She was a smallish moon, looking very chaste and chilly and she peered
vaguely through folds of scurrying fog. She shone upon a silent street
that ran up a moderate hill between far-scattered corporation
gas-lamps--a street that having reached the hill top seemed to saunter
leisurely across a height which had once been the most aristocratic
quarter of the Misty City; the quarter was still pathetically
respectable, and for three squares at least its handsome residences
stared destiny in the face and stood in the midst of flower-bordered
lawns, unmindful of decay. Its fountains no longer played; even its once
pampered children had grown up, and the young of the present generation
were of a different cast; but the street seemed not to heed these
changes; indeed it was growing a little careless of itself and needed
replanking. Was it a realization of this fact, I wonder, that caused it
on a sudden to run violently down a steep place into the Bay, as if it
were possessed of Devils? Well it might be, for the human scum of the
town gathered about the base of the hill, and the nights there were
unutterably iniquitous.
O that pale watcher, the Moon! She shone on a rude stairway leading up
to the bare face of a cliff that topped the hill; and five and forty
uncertain steps that had more than once slid down into the street below
along with the wreckage of the winter rains, for the cliff was of rock
and clay and though the rock may stand until the crack of Doom, the clay
mingles with the elements and an annual mud pudding, tons in weight, was
deposited on the pavement of the high street, to the joy of the
juveniles and the grief of the belated pedestrians. The cliff towering
at the junction of the two thoroughfares shared with each its generous
mud-flow and half of it descended in lavalike cascades into the depths
of a ravine that crossed the high street at right angles, passing under
a bridge still celebrated as a triumph of architectural ungainliness.
She shone, my Lady Moon, into that deep ravine which was half filled
with shadow and made a weird picture of the place; it seemed like the
bed of some dark noiseless river, the source of which was still
undiscovered; and as for its mouth, no one would ever find it, or,
finding, tell of it, for the few who trusted themselves to its voiceless
and invisible current were heard of no more; sometimes a sharp cry for
help pierced the midnight silence, and it was known upon the hill that
murder was being done down yonder--that was all. Yet day by day the
great tide of traffic poured through this subterranean passage, with
muffled roar as of a distant sea.
She shone on all that was left of a once beautiful and imposing mansion.
It crowned the very brow of the cliff; it proudly overlooked all the
neighbors; it was a Gothic ruin girded about with a mantle of ivy and
dense creepers, yet not all of the perennial leafage that clothed it,
even to the eaves, could disguise the fact that the major portion of the
mansion had been razed to the ground lest it should topple and go
crashing into that gulf below. There, once upon a time, in a Gothic
garden shaded by slender cypresses, walked the golden youth of the land;
there, feminine lunch parties, pink teas, highly exclusive musicales and
fashionable hops, flourished mightily; now the former side-door served
as the front entrance to all that was left of the mansion; the stone
that was rejected had become the headstone of the corner, as it were; it
was an abrupt corner to be sure, with the upper half of its narrow door
filled with small panes of glass; its modest threshold was somewhat
worn; but upon the platform before it a large egg-shaped jar of
unmistakable Chinese origin encased the roots of a flowing cactus that
might have added a grace to the proudest palace in the Misty City. This
was the modest portal of the Eyrie; ivy vines sheltered it like a dense
thatch; ivy vines clung fast to a deep bay window that nearly filled one
side of the library of the old mansion, now a living-room; ivy vines
curtained the glazed wall of a conservatory where some one slept as in a
bower. A weird dwelling place was this the moon shone upon, where
pigeons nested and cooed at intervals in all the green nooks thereof.
