Messroom

“ Up a broad staircase he ascended and at a chamber door he paused—then entered. I followed. His presence seemed to cause the very furniture to shake and rattle.
“Here,” thought I, “I will solve the enigma. Here, without doubt, has occurred some grand disturbance of nature. The walls of this apartment, its casements, its decorations, have been witness to some fell crime. The spectre of evil impresses itself upon matter.” ”

“ All around the hall, in each of those basalt caves, are all the evils, all the plagues, all the sicknesses, all the terrors, all the catastrophes, all the mysteries that have afflicted life since the beginning of the world.... ”

“ If you were to see how the mortar is starting from the brickwork, how the plaster is peeling from the ceilings, and how the furniture is faded; if you were to hear the windows shaking and rattling as if they had a fit of the ague, the boards creaking, and the long passages echoing, you would think any sensible man well out of so dreary a prison. ”

“ Their plan is to steal up noiselessly to the window, and applying the moist tips of their tongues to the paper, the soft substance yields silently to the little weapon, and thus a hole is made through which a bright eye surveys the interior of the forbidden chamber, and a quick ear drinks in the delicious tones of the prohibited conversation. ”

“ Deep down in his eyes was a picture, the vision of a great place like a chamber of justice, where, before a watching crowd, a poor girl, exposed but heroic, swore with a quavering voice to a document, proved an alibi, supplied a link. ”

“ We have many narratives on record of houses that have been the scenes of remarkable disturbances and strange apparitions, of furniture moved from place to place without apparent agency, of domestic utensils thrown about by no perceptible impelling power, and of noises attributable to no human cause, problems that in many cases have never been solved, but which have usually been ascribed to some mischievous goblin, or to the ghost of some unhappy person who has come by death unfairly and by foul means. ”

“ The plank floor was littered with the belongings of the white men; open half-empty boxes, torn wearing apparel, old boots; all the things dirty, and all the things broken, that accumulate mysteriously round untidy men. ”

“ Once there, I moved immediately into the dark chamber, and walking with the utmost circumspection, crossed to the wall adjoining the oak parlor, and laying my ear against the opening into that room, I listened.
At first I heard nothing, probably because its inmates were still. Then I caught an exclamation of weariness, and soon some words of desultory conversation. Relieved beyond expression, not only because I could hear, but because they talked in English, I withdrew again into my own room. [254] The most difficult problem in the world was solved. ”

“ Have you such a sense of comical self-delusion that you can place yourself at that large doorway and turn back the mob of scoundrels, blackguards, roughs, cheats, jailbirds, lorettes—aye, and even decent men and women—with your faint expostulation? ”

“ As to the various stories in a house, several rooms on a story, and staircases which lead from one to the other, they flatly declined to believe that anything of the kind could exist, and thought that their guest was trying to amuse himself at the expense of their credulity. ”

“ In what narrow cell, lighted only by a high, iron-barred window—for so the scene shaped itself in her mind—with uncovered floor of stone, bare walls and a bench to lie on, was the man she loved wearing away his days under the burden of so frightful an accusation? ”

“ The gruesomeness of the room in which a murder was committed three hundred years ago is heightened when your guide points to a stain on the floor and tells you that all the processes of modern scrubbing and cleaning have failed to remove it. ”

“ This room—see, it has no outlet save those windows, scarcely if at all perceptible to you, above our heads, and that opening shielded now by a simple curtain, but which in an instant, without my moving from this place, I can so hermetically seal that no man, save he be armed with crowbar and pickaxe, could enter here, even if man could know of our imprisonment, in a house soon to be closed from top to bottom by my departing servant. ”

“ Somehow, the impression was burned with overpowering force into my mind, that houses and furniture, scrubbed floors, white curtains, bright tins and brasses were the great, awful, permanent facts of existence,—and that men and women, and particularly children, were the meddlesome intruders upon this divine order, every trace of whose intermeddling must be scrubbed out and obliterated in the quickest way possible. ”

“ Better, we can not do for you. This house is not a tavern, but the somewhat valuable property of—" He turned with a bow and smile, as every one there drew a deep breath; but no one ventured to end that sentence. [Pg 32]
I would have given all my future prospects (which, by the way, were not very great) to remain in that room. The oddity of the situation; the mystery of the occurrence; the suspense I saw in every face; the eagerness of the cries I heard redoubled from time to time outside; the malevolence but poorly disguised in the old lawyer's countenance ”

“ And who would recognise in the primly-walking and stiffly-dressed boys and girls of the public gardens those scantily-attired mortals who hunt the house-top above the sixth floor, and peril their necks on dangerous parapets, and furtively feel for small spoil in the kitchen, and get whipped for venial sins in theft and fibbing? ”

“ For, shut up a room, exclude from it the light of day, cover the furniture with dust-sheets till you get the semblance of a morgue of strange beasts, forget it for a while, and, on re-entering it, you will have all the elements of mystery which gradually and agreeably give place to little pleasant shocks of discovery of the familiar. ”

“ The houses are decayed from cellar to garret, and filthy beyond description,—the filthiest, in fact, we have ever seen. The beams, the floors, the plaster on the walls, where there is any plaster, are rotten, and alive with vermin. ”

