the technic of lecturing. No one who has ever lectured can deny the apprehension of the first five minutes of the effort. Those five minutes are perhaps the most critical period of the evening. If the attack is not right, the whole affair is likely to come down with a crash; for first impressions count perhaps more than they should with the average audience. If the attack is good, and the lecturer can "make himself solid" with his audience at the very beginning, structural weaknesses and an occasional dull or dragging moment will be forgiven later, because those who listen have come to like the speaker personally, and decline to let him fail unless he really insists upon doing so.

Now the technic of this attack, I should say if I were retained to write a Primer for Lecturers, involves the chairman most materially. He is the tangible hook on which the alert lyceumite almost invariably either hangs or supports himself in those first five minutes. Human nature is so constituted that people like a pleasantry at the expense of some person or of some thing with which they are personally familiar. It grows out of the love of the concrete – which is a failure of us all, I fancy – and in every community there are always at least two concrete things that are sure winners for the lecturer – the chairman of the evening, and the railway system upon which the inhabitants of the community depend. Jests broad or subtle at the expense of either are received with howls of joy.

On my first transcontinental trip, made ten years ago, I never failed to receive an immediate response from my audiences when I referred to the letters N. P. R. R., the abbreviated form for the Northern Pacific Railroad, as really signifying a "Not Particularly Rapid Route"; and in other sections of the country served by those charming corporations the shortest cut I know to the affections of the people is through a bald or ribald jest at the expense of the Erie or the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

The chairman, however, is an equally safe proposition. He is either a very popular man in town, or directly the reverse, and in either case his neighbors enjoy a little joke at his expense. Naturally the joke, to be successful, must have to do with something peculiar to the moment, which the lecturer must find in the chairman's opening remarks. Obviously one cannot be so freely facetious with a woman as with a man, and if he has been properly brought up does not even wish to be so. So that the Lady Chairman invariably leaves the speaker with a restricted field of operations at the outset.

Of course in all these reflections I am speaking merely of the lecturer who seeks popular rather than academic favor, which is frankly my own case. I should infinitely prefer to find myself liked by a miscellaneous audience rather than by a limited company of scientificos who are professionally more interested in things of the head than of the heart. It is better to be human than great, and I care more for Humanity than for the Humanities.

At a rough estimate I should say that in the last ten years I have been the beneficiary of the services of not less than eight hundred chairmen, and in that whole list I can recall but one that I did not like, and no doubt he was a most likable fellow. He was a clergyman and a man of information, if not education; but he seemed to think that because somebody had once intimated that I was a "humorist" (a title that I have neither laid claim to, nor specially desired to win) I must naturally be reached only by a downward climb from his own dignified heights. There are individuals in this world who conceive humor to be a somewhat undignified pursuit, their own education in that branch of human action having been confined to a study of the antics of the circus clown, and they are likely to deny to humorists even the right to the use of correct English.

"Well," said this special chairman unctuously when we met for the first time, "you are from New York, I understand."

"I have been a New Yorker," I said noncommittally.

"I suppose you know Howells, and Mark Twain, and all that bunch?" he went on, condescending to use the kind of language with which he of course assumed I was most familiar.

And it was just there that I took a violent dislike to the man. The word bunch, as applied to Mr. Howells and Mark Twain by one of his presumed education was not pleasing to my soul, though I should have loved it from a cowboy. It was as if somebody had referred to "those talented cusses, Carlyle and Emerson," and I simmered slightly within.

"Well," I replied, "I've known Howells and his gang for ages – bunked with the whole kit and caboodle of 'em for nearly twenty years – and you can take it from me they're a nifty herd! But the other – who was the other man?"

"Mark Twain," said he.

"I seem to have heard the name somewhere," said I; "but I don't think I've ever met him, or at least I don't remember it. New York's a pretty big place, you know, and you can't be expected to know everybody. What was his line?"

I am not sure, but I think the reverend gentleman woke up at that point. At any rate he gave me no clue as to Mark Twain's identity. He turned away, and excused himself on the ground that he wanted to see if the audience was "all in."

