The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 29, March, 1860

WHITE MICE

A great many circumstances led me to decide on leaving the convenient boarding-house of Mrs. Silvernail: a house correctly described as containing several "modern improvements": improperly, as being "in the immediate vicinity of all the places of public amusement." For, as the Central Park of New York is a place of public amusement, so likewise is Barnum's Museum; and these two places being at a distance of about five miles from each other, how could any one house be in the immediate vicinity of both? But it was not upon this incompatibility that any of my objections were founded.

If I have a prejudice, it is against being talked at instead of to. Now Mrs. Silvernail, who, like the katydid of the poplar-tree, if small, was shrill, had a way of conveying instructions to her boarders by means of parables ostensibly directed at Catharine, the tall Irish serving-maid, but in reality meant for the ear of the obnoxious boarder who had lately transgressed some important statute of the house, made and provided to meet a case or cases.

A landing-place on the stairs was usually the platform selected for the delivery of a monologue, in which Catharine was always assumed to be the person addressed; although I have known instances in which that "excellent wench" was, at the time of being so conferred with, in the grocery at the corner, about half a block distant, as I could see from the window where I sat and viewed her protracting her doorway dalliance with Jeremiah Tomaters, the grocer's efficient young man.

"Catharine," my landlady would say in a loudish whisper, close by a malefactor's chamber-door, and probably when Catharine was yet far down the street,—"Catharine, who let the water in the bathroom run over just now? If the slippers he left behind him a'n't Mr. Jennings's, I declare! Boarders must be warned an' watched, elseways we shall hev all in the house afloat, 'cepting the stoves an' flat-irons, by-'n'-by. Somebody at Mrs. Moyler's acted so, and the house was like a roarin' sea, with the baby adrift in his little cradle, and the roaches a-swimmin' round. Oh, dear!"

Now Mr. Jennings was the serious boarder, who lodged in the room just over mine: a man who, from general indications, had never had a bath in his life; certainly he had never troubled the waters in that house. I was the supposed delinquent, and at me the parable was levelled.

"Catharine, whose pass-key was that you found in the door? It's a mussy we wasn't all a-murdered and a-plundered in cold blood, by the light o' the moon! Mr. Jennings's night-key it must have been, to be sure! Boarders must be warned and watched. When Mrs. Toyler's nephew's night-key was found in the door of Number Forty-Seven, the boarders all went off at daylight in an omnibus, takin' away custom and character from the house forever."

Now Mr. Jennings, the serious boarder, was always in bed and asleep long before latch-key time came round; and even supposing he ever had let himself in by means of that mischievous little convenience, he would as soon have thought of taking the door up to bed with him as of leaving the key in it. The parable was intended for the hearing of a young man who occupied the room opposite mine, and who, being connected with clubs, came home nobody ever knew when or in what condition, but had red eyes o' mornings and a general odor of the convivial kind.

Then, again, Mrs. Silvernail had a way of being always about the doors of the rooms, and a faculty, as I thought, of hovering near several of them at one and the same moment. There are men who will turn the least promising circumstance to advantage,—even that of being listened at through a keyhole, while they discourse to themselves about affairs connected with their most cherished and secret designs. One Captain Dunnitt, who lived in the house before I came, adroitly made his account of this eavesdropping propensity of the landlady, by settling his weekly bill with a silver-mounted pistol, instead of the dollars justly due. He had been a tragedian as well as a captain, and was saturated with Shakspeare and other bards to a far greater amount than with money; and when his week came round, he used to stride up and down his room with much gnashing of teeth and other stage indications of distress, finally settling down into a chair before the table, on which he would place and replace a packet of letters and a wisp of unromantic-looking hair. Then he would take the little silver pistol from his breast, and, after the usual soliloquy of "To be or not to be," or something equally to the purpose, would point it at his temples just as the landlady came bursting into the room, begging him for all sakes not to "ruin the character of her second-best room, and the walls newly painted at that!" Remorse would then double up the manly form of Captain Dunnitt, who would fall on his knees before the landlady,—"his benefactress! his better angel!"—and then arrangements would be entered into by which he was not to commit suicide for the present, but could avail himself of the landlady's indulgence and wait for "that remittance," which was always coming, but which never came.

