Who Is Mark Twain? Read Online Free PDF Page A

hence. Ten days! Only 10 days to advertise in? Couldn’t pull a house together for Adam in 10 days. Oh, dear, I said, we haven’t a show in the world. I begged him to get to work straight off with his advertising; and I offered to sit up all night and every night and help. He looked astonished; and said there was a much more serious thing than that to be looked after and thought about, and that was, what to do with 30,000 people in a house that would seat only a tenth of it.
    But he said he would advertise, and he did. He spent his money as freely as if it had been somebody else’s, and maybe it was—I dono where he got it. And he worked, too—worked like a steam engine. It was inspiring to see him at it. He performed prodigies. Well, you can’t be in the company of forces like that and remain dead. His splendid confidence, his volcanic enthusiasm carried me out of myself again. I got to believing, once more.
    The plans that that man made! He was going to have all the horse-cars in the city put on the line that ran by the hall;—bridge of cars from one end of New York to the other—couldn’t move . He said that didn’t make any difference, people just pay their fare and walk through and go in . He was going to have the neighboring streets walled by policemen to preserve order in the multitudes; he was going to have ambulances all along, to carry away people wounded in the crush—and some hearses, and undertakers; all there were in town; he was going to have cavalry and artillery to put down the riots—amongst the people that couldn’t get in. And he sent out invitations to all the celebrated people in America, and said he was going to seat them on the platform—when they came. He was going to have Senator Nye introduce me.
    During three days I led the most exciting life I had ever known—and the happiest and proudest. Then I began to sober a little. It seemed to me that the excitement was too local—it didn’t seem to be spreading outside of our quarters. I said so to Fuller. He said, Sho, the town is just boiling, underneath. Vesuvius! he said; that’s what it is; and there’s going to be an irruption—the biggest since Pompeii was buried. Don’t fret—it’s all right.
    But the next three days were no better. The city was still calm; awfully calm; ominously calm, I feared. But Fuller was not troubled. He said there’s always that kind of a calm before a storm. He said he was working the newspapers—keeping them quiet, so’t they would begin to talk presently. Which they didn’t. And he said they would talk after the lecture, too. I was afraid of that myself.
    On the eighth day I was in a panic—for that deadly calm held on as solidly as ever. I couldn’t hear a whisper anywhere about my lecture. Fuller said, don’t worry—look at these; you’ll see what these will do. They were little handbills the size of your hand, all display headings full of extravagant laudations of my celebrity and my lecture, and names of the illustrious people who were going to be there. He didn’t say how many of them he had had printed, but there were 13 barrels of them. They were tied together in bunches of 50, with a string that had a loop to it. He had them hung up in the omnibuses and horse-cars, and also on all the door-knobs in town. I could not rest, I was too miserable, too distressed, too sad, too hopeless. I rode in omnibuses all that day, up and down Broadway, and watched those bunches of lies dangling from the cleats, crick in back of my neck from looking up, all day. But nobody ever took one; and gradually my heart broke. At least nobody took one till late in the afternoon. Then a man pulled one down and read it, and made me happy. His friend spoke up and asked Who is Mark Twain? and he said God knows—I don’t.
    These things seem funny, now, after 30 years; much funnier than they did then. But then the development of the humor of a thing is a pretty slow growth sometimes.
    I did not ride any more. I