Chapter VI. The Boswell Tours: Personally Conducted

The Enchanted Typewriter

by John Kendrick Bangs

It was and will no doubt be considered, even by those who are not
too friendly towards myself, a daring idea, and it was all my own.
One night, several weeks after the interview with Boswell just
narrated, the idea came to me simultaneously with the first tapping
of the keys for the evening upon the Enchanted Type-Writer. It was
Boswell's touch that summoned me from my divan. My family were on the
eve of departure for a month's rest from care and play in the
mountains, and I was looking forward to a period of very great
loneliness. But as Boswell materialized and began his work upon the
machine, the great idea flashed across my mind, and I resolved to
"play it" for all it was worth.

"Jim," said I, as I approached the vacant chair in which he
sat-- for by this time the great biographer and I had got upon terms
of familiarity--"Jim," said I, "I've got a very gloomy prospect ahead
of me."

"Well, why not?" he tapped off. "Where do you expect to have
your gloomy prospects? They can't very well be behind you."

"Humph!" said I. "You are facetious this evening."

"Not at all," he replied. "I have been spending the day with my
old-time boss, Samuel Johnson, and I am so saturated with purism that
I hardly know where I am. From the Johnsonian point of view you have
expressed yourself ill--"

"Well, I am ill," I retorted. "I don't know how far you are
acquainted with home life, but I do know that there is no greater
homesickness in the world than that of the man who is sick of
home."

"I am not an imitator," said Boswell, "but I must imitate you to
the extent of saying humph! I quote you, and, doing so, I honor you.
But really, I never thought you could be sick of home, as you put
it--you who are so happy at home and who so wildly hate being away
from home."

"I'm not surprised at that, my dear Boswell," said I. "But you
are, of course, familiar with the phrase 'Stone walls do not a prison
make?'"

"I've heard it," said Boswell.

"Well, there's another equally valid phrase which I have not yet
heard expressed by another, and it is this: 'Stone walls do not a
home make.'"

"It isn't very musical, is it?" said he.

"Not very," I answered, "but we don't all live magazine lives,
do we? We have occasionally a sentiment, a feeling, out of which we
do not try 'to make copy.' It is undoubtedly a truth which I have not
yet seen voiced by any modern poet of my acquaintance, not even by
the dead-baby poets, that home is not always preferable to some other
things. At any rate, it is my feeling, and is shortly to represent my
condition. My home, you know. It has its walls and its pictures, and
its thousand and one comforts, and its associations, but when my wife
and my children are away, and the four walls do not re-echo the
voices of the children, and my library lacks the presence of madame,
it ceases truly to be home, and if I've got to stay here during the
month of August alone I must have diversion, else I shall find myself
as badly off as the butterfly man, to whom a vaudeville exhibition is
the greatest joy in life."

"I think you are queer," said Boswell.

"Well, I am not," said I. "However low we may set the standard
of man, Mr. B."--and I called him Mr. B. instead of Jim, because I
wished to be severe and yet retain the basis of familiarity--
"however low we may set the standard of man, I think man as a rule
prefers his home to the most seductive roof-garden life in
existence."

"Wherefore?" said he, coldly.

"Wherefore my home about to become unattractive through the
absence of my boys and their mother, I shall need some extraordinary
diversion to accomplish my happiness. Now if you can come here, why
can't others? Suppose to-night you dash off on the machine a lot of
invitations to the pleasantest people in Hades to come up here with
you and have an evening on earth, which isn't all bad."

"It's a scheme and a half," said Boswell, with more enthusiasm
than I had expected. "I'll do it, only instead of trying to get these
people to make a pilgrimage to your shrine, which I think they would
decline to do--Shakespeare, for instance, wouldn't give a tuppence to
inspect your birthplace as you have inspected his--I'll institute a
series of 'Boswell's Personally Conducted Pleasure Parties,' and make
you my agent here. That, you see, will naturally make your home our
headquarters, and I think the scheme would work a charm, because
there are a great many well-known Stygians who are curious to revisit
the scenes of their earlier state, but who are timid about coming on
their own responsibility."

"I see," said I. "Immortals are but mortal after all, with all
the timidity and weaknesses of mortality. But I agree to the
proposition, and if you wish it I'll prepare to give them a rousing
old time."

"And be sure to show them something characteristic," said
Boswell.

"I will," I replied; "I may even get up a trolley-party for
them."

