He went out with the crowd to Harleigh, saw the strange ceremony, and heard, without understanding them, the fine words spoken. And then, refusing to be comforted, he escaped, walking home alone along the dusty roads—alone forever now—the tears coursing down his cheeks.
But come! he would no longer waste the hours in vain reproaches. Walt, after all, understood. He had always understood, and felt the depth of love that sometimes seeks so false an expression in jealousy. Come now, he will live henceforward by the thought and in the unclouded love of his old Walt, once his and his now forever.
Of course, he had not understood Walt, not as these scholars, these writers and poets understood him. But he had been “awful near to him, nights and days”. And those letters of his! Sometimes he thought that in the passion of his young plain manhood, he had come nearer, yes, nearer than any other, to that great loving soul. And for my part, I am not sure that he was mistaken.
Meanwhile, in the new cemetery, out along Haddon Avenue beyond the Dominican Convent where dwell the Sisters of the Perpetual Rosary, they had buried the remains of Walt Whitman’s body. The hillside above the pool had been covered with folk; and up on the beech-spray over the tomb, the first blue-bird had sung its plaintive-sweet promise of the breaking spring.[775]
In the palm-decked white pavilion, with its open sides, the words of the old poet’s Chant of Death had mingled with those of the Christ and of the Buddha, and with the half-choked sentences of living lovers and friends. “I felt as if I had been at the entombment of Christ,” writes one; and another murmured, “We are at the summit”.
But the last words had been spoken by Ingersoll—“I loved him living, and I love him still”.[776]
THE TOMB AT HARLEIGH CEMETERY, 1904