Friends Again

‘OF course,’ I said, ‘friendships improve with age.’

‘And common is the common-place, and vacant chaff,’ — he answered, giving me one of those challenging looks that I had long both loved and feared.

‘Not at all,’ I replied, ‘for it’s not common-placeness but pure necessity that drives us to the repetition of the value of old friendships. The fact is, Henry, if we did n’t keep on reminding ourselves of it, it just would n’t be true. There’s many a friendship that has only age to recommend it, and if we did n’t whistle in the dark about it we’d lose it entirely.’

‘Now, yours and mine, for instance,’ — and Henry edged toward the fire and took up the poker carelessly, which I interpreted, as usual, not as a gesture for defense, but rather one for tribute; for it meant, as always, that he yielded the floor to me. That was one of his ways of keeping our friendship.

‘Well, have that part of it your own way, at any rate —’

‘Jim,’ he interrupted, ‘you know there is n’t a blessed thing that’s new to be said on this old subject. Cicero, and Damon and Pythias, and Emerson and lesser lights have circumnavigated the globe and charted all the seas of that topic. Why under the sun do you want to launch out into it tonight? If you can’t be a discoverer in this field, why not contentedly follow these mariners and call it done; one of the delightful topics about which no more problems can arise to trouble us? Friendship, — why, it simply can’t be talked about any more, and that’s all there is to it.’

But Henry still held the poker, so I knew that he only half-meant what he said. I surmised that I could continue safely.

‘Of course,’ I went on, ‘all you say is true, yet it merely shows the need of further enlightening you; for the only subjects worth talking about are the closed ones, like love, and religion, and forbidden secrets, and — and friendship. Now, friendship is a science. Nothing can add to its basal facts or to its elements, but the combinations are absolutely endless; just as nothing new could possibly add to the fact that you and I are sitting here by the fire, yet the positions and attitudes and changes we might make in our sitting, you there and I here, are endless. You see?’

‘Plain enough,’ he grunted.

‘Well, then, I maintain that friendships are divisible into many kinds. There are the inherited ones, the axiomatic, the evolutionary, the contemporaneous, the incidental, and the prospective or contributory.

‘The inherited friendships are those that are usually given to us by our family. We are not to blame for them, nor do we deserve credit for them. Sometimes we may want to shake them off, but good or bad they stick pretty close; and I for one find an increasing value in some friends of the family whom, not so long ago, I placed among the things to be forgotten. They are like the last few apples on an old tree that is long past its prime, sweet with long seasoning, and sometimes useful beyond calculation.

‘For instance, ten years ago when I cut loose into the Far West, I did n’t know a soul in the place. One day I happened to remember an old friend of my people. I had neither part nor lot in his destiny nor he in mine, as I supposed; and I had a sneaking feeling that, as a man far beyond me in years, he would still look on me as a small boy, worthy of nothing except to listen to advice. I had that strange feeling we all have occasionally, that he would n’t give me any standing in the universe except on the shoulders of my family. I, as I, would count for nothing with him. But with a sense of duty high in my heart, and duty alone, I went to call on him. I found him outwardly as expected, a withered tree. But for the first time in my life I found out what it is to be received at your own full value of estimation plus the momentum of the family name and history.

‘I learned for the first time the pleasure of being taken not only for what I was, but also for the worth of origins and sources hidden even from me. He did n’t forget for one minute that I was different from my family, yet neither did he fail to reveal to me the common source of those very differences. Talk about knitting the generations each to each! why, my first evening with that man gave me back more of myself than I had ever hoped to rescue again. And if I inherited him from my family, he in turn restored my family tome along with a large part of myself. I doubt if I shall ever see him again: he’s nearly eighty now, and out West; but the letter I had from him last week asked me to tell him the latest news about myself. Do you call that a withered inheritance? I don’t.’

‘Perhaps he’s an exception,’ Henry muttered as he looked steadily at the fire.

‘No, he is n’t. He’s simply one of the old atmospheres that we have no right to lose, and can’t lose unless we deliberately throw them away. He’s as mysterious to me now as the old well-sweep on the farm, or as the path that led down to the spring-house; as web-like and indefinite as the mornings when I used to gather mushrooms for breakfast in the lower lot. There’s something silvery about him, as about a shining memory, and I would n’t exchange the bestowal of old things he has brought to me for my richest treasure. The family beauty sweeps over me when I think of him, as it never did before I knew him. And after all, I firmly believe one has to see one’s family through a friend before one appreciates them, just about as much as the reverse of that process is true. I’m all for inherited friendships anyhow.

