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will illustrate still better the atmosphere of the class of men under whose patronizing influence Forrest came in the company of his friend Bowie.
The plantations of Bowie and a very quarrelsome Spaniard joined each other. The proprietors naturally fell out. The Spaniard swore he would shoot Bowie on the first chance. The latter, not liking to live with such an account on his hands, challenged his neighbor, who was a very powerful and skilful fighter with all sorts of weapons and had in his time killed a good many men. The Spaniard accepted the challenge, and fixed the following conditions for the combat. An oak bench six feet long, two feet high, and one foot wide should be firmly fastened in the earth. The combatants, stark naked, each with a knife in his right hand, its blade twelve inches in length, should be securely strapped to the bench, face to face, their knees touching. Then, at a signal, they should go at it, and no one should interfere till the fight was done. The murderous temper of the arrangements was not more evident than the horrible death of one of the men or of both was sure. But Bowie did not shrink. He said to himself, "If the Spaniard's hate is so fiendish, why, he shall have his bellyful before we end." All was ready, and a crowd stood by. Bowie may tell the rest himself, as he related it a dozen years after to Forrest, whose blood curdled while he listened:
"We confronted each other with mutual watch, motionless, for a minute or two. I felt that it was all over with me, and a slight chill went through my breast, but my heart was hot and my brain was steady, and I resolved that at all events he should die too. Every fight is won in the eye first. Well, as I held my look rooted in his eye, I suddenly saw in it a slight quiver, an almost imperceptible sign of giving way. A thrill of joy shot through my heart, and I knew that he was mine. At that instant he stabbed at me. I took his blade right through my left arm, and at the same time, by an upward stroke, as swift as lightning and reaching to his very spine, I ripped him open from the abdomen to the chin. He gave a hoarse grunt, the whole of his insides gushed out, and he tumbled into my lap, dead."
An intimate of Bowie, and a firm patron and friend of Forrest, teaching him much by precept in answer to his inquiries, and contagiously imparting to him yet more by personal contact and
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example, was Colonel Macaire. The real name of this man, and also those of the two succeeding members of the group, are replaced here by fictitious ones on account of their relatives who are still living. The two most prominent traits of Macaire in social life were his enthusiasm for the military art and his extreme fondness for horses. He was a finished soldier and officer. The martial discipline had left its results plainly all through his mind and his person, in a sensitive loyalty to the code of honor, an easy precision of movement, and an authoritative suavity of demeanor. The military art, on the whole, regarded in its influences on individuals and nations, is perhaps the richest in its power and the most exact in its methods of all the disciplines thus far developed in history. Its drill, faithfully applied to a fair subject, nourishes the habit of obedience and the faculty of command, regulates and refines the behavior, lifts the head, throws back the shoulders, brings out the chest, deepens the breathing, frees the circulation, and through its marching time-beat exalts the rank of the organism by co-ordinating its functions in a spirit of rhythm. It changes the contracted and fixed action of the muscles for an action flowing over the shoulders and hips and drawing on the spinal column instead of the brain. And every work which can be shifted from the brain to the spine is a mental economy especially needed in these days of excessive mental action and deficient vital action.
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 re
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view—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
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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
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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.
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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.
Besides listening to innumerable descriptions of this sort, nearly as vivid as sight itself, Forrest actually saw many terrible quarrels and several fatal fights. And the convulsive exhibitions of human passion and energy in their elemental rawness thus afforded were recorded in his imagination and reproduced in the most sensational of his poses and bursts. That he should be,
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under such a training, melodramatic sometimes, whatever else he added, was inevitable. His school was naturalistic and appalling. Even when he attained to so much that was finer and higher, some portion of this still clung to him. He had, it must be remembered, no academic advantages and no tutor, but was a child of nature.
The fourth member of the Forrest group in New Orleans was Charles Graham, captain of a steamer on the Mississippi. He was originally a flatboatman, and was not only familiar with the traditions of the river and the rude border-life concentrated on its current for so many years, but well represented it all in himself. He was widely known among all classes, and especially was such a favorite with the boatmen as to be a sort of a king over them. Though of a kind heart, he was not incapable of taking a frightful revenge when wronged or provoked. One of his men having been abused in a house of disreputable women, he fastened a cable around a large wooden pier on which the house rested, and, starting his steamer, pulled the house over into the river and drowned the whole obscene gang, then proceeded on his way as if nothing had happened.