"I don't know what a trolley-party is, but it sounds well," said
Boswell, "and I'll advertise the enterprise at once. 'Boswell's
Personally Conducted Pleasure Parties. First Series, No. 1.
Trolleying Through Hoboken. For the Round Trip, Four Dollars. Supper
and All Expenses Included. No Tips. Extra Lady's Ticket, One
Dollar.'"

"Hold on!" I cried. "That can't be. These affairs will really
have to be stag-parties--with my wife away, you know."

"Not if we secure a suitable chaperon," said Boswell.

"Anyhow!" said I, with great positiveness. "You don't suppose
that in the absence of my family I'm going to have my neighbors see
me cavorting about the country on a trolley-car full of queens and
duchesses and other females of all ages? Not a bit of it, my dear
James. I'm not a strictly conventional person, but there are some
points between which I draw lines. I've got to live on this earth for
a little while yet, and until I leave it I must be guided more or
less in what I do by what the world approves or disapproves."

"Very well," Boswell answered. "I suppose you are right, but in
the autumn, when your family has returned--"

"We can discuss the matter again," said I, resolved to put off
the question for as long a time as I could, for I candidly confess
that I had no wish to make myself responsible for the welfare of such
Stygian ladies as might avail themselves of the opportunity to go off
on one of Boswell's tours. "Show the value and beauties of your plan
to the influential men of Hades first, my dear Boswell," I added,
"and then if they choose they can come again and bring their wives
with them on their own responsibility."

"I fancy that is the best plan, but we ought to have some
variety in these tours," he replied. "A trolley-party, however
successful, would not make a great season for an entertainment
bureau, would it?"

"No, indeed," said I. "You are perfectly right about that. What
you want is one function a week during the summer season. Open with
the trolley-party as No. 1 of your first series. Follow this with 'An
Evening of Vaudeville: The Grand Tour of the Roof Gardens.' After
that have a 'Sunday at the Sea-side--Surf Bathing, Summer Girls and
Sand.' That would make a mighty attractive line for your
advertisement."

"Magnificent. I don't see why you don't give up poetry and
magazine work and get a position as poster-writer for a circus. You
are only a mediocre magazinist, but in the poster business you'd be a
genius."

This was tapped off with such manifest sincerity that I could
not take offence, so I thanked him and resumed.

"The grand finale of your first series might be 'A Tandem
Scorch: A Century Run on a Bicycle Built for Two Hundred!'"

"Magnificent!" cried Boswell, with such enthusiasm that I feared
he would smash the machine. "I'll devote a whole page of my Sunday
issue to the prospectus--but, to return to the woman question, we
ought really to have something to announce for them. Hades hath no
fury like a woman scorned, and I can't afford to scorn the sex. You
needn't have anything to do with them if you don't want to--only tell
me something I can announce, and I'll make Henry the Eighth solid
again by putting that branch of the enterprise in his wives' hands.
In that way I'll kill two birds with one stone."

"That's all very well, Boswell, but I'm afraid I can't," said I.
"It's hard enough to know how to please a mortal woman without
attempting to get up a series of picnics for the rather miscellaneous
assortment of ladies who form your social structure below. All men
are alike, and man's pleasures in all times have been generally the
same, but every woman is unique. I never knew two who were alike, and
if it's all the same to you I'd rather you left me out of your
ladies' tours altogether. Of course I know that even the Queen of
Sheba would enjoy a visit to a Monday sale at one of our big
department stores, and I am quite as well aware that nine out of ten
women in Hades or out of it would enjoy the millinery exhibition at
the opera matinee--and if these two ideas impress you at all you are
welcome to them-- but beyond this I have nothing to suggest."

"Well, I'm sure those two ideas are worth a great deal,"
returned Boswell, making a note of them; "I shall announce four trips
to Monday sales--"

"Call 'em 'To Bargaindale and Back: The Great Marked-down Tour,'
and be sure you add, 'For Able-bodied Women Only. No Tickets Issued
Except on Recommendation of your Family Physician.' This is
especially important, for next to a war or a football match there's
nothing that I know of that is quite so dangerous to the participants
as a bargain day."

"I'll bear what you say in mind," quoth Boswell, and he made a
note of my injunction. "And immediately upon my return to Hades I
will request an audience with Henry's queens, and ask them to devise
a number of other tours likely to prove profitable and popular."

