It is not often that I trouble the readers of _The Atlantic
Monthly_. I should not trouble them now, but for the importunities
of my wife, who “feels to insist” that a duty to society is
unfulfilled, till I have told why I had to have a double, and
how he undid me. She is sure, she says, that intelligent persons
cannot understand that pressure upon public servants which alone
drives any man into the employment of a double. And while I fear
she thinks, at the bottom of her heart, that my fortunes will never
be re-made, she has a faint hope, that, as another Rasselas, I
may teach a lesson to future publics, from which they may profit,
though we die. Owing to the behavior of my double, or, if you
please, to that public pressure which compelled me to employ him, I
have plenty of leisure to write this communication.
I am, or rather was, a minister, of the Sandemanian connection. I
was settled in the active, wide-awake town of Naguadavick, on one
of the finest water-powers in Maine. We used to call it a Western
town in the heart of the civilization of New England. A charming
place it was and is. A spirited, brave young parish had I; and it
seemed as if we might have all “the joy of eventful living” to our
hearts’ content.
Alas! how little we knew on the day of my ordination, and in those
halcyon moments of our first housekeeping! To be the confidential
friend in a hundred families in the town—cutting the social trifle,
as my friend Haliburton says, “from the top of the whipped-syllabub
to the bottom of the sponge-cake, which is the foundation”—to keep
abreast of the thought of the age in one’s study, and to do one’s
best on Sunday to interweave that thought with the active life of
an active town, and to inspirit both and make both infinite by
glimpses of the Eternal Glory, seemed such an exquisite forelook
into one’s life! Enough to do, and all so real and so grand! If
this vision could only have lasted.
The truth is, that this vision was not in itself a delusion, nor,
indeed, half bright enough. If one could only have been left to
do his own business, the vision would have accomplished itself
and brought out new paraheliacal visions, each as bright as the
original. The misery was and is, as we found out, I and Polly,
before long, that, besides the vision, and besides the usual human
and finite failures in life (such as breaking the old pitcher
that came over in the Mayflower, and putting into the fire the
alpenstock with which her father climbed Mont Blanc)—besides,
these, I say (imitating the style of Robinson Crusoe), there
were pitchforked in on us a great rowen-heap of humbugs, handed
down from some unknown seed-time, in which we were expected,
and I chiefly, to fulfil certain public functions before the
community, of the character of those fulfilled by the third row
of supernumeraries who stand behind the Sepoys in the spectacle
of the _Cataract of the Ganges_. They were the duties, in a word,
which one performs as member of one or another social class or
subdivision, wholly distinct from what one does as A. by himself A.
What invisible power put these functions on me, it would be very
hard to tell. But such power there was and is. And I had not been
at work a year before I found I was living two lives, one real and
one merely functional—for two sets of people, one my parish, whom
I loved, and the other a vague public, for whom I did not care two
straws. All this was in a vague notion, which everybody had and
has, that this second life would eventually bring out some great
results, unknown at present, to somebody somewhere.
Crazed by this duality of life, I first read Dr. Wigan on the
_Duality of the Brain_, hoping that I could train one side of my
head to do these outside jobs, and the other to do my intimate and
real duties. For Richard Greenough once told me that, in studying
for the statue of Franklin, he found that the left side of the
great man’s face was philosophic and reflective, and the right side
funny and smiling. If you will go and look at the bronze statue,
you will find he has repeated this observation there for posterity.
The eastern profile is the portrait of the statesman Franklin,
the western of Poor Richard. But Dr. Wigan does not go into these
niceties of this subject, and I failed. It was then that, on my
wife’s suggestion, I resolved to look out for a Double.
I was, at first, singularly successful. We happened to be
recreating at Stafford Springs that summer. We rode out one day,
for one of the relaxations of that watering-place, to the great
Monsonpon House. We were passing through one of the large halls,
when my destiny was fulfilled! I saw my man!
He was not shaven. He had on no spectacles. He was dressed in a
green baize roundabout and faded blue overalls, worn sadly at
the knee. But I saw at once that he was of my height, five feet
four and a half. He had black hair, worn off by his hat. So have
and have not I. He stooped in walking. So do I. His hands were
large, and mine. And—choicest gift of Fate in all—he had, not
“a strawberry-mark on his left arm,” but a cut from a juvenile
brickbat over his right eye, slightly affecting the play of that
eyebrow. Reader, so have I!—My fate was sealed!
A word with Mr. Holley, one of the inspectors, settled the whole
thing. It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable
fellow, of the class known as shiftless, who had sealed his
fate by marrying a dumb wife, who was at that moment ironing in
the laundry. Before I left Stafford, I had hired both for five
years. We had applied to Judge Pynchon, then the probate judge at
Springfield, to change the name of Dennis Shea to Frederic Ingham.
We had explained to the Judge, what was the precise truth, that
an eccentric gentleman wished to adopt Dennis under this new name
into his family. It never occurred to him that Dennis might be more
than fourteen years old. And thus, to shorten this preface, when
we returned at night to my parsonage at Naguadavick, there entered
Mrs. Ingham, her new dumb laundress, myself, who am Mr. Frederic
Ingham, and my double, who was Mr. Frederic Ingham by as good right
as I.
Oh, the fun we had the next morning in shaving his beard to my
pattern, cutting his hair to match mine, and teaching him how to
wear and how to take off gold-bowed spectacles! Really, they were
electroplate, and the glass was plain (for the poor fellow’s eyes
were excellent). Then in four successive afternoons I taught him
four speeches. I had found these would be quite enough for the
supernumerary-Sepoy line of life, and it was well for me they were.
For though he was good-natured, he was very shiftless, and it was,
as our national proverb says, “like pulling teeth” to teach him.
But at the end of the next week he could say, with quite my easy
and frisky air:
1. “Very well, thank you. And you?” This for an answer to casual
salutations.