Всего за 5.99 руб. Купить полную версию
the audience, and if there were present any others who later found themselves in a protesting mood it is pretty certain that they waited for a safer occasion upon which to manifest it. Mr. Beecher on his feet was never a man to be trifled with.
On a stumping campaign myself a number of years ago I was confronted by a somewhat similar condition. An allusion to a statesman whom I greatly admired elicited a decided hiss from a group of hostiles seated under the gallery of a rural opera house. I silenced the hiss by pausing in my remarks and appealing to the janitor to "turn off that steam radiator," since the hall was evidently already too hot for the comfort of some of the audience. It was not particularly deft, but it served the purpose, and we heard no more from that particular quarter for the rest of the evening.
It is a safer rule, however, for the speaker to try to conciliate the hostile element, and it has been a rule of mine for the last five years to endeavor to locate such centers of frigidity as may be found before me, and then direct all my energies toward "thawing them out." Popular as the platform is in all parts of the country to-day, there is always present in every community a small leaven of at least reluctant men who are dragged unwillingly to the lecture halls by their enthusiastic wives, when, if they were only permitted to have their own way, they would be resting tranquilly at home, slippers on feet, feet on fender, book or favorite newspaper in hand, and a sweet-scented briarwood pipe for company. It is not difficult to locate these sufferers. They are such conscious martyrs that they immediately betray themselves, and as a rule while my chairmen are introducing me to my audiences I scan the rows of faces before me in search of them.
They have certain unmistakable earmarks that betray them to the sympathetic eye which, with all due modesty, I may claim mine to be; for, while I love lecturing, being lectured to or at, as the case may be, bores me to extinction. I am like those doctors who rejoice in the opportunity to amputate another man's leg, but would not give seven cents to cut off one or both of their own.
The first of these earmarks is the expression of the face, which is either one of hopeless resignation, or full of lowering, one might almost say vengeful, contempt, as if the owner of the face were calling down inwardly all the wrath of Heaven upon the lecturer in particular, and the whole lyceum movement in general. With both these expressions go arms tightly folded across the breast, as though the sufferer were really trying hard to hold himself in.
The second almost certain manifestation is in the physical relation of the sufferer to the chair in which he sits. He makes it bear the heavy material burden of his despair by sitting not as Nature intended that he should sit, but as nearly upon the small of his back as the available space at his disposal will permit. If he occupy an aisle seat, he sits wholly on the small of his back, with his legs crossed, and his hands tightly clasped across his freer knee.
Once located, this man is the special person that I go after. It becomes my persistent effort, and in so far as I can master the situation my determination, to win his reluctant heart. If I can only get him sitting up like a vertebrate animal, using his spine like a prop instead of like a hammock, and returning my gaze with a gleam of interest, I am happy. If I can get him not only to sit up but to lean forward with his head cocked to one side, much as a horse will cock its ears when something unexpected comes within the range of its vision, I feel that I have scored a triumph. I should say that at a rough guess in eight cases out of ten the effort is successful, although there have been ninth and tenth cases that have chilled me to the marrow, and sent me home with an uncomfortable sense of failure.
My lamented friend, the late R. K. Munkittrick, an American humorist who never really received the full measure of appreciation to which his delicious humor entitled him, once when we were "reading" together one night at Albany, scoring a fiasco so complete that we could only laugh over it, put the situation before me in terms so wholly comprehensive that I have never forgotten it.
"See that red-headed chap in the fourth row?" he whispered, as the chairman was indulging in some extended remarks concerning our greatness to which we could never hope to live up.
"You mean the pall bearer with the green necktie?" I asked.
"Yes," said Munkittrick, "he's the one."
"Well what of him?" said I.
"Oh, nothing," grinned Munkittrick, "but I'll bet you seven dollars and forty-seven cents he's bet the boxoffice fifty cents we can't make him laugh."
I may record with due humility that if good
old Munkittrick's surmise was correct our highly chromatic but otherwise funereal friend won his bet. I doubt we could have moved him with dynamite.
But these gentlemen serve a highly useful purpose. They keep us with our feet on the earth, and prevent us from soaring too high in our own estimation.