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Page 50
Crazed by this duality of life, I first read Dr. Wigan on the "Duality
of the Brain," hoping that I could train one side of my head to do these
outside jobs, and the other to do my intimate and real duties. For
Richard Greenough once told me, that, in studying for the statue of
Franklin, he found that the left side of the great man's face was
philosophic and reflective, and the right side funny and smiling. If you
will go and look at the bronze statue, you will find he has repeated
this observation there for posterity. The eastern profile is the
portrait of the statesman Franklin, the western of poor Richard. But Dr.
Wigan does not go into these niceties of this subject, and I failed. It
was then that, on my wife's suggestion, I resolved to look out for a
Double.
I was, at first, singularly successful. We happened to be recreating at
Stafford Springs that summer. We rode out one day, for one of the
relaxations of that watering-place, to the great Monson Poorhouse. We
were passing through one of the large halls, when my destiny was
fulfilled!
He was not shaven. He had on no spectacles. He was dressed in a green
baize roundabout and faded blue overalls, worn sadly at the knee. But I
saw at once that he was of my height, five feet four and a half. He had
black hair, worn off by his hat. So have and have not I. He stooped in
walking. So do I. His hands were large, and mine. And--choicest gift of
Fate in all--he had, not "a strawberry-mark on his left arm," but a cut
from a juvenile brickbat over his right eye, slightly affecting the play
of that eyebrow. Reader, so have I! My fate was sealed!
A word with Mr. Holley, one of the inspectors, settled the whole thing.
It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable fellow, of the
class known as shiftless, who had sealed his fate by marrying a dumb
wife, who was at that moment ironing in the laundry. Before I left
Stafford, I had hired both for five years. We had applied to Judge
Pynchon, then the probate judge at Springfield, to change the name of
Dennis Shea to Frederic Ingham. We had explained to the Judge, what was
the precise truth, that an eccentric gentleman wished to adopt Dennis,
under this new name, into his family. It never occurred to him that
Dennis might be more than fourteen years old. And thus, to shorten this
preface, when we returned at night to my parsonage at Naguadavick, there
entered Mrs. Ingham, her new dumb laundress, myself, who am Mr. Frederic
Ingham, and my double, who was Mr. Frederic Ingham by as good right as
I.
O the fun we had the next morning in shaving his beard to my pattern,
cutting his hair to match mine, and teaching him how to wear and how to
take off gold-bowed spectacles! Really, they were electro-plate, and the
glass was plain (for the poor fellow's eyes were excellent). Then in
four successive afternoons I taught him four speeches. I had found these
would be quite enough for the supernumerary-Sepoy line of life, and it
was well for me they were; for though he was good-natured, he was very
shiftless, and it was, as our national proverb says, "like pulling
teeth," to teach him. But at the end of the next week he could say, with
quite my easy and frisky air,--
1. "Very well, thank you. And you?" This for a answer to casual
salutations.
2. "I am very glad you liked it."
3. "There has been so much said, and, on the whole, so well said, that I
will not occupy the time."
4. "I agree, in general, with my friend the other side of the room."
At first I had a feeling that I was going to be at great cost for
clothing him. But it proved, of course, at once, that, whenever he was
out, I should be at home. And I went, during the bright period of his
success, to so few of those awful pageants which require a black
dress-coat and what the ungodly call, after Mr. Dickens, a white choker,
that in the happy retreat of my own dressing-gowns and jackets my days
went by as happily and cheaply as those of another Thalaba. And Polly
declares there was never a year when the tailoring cost so little. He
lived (Dennis, not Thalaba) in his wife's room over the kitchen. He had
orders never to show himself at that window. When he appeared in the
front of the house, I retired to my sanctissimum and my dressing-gown.
In short, the Dutchman and his wife, in the old weather-box, had not
less to do with each other than he and I. He made the furnace-fire and
split the wood before daylight; then he went to sleep again, and slept
late; then came for orders, with a red silk bandanna tied round his
head, with his overalls on, and his dress-coat and spectacles off. If we
happened to be interrupted, no one guessed that he was Frederic Ingham
as well as I; and, in the neighborhood, there grew up an impression that
the minister's Irishman worked day-times in the factory-village at New
Coventry. After I had given him his orders, I never saw him till the
next day.
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