Nedding

I USED to think that the world was filled with all sorts and conditions of men, but that was before the Only Woman and I took to Nedding. Now we know there are only fifteen or twenty at the outside. Nedding is a very simple pastime, within reach of anybody whom necessity or disposition compels to travel even a little.

She invented it — at Avignon, if I remember — by simply remarking as we sat there having a coffee in the Café des Négociants: ‘ Why, that man over there looks exactly like your uncle Ned.’

Until that hour we had both preserved our infantile illusion that the human family was a vast agglomeration of desperate units, grouped somewhat carelessly into races, but otherwise decidedly heterogeneous. A great many apples must have fallen to the ground before there came a Newton to deduce the law of gravitation. Do you see? No sooner had I discovered that the man at the neighboring table was but another edition of Ned, than I became aware that his companion, a woman whose sharp features seemed to have been thrust into visibility by the pressure of a volcanic personality, was but the double of Fanny, a nursemaid, sacred to the memory of my tenderest years. Much social as well as temporal and geographical — to say nothing of ethnological — distance separated them, no doubt. Nevertheless they had been cast in the same mould.

That opened my eyes, and the eyes of the Only Woman. To Ned and Fanny were soon added Father, Mrs. B., Dollyann, the Farmer, Splitcracker, and Double Bass. Avignon began to seem like a reincarnation of our native town. A nomadic existence led us back to Paris; from there to London; thence to Marseilles, Turin, Venice, Vienna, Athens, Constantinople, to Avignon again. Nomadism is a weary thing when it is one’s business. The hours that one spends in cafés become simply irksome. But it is different when you have discovered a great secret of the race and have something to look for.

Ned reappeared in Paris the first day we were there. He had grown a moustache and lost most of his hair. The hair was even of a different shade. But nothing could disguise him. He has never deserted us since, except in Turin, where our stay was short and filled with uninteresting matters. Nor have the other members of the Doubles family proved less constant. Their numbers are increasing every day as our trained senses become more apt in piercing through superficial differences to hidden identities. We have had to invent new nicknames, as types never noted before thrust themselves repeatedly upon our attention; and one of the things that help us to look forward with pleasure to an approaching pilgrimage to the home town is the hope of finding the overlooked originals who will make these types as old as the others.

For the human race is composed of a very few strains. They run through races, tribes, and nations like threads through a pattern. You, who consider yourself so original in thought and feature — the Only Woman and I will agree to find your twin in any town on earth to which you will pay our traveling expenses. How witnesses dare to identify the defendant in the offhand way they do at criminal trials passes my comprehension. I would not swear, now, even to Uncle Ned.