Besides many other things, Raggles was a poet. He was called a tramp;
but that was only an elliptical way of saying that he was a
philosopher, an artist, a traveller, a naturalist and a discoverer. But
most of all he was a poet. In all his life he never wrote a line of
verse; he lived his poetry. His Odyssey would have been a Limerick, had
it been written. But, to linger with the primary proposition, Raggles
was a poet.
Raggles’s specialty, had he been driven to ink and paper, would have
been sonnets to the cities. He studied cities as women study their
reflections in mirrors; as children study the glue and sawdust of a
dislocated doll; as the men who write about wild animals study the
cages in the zoo. A city to Raggles was not merely a pile of bricks and
mortar, peopled by a certain number of inhabitants; it was a thing with
a soul characteristic and distinct; an individual conglomeration of
life, with its own peculiar essence, flavor and feeling. Two thousand
miles to the north and south, east and west, Raggles wandered in poetic
fervor, taking the cities to his breast. He footed it on dusty roads,
or sped magnificently in freight cars, counting time as of no account.
And when he had found the heart of a city and listened to its secret
confession, he strayed on, restless, to another. Fickle Raggles!—but
perhaps he had not met the civic corporation that could engage and hold
his critical fancy.
Through the ancient poets we have learned that the cities are feminine.
So they were to poet Raggles; and his mind carried a concrete and clear
conception of the figure that symbolized and typified each one that he
had wooed.
Chicago seemed to swoop down upon him with a breezy suggestion of Mrs.
Partington, plumes and patchouli, and to disturb his rest with a
soaring and beautiful song of future promise. But Raggles would awake
to a sense of shivering cold and a haunting impression of ideals lost
in a depressing aura of potato salad and fish.
Thus Chicago affected him. Perhaps there is a vagueness and inaccuracy
in the description; but that is Raggles’s fault. He should have
recorded his sensations in magazine poems.
Pittsburg impressed him as the play of “Othello” performed in the
Russian language in a railroad station by Dockstader’s minstrels. A
royal and generous lady this Pittsburg, though—homely, hearty, with
flushed face, washing the dishes in a silk dress and white kid
slippers, and bidding Raggles sit before the roaring fireplace and
drink champagne with his pigs’ feet and fried potatoes.
New Orleans had simply gazed down upon him from a balcony. He could see
her pensive, starry eyes and catch the flutter of her fan, and that was
all. Only once he came face to face with her. It was at dawn, when she
was flushing the red bricks of the banquette with a pail of water. She
laughed and hummed a chansonette and filled Raggles’s shoes with
ice-cold water. Allons!
Boston construed herself to the poetic Raggles in an erratic and
singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the
city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his
brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort. And,
after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; and the cloth,
becoming wet, tightened its knots and could not be removed.
Indefinite and unintelligible ideas, you will say; but your
disapprobation should be tempered with gratitude, for these are poets’
fancies—and suppose you had come upon them in verse!
One day Raggles came and laid siege to the heart of the great city of
Manhattan. She was the greatest of all; and he wanted to learn her note
in the scale; to taste and appraise and classify and solve and label
her and arrange her with the other cities that had given him up the
secret of their individuality. And here we cease to be Raggles’s
translator and become his chronicler.
Raggles landed from a ferry-boat one morning and walked into the core
of the town with the blasé air of a cosmopolite. He was dressed with
care to play the rôle of an “unidentified man.” No country, race,
class, clique, union, party clan or bowling association could have
claimed him. His clothing, which had been donated to him piece-meal by
citizens of different height, but same number of inches around the
heart, was not yet as uncomfortable to his figure as those specimens of
raiment, self-measured, that are railroaded to you by transcontinental
tailors with a suit case, suspenders, silk handkerchief and pearl studs
as a bonus. Without money—as a poet should be—but with the ardor of an
astronomer discovering a new star in the chorus of the milky way, or a
man who has seen ink suddenly flow from his fountain pen, Raggles
wandered into the great city.
Late in the afternoon he drew out of the roar and commotion with a look
of dumb terror on his countenance. He was defeated, puzzled,
discomfited, frightened. Other cities had been to him as long primer to
read; as country maidens quickly to fathom; as
send-price-of-subscription-with-answer rebuses to solve; as oyster
cocktails to swallow; but here was one as cold, glittering, serene,
impossible as a four-carat diamond in a window to a lover outside
fingering damply in his pocket his ribbon-counter salary.
The greetings of the other cities he had known—their homespun
kindliness, their human gamut of rough charity, friendly curses,
garrulous curiosity and easily estimated credulity or indifference.
This city of Manhattan gave him no clue; it was walled against him.
Like a river of adamant it flowed past him in the streets. Never an eye
was turned upon him; no voice spoke to him. His heart yearned for the
clap of Pittsburg’s sooty hand on his shoulder; for Chicago’s menacing
but social yawp in his ear; for the pale and eleemosynary stare through
the Bostonian eyeglass—even for the precipitate but unmalicious
boot-toe of Louisville or St. Louis.
