20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or David Copperfield Read online

  1st CITIZEN: Well, well, what ever became of George Wisser?

  VOICE FROM AUDIENCE: Yeah! Wisser!

  2nd VOICE FROM AUDIENCE: He went to Princeton!

  ENTIRE AUDIENCE: Yeah – Princeton!

  1st CITIZEN (addressing audience personally): He couldn’t go to Princeton, he didn’t have a signet ring. (Entirely extemporaneous line but very popular.)

  2nd CITIZEN (with some idea of getting along with the show): Well, Eddie, what did become of George Wisser?

  GEORGE WISSER (from audience): Here I am! Fast asleep!

  (At this, pandemonium breaks loose, and, encouraged by cries of “We want Wisser!” Mr. Wisser climbs up on the stage and joins the cast.)

  3rd CITIZEN: Why, hello, George! Want to be in the show?

  GEORGE WISSER (suddenly disgusted with the whole thing): No! (Climbs down and goes back to his seat.)

  At this point some one, dressed for no reason at all to represent President Lowell of Harvard, arises and announces that there will now be a song by Arthur Welson entitled: “If I Send My Son to the Dental School, Will a Gold-Digger Teach the Class?” This is met by a storm of disapproval, and Arthur Welson is never heard, chiefly because of cries of “Louder!”

  At this point the entire entertainment is taken over by the audience for a period of about ten minutes. Six or seven members climb up on the stage and three or four of the cast visit with cronies in the audience. “Hallelujah!” is sung several times and one or two announcements are made, preceded by much banging for order.

  Finally, one of the class marshals makes himself heard to the following extent:

  CLASS MARSHAL: Come on, now, fellows! Tony and the rest have worked hard on this show and are trying to do something for the class. The least we can do is to sit still and be quiet. Everybody back in his seat, now!

  There is general cheering at this and several of the more earnest classmates take their seats. The rest mill about at random. In the meantime, the show has been begun again, starting with the entrance of the chorus singing “Hallelujah!”

  This goes on for some time.

  CURTAIN

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  Meeting the Boats

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  One of the worst phases of staying in America all summer is what is known as “meeting the boats.” By this is meant going down to the docks to welcome incoming travelers. It is an incredibly cruel rite and should be abolished.

  In the first place, the boat-meeter has presumably been stewing in New York for at least three days before the boat is due – sometimes all summer. He is in no mood to meet anything – much less a boatful of buoyant vacationists. Even if ft were possible for him just to go downstairs in his hotel and have the boat dock right in the lobby, he wouldn’t be any too game. But docking in a hotel lobby is something they haven’t worked up yet, modern science or no modern science. At present, it is the invariable rule of steamers to find out where you (the meeters) are and then to dock at a point as inaccessible as the topography of New York will permit. And the topography of New York permits almost anything.

  It is always well to call up the office of the steamship company the day before the boat is due and ask at what hour she will dock. You will talk with some very small child who seems to be dazed by your question and who gives you an answer which is palpably wrong, provided it will parse at all. This will put you on your guard. You will then see that you are up against no ordinary emergency and will begin to worry. All this helps the general effect and makes the day more unpleasant.

  There are two possibilities for the next day. One is that you will arrive at the dock (a) too early and (b) too late. The records show no instance of anyone’s arriving just as the gangplank was put down. This would be contrary to maritime law.

  Arriving too early is much the worse method of procedure, which is probably what makes so many people arrive late. When you arrive early there is grave danger of going insane while waiting. A rumor that the boat is due at 9 A.M. brings you sweating to the pier at 9:10. You dash up the dock and see a boat already being unloaded and most of its passengers gone. This is terrifying. A wild search among the remaining battlers with the customs officers reveals no familiar face. Inquiries of stewards, if it is a non-English-speaking crew (and it always is), get you nothing but pleasant nods and queer noises. Just as you are about to leave the dock in a panic, you see the name of the ship on her bow. It is not the ship you are meeting. Your ship is due on the other side of the pier.

  And then begins the long vigil. An official says that she is in Quarantine and will dock in half an hour. Another says she will be in in ten minutes. Another says she hasn’t left Cherbourg yet. So you decide not to leave and go back to bed as you would like to do but to stick it out. Half an hour isn’t bad. It isn’t good, either.

  Now half an hour – an hour – two hours – on a North River pier with nothing to do is what makes radicals of people. No matter what the weather may be out in the street, on the pier it is damp and cold. There is a preparation in the construction of piers which is calculated to eat through shoe soles in twenty minutes and freeze feet in forty-five. This gets in its work the minute you put foot on the dock.

  The question of entertainment while you are waiting is a knotty one. You may run very fast up and down the pier until you are exhausted and fall unconscious. If unconsciousness is your aim, however, there are less nervous ways of acquiring it, although the use of stimulants to this end is to be deplored, as it is likely to result in nasty complications with dock officials and your being put off entirely. A slow, carefully nursed bun might work out well, but it is very hard to gauge those things. You think you are nursing it along carefully and the next thing you know you are over on your face with an ugly gash in your forehead.