Shortly after my visitor departed and I retired. The next day my
family deserted me and went to the mountains, and all my fears as to
the inordinate sense of loneliness which was to be my lot were
realized. Even Boswell neglected me apparently for a week. I went to
my desk daily and returned at night hoping that my type-writer would
bring forth something of an interesting nature, but naught other than
disappointment awaited me. For a whole blessed week I was thrown back
upon the society of my neighbors for diversion. The type-writer gave
no sign of being.

Little did I guess that Boswell was busy working up my scheme in
his Stygian home!

But it came to pass finally that I was roused up. Walking one
morning to my desk to find a bit of memoranda I needed, I discovered
a type-written slip marked, "No time for small talk. Boswell's tours
grand success. Trolley-party to-night. Ten cars wanted. Jim."

It was a large order for a town like mine, where forty thousand
people have to get along with five cars--two open ones for winter and
two closed for summer, and one, which we have never seen, which is
kept for use in the repair-shop. I was in despair. Ten car-loads of
immortals coming to my house for a trolley-party under such
conditions! It was frightful! I did the best I could, however.

I ordered one trolley-car to be ready at eight, and a large
variety of good things edible and drinkable, the latter to be held
subject to the demand-notes of our guests.

As may be imagined, I did little real work that day, and when I
returned home at night I was on tenter-hooks lest something should go
wrong; but fortunately Boswell himself came early and relieved me of
my worry--in fact, he was at the machine when I entered the house.

"Well," he said, "have you the ten cars?"

"What do you take me for," said I, "a trolley-car trust? Of
course I haven't. There are only five cars in town, one of which is
kept in the repair-shop for effect. I've hired one."

"Humph!" he cried. "What will the kings do?"

"Kings!" I cried. "What kings?"

"I have nine kings and one car-load of common souls besides for
this affair," he explained. "Each king wants a special car."

"Kings be jiggered!" said I. "A trolley-party, my much beloved
James, is an essentially democratic institution, and private cars are
not de rigueur. If your kings choose to come, let 'em hang on by the
straps."

"But I've charged 'em extra!" cried Boswell.

"That's all right," said I, "they receive extra. They have the
ride plus the straps, with the privilege of standing out on the
platform and ringing the gong if they want to. The great thing about
the trolley-party is that there's no private car business about
it."

"Well, I don't know," Boswell murmured, reflectively. "If
Charles the First and Louis Fourteenth don't kick about being crowded
in with all the rest, I can stand anything that Frederick the Great
or Nero might say; but those two fellows are great sticklers for the
royal prerogative."

"There isn't any such thing as royal prerogative on a
trolley-car," I retorted, "and if they don't like what they get they
can sit down in the waiting-room and wait until we get back."

But Boswell's fears were not realized. Charles and Louis were
perfectly delighted with the trolley-party, and long before we
reached home the former had rung up the fare-register to its full
capacity, while the latter, a half-a-dozen times, delightedly
occupied himself in mastering the intricacies of the overhead wire.
The trolley-party was an undoubted success. The same remains to be
said of the vaudeville expedition of the following week. The same
guests and potentates attended this, to the number of twenty, and the
Boswell tours were accounted a great enterprise, and bade fair to
redeem the losses of the eminent journalist incurred during
Xanthippe's administration of his affairs; but after the bicycle
night I had to withdraw from the combination to save my reputation.
The fact upon which I had not counted was that my neighbors began to
think me insane. I had failed to remember that none of these visiting
spirits was visible to us in this material world, and while my
fellow-townsmen were disposed to lay up my hiring of a special
trolley-car for my own private and particular use against the
eccentricity of genius, they marvelled greatly that I should purchase
twenty of the best seats at a vaudeville show seemingly for my own
exclusive use. When, besides this, they saw me start off apparently
alone on one tandem bicycle, followed by twenty-eight other empty
wheels, which they could not know were manipulated by some of the
most famous legs in the history of the world, from Noah's down to
those of Henry Fielding the novelist, they began to regard me as
something uncanny.

Nor can I blame them. It seems to me that if I saw one man
scorching along a road alone on a tandem bicycle chatting to an empty
front-seat, I should think him queer, but if following in his wake I
perceived twenty-eight other wheels, scorching up hill and down dale
without any visible motive power, I should regard him as one who was
in league with the devil himself.

Nevertheless, I judge from what Boswell has told me that I am
regarded in Hades as a great benefactor of the people there, for
having established a series of excursions from that world into this,
a service which has done much to convince the Stygians that after
all, if only by contrast, the life below has its redeeming
features.