Part 15 (1/2)
”Well, Mr. Landlord,” I said, as affably as I knew how, ”I--I've come to--to settle up. It seems we were expected to stay with Dr. and Mrs.
Soandso. We--er--we didn't know it when we arrived--and I--I'm sorry to leave you; but--er--but of course--”
”_Thank G.o.d!_” the landlord returned explosively, rising and seizing my hand in a viselike grip that even to remember two years later causes me anguish. ”That's the first good news I've had to-day. I been running this blankety blank blank joint for seven years now, and it's cost me over thirty thousand dollars already, and every time I see a blinkety blank blank boarder come in through that front door it makes me so dashed sick that I feel like nailin' the blankety blank door up so tight old Beelzybub himself'd have to come down through the chimbley to get inside!”
It was at this point that Conk and I parted company at the beginning of what I am inclined to think might have ripened into a lifelong friends.h.i.+p. _I had got his point of view!_ Strange as his conception of hospitality seemed superficially to be, there was reason in him, and I began to perceive that he had some mighty good points. Frankness was one of them, and grat.i.tude, and one of the incidents of his career as narrated to me later by one of his neighbors was convincing proof that, in sporting parlance, the old fellow was a good loser.
It seems that a certain traveling man of great nerve force stopped overnight some years ago with Conk, probably occupying number thirty-two. It was a fearfully hot night, and the room became unbearably stuffy. For a long time the suffering guest strove to open the window, but without results. Prayer, condemnation, muscular force, all alike were powerless to move it. Finally in desperation the unhappy visitor threw on his dressing robe, and stalked down to the office to make complaint.
”It's hotter than Tophet in that room of mine,” he protested, ”and I've been monkeying with that dod-gasted window of yours for the last hour, and the dinged thing won't give an inch!”
”Well, if ya can't move it, why in Dothan dontcha kick it out?” retorted Conk coldly.
”All right, I will,” said the guest, returning to the furnace above.
And he did. Gla.s.s, frame, and sash were kicked with all the power of an angry man into a ma.s.s of wreckage never again to be redeemed.
”Well,” said the guest the following morning, as he started to leave for the station, ”what's the tax? What do I owe you?”
”_Not a blamed cent!_” gruffed Conk. ”You're the first son of a sea cook that's ever had the nerve to call my bluff, and _by Henry you don't pay a nickel into my till except over my dead body_!”
If I have seemed in any wise severe in my treatment of Conk in this tribute to his memory, I am sorry. The material facts could hardly be glossed over; but as for the man himself I am truly glad to have met him. I wouldn't have missed him for a farm. He was not much of a Chesterfield; but he had his own ways, and they gave me a thrill. The joyous, almost grateful courtesy with which he put me out of his front door was a thing to remember, and I in turn am everlastingly grateful to him for letting me out on the ground floor instead of seizing me by the left leg and dragging me up through the skylight, and throwing me off the roof. He could have done it easily, and I am sure it was only the intrinsic, if considerably latent, n.o.bility of his soul that restrained the impulse to do so that I am confident he felt.
XII
PERILS OF THE PLATFORM
”Yours must be an extra hazardous occupation,” said a chance acquaintance on a little trip through Ohio last year. ”Do you carry any insurance?”
”Yes,” said I. ”I have an excellent accident insurance policy, and it is a great comfort. Sometimes on dark nights when I am suddenly awakened by some catastrophic quivering of my berth, as if a young earthquake had come aboard, and realize that the train has probably left the track, and is traveling ahead at a mile-a-minute clip over the rocky bed of some mountain stream, it is a real pleasure to me to foot up the sum total of the affluence that will be mine if we fail to strike a switch somewhere that will get us back on the main line again.”
”Affluence is good,” said he; ”but it won't be yours--not if you break your neck.”
”Oh, I never think of that,” said I. ”I think only of the possibility of injuries, and from that point of view the accident insurance policy is a joy forever. It makes you think so well of yourself, and as you lie off in your berth figuring on two legs and a couple of arms at five thousand dollars apiece, twenty toes and fingers at two hundred and fifty a digit, with your neck valued at twenty-five thousand dollars, you begin to feel that a man isn't such a worthless creature after all. I suppose even my nose is worth something.”
”Great Scott!” he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. ”Do toes and fingers come as high as that?”
”They do,” said I. ”I've carried a policy a.s.suring me a market for them at that rate for the last five years, and if I lose them in a railway smash-up, in a taxicab, in a trolley, or in a public elevator somewhere, the quotation doubles. Under certain contingencies my fingers and toes have a market value of ten thousand dollars.”
”Heavens!” he cried. ”_Have you ever had any luck?_”
From his point of view I presume I have not had any ”luck”; but I am content, satisfied, and even grateful that so far the exigencies of travel have not required me to collect anything on my policy, or compelled me to sacrifice any of my digital collateral even at what seem to be par or premium prices.
But my friend was not altogether wrong in regarding the occupation of an itinerant lyceumite as a hazardous one. If one were to conjure up a picture of the G.o.ds of evil shooting darts at human targets, one might think that, a moving object being harder to hit than one that is definitely fixed, the former would prove a better risk than the latter; but it is one of the paradoxes of life that this is not the case, unless of course the sniping fates are better sharpshooters than professional artillerists.
The possibilities of accident to one who is constantly moving from pillar to post on American railways, many of them starved to death in the name of Progress, and unable to maintain an equipment that is even moderately safe; on steamboat lines many of whose vessels are little more than resin-soaked tinderboxes, over-crowded with pipe and cigarette smokers, and speeding through fog-bound waters at night as though the Evil One himself were just astern in pursuit of the Captain; sleeping in hotels constructed of Georgia pine, on mattresses stuffed with excelsior, with matches that, like flies, will light on anything in sight, strewn about on every side,--well, to commute this sentence, the possibilities of accident to such a one are of such a sort that ”age cannot wither nor custom stale their infinite variety.”
And as for the lecture halls, one now and then encounters a place where it seems as though it were a vain-glorious tempting of fate to enter it.
I recall one marvelous hall in one of the most cultured sections of New England, in a town not more than seventy-five miles from Boston, the home of one of America's most famous schools, and the capital of a State that has produced men of worldwide eminence, which in any Court of Commonsense would have been indicted as a menace to the public welfare.
It was reached by a climb of two flights of stairs, the first scarcely wide enough for two people to walk up abreast, and the second rising from the end of a dimly lighted corridor up six steps to a landing whence ran on each side two other sections of four or five steps each to a second landing, with still a third turn and another climb before the auditorium floor was reached; and all this in an ordinary brick building, erected long before fireproof construction was even thought of.