 | CHAPTER IV.
THE PALACE AND ITS NEIGHBORS. Cecil Dreeme |  |
4. CHAPTER IV.
THE PALACE AND ITS NEIGHBORS.
Stillfleet and I passed out into the chilly
marble-paved corridor.
The young Chrysalids in the class-room seemed
to be in high revolt. They were mobbing their
lank professor. We could see the confusion
through the open door.
“He takes it meekly, you see,” said Stillfleet.
“He knows that the hullabaloo is n't half punishment
enough for his share in the fiction of calling
the place a college.”
We descended the main stairway. The whitewashed
fan-tracery snowed its little souvenir on
us as we passed. On the ground floor, a few
steps along the damp corridor, was the door
marked “Janitor.”
Stillfleet pulled the bell. A cheerful, handsome,
housewifely woman opened.
“Can we come in, Mrs. Locksley?” said my
friend.
“You are always welcome, Mr. Stillfleet.”
We entered a compact little snuggery. There
effect and atmosphere of the place.
Three junior Locksleys caught sight of Stillfleet.
They rushed at him, with shouts and gambols
enough for a dozen.
I love to see children kitten it securely about
a young man. They know friends and foes without
paying battles and wounds for the knowledge.
They seem to divine a sour heart, a stale heart,
or a rotten heart, by unerring instinct. If a man
is base metal, he may pass current with the old
counterfeits like himself; children will not touch
him.
“The world has smoked and salted me,” said
Stillfleet, “and tried to cure me hard as an old
ham. But there is a fresh spot inside me, Byng,
and juveniles always find it. I 've come to say
good-bye, children,” he continued; “but here 's
Mr. Bob Byng, he 'll take my place. His head
is full of fairy stories for Dora. His fingers make
windmills and pop-guns almost without knowing
it. Think of that, Hall!”
Dora, a pretty damsel of twelve, and Hall, a
ten-year-old male and sturdy, inspected me critically.
Was I bogus? Their looks said, they
thought not.
“As for Key Locksley here,” said Harry, “all
he wants is romp and sugar-plums. This is Mr.
Byng, Key. `Some in his pocket and some in
So Master Key, a toddler, accepted me as his
Lord Chief Confectioner.
“Now, children,” said Stillfleet, with mock
gravity, “be Mr. Byng's monitors. Require
him to set you a good example. Tell him young
men generally go to the bad without children to
watch over them.”
“Many a true word is spoken in jest,” said
Mrs. Locksley.
“But where is your husband?” my friend
asked. “I must exhibit his new tenant to him.”
“Coming, sir!” said a voice from the bedroom
adjoining.
I had heard a rustling and crackling there, as
if some one was splitting his way into a starchy
clean shirt.
At the word, out came Locksley, a bristly
little man. His hair and beard were so stiff
that I fancied at once he could discharge a
volley of hairs, as a porcupine shoots quills at
a foe. This bristliness and a pair of keen black
eyes gave him a sharp, alert, and warlike look, as
if he were quick to take alarm, but not likely
to be frightened. No danger of the hobbledehoys
of Chrysalis, the College, riding roughshod
over such a janitor.
I detected him as a man who had seen better
They were stiff as Calvinism and white
as Spitzbergen. Such collars are the badge of
men who, though low in the pocket, are not down
in the mouth. So long as there is starch in the
shirt, no matter how little nap the coat wears;
but limp linen betokens a desponding spirit, and
presently there will be no linen and despair.
“Locksley,” said Stillfleet, in his rattling,
Frenchy way, “here 's my friend Byng, Robert
Byng, Esquire, of Everywhere and Nowhere.
I pop out and he pops in to Rubbish Palace.
He 's been a half-century in Europe and knows
no more of America than the babe unborn. Protect
his innocence in this strange city. Save
him from Peter Funk. Don't let him stay out
after curfew. He must not make any low acquaintances
in Chrysalis. He has a pet animal,
the Orgie, picked up in Paris, very noisy and
bites; don't allow him to bring it into these
quiet cloisters. Well, I trust him to you and
Mrs. Locksley. I 'm off for Washington. Good
by, all!”
He shook hands with janitor and janitress,
kissed Dora, tweaked the boys, and fled riotously.
I saw him and his traps into a carriage and
off, — off and out of the era of my life which
I describe in these pages. With him I fear the
merry element disappears from a sombre story.
I perceived what a lonely fellow I was, as
soon as I lost sight of Stillfleet.
