Idolatry: Chapter 3

Chapter 3

A MAY MORNING.

King Arthur, in his Bohemian days, carried an adamantine shield, the
gift of some fairy relative. Not only was it impenetrable, but, so
intolerable was its lustre, it overthrew all foes before the lance's
point could reach them. Observing this, the chivalric monarch had a
cover made for it, which he never removed save in the face of
superhuman odds.

Here is an analogy. The imaginative reader may look upon our enchanted
facet-mirror as too glaringly simple and direct a source of facts to
suit the needs of a professed romance. Be there left, he would say,
some room for fancy, and even for conjecture. Let the author seem
occasionally to consult with his companion, gracefully to defer to his
judgment. Bare statement, the parade of indisputable evidence, is well
enough in law, but appears ungentle in a work of fiction.

How just is this mild censure! how gladly are its demands conceded!
Let dogmatism retire, and blossom, flowers of fancy, on your yielding
stems! Henceforward the reader is our confidential counsellor. We
will pretend that our means of information are no better than other
writers'. We will uniformly revel in speculation, and dally with
imaginative delights; and only when hard pressed for the true path
will we snatch off the veil, and let forth for a moment a redeeming
ray.

In this generous mood, we pass through the partition between No. 27
and No. 29. In the matter of bedchambers--even hotelbedchambers--there
can be great diversity. That we were in just now was close and
unwholesome, and wore an air of feverishness and disorder. Here, on
the contrary, the air is fresh and brisk, for the breeze from Boston
harbor--slightly flavored, it is true, by its journey across the
northern part of the city--has been blowing into the room all night
long. Here are some trunks and carpet-bags, well bepasted with the
names of foreign towns and countries, famous and infamous. One of the
trunks is a bathing-tub, fitted with a cover--an agreeable promise of
refreshment amidst the dust and weariness of travel. A Russia-leather
travelling-bag lies open on the table, disgorging an abundant armament
of brushes and combs and various toilet niceties. Mr. Helwyse must be
a dandy.

Cheek by jowl with the haversack lies a cylindrical case of the same
kind of leather, with a strap attached, to sling over the shoulder.
This, perhaps, contains a telescope. It would not be worth mentioning,
save that our prophetic vision sees it coming into use by and by. Not
to analyze too closely, everything in this room speaks of life,
health, and movement. In spite of smallness, bareness, and angularity,
it is fit for a May morning to enter, and expand to full-grown day.

It is now about half past four, and the crisp new sunshine, just above
ground, has clambered over the window-sill, taken a flying leap across
the narrow floor, and is chuckling full in the agreeable face asleep
upon the pillow. The face, feeling the warmth, and conscious, through
its closed eyelids, of the light, presently stretches its eyebrows,
then blinks, and finally yawns,--Ah--h! Thirty-two even, white teeth,
in perfect order; a great, red, healthy tongue, and a round, mellow
roar, the parting remonstrance of the sleepy god, taking flight for
the day. Thereupon a voice, fetched from some profounder source than
the back of the head,--

"Steward! bring me my--Oh! A land-lubber again, am I!"

Mr. Balder Helwyse now sits up in bed, his hair and beard,--which are
extraordinarily luxuriant, and will be treated at greater length
hereafter,--his hair and beard in the wildest confusion. He stares
about him with a pair of well-opened dark eyes, which contrast
strangely with his fair Northern complexion. Next comes a spasmodic
stretching of arms and legs, a whisking of bedclothes, and a solid
thump of two feet upon the floor. Another survey of the room, ending
with a deep breathing in of the fresh air and an appreciative smack of
the lips.

"O nose, eyes, ears, and all my other godlike senses and faculties!
what a sensation is this of Mother Earth at sunrise! Better, seems to
me, than ocean, beloved of my Scandinavian forefathers. Hear those
birds! look at those divine trees, and the tall moist grass round
them! By my head! living is a glorious business!--What, ho! slave,
empty me here that bath-tub, and then ring the bell."

The slave--a handsome, handy fellow, unusually docile, inseparable
from his master, whose life-long bondsman he was, and so much like him
in many ways (owing, perhaps, to the intimacy always subsisting
between the two), that he had more than once been confounded with
him,--this obedient menial--

No! not even for a moment will we mislead our reader. Are we not sworn
confidants? What is he to think, then, of this abrupt introduction,
unheralded, unexplained? Be it at once confessed that Mr. Helwyse
travelled unattended, that there was no slave or other person of any
kind in the room, and that this high-sounding order of his was a mere
ebullition of his peculiar humor.

He was a philosopher, and was in the habit of making many of his
tenets minister to his amusement, when in his more sportive and genial
moods. Not to exhaust his characteristics too early in the story, it
need only be observed here that he held body and soul distinct, and so
far antagonistic that one or the other must be master; furthermore,
that the soul's supremacy was the more desirable. Whether it were also
invariable and uncontested, there will be opportunity to find out
later. Meantime, this dual condition was productive of not a little
harmless entertainment to Mr. Helwyse, at times when persons less
happily organized would become victims of ennui. Be the conditions
what they might, he was never without a companion, whose ways he knew,
and whom he was yet never weary of questioning and studying. No
subject so dull that its different aspects, as viewed from soul and
from body, would not give it piquancy. No question so trivial that its
discussion on material and on spiritual grounds would not lend it
importance. Nor was any enjoyment so keen as not to be enhanced by the
contrast of its physical with its psychical phase.

