 | II. Inklings of adventure |  |
2. II.
I have observed that of all the friends one has in
the course of his life, the truest and most attached is
exactly the one who, from his dissimilarity to yourself,
the world finds it very odd you should fancy.
We hear sometimes of lovers who “are made for
each other,” but rarely of the same natural match in
friendship. It is no great marvel. In a world like
this, where we pluck so desperately at the fruit of
pleasure, we prefer for company those who are not
formed with precisely the same palate as ourselves.
You will seldom go wrong, dear reader, if you refer
any human question about which you are in doubt to
that icy oracle—selfishness.
My shadow for many years was a gentle monster,
whom I have before mentioned, baptized by the name
of Forbearance Smith. He was a Vermontese, a
descendant of one of the Puritan pilgrims, and the
first of his family who had left the Green Mountains
since the flight of the regicides to America. We assimilate
to what we live among, and Forbearance was
very green, and very like a mountain. He had a
Apostles—larger than life, and just hewn into outline.
My acquaintance with him commenced during
my first year at the university. He stalked into my
room one morning with a hair-trunk on his back, and
handed me the following note from the tutor:—
“Sir,—The Faculty have decided to impose upon
you the fine of ten dollars and damages, for painting
the President's horse on Sabbath night while grazing
on the College Green. They, moreover, have removed
Freshman Wilding from your rooms, and appoint as
your future chum the studious and exemplary bearer,
Forbearance Smith, to whom you are desired to show
a becoming respect.
Rather relieved by my lenient sentence, (for, till the
next shedding of his well-saturated coat, the sky-blue
body and red mane and tail of the President's once
gray mare would interfere with that esteemed animal's
usefulness,) I received Mr. Smith with more politeness
than he expected. He deposited his hair-trunk in the
vacant bed-room, remarked with a good-humoured
smile that it was a cold morning, and seating himself
in my easiest chair, opened his Euclid, and went to
work upon a problem, as perfectly at home as if he
had furnished the room himself, and lived in it from
his matriculation. I had expected some preparatory
apology at least, and was a little annoyed; but being
upon my good behaviour, I bit my lips, and resumed
the “Art of Love,” upon which I was just then practising
my nascent Latinity, instead of calculating logarithms
for recitation. In about an hour, my new chum
and having stretched himself, (a very unnecessary
operation,) coolly walked to my dressing-table, selected
my best hair-brush, redolent of Macassar, and used it
with the greatest apparent satisfaction.
“Have you done with that hair-brush?” I asked, as
he laid it in its place again.
“Oh yes!”
“Then, perhaps, you will do me the favour to throw
it out of the window.”
He did it without the slightest hesitation. He then
resumed his seat by the fire, and I went on with my
book in silence. Twenty minutes had elapsed, perhaps,
when he rose very deliberately, and without a
word of preparation, gave me a cuff that sent me flying
into the wood-basket in the corner behind me. As
soon as I could pick myself out, I flew upon him, but
I might as well have grappled with a boa-constrictor.
He held me off at arm's length till I was quite exhausted
with rage, and, at last, when I could struggle
no more, I found breath to ask him what the devil he
meant?
“To resent what seemed to me, on reflection, to be
an insult;” he answered, in the calmest tone, “and
now to ask your pardon for a fault of ignorance. The
first was due to myself, the second to you.”
Thenceforth, to the surprise of every body, and
Bob Wilding and the tutor, we were inseparable. I
took Bruin (by a double elision Forbearance became
“bear,” and by paraphrase Bruin, and he answered to
the name)—I took him, I say, to the omnium shop, and
presented him with a dressing-case, and other appliances
for his outer man; and as my inner man was
relatively as much in need of his assistance, we mutually
improved. I instructed him in poetry and politeness,
and he returned the lesson in problems and
Four years had woven their threads of memory
about us, and there was never woof more free from
blemish. Our friendship was proverbial. All that
much care and Macassar could do for Bruin had been
done, but there was no abating his seven feet of stature,
nor reducing the size of his feet proper, nor making
the muscles of his face answer to their natural
wires. At his most placid smile, a strange waiter
would run for a hot towel and the doctor; (colic was
not more like itself than that like colic;) and for his
motions—oh Lord! a skeleton, with each individual
bone appended to its neighbour with a string, would
execute a pas seul with the same expression. His
mind, however, had none of the awkwardness of his
body. A simplicity and truth, amounting to the greatest
naïveté, and a fatuitous unconsciousness of the
effect on beholders of his outer man, were its only approaches
to fault or foible. With the finest sense of
the beautiful, the most unerring judgment in literary
taste, the purest romance, a fervid enthusiasm, constancy,
courage, and good temper, he walked about
the world in a mask—an admirable creature, in the
guise and seeming of a ludicrous monster.
Bruin was sensitive on but one point. He never
could forgive his father and mother for the wrong they
had entailed on him at his baptism, “Forbearance
Smith!” he would say to himself sometimes in unconscious
soliloquy, “they should have given me the virtue
as well as the name!” And then he would sit
with a pen, and scrawl “F. Smith” on a sheet of paper
by the hour together. To insist upon knowing his
Christian name was the one impertinence he never
forgave.
| II. Inklings of adventure | |