There was a painless stage of incubation that lasted twenty-five years,
and then it broke out on me, and people said I was It.
But they called it humor instead of measles.
The employees in the store bought a silver inkstand for the senior
partner on his fiftieth birthday. We crowded into his private office to
present it. I had been selected for spokesman, and I made a little
speech that I had been preparing for a week.
It made a hit. It was full of puns and epigrams and funny twists that
brought down the house—which was a very solid one in the wholesale
hardware line. Old Marlowe himself actually grinned, and the employees
took their cue and roared.
My reputation as a humorist dates from half-past nine o’clock on that
morning. For weeks afterward my fellow clerks fanned the flame of my
self-esteem. One by one they came to me, saying what an awfully clever
speech that was, old man, and carefully explained to me the point of
each one of my jokes.
Gradually I found that I was expected to keep it up. Others might speak
sanely on business matters and the day’s topics, but from me something
gamesome and airy was required.
I was expected to crack jokes about the crockery and lighten up the
granite ware with persiflage. I was second bookkeeper, and if I failed
to show up a balance sheet without something comic about the footings
or could find no cause for laughter in an invoice of plows, the other
clerks were disappointed. By degrees my fame spread, and I became a
local “character.” Our town was small enough to make this possible. The
daily newspaper quoted me. At social gatherings I was indispensable.
I believe I did possess considerable wit and a facility for quick and
spontaneous repartee. This gift I cultivated and improved by practice.
And the nature of it was kindly and genial, not running to sarcasm or
offending others. People began to smile when they saw me coming, and by
the time we had met I generally had the word ready to broaden the smile
into a laugh.
I had married early. We had a charming boy of three and a girl of five.
Naturally, we lived in a vine-covered cottage, and were happy. My
salary as bookkeeper in the hardware concern kept at a distance those
ills attendant upon superfluous wealth.
At sundry times I had written out a few jokes and conceits that I
considered peculiarly happy, and had sent them to certain periodicals
that print such things. All of them had been instantly accepted.
Several of the editors had written to request further contributions.
One day I received a letter from the editor of a famous weekly
publication. He suggested that I submit to him a humorous composition
to fill a column of space; hinting that he would make it a regular
feature of each issue if the work proved satisfactory. I did so, and at
the end of two weeks he offered to make a contract with me for a year
at a figure that was considerably higher than the amount paid me by the
hardware firm.
I was filled with delight. My wife already crowned me in her mind with
the imperishable evergreens of literary success. We had lobster
croquettes and a bottle of blackberry wine for supper that night. Here
was the chance to liberate myself from drudgery. I talked over the
matter very seriously with Louisa. We agreed that I must resign my
place at the store and devote myself to humor.
I resigned. My fellow clerks gave me a farewell banquet. The speech I
made there coruscated. It was printed in full by the _Gazette_. The
next morning I awoke and looked at the clock.
“Late, by George!” I exclaimed, and grabbed for my clothes. Louisa
reminded me that I was no longer a slave to hardware and contractors’
supplies. I was now a professional humorist.
After breakfast she proudly led me to the little room off the kitchen.
Dear girl! There was my table and chair, writing pad, ink, and pipe
tray. And all the author’s trappings—the celery stand full of fresh
roses and honeysuckle, last year’s calendar on the wall, the
dictionary, and a little bag of chocolates to nibble between
inspirations. Dear girl!
I sat me to work. The wall paper is patterned with arabesques or
odalisks or—perhaps—it is trapezoids. Upon one of the figures I fixed
my eyes. I bethought me of humor.
A voice startled me—Louisa’s voice.
“If you aren’t too busy, dear,” it said, “come to dinner.”
I looked at my watch. Yes, five hours had been gathered in by the grim
scytheman. I went to dinner.
“You mustn’t work too hard at first,” said Louisa. “Goethe—or was it
Napoleon?—said five hours a day is enough for mental labor. Couldn’t
you take me and the children to the woods this afternoon?”
“I _am_ a little tired,” I admitted. So we went to the woods.
But I soon got the swing of it. Within a month I was turning out copy
as regular as shipments of hardware.
And I had success. My column in the weekly made some stir, and I was
referred to in a gossipy way by the critics as something fresh in the
line of humorists. I augmented my income considerably by contributing
to other publications.
I picked up the tricks of the trade. I could take a funny idea and make
a two-line joke of it, earning a dollar. With false whiskers on, it
would serve up cold as a quatrain, doubling its producing value. By
turning the skirt and adding a ruffle of rhyme you would hardly
recognize it as _vers de societe_ with neatly shod feet and a
fashion-plate illustration.
