Long afterwards, a year and more, I went to Harvard College for the
purpose of pursuing special studies. I was standing one rainy November
afternoon in the stone vestibule of Gore Hall. A figure approached
with his head close under an umbrella, which he closed as he entered
the library. It was Dunlevy. Our eyes twinkled a moment, then we each
grasped the other’s hand. It was like coming from the cold into a warm
room to meet a southerner in New England.
“I am afraid you don’t remember me;” I said.
“Don’t I!” he exclaimed; “do you suppose I could forget the man who
came to see me twice when I took sick at the dear old ‘U. Va.’ and who
is also an admirer of Cardinal Newman’s style?”
His memory astonished me; and it touched me to think that the man
should be grateful for my simple attention of calling upon him when
he was ill. After a few words of greeting I told him that I had an
appointment and should have to hurry on, but that if he would tell me
where he lived I would come to see him. He told me the number of his
room in Beck Hall.
“I have a corner window in the rear;” he said, as we parted.
Well, I went to see him; and he returned my calls, for that was
all they were--just calls. Somehow or other, Dunlevy and I were
not to become intimate. It seemed as though I were handling a
piece of quicksilver on an earthen platter, looking so bright, so
impressionable, and yet the moment one would say, “You are mine!” all
was gone, scattered and running in every direction, nowhere to be
seized. So long as I did not seek to make an intimate friend of him,
all went well.
To describe how I felt when calling on Dunlevy, I may do best by
quoting this sentence from Emerson:
“He is solitary because he has society in his thought, and, when people
come in, they drive away his society and isolate him.”
With me he was outwardly cordial and inwardly aloof.
The truth is, no one ever knew Dunlevy well. So far as I am aware he
had not a single intimate friend. He walked alone. I used to see him on
winter afternoons going up Brattle Street, carrying his head back, his
eyes looking upward as though he were studying the leafless branches of
the trees. He made me think of what Abbé Barthelemy wrote of himself:
“I go on solitary promenades, and when night comes I say to myself,
‘There is another day gone by.’” I verily believe that Dunlevy was so
alone during those days at Harvard that for two months at a time no one
entered his room.
At lectures and at meals it was as if he were not really thinking of
what was actually taking place in his presence. I do not mean that
his appearance was that of a listless dreamer. Nor do I mean that he
tried to carry a pose of abstraction. It was simply that he had the
nervous, conscious look of an habitual recluse. He might well have said
with Rousseau, “Being a recluse, I am more sensitive than other men.”
He held himself aloof, not wilfully, but because he seemed to have a
constitutional inability to adapt himself to others. This reserve was
by many mistaken for rudeness.
It was noticeable that he rarely entered into general conversation
and that for the most part he kept strict counsel with himself. Yet
whenever I felt certain that Dunlevy was utterly inattentive, he had a
way of stroking his delicately featured face and then of saying a few
carefully chosen words which were sufficient to prove that he took an
occasional reckoning of the depth of the persons with whom necessity
forced him to have intercourse. Dunlevy had much of the feminine in the
make-up of his character, though he was in no sense effeminate.
Usually he ate his meals in silence, surrounded by the students and
instructors who throng Memorial Hall. One could see that he hated the
puerile discussion and long-winded disputations of Sophomores and
Juniors. He had heard them before. Some of the fellows thought him
hopelessly conceited, queer, and that he deemed himself “above the
common flight of vulgar souls.” Others were convinced that the man
was morbidly sensitive, diffident, shy, afraid of the light. A few
of us knew him to be a sort of semi-sane genius, prematurely old; a
disappointed being who wreaked vengeance upon himself by trying to keep
others from knowing the cause of his troubles, if troubles there were.
In fine, none of us knew anything definitely or specifically about him.
Of course this last statement is not strictly accurate as regards my
own slight intimacy with him at the University of Virginia, taken in
connection with the hearsay tattle about him there. I went over in my
mind the gossip of his love affair, the particulars of which I had not
the malignant disposition to relate to other students. Yet I could
not refrain from asking, were these two periods in his life forever
separated by a sort of moral illness which he could not cure? Else
what had happened so suddenly to put an end to the levities of his
early life? But it is not my purpose to tell the story of the lover in
Dunlevy.
Let it not be supposed that because Dunlevy came from the South in
those days that he was in needy circumstances. Such was far from
the case. His rooms were in what was then the most expensive of
dormitories. This was one of the strange things about him, like his
dining at such a crowded place as Memorial Hall. One would have
supposed that he would have sought a secluded peaceful spot. He
preferred, as it were, to live in the midst of social life, and yet
take no part in it. In like manner, he had very little intercourse with
the Boston world, and, so far as I know, he made but few excursions
into that City of Inconsistencies. The fashionable cafés and hotel
lobbies were not rendezvous for Dunlevy. Nor those pseudo-Bohemian
joints, where students imagined they “were seeing life” and the seamy
side, these tinsel vacuums apparently had small attraction for him. And
most peculiar of all, if by chance he were discovered in one of these
places by somebody like myself who knew him, he would bow cordially,
and soon afterwards pay his check and depart. Even to laugh or sneer
at garish pretense, fashionable or unfashionable, had become a bore to
this lonely mortal.
Apparently, he was one of those who like to observe without being
observed. This trait must also have been an outgrowth of the man’s
morbid sensitiveness. Balzac in a letter to Madame Hanska says: “It
is only mis-appreciated souls and the poor who know how to observe,
because everything wounds them, and observation is the result of
suffering. Memory keeps a record only of what is painful.” This last
view strikes me as being erroneous, but the first part of the great
Frenchman’s comment is applicable to Dunlevy.
As to his wealth, he told me once that his father had owned extensive
sugar plantations with four hundred working slaves in Louisiana,
besides their farm lands in Albemarle County, Virginia; but that his
father had lost all in the war of the Rebellion. I looked at him in
wonderment.
“But,” he added, “after the war was over, an immense deposit of coal
was discovered on a tract of land belonging to my mother. This mine
saved our family fortunes.”
Dunlevy had with him in Cambridge the same aged man, the full-blooded
negro of the old regime, who, he said, had been his father’s
body-servant during the war and who was with him when he was wounded
at Manassas. I have mentioned having seen this man in his chambers at
the University of Virginia. He was constantly attendant upon Dunlevy.
He appeared to worship him and to love him as if he were one of those
god-descended heroes about whom the ancients tell us. And Dunlevy on
his part seemed to be in perfect contentment with this one man. He said
that now that all of his own family were gone, the old fellow was the
only remaining human being who connected him with the past. The two
seemed inseparable. I state these things about him, because Dunlevy
makes reference to one “Sandy” in his papers and I want it to be clear
that it is to this aged family retainer he refers. Moreover, when
persons told me, as I relate below, that no one would answer Dunlevy’s
door--that door with hinges oiled lest their creaking grate upon his
nerves--I used to take it to mean that he had instructed Sandy to pay
no heed to their calls unless he bade him.
And now for the stories about his being dissipated. Gossip said that
Dunlevy was what is known as a solitary drinker. Students who roomed in
the same dormitory with him said that he barricaded his doors and would
not answer knocks for days at a time. That when they first met him upon
his coming to Harvard at the beginning of the college year, he used to
make engagements with them and then invariably break his appointments
at the last moment by sending Sandy with a scrap of paper looking as
if it had been taken out of a waste-basket and scribbled upon in the
extremity of indecision.
In regard to these insinuations, I can only speak of my own experience.
On three occasions (two of them were appointments) I went to Dunlevy’s
door and I tapped and I knocked and I pronounced words in vain like
Ali Baba’s brother in the robbers’ cave. Another night late, I went
unexpectedly to his door and met the janitor of the dormitory coming
out of his rooms. He said that a student had told him that he saw
flames coming out of Mr. Dunlevy’s windows. I supposed it was merely
a practical joke that some undergraduates had put upon the janitor in
order to disturb Dunlevy. I prevailed upon the janitor to let me enter,
as he said that Mr. Dunlevy was within.
“I have brought you over that work on Ethics about which I spoke to you
yesterday at the philosophy lecture,” I said, entering his study and
finding him in a long silk dressing gown and wearing a pair of stunted
Chinese slippers. He had in his hand a tumbler full to the brim of a
heavy mixture.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, as if he had received a shock, and was momentarily
pausing over his surprise, “how the devil did you get in here?”
