My acquaintance with them began, I may say, about fifteen years before
their birth; for I had played marbles with their father, made mud
pies with their mother, thrashed the former through his school-days,
and loved the latter from the beginning to the end--which is not yet.
Finally, I had officiated as best man at the wedding.
The twins were as like as two peas, and to preserve their identity the
usual expedient was tried of decorating them with ribbons of different
hue. But when, at three years of age, they were detected in the very
natural act of swapping ribbons, I, as the family physician, was called
in; then Jack's identity was fixed with a tattooed dot of india ink on
his left arm, and Jim's with a corresponding dot on his right. Their
mother was mostly concerned with their pain and protesting squalls,
their father with my wonderful ingenuity, and I with the rebellious,
yet imperious, thought that, according to the eternal fitness of
things, I should have been the father of these two beautiful boys.
Their father was about my age, twenty-five, and a weakling; one who,
as a boy, could never catch a ball nor throw one straight; who never
learned to swim, and preferred girls for playmates; who, as a youth,
could not dress himself without assistance; who never, in his whole
lackadaisical life, had an original thought or took the initiative in
any proceeding; and why that splendid, healthy-minded, dark-eyed girl
of seventeen should choose him out of a host of suitors was beyond
my comprehension at the time. Later, I understood; somewhat weakly
sexed at that age, but largely endowed with the maternal instinct (she
played with dolls until within a year of her marriage), she pitied his
helplessness and married him to mother and protect him. And from this
pair, so utterly diverse, Mother Nature produced two perfect specimens
of humanity, and rested. After their arrival the parents drifted apart,
and from sheer incompatibility were divorced when the boys were seven
years old. They went to their original homes at opposite sides of the
town, each taking a twin; for the asinine judge, unable to decide in
favor of either, had, Solomon-like, so conditioned the divorce.
Their grief was heart-rending--equaled only by that of the mother, as
I, in my professional relation to each home, had full opportunity to
judge. But time softened this grief in all of them, and brought about
in the mother a state of mind exceedingly valuable and gratifying
to me. In a year from the divorce she became my wife. So far I had
observed the development of the twins as a physician, noting that the
measles, mumps, croup, and other childhood ailments came to both at
the same time, and, as a physician, ascribing it to bodily contagion.
But now, still a physician to each, I took note of other concurrent
happenings that spoke of mental contagion as well. I was called to Jim
late one afternoon by the agitated father, and found him in a strange
mental condition, crying and laughing, and again storming in an ecstasy
of rage at the house-dog, a gentle, harmless collie and a former pet,
against whom he had conceived a violent hatred. He had attacked and
nearly killed him with a club.
When I reached home that evening I was regaled by the joyous Jack with
an account of his successful battle that afternoon with a mad dog that
had attacked him. It was a large, black mongrel, and he had brained it
with his ball club. I sounded his emotions. Frightened? Of course; who
would not be with a huge mad brute, frothing at the mouth, charging at
him? But he had staggered the animal with the first blow, and then had
come his courage, his anger, and his furious desire to kill, and save
his life. Yes, he had cried, afterward, and was much ashamed of the
weakness. But I reassured him on this point, convinced him that strong,
brave men sometimes cried under extreme excitement, and in my desire to
make the most of the incident in his development, almost overshot the
mark. His self-respect became abnormal, and neighboring dogs and small
boys suffered, until he was stopped by an experience more salutary than
would have been the strapping which his mother and I were seriously
contemplating. He attacked another dog, but a sane dog of small size
and attending to his business. This dog met the assault bravely and,
though suffering keenly from Jack's first blow and unable to injure
any living thing larger than a rabbit, offered a strong protest of
growls and barks, the moral effect of which was to send the small
boy fleeing for home with the small dog snapping at his heels. The
neighbors rejoiced, and it was a month before Jack recovered from the
humiliation. He did not understand, nor did I until the following day,
when his father informed me on the street that the collie, recovered
in mind and body, had revenged himself by attacking and biting Jim,
who was badly frightened and needed my attention. I could not learn
that there was concomitance of time, but I knew that the twins, a mile
apart, _shared each other's emotions_.
After a fruitless attempt to get legal transfer of Jim to my own
household, I fell back on my growing faith in this sympathy of mind,
trusting that a careful training of Jack might have a corresponding
influence upon Jim. But in this I hoped too much. No such sympathy
is ever as strong as daily and personal contact, and the direct and
weakening example of that father's life and words worked powerfully
upon the character of the boy. His individuality lessened, and as
though this lessening were an invitation, the apparently fortuitous
incidents and influences of his life became such as to lessen it still
further. He seemed to be looking for trouble, and would attempt feats
that he failed to perform, while Jack attempted such as were just
within his increasing powers. A boy that Jack had pummeled came around
and took revenge on Jim. He would yield to pressure that Jack would
resist.
And so they grew farther and farther apart in face, form, and
disposition, Jack into a tall, straight, handsome and high-minded
young gentleman, Jim into a shifty, cowardly, stoop-shouldered and
cad-like sort of a youth, without friends, ambition, or ideals, whose
backwardness in study brought him into the lowest class of the town's
one high school as Jack entered the highest. In this year of schooling
they met for the first time since the separation, but they met as
strangers. They knew they were brothers, of course, but carefully
avoided reference to the fact, and soon avoided each other. Between
them there was no outward sympathy nor community of interest, the
unwise but cast-iron pride of the mother finding expression in Jack's
attitude, and the cowardice of the negative father in Jim's.
Jack graduated with honor, and, confronted with another four years of
study at college, yet ardent, ambitious, anxious to begin life's battle
as a man, chose a career that satisfied both conditions--a life in the
navy. He arranged matters himself, secured an appointment to the Naval
Academy, and left us. And on that day, Jim, friendless in school and
stubborn, was dismissed from school for negligence in his studies.
Then, as though his evil star were now at its zenith, his father,
having lost all his inherited property in unwise speculation, took him
away, where I could not learn; but a year later we read the list of
lost in a coasting-steamship wreck, and in this list were the names of
these two.
I now had to deal with a half-crazed woman, who spoke little and did
not weep, but whose strained face and whitening hair told of the
strength of that misplaced pride and outraged mother-love, suppressed
for so many years. Nothing that I could say or do availed against the
aroused craving for the neglected boy. She resisted my oft-repeated
suggestions that Jim was gone, and that there was nothing to do but
to make the best of it. She refused to be resigned, for she could not
bring herself to believe that he was dead. She insisted that he was
alive, and that some day he would come back.
This continued through the years, while her hair became whiter and
her voice nearly silent, while Jack finished his course and sea term,
to be then retired against his will because of the preponderance of
officers in a wooden navy too small for them, and while my practice
and my health left me under the strain of caring for the queenly woman
I loved. Then Jack, a born free-lance who would have entered any navy
in the world had a war been on, did the next best thing for him; he
secured command of a large, new merchant ship, and made a successful
voyage, perhaps the youngest and probably the best educated master in
the merchant marine. When he returned my nerves were as bad as his
mother's, my practice was gone, my future uncertain; and so we accepted
his invitation to make a voyage with him, I with the listlessness of
all neurasthenics, my wife with an avidity which surprised us. She
brightened at once.
And now this story really begins.