“ Rooms which are made [99] attractive only to catch men, to rob them of their money, and of their self-control, and of their reason, and of their homes, and of all temporal good, and of all hope of heaven—destroying men's souls and bodies, both for a time and for all eternity. ”

“ The workhouse and the gutter, ignorance and cold, filth and tatters, nights of huddling under bridges and in doorways, vermin, starvation and blows, possibly even the vigorous efflorescence of an inherited disposition to crime—these things, which he saw with unprecedented vividness, suggested themselves as his natural portion. ”

“ All entrails are tortuous,—those of a prison as well as those of a man. Here and there, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left, spaces in the wall, square and closed by large iron gratings, afforded glimpses of flights of stairs, some descending and some ascending. ”

“ With few exceptions, the fronts of the houses present nothing but rows of windows with iron-bars, or heavy wooden jalousies, that give them the appearance of prisons—weeds and hyssop are growing upon many—others are fast falling to decay—the whole is a sad picture of neglect and indifference. ”

“ Anywhere else so strange and grotesque a proceeding would have excited laughter, but here, in this gloomy chamber, the anteroom of the assize court, an otherwise trivial act is fraught with serious import. ”

“ The time has come for judgment, and for everything that is done in a chamber to be proclaimed from the housetops. (Luke 12:3.) Once the wall of secrecy is dug through, the door is open to see whatever transpires. ”

“ The decorum of the visitors has been excellent, and it is remarkable, in view of such a very large number of persons visiting the room, that so few mutilations and injuries occur to the periodicals and books, and that so few books, probably not more than half a dozen in the course of a year, and those of small consequence, are stolen. ”

“ The building, which is as mournful as a prison, has only narrow loopholes by way of windows, and a door so low that one must stoop to enter it. A dark passage leads to the interior, into which air and light can scarcely penetrate. ”

“ By a process of begging, borrowing and salvaging—nobody says steal any more these days,—I have visions of getting the floor in the centre all filled in, but for the edges, under the sloping sides, I am afraid there is no hope. ”

“ When they try to make individual homes out of their fixed molds of rooms—the hard walls, the brass bedsteads, the inevitable bureaus, the small rockers, and the transoms that always let in too much light from the hall at night—then they are only the more pathetic. ”

“ Some of the people are assigned to the rooms on the ground floor, others to the first floor. Then a dispute arises. Those above are angry because those below have not yet finished, so that they cannot come down. ”

“ For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self! ”

“ All sorts of architectural atrocities are committed-curious false fronts, fancy shingles, scroll-work balustrades, and the like;-in the town where these words are written, a builder of a number of houses has satisfied a whim to give eyebrows to his windows, in the shape of flat arches of alternate red and white bricks, with an extraordinarily grotesque and discomforting effect. ”

“ There are, however, to be seen within these walls dark rooms, narrow passages, huge locks, heavy bars and bolts; enough of the ghosts of dead and buried fanaticism, superstition and bigotry to cause a man of modern times to shudder. ”

“ Some evil ginn must have raised these huge blocks of buildings which house the unbelievers. Strange things to help them on their road to perdition are exposed in the stores, and sheets of some invisible material which his eye can penetrate, but which resists the touch of his finger, hang before the accursed articles. ”

“ In the meantime the common people, when they saw themselves deluded, revenged themselves upon the hangings, curtains, chairs, stone walls, and whatsoever came in their way, very outrageously and made great spoil, there was great store of good company and many noblemen. ”

“ But, leaving rooms of this supernatural kind, we may allude to those which have acquired a strange notoriety from certain peculiarities of a somewhat gruesome character; and, with tales of horror attached to their guilty walls, it is not surprising that many rooms in our old country houses have long been said to be troubled with mysterious noises, and to have an uncanny aspect. ”

“ The material of which this building is composed, though seemingly so fragile, is a non-conductor of thought, and while detained within it the inmates gradually free themselves from their old influences and disorderly desires.
“Cultivating the fruits of the earth calls into action only their most harmonious organs. ”

“ That these smears (they could not be called footprints) not only crossed the hall but appeared in more than one place on the staircase proves that he did not confine his search to the lower storey; and perhaps one of the most interesting features of the case lies in the indications given by these marks of the raging course he took through these upper rooms. ”

“ The room was in that disorder produced only by those who have always had servants. ”

“ He breathes a sigh of relief and sinks exhausted into his chair.
At a score of desks men are writing special portions of the news. One is telling of the startling murders, another of the unusual accidents that have claimed a dozen prominent men as victims. ”

“ Now my soul's palace is become a prison:
Ah, would she break from hence, that this my body
Might in the ground be closed up in rest!
For never henceforth shall I joy again,
Never, O never shall I see more joy! ”

“ that is, to the point to which I say we both have arrived at—Well—I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me—The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think—We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; ”

“ "It gives me scope to amuse and tell the truth at the same time. A man pierces a hole in the wall of a boarding-house room, and watches what is going on in the next room." ”

“ B. and I were lying prone upon our respective beds when—presto, a storm arose at the further end of The Enormous Room. We looked, and beheld The Clever Man, thoroughly and efficiently angry, addressing, threatening and frightening generally a constantly increasing group of fellow-prisoners. ”

“ A moment before I had been safe of all men's respect, wealthy, beloved—the cloth laying for me in the dining room at home; and now I was the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the gallows. ”