Cecil Dreeme

by Theodore Winthrop

“Yes, a Sibyl who must see and know and suffer. Her friends gave out that she had actually gone mad with a fever, and so, while her nurse was asleep, she stole out, erred about the city, fell into the river, and was drowned.”

  “Not suicide!”

  “Never! with such a healthy soul. Yet some people do not hesitate to say that she drowned herself rather than be forced to marry Densdeth.”

  “These are not the days of forced marriages.”

  “Moral pressure is more despotic than physical force. I fancy our old friend Churm may think there was tyranny in the business, though he never speaks of it. You know he was a supplementary father and guardian of those ladies. He was absent when it all happened.”

  “And the Denmans,—how do they seem to bear it?”

  “Mr. Denman was sadly broken at first. I used to meet him, walking about, leaning feebly on Densdeth’s arm, looking like a dead man, or one just off the rack. But he is proud as Lucifer. He soon was himself again, prouder than before.”

  “And Emma Denman?”

  “I have had but one glimpse of her since the younger sister’s death. Her beauty is signally heightened by mourning.”

  “Such a tragedy must terribly blight her life. Will they see me, do you think? I should like to offer my sympathy, for old friendship’s sake.”

  “As an old friend, they will see you, of course. In fact, conspicuous people, like the Denmans, cannot long shelter themselves behind a sorrow. But come, old fellow, I have been talking solemnly long enough. Tell me about yourself. Come home ripe? Wild oats sowed? Ready to give us a lift with civilization?”

  “Ripe, I hope. Not raw, as I went. Nor rotten, as some fellows return. Wild oats? I keep a few handfuls still in my bag, for home sowing. As to civilization; let me get my pou sto and my handspike set, and I will heave with a will, lift or no.”

  “Suppose you state your case in full, as if you were a clown in the ring, or a hero on the stage.”

  I had been dressing while he talked. My toilette was nearly done. I struck an attitude and replied, “My name is Robert Byng, ‘as I sailed.’ ”

  “Name short, and with a good crack to it; man long and not whipper-snapper. Name distinguished; bearer capable. State your age, Byng the aforesaid.”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “The prisoner confesses to twenty-six. The judge in the name of the American people demands, ‘Why then haven’t you been five years at the bar, or ten years at the desk? Why are you not in command of a clipper ship, or in Congress, or driving an omnibus, or clearing a farm? Where is your door-plate? Where is your wife? What school does your eldest son go to? Where is your mark on the nineteenth century?’ ”

  “Bah, Harry! Don’t bore me with your Young Americanism! I know it is not sincere. Let me mature, before you expect a man’s work of me!”

  “The culprit desires to state,” says Stillfleet, as if he were addressing an audience, “that he was born to a fortune and a life of idleness and imbecility, that he would gladly be imbecile and idle now, like nous autres; but that losing his parents and most of his money at an unsophisticated age, while in Europe, he consulted the Oracle how he should make his living. ‘What is that burn on your thumb?’ asked the Oracle. ‘Phosphorus,’ replied Master Bob. ‘How came that hole in your sleeve?’ Oracle inquires. ‘Nitric acid,’ Byng responds. ‘It was the cat that scratched your face?’ says Oracle. ‘No,’ answers the youth, ‘my retort burst before it was half full of gas.’ ‘Phosphorus on your thumb,’ Oracle sums up, ‘nitric acid on your sleeve, and your face clawed with gas explosions,—there is only one thing for you to do. Be a chemist!’ Which he became. Is that a straight story, Byng?”

  “Near enough!” said I, laughing at my friend’s rattling history of my life.

  “And here he is, fellow-citizens,” Stillfleet continued. “He has seen the world and had his fling in Paris, where he picked up a little chemistry and this half-cynical manner and half-sceptical method, which you remark. He has also got a small supply of science and an abundance of dreaminess and fatalism in Germany. But he is a fine fellow, with a good complexion, not dishonest blue eyes, not spoilt in any way, and if America punishes him properly, and puts his nose severely to the grindstone, he may turn out respectable. I’ll offer you three to two, Byng, the Devil don’t get you. Speak quick, or I shall want to bet even.”

  “You rascal!” said I. “I would go at you with an analysis after the same fashion, if I were not too hungry. Come down and breakfast.”