“Every man has his friends, if he can only
find them,” I said to myself. “But here I am,
a returned absentee, and not a soul knows me,
except Densdeth. Exit Harry Stillfleet; manet
Densdeth. I believe I will look him up. Why
should I make a bête noir of such an agreeable
fellow? He won't bite. He 's no worse than
half the men I 've known. But first I must
transfer myself bag and baggage to Chrysalis.”
The Chuzzlewit unwillingly disgorged me and
my traps, after so short a period of feeding upon
us. The waiter, specially detailed to keep me
waiting if my bell rang, handled his clothes-broom,
when he saw me depart, as if he would
like to knock me down, lock me up, and make
me pay a princely ransom for my liberty.
I escaped, however, without a skirmish or the
aid of a policeman, and presently made my formal
entry into Rubbish Palace.
“Great luck!” thought I, beginning to unpack
and arrange, “to find myself at home the
first day.”
“Dreadful bore, to beat through this great
city on a house-hunt!”
I picked up a newspaper on Stillfleet's table,
and read the advertisements.
“Lodgings for a single gentleman of pious
habits.”
“Fine suite of apartments to let. N. B. Dodsley's
Band practises next door, and can be heard
free of expense, at all hours of day or night.”
“Parlor and bedroom over Dr. Toothaker's
office in Bond Street. Murderers, Coroners,
Banjoists, and District Attorneys need not apply.”
I was glad to have escaped inquiring into such
places, and to tumble into luxury at once.
And comfort? I asked myself. How as to
comfort?
My new quarters were almost too grandiose for
comfort. That simple emotion was hardly sufficiently
ambitious for an apartment big enough to
swing a tiger, fifteen feet from tip to tip, in.
There was no chimney, and therefore none of
the domestic cheerfulness of an open fire. But
an open fire would have interfered with the
Italian aspect of the chamber. To keep the
temperature up to Italy, I had a mighty stove,
a great architectural pile of cast-iron, elaborate
as if Prometheus had been a mediæval saint, and
this were his shrine.
I looked about my great room, and it seemed
to me more and more as if I were tenanting the
museum of some old virtuoso Tuscan marquis,
the last habitable chamber of his palazzo, the
treasury where he had huddled all the heirlooms
of the race since they were Counts of
wolves and Remus scorned earth-works.
It is idle to say that the scenery about a man's
life does not affect his character. It does so just
in proportion to his sensitiveness. A clown, of
course, might inhabit the Palace of Art, with the
Garden of Eve in front and the Garden of Armida
behind, and still never have any but clownish
thoughts in his clown's noddle.
Whatever else I was, I was certainly not a
clown. My being was susceptible to every touch
and every breath of influence. My new home
and its scenery took me at once in hand, and
began to string me to harmony with itself. I
fell into a spiritual mood befitting the place.
A romantic place.
And Stillfleet's collection heightened the romantic
effect. Stillfleet was a fellow of the practical
and artistic natures well combined, with a
bizarre slash, a bend dexter of oddity running
through him. Fact, beauty, and fun were all
represented in his museum.
He had, as he said, sampled all the ages. The
ages when beings were brutes, and did nothing
but feed and drink and fight and frisk and die,
leaving no sign but an unwieldy skeleton, were
represented in this Congress by a great thighbone,
which a shambling mammoth had spent his
days in exaggerating.
The fossil stood to symbolize the first kick of
animal life against chaos. From that beginning
the series went on rapidly. The times when Art
put its fancies into amorphous, into grotesque,
into clumsy forms, had all contributed some typical
object.
Then of things of beauty, joys forever, there
was abundance. There were models of the most
mythological temples, and the most Christian
spires and towers. There were prints and pictures,
old and young. There were curiosities in
iron and steel, in enamel and ivory, in glass and
gem, in armor and weapons.
I will not attempt at present to catalogue this
museum, or give any distinct impression of it.
On that first afternoon I did not pause to analyze.
I should have plenty of time in future,
and now I had my own traps to arrange. That
must be done systematically, so that I should be
a settled man from the start.
I felt, however, as I proceeded with my unpacking
and bestowing, a fine sense of order in
the apparent whimsical disorder of the objects
about me. The pictures had not alighted on the
walls merely at the first convenient perch. There
was method in all the contrasts and confusions of
the place.
That modern French picture, for example, of
masquers — a painting all vigor, all abandon, all
spiritual, as well as artistic significance, ranged
itself beside a scene of a meagre Franciscan in a
cavern, contemplating a scourge, a cup, and a
crust. There was propriety in setting a cast of
the Venus of Milo in a corner with the armor of
a knight and the pike of a Puritan.