But there were more serious objections, even than a landlady of shrill parables and an inquiring turn of mind, to my prolonging the delights of a residence at the first-class boarding-house of Mrs. Silvernail. Not the least of these was the fact of its being a boarding-house,—a community. In such communities, from the inevitable intercourse over the social board, your circle of acquaintance is always liable to be extended rather than improved. In them there is no escape from the disinterested offers of those who would be your perpetual friends. I am still under lasting obligations to a man who, at a boarding-house in which I sojourned for but three days, forced on me a pipeful of an extremely choice and luxurious kind of tobacco, to dilate on the properties of which he came and smoked about a quarter of a pound of it in my room that very evening, and far on into the morning light. His goodness is the more impressed upon my memory, because, on the same occasion, he drank the greater part of the contents of a large willow-bound bottle of old St. Croix rum, which I had just received from a friend who had imported it direct. Then, in boarding-house communities, one's magnetism is as much at fault as that of a ship sailing up a river whose rock-bound shores are impregnated with iron elements. I knew a man who was over-magnetized to the extent of matrimony by the lady of the house,—a widow, and a shrew. He hated, or at least professed to hate her, and had ridiculous stories about her to no end; but she married him, and he still lives. Another, of a rather unsociable turn, rejected the proffered civilities of all his fellow-boarders who ever came to offer him rations of curious tobacco or to assist him in performing a libation of old and valuable Hollands. The only one of the party to whom he ever "cottoned" was the latest comer, a smoothed-out, blandulose kind of man, who smoked up all his cunning cigars, made sad havoc among his Hollanders of gin, departed from that house in an unexpected manner and his friend's best trousers, in the pockets of which he had bestowed that friend's rarest gems and gold, and is now serving out a term allotted to him in the State Prison, in recognition of the remarkable abilities displayed by him in the character of what the police call a "confidence man."

And yet there are more objectionable boarding-house acquaintances than people who insist upon sharing with you their friendship, be they "confidence men" or not. I suppose we may allow, in these advanced times, that it is something like magnetism which decides the question of affinity and its reverse. But, in granting this, I will take the liberty of observing that external and palpable facts have a considerable effect in directing the currents of magnetism. For example, and to adopt the language of scientific men, the insignificant circumstance of a person habituating himself to the partial deglutition of his knife, while partaking of food, may produce antipathetic emotions on the part of others, whom prejudice or superstition has led to regard the knife as an article designed for cutting only. This kind of outrage I allude to merely for the purpose of illustrating a case. In first-class boarding-houses, like that of Mrs. Silvernail, such rusticities have long since become traditional, and of the things that have passed away; and, indeed, so particular was that lady with regard to her knives, that, had a boarder swallowed even a part of one, he would undoubtedly have heard the deed alluded to through the keyhole of his chamber-door on the following day, in the form of a parable having for its hero the justified Mr. Jennings, our serious young man.

If external and palpable circumstances, then, are admitted to have a decided effect upon streams of magnetism, I suppose we may assume that they have also a certain power of determining impressions by themselves, without the intervention of any of the more subtile agencies whatever. The granting of this postulate will put me on quite easy terms with regard to the very positive objection entertained by me towards a certain Mr. Désolé Arcubus, who, by provision of an immutable Medo-Persic edict promulgated by Mrs. Silvernail, occupied the chair next mine at the first-rate table of that rigid expounder of boarding-house law.

Mr. Désolé Arcubus, a young man of some three or four and twenty, had no special nationality about him from which one could guess how he came by his rather uncommon names. He was reputed to be learned, particularly in the modern languages; had a profusion of long, wild hair of a greenish-drab hue, which matched his complexion exactly,—this prevalent tint being infused also into the cornea or "white" of his eye,—and, in physical proportions, was of weedy and unwholesome growth. He was not a young man of cheerful disposition. On the contrary, his deportment at table, where alone his fellow-boarders had any opportunity of observing him, was such as to induce a very general belief that his mind must have been affected by some terrible calamity; and his presence, indeed, was looked upon as undesirable by many of the guests, whose health had begun to suffer seriously from the manner in which Arcubus used to groan between his instalments of food. Sometimes, in the interval between the soup and the solids, he would lean his elbows upon the table, and, burying his face in his hands, so that his long, sad hair swept the board, would abandon himself for a brief space to private despondency, until the boiled leg of mutton brought with it a necessity for renewed action.

