The Friend of My Youth

MR. RALPH KEELER, in one of the episodes in his entertaining volume of “ Vagabond Adventures,” takes the reader with him on a professional tour in Dr. Spaulding’s Floating Palace. This Floating Palace, a sort of Barnum’s Museum with a keel, was designed for navigation in Southern and Western rivers, and carried a cargo of complex delights that must have much amazed the simple dwellers on the banks of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Here, on board of this dramatical Noah’s ark, the reader finds himself on the pleasantest terms possible with negro minstrels, danseuses, apostolic wax-works, moral acrobats, stuffed animals, vocalists, and a certain Governor Dorr.

It was with a thrill of honest pleasure that I came upon this picturesque outcast unexpectedly embalmed in the clear prose of my friend. There was a time when I was proud to know this Governor Dorr, when I hung upon the rotund music of his lips, listened to his marvellous stories of moving accidents by flood and field, and was melted to the very heart at those rare moments when, in a three-cornered room in the rear of Wall’s Drug Store, he would favor me with some of the most lacrymose and sentimental poems that ever came of a despondent poet. At this epoch of my existence, Governor Dorr, with his sarcastic winks, his comic melancholy, his quotations from Shakespeare, and his fearful knowledge of the outside world, was in my eyes the personification of all that was learned, graceful, romantic, and daring. A little later my boyish admiration was somewhat shattered by the discovery that my Admirable Crichton was − well, it is of no use now to mince words − an adventurer and a gambler. With a kind of sigh that is at present a lost art to me, I put him aside with those dethroned idols and collapsed dreams which accumulate on one’s hands as one advances in life, and of which I already had a promising collection when I was about twenty. I cast off Governor Dorr, I repeat; but, oddly enough, Governor Dorr never cast me off, but persisted in turning up at intervals of four or five years in the tender and pathetic character of “ the friend of my youth.”

As Governor Dorr is the only gentleman in his line of business who ever evinced any interest in me, I intend to make the most of him ; and, indeed, among my reputable acquaintances there is none who deserves to fare better at my hands. My reputable acquaintances have sometimes bored me, and taught me nothing. Now Governor Dorr, in the ethereal shape of a reminiscence, has not only been a source of great entertainment to me at various times, but has taught me by his own atrocious example that whatever gifts a man may possess, if he have no moral principle he is a failure. Wanting the gift of honesty, Governor Dorr was a gambler and a sharper, and is dead.

I was a school-boy at Rivermouth when Governor Dorr swept like a brilliant comet into the narrow arc of my observation.¹ One day in the summer of 18 − I was going home from school when I saw standing in front of Wall’s Drug Store a showily dressed person, who seemed to me well advanced in years, that is to say, twenty-five or thirty; he was the centre of a little circle of idle fellows about town, who were drinking in with obvious relish one of those pre-Raphaelite narratives which I was afterwards destined to swallow with open - mouthed wonder. The genial twinkle of the man’s blue eyes, the glow of his half-smoked cigar, and the blaze of the diamond on his little finger, all seemed the members of one radiant family. To this day I cannot disassociate a sort of glitter with the memory of my first glimpse of Governor Dorr. He had finished speaking as I joined the group, and I caught only the words, “ and that was the last of gallant Jack Martinway,” delivered in a particularly mellow barytone voice, when he turned abruptly and disappeared behind the orange and scarlet jars in Dr. Wall’s shop-window.

Who is gallant Jack Martinway, I wondered, and who is this dazzling person that wears his best clothes on a week-day ? I took him for some distinguished military hero, and with a fine feeling for anachronism immediately connected him with the portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh in Mitchell’s Geography, − a work I was at that time neglecting with considerable perseverance.

The apparition of so bewildering a figure in our staid, slow-going little town was likely to cause a sensation. The next day in school I learned all about him. He was Governor Dorr ; he had once been a boy in Rivermouth, like us, but had gone off years ago to seek his fortune, and now he had come back immensely wealthy from somewhere, − South America or the Chincha Islands, where he was governor,− and was going to settle down in his native town and buy the “ Bilkins Mansion,”− an estate which the heirs were too poor to keep and nobody else rich enough to purchase.