‘As for axiomatic friendships,— well, they begin along in high-school and prep-school days; perhaps even most of our college friendships are in this class. These are “the fellows,” whom we take for granted as friends, no matter how far apart our courses afterward lie. Some of them will look blankly at us if we try for three short minutes to tell them what life has come to mean to us. Some of them will be thinking of stocks and bonds while we are trying to tell them of the high seas of truth and experience. Some of them will go away and declare that we have everything in us but the element of success. And after some of them we in turn can only close our door and say, “Poor fellow.” But, after all, they are friends; friends by the right of the group-system that brought us together, and by the power of influences and associations that respond the moment we see each other. Some old motto stood over the gateway we entered together, and we remain friends still, although that motto is probably everything that we now hold in common.

‘ I met one of them in the street the other day and all he had to say was, “Why, are you round here?” It was all he could think of, our nearness to each other as to physical distances. Yet the root of the matter was in his question. It flashed through us both that he could n’t even have said that but for the years when the same quadrangle sheltered us as home. We had been at home once together, and now to our surprise we were both “round here,” sheltered by the same surroundings, or storm-beaten in them, who knows? That part we did not have time to ask each other.

‘I can’t see my way to give up even these poor axiomatic friendships. There’s a space to them, they arc spread over our heads like the sky; and though we don’t look up at the sky every moment, it’s a comfort to know it’s there. Neighbors and people on the same street belong in this axiomatic class, and I’m not so sure but that they are like those whom the Good Samaritan met. They just lie on the road between Jericho and Jerusalem. And it may be that none can tell which of us will be the one lying by the roadside when next we pass each other. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll hold to my axiomatic friendships a while longer.’

‘It’s a plausible possibility,’ said Henry; which was really a great encouragement to me.

‘Well, then,’ I went on, ‘there are the evolutionary friendships. They are almost the finest of the lot. They are the friends we make because of our progress and development, veritable brands snatched from the burning, as we go on being whirled round in life’s crucible, if you’ll take the mixed metaphor. We fling out on our own line beyond the inherited and axiomatic people into our own free and frightening field of activity and thought. We feel ourselves growing into something new and strange, and, worse than that, we feel dreadfully lonely. The great wide fire-expanse frightens us; we know our old friends will never recognize us again. Then suddenly we touch a hand that touches ours. The grasp is passed, and we know we are not alone. Some other man from a far corner of the universe responds to the same thoughts that stir us. Some hitherto unknown spirit declares that what we have dreamed he also has dreamed. We strike a common vocabulary. In the midst of unresponsive eyes here are eyes that gleam with our own light. Why, it’s like a lamp in a house on a lonesome road at night! In the midst of mere people here is a real person. Our very progress has brought us near to each other. Look at the intellectual stimulus of it! By an entirely different route this man has found to be true the same things we have found to be true. No need now further to prove our uncertain guesses, for here is another who declares that they are not our personal hallucinations, but that in his “differing soul” they have actual validity. This gives us a foundation to stand on. What before was fluid supposition in our minds is now found to be solid human stuff. We have progressed in our own wide sea until we have found another mind.

‘That’s a great journey to have made. And the value of this evolutionary friendship is that it is our own. No one gave it to us; we reached it and claimed it by our own efforts. No separation is possible here, for this friendship belongs among the things that have evolved, it’s a link in the fundamental process of onward growth.

‘The joy of this friendship is something no man taketh from us, and while such friends are bound to be few from the very nature of the case, nevertheless they are the select ones. They are the appreciation that the universe bestows upon us in flesh and blood, rewards of merit, the survival of the fittest, and all the rest of the glorious crown on those who keep the law of evolution. No matter how far-away they are, they carry with them that mystic sense that we and they traveled differing roads to the same goal.