Nor was the social feeling of distrust of this unhappy young man allayed when the party learned, through a boarder of detective instincts, that Mr. Désolé Arcubus was an enthusiast in scientific pursuits, and that the "romance of a poor young man," as shadowed out by him, was no romance at all, but an unpleasant reality. Toxicology was the branch of science to which Mr. Arcubus had for some time past been devoting his mind. For fourteen hours a day he worked assiduously in the laboratory of an eminent analytical chemist, whose practice in connection with the coroner was of a flourishing and increasing kind, owing to the growing taste for suicide, and the preference given to poisons over any other means for accomplishing that irrevocable wrong. In this chamber of horrors,—a court of which the tests were the stern, incorruptible ordinances of Nature,—he had already gone steadily through a course which gave him a mastery over the secrets of the relative poisons, with which he laughed secretly now, and played as securely as a child might with a dog-rose of whose thorns he had been made aware. But of late, his haggard features, and the start with which he would wake into life when a guest haply plucked a flower from the bouquets on the table, or when the handmaiden came round to him with a dish of leguminous vegetables, could readily have been traced by a clairvoyant to associations connected with the ghastly belladonna and with the deadly bean of St. Ignatius the Martyr. For Mr. Arcubus had now arrived at the investigation of the positive poisons,—a fact which might have revealed itself to the man of science by the general narcotico-acrid expression into which he had settled down bodily; while the most casual observer might have gathered from his incoherent contributions to the table-talk that some noxious drug was envenoming the cup of his life.

He had a way of thinking aloud, and, as his thoughts always ran on the subject of his studies, the expression of them sometimes dovetailed curiously with the general conversation.

"Miss Rocket will not come down to dinner, poor thing!" said Mrs. Silvernail, in her choicest table-manner. "She has lost her beautiful Angola kitten. It slipped into the glass globe, this morning, among the gold-fishes, and was drowned."

"Digested in water, several of its constituents are dissolved," said Mr. Arcubus, in a husky voice, looking wildly at the picture on his plate.

"You have a spécialité for puddings, I perceive, Madam," remarked a smiling old gentleman, a new-comer, addressing himself to the hostess; "may I ask now of what this very excellent one is composed?"

"Sulphate of lime, potash, oil, resin, extractive matter, gluten, et cetera, et cetera," put in Mr. Arcubus, still following out his train of thought.

"During the process of evaporation, a black substance is precipitated," continued he; and at that very moment, the small colored boy, running to pour out some water for the wild boarder, who had just arrived in an excited condition from a rowing match, caught his foot in the carpet, and came to the floor with a crash.

"Black oxide of Mercury, called Ethiops per se," pursued Mr. Arcubus, grappling with his tangled hair.

"Do just try a drop or two of this Hollands of mine in that iced water; it is positively dangerous to drink it so," said an attentive boarder to Mrs. Silvernail, who certainly did look warm.

"Absorbs oxygen readily, when brought to a red heat," said Mr. Arcubus, abstractedly, as he pulled at his long fingers and made their joints crack.

"Who is the tall lady who dined here yesterday with Miss Rocket, and talked so enthusiastically about woman's rights?" inquired the serious boarder of Mrs. Silvernail.

"Prepared by deflagration in a crucible, one part of nitre with two of powdered tartar," proceeded Mr. Arcubus.

"What do you think of that sample of mixed tobacco I gave you to try?" asked the wild boarder of another, whom Mrs. Silvernail used to speak of with fear and doubt. "When heated, it readily sublimes in the form of a dense white vapor," said Mr. Arcubus, confidently, "disagreeably affecting the nose and eyes."