She shone on the tall slim panes of glass in the bay window till they
shimmered like ice, and brightened the carpet on the floor of the
room--a carpet that was faded and frayed; she threw a soft glow upon the
three walls beyond the window; where were low, convenient shelves of
books; there were books, books, books everywhere--books of all
descriptions, neither creed nor caution limited their range. Many
pictures and sketches in oil or water-color--some of them unframed--were
upon the walls above the book-shelves; there were bronze statuettes,
graceful figures of lute-strumming troubadours upon the old-fashioned
marble mantel; there were busts and medallions in plaster, and a few
casts after the antique. Heaped in corners, and upon the tops of the
book-shelves lay bric-a-brac in hopeless confusion; toy canoes from
Kamchatka and the Southern seas; wooden masks from the burial places of
the Alaskan Indians and the Theban Tombs of the Nile Kings; rude
fish-hooks that had been dropped in the coral seas; sharks' teeth; and
the strong beak of an albatross whose webbed feet were tobacco pouches
and whose hollow wing-bones were the long jointed stem of a pipe; spears
and war-clubs were there, brought from the gleaming shores of
reef-girdled islands; a Florentine lamp; a roll of papyrus; an idol from
Easter Island, the eyes of which were two missionary shirt buttons of
mother-of-pearl, of the Puritan type; your practical cannibal, having
eaten his missionary, spits out the shirt buttons to be used as the eyes
which see not; carved gourds were there, and calabashes; Mexican
pottery; and some of the latest Pompeiian antiquities such as are
miraculously discovered in the presence of the amazed and delighted
tourist who secretly purchases the same for considerably more than a
song.
There were pious objects, many of them resembling the Ex Votos at a
shrine; an ebony and bronzed indulgenced crucifix with a history, and
Sacred Hearts done in scarlet satin with flames of shining tinsel
flickering from their tops.
There were vines creeping everywhere within the room, from jars that
stood on brackets and made hanging gardens of themselves; creepers,
yards in length that sprung from the mouths of water-pots hidden behind
objects of interest, and these framed the pictures in living green; a
huge wide-mouthed vase stood in the bay window filled with a great pulu
fern still nourished by its native soil--a veritable tropical island
this, now basking in the moonlight far from its native clime. Japanese
and Chinese lanterns were there; and an ostrich egg brought from Nubia
that hung like an alabaster lamp lit by a moonbeam; and fans, of course,
but quaint barbaric ones from the Orient and the Equatorial Isles; and
framed and unframed photographs of celebrities each bearing an original
autograph; and easy chairs, nothing but the easiest chairs from the very
far-reaching one with the long arms like a pair of oars over which one
throws his slippered feet, and lolls in his pajamas in memory of an East
Indian season of exile, to the deep nest-like sleepy hollow quite big
enough for two, in which one dozes and dreams, and out of which it is so
difficult for one to rise. Over all this picturesque confusion grinned a
fleshless human skull with its eye sockets and yawning jaws stuffed full
of faded boutonnieres.
The moon shone, but paler now for it was growing late, on a closed coupe
that rolled rapidly from the Club House in the early morning after a
High Jinks night, and clattered through the streets accompanied by the
matutinal milk wagons with their frequent, intermittent pauses; thus it
rolled and rolled over the resounding pavement toward that house on the
hill top, The Eyrie.
The vehicle zigzagged up the steep grade, and stopped at the foot of
the long stairway; some one alighted and exchanged a friendly word or
two with the driver, for in that lonely part of the town it was pleasant
to hear the sound of one's own voice even if one was guiltily conscious
of making conversation; then with a cheerful "Good-night," this some-one
climbed the steps while the vehicle hurried away with its jumble of
hoofs and wheels. A key was heard at the outer door; the door sagged a
little in common with everything about the house--and a tenant passed
into the Eyrie.
Enter Paul Clitheroe, sole scion of that melancholy house whose
foundations had sunk under him, and left him, at the age of five and
twenty, master of himself, but slave to fortune.
In the dim light he closed and fastened the outer door; from a hall
scarcely large enough for two people to pass in, he entered the inner
room with the confident step of a familiar. Having deposited hat, cane
and ulster in their respective places--there was a place for everything
or it would have been quite impossible to abide in that snuggery--he
sank into one of the easy chairs, rolled a cigarette with meditative
deliberation, lighted it and blew the smoke into the moonlight where it
assumed a thousand fantastic forms.