‘As for contemporaneous friendships, well, I would n’t like to abandon the kindly touch of those who come and go, yesterday and to-day. These friends are the ones whom we meet largely because we can’t help it. Some momentary occasion or business brings us together. We know it will not bind us long or closely, but while it does hold, it is a heat as warm and genial as an April sun. We are friends just because we live in the same day, read the same newspaper, and put the same date on our letter-sheet. These contemporary friends at least remind us of the mutual needs, the common sorrows, the equal pressure of the moment on both of us. We do not partake largely of each other’s goods, but we are exalted and subdued by the same risings and fallings of the life of our time. I have a long list of friends to-day which next year I may not have. But, nevertheless, they sustain me as the vital tide of the present sways us together.

‘ They are somewhat like the people with whom we cross on the same steamer. We shall not long remember them, yet none the less it would have been a dreadful thing to have been the sole passenger on the liner. We’ve got to learn the worth of these contemporaneous friendships, for they are powerful over us by the very force of numbers. And it’s a poor soul who goes the day’s march alone when companionship may be had for the asking. The eyes that look for the more enduring friends will suffer no hurt by using the same expression for those who pass their way on the common highroad.

‘Then there are incidental friendships. These are the people whom some single or sudden event throws in our way. We are clashed together by some accident, or thrown against each other by some rude happening. We appear to have no likes or tastes in common. We even resent the acquaintance as an intrusion. Yet the result is as if two men stood on opposite sides of a sudden crack in the earth during an earthquake. Elemental forces caught them in their grip and then released them, and for a moment those men looked at each other as if an angel stood before them.

‘ I know of an almost perfect friendship that began in the hospital when two men lay for days at death’s door, and each one made hourly inquiry for the other, forgetful and ignorant of his own close treading on the narrow path of life. Their friendship sprang from a mere incident, but the incident was elemental. Its force has lasted far beyond its own limits. The flash of something eternal does really break through now and then and reveal two people to each other in this way, seeming to single them out from all the countless millions. We can’t explain it, but it’s so. Of course, such incidental friendships are rare, but I really believe all of us have some one whom we first knew in that way.’

‘ I met Minto the day we went down into the mine to cut off the fire-damp, when our elevator broke.’ That was all Henry said, but I knew what he meant, and it was more than sufficient.

‘Last of all, I believe, are the prospective friendships. I don’t mean those that we are yet to make, but those that have the future look to them. For instance, those chiefly that we form with people much younger than ourselves. We get tired of our own ideals and thoughts, we realize that they will never fulfill or complete themselves in our lives. They come to look dangerously like mere theories, after a while. But then we cross the track of a man far younger than we are. We find that he holds our ideals in the light of morning while for us the afternoon light is already throwing its shadows over them. Our thoughts on this or that great theme arc quiescent and tamely inactive. His are jubilant and alert. The thoughts are the same, but the light of opportunity is on one mind, while the gray of regret is just beginning to tingle in the ot her. A thrill goes through us as we realize that our holding of the thought was not for our sakes, but that we might act as a channel for the idea itself. Here is our relayrunner, come to meet us, waiting for us. Swifter than we he will grasp the truth and hold it, carry it further on, and pass it to the next man. Again we find we are only a link. Only a link! What more could we ask? And as we pass the torch on, giving it now to receptive hands, we feel that sense of protection rise in us that dignifies our weakest effort. We have sheltered for a while a great idea and passed it safely to another. We made little of it, we failed to touch the heights with it, but we sheltered it, gave it protection on its way down the ages.

‘This prospective friendship is a racial thing, and lifts us out of our petty place as a mere neighbor or citizen. We are more than that when we find a friendship with a younger man than ourselves. A friendship with one of them that has in it equality in spite of a dozen years or more of difference, makes us contributors to human welfare, and enables us to say with almost a messianic hope, “The government shall be upon his shoulders, his name shall be called Wonderful.” Ours shall have no fame, but his has endless possibility in it.

‘It seems to me that a friendship like that is compensation to a man for almost any failure, the open door to complete reparation, or even retribution, for all mistakes. I, for my part, am glad I have one or two whose younger faces light up when we talk together. It takes away some of my sense of unaccomplishment. Most of our friendships are rooted in the past. Is it wrong to suppose that we may have one or two whose main sustenance is drawn from the sense of things yet to be?’

My friend sat silent for a moment, poked the fire-log with the poker, and then said, —

‘You have n’t classified our friendship, Jim.’

‘There are some that refuse classification,’ I replied.

And then we relighted our cold pipes and watched the fire die down.