  “Here is a gentleman from Sybaris!” cried Stillfleet. “ ‘Come and breakfast!’ says he, lifting himself out of his bed of rose-leaves at mid-day. Why, man! I breakfasted three hours ago. I’ve been up to the Reservoir and down to the Exchange and over to Brooklyn since. That’s the style you have to learn, twenty thousand miles an hour, hurrah boys! go ahead! ‘En avant, marrche!’ ‘Marrrrche!’ Yes; I took breakfast three hours ago,—and a stout one,—to fortify me for the toil of packing to go to Washington. But I’ll sit by and check your come-ashore appetite.”

  2

  Chrysalis College

  Stillfleet escorted me down to the long, desolate dining-room of my hotel, the Chuzzlewit.

  The great Chuzzlewit dined there on his visit to America, and damned his dinner with such fine irony, that the proprietor thought himself complimented, and re-baptized his hotel.

  “Here you are,” said my friend, “at a crack house on the American plan. You can breakfast on fried beefsteak, hard eggs, café au delay, soggy toast, flannel cakes, blanket cakes, and wash-leather cakes. You can dine on mock soup, boiled porpoise, beef in the raw or in the chip, watery vegetables, quoit pies, and can have your choice at two dollars a bottle of twelve kinds of wine, all mixed in the same cellar, and labelled in the same shop. You can sup on soused tea, dusty sponge-cake, and Patrick à discrétion. How do you like the bill of fare?”

  “Marine appetites are not discriminating. But, Harry,” I continued, when I had ordered my breakfast, “you spoke of going to Washington. I thought only raff—Congressmen, contractors, and tide-waiters—went there.”

  “Civilization makes its missionaries acquainted with strange lodgings. They are building a big abortion of a new Capitol. I go, as an architect, to expunge a little of the Goth and the Vandal out of their sham-classic plans.”

  “Beware! Reform too soon, and you risk ostracism. But before you go, advise me. Where am I to live? Evidently not here at the Chuzzlewit. Here the prices are large, and the rooms little. I must have a den of my own, where I can swing a cat, a longish cat.”

  “Why not take my place off my hands? It is big enough to swing a royal Bengal tiger in. I meant to lock it up, but you shall occupy and enjoy, if you like. It’s a grand chance, old fellow. There’s not such another Rubbish Palace in America.”

  “Excellent!” said I. “But will you trust me with your plunder?”

  “Will I trust you? Haven’t we been brats together, lads together, men together?”

  “We have.”

  “Haven’t we been comrades in robbing orchards, mobbing tutors, spoiling the Egyptians of mummies, pillaging the Tuileries in ’48? Haven’t we been the historic friends, Demon and Pythagoras,—no, Damon and Pythias? Answer me that!”

  “We have.”

  “Well, then, enter my shop, studio, palace, and use and abuse my tools, rubbish, valuables, as you like. Really, Byng, it will be a great favor if you will fill my quarters, and keep down the rats with my rat rifle, while I am in Washington trying to decorate the Representative Chamber so that it will shame blackguards to silence.”

  “Now,” said I, after a pause, and a little stern champing over a tough Chuzzlewit chop, “all ready, Harry; conduct me to your den.”

  We left the Chuzzlewit by the side door on Mannering Place, and descended from Broadway as far as Ailanthus Square. On the corner, fronting that mean, shabby enclosure, Stillfleet pointed out a huge granite or rough marble building.

  “There I live,” said he. “
It’s not a jail, as you might suppose from its grimmish aspect. Not an Asylum. Not a Retreat. No lunatics, that I know of, kept there, nor anything mysterious, guilty, or out of the way.”

  “Chrysalis College, is it not?”

  “You have not forgotten its monastic phiz?”

  “No; I remember the sham convent, sham castle, modern-antique affair. But how do you happen to be quartered there? Is the College defunct?”

  “Not defunct; only without vitality. The Trustees fancied that, if they built roomy, their college would be populous; if they built marble, it would be permanent; if they built Gothic, it would be scholastic and mediæval in its influences; if they had narrow, mullioned windows, not too much disorganizing modern thought would penetrate.”

  “Well, and what was the result?”

