Roughing It
skyrocket, him and his crowbar! Well, sir, he kept on going up in the
air higher and higher, till he didn’t look any bigger than a boy—and he
kept going on up higher and higher, till he didn’t look any bigger than
a doll—and he kept on going up higher and higher, till he didn’t look
any bigger than a little small bee—and then he went out of sight!
Presently he came in sight again, looking like a little small bee—and he
came along down further and further, till he looked as big as a doll
again—and down further and further, till he was as big as a boy
again—and further and further, till he was a full-sized man once more;
and then him and his crowbar came a wh-izzing down and lit right exactly
in the same old tracks and went to r-ramming down, and r-ramming down,
and r-ramming down again, just the same as if nothing had happened! Now
do you know, that poor cuss warn’t gone only sixteen minutes, and yet
that Incorporated Company of Mean Men DOCKED HIM FOR THE LOST TIME!”
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I said I had the headache, and so excused myself and went home. And on
my diary I entered “another night spoiled” by this offensive loafer. And
a fervent curse was set down with it to keep the item company. And the
very next day I packed up, out of all patience, and left the Island.
Almost from the very beginning, I regarded that man as a liar
.................................
The line of points represents an interval of years. At the end of which
time the opinion hazarded in that last sentence came to be gratifyingly
and remarkably endorsed, and by wholly disinterested persons. The man
Markiss was found one morning hanging to a beam of his own bedroom (the
doors and windows securely fastened on the inside), dead; and on his
breast was pinned a paper in his own handwriting begging his friends to
suspect no innocent person of having any thing to do with his death, for
that it was the work of his own hands entirely. Yet the jury brought in
the astounding verdict that deceased came to his death “by the hands of
some person or persons unknown!” They explained that the perfectly
undeviating consistency of Markiss’s character for thirty years towered
aloft as colossal and indestructible testimony, that whatever statement
he chose to make was entitled to instant and unquestioning acceptance as
a _lie_. And they furthermore stated their belief that he was not dead,
and instanced the strong circumstantial evidence of his own word that he
_was_ dead—and beseeched the coroner to delay the funeral as long as
possible, which was done. And so in the tropical climate of Lahaina the
coffin stood open for seven days, and then even the loyal jury gave him
up. But they sat on him again, and changed their verdict to “suicide
induced by mental aberration”—because, said they, with penetration, “he
said he was dead, and he _was_ dead; and would he have told the truth if
he had been in his right mind? No, sir.”
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CHAPTER LXXIII.
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.
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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 7½. 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!
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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;
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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.
CHAPTER LXXIX.
I launched out as a lecturer, now, with great boldness. I had the field