The Friendly Club and Other Portraits

by Francis Parsons

The possession of a motor car and the services of a chauffeur, though generally involving more financial outlay than a stable and coachman necessitated, somehow do not quite confer the reflected glory in which the employer of a coachman used to shine. Everybody has a motor and the very prevalence and numerousness of the chauffeur, capable and loyal soul though he be, necessarily detract from the distinction which the rarer coachman used to give.

One usually stood rather in awe of the coachman—particularly in boyhood, the period with which he is chiefly associated in the memories of most of us. He was a person of strange and exalted attainments. He held mysterious and telepathetic communication with his horses. He understood them, and they him. He had theories about shoeing, he could prescribe for most of their ailments, he hissed at them queerly as he groomed them. Moreover, he had the real sporting spirit. He knew all about the performances of Maud S. and John L. Sullivan. He called the firemen and policemen by their first names and the fire bell would send him running out of the stable at any hour.

If the boy wanted to acquire a puppy he got the coachman to select it and to clip its ears (without anæsthetic) behind the stable—or, if the coachman was wise, he persuaded a friend to do this surgical work at some livery stable, out of earshot of the family. Probably when the puppy was grown the coachman surreptitiously staged fights with him against rival dogs, chaperoned by brother coachmen, late at night after the boy and his elders were asleep, thus occasionally providing a precarious addition to his wages if the dog came up to expectation. To tell the truth, it was generally selected for its fighting qualities.

He had strange tales of adventure, many of them doubtless fictitious, but showing the swift imagination of the race from which he generally sprang. The great event of his life was his trip to Philadelphia at the time of the Centennial when he was temporarily a soldier and had charge of the major's horse. For years brilliant lithographs of the exhibition buildings were tacked to the stable wall above the shelf where stood bottles of horse liniment and harness dressing. He had seen men and cities and out of his experience had grown a practical and homely wisdom that was by no means lost upon his young admirers. He was the friend of youth.

And now it seems that the guild is officially extinct. Hail and farewell, private coachman! Though legally dissolved you are not forgotten, but remain ever enshrined in our memories of an older and simpler day.

In those memories the coachman assumes multiform incarnations. The individuals varied as the years of childhood lengthened, but they all conformed to type.

At the end of one of those dim vistas of childish recollections, illumined by the mellow light that always plays about our earliest remembrances, stands the figure of Patrick, the first coachman of them all. His first appearance was so very long ago—as a life-time is measured—that the vision, emerging from the mists in which the first consciousness of the world is enveloped, is painted somewhat vaguely on the retina of the mind. How much of it is real, how much an idealized memory, can not perhaps be definitely determined. After all, it is only a picture and a feeling.

One seems to remember being enthroned on a rug spread on the grass of the garden, beneath the big apple tree, in the level sunlight of a late afternoon in spring. It must have been spring for the apple tree was in bloom. About one, seated on the grass, was grouped a circle of the maids of the household and their visitors. No experience of later years has ever given the slightest intimation that one could possibly be or became such a center of interest and admiration as that microcosm of dawning intelligence then consciously was to that laudatory audience. There was a distinct sense of being the source of the happiness and laughter that composed the mental atmosphere of that golden afternoon. Such an assurance that the world was entirely good and beautiful has not since been attained.

Then, suddenly, Patrick was added to the circle—a smooth-shaven, apple-cheeked, merry man—having doubtless strolled over from the neighboring stable yard. Was it partly because a masculine note of admiration was added to the feminine chorus that the effect of general well-being and of mirth seemed, with his arrival, to be emphasized and confirmed? At all events there was an instinctive perception between Patrick and the center of interest that they understood each other, and Patrick was welcomed from the rug with evidences of the recognition of this bond which precipitated another wave of delightful worship.