Macaire was a great expert in horses, ever to be found where the best thoroughbreds were to be seen, attending races with the most avid relish. And it is well known that hardly anything else is so effective in imparting vitality and courage to a man as the habit of sympathetic contact with horses, looking at them, breathing with them, handling them, driving them. The popular instinct says they give their magnetism to their keepers. The fact is, the vibrations of the blood and nerves of the animal are communicated to those of the man and strengtheningly mix with them. The evil connected with this good is that the companionship often not only imparts vital force and courage but likewise stimulates the coarser animal passions. The tendency, however, is neutralized in the man of refinement.
It was from his friendship with Macaire—attending races, going through stables, visiting armories, drills, and fields of review—that Forrest first learned to feel that keen love for horses which was one of his passions to the end of his life, and first took that intelligent interest in the law of the military drill which gradually grew upon him until he had appropriated its fruits. For the inartistic rudeness of his early gymnastic, his rough circus-tumbling, had left him somewhat stiff and enslaved in parts of his body. But rhythmic movements, regulated by will until they become automatic, free the muscles and joints and give the organism a liberal grace, a generous openness and ease of bearing. A few months after his début in New Orleans the "Advertiser" remarked, "We are happy to be able to say that Mr. E. Forrest now uses his limbs with freedom and grace." The improvement had made itself plain.
The third of the set of comrades grouped about Forrest at this time was Gazonac, one of the most remarkable of the gentlemen gamblers and duellists for whom the Crescent City was famous fifty years ago. Such were the qualities of this smooth, imperturbable, and accomplished man, consummate master of every trick of his art and of every weapon of offence or defence, and such was the tone of popular sentiment in the place, that although gambling was his profession and duelling his diversion he neither had a bad conscience in himself nor was regarded as an outcast by the community. He was a rare judge and adept in everything concerning the physical powers of men, and the expression of their passions in real life under the most concentrated excitements. And he was himself trained to the very nicest possible degree of self-control. His muscular tissue, of the most elastic and tenacious texture, covered him like a garment flowing around his joints as if it had no fastenings, and under it he moved in subtle ease and concealment, allowing no conceivable provocation to extort any signal without consent of his will. His nervous system had been drilled to act with the precision of astronomical clock-work. His conscious calculations had the swiftness and exactitude of the instincts of animals. What he did not know concerning the public sporting life and the secret passionate life of the city was not worth knowing; and he knew it not superficially but through and through. He had fought a dozen duels and always killed his opponent. "How have you invariably come off victor?" Forrest once asked him. "It is easy enough," he answered, "if one is but complete master of himself, of his weapon, and of the situation, cool as personified mathematics. I always shoot, on an exact calculation, just enough quicker than my adversary for my ball to strike him as he fires, and so disorder his aim."
An absolute social nonchalance in every emergency, a perfect superiority to the fear of our fellow-beings singly or collectively, is attainable only in one of three ways, if we omit idiotic insensibility, sheer brute stolidity. First, by ourselves, as it were, impersonating and representing the established standard of judgment, the code by which we and our conduct are to be tested. This is the assured ease of the fashionable leader, the noble, the king. Second, by utterly defying that standard, and ignoring it, substituting for it a personal standard of our own, or the code of some special class of our associates. This is the sang-froid of the gambler, the stony courage of the habituated criminal. He is immovably collected, cool, and brave, in spite of his condemnation by law and morality, because he has displaced from his consciousness the social standard of judgment prevalent around him which he disobeys, and set up in its stead another standard which he obeys. His conscience then does not make a coward of him. Self-poised in what he himself thinks, he is not disturbed by mental reaction on what he imagines other people think. The moment he violates his own conscience or the code which he professes loyalty to, he feels guilty, and to that extent becomes weak and cowardly. The third method of superiority to fear is by conscious and direct obedience to the intrinsic right, the will of God. This is the imperial heroism of the saint and the martyr. Then the supreme code of the universe makes the harmonious conscience indomitably superior to the frowning penalties of all lesser and meaner codes, and no personal enemy, no hostile public opinion, can terrify.
