It was a small matter, but the friendship begun in manly and helpful kindness has gone on for twenty-two years in mutual faith and loyalty; and the growth dignifies the seed.
A sturdy growth it was in its sapling days. It was in the late spring that we decided to take the room together in St. Mark`s Place. A big room and a poor room, indeed, on the third story of that “battered caravanserai,” and for twelve long years it held us and our hopes and our despairs and our troubles and our joys.
First purchase
I don`t think I have forgotten one detail of that room. There is the generous old fireplace, insultingly bricked up by modern poverty, all save the meager niche that holds our fire when we can have a fire. There is the great second-hand table our first purchase where we sit and work for immortality in the scant intervals of working for life. Your drawer, with the manuscript of your Concordance of Political Economy, is to the right. Mine is to the left; it holds the unfinished play, and the poems that might better have been unfinished. There are the two nar-row cots yours to the left of the door as you enter; mine to the right.
How strange that I can see it all so clearly, now that all is different!
Yet I can remember myself coming home at one o`clock at night, dragging my tired feet up those dark, still, tortuous stairs, gripping the shaky baluster for aid. I open the door I can feel the little old- fashioned brass knob in my palm even now and I look to the left. Ah, you are already at home and in bed.
I need not look toward the table. There is money a little in the common treasury; and, in accordance with our regular compact, I know there stand on that table twin bottles of beer, half a loaf of rye bread, and a double palm`s- breadth of Swiss cheese. You are staying your hunger in sleep: for one may not eat until the other comes. I will wake you up, and we shall feast together and talk over the day that is dead and the day that is begun.
Strange, is it not, that I should have some trouble to realize that this is only a memory, I, with my feet in the bearskin rug that it would have beggared the two of us, or a dozen like us, to purchase in those days. Strange that my mind should be wandering on the crude work of my boyhood and my early manhood.
I who have won name and fame, as the world would say. I, to whom young men come for advice and encouragement, as to a tried veteran! Strange that I should be thinking of a time when even your true and tireless friendship could not quench a subtle hunger at my heart, a hunger for a more dear and intimate comradeship. I, with the tenderest of wives scarce out of my sight; even in her sleep she is no further from me than my own soul.
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