University of Virginia Library

39. CHAPTER XXXIX.
THE HYPOTHETICAL FRIENDS.

“Charlie, I am going to put confidence in you.”

“You always have, and with reason. What is it
Frank?”

“Charlie, I am in want—urgent want of money.”

“That's not well.”

“But it will be well, Charlie, if you loan me a hundred
dollars. I would not ask this of you, only my
need is sore, and you and I have so long shared hearts
and minds together, however unequally on my side, that
nothing remains to prove our friendship than, with the
same inequality on my side, to share pursues. You will
do me the favor, won't you?”

“Favor? What do you, mean by asking me to do
you a favor?”

“Why, Charlie, you never used to talk so.”

“Because, Frank, you on your side, never used to
talk so.”

“But won't you loan me the money?”

“No, Frank.”

“Why?”

“Because my rule forbids. I give away money, but

never loan it; and of course the man who calls himself
my friend is above receiving alms. The negotiation
of a loan is a business transaction. And I will
transact no business with a friend. What a friend is, he
is socially and intellectually; and I rate social and intellectual
friendship too high to degrade it on either
side into a pecuniary make-shift. To be sure there are,
and I have, what is called business friends; that is, commercial
acquaintances, very convenient persons. But
I draw a red-ink line between them and my friends
in the true sense—my friends social and intellectual.
In brief, a true friend has nothing to do with loans;
he should have a soul above loans. Loans are such
unfriendly accommodations as are to be had from the
soulless corporation of a bank, by giving the regular
security and paying the regular discount.”

“An unfriendly accommodation? Do those words go
together handsomely?”

“Like the poor farmer's team, of an old man and
a cow—not handsomely, but to the purpose. Look,
Frank, a loan of money on interest is a sale of money
on credit. To sell a thing on credit may be an
accommodation, but where is the friendliness? Few
men in their senses, except operators, borrow money on
interest, except upon a necessity akin to starvation.
Well, now, where is the friendliness of my letting a
starving man have, say, the money's worth of a barrel of
flour upon the condition that, on a given day, he shall let
me have the money's worth of a barrel and a half of flour;
especially if I add this further proviso, that if he fail so

to do, I shall then, to secure to myself the money's
worth of my barrel and his half barrel, put his heart up
at public auction, and, as it is cruel to part families,
throw in his wife's and children's?”

“I understand,” with a pathetic shudder; “but even
did it come to that, such a step on the creditor's part,
let us, for the honor of human nature, hope, were less
the intention than the contingency.”

“But, Frank, a contingency not unprovided for in
the taking beforehand of due securities.”

“Still, Charlie, was not the loan in the first place a
friend's act?”

“And the auction in the last place an enemy's act.
Don't you see? The enmity lies couched in the friendship,
just as the ruin in the relief.”

“I must be very stupid to-day, Charlie, but really,
I can't understand this. Excuse me, my dear friend, but
it strikes me that in going into the philosophy of the
subject, you go somewhat out of your depth.”

“So said the incautious wader-out to the ocean; but
the ocean replied: `It is just the other way, my wet
friend,' and drowned him.”

“That, Charlie, is a fable about as unjust to the
ocean, as some of Æsop's are to the animals. The ocean
is a magnanimous element, and would scorn to assassinate
a poor fellow, let alone taunting him in the act.
But I don't understand what you say about enmity
couched in friendship, and ruin in relief.”

“I will illustrate, Frank. The needy man is a train
slipped off the rail. He who loans him money on interest

is the one who, by way of accommodation, helps
get the train back where it belongs; but then, by way
of making all square, and a little more, telegraphs to an
agent, thirty miles a-head by a precipice, to throw just
there, on his account, a beam across the track. Your
needy man's principle-and-interest friend is, I say
again, a friend with an enmity in reserve. No, no, my
dear friend, no interest for me. I scorn interest.”

“Well, Charlie, none need you charge. Loan me
without interest.”

