I dropped in the other day to see New York's great congress of wax
figures and soft statuary carnival. It is quite a success. The first
thing you do on entering is to contribute to the pedestal fund. New York
this spring is mostly a large rectangular box with a hole in the top,
through which the genial public is cordially requested to slide a dollar
to give the goddess of liberty a boom.
I was astonished and appalled at the wealth of apertures in Gotham
through which I was expected to slide a dime to assist some deserving
object. Every little while you run into a free-lunch room where there
is a model ship that will start up and operate if you feed it with a
nickle. I never visited a town that offered so many inducements for
early and judicious investments as New York.
But we were speaking of the wax works. I did not tarry long to notice
the presidents of the United States embalmed in wax, or to listen to the
band of lutists who furnished music in the winter garden. I ascertained
where the chamber of horrors was located, and went there at once. It is
lovely. I have never seen a more successful aggregation of horrors under
one roof and at one price of admission.
If you want to be shocked at cost, or have your pores opened for a
merely nominal price, and see a show that you will never forget as long
as you live, that is the place to find it. I never invested my money so
as to get so large a return for it, because I frequently see the whole
show yet in the middle of the night, and the cold perspiration ripples
down my spinal column just as it did the first time I saw it.
The chamber of horrors certainly furnishes a very durable show. I don't
think I was ever more successfully or economically horrified.
I got quite nervous after a while, standing in the dim religious light
watching the lovely horrors. But it is the saving of money that I
look at most. I have known men to pay out thousands of dollars for a
collection of delirium tremens and new-laid horrors no better than these
that you get on week days for fifty cents and on Sundays for two bits.
Certainly New York is the place where you get your money's worth.
There are horrors there in that crypt that are well worth double the
price of admission. One peculiarity of the chamber of horrors is that
you finally get nervous when anyone touches you, and you immediately
suspect that he is a horror who has come out of his crypt to get a
breath of fresh air and stretch his legs.
That is the reason I shuddered a little when I felt a man's hand in my
pocket. It was so unexpected, and the surroundings were such that I must
have appeared startled. The man was a stranger to me, though I could see
that he was a perfect gentleman. His clothes were superior to mine in
every way, and he had a certain refinement of manners which betrayed his
ill-concealed knickerbocker lineage high.
I said, "Sir, you will find my fine cut tobacco in the other pocket."
This startled him so that he wheeled about and wildly dashed into the
arms of a wax policeman near the door. When he discovered that he was in
the clutches of a suit of second-hand clothes filled with wax, he seemed
to be greatly annoyed and strode rapidly away.
[Illustration: 0387]
I turned to view the chaste and truthful scene where one man had
successfully killed another with a club. I leaned pensively against a
column with my own spinal column, wrapped in thought.
Pretty soon a young gentleman from New Jersey with an Adam's apple on
him like a full-grown yam, and accompanied by a young lady also from the
mosquito jungles of Jersey, touched me on the bosom with his umbrella
and began to explain me to his companion.
"This," said the Adam's apple with the young man attached to it, "is
Jesse James, the great outlaw chief from Missouri. How lifelike he is.
Little would you think, Emeline, that he would as soon disembowel a
bank, kill the entire board of directors of a railroad company and ride
off the rolling stock, as you would wrap yourself around a doughnut. How
tender and kind he looks. He not only looks gentle and peaceful, but he
looks to me as if he wasn't real bright."
[Illustration: 0389]
I then uttered a piercing shriek and the young man from New Jersey went
away. Nothing is so embarrassing to an eminent man as to stand quietly
near and hear people discuss him.
But it is remarkable to see people get fooled at a wax show. Every day
a wax figure is taken for a live man, and live people are mistaken for
wax. I took hold of a waxen hand in one corner of the winter garden to
see if the ring was a real diamond, and it flew up and took me across
the ear in such a life-like manner that my ear is still hot and there is
a roaring in my head that sounds very disagreeable, indeed.