第41章

You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back.

Bloated some, I expect.

This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which the Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.

Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part to continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and particularly unpleasant world.This is so much a matter of course, that I was surprised to see the divinity-student change color.He took a look at a small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting forward over the chapped sideboard.The image it returned to him had the color of a very young pea somewhat overboiled.The scenery of a long tragic drama flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-train whishes by a station: the gradual dismantling process of disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over their own stomachs of iron and lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive, but calculating their crop, and thinking how soon it will be ripe, so that they can go to your neighbor, who is good for a year or so longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental shake, as they go out of your door, which throws off your particular grief as a duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who puts your name on the slab which has been waiting for you ever since the birds or beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and the dandelions and the buttercups,----Earth saying to the mortal body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom, but you are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size, so far as it could be said to have any size at all, wandering about and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist,--in fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the sitting posture.

And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the formless and position to the placeless.Neither did his thoughts spread themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them.

They came confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--sometimes a part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes connected fragments, and sometimes only single severed stones.

They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance.

On the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as Ihave said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass turned him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to him as if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut not yet half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground archives.He coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the direction in which his downward path was tending.It was an honest little cough enough, so far as appearances went.But coughs are ungrateful things.You find one out in the cold, take it up and nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give it all sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in your bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog.And by-and-by its little bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing! --you find it is a wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in the breast where he has been nestling so long.--The Poor Relation said that somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a bad way.--The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by cherry-pictorial.

Whiskey's the fellah,--said the young man John.--Make it into punch, cold at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time.I'll come up 'n' show you how to mix it.Have n't any of you seen the wonderful fat man exhibitin' down in Hanover Street?

Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place where the fat man was exhibitin'.Tried to get in at half-price, but the man at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten year old.

It is n't two years,--said the young man John, since that fat fellah was exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton.Whiskey--that's what did it,--real Burbon's the stuff.Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little shavin' of lemon-skin in it,--skin, mind you, none o' your juice;take it off thin,--shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls wear on the sides of their foreheads.

But I am a teetotaller,--said the divinity-student in a subdued tone;--not noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young fellow had just drawn.

He took up his hat and went out.

I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,--I said.

--I don't believe he will jump off one of the bridges, for he has too much principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for he looks as if his mind were made up to something.

I followed him at a reasonable distance.He walked doggedly along, looking neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street, and made for a well-known Life-Insurance Office.Luckily, the doctor was there and overhauled him on the spot.There was nothing the matter with him, he said, and he could have his life insured as a sound one.He came out in good spirits, and told me this soon after.

This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of well-bred and ill-bred people.

I began,--The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable.