MISS TEETUM'S LONG TABLE
The prying sun peeped through the dingy curtains of Fred's bedroom on
the morning after Oliver's revels, stencilling a long slant of yellow
light down its grimy walls, and awaking our young hero with a start.
Except for the shattered remnants of the basins and pitchers that he
saw as he looked around him, and the stringy towels, still wet, hanging
over the backs of the chairs, he would not have recognized it as the
same room in which he had met such brilliant company the night
before--so kindly a glamour does the night throw over our follies.
With the vision of the room and its tokens of their frolic came an
uneasy sense of an unpleasant remembrance. The thrill of his own
triumph no longer filled his heart; only the memory of the uproar
remained. As he caught sight of the broken pieces of china still
littering the carpet, and recalled McFudd's sprawling figure, a slight
color suffused his cheek.
The room itself, in the light of day, was not only cold and uninviting,
but so bare of even the commonest comforts that Oliver shivered. The
bottoms were half out of the chairs; the painted wash-stand stood on a
square of chilly oil-cloth; the rusty grate and broken hearth were
unswept of their ashes; the carpet patched and threadbare. He wondered,
as he studied each detail, how Miss Teetum could expect her boarders to
be contented in such quarters.
He saw at a glance how much more cosey and restful the room might be
made with the addition of a few touches here and there; a colored print
or two--a plaster cast--a bit of cheap stuff or some gay-colored
cushions. It surprised him, above all, to discover that Fred, who was
studying art and should, therefore, be sensitive to such influences,
was willing to live amid such desolate surroundings.
When he stepped out into the square hall, the scene of the night's
revelry, and glanced about him, the crude bareness and reckless
disorder that the merciful glow of the gas-light and its attendant
shadows had kindly concealed, stood out in bold relief under the white
light of the day now streaming through an oval skylight immediately
above the piano. The floor was strewn with the various properties of
the night's performance--overturned stools, china mugs, bits of
lemon-peel, stumps of cigars, and stray pipes; while scattered about
under the piano and between the legs of the chairs, and even upon the
steps of the staircase, were the pieces of coal which Fog-horn Cranch
and Waller, who held the scuttle, had pounded into bits when they
produced that wild jangle which had added so much of dignity and power
to the bass notes of the Dead Man's Chorus.
These cold facts aroused in Oliver a sense of repugnance which he could
not shake off. It was as if the head of some jolly clown of the night
before had been suddenly thrust through the canvas of the tent in broad
daylight, showing the paint, the wrinkles beneath, the yellow teeth,
and the coarse mouth.
Oliver was about to turn back to Fred's room, this feeling of revolt
strong upon him, when his attention was arrested by a collection of
drawings that covered almost every square inch of the ceiling. To his
astonishment he discovered that what in the smoke of the night before
he had supposed to be only hasty sketches scrawled over the white
plaster, were in reality, now that he saw them in a clearer atmosphere,
effective pictures in pastel, oil, and charcoal. That the basis of
these cartoons was but the grimy stain made by the water which had
beaten through the rickety sash during the drive and thrash of winter
storms, flooding the whitewashed ceiling and trickling down the
side-walls in smears of brown rust, did not lessen their value in his
eyes.
Closer inspection showed him that these discolorations--some round or
curved, others straight or angular--had been altered and amended as the
signatures indicated by the deft pencils of Waller, Fred, Bowdoin, and
the others, into flying Cupids, Dianas, Neptunes, and mermaids fit to
grace the ceiling of a salon if properly enlarged; while the
up-and-down smears had suggested the opportunity for caricaturing half
the boarders of the house. Every fresh leak and its accompanying stains
evidently presented a new problem to the painters, and were made the
subject of prolonged study and much consultation before a brush was
permitted to touch them, the point apparently being to help the
discolorations express themselves with the fewest possible touches.
In addition to these decorations overhead, Oliver found, framed in on
the cleaner plaster of the side-walls, between broad bands of black
paint, several taking bits of landscape in color and black and white;
stretches of coast with quaint boats and dots of figures; winter wood
interiors with white plaster for snow and scrapings of charcoal for
tree-trunks, each one marked with that sure crispness of touch which
denotes the master-hand. Moreover, the panels of all the doors, as well
as their jambs and frames, were ornamented with sketches in all
mediums, illustrating incidents in the lives of the various boarders
who occupied the rooms below, and who--so Fred told him
afterward--stole into this sacred spot on the sly, to gloat over the
night's work whenever a new picture was reported and the rightful
denizens were known to be absent.