This was appetizing, and after school I wandered down to Wall’s Drug Store to take a look at my gilded townsman, of whom I was not a little proud.

I was so dazed at the time, that I do not recollect how it all came about; but Governor Dorr was in the shop holding a glass of soda-water in one hand and leaning elegantly on the Gothic fountain ; I entered with the weak pretence of buying a slate pencil; the Governor spoke to me, and then − I can recall nothing except that, when I recovered from my embarrassment and confusion, I was drinking sodawater with the Great Mogul, strangling myself with the lively beverage, and eliciting from him the laughing advice that I should n’t drink it while it was boiling.

I think it was an aggravated case of friendship at first sight. In less than a week my admiration for Governor Dorr was so pure, unselfish, and unquestioning, that it saddens me to remember it, knowing that the stock is exhausted. Every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon − our half-holidays − I hurried to Wall’s Drug Store to meet my friend. Here were his headquarters, and a most profitable customer he must have been, for when he was not drinking soda-water he was smoking the Doctor’s cigars.

In the rear of the shop was a small triangular room where Dr. Wall manufactured a patent eclectic cough sirup, and where he allowed us to sit rainy afternoons. Nothing about me as I write is so real as a vision of that musty, pennyroyal-smelling little room, with Governor Dorr sitting on a reversed mortar and accenting the spirited parts of some Homeric story with a circumflex flourish of the Doctor’s iron pestle, on the end of which was always a thin crust of the prescription last put up. Rows of croupy square bottles filled with a dark-colored mixture and labelled “Cough Sirup” look down on me from their dingy shelves, and I am listening again as of old!

In pleasant weather we sauntered about town, or wandered off into those pretty lanes which make Rivermouth, and rural places like Rivermouth, a paradise for lovers. In all these hours with Governor Dorr, I never knew him to let fall a word that a child should not hear. Perhaps my innocence and my unconcealed reverence for him touched and drew the better part of his heart to me, for it had a better part, − one uncontaminated little piece for children.

Our conversation turned chiefly on his travels, literature, literary men, and actors. His talk, I may remark, was very full on literary men ; he knew them well, and was on astonishingly familiar personal terms with all the American authors quoted in my Third Reader, especially with Joel Barlow, who, I subsequently learned, had quitted this planet about half a century previous to the advent of my friend. He called him “Joel,” quite familiarly, and sometimes his “ dear old friend Joe Barlow, the Hasty-Pudding Man ! ”

Shakespeare, however, was the weakness or the strength of Governor Dorr. I am glad he did not have the effrontery to claim his acquaintance in propria persona. I am afraid that would have shaken my faith and spoiled me for enjoying my comrade’s constant quotations. I am not sure, though, for I trusted so implicitly in the superior knowledge of Governor Dorr that on one occasion he convinced me that Herrick was a contemporary American author, and not an old English poet as I had read somewhere. “ Why, my dear boy,”he exclaimed, “ I know him well, he is a fellow of infinite jest, and his father edits the New York Sunday Atlas ! ” And the Governor drew forth a copy of the Atlas and showed me the name of ANSON HERRICK in large capitals at the head of the paper. After that I was quite adrift on what is called “ the sea of English literature.”

To return to the Bard of Avon, “ the immortal Bill,” as my friend called him in moments of enthusiasm. The daily talk of the Governor would have come to a dead-lock, if he had been debarred the privilege of drawing at sight on his favorite poet. Take Shakespeare from Dorr, and naught remains. It was remarkable how the plays helped him out; now it was Hamlet, and now it was Touchstone, and now it was Prospero who flew to his assistance with words and phrases so pat that they seemed created for the occasion. His voice, at that time rich, strong, and varied as the lines themselves, made it a delight to hear him repeat a long passage. I was not often able to follow the sense of the text, but the music bore me on with it. I can hear him now, saying : −

I never read the lines but I feel his hand laid suddenly upon my shoulder, and fancy myself standing on the old Mill-Dam Bridge at Rivermouth, with the water rushing through the sluices and the rest of the pond lying like a sheet of crinkled silver in the moonlight.

