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 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 tumult 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.