“That would be alms again.”

“Alms, if the sum borrowed is returned?”

“Yes: an alms, not of the principle, but the interest.”

“Well, I am in sore need, so I will not decline the
alms. Seeing that it is you, Charlie, gratefully will I
accept the alms of the interest. No humiliation between
friends.”

“Now, how in the refined view of friendship can you
suffer yourself to talk so, my dear Frank. It pains me.
For though I am not of the sour mind of Solomon, that,
in the hour of need, a stranger is better than a brother;
yet, I entirely agree with my sublime master, who, in his
Essay on Friendship, says so nobly, that if he want a
terrestrial convenience, not to his friend celestial (or
friend social and intellectual) would he go; no: for his
terrestial convenience, to his friend terrestrial (or humbler
business-friend) he goes. Very lucidly he adds the
reason: Because, for the superior nature, which on no
account can ever descend to do good, to be annoyed

with requests to do it, when the inferior one, which by
no instruction can ever rise above that capacity, stands
always inclined to it—this is unsuitable.”

“Then I will not consider you as my friend celestial,
but as the other.”

“It racks me to come to that; but, to oblige you, I'll
do it. We are business friends; business is business.
You want to negotiate a loan. Very good. On what
paper? Will you pay three per cent. a month? Where
is your security?”

“Surely, you will not exact those formalities from
your old schoolmate—him with whom you have so often
sauntered down the groves of Academe, discoursing of
the beauty of virtue, and the grace that is in kindliness—
and all for so paltry a sum. Security? Our being fellow-academics,
and friends from childhood up, is security.”

“Pardon me, my dear Frank, our being fellow-academics
is the worst of securities; while, our having been
friends from childhood up is just no security at all.
You forget we are now business friends.”

“And you, on your side, forget, Charlie, that as your
business friend I can give you no security; my need being
so sore that I cannot get an indorser.”

“No indorser, then, no business loan.”

“Since then, Charlie, neither as the one nor the other
sort of friend you have defined, can I prevail with you;
how if, combining the two, I sue as both?”

“Are you a centaur?”

“When all is said then, what good have I of your
friendship, regarded in what light you will?”

“The good which is in the philosophy of Mark Winsome,
as reduced to practice by a practical disciple.”

“And why don't you add, much good may the philosophy
of Mark Winsome do me? Ah,” turning invokingly,
“what is friendship, if it be not the helping hand
and the feeling heart, the good Samaritan pouring out
at need the purse as the vial!”

“Now, my dear Frank, don't be childish. Through
tears never did man see his way in the dark. I should
hold you unworthy that sincere friendship I bear you,
could I think that friendship in the ideal is too lofty for
you to conceive. And let me tell you, my dear Frank,
that you would seriously shake the foundations of our
love, if ever again you should repeat the present scene.
The philosophy, which is mine in the strongest way,
teaches plain-dealing. Let me, then, now, as at the most
suitable time, candidly disclose certain circumstances
you seem in ignorance of. Though our friendship began
in boyhood, think not that, on my side at least, it began
injudiciously. Boys are little men, it is said. You, I
juvenilely picked out for my friend, for your favorable
points at the time; not the least of which were your good
manners, handsome dress, and your parents' rank and
repute of wealth. In short, like any grown man, boy
though I was, I went into the market and chose me my
mutton, not for its leanness, but its fatness. In other
words, there seemed in you, the schoolboy who always
had silver in his pocket, a reasonable probability that
you would never stand in lean need of fat succor; and if
my early impression has not been verified by the event,

it is only because of the caprice of fortune producing a
fallibility of human expectations, however discreet.”

“Oh, that I should listen to this cold-blooded disclosure!”

