From Pillar to Post Part 5

"Yes--I am," said I.

"Oh," said he, "that's different. You are our engagement. Come up to my office, and I'll fix you up in a jiffy."

So we marched five long blocks up to his office, where I was soon stretched out, and the desired operation put through with neatness and despatch.

"Well, doctor," said I as he held the offending molar up before me tightly gripped in his forceps, "you have given me the first moment of relief I have had all day. My debt in grat.i.tude I shall never be able to repay, but the other I think I can handle. How much do I owe you?"

"Nothing at all, Mr. Bangs," he replied. "Nothing at all."

"Oh, that's nonsense, doctor," I retorted. "You are a professional man, and I am a stranger to you--you must charge something."

"Oh, no, Mr. Bangs," said he, smilingly. "You are no stranger to me. I have been reading your books for the past twenty years, and _it's a positive pleasure to pull your teeth_."

V

A VAGRANT POET

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 pa.s.s as patent-leathers; Jackdaws strut in peac.o.c.k's feathers.

The good woman who sang this song--little b.u.t.tercup, 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 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s, 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 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 b.u.t.tonless, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: In the last stages of poverty.]

The old fellow shambled feebly to the seat adjoining 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 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-cla.s.s case for libel against the feller that lithographed you."

He puffed away in silence for a minute or two, 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 one real man's life, sympathetically presented, than any number of absorbing tales concerning the deeds and emotions of the fict.i.tious 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 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 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 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!--