"Don't bother," I called after him. "It will be all in when I get through with it."

But he never cracked a smile. I presume there were refinements of slang with which he was not familiar.

As to the others, however, I find as I run the noble army over in retrospect that many have won their way into my affections, and none are remembered save pleasantly. Several of them stand out preëminently for acts of self-sacrificing kindness on my behalf; notably one gentleman in Iowa who drove me over a distance of eighteen miles after midnight through a raging blizzard, requiring the unremitting efforts of four sturdy horses to pull us through, in order that I might catch a train back East and be with my children at Christmas time, and he was not a particularly emotional man, or anything of a sentimentalist, at that.

I shall never forget the spur of his answer to a remark I made to him that night on our way from the hotel to the lecture hall. The snow was falling lightly when he arrived, but the distance to the hall was so short that we walked it. As we came to the public square I noticed that hitched to the white railing about the county courthouse that stood in the middle thereof were some thirty or forty teams, harnessed to farm wagons of various types, large and small. It was already after eight o'clock, and I was surprised to find the wagons there at so late an hour.

"Your people work late, Mr. Robb," said I, as we sauntered along.

"What do you mean by that?" he inquired.

"Why," said I, "those wagons over there. Isn't it a trifle late for your farmers to be in town?"

"Oh," he said, "those wagons – why no, Mr. Bangs. Those wagons are here for pleasure, not on business. They have brought in a good part of your audience. Some of your people to-night have driven in from as far as twenty miles to hear you."

My heart sank. "Great Scott!" I ejaculated. "Twenty miles, eh? On a night like this – I – I hope I'll be good enough for that."

"I hope so!" was his laconic response.

The rejoinder was as the prick of a spur, and by its aid, as well as with the assistance of a delightfully receptive gathering of listeners who had traveled far to have a good time, and meant to have it anyhow – a characteristic of your Westerner – we pulled through in good condition.

When all was over this noncommittal Iowan bundled me up in a borrowed fur overcoat, and insisted on taking that all-night drive with me through the raging storm that I might be sent safely and rejoicing back to my youngsters awaiting my coming on the Atlantic coast. It was shortly after four in the morning when my train drew out of the distant station, and the last I saw of my kindly host he was standing on the railway platform, knee deep in the snow, in the spotlight of a solitary white electric lamp, hat in hand, and waving his farewells and good wishes for me and mine.

I rejoice to say that he has remained my friend over the eight or nine years that have since elapsed, and if by any chance he shall read these lines I trust they will serve to prove to him that my affection, as frequently expressed in my letters to him, is still quite as strong and as deep as one with his capacity for friendliness could possibly wish it to be. And I wish to add that his figure as it stands out in my memory has become a symbol to me of the kindness, and courtesy, and friendliness of the great-hearted people who dwell in what he and his fellows properly and pridefully refer to always as "God's Own Country."

Another Iowa chairman, whose charming companionship and courtesy I shall always remember, will not mind, I am sure, if I record here a most amusing "break" that he made at our first meeting, which, I hasten to add, he more than redeemed afterward when the stress and strain of the evening relaxed. He dwelt in what appeared to be a most flourishing little city in the northern part of the State. I had arrived there early in the afternoon, and was so much impressed by the clean-cut appearance of everything I saw that I lingered upon the streets long after I should have sought my couch to rest up for the evening. The streets were as clean as a whistle. The dwellings were attractive in design and setting, and the business blocks were of a dignified if not massive style of architecture. Best of all, if I could judge from those I saw to-ing and fro-ing upon the streets, the people themselves were alert and active.

In view of all this apparent prosperity I was a trifle surprised when the chairman arrived at the hotel to find him rather depressed. He was a clergyman, and at first glance seemed to be suffering from profound melancholy; so very profound indeed that I deemed it my duty to try to cheer him up.

"What a fine, prosperous little city you have here, Doctor," said I with genuine enthusiasm. "I've put in the greater part of the afternoon looking the place over, and I tell you it has filled me with joy."