the street we followed was as wide as a football field, with islands of greenery along the middle—hence its name, Park Avenue. We passed the impressive Murray Hill Hotel at Fortieth Street, with a line of elegant rigs in front that made my hired conveyance and its driver look decidedly frugal. The pedestrians in this affluent neighborhood were well-dressed and unhurried, manifestly at home among the handsome buildings lining the street. Even the few children I saw were clean, well-behaved, and firmly attached to their governesses.
At Thirty-fourth Street, where the subway emerged from its caverns, the street changed its name to Fourth Avenue, and the character of the neighborhood altered. Now my cab contended for the right-of-way with heavy-laden delivery wagons, and the crowds along the sidewalk moved along with evident purpose. The shops were now more numerous, and made no pretense to exclusivity. And every corner seemed to have its newsboy, bawling out his singsong inducements to purchase his papers. I saw other young boys, too—usually gathered in conspiratorial groups, planning some sport or mischief. One gang of half a dozen urchins ran full tilt across the trolley tracks in front of an onrushing train—just in time to escape the clutches of a pursuing police officer, who pulled to a halt, puffing and shaking his fist at the laughing boys.
I had heard that New York was at once the grandest and the most wicked city in the United States, and by the end of my ride, I was ready to believe it. It was hard to imagine that so many sights and events could be crammed into a two-mile carriage ride. But at last we reached the lecture hall, in a clean, well-lit area of the city. I arrived about twenty minutes early, and from my vantage point in the middle of the auditorium, I watched the seats filling up with prosperous-looking citizens and their wives, as well as a few less respectable-looking characters. At the appointed hour, the lights dimmed and a little white-haired fellow with a large mustache shuffled out onto the stage. Nothing could have prepared me for the surprise that was about to follow.
In a quiet, almost conversational voice, with a noticeable western drawl, he began to say the most preposterous things. His casual posture was a sharp contrast to his formal attire; but his subject matter, poor diction, and undignified language were an even greater contrast. He began with an incoherent story of some outlandish wager concerning a frog, followed by a tale of being cheated in a horse trade, and continued with long-winded, highly improbable tales of his travels—all interspersed with irreverent observations of the great and powerful. Having grown up in a quiet corner of Connecticut without much straying forth, I found much of his talk frankly incredible.
So, apparently, did the audience; no sooner would he utter some absurdity than they would break into peals of laughter. He kept his composure remarkably well at this ridicule, and indeed kept up his talk, slowly and calmly, as if he didn’t care in the least whether they believed him or not. The audience neither hooted nor stormed out, but seemed willing to wait complacently to see what impossible statement he would make next, and howl at it as uproariously as at the previous—with frequent applause, as well. They even clapped after he told a ghost story in Negro dialect and frightened some poor girl in the front row half to death with the shout, “You’ve got it!”
I was frankly at a loss to understand either the audience’s behavior or the lecturer’s willingness to tolerate it. I began to wonder whether he might be inviting the audience’s laughter on purpose, but dismissed that notion as ludicrous. After all, I had it on the best authority that he was a highly successful and respected literary figure. Still, I was completely amazed when he finished and the audience rose to their feet to applaud him. I had never seen such a singular performance before. Indeed, it gave me some reason to wonder whether I might not better abandon my notions of travel altogether.
Despite my misgivings, I made my way backstage and found Mr. Clemens surrounded by a large group of notables and others who had come to pay their respects—ranging from several gentlemen and ladies in the height of fashion to a swarthy immigrant in worker’s clothes and two men dressed in a sort of nautical uniform. I would eventually get used to the fact that in almost every city we visited, half the local people of importance and out-of-town celebrities, an appalling number of fortune hunters, gamblers, rivermen, and other characters too disreputable even to list here would apply for free passes on the ground that “Sam and I go back twenty-five years.” But I am getting ahead of my story.
The group began at last to thin out, and the lecturer took note of me standing quietly to the side and turned to address me. “You must be young Cabot. Howells says he knows your father, is that right?”
I nodded my assent and shook his hand. “Well,” he said to the remaining throng, “this big young fellow has come all the way from New London to see me, so I’ll ask your leave. Mike, Mr. Snipes, I’ll see you tomorrow.” The two men in uniform murmured their assent, and I followed Mr. Clemens along the hallway.
He led me to a dressing room and plopped himself in a comfortable-looking seat. I took his broad gesture as an indication to seat myself in a nearby chair, and declined his offer of a cigar. He took one out for himself, and I waited while he clipped the end and applied the match.
I am not sure how I expected a literary man to look, but I took the opportunity to examine Mr. Clemens carefully. He stood perhaps five feet eight, and still wore the dark evening dress that was his “uniform” for lectures. He wore his white hair long, in the fashion of two decades ago, and he sported a large mustache. His piercing eyes—surmounted by bushy brows—bespoke a lively intelligence, while his drawl suggested an origin somewhere in the West. A sly smile and the now briskly burning cigar provided a sense of warmth in the midst of all the snowy-white hair.
“W. W. Cabot,” he said, taking an experimental puff. “What would the initials be for?”
“William Wentworth, sir. I’m named after my mother’s older brother. At school, there were quite a few other fellows named William, so everyone called me Wentworth.”
“Wentworth Cabot; well, it has a respectable enough air about it, for whatever that’s worth. So, young man, do you have any notion what I want a traveling secretary to do for me?”
It seemed a simple enough question. “Why, travel with you, and handle your correspondence and papers,” I responded.
“Just as I thought. Cabot, I suppose you think a travel writer makes his living by traveling and writing about it. Is that so?” The cigar smoke was getting thicker.
I had never thought of any other possibility, and said so. Clemens nodded, took another puff, fixed his gaze on me, and began to talk.
“I can’t say as how I expected much else. I don’t expect you’ve read any of my books, either.” He waved away my stillborn protest. “Don’t sham, young fellow, you’ll never get the job that way. I’d smoke you out in two minutes if you tried it.” I restrained myself from commenting that his cigar was on the verge of doing exactly that.
“The fact of the matter is, I can’t really travel at my own pleasure any more. Every town I set foot in expects a lecture, if not a solid week of ’em. I can put off the little towns with halls the size of a tomcat’s coffin, but the big ones will pester me to distraction. I’ll end up doing them anyway, so I might as well schedule them in advance and let the people know I’m coming through. So my traveling secretary has to set up my schedule of lectures—deal with the booking agents and hotel managers in every city I’m going to, collect the fees, buy the train tickets, and in general run my whole life so I have time to see enough of the dratted place to write about it.
“If that’s not enough, you have to arrange mail forwarding to my local address in each city, so I don’t miss anything of importance. You have to find out the location of the hotel and the train station and the lecture hall and the telegraph office and how to get from one to the other and a dozen other places before we even set foot in the town. If I want to tour the local diamond mine, or elephant