On Broadway Raggles, successful suitor of many cities, stood, bashful,
like any country swain. For the first time he experienced the poignant
humiliation of being ignored. And when he tried to reduce this
brilliant, swiftly changing, ice-cold city to a formula he failed
utterly. Poet though he was, it offered him no color similes, no points
of comparison, no flaw in its polished facets, no handle by which he
could hold it up and view its shape and structure, as he familiarly and
often contemptuously had done with other towns. The houses were
interminable ramparts loopholed for defense; the people were bright but
bloodless spectres passing in sinister and selfish array.
The thing that weighed heaviest on Raggles’s soul and clogged his
poet’s fancy was the spirit of absolute egotism that seemed to saturate
the people as toys are saturated with paint. Each one that he
considered appeared a monster of abominable and insolent conceit.
Humanity was gone from them; they were toddling idols of stone and
varnish, worshipping themselves and greedy for though oblivious of
worship from their fellow graven images. Frozen, cruel, implacable,
impervious, cut to an identical pattern, they hurried on their ways
like statues brought by some miracles to motion, while soul and feeling
lay unaroused in the reluctant marble.
Gradually Raggles became conscious of certain types. One was an elderly
gentleman with a snow-white, short beard, pink, unwrinkled face and
stony, sharp blue eyes, attired in the fashion of a gilded youth, who
seemed to personify the city’s wealth, ripeness and frigid unconcern.
Another type was a woman, tall, beautiful, clear as a steel engraving,
goddess-like, calm, clothed like the princesses of old, with eyes as
coldly blue as the reflection of sunlight on a glacier. And another was
a by-product of this town of marionettes—a broad, swaggering, grim,
threateningly sedate fellow, with a jowl as large as a harvested wheat
field, the complexion of a baptized infant and the knuckles of a
prize-fighter. This type leaned against cigar signs and viewed the
world with frappéd contumely.
A poet is a sensitive creature, and Raggles soon shrivelled in the
bleak embrace of the undecipherable. The chill, sphinx-like, ironical,
illegible, unnatural, ruthless expression of the city left him downcast
and bewildered. Had it no heart? Better the woodpile, the scolding of
vinegar-faced housewives at back doors, the kindly spleen of bartenders
behind provincial free-lunch counters, the amiable truculence of rural
constables, the kicks, arrests and happy-go-lucky chances of the other
vulgar, loud, crude cities than this freezing heartlessness.
Raggles summoned his courage and sought alms from the populace.
Unheeding, regardless, they passed on without the wink of an eyelash to
testify that they were conscious of his existence. And then he said to
himself that this fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a
soul; that its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs,
and that he was alone in a great wilderness.
Raggles started to cross the street. There was a blast, a roar, a
hissing and a crash as something struck him and hurled him over and
over six yards from where he had been. As he was coming down like the
stick of a rocket the earth and all the cities thereof turned to a
fractured dream.
Raggles opened his eyes. First an odor made itself known to him—an odor
of the earliest spring flowers of Paradise. And then a hand soft as a
falling petal touched his brow. Bending over him was the woman clothed
like the princess of old, with blue eyes, now soft and humid with human
sympathy. Under his head on the pavement were silks and furs. With
Raggles’s hat in his hand and with his face pinker than ever from a
vehement burst of oratory against reckless driving, stood the elderly
gentleman who personified the city’s wealth and ripeness. From a nearby
café hurried the by-product with the vast jowl and baby complexion,
bearing a glass full of a crimson fluid that suggested delightful
possibilities.
“Drink dis, sport,” said the by-product, holding the glass to Raggles’s
lips.
Hundreds of people huddled around in a moment, their faces wearing the
deepest concern. Two flattering and gorgeous policemen got into the
circle and pressed back the overplus of Samaritans. An old lady in a
black shawl spoke loudly of camphor; a newsboy slipped one of his
papers beneath Raggles’s elbow, where it lay on the muddy pavement. A
brisk young man with a notebook was asking for names.
A bell clanged importantly, and the ambulance cleaned a lane through
the crowd. A cool surgeon slipped into the midst of affairs.
“How do you feel, old man?” asked the surgeon, stooping easily to his
task. The princess of silks and satins wiped a red drop or two from
Raggles’s brow with a fragrant cobweb.
“Me?” said Raggles, with a seraphic smile, “I feel fine.”
He had found the heart of his new city.
In three days they let him leave his cot for the convalescent ward in
the hospital. He had been in there an hour when the attendants heard
sounds of conflict. Upon investigation they found that Raggles had
assaulted and damaged a brother convalescent—a glowering transient whom
a freight train collision had sent in to be patched up.
“What’s all this about?” inquired the head nurse.
“He was runnin’ down me town,” said Raggles.
“What town?” asked the nurse.
“Noo York,” said Raggles.