Former Tenant Of His Room

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Title:     Former Tenant Of His Room
Author: Robert Cortes Holliday [More Titles by Holliday]

There are certain things which must be done, to yield their best, when one is young. For one thing, there is only one time in life to run away to sea. If you did not run away to sea when you were a lad, it is too late now for you to get any sport out of it. 'Tis something the same with living in a garret or in a hall bedroom. If you did not read "Robinson Crusoe" when you were a boy there is no use for you to read it now; you will not understand it. There are some other things you can enjoy when you are old--grandchildren, for instance. But the time to come up to a great city is when one is young. The time to walk up Broadway at night, and feel a gusto about it, and Fifth Avenue by day, is when one is young. That is an enchanted time, when it is a fine dashing thing to be doing, to live at a second-rate boarding house; when discouragement is adventure; when it is worth while even to be poor; when one makes life-long friends at sight; when young love is sipped; when courage is ever stout in one's breast; when one's illusions are virgin yet; and all's right with the world. At that season one can swell with a rich personal pride in "Shanley's" and, almost at the same time, eat one's own theatre supper in a "Dairy Lunch" room, where every customer is his own waiter as well, and where his table is the broadened arm of his chair against the wall.

Richard Day, student at the law, munched his egg sandwich (egg sandwich was the favorite dish at the "Dairy Lunches" until eggs got so high) and drank his coffee from a cup that remarkably resembled in shape a shaving mug and was decorated in similar fashion. The blocks of sugar (two for Richard) for this stimulating beverage (made out of chicory) were taken by the customer with his fingers from a heaping-full sort of great punch-bowl mounted on a pedestal in the middle of the room. It was drawn from a nickel-plated engine with glass tubes by a young man in a white coat like a barber's, who served it, with crullers, piece of pie, or sandwich, across a kind of little bar at the rear end of the long room.

Day scorned the packed, parading trolley cars, and swung vigorously up the street. Far up the thoroughfare an enormous electric sign (in its size suggesting that it had been somehow brought back by Gulliver from the country of Brobdingnag and mounted here upon a sturdy little building for awful exhibition) its gigantic illuminated letters spelling "Arthur Pendennis Ten Cent Cigar," lighted the mist for blocks approaching it, and marked the north boundary of the dominion for revelry. The sidewalks were much quieter now. One of those birds of the urban night deftly wheeled his vehicle alongside our pedestrian and pulled his clattering quadruped violently back upon its haunches until it slid along the slippery pavement. "Cab, sir? Cab?" Then he whisked away again. It was not long before Richard had entered into the district of slumbering residences, and not much longer until he ran up the steps before his own door, or, speaking more literally, his own landlady's door. It is not much to mount three pairs of stairs in the brave days when one is twenty-one, and Day was in the little room, where, rich only in the glory of his rising sun, in his youth, he weathered it so long.

This apartment was the width of the dark hall, which was face to face with it, about fourteen feet long, and furnished in tune, so to speak. An uncommonly small, old-fashioned, wooden bedstead, a bantam-size "dresser," a washstand its shorter brother, a small table or "stand," and two half-grown chairs, mature before their season, were the principal articles of furniture. The room was heated by an oil stove that had passed the age of vanity in one's appearance; it was lighted at night by a gas-jet, without a globe; by day through a single window, which occupied between a half and a third of the wall space of the front end of the room, and which balanced in decorative effect with the door at the other end. A row of books was arranged along the dresser top against the lower part of the small looking-glass. Two pictures (the property of Day), one of Lincoln and one of Roosevelt squinting in the sunlight (this is a land where every young man may hope to be President), were tacked on the walls. In company with these were a combination calendar and fire-insurance advertisement and a card displaying a lithographed upper part and idealistic legs of a blithe young woman wearing, stuck on, a short, bright skirt made of sandpaper and streaked with match-scratches, who in fancy letters was ingeniously labelled "A Striking Girl." These bits of applied art were properties of Mrs. Knoll's establishment.

Day's dresser had several small drawers and a little square door. He had one day discovered adhering to the back of this door a hardened piece of chewing gum, and from this he had deduced that a former tenant of the room had been a woman, presumably a young one (for surely there is an age after which one knows better). He sometimes speculated on the subject of the former tenant, and he was of three minds about her vocation. Sometimes he thought she had been a school-teacher, sometimes he thought an art student, and again a clerk in a store. He reconstructed her as having had red hair and having been a bit frowsy. But whatever she had been she had slept on a mighty hard little bed, and he felt something like a tenderness for her on that account.

When he had got home from the theatre, Richard sat on the edge of his bed (it seemed always somehow the most natural place in the room to sit), and smoked his pipe. One Christmas Day he and his bosom friend had gone together and bought pipes exactly alike, then each had given his to the other. Years later Day was compelled to give up smoking, and he was never exactly the same again. But when he was young the gods blessed him. He smoked his pipe out, then he slowly pulled off his shoes. That is, he pulled off one shoe and sat abstractedly a considerable while with it in his hand. He had many thoughts, mainly associated with an unknown young lady he had seen that evening at the theatre. He wished he had had on a different style of collar--and he would have had if his laundryman had kept his word. However, he thought rather sadly what booted it to him now. Then he roused himself, slowly undressed, put on his pajamas (his mother had made them for him), turned off his light, pulled up his window curtain (so the morning light would waken him), and got into bed.

Richard fell into a great many adventures in his night's sleep. He fought bandits, with never any cartridges in his gun; he travelled across plains that appeared to be constructed on the principle of a treadmill; he visited sundry peculiar places and did divers queer things with solemnity and without surprise. After a while it seemed to him that he was somewhere talking with, or rather to, the former tenant of his room. But the former tenant did not have red hair; her hair was the loveliest brown; nor was she the least bit frowzy; she was the very opposite extreme to that. Nor clerk nor teacher nor student was she. She was a bright princess. Her complexion had rather more of the rose than of the lily. Her pure and eloquent blood spoke in her cheeks. She and the lady he had seen at the theatre were one and the same person. He could not make out exactly how he came to know she was the former tenant, but that seemed to be considered so very well understood he felt ashamed to speak about it.

He was saying to her some of the cleverest things he had ever heard. He surprised himself as he listened to himself; and he was much elated; for if ever he wished to speak well, now was the time. Now Day was really a very clever fellow, as well as a comely one (this is only a story of his youth, but in after life he became a distinguished man), and, like all very clever fellows, he was never perfectly happy except when his talents were recognized and appreciated. Here in his dream he had come into his own. It was a night to be marked with a white stone. One of the things that particularly impressed him in this dream was his impression that it was not a dream.

In the morning it was always colder in Day's room than at night, and always it seemed somehow lonesomer. It was bare then, and not cozy. To come directly from such an especially comfortable dream into the cold, grey dawn, and find one's window opaque with frost and one's breath like steam in the air, requires a little time for one to adjust oneself to the transition. Richard lay a little time generating courage to get up. He did not immediately shake off his dream entirely; but crumbs of it stuck to his mind, like the last of a fine cake on the face. But it was as if his cake had turned cold in the mouth. He squirmed in bed with embarrassment when he reviewed those clever things, on which he had so plumed himself, that he had said to the former tenant. They were so very poor and flat that he tried to stop his mind against the recollection of them. And even the former tenant herself, as she faded now more into the night, and he came more out into the morning, was like Cinderella as she fled from the hall back to her kitchen. But Richard caught up the crystal slipper that remained to him and in his bosom bore it forth into the day.

[The end]
Robert Cortes Holliday's essay: Former Tenant Of His Room

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