A Morning with Cecil Dreeme
Through Churm’s active friendship, I at once found my place. I have mentioned my profession, chemistry. I was wanted in the world. Better business came to me than a professorship at the Terryhutte University, salary Muddefontaine bonds, or a post at the Nolachucky Polytechnic, salary Cumberland wild lands.
Churm only waited to establish me, and then was off, north, south, east, and west. It was one of those epochs when mankind is in a slough of despond, and must have a lift from Hercules. It was a time when society, that drowsy Diogenes, was beginning to bestir itself after a careless slumber, and, holding up the great lantern of public opinion to find honest men, suddenly revealed a mighty army of rogues. Rogues everywhere; scurvy rogues in mean places, showy rogues in high places; rogues cheating for cents in cheap shops, rogues defrauding for millions in splendid bank parlors; princely rogues, claiming princely salaries for unprofitable services, and puny rogues, corrupted by such example, stealing the last profits to eke out their puny pay and give them their base pleasures; potent rogues, buttoning up a million’s worth of steamships or locomotives in their fob, and rogues, as potent for ill on a smaller scale, keeping back the widow’s mite, and storing the orphan’s portion with the usurer. Rogues everywhere! and the great, stern, steady eye of public opinion, at last fully open and detecting each rogue in the place he had crept or strode into, marking him there in his dastard shame or haughty bravado, and branding him THIEF, so that all mankind could know him.
In this crisis, Society’s great eye of Public Opinion turned itself upon Churm, and demanded him as The Honest Man. Society’s unanimous voice called upon him to put his shoulder to the wheel. Society said, “Be Dictator! dethrone, abolish, raze, redeem, restore, construct! Condemn; forgive! Do what you please, — only oust Roguery and instate Honesty.”
This gigantic task engaged Churm totally. I lost him from my daily life.
It was a busy, practical life, — the life of one who had his way to work; and yet not without strange and unlooked-for excitements, in the region of romance.
My comrades in Europe, countrymen and foreigners, had condoled with me on my departure for home.
“Going back to America!” said they, “to that matter-of-fact country, where everything is in the newspapers.”
“You that have lived in Italy!” deplored my romantic friends, — “in Italy, where skeletons in closets are packed scores deep; where you can scarcely step without treading on a murder-stain; where if a man but sigh in his bedchamber, when he loosens his waistcoat, the old slumbering sighs, which chronicle old wrongs done in that palace, awake and will not sleep until they have whispered to each other and to the affrighted stranger their tale of a misery; where the antique dagger you use for a paper-cutter has rust-marks that any chemist will say mean maiden’s blood; where the old chalice you buy at a bargain gives a mild flavor of poison to your wine; you that have lived in richly historied Italy, where the magnificent past overshadows the present, what will you find to interest you in a country where there is no past, no yesterday, and if no yesterday, no to-day worth having, — but life one indefinitely adjourned to-morrow?”
“Poor Byng! Romantic fellow! Why, unless there should be a raid of Camanches or Pawnees from the Ohio country,” said my European friends, with a refreshing ignorance of geography, — “unless there should come a stampede of the red-skinned gentry to snatch a scalp or a squaw in the Broadway of New York, you will positively pine away for lack of adventures.”
“What a bore to dwell in a land where there are no sbirri to whisk you off to black dungeons! How tame! a life where no tyrannies exist to whisper against always, to growl at on anniversaries, to scream at when they pounce on you, to roar at when you pounce on them. Yes, what stupid business, existence in a city where nobody has more and nobody less than fifteen hundred dollars a year, paid quarterly in advance; where there is such simple, easy, matter-of-fact prosperity that no one is ever tempted to overstep bounds and grasp a bigger share than his neighbors; and so there is never any considerable wrong done to any one; — no wrong, and consequently hearts never break, and there can be no need of mercy, pity, or pardon.”