I began to save up money, and we had new carpets, and a parlor organ.
My townspeople began to look upon me as a citizen of some consequence
instead of the merry trifler I had been when I clerked in the hardware
store.
After five or six months the spontaniety seemed to depart from my
humor. Quips and droll sayings no longer fell carelessly from my lips.
I was sometimes hard run for material. I found myself listening to
catch available ideas from the conversation of my friends. Sometimes I
chewed my pencil and gazed at the wall paper for hours trying to build
up some gay little bubble of unstudied fun.
And then I became a harpy, a Moloch, a Jonah, a vampire, to my
acquaintances. Anxious, haggard, greedy, I stood among them like a
veritable killjoy. Let a bright saying, a witty comparison, a piquant
phrase fall from their lips and I was after it like a hound springing
upon a bone. I dared not trust my memory; but, turning aside guiltily
and meanly, I would make a note of it in my ever-present memorandum
book or upon my cuff for my own future use.
My friends regarded me in sorrow and wonder. I was not the same man.
Where once I had furnished them entertainment and jollity, I now preyed
upon them. No jests from me ever bid for their smiles now. They were
too precious. I could not afford to dispense gratuitously the means of
my livelihood.
I was a lugubrious fox praising the singing of my friends, the crow’s,
that they might drop from their beaks the morsels of wit that I
coveted.
Nearly every one began to avoid me. I even forgot how to smile, not
even paying that much for the sayings I appropriated.
No persons, places, times, or subjects were exempt from my plundering
in search of material. Even in church my demoralized fancy went hunting
among the solemn aisles and pillars for spoil.
Did the minister give out the long-meter doxology, at once I began:
“Doxology—sockdology—sockdolager—meter—meet her.”
The sermon ran through my mental sieve, its precepts filtering
unheeded, could I but glean a suggestion of a pun or a _bon mot_. The
solemnest anthems of the choir were but an accompaniment to my thoughts
as I conceived new changes to ring upon the ancient comicalities
concerning the jealousies of soprano, tenor, and basso.
My own home became a hunting ground. My wife is a singularly feminine
creature, candid, sympathetic, and impulsive. Once her conversation was
my delight, and her ideas a source of unfailing pleasure. Now I worked
her. She was a gold mine of those amusing but lovable inconsistencies
that distinguish the female mind.
I began to market those pearls of unwisdom and humor that should have
enriched only the sacred precincts of home. With devilish cunning I
encouraged her to talk. Unsuspecting, she laid her heart bare. Upon the
cold, conspicuous, common, printed page I offered it to the public
gaze.
A literary Judas, I kissed her and betrayed her. For pieces of silver I
dressed her sweet confidences in the pantalettes and frills of folly
and made them dance in the market place.
Dear Louisa! Of nights I have bent over her cruel as a wolf above a
tender lamb, hearkening even to her soft words murmured in sleep,
hoping to catch an idea for my next day’s grind. There is worse to
come.
God help me! Next my fangs were buried deep in the neck of the fugitive
sayings of my little children.
Guy and Viola were two bright fountains of childish, quaint thoughts
and speeches. I found a ready sale for this kind of humor, and was
furnishing a regular department in a magazine with “Funny Fancies of
Childhood.” I began to stalk them as an Indian stalks the antelope. I
would hide behind sofas and doors, or crawl on my hands and knees among
the bushes in the yard to eavesdrop while they were at play. I had all
the qualities of a harpy except remorse.
Once, when I was barren of ideas, and my copy must leave in the next
mail, I covered myself in a pile of autumn leaves in the yard, where I
knew they intended to come to play. I cannot bring myself to believe
that Guy was aware of my hiding place, but even if he was, I would be
loath to blame him for his setting fire to the leaves, causing the
destruction of my new suit of clothes, and nearly cremating a parent.
Soon my own children began to shun me as a pest. Often, when I was
creeping upon them like a melancholy ghoul, I would hear them say to
each other: “Here comes papa,” and they would gather their toys and
scurry away to some safer hiding place. Miserable wretch that I was!
And yet I was doing well financially. Before the first year had passed
I had saved a thousand dollars, and we had lived in comfort.
But at what a cost! I am not quite clear as to what a pariah is, but I
was everything that it sounds like. I had no friends, no amusements, no
enjoyment of life. The happiness of my family had been sacrificed. I
was a bee, sucking sordid honey from life’s fairest flowers, dreaded
and shunned on account of my sting.
One day a man spoke to me, with a pleasant and friendly smile. Not in
months had the thing happened. I was passing the undertaking
establishment of Peter Heffelbower. Peter stood in the door and saluted
me. I stopped, strangely wrung in my heart by his greeting. He asked me
inside.
The day was chill and rainy. We went into the back room, where a fire
burned, in a little stove. A customer came, and Peter left me alone for
a while. Presently I felt a new feeling stealing over me—a sense of
beautiful calm and content, I looked around the place. There were rows
of shining rosewood caskets, black palls, trestles, hearse plumes,
mourning streamers, and all the paraphernalia of the solemn trade. Here
was peace, order, silence, the abode of grave and dignified
reflections. Here, on the brink of life, was a little niche pervaded by
the spirit of eternal rest.
When I entered it, the follies of the world abandoned me at the door. I
felt no inclination to wrest a humorous idea from those sombre and
stately trappings. My mind seemed to stretch itself to grateful repose
upon a couch draped with gentle thoughts.
A quarter of an hour ago I was an abandoned humorist. Now I was a
philosopher, full of serenity and ease. I had found a refuge from
humor, from the hot chase of the shy quip, from the degrading pursuit
of the panting joke, from the restless reach after the nimble repartee.
I had not known Heffelbower well. When he came back, I let him talk,
fearful that he might prove to be a jarring note in the sweet,
dirgelike harmony of his establishment.
But, no. He chimed truly. I gave a long sigh of happiness. Never have I
known a man’s talk to be as magnificently dull as Peter’s was. Compared
with it the Dead Sea is a geyser. Never a sparkle or a glimmer of wit
marred his words. Commonplaces as trite and as plentiful as
blackberries flowed from his lips no more stirring in quality than a
last week’s tape running from a ticker. Quaking a little, I tried upon
him one of my best pointed jokes. It fell back ineffectual, with the
point broken. I loved that man from then on.
Two or three evenings each week I would steal down to Heffelbower’s and
revel in his back room. That was my only joy. I began to rise early and
hurry through my work, that I might spend more time in my haven. In no
other place could I throw off my habit of extracting humorous ideas
from my surroundings. Peter’s talk left me no opening had I besieged it
ever so hard.
Under this influence I began to improve in spirits. It was the
recreation from one’s labor which every man needs. I surprised one or
two of my former friends by throwing them a smile and a cheery word as
I passed them on the streets. Several times I dumfounded my family by
relaxing long enough to make a jocose remark in their presence.
I had so long been ridden by the incubus of humor that I seized my
hours of holiday with a schoolboy’s zest.
Mv work began to suffer. It was not the pain and burden to me that it
had been. I often whistled at my desk, and wrote with far more fluency
than before. I accomplished my tasks impatiently, as anxious to be off
to my helpful retreat as a drunkard is to get to his tavern.
My wife had some anxious hours in conjecturing where I spent my
afternoons. I thought it best not to tell her; women do not understand
these things. Poor girl!—she had one shock out of it.
One day I brought home a silver coffin handle for a paper weight and a
fine, fluffy hearse plume to dust my papers with.
I loved to see them on my desk, and think of the beloved back room down
at Heffelbower’s. But Louisa found them, and she shrieked with horror.
I had to console her with some lame excuse for having them, but I saw
in her eyes that the prejudice was not removed. I had to remove the
articles, though, at double-quick time.
One day Peter Heffelbower laid before me a temptation that swept me off
my feet. In his sensible, uninspired way he showed me his books, and
explained that his profits and his business were increasing rapidly. He
had thought of taking in a partner with some cash. He would rather have
me than any one he knew. When I left his place that afternoon Peter had
my check for the thousand dollars I had in the bank, and I was a
partner in his undertaking business.
I went home with feelings of delirious joy, mingled with a certain
amount of doubt. I was dreading to tell my wife about it. But I walked
on air. To give up the writing of humorous stuff, once more to enjoy
the apples of life, instead of squeezing them to a pulp for a few drops
of hard cider to make the pubic feel funny—what a boon that would be!
At the supper table Louisa handed me some letters that had come during
my absence. Several of them contained rejected manuscript. Ever since I
first began going to Heffelbower’s my stuff had been coming back with
alarming frequency. Lately I had been dashing off my jokes and articles
with the greatest fluency. Previously I had labored like a bricklayer,
slowly and with agony.
Presently I opened a letter from the editor of the weekly with which I
had a regular contract. The checks for that weekly article were still
our main dependence. The letter ran thus: