The Bad Boy's Second Letter from Paris--Dad Poses as a
Mormon Bishop and Has to Be Rescued--They Climb the Eiffel
Tower and the Old Man Gets Converted.
Paris, France.--Old Pardner in Crime: I got your letter, telling me
about the political campaign that is raging at home, and when I read it
to dad he wanted to go right out and fill up on campaign whisky and yell
for his presidential candidate, but he couldn't find any whisky, so he
has not tried to carry any precincts of Paris for our standard-bearer.
There is something queer about the liquor here. There is no regular
campaign beverage. At home you can select a drink that is appropriate
for any stage of a campaign. When the nominations are first made you are
not excited and beer and cheese sandwiches seem to fit the case A little
later, when the orators begin to come out into the open and shake their
hair, you take cocktails and your eyes begin to resemble those of a
caged rat, and you are ready to quarrel with an opponent. The next stage
in the campaign is the whisky stage, and when you have got plenty of it
the campaign may be said to be open, and you wear black eyes and lose
your teeth, and you swear strange oaths and smell of kerosene, and only
sleep in the morning. Then election comes and if your side wins you
drink all kinds of things at once for a week, shout hoarsely and then
go to the Keeley cure, but if your party loses you stay home and take a
course of treatment for nervous prostration and say you will never mix
up in another campaign.
Here in France it is different. The people have nervous prostration to
start on, start a campaign on champagne, wind up on absinthe, and after
the votes are counted go to an insane asylum. I do not know what first
got dad to drink absinthe and I don't know what it is, but it looks like
soap suds, tastes like seed cookies and smells like vermifuge. But it
gets there just the same and the result of drinking it is about the same
as the result of drinking anything in France--it makes you want to hug
somebody.
At home when a man gets full of whisky, he wants to hug the man he
drinks with and weep on his collar, and then hit him on the head with
a bottle; but here every kind of drink puts the drinker in condition to
want to hug. Dad says he never knew he had a brain until he learned to
drink absinthe, but now he can close his eyes and see things worse than
any mince pie nightmare, and when we go out among people he never sees
a man at all, but when a woman passes along, dad's eyes begin to take
turns winking at them and it is all I can do to keep him from proposing
marriage to every woman he sees.
[Illustration: Badge on dad's breast, with the word “Bishop” 153]
I thought I would break him of this woman foolishness, so I told
everybody dad was a Mormon bishop, and had a grand palace at Salt Lake
City, and owned millions of gold mines and tabernacles and wanted to
marry a thousand women and take them to Utah and place them at the head
of homes of their own, and he would just call once or twice a week and
leave bags of gold for his wives to spend. A newspaper reporter, that
could talk English, wrote a piece for a paper about dad wanting to marry
a whole lot and he said life in Utah was better than a Turkish harem,
cause the wives of a Mormon bishop did not have to be locked up and
watched by unix, but could flirt and blow in money and go out to dances
and have just as much fun as though they lived in Newport, and had got
divorces from millionaires, and he said any woman who wanted to marry a
Mormon bishop could meet dad on the bullyvard near a certain monument,
on a certain day. I was on to it, with the reporter, and we hired a
carriage and went to the bullyvard, just at the time the newspaper said
and I put a big red badge on dad's breast, with the word “Bishop” on it,
and dad had been drinking absinthe and he thought the badge was a kind
of sign of nobility. Well, you'd adide to see the bunch of women that
were there to meet dad. “What's the matter here?” said dad, as he
saw the crowd of women, looking like they were there in answer to an
advertisement for nurses. I told dad to stand up in the carriage, like
Dowie does in Chicago, and hold out his hands and say: “Bless you, my
children,” and when dad got up to bless them, the reporter and I got out
of the carriage, and the reporter, which could talk French, said for all
the women who wanted to be Mormon wives to get into the carriage with
the bishop and be sealed for life.
Well, sir, you'd a thought it was a remnant sale! More than a dozen got
into the carriage with dad, and about 400 couldn't get in, but when the
scared driver started up the horses, they all followed the carriage, and
then the mounted police surrounded the whole bunch and moved them off
towards the police station, and dad under the wagonload of females, each
one trying to get the nearest to him, so as to be his favorite wife.
It got noised around that a foreign potent-ate had been arrested with
his whole harem for conduct unbecoming to a potent-ate, and so when
we got to the jail dad had to be rescued from his wives, and they were
driven into a side street by the police, and dad was locked up to save
his life. The reporter and I went to the jail to get him out, but we had
to buy a new suit of clothes for him, as everything was torn off him in
the Mormon rush.