The silence of the room seemed emphasized by the presence of its
occupant; he was one who under no circumstances was likely to disturb
the serenity of a house. In most cases a single room takes on the
character of the one who inhabits it; this is invariably the case where
the apartment is in the possession of a woman; but turn a man loose in a
room, and leave him to himself for a season, and he will have made of
that room a witness strong enough to condemn or condone him on the Last
Day; the whole character of the place will gradually change until it has
become an index to the man's nature; where this is not the case, the man
is without noticeable characteristics.
Those who knew Paul Clitheroe, the solitary at the Eyrie, would at once
recognize this room as his abode; those of his friends who saw this room
for the first time, without knowing it to be his home, would say: "Paul
Clitheroe would fit in here." A kind of harmonious incongruity was the
chief characteristic of the man and his solitary lodging.
He sat for some time as silent as the inanimate objects in that
singularly silent room. An occasional turn of the wrist, the momentary
flash of the ash at the end of his cigarette, the smoke-wreath floating
in space--those were all that gave assurance of life; for when this
solitary returned into his well-chosen solitude he seemed to shed all
that was of the earth earthy, and to become a kind of spectre in a
dream.
Having finished his cigarette, Paul withdrew into the conservatory, his
sleeping room, half doll's house and half bower, where the ivy had crept
over the top of the casement and covered his ceiling with a web of
leaves. Shortly he was reposing upon his pillow, over which his
holy-water font--a large crimson heart of crystal with flames of
burnished gold, set upon a tablet of white marble--seemed almost to
pulsate in the exquisite half-lights of approaching dawn.
It may not have been manly, or even masculine, for him thus literally to
curtain his sleep, like a faun, with ivy; it may not have been orthodox
for him to admit to his Valhalla some of the false Gods, and to honor
them after a fashion; the one true God was duly adored, and all his
saints appealed to in filial faith. That was his nature and past
changing; if he could not look upon God as a Jealous God visiting His
judgments with fanatical justice upon the witted and half-witted, it was
because his was a nature which had never been warped by the various
social moral and religious influences brought to bear upon it.
He may have lacked judgment, in the eyes of the world, but he had never
suffered seriously in consequence. It may not have been wise for him to
fondly nourish tastes and tendencies that were usually quite beyond his
means; but he did it, and doing it afforded him the greatest pleasure in
life.
You will pardon him all this; every one did sooner or later, even those
who discountenanced similar weaknesses or affectations--or whatever you
are pleased to call them--in anyone else, soon found an excuse for
overlooking them in his case.
He was not, thank heaven, all things to all men; all things to a few, he
may have been--yea, even more than all else to some, so long as the
spell lasted; to the majority, however, he was probably nothing, and
less than nothing. And what of that? If he did little good in the world,
he certainly did less evil, and, as he lay in his bed, under a white
counterpane upon which the dawning light, sifting through the vines that
curtained the glazed front of his sleeping room, fell in a mottled
Japanese pattern, and while the ivy that covered the Gothic ceiling
trailed long tendrils of the palest and most delicate green, each leaf
glossed as if it had been varnished, this unheroic-hero, this
pantheistic-devotee, this heathenized-Christian, this
half-happy-go-lucky æthestic Bohemian, lay upon his pillow, the
incarnation of absolute repose.
And so the morning broke, and the early birds began to chirp in the ivy
and to prune their plumage and flutter among the leaves; and down the
street tramped the feet of the toilers on their way to forge and dock.
Over the harbor came the daffodil light from the sun-tipped eastern
hills, and it painted the waves that lapped the sleek sides of a yacht
lying at anchor under the hill. A yacht that Paul had watched many a day
and dreamed of many a night; for he often longed with a great longing to
slip cable and hie away, even unto the uttermost parts.