My intercourse with Governor Dorr was not carried on without the cognizance of my family. They raised no objections. The Governor was then in his best style, and by his good-nature and free-and-easy ways more or less won everybody. The leading men of the town touched their hats to him on the street, and chatted with him at the post-office. It must be confessed, though, that the Governor was a sore puzzle to those worthy people. His fluency of language and money was not a local characteristic. He had left the place about ten years before, a poor boy, and now he had dropped down from nobody knew where, like an aerolite, mysteriously gay and possibly valuable.

The fact is, he must have been merely a gambler at this period, and had not entered upon that more aggressive career which afterwards made him well known to the police of Boston New York, and New Orleans. At all events, his fame had not reached Rivermouth ; and though my family wondered what I saw in him or he in me to build a friendship on, − the disparity in our ages being so great, − they by no means objected to the intimacy, and it continued.

What impressed me most in Governor Dorr, next to his literary endowments, was his generous nature, his ready and practical sympathy for all sorts of unfortunate people. I have known him to go about the town half the morning with a blind man, selling his brooms for him at extortionate prices. I have seen the tears spring to his eyes at the recital of some story of suffering among the factory hands, many of whom were children. His love for these pale little men and women, as I think of it, is very touching; and it seems one of the finest things in the world to me now, and at the time it struck me as an epical exhibition of human sympathy, that he once purchased an expensive pair of skates for a little boy who had been born a cripple.

No doubt these facile sympathies were as superficial as letter-paper, as short-lived as those midges which are born and become great-grandfathers and die in the course of a single hour; but they endeared the Governor to me, and may be, when the final reckoning comes, all those good impulses will add up to something handsome ; who can tell ?

Nearly six months had passed since the beginning of our acquaintance, when one morning my noble friend and my copy of Shakespeare − an illegibly printed volume bound in seedy law-calf, but the most precious of my earthly treasures − disappeared from the town simultaneously. Governor Dorr had gone, as he had come, without a word of warning, leaving his “ ancient,” as he was pleased to call me, the victim of abject despair.

What complicated events caused the abrupt departure of my friend and my calf-skin Shakespeare from Rivermouth never transpired. Perhaps he had spent all his money ; perhaps he was wanted by a pal in New York, for some fresh piece of deviltry; or, what is more probable, the pastoral sweetness of life at Rivermouth had begun to cloy on his metropolitan palate.

It may have been five or it may have been ten months after his exodus that my late companion became known to the town in his true colors. He had been tripped up in some disreputable transaction or another, and had played a rather unenviable rôle in the New York police reports. I had been entertaining, not an angel, but a gambler unawares. My mortification was unassumed, and I banished the fascinating Governor Dorr from my affections forever.

A few years afterwards I left Rivermouth myself. The friend of my youth had become a faded memory. I had neither seen nor heard of him in the mean while ; and the summer when I planned to pass the whole of a long vacation at my boyhood’s home, the Governor assumed but a subordinate part in the associations naturally evoked by the proposed visit.

In my first walk through the town after my arrival, it was with a sort of comical consternation that I beheld Governor Dorr standing in front of Wall’s Drug Store, smoking the very same cigar it seemed, and skilfully catching the sunlight on the facets of that identical diamond ring.

The same, and not the same. He looked older, and was not so well groomed as he used to be ; his lower jaw had grown heavier and his figure not improved. There was a hard expression in his face, and that inexplicable something all over him which says as plainly as a whisper to the ear, “ This is a Black Sheep.”

At the crossing our eyes met. Would he recognize his quondam chum and dupe, after all these years ? The Governor gazed at me earnestly for ten seconds, then slowly drew back, and lifting his hat with a magnificent grand air quite his own, made me an obeisance so involved and elaborate that I should fail if I attempted to describe it.

The lady at my side gave my arm a little convulsive grasp, and whispered, “ Who is that dreadful man ? ”

“ O, that ? − that is the friend of my youth ! ”

Though I made light of the meeting, I was by no means amused by it. I saw that if Governor Dorr insisted on presuming on his old acquaintance, he might render it very disagreeable for me ; I might have to snub him, perhaps quarrel with him. His presence was altogether annoying and depressing.