“The janitor let me in,” I explained; “I met him at your door as he was
going out.”
“Oh--that was it--was it? Well--a--sit down, won’t you? This is a funny
get-up you’ve found me in--isn’t it? You wouldn’t think to see me in
street attire that I wore this sort of thing--would you? I say, a--have
a drink, eh?”
I said that I would have a glass with him, at which he appeared to be
rather taken off his guard and confused.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said, “this is a beverage of ante-bellum
days, a sort of compound potpouri or strong sangaree of the olden
time--you wouldn’t like it. But I will send Sandy out for anything you
say?”
I insisted upon taking what he was having. He hesitated for a moment as
though I had put him in a predicament, and then he called out:
“Sandy! Bring the gentleman a glass of our sangaree.”
During this brief colloquy Dunlevy kept shading his eyes from me as if
he did not care to have me see his face; and after giving the order for
the liquor, he drew his chair up close to the fire-place so that his
back was towards me. Even while he had been speaking these few words
to me, his face and figure attracted my notice. His expression was a
blending of artlessness and of shrewdness. He seemed to be one of those
men who try to keep you from believing that they have a heart, when
their gracious bearing and gentle mien give their tongue the lie.
So long as you do not try to make an intimate friend of him, I said to
myself, all will go well.
But after he had once invited me to share his rare beverage I could
perceive that there was an intangible metamorphosis going on within
him. It reminded me of Mr. Mansfield playing the character of Dr.
Jekyll just before becoming Mr. Hyde, only with Dunlevy the character
change was exactly the reverse: the genial GOOD in him seemed to thaw
out. His eyes, usually drunk with thought, were now radiant and watery
with feeling. His sensitiveness appeared to tingle in every pore.
Perhaps he anticipated the effect that his liquor was to produce upon
me.
The negro brought me a glass filled with a thick posset. I drank a
quarter of the tumblerful before I could take it from my lips.
“My soul! What is this?” I asked, still tasting the grated nutmeg and
the old-fashioned flavor of wild-cherry bounce. It seemed also to leave
that delicate bouquet of real Medford rum.
“You speak as though it were ambrosia,” said Dunlevy over his shoulder
from his chair before the fire, “but as a matter of fact, it is only
sangaree. You see, the reason I was surprised to see you was that I
every now and then have a spell of sickness--feel queer about the
head--that is all, and I don’t like to see anyone, you know; but as the
janitor let you in, I am certainly glad to see you and I reckon you
won’t mind me h’eh in this costume.” Here his southern accent broke out.
“But this sangaree!” I exclaimed, finishing the liquor, “how in
Heaven’s name is it made?”
“Really I couldn’t tell you,” replied Dunlevy calmly, “Sandy makes
it for me. He used to brew it or mix it or distill it, whichever you
please, for my father before me. Didn’t you, Sandy?”
“Yess, maarstar,” said Sandy, “that ah did! Right h’eh in this ole
bowl, too, that Gin’rl La Fayette give to ole maarstar’s maarstar.”
“Sandy,” interrupted Dunlevy, “I wish you would go down and tell the
janitor that I wish to see him tonight.”
It occurred to me, not only from this remark, but from the fact that
I noticed a large writing book open on the centre table, that I had
interrupted Dunlevy in his work, whatever it might be, and that it was
high time for me to depart. The book was an odd looking volume as large
as an office ledger, only very thin, and bound in sheepskin like a law
book. Dunlevy had evidently been writing in it or was just about to do
so, for a wet pen lay in the crotch between its pages.
“Pray don’t hurry,” he said conventionally, as I took my hat.
“I came up merely to give you the book on Ethics,” I answered, “and
I would not have stopped at all, had you not asked me to join you in
that beverage, and had I not felt that I needed some stimulant on this
howling first of March. Good-night.--I say, would you mind giving me
the receipt for your sangaree some day?”
“Aha!” he smiled, “that’s a secret which I have never been able to worm
out of Sandy.”
