There have been so many criticisms of my talk that I like to remember the times when I have not been too much of a pest. It has always managed to put babies to sleep, and several times it has quieted nervous, distracted invalids. There is a hypnotic quality about it, if used consciously. Once, when quite young, I amused myself by willing my mother to lift her hand. She obeyed, and her giggling frightened me terribly. Another time, much later, I succeeded in swaying a mob of people in an entirely new direction by jumping on the tail of a cart and inciting them to action. These incidents taught me to use this power cautiously, which partly accounts for my inconsequential babbling.
In the St. Botolph Club in Boston I met a very clever man named Eichberg, a musician of ability who had been a pupil of Liszt. I had just returned from a week’s absence when I saw him sitting in his accustomed corner, which I had always avoided, thinking he did not care for me. This time he called me over.
“I must tell you something,” he said. “When one first meets you, one feels as if one has moved to a house which gives upon a railway track and cannot sleep on account of the damnable noise; but you go, and one finds that he has really moved to a house in the country and cannot sleep for the damnable silence. I am glad to see you back.”
Much as my friends may laugh at this statement, there are times when I have listened. Frederick Villiers was the most entrancing talker one could imagine, and I protest I was dumb in his presence lest I miss one word of his conversation. Desdemona never heard anything like what I got from him. This is at least one refutation of the statement of my dear friend Oliver Herford, who said:
“Anyone can lead Ned (meaning me) up to a pause, but no man can make him take it.”
In the earliest ’nineties, Herford and I had rooms beside each other in the St. Botolph Club in Boston. In front of our doors was a card printed in scarlet, indicating the direction of the fire escape. One day, seeing his chance, Oliver took this sign into his room and, blotting out the word “fire,” skillfully lettered in my name in its place and hung it up again. Shortly after that a man came rushing downstairs, boiling over with mirth, yelling for all to come up to the top story. There was the sign, as brilliantly red as ever, but reading:
“Escape in case of Simmons!”
Stories of Oliver Herford come crowding to memory, topsy-turvy, one over another, and although perhaps they should have no place here among recollections of those long since passed away, his type of wit is mellow when it is born and does not need time to soften its edge. Oliver is the child of Whimsey; the eternal Puck or the Peter Pan; he has no age and is of no age; like Topsy, I believe he just “growed.” His fun is full of naïveté and childlike subterfuges; no task is too arduous for him if there be a joke at the end; and he pokes that droll mind of his into the oddest crooks and corners in the daintiest way.
I recall being with him in a restaurant when a man much the worse for liquor approached our table and almost kissed him in his desire to be friendly. Finally getting it into his drunken head that he was receiving no response to his advances, he said.
“I don’t believe that you remember me, Mr. Herford.”