As he stood absorbed before these marvels of brush and pencil,
scrutinizing each one in turn, his sense of repulsion for the debris on
the floor gave way to a feeling of enthusiasm. Not only were the
sketches far superior to any he had ever seen, but the way in which
they were done and the uses of the several mediums were a revelation to
him. It was only when Fog-horn Cranch's big voice roused him to
consciousness that he realized where he was. The auctioneer was coming
out of his room, resplendent in a striped suit, gaiters, and white
necktie--this being his real-estate day.
"My dear fellow," Cranch shouted, bringing his hand down on Oliver's
shoulder, "do you know you've got a voice like an angel's?"
Before Oliver could reply, My Lord Cockburn joined them, his first word
one of pleasure at meeting him, and his second a hope that he would
know him better; then Fred ran out, flinging on his coat and laughing
as he came. Under these combined influences of praise and good-cheer
Oliver's spirits rose and his blood began once more to surge through
his veins. With his old-time buoyancy he put his arm through Fred's,
while the two tramped gayly down the four flights of stairs to be
ushered into the long, narrow, stuffy dining-room on the basement
floor, there to be presented to the two Misses Teetum, who as the young
men entered bent low over their plates in unison. This perfunctory
salute our young gentleman acknowledged by bowing grandly in return,
after which he dropped into a seat next to Fred's--his back to a tin
box filled with plates, placed over the hot-air register--drew out a
damp napkin from a bone ring, and took a bird's-eye view of the table
and its occupants.
The two Misses Teetum sat one at either end--Miss Ann, thin, severe,
precise; Miss Sarah, stout, coy, and a trifle kittenish, as doubtless
became a young woman of forty-seven, and her sister's junior by eight
years. Miss Ann had evidently passed the dead-line of middle age, and
had given up the fight, and was fast becoming a very prim and very
proper old lady, but Miss Sarah, being out of range, could still smile,
and nod her head, and shake her curls, and laugh little, hollow,
girlish laughs, and otherwise disport herself in a light and kittenish
way, after the manner of her day and age. All of which betrayed not
only her earnest desire to please, but her increasing anxiety to get in
under matrimonial cover before one of Father Time's sharpshooters
picked her off, and thus ended her youthful career.
The guests seated on either side of these two presiding goddesses,
Oliver was convinced, as he studied the double row of faces, would have
stretched the wondering eyelids of Kennedy Square to their utmost
limits.
Old Mr. Lang, who with his invalid wife occupied the room immediately
below Fred's, and who had been so nearly drowned out the night before
because of McFudd's acrobatic tendencies, sat on Fred's left. Properly
clothed and in his right mind, he proved to be a most delightful old
gentleman, with gold spectacles and snow-white side-whiskers, and a
welcoming smile for everyone who entered. Fred said that the smile
never wavered even when the old gentleman had been up all night with
his wife.
Across the table, with her eye-glasses trained on Oliver, half
concealed by a huge china "compoteer" (to quote the waitress), and at
present filled with last week's fruit, caulked with almonds, sat Mrs.
Southwark Boggs--sole surviving relic of S. B., Esq. This misfortune
she celebrated by wearing his daguerreotype, set in plain gold, as a
brooch with which she fastened her crocheted collar. She was a thin,
faded, funereal-looking person, her body encased in a black silk dress,
which looked as if it had been pressed and ironed over night, and her
hands in black silk mitts which reached to her knuckles.
On Mrs. Boggs's right sat Bates--a rising young lawyer with political
tendencies--one of the first men to cut his hair so "Zou-Zou" that it
stood straight up from his forehead; and next to him Morgan, the
editor, who pored over manuscript while his coffee got cold; and then
Nelson, and Webster, and Cummings all graded in Miss Ann's mind as
being eight, or ten, or twelve-dollar-a-week men, depending on the
rooms that they occupied, and farther along, toward Miss Sarah, Cranch
and Cockburn--five-dollar boys these (Fred was another), with the
privilege of lighting their own coke fires, and of trimming the wicks
and filling the bulbs of their own burning-fluid lamps. And away down
in the far corner, crumpled up in his chair, crouched the cheery little
hunchback, Mr. Crumbs, who kept a book-stall on Astor Place, where
Bayard Taylor, Irving, Halleck, Bryant, and many another member of the
Century Club used to spend their late afternoons delving among the old
volumes on his shelves.
All these regular boarders, including Fog-horn Cranch and Fred,
breakfasted at eight o'clock. Waller, the painter, and Tomlins, the
swell, breakfasted at nine. As to that descendant of the Irish kings,
Mr. Cornelius McFudd, he rose at ten, or twelve, or two, just as the
spirit (and its dilutions of the night before) moved or retarded him,
and breakfasted whenever Miss Ann or Miss Sarah, who had presided
continuously at the coffee-urn from eight to ten, could spare one of
her two servants to carry a tray to his room.