“A little cold blood in your ardent veins, my dear
Frank, wouldn't do you any harm, let me tell you.
Cold-blooded? You say that, because my disclosure
seems to involve a vile prudence on my side. But not
so. My reason for choosing you in part for the points I
have mentioned, was solely with a view of preserving
inviolate the delicacy of the connection. For—do but
think of it—what more distressing to delicate friendship,
formed early, than your friend's eventually, in manhood,
dropping in of a rainy night for his little loan of five
dollars or so? Can delicate friendship stand that?
And, on the other side, would delicate friendship, so
long as it retained its delicacy, do that? Would you
not instinctively say of your dripping friend in the entry,
`I have been deceived, fraudulently deceived, in this
man; he is no true friend that, in platonic love to demand
love-tries?'”

“And rites, doubly rights, they are, cruel Charlie!”

“Take it how you will, heed well how, by too importunately
claiming those rights, as you call them, you
shake those foundations I hinted of. For though, as it
turns out, I, in my early friendship, built me a fair house
on a poor site; yet such pains and cost have I lavished
on that house, that, after all, it is dear to me. No, I
would not lose the sweet boon of your friendship, Frank.
But beware.”

“And of what? Of being in need? Oh, Charlie!
you talk not to a god, a being who in himself holds his
own estate, but to a man who, being a man, is the sport
of fate's wind and wave, and who mounts towards heaven
or sinks towards hell, as the billows roll him in trough
or on crest.”

“Tut! Frank. Man is no such poor devil as that
comes to—no poor drifting sea-weed of the universe.
Man has a soul; which, if he will, puts him beyond fortune's
finger and the future's spite. Don't whine like
fortune's whipped dog, Frank, or by the heart of a true
friend, I will cut ye.”

“Cut me you have already, cruel Charlie, and to the
quick. Call to mind the days we went nutting, the
times we walked in the woods, arms wreathed about
each other, showing trunks invined like the trees:—oh,
Charlie!”

“Pish! we were boys.”

“Then lucky the fate of the first-born of Egypt, cold
in the grave ere maturity struck them with a sharper
frost.—Charlie?”

“Fie! you're a girl.”

“Help, help, Charlie, I want help!”

“Help? to say nothing of the friend, there is something
wrong about the man who wants help. There is
somewhere a defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying
need, somewhere about that man.”

“So there is, Charlie.—Help, Help!”

“How foolish a cry, when to implore help, is itself
the proof of undesert of it.

“Oh, this, all along, is not you, Charlie, but some
ventriloquist who usurps your larynx. It is Mark Winsome
that speaks, not Charlie.

“If so, thank heaven, the voice of Mark Winsome is
not alien but congenial to my larynx. If the philosophy
of that illustrious teacher find little response among
mankind at large, it is less that they do not possess
teachable tempers, than because they are so unfortunate
as not to have natures predisposed to accord with him.

“Welcome, that compliment to humanity,” exclaimed
Frank with energy, “the truer because unintended.
And long in this respect may humanity remain what
you affirm it. And long it will; since humanity, inwardly
feeling how subject it is to straits, and hence
how precious is help, will, for selfishness' sake, if no
other, long postpone ratifying a philosophy that banishes
help from the world. But Charlie, Charlie! speak as
you used to; tell me you will help me. Were the case
reversed, not less freely would I loan you the money
than you would ask me to loan it.

“I ask? I ask a loan? Frank, by this hand, under
no circumstances would I accept a loan, though without
asking pressed on me. The experience of China
Aster might warn me.”

“And what was that?”

“Not very unlike the experience of the man that
built himself a palace of moon-beams, and when the moon
set was surprised that his palace vanished with it. I
will tell you about China Aster. I wish I could do so
in my own words, but unhappily the original storyteller

here has so tyrannized over me, that it is quite
impossible for me to repeat his incidents without sliding
into his style. I forewarn you of this, that you may
not think me so maudlin as, in some parts, the story
would seem to make its narrator. It is too bad that
any intellect, expecially in so small a matter, should
have such power to impose itself upon another, against
its best exerted will, too. However, it is satisfaction to
know that the main moral, to which all tends, I fully
approve. But, to begin.”