A Dance of Folly and Pleasure Page 4

  But Carter persisted. And at length he reached the flimsy, fluttering little soul of the shop-girl that existed somewhere deep down in her lovely bosom. His words penetrated the heart whose very lightness was its safest armour. She looked up at him with eyes that saw. And a warm glow visited her cool cheeks. Tremblingly, awfully, her moth wings closed, and she seemed about to settle upon the flower of love. Some faint glimmer of life and its possibilities on the other side of her glove counter dawned upon her. Carter felt the change and crowded the opportunity.

  ‘Marry me, Masie,’ he whispered softly, ‘and we will go away from this ugly city to beautiful ones. We will forget work and business, and life will be one long holiday. I know where I should take you – I have been there often. Just think of a shore where summer is eternal, where the waves are always rippling on the lovely beach and the people are happy and free as children. We will sail to those shores and remain there as long as you please. In one of those faraway cities there are grand and lovely palaces and towers full of beautiful pictures and statues. The streets of the city are water, and one travels about in—’

  ‘I know,’ said Masie, sitting up suddenly. ‘Gondolas.’

  ‘Yes,’ smiled Carter.

  ‘I thought so,’ said Masie

  ‘And then,’ continued Carter, ‘we will travel on and see whatever we wish in the world. After the European cities we will visit India and the ancient cities there, and ride on elephants and see the wonderful temples of the Hindus and Brahmins, and the Japanese gardens, and the camel trains and chariot races in Persia, and all the queer sights of foreign countries. Don’t you think you would like it, Masie?’

  Masie rose to her feet.

  ‘I think we had better be going home,’ she said coolly. ‘It’s getting late.’

  Carter humoured her. He had come to know her varying, thistledown moods, and that it was useless to combat them. But he felt a certain happy triumph. He had held for a moment, though but by a silken thread, the soul of his wild Psyche, and hope was stronger within him. Once she had folded her wings and her cool hand had closed about his own.

  At the Biggest Store the next day Masie’s chum, Lulu, waylaid her in an angle of the counter.

  ‘How are you and your swell friend making it?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, him?’ said Masie, patting her side-curls.’ He ain’t in it any more. Say, Lu, what do you think that fellow wanted me to do?’

  ‘Go on the stage?’ guessed Lulu breathlessly.

  ‘Nit; he’s too cheap a guy for that. He wanted me to marry him and go down to Coney Island for a wedding tour!’

  The Making of a New Yorker

  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 speciality, 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, flavour and feeling. Two thousand miles to the north and south, east and west, Raggles wandered in poetic fervour, 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 symbolised 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 role 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 piecemeal 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 suitcase, suspenders, silk handkerchief and pearl studs as a bonus. Without money – as a poet should be – but with the ardour 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 bu
t 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 colour, no 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 defence; 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 wheatfield, the complexion of a baptised infant and the knuckles of a prizefighter. This type leaned against cigar signs and viewed the world with frapped 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 odour made itself known to him – an odour 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 cleared 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?’ enquired the head nurse.

  ‘He was runnin’ down me town,’ said Raggles

  ‘What town?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘Noo York,’ said Raggles.

  The Buyer from Cactus City

  It is well that hay fever and colds do not obtain in the healthful vicinity of Cactus City, Texas, for the dry goods emporium of Navarro & Platt, situated there, is not to be sneezed at.

  Twenty thousand people in Cactus City scatter their silver coin with liberal hands for the things that their hearts desire. The bulk of this semi-precious metal goes to Navarro & Platt. Their huge brick building covers enough ground to graze a dozen head of sheep. You can buy of them a rattlesnake-skin necktie, an automobile, or an eighty-five-dollar, latest style, ladies’ tan coat in twenty different shades. Navarro & Platt first introduced pennies west of the Colorado River. They had been ranchmen with business heads, who saw that the world did not necessarily have to cease its revolutions after free grass went out.

  Every spring, Navarro, senior partner, fifty-five, half Spanish, cosmopolitan, able, polished, had ‘gone on’ to New York to buy goods. This year he shied at taking up the long trail. He was undoubtedly growing older; and he looked at his watch several times a day before the hour came for his siesta.

  ‘John,’ he said, to his junior partner, ‘you shall go on this year to buy the goods.’

  Platt looked tired.

  ‘I’m told,’ said he, ‘that New York is a plumb dead town; but I’ll go. I can take a whirl in San Antone for a few days on my way and have some fun.’

  Two weeks later a man in a Texas full dress suit – black frock-coat, broad-brimmed, soft, white hat, and lay-down collar 3–4 inch high, with black, wrought-iron necktie – entered the wholesale cloak and suit establishment of Zizzbaum & Son, on Lower Broadway.

  Old Zizzbaum had the eye of an osprey, the memory of an elephant and a mind that unfolded from him in three movements like the puzzle of the carpenter’s rule. He rolled to the front like a brunette polar bear, and shook Platt’s hand.

  ‘And how is the good Mr Navarro in Texas?’ he said. ‘The trip was too long for him this year, so? We welcome Mr Platt instead.’

  ‘A bull’s-eye,’ said Platt, ‘and I’d give forty acres of unirrigated Pecos County land to know how you did it.’

  ‘I knew,’ grinned Zizzbaum, ‘just as I know that the rainfall in El Paso for the year was 28.5 inches, or an increase of 15 inches, and that therefore Navarro & Platt will buy a $15,000 stock of suits this spring instead of $10,000, as in a dry year. But that will be tomorrow. There is first a cigar in my private office that will remove from your mouth the taste of the ones you smuggle across the Rio Grande and like – because they are smuggled.’

  It was late in the afternoon and business for the day had ended, Zizzbaum left Platt with a hal
f-smoked cigar and came out of the private office to Son, who was arranging his diamond scarf pin before a mirror, ready to leave.

  ‘Abey,’ he said, ‘you will have to take Mr Platt around tonight and show him things. They are customers for ten years. Mr Navarro and I we played chess every moment of spare time when he came. That is good, but Mr Platt is a young man and this is his first visit to New York. He should amuse easily.’

  ‘All right,’ said Abey, screwing the guard tightly on his pin. ‘I’ll take him on. After he’s seen the Flatiron and the head waiter at the Hotel Astor and heard the phonograph play “Under The Old Apple Tree” it’ll be half-past ten, and Mr Texas will be ready to roll up in his blanket. I’ve got a supper engagement at 11.30, but he’ll be all to the Mrs Winslow before then.’

  The next morning at ten Platt walked into the store ready to do business. He had a bunch of hyacinths pinned on his lapel. Zizzbaum himself waited on him. Navarro & Platt were good customers, and never failed to take their discount for cash.

  ‘And what did you think of our little town?’ asked Zizzbaum, with the fatuous smile of the Manhattanite.

  ‘I shouldn’t care to live in it,’ said the Texan. ‘Your son and I knocked around quite a little last night. You’ve got good water, but Cactus City is better lit up.’

  ‘We’ve got a few lights on Broadway, don’t you think, Mr Platt?’

  ‘And a good many shadows,’ said Platt. ‘I think I like your horses best. I haven’t seen a crowbait since I’ve been in town.’

  Zizzbaum led him upstairs to show the samples of suits.

  ‘Ask Miss Asher to come,’ he said to a clerk.

  Miss Asher came, and Platt, of Navarro & Platt, felt for the first time the wonderful bright light of romance and glory descend upon him. He stood still as a granite cliff above the canon of the Colorado, with his wide-open eyes fixed upon her. She noticed his look and flushed a little, which was contrary to her custom.