University of Virginia Library

29. CHAPTER XXIX
THE BOON COMPANIONS.

The wine, port, being called for, and the two seated
at the little table, a natural pause of convivial expectancy
ensued; the stranger's eye turned towards the bar
near by, watching the red-cheeked, white-aproned man
there, blithely dusting the bottle, and invitingly arranging
the salver and glasses; when, with a sudden impulse
turning round his head towards his companion, he said,
“Ours is friendship at first sight, ain't it?”

“It is,” was the placidly pleased reply: “and the
same may be said of friendship at first sight as of love
at first sight: it is the only true one, the only noble
one. It bespeaks confidence. Who would go sounding
his way into love or friendship, like a strange ship by
night, into an enemy's harbor?”

“Right. Boldly in before the wind. Agreeable, how
we always agree. By-the-way, though but a formality,
friends should know each other's names. What is yours,
pray?”

“Francis Goodman. But those who love me, call me
Frank. And yours?”

“Charles Arnold Noble. But do you call me
Charlie.”

“I will, Charlie; nothing like preserving in manhood
the fraternal familiarities of youth. It proves the heart
a rosy boy to the last.”

“My sentiments again. Ah!”

It was a smiling waiter, with the smiling bottle, the
cork drawn; a common quart bottle, but for the occasion
fitted at bottom into a little bark basket, braided
with porcupine quills, gayly tinted in the Indian fashion.
This being set before the entertainer, he regarded it
with affectionate interest, but seemed not to understand,
or else to pretend not to, a handsome red label pasted
on the bottle, bearing the capital letters, P. W.

“P. W.,” said he at last, perplexedly eying the pleasing
poser, “now what does P. W. mean?”

“Shouldn't wonder,” said the cosmopolitan gravely,
“if it stood for port wine. You called for port wine,
didn't you?”

“Why so it is, so it is!”

“I find some little mysteries not very hard to clear
up,” said the other, quietly crossing his legs.

This commonplace seemed to escape the stranger's
hearing, for, full of his bottle, he now rubbed his somewhat
sallow hands over it, and with a strange kind of
cackle, meant to be a chirrup, cried: “Good wine, good
wine; is it not the peculiar bond of good feeling?”
Then brimming both glasses, pushed one over, saying,
with what seemed intended for an air of fine disdain:
“Ill betide those gloomy skeptics who maintain that

now-a-days pure wine is unpurchasable; that almost
every variety on sale is less the vintage of vineyards
than laboratories; that most bar-keepers are but a set
of male Brinvilliarses, with complaisant arts practicing
against the lives of their best friends, their customers.”

A shade passed over the cosmopolitan. After a few
minutes' down-cast musing, he lifted his eyes and said:
“I have long thought, my dear Charlie, that the spirit
in which wine is regarded by too many in these days is
one of the most painful examples of want of confidence.
Look at these glasses. He who could mistrust poison
in this wine would mistrust consumption in Hebe's
cheek. While, as for suspicions against the dealers in
wine and sellers of it, those who cherish such suspicions
can have but limited trust in the human heart. Each
human heart they must think to be much like each bottle
of port, not such port as this, but such port as they
hold to. Strange traducers, who see good faith in nothing,
however sacred. Not medicines, not the wine in
sacraments, has escaped them. The doctor with his
phial, and the priest with his chalice, they deem equally
the unconscious dispensers of bogus cordials to the
dying.”

“Dreadful!”

“Dreadful indeed,” said the cosmopolitan solemnly.
“These distrusters stab at the very soul of confidence.
If this wine,” impressively holding up his full glass, “if
this wine with its bright promise be not true, how shall
man be, whose promise can be no brighter? But if wine
be false, while men are true, whither shall fly convivial

geniality? To think of sincerely-genial souls drinking
each other's health at unawares in perfidious and murderous
drugs!”

“Horrible!”

“Much too much so to be true, Charlie. Let us forget
it. Come, you are my entertainer on this occasion,
and yet you don't pledge me. I have been waiting for
it.”

“Pardon, pardon,” half confusedly and half ostentatiously
lifting his glass. “I pledge you, Frank, with
my whole heart, believe me,” taking a draught too decorous
to be large, but which, small though it was, was
followed by a slight involuntary wryness to the mouth.

“And I return you the pledge, Charlie, heart-warm
as it came to me, and honest as this wine I drink it in,”
reciprocated the cosmopolitan with princely kindliness in
his gesture, taking a generous swallow, concluding in a
smack, which, though audible, was not so much so as to
be unpleasing.

