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 days, and hoped to see them again, by his shirt-collars. 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 Etruria, long before Romulus cubbed it with 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 unterrified and riotous color—had not without 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