It was partly by the first, chiefly by the second, hardly at all, it is to be feared, by the third, of these methods that Gazonac acquired his marvellous self-possession and marble equilibrium of nerve. But he had it. And the perfected empire of his being in the range of his daily life, his transcendent fearlessness of everything external, his superlative feeling of competency to every occasion, was in itself a rare achievement and an enviable prize. He had disentangled and freed the fibres of his brain from all imaginative references to the opinions of other persons or to the requirements of any code but the one enthroned in his own bosom. To this imperfect code he was true, and therefore, however wrong and guilty he may have been, in his self-sufficingness he did not suffer the retributions of a bad conscience. He was shielded in the partial insensibility of a defective conscience. If the conscience of a man be pure and expansive enough properly to represent to him the will of God or the whole truth of his duty, then a neglectful superiority to individual censures and to social opinion is an heroic exaltation, which the more it sets other men against him so much the more it shows him to be diviner than they.
Under the guidance of this typical man, who was always scrupulously tender and careful with him, Forrest was initiated into all the mysteries, all the heights and depths, of a world of experience kept veiled and secret from most people. It was a world of dreadful fascinations and volcanic outbreaks, extravagant pleasures and indescribable horrors,—a world whose heroes are apt, as the proverb goes, to die with their boots on. Together they visited cock-pits, race-courses, bar-rooms, gambling-saloons, and every other resort of disorderly passion and disreputable living. And the young actor with his professional eyes drank in many a revelation of human nature uncovered at its deepest places and in its wildest moods. It was a fearful exposure, and he did not escape unscathed, though it seems from his after-life that he was more instructed than he was infected. He never forgot the impression made on him in the cock-pit by the rings of staring visages, tier above tier, massed in frenzied eagerness and regularly vibrating with the struggles of the feathered and gaffed champions whose untamable ferocity of valor and pluck seemed to satirize the vulgar pride of human battle. Still deeper was the effect on his memory of the scene when, at a race, he saw a vast crowd, including the governor of the State, the mayor of the city, members of Congress, rich planters, leading lawyers and merchants, boatmen, bullies, and loafers, all armed, yet behaving as politely as in a parlor, restrained by the knowledge that at the slightest insult knives would gleam, pistols crack, blood flow, and no one could foretell where the fray would end.
On one occasion, taking a swim with Gazonac in Lake Pontchartrain, Forrest saw a thick-set and commanding sort of man, with flashing black eyes, his breast scarred all over with stabs. "Who is that?" he asked. "It is Lafitte, the pirate," his comrade replied. A week or two afterwards, he saw Lafitte, in the square fronting the cathedral, running like a deer, chased by a man with a knife. Gazonac said, "Oh, on the quarter-deck, with his myrmidons around him, he could play the hero; but he was not a brave man. Some men can fight in crowds but cannot fight singly. This requires courage." He then proceeded to relate some examples of single-handed fights. Two friends of his fought a duel on this wise. They were locked in a room in the dark, naked, each having a knife. In the morning they were found dead in a bloody heap, cut almost into strips. A man who can foresee such a result yet go resolutely into it is no coward, Gazonac said.
Two others fought thus. They were to begin with rifles at three hundred paces; if these failed, advance with pistols; and, these failing, close with knives. At the first shot both dropped dead: the bullet of one struck exactly between the eyes, that of the other pierced the pit of the stomach.
In still another case, two men of his acquaintance were addressing the same woman, and were very jealous of each other. At an offensive remark of one the other said, "I will take your right eye for that!" "Will you?" was the retort, which was scarcely spoken before his enemy had gouged the eye from his head and politely handed it to him. He quietly replied, "I thank you," and put the palpitating orb in his pocket. Then, regardless of the streaming socket and the agony, with the ferocity and swiftness of a tiger he turned on his remorseless mutilator and with one stroke of a long and heavy knife nearly severed his head from his body, and dilated above him shuddering with revengeful joy.