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 general
resemblance to one of Thorwaldsen's unfinished 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.
“Your obedient servant,
“Erasmus Snufflegreek.
“To Freshman Slingsby.”
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 bedroom, remarked with a good-humored
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 behavior, 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
suddenly vociferated “Eureka!” shut up his book,
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 favor 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 everybody, 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
politics. My star was never in more fortunate conjunction.
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 append
ed to its neighbor 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.
