Cecil Dreeme. Theodore Winthrop
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 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 tryst in. But the vindictive centuries are dead 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 a keyhole, I was safe from a visit by that entrance. 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 he will dine with me at the Chuzzlewit, or show 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 cobwebs. I was surprised that no spider had 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.