It appears that the man had been lying about Rivermouth for the last twelvemonth. When he was there before he had mystified the town, but now he terrified it. The people were afraid of him, and Governor Dorr knew it, and was having what he would have described as “ a very soft thing.” He touched his hat to all the pretty girls in the place, talked to everybody, and ministered to the spiritual part of his nature, now and then, by walking down the street familiarly with an eminent divine who did not deem it prudent to resent the impertinence. For it was noticed by careful observers, that when any person repelled Governor Dorr, that person’s wood-house caught on fire mysteriously, or a successful raid was undertaken in the direction of that person’s family plate.

These little mishaps could never be traced to the Governor’s agency, but the remarkable precision with which a catastrophe followed any slight offered to him made the townspeople rather civil than otherwise to their lively guest.

The authorities, however, were on the alert, and one night, a week after my arrival, the Governor was caught flagrante delicto, and lodged by Sheriff Adams in the Stone Jail, to my great relief, be it said, for the dread of meeting the man in my walks to the postoffice and the reading-room had given me the air of a person seeking to elude the vigilance of justice.

I forget which of the laws the Governor had offended, − he was quite impartial in his transgressions, by the way, − but it was one that insured him a stationary residence for several months, and I considered myself well rid of the gentleman. But I little knew the resources of Governor Dorr.

He had been in the habit of contributing poems and sketches of a lurid nature to one of the local newspapers, and now, finding the time to hang heavily on his hands in the solitude of his cell, − the window of which overlooked the main street of the town,− he began a series of letters to the editor of the journal in question.

These letters were dated from the Hôtel d’ Adams (a graceful tribute to the sheriff of the county), and consisted of descriptions of what he saw from his cell window, with sharp, shrewd, and witty hits at the peculiarities of certain notable persons of the town, together with some attempts at fine writing not so successful. His observations on the townspeople were delicious. He had a neat humorous touch which, with training and under happier stars, might have won him reputation.

How I enjoyed those letters ! How impatiently I awaited the semi weekly appearance of the dingy journal containing them ; with what eager fingers I unfolded the damp sheet, until, alas ! one luckless morning there came a letter devoted wholly to myself. The “ Leaves from the Diary of a Gentleman of Elegant Leisure ” no longer seemed witty to me. And in truth this leaf was not intended to be witty. It was in the Governor’s best sentimental vein. He informed me that he had “ from afar ” watched over my budding career with the fondness of an elder brother, and that his heart, otherwise humble and unassuming, owned to a throb of honest pride and exultation when he remembered that it was he who had first guided my “ nursling feet ” over the flowery fields of English poesy, and bathed with me up to the chin in that “ Pierian flood ” which I had since made all my own. And so on through a column of solid nonpareil type. Altogether he placed me in a more ridiculous light than any amount of abuse could have done. His sentiment was a thousand times more deadly than his satire.

Though my vacation was not at an end by several weeks, I quietly packed my valise that night, and fled from the friend of my youth.

I find that I am using the capital letter I rather freely in this sketch, − a reprehensible habit into which people who write autobiography are apt to fall ; but really my intention is to give as little of myself and as much of my friend as possible.

In the two or three years that followed this ignominious flight from my native town, I frequently heard of Governor Dorr indirectly. He had become famous now in his modest way. I heard of him in New Orleans and in some of the Western cities. Once, at least, he reappeared in Rivermouth, where he got into some inscrutable difficulty with a number of noncombatant turkeys prepared for Thanksgiving, the result of which was that he spent that day of general festivity at the Hôtel d' Adams. But New York was, I believe, his favorite field of operations.

I cannot explain why the man, with his grotesqueness and his badnesses, so often came uppermost in my mind in those days ; but I thought of him a great deal at intervals, and was thinking of him very particularly one dismal November afternoon in 185-, as I sat alone in the editorial room of the Saturday Press, where I had remained to write after the departure of my confrères.

It was a melancholy small room, up two flights of stairs, in the rear of a building used as a warehouse by a paper firm doing business in the basement. Though bounded on all sides by turbulent streams of traffic, this room was as secluded and remote as if it had stood in the middle of the Desert of Sahara. It would have made an admirable scenic background for a noiseless midday murder in a melodrama. But it was an excellent place in which to write, in spite of the cobwebbed rafters overhead and the confirmed symptoms of scrofula in the plastering.