"I hope you are not going to bring another dog into the house, Mr. Puglock," remonstrated Mrs. Silvernail, addressing the wild boarder, to whose conversation she had been lending a sharp ear. "Re'lly now, I must restrict the number of dogs; we have three here already, I believe."

"There is a strong analogy between the virus injected into wounds made by the teeth of a rabid dog and that found in the poison-apparatus of venomous snakes," brought in Mr. Arcubus, diving his fork truculently into a ripe tomato.

This last observation of Mr. Arcubus, together with the fact that the blade of his knife had manifestly turned black, while all the other blades at table were as bright as silver, decided me. I packed up my portmanteau and writing-case that evening, and, having settled with my wondering landlady, to whom I accounted for my sudden departure by pleading expediency as to important affairs, took leave of that estimable widow, and drove away to a distant hotel, from which I sallied forth early next morning to look for lodgings,—furnished lodgings for single gentlemen, without board,—for against boarding-houses I had set my face forever.

A peculiar feature of life in lodgings in New York, as in other large cities, is the incomparable solitude attainable in that blessed state of deliverance from promiscuous "board." One may dwell for a twelvemonth in lodgings for single gentlemen, without incurring the obligation of knowing by sight, or even by name, the lodger who occupies the very room opposite to his, on the same landing. Fifty lodgers may have successively lived in those "apartments" during the twelve months, on the same terms of perfect isolation from one who would rather mind his own business than make any inquiries regarding theirs. And so it is, that, of all the stage-pieces which have achieved popularity in our day, none is more faithful to the facts than the often-repeated one of "Box and Cox"; yet, but for the exigencies of the drama, which, of course, has for its principal object the development of a plot, there would have been no necessity whatever for bringing Box on a footing of acquaintance with Cox,—still less for attributing to either of them an idea of his landlady's name.

For several months I lived contentedly in the house selected by me, up one pair of stairs, in a room looking out into a busy street,—a street so narrow, that the trees at one side of it, whenever a reviving breeze brought with it a subject for greeting and congratulation, shook hands in quite a friendly manner with those at the other. To illustrate the isolation of a residence in these lodgings, I may as well state, that, during all the time of my sojourn there, I never arrived at the knowledge of my landlady's name. It was not graven upon the house-door, and, as a knowledge of it was of no immediate consequence to any of my occupations, nor likely to be, I never asked about it from the old woman who kept the rooms in order, and to whom I seldom spoke, except upon the weekly occasion of handing to her the amount due to the landlady, with whom I never had any interview after the day I agreed with her for the lodgings. I believe there was a landlord,—if that be the proper term to apply to a man who is the husband of a landlady, and nothing else. From my window I once observed a man who might have been the landlord, a man of subdued appearance, accompanying the lady of the house to church. Subsequently, as I came in one evening rather earlier than usual, the same person was leaning against the railings by the hall-door, smoking a cigar. He greeted me as I passed in, addressing me in an interrogative manner with one word, the only one I ever heard him utter,—

"Owasyerelthbin?"

To which, as I supposed him to be a foreigner, unacquainted with the English tongue, I replied at random in the only word of German of which I happen to be master,—

"Yaw!"

And this was the only communication I ever had with people of the house, excepting occasional conversations with the dust-colored old woman who cleaned the windows and swept the floors; while, with regard to a dozen or two of lodgers who succeeded each other from time to time in the other disposable rooms of the house, I never saw one of them, nor was acquainted with them otherwise than by footstep,—and that rather infelicitously at one time, in the case of something which went either upon crutches or wooden legs, and which occupied the room immediately over mine. This was in charming contrast with life at Mrs. Silvernail's, in its freedom from parables, and from the uncared-for society of Miss Rocket's guests; likewise from that of the serious and vicious boarders, and above all of the poisonous young man.

A day came for cleaning my windows, and, as it rained heavily, I could not give the old woman a clear stage by going out for a couple of hours, but told her to clean away and be as lively as she could, while I sat there and wrote. Lodgers, she told me, as she polished up the brightening panes, came and went week after week, so fast that she forgot one when another came, and never knew any of their names. She had an eye for character, though, and told me the peculiarities of some of them in a quaint way, nailing her sentences, now and then, with odd, hard words, put in independently of the general text.

