Read Ebook: The Memoirs of a Failure: with an Account of the Man and His Manuscript by Kittredge Daniel Wright

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Ebook has 620 lines and 35319 words, and 13 pages

"I don't believe that man would have the spunk to run a hundred yards. He lacks gumption. There is too much of the woman about him. Please pass the pickles."

I pondered upon this utterance as I left Crowther eating his third helping of beef steak. And I wondered which is the more noble--the courage that comes from strength or the bravery born of suffering?

There was one man, a black man, who understood Dunlevy and his condition better than we did. He was that old negro body-servant, a relic of plantation days. I saw his good, open, loyal face when I went to Dunlevy's chambers during his illness at the University of Virginia. His name was Sandy. Could I know what Sandy must have known, I might have a tale that would be better left untold.

DUNLEVY AT HARVARD.

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 Abb? 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 caf?s 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 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?

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