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From Pillar to Post

[83] <h2>V</h2> <h3>A VAGRANT POET</h3> The inimitable and forever to be lamented Gilbert, in one of his delightful songs in Pinafore, bade us once to remember that— Things are seldom what they seem— Skim-milk masquerades as cream; Highlows pass as patent-leathers; Jackdaws strut in peacock's feathers. The good woman who sang this song—little Buttercup, they called her—was in a pessimistic mood at the moment; for had she not been so she would have reversed the sentiment, showing us with equal truth how sometimes cream masquerades as skim milk, and how underneath the wear and tear of time what outwardly appears to be a "high low" still possesses some of the glorious polish of the "patent leather." Everywhere I travel I find something of this latter truth; but never was it more clearly demonstrated than when on one of my Western jaunts I came unexpectedly upon an[84] almost overwhelming revelation of a finely poetic nature under an apparently rough and unpromising exterior. It happened on a trip in Arizona back in 1906. My train after passing Yuma was held up for several hours. Ordinarily I should have found this distressing; but, as the event proved, it brought to me one of the most delightfully instructive experiences I have yet had in the pursuit of my platform labors. As the express stood waiting for another much belated train from the East to pass, the door of the ordinary day coach—in which I had chosen to while away the tedium of the morning, largely because it was fastened to the end of the train, whence I could secure a wonderful view of the surrounding country—was opened, and a man apparently in the last stages of poverty entered the car. He was an oldish man, past sixty, I should say, and a glance at him caused my mind instinctively to revert to certain descriptions I had heard of the sad condition of the downtrodden Westerner, concerning whose unhappy lot our friends the Populists used to tell us so much. He looked so very poor and so irremediably miserable that he excited[85] my sympathy. Upon his back there lay loosely the time-rusted and threadbare remnant of what had once in the days of its pride and freshness been a frock coat, now buttonless, spotted, and fringing at the edges. His trousers matched. His neck was collarless, a faded blue polka-dotted handkerchief serving as both collar and tie. His hat suggested service in numerous wars, and on his feet, bound there for their greater security with ordinary twine, were the uppers and a perforated part of the soles of a one-time pair of congress gaiters. As for his face—well, it brought vividly to mind the lines of Spenser— His rawbone cheekes, through penurie and pine, Were shronke into his jawes, as he did never dyne. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/gs09.jpg" width-obs="224" height-obs="500" alt="In the last stages of poverty." title="" /> In the last stages of poverty.</div> The old fellow shambled feebly to the seat adjoining[86] my own, gazing pensively out of the window for a few moments, and then turning fixed a pair of penetrating blue eyes upon me. "Pretty tiresome waiting," he ventured, in a voice not altogether certain in its pitch, as if he had not had much chance to use it latterly. "Very," said I carelessly. "But I suppose we've got to get used to this sort of thing." "I suppose so," he agreed; "but just the same for a man in your business I should think it would be something awful. Don't it get on your nerves?" "What do you know about my business?" I asked, my curiosity aroused. "Oh," he laughed, "I know who you are. I read one of your books once. I've forgotten what it was about; but it had your picture in the front of it, and I knew you the minute I saw you. Besides I was down in Tucson the other day, and—you're going to lecture at Tucson Tuesday night, aren't you?" "I am if I ever get there," said I. "At this rate of speed I'm afraid it'll be season after next." "Well, they'll be ready for you when you arrive," he chuckled. "They've got your picture[87] plastered all over the place. It's in every drug-store and saloon window in the town. They've got it tacked onto every tree, hydrant, hitching post, billboard, and pump, from the railway station out to the university and back. I ain't sure that there ain't a few of 'em nailed onto the ash barrels. You can't look anywhere without seeing John Kendrick Bangs staring out at you from the depths of a photographer's arm chair. Fact is," he added with a whimsical wink, "I left Tucson to get away from the Bangs rash that's broken out all over the place, and, by Jehosaphat! I get aboard this train, and there sets the original!" I laughed and handed the old fellow a cigar, which he accepted with avidity, biting off at least a quarter of it in his eagerness to get down to business. "I'm not so bad as I'm lithographed," I said facetiously. "So I see," he replied, "and it must be some comfort to you to realize that if you ever get down and out financially you've got a first-class case for libel against the feller that lithographed you." He puffed away in silence for a minute or two,[88] and then leaning over