As I went on putting my chattels to rights and
making myself at home in a methodic way, the
atmosphere of the spot more and more affected
me. I am careful in stating this dreamy influence.
A certain romantic feeling of expectation
took possession of me. I had no definite life before
me. I was passive, and awaiting events. A
man at work resists emanations and miasms; a
man at rest is infected.
I looked about the room. Everything in it
seemed watching me. I fancied that the ancient
objects were weary of being regarded as dead curiosities,
as fossils. They seemed to reclaim their
former semi-animation, to desire to be the properties
of an actual drama, to long to sympathize
with joy and sorrow, as they had dumbly sympathized
long ago.
I felt myself becoming a dramatic personage,
but with no rôle yet assigned.
“Here is the stage,” I thought. “Here is the
scenery. Here is such a hall as conspirators,
when there were conspirators, would have held
and gone. There is no Vehm to sit here in sombre
judgment. And if there were a Vehm, the
age of crime is over. I dare say I shall lead a
commonplace life enough here, — study, smoke,
sleep, just as if the room were not thirty feet
square, dimly lighted with mullioned windows,
and hung with pictures grim with three centuries
of silent monitorship.
“Lucky that I 'm not superstitious!” my
thought continued. “I never shall peer behind
the bed for ghosts, or for fiends into the coal-bin.
A superstitious man might well be uneasy here.
If I wanted to give a timid fellow the horrors, I
would shut him up in this very room for a single
night without light and without cigars. I don't
believe a guilty man could stand it at all. If
one had fathered villain purposes, those bastards
of the soul's begetting would be sure to return
and plague their parent in these lodgings. No,
a guilty man could never live here a day.
“Densdeth, now, — how would he like to be
quartered in Rubbish Palace? I forget that he
does occupy the next room. By the way, I will
see whether the door to his dark room is fast on
my side.”
I crowded between the piles of packing-cases
in Stillfleet's lumber-closet to examine. Unless
Densdeth were a spirit, and could squeeze through
Stillfleet had screwed on this door a
grand piece of ancient ironmongery, a bolt big
enough to hold the gate of a condemned cell.
As I stooped to admire the workmanship of
the old bolt, I was aware of the faint fragrance
of a subtle and luxurious perfume. Stillfleet's
boxes were musty enough. The scent was only
perceptible at the door. It must come from the
other side.
“Odor of boudoir, not store-room,” I thought.
“But perhaps he keeps a box of some precious
nard stored here, and it has sprung a leak.
Never mind, Mr. Byng; keep your nose for your
own Cologne-bottle. Boudoir or magazine, remember
it is Densdeth's, a man you mistrust.”
I shut the closet-door, left the coffins of Stillfleet's
Old Masters in their dark vault, and returned
to my work.
In another half-hour all my traps had found
their places. Everything, from boots to Bible,
was where it would come to hand at need. I
laid my matches so that I need not grope about
in the formidable dimness of my chamber when I
entered at night.
It was five o'clock. I felt a great want of society,
and an imperative appetite for dinner.
“Why not venture,” I asked myself, “to
knock at Mr. Churm's door up-stairs? Perhaps
me a better place. He will not think me impertinent,
I am sure, in making myself known anew
to him.”
I took the nearest staircase for the floor above,
expecting to find there another corridor running
the whole length of the building, as below. A
locked door, however, at the left of the landing
obstructed my passage towards Churm's side of
Chrysalis. At the right also was a door, cutting
off that portion of the corridor. It stood ajar.
As I was turning to descend, and find my way
by the other staircase to Churm's lodgings, the
question occurred to me, “Have I a neighbor
overhead? Densdeth beside me, — who is above?
By what name shall I chide him, if in dancing
his breakdowns he comes crashing through the
centre-piece of my ceiling? I should be glad to
have a fine fellow close at hand to serve me as a
counterblast to Densdeth. I must have friends,
and if I can find one in my neighbor, so much
the better.”
I pushed open the door, and entered the little
hall; it was lighted, as below, by a narrow mullioned
window, — only half-lighted at that hour
of a winter's afternoon.
A lonely, dismal place. The ceiling, instead
of showing a tidy baldness under recent combings
by a housemaid's broom, was all hairy with
slung himself across the doorway, making the
lobby a cave of Adullam.
There were two doors on the right. Each was
labelled “To Let.” The light was so faint by
this time that I was obliged to approach close to
satisfy myself that “To Let” was not the name
of a tenant.
On the left the same unprofitable nonentity
occupied the room over Densdeth's. The fourth
door, corresponding to my own, remained. I
inspected that in turn.