And so Dunlevy and I separated practically at the point where we had
met. Sandy escorted me to the door, and as he closed it upon me, I
thought of both him and his master as two of the last representatives
of an epoch, an epoch of landed proprietors, of loyal passionate blood,
full of warmth and of color and of stately grace, into which a modern
American may never hope to enter. I, for one, gave up the attempt. With
generations of slaveholders behind him, it was not hard for Dunlevy
to become a Sybarite. I would I were mistaken, but it struck me that
the only live color of his college days were these nights of revery,
nights such as when Omar awakened. From his appearance that night, I
feared that in this respect he lived without constraint according to
his inclinations. Here surely was one man who had determined to let the
world go by.
As I walked down Holyoke Street that night to my room, I tried to
phrase the attractive impression that Dunlevy had made upon me; and
from thinking of him many times since then, I have finally found words
which describe his elusive nature, a nature leading me by eluding me.
The words were said of Grimm in his day:
“He is perhaps the only man who has the faculty of inspiring confidence
without bestowing it.”
Before the end of the session Dunlevy had left college again and
disappeared for parts unknown. I suppose a new fit of restlessness
had seized him. He must have been one of those men who are led by
successive impulses and are unable to settle upon anything. No excuse
was given and no word was left as to whether or no he would come back
until finally a storage van appeared at Beck Hall and carted away
his effects. Neither did he return to college the following fall. I
lost trace of him completely, yet I used to wonder how that man would
“finish,” as race-horse men express it; for one may study men as a
trainer does a string of horses and bet against them or bank upon them,
and it is always interesting to see who loses and who wins, who it is
that keeps whipping to the end in the face of certain defeat, and who
it is that loses hope, lags behind and drops out before the stretch is
reached. I had wagered upon Dunlevy as a man who would some day carry
his colors ahead before the judge’s stand. Perhaps I was mistaken about
him from the point of view of the world, but, friend, way down in the
bottom of your soul don’t you sometimes admit that there are other
points of view than that of the WORLD as we call it? In that case, it
may be that Dunlevy has won. Who knows?
The day after my class festivities at graduation were over, I was
seated in my room which was littered up with the remnants of packing,
when there came a knock at my door.
It was only the postman who said that he had a registered letter for
me. I signed its receipt, and sat down on my trunk to read it. The
handwriting was unfamiliar. I am going to give a copy of its entire
contents in order that my position in this matter be made perfectly
plain. Secondly, my part is to explain my own connection with the
subject of this biography, and thereby to account for its publication.
I have before my eyes this letter:
“San Diego, California,
June 22.
My Dear Sir:
In the piece of tissue paper which is folded within this letter
you will find a little silver key. It opens the lock of a wooden
safe which I am forwarding this day to your care.
I am about to ask a favor of you, if I may, as I know of no one
else of whom I might make the request concerning which I am now
to write you. I have no near relatives, so far as I know; may I
therefore take the liberty of forcing you to be my friend, because
I want some one to know what became of me.
This little wooden safe contains a book of my private papers. Now
I enclose to your order a postal draft for forty dollars, which
will pay for keeping this box in some safe-deposit vault for a
period of six years. If you do not hear from me on or before the
twenty-second day of June of that sixth year from the present you
may conclude that I shall have ceased to live. I am confident
that if I am ever able to return again to civilization it will be
within that period. If not, it will mean that I am gone beyond the
hope of return, and in that event, these papers become yours to do
with them what you will. I put aside ideas of the future as best
I can, and allow myself to be carried along by destiny.
Do not infer from the fact that I wish these documents placed in
a vault that I consider them valuable. Such is far from the case.
I want merely to be sure that in the event that you should die,
they would fall into no other’s hand in case I might return. To be
frank, they are scribblings descriptive of personal sensations and
remembrances during a long period of time, that is all.
In after years, if I do not return, read these papers, providing
you have nothing better to do. May their record awaken within you
some apprehension of a similar fate had I given you the receipt
for the strong sangaree which you drank at my room in Cambridge on
one occasion, when I must have been an object of suspicion to you.
Its maker, Sandy, my old body-servant, sails with me today. I may
yet overcome myself; but if not, this, then, is my good-bye to you.
W. W. Dunlevy.”
The next morning an express package arrived, and I carried it, box and
all, into Boston to a banking house on State Street, where I placed it
in their charge, together with the forty dollars for its six years’
safe-keeping.