Last and by no means least, with her eyes devouring every expression
that flitted across the new arrival's face, there beamed out beside
Miss Ann, a tail, willowy young person, whom Fred, in answer to an
inquiring lifting of Oliver's eyebrows, designated as the belle of the
house. This engaging young woman really lived with her mother, in the
next street, but flitted in and out, dining, or breakfasting, or
spending a week at a time with her aunts, the Misses Teetum, whenever
an opportunity offered--the opportunity being a vacant and non-paying
room, one of which she was at the time enjoying.
This fair damsel, who was known to the boarders on the top floor as
"our Phemy," and to the world at large as Miss Euphemia Teetum--the
real jewel in her name was Phoebe, but she had reset it--had been
especially beloved, so Fred informed Oliver, by every member of the
club except Waller, who, having lived in boarding-houses all his life,
understood her thoroughly. Her last flame--the fire was still
smouldering--had been the immaculate Tomlins, who had won her heart by
going into raptures, in one of his stage whispers, over the classic
outlines of her face. This outburst resulted in Miss Euphemia appearing
the following week in a silk gown, a Greek fillet and no hoops--a
costume which Waller faithfully portrayed on the side-wall of the attic
the night of her appearance--the fillet being reproduced by a strip of
brass which the artist had torn from his easel and nailed to the
plaster, and the classic curves of her hair by a ripple of brown paint.
This caricature nearly provoked a riot before the night was over, the
whole club, including even the fun-loving McFudd, denouncing. Waller's
act as an outrage. In fact, the Hibernian himself had once been so
completely taken off his feet--it was the first week of his stay--by
the winning ways of the young lady, that Miss Ann had begun to have
high hopes of Euphemia's being finally installed mistress in one of
those shadowy estates which the distinguished Hibernian described with
such eloquence. That these hopes did not materialize was entirely due
to Cockburn, who took pains to enlighten the good woman upon the
intangible character of the Hibernian's possessions, thus saving the
innocent maiden from the clutches of the bold, bad adventurer. At
least, that had been Cockburn's account of it when he came upstairs.
But it was at dinner that same night--for Oliver at Fred's pressing
invitation had come back to dinner--that the full galaxy of guests and
regulars burst upon our hero. Then came not only Miss Euphemia Teetum
in a costume especially selected for Oliver's capture, but a person
still more startling and imposing--so imposing, in fact, that when she
entered the room one-half of the gentlemen present made little backward
movements with the legs of their chairs, as if intending to rise to
their feet in honor of her presence.
This prominent figure in fashionable life, who had now settled herself
on the right of Miss Ann--the post of honor at the table--and who was
smiling in so gracious and condescending a manner as her eye lighted on
the several recipients of her favor, was none other than the
distinguished Mrs. Schuyler Van Tassell, of Tarrytown, another bird of
passage, who had left her country-seat on the Hudson to spend the
winter months in what she called the delights of "upper-tandem." She
belonged to an ancient family--or, at least, her husband did--he was
under the sod, poor soul, and therefore at peace--and, having inherited
his estate--a considerable one--was to be treated with every
distinction.
These several personages of low and high degree interested our young
gentleman quite as much as our young gentleman interested them. He made
friends with them all--especially with the ladies, who all agreed that
he was a most charming and accomplished youth. This good opinion became
permanent when Oliver had paid each in turn the compliment of rising
from his seat when any one of them entered the room, as much a habit
with the young fellow as the taking off of his hat when he came into a
house, but which was so rare a courtesy at Miss Teetum's that each
recipient appropriated the compliment as personal to herself.
These sentiments of admiration were shared, and to an alarming degree,
by Miss Euphemia herself, who, on learning later that Oliver had
decided to occupy half of Fred's room through the winter, had at once
determined to remain during the week, the better to lay siege to his
heart. This resolution, it is fair to Oliver to say, she abandoned
before dinner was over, when her experienced eye detected a certain
amused if not derisive smile playing around the corners of Oliver's
mouth; a discovery which so impressed the young woman that she left him
severely alone ever after.
And so it was that Oliver unpacked his trunk--the same old hair trunk,
studded with brass nails, that had held his father's wardrobe at
college--spread out and tacked up the various knick-knacks which his
mother and Sue and Miss Clendenning had given him when he had left the
old home, and began to make himself comfortable on the top floor of
Miss Teetum's boarding-house on Union Square.