the arm of his seat he re-opened the conversation. "I say, Mr. Bangs," he said, rather wistfully, I thought, "you must read a great deal from one year's end to another—maybe you could recommend one or two good books for me?" It was something of a poser. Somehow or other he did not suggest at first glance anything remotely connected with a literary taste, and I temporized with the problem. "Why, yes," I answered cautiously. "I do run through a good many books in the course of a year; but I don't like to prescribe a course of literary treatment for a man unless I have had time to diagnose his case, and get at his symptoms. You know you mightn't like the same sort of thing that I do." "That may be so too," he observed coolly. "But we've got some time on our hands—suppose you try me and find out. I'm willin' to testify. Fire ahead—nothin' like a few experiments." "Well," said I, "personally I prefer biography to any other kind of reading. I like novels well enough; but after all I'd rather read the story of[89] one real man's life, sympathetically presented, than any number of absorbing tales concerning the deeds and emotions of the fictitious creatures of a novelist's fancy. I like Boswell better than Fielding, and Dr. Johnson is vastly more interesting to me than Tom Jones." "Same here," said my new friend. "That's what I've always said. What's the use of puttin' in all your time on fiction when there's so much romance to be found in the real thing? The only trouble is that there ain't much in the way of good biography written these days—is there?" "Oh, yes, there is," said I. "There's plenty of it, and now and then we come upon something that is tremendously stimulating. I don't suppose it would interest you very much, but I have just finished a two-volume life of a great painter—it is called 'Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones,' written by his wife." The old man's face fairly shone with interest as I spoke, and reaching down into the inner pocket of his ragged coat he produced a time-smeared, pocket-worn envelop upon which to make a memorandum, and then after rummaging around in the[90] mysterious recesses of an over-large waistcoat for a moment or two he brought forth the merest stub of a pencil. "Who publishes that book?" he asked, leaning forward and gazing eagerly into my face. "Why—the Macmillan Company," I replied, somewhat abashed. "But—would you be interested in that?" And then came the illuminating moment—I fear its radiance even affected the color of my cheeks when I thought of my somewhat patronizing manner of a moment before. "I guess I would be interested in that!" he replied with a real show of enthusiasm. "I've always been interested in that whole Preraphaelite movement!" I tried manfully to conceal my astonishment; but I am very much afraid that in spite of all my efforts my eyes gave my real feelings away. I swallowed hard, and stared, and the old man chuckled as he went on. "They were a great bunch, that crowd," he observed reflectively, "and I don't suppose the world realizes yet what we owe to them and their influence. Burne-Jones, William Morris, Madox[91] Brown, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti—I suppose you know your Rossetti like a book?" I tried to convey the impression that I was not without due familiarity with and appreciation of my Rossetti; but I began to feel myself getting into deeper water than I had expected. "There's a lot of fine things in poetry and in paint we'd never have had if it hadn't been for those fellows," the old man went on. "Of course there's a lot of minds so calloused over with the things of the past that they can't see the beauty in anything that takes 'em out of a rut, even if it's really old and only seems to be new. That's always the way with any new movement, and the fellow that starts in at the head of the procession gets a lot of abuse. Take poor old Rossetti, for instance, how the critics did hand it to him, especially Buchanan—the idea of a man like Robert Buchanan even daring to criticize Rossetti's 'Blessed Damozel'! It's preposterous! It's like an elephant trying to handle a cobweb to find out how any living thing could make a home of it. Of course the elephant couldn't!" I quite agreed that the average elephant of my acquaintance would have found the average cobweb[92] a rather insecure retreat in which to stretch his weary length. "Do you remember," he went on, "what Buchanan said about those lines?— "And still she bowed herself and stooped Out of the circling charm Until her bosom must have made The bar she leaned on warm. He said those lines were bad, and that the third and fourth were quite without merit, and almost without meaning! Fancy that!