“Talking of alleged spuriousness of wines,” said he,
tranquilly setting down his glass, and then sloping back
his head and with friendly fixedness eying the wine,
“perhaps the strangest part of those allegings is, that
there is, as claimed, a kind of man who, while convinced
that on this continent most wines are shams, yet still
drinks away at them; accounting wine so fine a thing,
that even the sham article is better than none at all. And
if the temperance people urge that, by this course, he
will sooner or later be undermined in health, he answers,
`And do you think I don't know that? But health

without cheer I hold a bore; and cheer, even of the
spurious sort, has its price, which I am willing to
pay.'”

“Such a man, Frank, must have a disposition ungovernably
bacchanalian.”

“Yes, if such a man there be, which I don't credit.
It is a fable, but a fable from which I once heard a person
of less genius than grotesqueness draw a moral even
more extravagant than the fable itself. He said that it
illustrated, as in a parable, how that a man of a disposition
ungovernably good-natured might still familiarly
associate with men, though, at the same time, he believed
the greater part of men false-hearted—accounting society
so sweet a thing that even the spurious sort was
better than none at all. And if the Rochefoucaultites
urge that, by this course, he will sooner or later be undermined
in security, he answers, `And do you think I
don't know that? But security without society I hold
a bore; and society, even of the spurious sort, has its
price, which I am willing to pay.'”

“A most singular theory,” said the stranger with a
slight fidget, eying his companion with some inquisitiveness,
“indeed, Frank, a most slanderous thought,” he
exclaimed in sudden heat and with an involuntary look
almost of being personally aggrieved.

“In one sense it merits all you say, and more,” rejoined
the other with wonted mildness, “but, for a kind
of drollery in it, charity might, perhaps, overlook something
of the wickedness. Humor is, in fact, so blessed a
thing, that even in the least virtuous product of the

human mind, if there can be found but nine good jokes,
some philosophers are clement enough to affirm that
those nine good jokes should redeem all the wicked
thoughts, though plenty as the populace of Sodom. At
any rate, this same humor has something, there is no
telling what, of beneficence in it, it is such a catholicon
and charm—nearly all men agreeing in relishing it,
though they may agree in little else—and in its way it
undeniably does such a deal of familiar good in the
world, that no wonder it is almost a proverb, that a man
of humor, a man capable of a good loud laugh—seem
how he may in other things—can hardly be a heartless
scamp.”

“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed the other, pointing to the
figure of a pale pauper-boy on the deck below, whose
pitiableness was touched, as it were, with ludicrousness
by a pair of monstrous boots, apparently some mason's
discarded ones, cracked with drouth, half eaten by lime,
and curled up about the toe like a bassoon. “Look—
ha, ha, ha!”

“I see,” said the other, with what seemed quiet appreciation,
but of a kind expressing an eye to the grotesque,
without blindness to what in this case accompanied
it, “I see; and the way in which it moves you,
Charlie, comes in very apropos to point the proverb I
was speaking of. Indeed, had you intended this effect,
it could not have been more so. For who that heard
that laugh, but would as naturally argue from it a
sound heart as sound lungs? True, it is said that a
man may smile, and smile, and smile, and be a villain;

but it is not said that a man may laugh, and laugh, and
laugh, and be one, is it, Charlie?”

“Ha, ha, ha!—no no, no no.”

“Why Charlie, your explosions illustrate my remarks
almost as aptly as the chemist's imitation volcano did
his lectures. But even if experience did not sanction
the proverb, that a good laugher cannot be a bad man, I
should yet feel bound in confidence to believe it, since
it is a saying current among the people, and I doubt
not originated among them, and hence must be true; for
the voice of the people is the voice of truth. Don't
you think so?”

“Of course I do. If Truth don't speak through the
people, it never speaks at all; so I heard one say.”

“A true saying. But we stray. The popular notion
of humor, considered as index to the heart, would seem
curiously confirmed by Aristotle—I think, in his “Politics,”
(a work, by-the-by, which, however it may be
viewed upon the whole, yet, from the tenor of certain
sections, should not, without precaution, be placed in
the hands of youth)—who remarks that the least lovable
men in history seem to have had for humor not only a
disrelish, but a hatred; and this, in some cases, along
with an extraordinary dry taste for practical punning.
I remember it is related of Phalaris, the capricious
tyrant of Sicily, that he once caused a poor fellow to be
beheaded on a horse-block, for no other cause than having
a horse-laugh.”

“Funny Phalaris!”

“Cruel Phalaris!”

