The Empire state...
O. Henry, "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 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 blase 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 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 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 home-spun
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 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 complex-ion of a baptized 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 popu-lace.
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 near-by cafe hurned 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?' inquired the head nurse.
`He was runnin' down me town,' said Raggles
`What town?' asked the nurse.
`Noo York,' said Raggles.
P.S. J. London = West Coast; O. Henry = East Coast; Faulkner/Steinback = South, West;
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 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 blase 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 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 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 home-spun
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 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 complex-ion of a baptized 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 popu-lace.
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 near-by cafe hurned 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?' inquired the head nurse.
`He was runnin' down me town,' said Raggles
`What town?' asked the nurse.
`Noo York,' said Raggles.
P.S. J. London = West Coast; O. Henry = East Coast; Faulkner/Steinback = South, West;