What was
the use of troubling to become better acquainted with a person, when,
just as you began really to know him, he was up and away? At home, in
the old country, a man as often as not died in the place where he was
born; and the slow, eventless years, spent shoulder to shoulder,
automatically brought about a kind of intimacy. But this was only a
surface reason: there was another that went deeper. He had no talent for
friendship, and he knew it; indeed, he would even invert the thing, and
say bluntly that his nature had a twist in it which directly hindered
friendship; and this, though there came moments when he longed, as your
popular mortal never did, for close companionship. Sometimes he felt
like a hungry man looking on at a banquet, of which no one invited him
to partake, because he had already given it to be understood that he
would decline. But such lapses were few. On nine days out of ten, he did
not feel the need of either making or receiving confidences; he shrank
rather, with a peculiar shy dread, from personal unbosomings. Some imp
housed in him--some wayward, wilful, mocking Irish devil--bidding him
hold back, remain cool, dry-eyed, in face of others' joys and pains.
Hence the break with Purdy was a real calamity. The associations of some
five-and-twenty years were bound up in it; measured by it, one's
marriage seemed a thing of yesterday. And even more than the friend, he
would miss the friendship and all it stood for: this solid base of joint
experience; this past of common memories into which one could dip as
into a well; this handle of "Do you remember?" which opened the door to
such a wealth of anecdote.
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