As after fire-crackers, there was a pause, both looking
downward on the table as if mutually struck by the
contrast of exclamations, and pondering upon its significance,
if any. So, at least, it seemed; but on one side
it might have been otherwise: for presently glancing up,
the cosmopolitan said: “In the instance of the moral,
drolly cynic, drawn from the queer bacchanalian fellow
we were speaking of, who had his reasons for still drinking
spurious wine, though knowing it to be such—there,
I say, we have an example of what is certainly a wicked
thought, but conceived in humor. I will now give you
one of a wicked thought conceived in wickedness. You
shall compare the two, and answer, whether in the one
case the sting is not neutralized by the humor, and
whether in the other the absence of humor does not
leave the sting free play. I once heard a wit, a mere
wit, mind, an irreligious Parisian wit, say, with regard
to the temperance movement, that none, to their personal
benefit, joined it sooner than niggards and knaves;
because, as he affirmed, the one by it saved money and
the other made money, as in ship-owners cutting off
the spirit ration without giving its equivalent, and
gamblers and all sorts of subtle tricksters sticking to
cold water, the better to keep a cool head for business.”

“A wicked thought, indeed!” cried the stranger,
feelingly.

“Yes,” leaning over the table on his elbow and genially
gesturing at him with his forefinger: “yes, and, as
I said, you don't remark the sting of it?”

“I do, indeed. Most calumnious thought, Frank!”

“No humor in it?”

“Not a bit!”

“Well now, Charlie,” eying him with moist regard,
“let us drink. It appears to me you don't drink
freely.”

“Oh, oh—indeed, indeed—I am not backward there.
I protest, a freer drinker than friend Charlie you will
find nowhere,” with feverish zeal snatching his glass,
but only in the sequel to dally with it. “By-the-way,
Frank,” said he, perhaps, or perhaps not, to draw attention
from himself, “by-the-way, I saw a good thing
the other day; capital thing; a panegyric on the press.
It pleased me so, I got it by heart at two readings. It
is a kind of poetry, but in a form which stands in something
the same relation to blank verse which that does
to rhyme. A sort of free-and-easy chant with refrains
to it. Shall I recite it?”

“Anything in praise of the press I shall be happy to
hear,” rejoined the cosmopolitan, “the more so,” he
gravely proceeded, “as of late I have observed in some
quarters a disposition to disparage the press.”

“Disparage the press?”

“Even so; some gloomy souls affirming that it is
proving with that great invention as with brandy or
eau-de-vie, which, upon its first discovery, was believed
by the doctors to be, as its French name implies, a panacea—a
notion which experience, it may be thought,
has not fully verified.”

“You surprise me, Frank. Are there really those who
so decry the press? Tell me more. Their reasons.”

“Reasons they have none, but affirmations they have
many; among other things affirming that, while under
dynastic despotisms, the press is to the people little but
an improvisatore, under popular ones it is too apt to be
their Jack Cade. In fine, these sour sages regard the
press in the light of a Colt's revolver, pledged to no
cause but his in whose chance hands it may be; deeming
the one invention an improvement upon the pen,
much akin to what the other is upon the pistol; involving,
along with the multiplication of the barrel, no consecration
of the aim. The term `freedom of the press'
they consider on a par with freedom of Colt's revolver.
Hence, for truth and the right, they hold, to indulge
hopes from the one is little more sensible than for Kossuth
and Mazzini to indulge hopes from the other.
Heart-breaking views enough, you think; but their
refutation is in every true reformer's contempt. Is it
not so?”

“Without doubt. But go on, go on. I like to hear
you,” flatteringly brimming up his glass for him.

“For one,” continued the cosmopolitan, grandly
swelling his chest, “I hold the press to be neither the
people's improvisatore, nor Jack Cade; neither their
paid fool, nor conceited drudge. I think interest never
prevails with it over duty. The press still speaks for
truth though impaled, in the teeth of lies though intrenched.
Disdaining for it the poor name of cheap
diffuser of news, I claim for it the independent apostleship
of Advancer of Knowledge:—the iron Paul!
Paul, I say; for not only does the press advance knowledge,

but righteousness. In the press, as in the sun,
resides, my dear Charlie, a dedicated principle of beneficent
force and light. For the Satanic press, by its
coappearance with the apostolic, it is no more an aspersion
to that, than to the true sun is the coappearance
of the mock one. For all the baleful-looking parhelion,
god Apollo dispenses the day. In a word, Charlie, what
the sovereign of England is titularly, I hold the press to
be actually—Defender of the Faith!—defender of the
faith in the final triumph of truth over error, metaphysics
over superstition, theory over falsehood, machinery
over nature, and the good man over the bad. Such are
my views, which, if stated at some length, you, Charlie,
must pardon, for it is a theme upon which I cannot
speak with cold brevity. And now I am impatient for
your panegyric, which, I doubt not, will put mine to
the blush.”

“It is rather in the blush-giving vein,” smiled the
other; “but such as it is, Frank, you shall have it.”

“Tell me when you are about to begin,” said the
cosmopolitan, “for, when at public dinners the press is
toasted, I always drink the toast standing, and shall
stand while you pronounce the panegyric.”

“Very good, Frank; you may stand up now.”

He accordingly did so, when the stranger likewise
rose, and uplifting the ruby wine-flask, began.