I did not settle down to work easily that afternoon ; my fancy busied itself with everything except the matter in hand : I fell to thinking of old times and Rivermouth, and what comical things boys are with their hero-worship and their monkey-shines, and how I used to regard Governor Dorr as a cross between Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh, and what a pitiable, flimsy hero he was in reality, a king of shreds and patches. “ Why were such men born ? ” I said to myself; “ Nature in her severe economy creates nothing useless, unless it be the ruminative moth or the New Jersey mosquito ; the human species alone is full of failures monstrous and inexplicable.77

In the midst of this the door opened, and Governor Dorr stood before me. I have had pleasanter surprises.

There was a certain deprecating air about him as he raised his hat in a feeble attempt at his old-time manner, a tacit confession that he could n’t do it. He was unshaven and pathetically shabby. With his closely cropped hair he looked like a prize-fighter retired from business. His features were out of drawing, and wore that peculiar retributive pallor which gin and water in unfair proportions are said to produce. The dye had faded from his heavy mustache, leaving it of a dark greenish tint not becoming to his style of beauty. His threadbare coat was buttoned unevenly across his chest close up to the throat, and was shiny at the cuffs and along the seams. His hat had a weed on it, which struck me as being strange, as I did not remember that anybody had been hanged recently. I afterwards formed a theory touching that weed, based on the supposition that the hat was somebody else’s property. Altogether the Governor looked as if he had fallen upon evil days since our last meeting. There was a hard, cold look in his eyes which, in spite of his half-apologetic attitude, was far from reassuring.

Given a choice in the matter, I should not have elected to have a private conference with him that dull November afternoon in that lonely room in the old barracks on Spruce Street.

The space occupied by the editorial tables was shut off from the rest of the room by a slight wooden rail extending across the apartment. In the centre of this rail was a gate, which my visitor, after a moment’s hesitation, proceeded to open.

As I noted down all the circumstances of the interview while it was fresh in my mind, I am able to reproduce the Governor’s words and manner pretty faithfully.

He closed the gate behind him with great deliberation, advanced a few steps, rested one hand upon the back of a chair, and fixed a pair of very fishy eyes upon me. If he intended to fascinate me, he failed ; if he intended to make me feel extremely nervous, his success was complete.

“ Telemachus,” he said, at length, in a voice that had lost its old music and might be described as ropy, − “ you know I used to call you Telemachus in those happy days when I was your ‘ guide, philosopher, and friend,7 − you see before you a reformed man.”

I suppose I was not entirely successful in concealing my inward conviction.

“ So help me Bob ! 77 exclaimed the Governor, “ I am going to reform, and get some decent clothes,” casting a look of unutterable scorn on his coatsleeve.

The idea of connecting a reformatory measure with an increase of wardrobe struck me as neat, and I smiled.

“ I am going to be honest,” continued Governor Dorr, not heeding my unseemly levity; “‘Honest Iago.7 I am going to turn over a new leaf. I don’t like the way things have been going. I was n’t intended to be a low fellow. I ain’t adapted to being an outcast from society. ‘ We know what we are, but we don’t know what we may be,’ as the sublime Shakespeare remarks. Now, I know what I am, and I know what I ’m going to be. I ’m going to be another man. But I must get out of New York first. The boys would n’t let me reform. I know too many people here and too many people know me. I am going to New Orleans. My old friend Kendall of the Picayune knows my literary qualifications, and would give me an engagement on his paper at sight ; but I’m not proud, and if worst came to worst I could get advertisements or solicit subscribers, and work my way up. In the bright lexicon of a man who means what he says, there ’s no such word as ‘ fail.’ He does n’t know how to spell it.”

The Governor paused and looked at me for a reply ; but as I had nothing to say, I said it.

“ I ’ve been down to Rivermouth,” he resumed, a trifle less spiritedly, “ to see what my old chums would do towards paying my way to New Orleans. They gave me a good deal of good advice, especially Colonel B-; but I am out just twenty dollars, travelling expenses. Advice, however excellent, does n’t pay a fellow’s passage to New Orleans in the present disordered state of society. I have collected some money, but not enough by a few dollars ; and presuming on the memory of those days − those Arcadian days − when we wandered hand in hand through the green pastures of American poesy, I have come to you for a temporary loan, − however small,” he added hastily, “ to help me in becoming an honest citizen and a useful member of society.”