"And who lives in the room just under mine? Somebody who raises plants, I see,—unless the green things on the balcony belong to the house."

"A gentleman as keeps emself quite to emself. Lonesome and friendless, I reckon, for he looks but poorly. Plants out queer sasses in boxes all the time, and some of 'em on the balcoany itself. Guess he makes kinder tea of 'em, or root-drink. Decoctifies."

"And who in the room opposite, on this floor?"

"Empty now. Two dark-featured little gentlemen had it for a fortnight,– Jews, I reckon,—and as like one another as two spots of dirt on this 'ere pane of glass. Spoke a hard-biled kind of tongue, and was furriners, I guess. Polyanders."

The vacant room would just suit De Vonville, who had arrived a few days before from abroad. I told him of it, and he came in the next day, bag and baggage, a portion of which latter was curious and uncommon.

De Vonville, with whom I had lived in lodgings two or three years previously, was a Belgian and a savant, and a man of rare companionable qualities besides. Professionally, I believe, he called himself a naturalist. He had already roamed over the greater part of America, North and South, investigating the mysteries of Nature, especially of the animal kingdom, and contributing, as he went, many specimens of rare animals to the principal collections of Europe. His latest adventures took him through Africa and the East, whence he brought to New York a number of living creatures of many species, all of which, however, he had shipped for Havre before I met him, with the exception of two or three of the least disreputable kinds, which he meant to keep about him as pets. The most valued of these treasures were a small animal called a Mangouste, and a cage containing a family of white mice.

These white mice were greatly prized by De Vonville, on account of the rare manner in which they were marked, their paws and muzzles being of a perfect jet black. They were quite tame and familiar; but, on the approach of a cat, or any other cause for alarm, the whole family would concentrate their energies in a very remarkable way into one piercing squeak.

The Mangouste, an animal somewhat resembling a ferret, but more nearly allied to the Nilotic ichneumon of Egypt, was a marvellously lithe and active little creature, perfectly tame, and coming as readily as a dog to his name, "Mungo," except when overfed, when he would sleep sometimes for hours, rolled up at the bottom of his cage, or in some dark corner of the room. There were personal reminiscences connected with Mungo which rendered him particularly valuable to De Vonville, whom he had often saved from the stings of the noxious vermin to be encountered by those who dwell in tents. His instinct was for creeping things, though he looked as if he could have dined contentedly on a brace of white mice. One piece of mischief he committed, during the few days he was allowed to run about the rooms: he gnawed holes at the bottom of all the doors, through which he could let himself in and out. He used to lie in the sun, on my table, as I sat reading; and was generally companionable and trustworthy, notwithstanding his insidious look.

Seeing the interest I took in his small menagerie, De Vonville begged me to undertake the superintendence of it, on his being called away for a brief tour to Baltimore and elsewhere, in pursuance of an engagement to deliver a course of traveller's tales. Numerous were the directions I had from him as to the diet and general treatment most congenial to the constitutions of white mice; and there was implicit confidence expressed, that, for safety, the Mangouste should be kept strictly confined to his cage. There were parrots to be looked after, also, including an extremely vituperative old macaw, any verbal communication with whom laid the advancing party open to all manner of insult and objurgation.

The very first day of my menagerial experience, the Mangouste got out of his cage while I was feeding him, and glided away into dark nooks and garrets unknown. I failed of recovering him by a stalking process among the giddy passes of the upper stairs; nor did he return that day to my often-repeated call; for I vociferated at intervals throughout the day the word "Mungo!" in a manner that must have led the mysterious inhabitants of that silent house to the conclusion that I was a spiritual medium, inviting revelations from the shade of the mighty Park.

A hot, clammy night. No balmy essences arise from the kennels of this hollow street in which I live; whatever comes from that quarter must be malarious, if anything. The windows are thrown open as far as they were made to be thrown, and I get as far out of one of them as I safely can, by tilting my chair back, and extending my legs out into that undefined everywhere called the wide, wide world. The only newspaper within reach of my hand is one I have already looked over, but I glance at it again, reading backwards from the end an account of a terrible poisoning case lately brought to light in England, which I had already read forwards from the beginning. Throwing it away from me in disgust, I reach out my other hand for a book. The one I lay hold of is "Laurel-Water," the melancholy drama of Sir Theodosius Boughton by insidious poisoner killed. I dashed it away, backwards, over my head, and, turning off the gas, abandoned myself to the strange influences that breathed hotly upon me from the clammy vegetation festering in the ropy night-air.