[Illustration: Dad was a sight when we found him in jail 155]
Dad was a sight when we found him in jail, and he thought his bones
were broken, and he wanted to know what was the cause of his sudden
popularity with the fair sex, and I told him it all came from his
looking so confounded distinguished, and his flirting with women. He
said he would swear he never looked at one of those women in a tone of
voice that would deceive a Sunday school teacher, and he felt as though
he was being misunderstood in France. We told him the only way to get
out of jail was to say he was a crowned head from Oshkosh, traveling
incog, and when he began to stand on his dignity and demand that a
messenger be sent for the president of France, to apologize for the
treatment he had received, the jailer and police begged his pardon and
we dressed him up in his new clothes and got him out, and we went to the
Eiffel tower to get some fresh air.
I suppose you have seen pictures of the Eiffel tower, on the
advertisements of breakfast food in your grocery, but you can form
no idea of the height and magnificence of the tower by studying
advertisements. You may think that the pictures you see of world events
on your cans of baked beans and maple syrup and soap, give you the
benefit of foreign travel, but it does not. You have got to see the
real thing or you are not fit to even talk about what you think you have
seen. You remember that Ferris wheel at the Chicago world's fair, and
how we thought it was the greatest thing ever made of steel, so high
that it made us dizzy to look to the top of it, and when we went up
on the wheel we thought we could see the world, from Alaska to South
Africa, and we marveled at the work of man and prayed that we be
permitted to get down off that wheel alive, and not be spilled down
through the rarified Chicago atmosphere and flattened on the pavement so
thin we would have to be scraped up off the pavement with a case knife,
like a buckwheat cake that sticks to the griddle.
You remember, old man, how you cried when our sentence to ride in the
Ferris wheel expired, and the jailer of the wheel opened the cell and
let us out, and you said no one would ever get you to ride again on
anything that you couldn't jump out of if it balked, or you got wheels
in your head and chunks of things came up to your Adam's apple and
choked you. Well, cross my heart, if that Ferris wheel, that looked so
big to us, would make a main spring for the Eiffel tower. The tower is
higher than a kite, and when you get near it and try to look up to the
top, you think it is a joke, and that really no one actually goes up to
the top of it. You see some flies up around the top of it, and when the
guide tells you the flies crawling around there are men and women, you
think the guide has been drinking.
[Illustration: Flies crawling around there are men and women 157]
But dad and I and the guide paid our money, got into an elevator and
began to go up. After the thing had been going up awhile dad said he
wouldn't go up more than a mile or so at first, and asked the man to let
him off at the 3,000-foot level, but the elevator man said dad had got
to take all the degrees and dad said: “Let her went,” and after an hour
or so we got to the top.
Gee! but I thought dad would fall dead right there, when he looked off
at Paris and the world beyond. The flies we had seen at the top before
starting had changed to human beings, all looking pale and scared, and
the human beings on the ground had changed into flies and bugs, for all
you could see of a man on the ground was his feet with a flattened plug
hat someway fastened on the ankles, and a woman looked like a spoonful
of raspberry jam dropped on the pavement, or a splash of current jelly
moving on the ground in a mysterious way. I do not know as the Eiffel
tower was intended to act as a Keeley cure, but of the 50 people
who went up with us, half of them were so full their back teeth were
floating, including dad and the guide, but when we got to the top and
they got a view of the awful height to which we had come, it seemed as
though every man got sober at once, and their tongues seemed to cleave
to the roof of their mouths. All they could do was to look off at the
city and the view in the distance, and choke up, and look sorry about
something.
I couldn't help thinking of what sort of a pulp a man would be if he
fell off the top of the tower and struck a fat woman on the pavement,
cause it seemed to me you couldn't tell which was fat woman and which
was man. I never saw such a change in a man as there was in dad, after
he got his second wind and got his voice working. He looked like a man
who had made up his mind to lead a different life and begin right there.
[Illustration: He took out a five-dollar bill 159]
There was a Salvation Army man and woman in the crowd and dad went up to
them. He took out a five-dollar bill and put it in the tambourine of the
lassie, and said to the man and woman: “Now, look a here, I want to
join your church, and if you have got the facilities for giving me the
degrees, you can sign me as a Christian right now. I have been a bad
man, and never thought I needed the benefits of religious training, but
since I got up here, so near Heaven, in an elevator which I will bet $10
will break and kill us all before we get down to Paris, I want you to
prepare me for the hereafter quick.”
Some of the other fellows laughed at dad, and the Salvation Army people
looked as though dad was drunk, but he continued: “You can laugh and be
jammed, but I'll never leave this place until I am a pious man, and
you Salvation Army people have got to enlist me in your army, for I
am scared plum to death. Go ahead and convert me, while we wait.” The
Salvation Army captain put his hand on dad's head, the girl held out
the tambourine for another contribution, and dad felt a sweet peace come
over him, and we went down in the elevator and took a hack to the hotel,
and dad's lips worked as though in pain.
H.