An ordinary visiting-card was tacked to the
door. It bore a name neatly printed by hand.
I deciphered it with difficulty by the twilight
through the grimy window: —
Cecil Dreeme,
Painter.
A modest little door-plate. Its shyness interested
me at once. Some men force their name
and business on the world's eye, as the vulgar
and pushing announce their presence by a loud
voice and large manner. A person of conscious
power will let his works speak for him. Take
care of the work, and the name will take care of
itself.
“Mr. Cecil Dreeme,” I said to myself, “is
some confident genius, willing to have his name
until the world writes it in big capitals in Valhalla.
Here he lurks and works, `like some
poet hidden in the realm of thought.' By and
by a great picture will walk out through this
cobwebby corridor.
“Cecil Dreeme,” I repeated. “My neighbor
overhead has a most musical, most artistic name.
Dreeme, — yes; the sound, if not the spelling,
fits perfectly. A painter's life, if common theories
be true, should be all a dream. Visions of
Paradises and Peris should always be with him.
No vulgar, harsh, or cruel realities should shatter
his placid repose. Cecil, too, — how fortunate
that those liquid syllables were sprinkled
upon him by the surplice at the font. Tom or
Sam or Peter would have been an unpardonable
discord.”
Cecil Dreeme! The melodious vagueness of
the name gently attracted me. It was to mine
what the note of a flute is to the crack of a
rifle.
Cecil Dreeme — Robert Byng.
“There is a contrast to begin with,” I thought.
“Our professions, too, are antagonistic. Chemistry
— Art. Formulas — Inspirations. Analysis
— Combination. I work with matter; he
with spirit. I unmake; he makes. I split
atoms, unravel gases; he grafts lovely image
of beauty into one transcendent fabric.”
As these fancies ran through my brain, I began
to develop a lively curiosity in my neighbor
overhead.
Remember that I was a ten years' absentee,
without relatives, without sure friends, wanting
society, and just now a thought romanticized by
the air and scenery of Rubbish Palace.
I began to long to be acquainted with this
gentleman above me, this possible counterblast
to Densdeth, this possible apparition through my
ceiling at the heel of a breakdown.
“Does he, then, dance breakdowns?” I thought.
“Is he perhaps a painter of the frowzy class,
with a velvet coat, mop of hair and mile of
beard, pendulous pipe and a figurante on the
bowl, and with a Düsseldorf, not to say Bohemian,
demeanor. Is he a man whose art is a
trade, who paints a picture as he would daub
the side of a house? Or is he the true Artist, a
refined and spiritualized being, Raphael in look,
Fra Angelico in life, a man in force, but with
the feminine insight, — one whose labor is love,
one whose every work is a poem and a prayer?
Which? Shall I knock and discover? An artist
generally opens his doors hospitably to an
amateur.
“No,” I decided, “I will not knock. We
the same Chrysalis, we cannot dodge each other
without some trouble. If I am lonely by and
by, and yearn for a friend, and he does not dance
through my centre-piece, I will fire a pistol-ball
through his floor. Then apology, laugh, confession,
and sworn friendship, — that is, of course,
if he is Raphael-Angelico, not Bohemian-Dusseldorf.”
These fancies, so long in the telling, flashed
rapidly through my mind.
I turned away from the door, with its quiet
announcement of the name and business of a
tenant, not precisely evading, but certainly not
inviting notice.
I made my way down, and up again by the
other staircase to the same floor. Here I found
the same arrangement of rooms, but more population
and fewer cobwebs. The southern exposure
was preferred to the northern, in that chilly
structure.
I knocked at Mr. John Churm's door in the
southwest corner of the building.
No “Come in.” I must dine alone at the
Chuzzlewit.
As I stepped from Chrysalis, I gave a look to
Ailanthus Square in front.
“This will never do!” I exclaimed.
It was a wretched place, stiffly laid out, shabbily
in the middle the basin of an extinct fountain
filled with foul snow, through which the dead
cats and dogs were beginning to sprout at the
solicitation of the winter's sunshine.
A dreary place, and drearily surrounded by
red brick houses, with marble steps monstrous
white, and blinds monstrous green, — all destined
to be boarding-houses in a decade.
“This will never do!” I exclaimed again.
“Outdoor life offers no temptation. I am forced
inward to indoor duties and pleasures. Objects
in America are not attractive. I must content
myself with people. And what people? My
first day wanes, Stillfleet is off, and I have made
no acquaintance but a musical name on a door
in a dusty corner of Chrysalis.”
| CHAPTER IV.
THE PALACE AND ITS NEIGHBORS. Cecil Dreeme | |