Part 11 (1/2)
He threw his head back and roared with laughter. ”By George! the dinner's on me!” he said.
He accompanied me to the hall that evening, and sitting in the front row gazed at me quizzically all through my labors--full of sympathy and understanding, however--and after the affair was over and he joined me for my return journey to the hotel he slapped me hard on the back.
”Some gas, all right!” said he. ”I wouldn't blow that out if I could!”
Which I took to be one of the most genuine compliments I have ever received.
I have never in any of my trips felt myself in danger of a.s.sa.s.sination, and yet one of these chance acquaintances of mine involved me by his love of practical joking in an implied ultimatum from a stranger of a most awe-inspiring nature. In leaving a California city some years ago I found myself seated with a group of other travelers just inside the rear door of the observation car. The train had come to a sudden standstill alongside a row of flouris.h.i.+ng olive trees, and the traveling man (if I remember correctly he was to Suspenders what Darwin was to the Origin of Species) jumped from the platform and plucked a handful of their fruit from branches overhanging the border of the road. Three of these he pa.s.sed in to me, and in the innocence of my young heart I immediately plumped one of them into my mouth, and bit into it.
The result I shall not attempt to describe. Our dictionaries have at least a dozen separate and distinct terms signifying that which is bitter, no single one of which is adequate even to intimate the taste of that olive. There are such expressions as ”gall and wormwood”; there are adjectives involving such qualifications of taste as ”acrid,”
”nauseous,” ”sharp,” ”tangy,” ”stinging,” ”rough,” and ”gamy.” None suffices. I have tasted rue, I have tasted aloes, I have tasted qua.s.sia, and I have nearly died of squills. As a small boy I once started in to chew a four-grain quinine pill that had been rolled with no ameliorating ingredient to take off the tang of it. But never in my life before or since have I tasted anything comparable to that olive for pure, unadulterated acerbity. It was an Ossa of Gall piled on a Pelion of Wormwood--I might say that it represented the complete reunion of that Gall which the historians of the past have told us was ”divided into three parts”--and I suffered accordingly.
But when I saw that traveling man's eye full of twinkling joy fixed upon me I resolved not to let him know that the horrid thing was not the most exquisite bit of ambrosial sweetness that had ever been perpetrated upon my paralyzed palate. I simply chewed quietly ahead, externally as calm and as placid as any cow that ever fletcherized her cud.
”How is it?” asked another traveler, sitting alongside me.
”Delicious!” said I. ”Have one.”
And I handed him over one of my two remaining olives. He was as innocent as I, but not quite so self-controlled. Even as I had done, he too plumped the olive into his mouth, bit into it--and forthwith exploded. I shall not repeat here the appeal to Heaven that issued from his lips along with the offending olive itself. Suffice it to say that although there were several ladies present it was verbally adequate. And then out of the depths of the car, from a physical giant lolling at ease in a plush-covered arm chair, came a deep, ba.s.so-profundo voice.
”_I'd kill any man who did that to me!_” it said, with a vicious aspirate at the beginning of the word kill.
But there was no murder done, and before night as our train rolled over into Nevada we were as happy a family as one will be likely to find under any kind of roof in the far-off days of the millennium.
It is not often that we look for fine literary and other distinctions in the minds of men engaged in the humbler pursuits of life, and yet from two of my chance acquaintances en route, both barbers, I have gathered subtleties of line that have remained with me impressively ever since.
The first of these worthy toilers and subconscious philosophers I discovered in a Chicago hotel in 1905. I was on my way into Iowa for a week of one-night stands, having come almost directly from one of the most delightful of my literary opportunities--Colonel George Harvey's dinner in honor of Mark Twain's seventieth birthday.
The stains of travel needed to be removed, and I sought the aid of the hero of my tale, a stocky little chap, whose face suggested an ancestry part Spanish and part East Side New York. I will say that judged externally I should not have cared to meet him in a dark alley after midnight; but inwardly he turned out to be a pretty good sort of fellow.
His speech was pure vernacular.
As he was cutting my hair I glanced over the supplement to that week's issue of ”Harper's Weekly,” at that time under Harvey's control, devoted to a full account of the Mark Twain dinner both in picture and in text.
In turning over the leaves to see what kind of melon-shaped head the flashlight photographer had given me I came upon the counterfeit presentment of the group of which I had been a member, and was relieved to find that the print had treated me fairly well, and that instead of looking like a cross between a professional gambler and a train robber, as most of my published portraits have made me appear, the thing was recognizable, and in certain unsuspecting quarters might enable me to pa.s.s as a reputable citizen. The snipping of the scissors back of my ear suddenly ceased as I gazed upon my alleged ”liniments”--as an old friend of mine used to call them--and the barber's voice broke the stillness.
”Say,” he said, pointing with the scissors point to the portrait of myself, ”that guy looks sump'n like you, don't he?”
”He ought to,” said I. ”Me and him's the same guy.”
”Well whaddyer know about that!” he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. ”Really?”
”Yep,” said I.
”And you're from New York, eh?” he went on, resuming his labors. ”What's the name?”
I enlightened him, and received the inevitable question.
”Whaddyer think of Chicago?”
It had happened that every visit I had made to Chicago for several years had shown that city almost completely hidden beneath a pall of sooty cloud and lake fog; so I answered him accordingly.