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.
Another effective factor in this disciplinary element in platform work is the "back-handed" compliment that leaves the party of the second part suspended like Mahomet's coffin, midway between heaven and earth, and in some uncertainty as to exactly where "he is going to get off." I have rejoiced in several such. The great State of Pennsylvania, which has "officially" done so much for the platform by its liberal appropriations for teachers' institutes, enabling the school centers to secure the services of speakers of high cost who would otherwise be beyond their reach, is responsible for one of these.