  “The result is, that the old nickname of Chrysalis sticks to it, and whatever real name it may have is forgotten. There it stands, big, battlemented, buttressed, marble, with windows like crenelles; and inside they keep up the traditional methods of education.”

  “But pupils don’t beleaguer it?”

  “That is the blunt fact. It stays an ineffectual high-low school. The halls and lecture-rooms would stand vacant, so they let them to lodgers.”

  “You are not very grateful to your landlords.”

  “I pay my rent, and have a right to criticise.”

  “Who live there besides you?”

  “Several artists, a brace of young doctors, one or two quiet men about town, Churm, and myself.”

  “Churm! How is that noble old fellow? I count upon reclaiming his friendship.”

  “How is Churm? Just the same. Tranquil sage; headlong boy. An aristocratic radical. A Timon without gall. Says the wisest things; does the kindest. Knows everything; and yet is always ready for the new truth that nullifies the old facts. He cannot work inside of the institutions of society. He calls them ‘shingle-cells,’ tight and transitory. He cannot get over his cynical way of putting a subject, though there is no cynic in his heart. So the world votes him odd, and lets him have his own way.”

  “Lucky to get liberty at cost of a nickname! Who would not be called odd to be left free?”

  “If Churm were poor, he would be howled at as a radical, a destructive, an infidel.”

  “I suppose he is too rich and powerful to be harmed, and too intrepid to care.”

  “Yes; and then there is something in Churm’s vigor that disarms opposition. His generosity hoists people up to his level. But here we are, Byng, at the grand portal of the grand front.”

  “I see the front and the door. Where is the grandeur?”

  “Don’t put on airs, stranger! We call this imposing, magnifique, in short, pretty good. Up goes your nose! You have lived too long in Florence. Brunelleschi and Giotto have spoilt you. Well, I will show you something better inside. Follow me!”

  We entered the edifice, half college, half lodging-house, through a large doorway, under a pointed arch. The interior was singularly ill-contrived. A lobby opened at the door, communicating with a dim corridor running through the middle of the building, parallel to the front. A fan-tracery vaulting of plaster, peeled and crumbling, ceiled the lobby. A marble stairway, with iron hand-rails, went squarely and clumsily up from the door, nearly filling the lobby.

  Stillfleet led the way up-stairs.

  He pointed to the fan-tracery.

  “This of course reminds you of King’s College Chapel,” said he.

  “Entirely,” replied I. “Pity it is deciduous!” and I brushed off from my coat several flakes of its whitewash.

  The stairs landed us on the main floor of the building. Another dimly lighted corridor, answering to the one below, but loftier, ran from end to end of the building. This also was paved with marble tiles. Large Gothicish doors opened along on either side. The middle room on the rear of the corridor was two stories high, and served as chapel and lecture-room. On either side of this, a narrow staircase climbed to the upper floors.

  By the half-light from the great window over the doorway where we had entered, and from a small single mullioned window at the northern end of the corridor, there was a bastard mediævalism of effect in Chrysalis, rather welcome after the bald red-brick houses without.

  “How do you like it?” asked Stillfleet.

  “It’s not old enough to be romantic. But then it does not smell of new paint, as the rest of America does.”

  We turned up the echoing corridor toward the north window. We passed a side staircase and a heavily padlocked door on the right. On the left was a class-room. The door was open. We could see a swarm of collegians buzzing for such drops of the honey of learning as they could get from a lank plant of a professor. We stopped at the farther door on the right, adjoining the one so carefully padlocked. It bore my friend’s plate,—

  H. STILLFLEET,

  ARCHITECT.

  3

  Rubbish Palace

  Stillfleet drew a great key, aimed at the keyhole, and snapped the bolt, all with a mysterious and theatrical air.

  “Now,” said he, “how is your pulse?”

  “Steady and full. Why shouldn’t it be?”

  “Shut your eyes, then! Open sesame! Eyes tight? Enter into Rubbish Palace!” He led me several steps forward.

  “Open!” he commanded.

  “Where am I?” I cried, staring about in surprise.

  “City of Manhattan, corner of Mannering Place and Ailanthus Square, Chrysalis College Buildings.”