— "Until her bosom must have made The bar she leaned on warm almost without meaning! Suffering Centipedes!" he cried indignantly. "That man must have been brought up on the bottle!" I think I may truthfully say that from that point on I listened to the old man breathlessly. Buchanan's monograph on "The Fleshly School of Poetry" though wholly out of sympathy with my own views has long been a favorite bit of literary excoriation with me, comparable to Victor Hugo's incisive flaying of Napoleon III, and to have it spring up at me thus out of the alkali desert, through the medium of this beloved vagabond, was[93] indeed an experience. Instead of conversing with my friend, I turned myself into what theatrical people call a "feeder" for the time being, putting questions, and now and then venturing a remark sufficiently suggestive to keep him going. His voice as he ran on gathered in strength, and waxed tuneful and mellow, until, if I had closed my eyes, I could almost have brought myself to believe that it was our much-loved Mark Twain who was speaking with that musical drawl of his, shot through and through with that lyrical note which gave his voice such rare sweetness. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/gs10.jpg" width-obs="500" height-obs="499" alt=""Suffering Centipedes!" he cried. "That man must have been brought up on the bottle!"" title="" /> "Suffering Centipedes!" he cried. "That man must have been brought up on the bottle!"</div> [94]From Rossetti my new-found friend jumped to Whistler—to whom he referred as "Jimmy"—thence to Watts, and from Watts to Ruskin; from Ruskin he ran on to Burne-Jones, and then harked back to Rossetti again. Rossetti now seemed to become an obsession with him; only it was Rossetti the poet instead of Rossetti the painter to whom he referred. In a few moments the stillness of that sordid coach was echoing to the sonnet of "Lost Days": "The lost days of my life until to-day, What were they, could I see them on the street Lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat Sown once for food but trodden into clay? Or golden coins squander'd and still to pay? Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet? Or such spill'd water as in dreams must cheat The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway? I do not see them here; but after death God knows I know the faces I shall see— Each one a murder'd self, with low last breath; 'I am thyself—what hast thou done to me?' 'And I—and I—thyself' (lo! each one saith)— 'And thou thyself to all eternity.'" His voice trembled as he finished, and a long silence followed. [95]"Pretty good stuff, that, eh?" he said, at length. "Fine!" said I, suddenly afflicted with a poverty of language quite comparable to his own in the way of worldly goods. "Takes you here, however," said he, tapping his forehead. "Makes you think—and somehow or other I—I don't like to think. I'd rather feel—and when it comes to that it's Christina Rossetti that takes you here." He tapped his left breast over his heart. "She's got all the rest of 'em skinned a mile, as far as I'm concerned. I love that 'Up Hill' thing of hers—remember it?— "Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day's journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend. "But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for where the slow dark hours begin. May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that Inn. "Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before. Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? [96]They will not keep you standing at the door. "Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labor you shall find the sum. Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come. "Ah, me!" he said. "I've got a deal of heartening out of that, and then some day when things don't seem to go just right, I sing for my comfort that song of hers: "When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me, With showers and dew-drops wet, And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget. "I shall not see the shadows. I shall not feel the rain. I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain: And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget." The train had long since started on toward our destination, the old fellow discoursing gloriously as we ran along, I utterly unconscious of everything save the marvelous contrasts of that picture—a seemingly wretched vagabond, held in the[97] grip of a relentless poverty, pouring forth out of the depths of a rich mind as rare a spiritual disquisition as I ever remember to have enjoyed. Our destination finally reached, I held out my hand to bid him good-by. "I can't thank you sufficiently," I said, "for a wonderful hour. I want you to do something for me. You see you have the advantage of me. You know who I am; but I don't know who you are. Won't you tell me your name, that I may add it to the list of my friends?" The old fellow's eyes filled with tears. He laid his hand gently on my shoulder. "My young friend," he said, his voice growing hoarse and husky again, "who I am is one of the least important things on the face of God's beautiful green earth. What is really important is the kind of man I am. I am one of those unfortunates who started in life at the top of the ladder and moved in the only direction he thought was left open to him." He seized my hand, gave it a soft, seemingly affectionate pressure, and walked away, leaving me standing alone, and I have not seen nor heard from him since. <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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