I listened attentively to the Governor’s statement, and believed not a syllable of it, not so much as a hyphen. It had a fatally familiar jingle ; I had helped to reform people before. Nevertheless, the man’s misery was genuine, and I determined not to throw him over altogether. But I did not wish him to think me the victim of his cleverness ; so I frankly told him that I did not believe a word about his reforming, and that if I gave him a little pecuniary assistance, it was solely because I used to think kindly of him when I was a boy.

The Governor was so affected by this that he searched in several pockets for a handkerchief, but not finding one, he wiped away what I should call a very dry tear with the cuff of his sleeve.

With assumed hardness, I begged him not to think he was “doing” a verdant young man, unknowing in the ways of the world, but to bear in mind that I was well aware the few dollars I intended to give him would be staked at the nearest gambling-table or squandered over the counter of a neighboring bar.

Now the journal of which I was part proprietor had a weekly circulation of less than forty thousand copies, and at the end of the week, when we had paid a sordid printer and an unimaginative paper-maker, we were in a condition that entitled us to rank as objects of charity rather than as benefactors of the poor. A five-dollar bill was all my available assets that November afternoon, and out of this I purposed to reserve two dollars for my dinner at Mataran’s. I stated the case plainly to the Governor, suggesting that I could get the note changed at the Tribune office.

He picked up the bill which I had spread out on the table between us, remarking that he thought he could change it. Whereupon he produced a portly pocket-book from the breast of his coat, and from the pocket-book so fat a roll of bank-notes that I glowed with indignation to think he had the coolness to appropriate three fifths of my slender earnings.

“ New Orleans, you know,” he remarked, explanatorily.

The Governor was quite another man now, running dexterously over the bills with a moist forefinger in the gayest of spirits. He handed me my share of the five-dollar bill with the manner of a benevolent prince dispensing his bounties, accorded me the privilege of grasping his manly hand, raised his hat with a good deal of his old quasi aristocratic flourish, and was gone.

There is this heavenly quality in a deed of even misplaced charity,−it makes the heart of the doer sit lightly in his bosom. I treated myself handsomely that afternoon at dinner. I went through the delicacies of M. Mataran’s cuisine to the whole extent of my purse ; but when I stepped to the desk to pay the reckoning, those two one-dollar bills rather awkwardly turned out to be counterfeits !

Well, I suppose I deserved it.

The frequency with which Governor Dorr’s name figured in the local police reports during the ensuing twelve months leads me to infer that he did not depart for New Orleans as soon as he expected.

Time rolled on, and the Saturday Press, being loved by the gods, died early, and one fine morning in 1861 I found myself at liberty to undertake a long-deferred pilgrimage to Rivermouth.

On arriving at my destination, cramped with a night’s ride in the cars, I resolved to get the kinks out of me by walking from the station. Turning into one of the less - frequented streets in order not to meet too many of my townsfolk, I came abruptly upon a hearse jogging along quite pleasantly and followed at a little distance by a single hack. When all one’s friends can be put into a single hack, perhaps it is best that one should be buried expeditiously.

A malign boy stood on the corner whistling shrilly through his fingers, which he removed from his lips with an injured air long enough to answer my question. “ Who’s dead ? Why, Guvner Dorr’s dead. That’s ’im,” curving a calliopean thumb in the direction of the hearse. The pity of it ! The forlornness of the thing touched me, and a feeling of gratitude went out from my bosom towards the two or three hacks which now made their appearance round the corner and joined the funeral train.

Broken down in his prime with careless living, Governor Dorr a few months previously had straggled back to the old place to die ; and thus had chance − which sometimes displays a keen appreciation of dramatic effect − once more brought me in contact with the friend of my youth. Obeying the impulse, I turned and followed the procession until it came to the head of that long unbuilt street which, stretching in a curve from the yawning gate of the cemetery into the heart of the town, always seemed to me like a great siphon draining the life from Rivermouth. Here I halted and watched the black carriages as they crawled down the road, growing smaller and smaller, until they appeared to resolve themselves into one tiny coach, which, lessening in the distance, finally vanished through a gateway that seemed about a foot high.

T. B. Aldrich.