  There are games that the waiter can play among the boxes and crates on a pier provided he likes games, but, if you happen to be all alone, it is rather difficult not to look silly playing them. One of the least suspicious-looking games for the lone waiter to play is counting all the crates and seeing if he can give each one the name of a prominent character in history.

  It is unwise to keep asking officials when the boat is going to dock, as they know no more about it than you do and it just irritates them. On the other hand, it is well to keep in friendly contact with some one of the pier authorities, otherwise they will think that you are a Red, snooping about to blow up the dock. Either way, you are going to make yourself unpopular. Either way, you are going to catch cold.

  Now, let us suppose for the sake of argument that the ship finally docks. You are standing in the crowd at the foot of the gangplank, trying to spot your mother or your wife or whatever it is you are meeting. After a few abortive waves at the wrong people, you decide that a sense of dignity alone requires you to keep your gestures under control; so you stand impassive until practically all the passengers are off. Then you begin to wonder. Has there been a burial at sea? Has your loved one fallen into the machinery? Whoever the people are that get off boats first, they are never by any chance your people. They must be somebody’s people, because somebody is there to meet them. But your people are always the last to get off a train, a boat, or out of a theater or football stadium. That’s the way life is.

  Let us again suppose, for the sake of argument (if anybody cares to argue), that they finally appear, all very flustered and in somewhat of a daze. You rather expect to have them impressed at the sacrifice of time and money that you have made to be down at the pier to greet them, but no. This is taken for granted. Of course, your mother or your wife you have to be down at the pier to meet, but you certainly don’t have to go out of your way to meet anybody else, and the next time they can just meet themselves and see how they like it.

  Your presence is not only taken for granted but also your contribution toward the customs duties. “Oh, have you got fifty dollars with you, Bob?” they say; “we haven’t had our money changed yet and this man says that I have to p
ay excess on my coat.” So out comes the fifty dollars (if you are sap enough to have it on you) and away it goes into the coffers of the United States Customs House – zip! You can also take care of the bags and get them into a cab and you can see that the porters are taken care of and that the steward (who has been so awfully nice) gets a little something extra for coming ’way out to the stairs with you.

  I went to meet Donald Ogden Stewart (I mention no names) and bride on their return from their honeymoon. They landed in Hoboken, necessitating my leaving New York before daylight. Well, it seems that they had plans to go to Princeton to the Yale-Princeton game that afternoon, and, as it would be so much easier for them to drive right from the pier in Hoboken to Princeton, it was only logical that old Bob should take the bags (nineteen pieces) and little Lucy (the worst dog ever smuggled into America) over to New York for them and get them a room at a hotel – a hotel where one could keep dogs.

  I didn’t want to do this – and did it with very bad grace – but nevertheless I found myself in a cab with nineteen pieces of baggage (including Lucy’s dog-house) and Lucy, bound for Manhattan. That was a Saturday noon.

  Late Sunday afternoon we were found on the beach at Yaphank, Long Island. There were only five pieces of baggage left, and I had eaten part of Lucy while Lucy had eaten part of me. I remember nothing after visiting the eighth hotel and being told that one could not bring dogs in. The Stewarts tell me that they had a swell time at Princeton and that I ought to have gone.

  This was the last boat that I met until I had to meet my wife this spring. I determined not to get there too early and consequently tore up just as the last passengers were leaving the pier. I had forgotten to get a dock permit and was forced to scream over the top of a picket fence at my wife and two little boys who were standing huddled under the “B” sign, crying softly and on the verge of being taken up by the Travelers’ Aid Society.

  My wife beckoned for me to come over.

  “I can’t!” I replied. “I have trachoma.”

  At this my entire family burst into tears and got back on the boat to return to France. I couldn’t get in touch with them until I had been to the American consul’s and got a photograph of myself with two sides to it, one for the government and one for the class-book. Even then they were pretty cross at me.

  So I have given up meeting boats. You can’t win. The best way is to go abroad yourself and get met.

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  “In this Corner—”

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  Frankly, I am not much of a fight fan. I always get sorry for the one who is getting socked. On the other hand, if no one is getting socked, I am bored and start screaming for blood. There is no such thing as pleasing me at a fight.

  Of course, as I keep saying to myself when I get to worrying over the loser’s suffering, he probably expects this sort of thing. When a man decides to be a fighter he must know that sooner or later he is going to get his nose mashed in. He takes that chance. So there is really no need for me to feel so bad about it. God knows, I have troubles enough of my own without sitting and wincing every time some Lithuanian bunker-boy gets punched in the side of the head.

  But somehow I can’t help feeling that the one who is getting mashed is pretty fairly surprised that things have taken this turn – and not a little mortified. I am afraid that he didn’t want to fight in the first place, but was forced into it by his backers. Perhaps, if I read more of the fighters’ statements before the fight, I would feel a little less sorry for them when I hear their faces give way. Once I read what a welterweight said on the day before the contest, and, for the first time, I actually enjoyed seeing his lip swell up.

  Probably my tender feelings in the matter are due to an instinctive habit I have of putting myself in the place of anyone I am watching. I haven’t been at a fight for more than three minutes before I begin indulging in one of my favorite nightmares. This consists of imagining that I myself am up in the ring facing the better of the two men.

  Just how I am supposed to have got up in the ring is never quite clear. I don’t believe that I ever would sign up deliberately for a prize fight, much as I need the money. I can think of at least fourteen thousand things that I would try first. But the idea seems to be that while drugged or under the influence of alcohol I have agreed to meet some prominent pugilist in the Yankee Stadium and, quite naturally, the affair has filled the mammoth bowl with a record crowd, all of whom are cynically antagonistic to me.

  Whatever my mental processes may have been which led me to don silken tights and crawl through the ropes, my reverie begins when I awake to find myself standing under the terrific glare of the lights going through the formality of shaking gloves with a very large man.

  “Here, here, Benchley,” I say to myself. “What’s all this? This is a very foolhardy thing to be doing.”

  But there is no way of backing out now and the only thing that I can do is to throw a big bluff that I know something about boxing.

  Now, as a matter of fact, my fighting technique is limited to a few elementary passes learned in a gymnasium class when I was in school, and consists of a rather trusting stance with the arms raised as if posing for a photograph, followed by a quick lunge forward with my left and an almost simultaneous jump backward. The fact that this is all done to a count, “one, two, three, and four,” leaves something to be desired as strategy. I also have a nasty right hook – done to “five, six, seven, and eight” – which, I think, would deceive no one. I have tried both of these on the younger of my two boys, and he found little difficulty in solving them the very first time. Fortunately, I had the reach, however.

  Equipped with these two primary attacks, each of which resolves itself into the quick jump backward, I am supposed to pit myself against a trained fighter. The whole thing is pretty terrifying to start with and rapidly grows worse.

  The trouble with my position No. 1 seems to be that my opponent doesn’t wait for me. No sooner have I taken my stance and raised my fists than I am the recipient of a terrific clout on the ear, without even the formality of counting “one, two, three, and four.” Without seeing very much of anything at the time, I try my left hook, which ends very badly somewhere in midair, and again take a rapid succession of neck-bending socks on either side of the jaw. At this juncture, I decide to lie down.

  This strategy on my part is greeted with derisive hoots from the crowd, but there seems to be nothing else to be done about it. There is practically nothing that my opponent can’t do to me and nobody knows it better than I do. Furthermore, I am not one of those people who develop a gameness under physical pain. I am not a glutton for punishment. If I had my way about it I would practically never let myself be hurt. In the waiting room of a dentist’s office I have been known to develop a yellow streak which is clearly visible through my clothing. Gameness is a grand quality and it is all right as a last resort, but my motto is “Try everything else first.”

  Consequently, in the position in which I now find myself, my first thought is how to get out of the ring and into bed with the covers pulled over my head. I try crawling out through the ropes, but in this particular dream-fight of mine, there is a rule against throwing in the towel. Both fighters must go the entire fifteen rounds, dead or alive. So you can see my predicament.

  I very seldom get much farther than this point in my reverie. I suppose that I would just lie there on the floor and make my opponent come to me if he wanted to hit me. I am very certain that I would not be fool enough to get up on my feet again. I might try kicking him in the shins from my recumbent position, but I doubt that I would bring myself to even that show of belligerence. I would simply have to trust in his seeing the humor of the thing and good-naturedly getting down on the floor beside me and wrestling the rest of the fight out. He would win that, too, but I wouldn’t get those socks on the side of the head at any rate.

  As I snap out of this dream state and find myself sitting in my safe ringside seat (
from which I can see nothing, owing to the holders of ringside seats in front of me indulging in the good American custom of standing up whenever things get interesting) my first sensation is one of great relief at my good fortune in not being in the ring. But then I see some other poor son-of-a-gun getting what I might have had, and I can’t help but wish that the whole thing would stop. Maybe he, too, found himself up there quite by accident.

  Of course, there is one thing about prize fights that one sees nowadays. In a large majority of them no one gets hurt enough even to want to stop before it is over. Sometimes it is hard to tell who is the winner, and the most serious injury sustained by either fighter is a little skin rubbed off the inside of his arms from waltzing. At least, I have the distinction of having taken part in the most brutal fight of modern times.

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  ’Round and ’Round and ’Round

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  In a feverish attempt to make a hundred percent survey of the entertainment facilities of New York City, I have finally gone into the skating-rink situation. My report is, in the main, unfavorable.

  Skating is, or should be, a ritualistic procedure. You don’t just go out and move your feet along ice. The act itself should be preceded by what is known as “bundling up” (not to be confused with the old New England custom of “bundling”). This should come as the result of a state of mind – the Will to Suffer. There must be a definite masochistic desire on the part of the skater to be uncomfortable. He must court the pain of strapping on skates with chapped and benumbed fingers (although, of course, your modern smart-aleck skater has his skates already attached to his shoes when he leaves home, avoiding the necessity of skating along the brick pavements on his way to the ice by carrying both shoes and skates in his hand and wearing another pair of shoes, thereby complicating the process to the point of almost complete confusion and chaos). And there must also be the ever-present danger of skating into a portion of the pond where there is no ice-formation, resulting in at least a wet leg and possibly complete drowning.