78. CHAPTER LXXVIII.
AFTER half a year's luxurious vagrancy in the islands, I took
shipping in a sailing vessel, and regretfully returned to San
Francisco—a voyage in every way delightful, but without an
incident: unless lying two long weeks in a dead calm, eighteen
hundred miles from the nearest land, may rank as an incident.
Schools of whales grew so tame that day after day they played
about the ship among the porpoises and the sharks without the
least apparent fear of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles
for lack of better sport. Twenty-four hours afterward these bottles
would be still lying on the glassy water under our noses, showing
that the ship had not moved out of her place in all that time. The
calm was absolutely breathless, and the surface of the sea
absolutely without a wrinkle. For a whole day and part of a night
we lay so close to another ship that had drifted to our vicinity, that
we carried on conversations with her passengers, introduced each
other by name, and became pretty intimately acquainted with
people we had never heard of before, and have never heard of
since. This was the only vessel we saw during the whole lonely
voyage. We had fifteen passengers, and to show how hard pressed
they were at last for occupation and amusement, I will mention
that the gentlemen gave a good part of their time every day, during
the calm, to trying to sit on an empty champagne bottle (lying on
its side), and thread a needle without touching their heels to the
deck, or falling over; and the ladies sat in the shade of the
mainsail, and watched the enterprise with absorbing interest. We
were at sea five Sundays; and yet, but for the almanac, we never
would have known but that all the other days were Sundays
too.
I was home again, in San Francisco, without means and
without employment. I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of
some kind, and at last a public lecture occurred to me! I sat down
and wrote one, in a fever of hopeful anticipation. I showed it to
several friends, but they all shook their heads. They said nobody
would come to hear me, and I would make a humiliating failure of
it.
They said that as I had never spoken in public, I would break down
in the delivery, anyhow. I was disconsolate now. But at last an
editor slapped me on the back and told me to "go ahead." He said,
"Take the largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket." The
audacity of the proposition was charming; it seemed fraught with
practical worldly wisdom, however. The proprietor of the several
theatres endorsed the advice, and said I might have his handsome
new opera-house at half price—fifty dollars. In sheer desperation I
took it—on credit, for sufficient reasons. In three days I did a
hundred and fifty dollars' worth of printing and advertising, and
was the most distressed and frightened creature on the Pacific
coast. I could not sleep—who could, under such circumstances?
For other people there was facetiousness in the last line of my
posters, but to me it was plaintive with a pang when I wrote
it:
"Doors open at 7 1/2. The trouble will begin at 8."
That line has done good service since. Showmen have
borrowed it frequently. I have even seen it appended to a
newspaper advertisement reminding school pupils in vacation
what time next term would begin. As those three days of suspense
dragged by, I grew more and more unhappy. I had sold two
hundred tickets among my personal friends, but I feared they might
not come. My lecture, which had seemed "humorous" to me, at
first, grew steadily more and more dreary, till not a vestige of fun
seemed left, and I grieved that I could not bring a coffin on the
stage and turn the thing into a funeral. I was so panic-stricken, at
last, that I went to three old friends, giants in stature, cordial by
nature, and stormy-voiced, and said:
"This thing is going to be a failure; the jokes in it are so dim
that nobody will ever see them; I would like to have you sit in the
parquette, and help me through."
They said they would. Then I went to the wife of a popular
citizen, and said that if she was willing to do me a very great
kindness, I would be glad if she and her husband would sit
prominently in the left-hand stage-box, where the whole house
could see them. I explained that I should need help, and would
turn toward her and smile, as a signal, when I had been delivered
of an obscure joke—"and then," I added, "don't wait to investigate,
but respond! "
She promised. Down the street I met a man I never had seen
before. He had been drinking, and was beaming with smiles and
good nature. He said:
"My name's Sawyer. You don't know me, but that don't matter.
I haven't got a cent, but if you knew how bad I wanted to laugh,
you'd give me a ticket. Come, now, what do you say?"
"Is your laugh hung on a hair-trigger?—that is, is it critical, or
can you get it off easy?"
My drawling infirmity of speech so affected him that he
laughed a specimen or two that struck me as being about the
article I wanted, and I gave him a ticket, and appointed him to sit
in the second circle, in the centre, and be responsible for that
division of the house. I gave him minute instructions about how to
detect indistinct jokes, and then went away, and left him chuckling
placidly over the novelty of the idea.
I ate nothing on the last of the three eventful days—I only
suffered. I had advertised that on this third day the box-office
would be opened for the sale of reserved seats. I crept down to the
theater at four in the afternoon to see if any sales had been made.
The ticket seller was gone, the box-office was locked up. I had to
swallow suddenly, or my heart would have got out. "No sales," I
said to myself; "I might have known it." I thought of suicide,
pretended illness, flight. I thought of these things in earnest, for I
was very miserable and scared. But of course I had to drive them
away, and prepare to meet my fate. I could not wait for half-past
seven—I wanted to face the horror, and end it—the feeling of many
a man doomed to hang, no doubt. I went down back streets at six
o'clock, and entered the theatre by the back door. I stumbled my
way in the dark among the ranks of canvas scenery, and stood on
the stage. The house was gloomy and silent, and its emptiness
depressing. I went into the the dark among the scenes again, and
for an hour and a half gave myself up to the horrors, wholly
unconscious of everything else. Then I heard a murmur; it rose
higher and higher, and ended in a crash, mingled with cheers. It
made my hair raise, it was so close to me, and so loud.
There was a pause, and then another; presently came a third, and
before I well knew what I was about, I was in the middle of the
stage, staring at a sea of faces, bewildered
by the fierce glare of the lights, and quaking in every limb with a
terror that seemed like to take my life away. The house was full,
aisles and all!
The tummult in my heart and brain and legs continued a full
minute before I could gain any command over myself. Then I
recognized the charity and the friendliness in the faces before me,
and little by little my fright melted away, and I began to talk
Within three or four minutes I was comfortable, and even content.
My three chief allies, with three auxiliaries, were on hand, in the
parquette, all sitting together, all armed with bludgeons, and all
ready to make an onslaught upon the feeblest joke that might show
its head. And whenever a joke did fall, their bludgeons came
down and their faces seemed to split from ear to ear;
Sawyer, whose hearty countenance was seen looming redly in the
centre of the second circle, took it up, and the house was carried
handsomely. Inferior jokes never fared so royally before.
Presently I delivered a bit of
serious matter with impressive unction (it was my pet), and the
audience listened with an absorbed hush that gratified me more
than any applause; and as I dropped the last word of the clause, I
happened to turn and catch Mrs.—'s intent and waiting eye; my
conversation with her flashed upon me, and in spite of all I could
do I smiled. She took it for the signal, and promptly delivered a
mellow laugh that touched off the whole audience; and the
explosion that followed was the triumph of the evening. I thought
that that honest man Sawyer would choke himself; and as for the
bludgeons, they performed like pile-drivers. But my poor little
morsel of pathos was ruined. It was taken in good faith as an
intentional joke, and the prize one of the entertainment, and I
wisely let it go at that.
All the papers were kind in the morning; my appetite returned;
I had a abundance of money. All's well that ends well.