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.