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 isn’t half punishment enough for his share in the fiction of calling the place a college.”
We descended the main stairway. The white-washed 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 was something infinitely honest and trusty in the 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 his sleeve, he’s made of sugar-plums I do believe.’”
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 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