A few months ago there came to take lodgings in one of the two rooms on my floor a very strange man.
The evening upon which he moved into his room my landlady knocked at my door the way she does occasionally for a little chat.
"Evenin", Mr. Scrimgeour," she said. "I suppose you heard him movin' in his things?"
"Oh, your new lodger," I replied. "Well, Mrs. Muzzard, you've had the room a long while idle on your hands."
"Yes, Mr. Scrimgeour, but I can't ezac'ly say as I'm overjoyed that it's rented."
"Why not?"
"Mr. Scrimgeour, I don't like him!"
"What's the matter with.him?"
"Why, there ain't nothin' the matter with him as far as that goes. It's on'y that I have a kind of presentiment, that's all. He's so — so queer."
"That needn't worry you, Mrs. Muzzard, if he pays his rent. That is, as long as he doesn't look like a Bolshevik or any other kind of dangerous lunatic."
"He ain't no Bolshy and I guess he ain't no loonier than most of the artists and writers around Greenwich Village here. And as I've been living down among them for twenty-odd years I guess I can stand it. No, it ain't that, Mr. Scrimgeour; I can't say ezac'ly what it is. I think he's one of them Spiritualists we hear so much about these days in the papers. Now he asks me for an oil lamp with a heavy shade. Why ain't the gas light good enough for the likes of him? I'd like to know. I never heard of such a queer thing. What can he be wantin' a 'soft light,' as he calls it, for, if it ain't so as he can see the spirits? They say them mediums works in the dark; Ugh! It fair makes me creep!"
"Well, if he raises any objectionable spirits around here, you just let me know," I laughed. "I'll see what can be done toward exorcising them."
As my interest was aroused in my fellow lodger by this conversation with my landlady I lingered about in the hallway the following morning in the hope of catching a glimpse of the stranger. But my curiosity was unrewarded.
Every evening during a whole week I heard him climb the uncarpeted stairs and enter his room. Often, during the course of the evening, I could hear his heavy, measured tread as he paced the floor sometimes late into the night.
One evening as I arrived home slightly later than usual, having been detained at the office upon some special work, I passed him in the dark stairway.
He was coming downstairs, and as the light from the upper hall shone upon his back and full into my face, I was unable to see what he looked like. I got the impression only of the hugeness of the man.
Tall, heavily built, his body enveloped in a large black cloak, he appeared, in the exaggerated half-light of the stairway, to be some great giant hovering threateningly over me.
He stood courteously aside, however, pressing himself against the wall to allow me to pass. As I did so I glanced into his face. But he wore a very wide-brimmed Quaker-like hat and, in the shadow which it cast, I could note little save that he wore large, black-rimmed spectacles.
"Good evening," I murmured.
His reply came to me in a deep, resonant voice, soft and almost tender. There was the rich quality in it of the deep notes of an organ.
A most unaccountable feeling came over me as I brushed past him; something from the inscrutable alchemy of an unusual personality. I felt like a little child that had got lost in an empty house.
II
One evening I discovered, upon trying to light the gas in my room, that I was without matches. Seeing a light shining under the stranger's door, I ventured to knock and to beg a match of him.
He answered with a sonorous "Come in," which, considering the secrecy of the man, filled me with surprise.
I found myself in a meagrely furnished room of nondescript threadbareness akin to my own. The apartment was lighted not with gas, as in my room, but by the small table oil-lamp which had so excited the landlady's suspicions. The soft yellow glow, repressed by a heavy shade, poured its light over the table, covered, as I noticed, with a confusion of papers.
"You will pardon my intrusion," I began, explaining my forgetfulness about the matches.,
"Indeed," he replied. "I am glad, if I may put it that way, that you have forgotten them, as it affords me an opportunity of meeting you other than in the stairway."
Why was it that, as he spoke, I fancied he must be smiling? Something in the genial raillery of his words, I suppose, for when I looked at him no trace of amusement could be seen. His face was as calm, as unemotional as the placid features of a Chinese idol. His cheeks did not crease, nor were there any wrinkles about his eyes.
The impression which he made upon me now was only one of great goodnature. I wondered why, recalling our first meeting, I had been so eerily moved.
Then I looked into his eyes and again that strange, haunted feeling crept over me, as it had done that evening upon the stairs.
His eyes were so large that I fancied their unusualness must be caused by the lenses of his glasses, or perhaps by a trick of the shadows. Yet there was something in their expression which I was unable to fathom. Could it be drugs? No, for there was a look of grandeur about them. They baffled me. We humans, who trust so innocently to our sight, we are all so pitifully blind I…
This was only the first of many evenings spent with Nathaniel Broome. Diffidently, almost timidly at first, our acquaintance then ripened into a quiet friendship.
What I am most conscious of having gathered from him is beauty; beauty in the commonplace; beauty in the song of a sparrow; beauty in the drowsy hum of the city's impersonal noises.
Nathaniel Broome changed my outlook upon life until we together saw "no longer blinded by our eyes."
The low, quiet tone of his magnetic voice lent a magic to his strange un-usualness; his great, expressive hands shaping the gestures of his speech.
When I listened to him talking I seemed to be swept up, enveloped in his personality. I felt as a child must feel when a playful senior stoops and smothers it in the skirts of his overcoat I felt helpless, yet cared for. I was strangely happy.
And, more than his voice, his eyes, always his eyes, sometimes a little terrifying to me even now, held the secret fascination of his remarkable character.
That immobile face; that calm, inscrutable Buddha. Behind his huge, horn-rimmed spectacles those great, kindly eyes of his beamed in gentle merriment at some jest or some quaint conceit of his fancy.
He showed me once the portrait of a young girl — a dark-haired, hauntingly beautiful child.
"My daughter," he replied to my look of inquiry, putting the photograph back into the drawer of his writing-table. I knew that he was a widower and, for some reason, by his manner perhaps, I supposed that his daughter was dead, too.
Naturally, I did not press him for these confidences. The subject seemed to move him so deeply that, after he had once spoken, I had never voluntarily mentioned it of my own accord. If he told me about himself it was because he felt the need of companionship, the want of a sympathetic ear.
III
One morning — it was a holiday, one of those rare occasions when one is permitted to enjoy the meagre privilege of seeing his home surroundings by the unfamiliar light of day — Mrs. Muzzard rapped sharply at my door.
"Mr. Scrimgeour, for heaven's sake come and see what can have happened to Mr. Broome. I've knocked and knocked at his door, but I can't get no answer."
"He's probably asleep still," I replied. "I wouldn't disturb him yet, Mrs. Muzzard."
"Oh, Mr. Scrimgeour, I don't think he's asleep! Please come and try to get him to talk to you. I'm… terribly frightened of him and those creepy eyes of his. You mark my words, Mr. Scrimgeour, there's something uncanny about that terrible man! Oh, why did I ever let him have me room! Why did I ever let him come into me house? Him with his strange ways, talking to departed sperits all night long!"