Why do civic wood-rangers choose the ailantus-tree for a bouquet-holder to the close-pent inhabitants of towns? Nothing can be more graceful, certainly, than the ellipses arched by the boughs from its taper stem. Few contrivances more umbrageous than the combination of its long, feathery foliations into its perfection of a parasol. But there are times in the dank, hot nights of midsummer, when the ailantus is but a diluted upas-antiar of Macassar, tainting, albeit with no deadly essence, the muggy air that rocks its slumbering branches and rolls away thence along the parapets and in at the windows of the sleepers. Dead-horse chestnut it might reasonably be called, because of its heavy, carrion smell, which, under the influences of a July night, is but too perceptible to the dwellers of streets where it abides. The tree at my window was an ailantus, of stately dimensions, and bounteous in a proportionate enormity of smell; yet it had never before affected me so much as on this night, when I lay dozing in the ghastly gloom. Sleep must have overcome me, for I had a troublous dream or vision of which Poison was the predominant nightmare,—a dream and slumber broken by the convulsive sensation which roused me up as I endeavored in imagination to swallow at one draught the contents of a metal tankard of half-and-half—half laurel-water, and half decoction of henbane—handed to me on a leaden salver by a demon-waiter, with a sprig of hemlock in the third buttonhole of his coat. This Lethean influence could hardly be that of the ailantus-tree alone. What of the plants on the balcony beneath,—the strange, rooty coilers which the mysterious planter sedulously fosters at the glooming of dusk, with a weird watering-pot held forth in a fawn-colored hand?

In a particular condition of the nerves,—say, when a man feels "shaky,"—it takes but little to convince him that anything which may possibly not be all right is to a moral certainty all wrong. To sleep another night in that room, with the windows open,—and who would shut his windows in July?—directly exposed to the exhalations of a rising forest of upas-antiars of Macassar, nurtured by the unwholesome hand of a mysterious vegetarian for purposes unavowed, was no longer to be thought of. De Vonville's room, which was at the back of the house, and had no fuming ailantus by its windows on which to browse nightmares of skunkish flavor, afforded a better climate for a night's rest, notwithstanding the singular ideas which these travelled men, especially naturalists, have of comfort, in a civilized sense. He invariably slept on the floor, converting his room, indeed, into the general semblance of a tent, by divesting it of all the appliances dear to a Christian gentleman, and one who loves to repose as such. Yet there was comparative freshness in that tent-like apartment, as I entered it that night, shutting the door of mine after me, to prevent ailantus and upas-antiar from following in my wake. The little beasts were all sleeping tranquilly in their cages, and the birds on their perches rested quietly, too,—excepting the old macaw, who cursed me in his sleep, as I lit up the gas. But the Mangouste had not returned, nor did I quite regret his absence for the present; because, although highly approving of the culture of four-footed beasts, be they large or small, I have a prejudice against having my jugular vein breathed, at midnight, by small animals of the weasel tribe,—an act of which Mungo, probably, would have been incapable. His relations will do such things, however, and newspapers recording appalling instances of it may be found.

Shutting the door, I turned the gas down to a mere spark, and stretched my weary limbs on the mat which served the travelled man for a bed, drawing over me a gauze-like fabric, which, I suppose, answers in tropical countries all the purposes of the more voluminous "bed-clothes" of ours. Sleep soon came upon me,—a heavy, but unquiet sleep, in which the same influences haunted me as those I felt when slumbering at the window. The malaria from the trees was there, and the planter of the balcony watering henbane and hellebore with boiling aquafortis; likewise the demon-waiter, with his leaden salver and poisoned tankard, wearing an ophidian smile on his features and a fresh sprig of hemlock in his third buttonhole.