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<h2> CHAPTER LXXIII. </h2>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"Doors open at 7 1/2. The trouble will begin at 8."</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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!"</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"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?"</p>
<p>"Is your laugh hung on a hair-trigger?—that is, is it critical, or
can you get it off easy?"</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>All the papers were kind in the morning; my appetite returned; I had a
abundance of money. All's well that ends well.</p>
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