Waking up, therefore, on this May morning, and being in a charming
humor, he chose to look upon himself as the proprietor of a
body-servant, and to give his orders with patrician imperiousness. The
obedient menial, then,--to resume the thread,--sprang upon the
tub-trunk, whipped off the lid, and discharged the contents upon the
bed in a twinkling. This done, he stepped to the bell-rope, and lent
it a vigorous jerk, soon answered by a brisk tapping at the door.

"Please, sir, did you ring?"

"Indeed I did, my dear. Are you the pretty chambermaid?"

This bold venture is met by silence, only modified by a low delighted
giggle. Presently,--"Did you want anything, sir, please?"

"Ever so many things, my girl; more than my life is long enough to
tell! First, though, I want to apologize for addressing you from
behind a closed door; but circumstances which I can neither explain
nor overcome forbid my opening it. Next, two pails of the best cold
water at your earliest convenience. Hurry, now, there's a Hebe!"

"Very good, sir," giggles Hebe, retreating down passage.

It is to be supposed that it was the plebeian body-servant that
carried on this unideal conversation, and that the patrician soul had
nothing to do with it. The ability to lay the burden of lapses from
good taste, and other goods, upon the shoulders of the flesh, is
sometimes convenient and comforting.

Balder Helwyse, master and man, turns away from the door, and catches
sight of a white-robed, hairy-headed reflection in the looking-glass,
the phantom face of which at once expands in a genial expression of
mirth; an impalpable arm is outstretched, and the mouth seems thus to
speak:--

"Stick to your bath, my good fellow, and the evil things of this life
shall not get hold of you. Water is like truth,--purifying,
transparent; a tonic to those fouled and wearied with the dust and
vanity of this transitional phenomenon called the world. Patronize it!
be thy acquaintance with it constant and familiar! Remember, my dear
Balder, that this slave of thine is the medium through which something
better than he (thyself, namely) is filtered to the world, and the
world to thee. Go to, then! if the filter be foul, shall not that
which is filtered become unclean also?"

Here the rhetorical phantom was interrupted by the sound of a very
good violin, touched with unusual skill, in the next room. The phantom
vanished, but Mr. Helwyse seated himself softly upon the bed,
listening with full enjoyment to every note; his very toes seeming to
partake of his appreciation. Music is the mysterious power which makes
body and soul--master and man--thrill as one string. The musician
played several bars, beautiful in themselves, but unconnected; and
ever and anon there sounded a discordant note, like a smirch upon a
fair picture. The execution, however, showed a master hand, and the
themes betrayed the soul of a true musician, albeit tainted with some
subtile deformity.

"Heard him last night, and fell asleep, dreaming of a man with the
brain of a devil and an angel's heart.--Drop in on him presently, and
have him down to breakfast. If young, shall be our brother,--so long
as there's anything in him. If--as I partly suspect--old, and a
father, marry his daughter. But no; such a fiddler as he can't be
married, unless unhappily." Mr. Helwyse runs his hands dreamily
through his tangled mane, and shakes it back. If philosophical, he
seems also to be romantic and imaginative, and impressionable by other
personalities. It is, to be sure, unfair to judge a man from such
unconsidered words as he may let fall during the first half-hour after
waking up in the morning; were it otherwise, we should infer that,
although he might take a genuine interest in whomever he meets, it
would be too analytical to last long, except where the vein was a very
rich one. He would pick the kernel out of the nut, but, that done,
would feel no sentimental interest in the shell. Too much of this! and
yet who can help drawing conclusions (and not always incorrectly) from
the first sight and sound of a new acquaintance?

There is a knock at the door, and Mr. Helwyse calls out, "Hullo? Ah!
the cold water, emblem of truth. Thank you, Hebe; and scamper away as
fast as you can, for I'm going to open the door!"

We also will retire, fastidious reader, and employ the leisure
interval in packing an imaginary carpet-bag for a short journey. Our
main business, during the next few days, is with Mr. Helwyse, and
since there will be no telling what becomes of him after that, he must
be followed up pretty closely. A few days does not seem much for the
getting a satisfactory knowledge of a man; nevertheless, an hour,
rightly used, may be ample. If he will continue his habit of thinking
aloud, will affect situations tending to bring out his leading traits
of character; if we may intrude upon him, note-book in hand, in all
his moods and crises,--with all this in addition to discretionary use
of the magic mirror,--it will be our own fault if Mr. Helwyse be not
turned inside out. Properly speaking, there is no mystery about men,
but only a great dulness and lethargy in our perceptions of them. The
secret of the universe is no more a secret than is the answer to a
school-boy's problem. A mathematician will draw you a triangle and a
circle, and show you the trigonometrical science latent therein. But a
profounder mathematician would do as much with the equation man!

While Mr. Helwyse is still lingering over his toilet, his neighbor the
fiddler, whom he had meant to ask to breakfast, comes out of his room,
violin-box in hand, walks along the passage-way, and is off down
stairs. An odd-looking figure; those stylish clothes become him as
little as they would a long-limbed, angular Egyptian statue. Fashion,
in some men, is an eccentricity, or rather a violence done to their
essential selves. A born fop would have looked as little at home in a
toga and sandals, as did this swarthy musician, doctor, priest, or
whatever he was, in his fashion-plate costume. Then why did he wear
it?

There are other things to be followed up before attending to that
question. But the man is gone, and Balder Helwyse has missed this
opportunity of making his acquaintance. Had he been an hour
earlier,--had any one of us, for that matter, ever been an hour
earlier or later,--who can tell how the destinies of the world would
be affected! Luckily for our peace of mind, the hypothesis involves an
impossibility.

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