  “Harry,” said I, “this is magic, phantasmagoria. Outside was the nineteenth century; here is the fifteenth. When I shut my eyes, I was in a seedy building in a busy modern town; I open them, and here I am in the Palazzo Sforza of an old Italian city, in the great chamber where there was love and hate, passion and despair, revelry and poison, long before Columbus cracked the egg.”

  “It is rather a rum old place,” said Stillfleet, twisting his third moustache, and enjoying my surprise.

  “Trot out your Bengal tiger. Let me swing him, and measure the dimensions.”

  “Tiger and I did that long ago. It is thirty feet square and seventeen high.”

  “Built for some grand college purpose, I suppose.”

  “As a hall, I believe, for the dons to receive lions on great occasions. But lions and great occasions never come. So I have inherited. It is the old story. ‘Sic vos non vobis ædificatis ædes.’ How do you like it? Not too sombre, eh? with only those two narrow windows opening north?”

  “Certainly not too sombre. I don’t want the remorseless day staring in upon my studies. How do I like it? Enormously. The place is a romance.”

  “It is Dantesque, Byronic, Victor Hugoish.”

  “Yes,” said I, looking up. “I shall be sure of rich old morbid fancies under this ceiling, with its frescoed arabesques, faded and crumbling.”

  “You have a taste for the musty, then,” said Harry.

  “Anything is better than the raw. The Chuzzlewit has given me enough of that. Well, Harry, your den is my den, if you say so.”

  “Yours to have and to hold while I am gone, and much romance may you find here. Let me show you the whole. Here’s my bath-room, ‘replete,’ as the advertisements say, ‘with every convenience.’ Here, alongside, is my bedroom.” He opened doors in the wall opposite the windows.

  “A gilded bedstead!” said I.

  “It was Marshal Soult’s, bought cheap at his sale.”

  “A yellow satin coverlet!”

  “Louis Philippe’s. Citizen Sabots stole it from the Tuileries in ’48 and sold it to me.”

  “But what is this dark cavern, next the bedroom?” I asked. “Where does that door at the back open?”

  “Oh! that is my trash room. Those boxes contain ‘Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff.’ I was jockeyed with old masters once, as my compatriots still are. I don’t hang them up and post myself for a greenhorn.”

  “But that door at the back?”

  “What are you afraid
of, Byng?”

  “I ask for information.”

  “Your voice certainly trembled. No danger. Rachel will never peer through and hiss ‘Le flambeau fume encore.’ No Lady Macbeth will march in, wringing her hands that never will be clean.”

  “I hope not, I am sure.”

  “It is clear you expect it. Your tone is ominous.”

  “Indeed. A Palazzo Sforza style of place inspires Palazzo Sforza fancies, perhaps. But really, Harry, where does the door open?”

  “It does not open, and probably will not till doomsday. It is bolted solid on my side, whatever it be on the other. It leads to a dark room.”

  “A dark room! that is Otrantoish.”

  “A windowless room, properly an appendage to this. But there is another door on the corridor. You may have noticed it, closed with a heavy padlock. The tenant enters there, and asks no right of way of me.”

  “The tenant, who is he? I should know my next neighbor.”

  “You know him already.”

  “Don’t play with my curiosity. Name.”

  “Densdeth.”

  “Densdeth,” I repeated, aware of a slight uneasiness. “What use has he for a dark room?—here, too, in this public privacy of Chrysalis?”

  “The publicity makes privacy. Densdeth says it is his store-room for books and furniture.”

  “Well, why not? You speak incredulously.”

  “Because there is a faint suspicion that he lies. The last janitor, an ex-servant of Densdeth’s, is dead. None now is allowed to enter there except the owner’s own man, a horrid black creature. He opens the door cautiously, and a curtain appears. He closes the door before he lifts it. Densdeth may pestle poisons, grind stilettos, sweat eagles, revel by gas-light there. What do I know?”

  “You are not inquisitive, then, in Chrysalis.”

  “No. We have no concierge by the street-door to spy ourselves or our visitors. We can live here in completer privacy than anywhere in Christendom. Daggeroni, De Bogus, or Mademoiselle des Mollets might rendezvous with my neighbor, and I never be the wiser.”

  “Well, if Densdeth is well bolted out of my quarters, I will not pry into his. And now I’ll look about a little at your treasures.”