Out & Proud: Gay Classics Collection. Radclyffe Hall
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edifice, half college, half lodging-house, through a large doorway, under a pointed arch. The interior was singularly ill- contrived. A lobby opened at the door, communicating with a dim corridor running through the middle of the building, parallel to the front. A fan-tracery vaulting of plaster, peeled and crumbling, ceiled the lobby. A marble stairway, with iron hand-rails, went squarely and clumsily up from the door, nearly filling the lobby.
Stillfleet led the way up-stairs.
He pointed to the fan-tracery.
“This of course reminds you of King’s College Chapel,” said he.
“Entirely,” replied I. “Pity it is deciduous!” and I brushed off from my coat several flakes of its whitewash.
The stairs landed us on the main floor of the building. Another dimly lighted corridor, answering to the one below, but loftier, ran from end to end of the building. This also was paved with marble tiles. Large Gothicish doors opened along on either side. The middle room on the rear of the corridor was two stories high, and served as chapel and lecture-room. On either side of this, a narrow staircase climbed to the upper floors.
By the half-light from the great window over the doorway where we had entered, and from a small single mullioned window at the northern end of the corridor, there was a bastard mediævalism of effect in Chrysalis, rather welcome after the bald red-brick houses without.
“How do you like it?” asked Stillfleet. “It’s not old enough to be romantic. But then it does not smell of new paint, as the rest of America does.”
We turned up the echoing corridor toward the north window. We passed a side staircase and a heavily padlocked door on the right. On the left was a class-room. The door was open. We could see a swarm of collegians buzzing for such drops of the honey of learning as they could get from a lank plant of a professor.
We stopped at. the farther door on the right, adjoining the one so carefully padlocked. It bore my friend’s. plate, —
H. STILLFLEET,
ARCHITECT.
Rubbish Palace
Stillfleet drew a great key, aimed at the keyhole, and snapped the bolt, all with a mysterious and theatrical air.
“Now,” said he, “how is your pulse?”
“Steady and full. Why shouldn’t it be?”
“Shut your eyes, then! Open sesame! Eyes tight? Enter into Rubbish Palace!”
He led me several steps forward.
“Open!” he commanded.
“Where am I?” I cried, staring about in surprise.
“City of Manhattan, corner of Mannering Place and Ailanthus Square, Chrysalis College Buildings.”
“Harry,” said I, “this is magic, phantasmagoria. Outside was the nineteenth century; here is the fifteenth. When I shut my eyes, I was in a seedy building in a busy modern town; I open them, and here I am in the Palazzo Sforza of an old Italian city, in the great chamber where there was love and hate, passion and despair, revelry and poison, long before Columbus cracked the egg.”
“It is rather a rum old place,” said Stillfleet, twisting his third moustache, and enjoying my surprise.
“Trot out your Bengal tiger. Let me swing him, and measure the dimensions.”
“Tiger and I did that long ago. It is thirty feet square and seventeen high.”
“Built for some grand college purpose, I suppose.”
“As a hall, I believe, for the dons to receive lions on great occasions. But lions and great occasions never come. So I have inherited. It is the old story. ‘Sic vos non vobis ædificatis ædes.’ How do you like it? Not too sombre, eh? with only those two narrow windows opening north?”
“Certainly not too sombre. I don’t want the remorseless day staring in upon my studies. How do I like it? Enormously. The place is a romance.”
“It is Dantesque, Byronic, Victor Hugoish.”
“Yes,” said I, looking up. “I shall be sure of rich old morbid fancies under this ceiling, with its frescoed arabesques, faded and crumbling.”
“You have a taste for the musty, then,” said Harry.
“Anything is better than the raw. The Chuzzlewit has given me enough of that. “Well, Harry, your den is my den, if you say so.”
“Yours to have and to hold while I am gone, and much romance may you find here. Let me show you the whole. Here’s my bath-room, ‘replete,’ as the advertisements say, ‘with every convenience.’ Here, alongside, is my bedroom.”
He opened doors in the wall opposite the windows.
“A gilded bedstead!” said I.
“It was Marshal Soult’s, bought cheap at his sale.”
“A yellow satin coverlet!”
“Louis Philippe’s. Citizen Sabots stole it from the Tuileries in ’48 and sold it to me.”
“But what is this dark cavern, next the bedroom?” I asked. “Where does that door at the back open?”
“Oh! that is my trash room. Those boxes contain ‘Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff.’ I was jockeyed with old masters once, as my compatriots still are. I don’t hang them up and post myself for a greenhorn.”
“But that door at the back?”
“What are you afraid of, Byng?”
“I ask for information.”
“Your voice certainly trembled. No danger. Rachel will never peer through and hiss ‘Le flambeau fume encore.’ No Lady Macbeth will march in, wringing her hands that never will be clean.”
“I hope not, I am sure.”
“It is clear you expect it. Your tone is ominous.”
“Indeed. A Palazzo Sforza style of place inspires Palazzo Sforza fancies, perhaps. But really, Harry, where does the door open?”
“It does not open, and probably will not till doomsday. It is bolted solid on my side, whatever it be on the other. It leads to a dark room.”
“A dark room! that is Otrantoish.”
“A windowless room, properly an appendage to this. But there is another door on the corridor. You may have noticed it, closed with a heavy padlock. The tenant enters there, and asks no right of way of me.”
“The tenant, who is he? I should know my next neighbor.”
“You know him already.”
“Don’t play with my curiosity. Name.”
“Densdeth.”
“Densdeth,” I repeated, aware of a slight uneasiness. “What use has he for a dark room? — here, too, in this public privacy of Chrysalis?”
“The publicity makes privacy. Densdeth says it is his store-room for books and furniture.”
“Well, why not? You speak incredulously.”
“Because there is a faint suspicion that he lies. The last janitor, an ex-servant of Densdeth’s, is dead. None now is allowed to enter there except the owner’s own man, a horrid black creature. He opens the door cautiously, and a curtain appears. He closes the door before he lifts it. Densdeth may pestle poisons, grind stilettos, sweat eagles, revel by gas-light there. What do I know?”
“You are not inquisitive, then, in Chrysalis.”
“No.