The rest of my business in Edinburgh, not to dwell on a very agreeable dinner with the lawyer or the horrors of the family luncheon, took the form of an excursion with the stonemason, who led me this time to no suburb or work of his old hands, but, with an impulse both natural and pretty, to that more enduring home which he had chosen for his clay. It was in a cemetery, by some strange chance immured within the bulwarks of a prison; standing, besides, on the margin of a cliff, crowded with elderly stone memorials, and green with turf and ivy. The east wind (which I thought too harsh for the old man) continually shook the boughs, and the thin sun of a Scottish summer drew their dancing shadows.
“I wanted ye to see the place,” said he. “Yon’s the stane. Euphemia Ross: that was my goodwife, your grandmither—hoots! I’m wrong; that was my first yin; I had no bairns by her;—yours is the second, Mary Murray, Born 1819, Died 1850; that’s her—a fine, plain, decent sort of a creature, tak’ her a’thegether. Alexander Loudon, Born Seventeen Ninety-Twa, Died—and then a hole in the ballant: that’s me. Alexander’s my name. They ca’d me Ecky when I was a boy. Eh, Ecky! ye’re an awfu’ auld man!”
I had a second and sadder experience of graveyards at my next alighting-place, the city of Muskegon, now rendered conspicuous by the dome of the new capitol encaged in scaffolding. It was late in the afternoon when I arrived, and raining; and as I walked in great streets, of the very name of which I was quite ignorant—double, treble, and quadruple lines of horse-cars jingling by—hundred-fold wires of telegraph and telephone matting heaven above my head—huge, staring houses, garish and gloomy, flanking me from either hand—the thought of the Rue Racine, ay, and of the cabman’s eating-house, brought tears to my eyes. The whole monotonous Babel had grown—or, I should rather say, swelled—with such a leap since my departure that I must continually inquire my way; and the very cemetery was brand-new. Death, however, had been active; the graves were already numerous, and I must pick my way in the rain among the tawdry sepulchres of millionaires, and past the plain black crosses of Hungarian labourers, till chance or instinct led me to the place that was my father’s. The stone had been erected (I knew already) “by admiring friends”; I could now judge their taste in monuments. Their taste in literature, methought, I could imagine, and I refrained from drawing near enough to read the terms of the inscription. But the name was in larger letters and stared at me—James K. Dodd. “What a singular thing is a name!” I thought; “how it clings to a man, and continually misrepresents, and then survives him!” And it flashed across my mind, with a mixture of regret and bitter mirth, that I had never known, and now probably never should know, what the K had represented. King, Kilter, Kay, Kaiser, I went, running over names at random, and then stumbled, with ludicrous misspelling, on Kornelius, and had nearly laughed aloud. I have never been more childish; I suppose (although the deeper voices of my nature seemed all dumb) because I have never been more moved. And at this last incongruous antic of my nerves I was seized with a panic of remorse, and fled the cemetery.
Scarce less funereal was the rest of my experience in Muskegon, where, nevertheless, I lingered, visiting my father’s circle, for some days. It was in piety to him I lingered; and I might have spared myself the pain. His memory was already quite gone out. For his sake, indeed, I was made welcome; and for mine the conversation rolled a while with laborious effort on the virtues of the deceased. His former comrades dwelt, in my company, upon his business talents or his generosity for public purposes: when my back was turned, they remembered him no more. My father had loved me; I had left him alone, to live and die among the indifferent; now I returned to find him dead and buried and forgotten. Unavailing penitence translated itself in my thoughts to fresh resolve. There was another poor soul who loved me—Pinkerton. I must not be guilty twice of the same error.
A week perhaps had been thus wasted, nor had I prepared my friend for the delay. Accordingly, when I had changed trains at Council Bluffs, I was aware of a man appearing at the end of the car with a telegram in his hand and inquiring whether there were any one aboard “of the name of London Dodd?” I thought the name near enough, claimed the despatch, and found it was from Pinkerton: “What day do you arrive? Awfully important.” I sent him an answer, giving day and hour, and at Ogden found a fresh despatch awaiting me: “That will do. Unspeakable relief. Meet you at Sacramento.” In Paris days I had a private name for Pinkerton: “The Irrepressible” was what I had called him in hours of bitterness, and the name rose once more on my lips. What mischief was he up to now? What new bowl was my benignant monster brewing for his Frankenstein? In what new imbroglio should I alight on the Pacific coast? My trust in the man was entire, and my distrust perfect. I knew he would never mean amiss; but I was convinced he would almost never (in my sense) do aright.
I suppose these vague anticipations added a shade of gloom to that already gloomy place of travel: Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, scowled in my face at least, and seemed to point me back again to that other native land of mine, the Latin Quarter. But when the Sierras had been climbed, and the train, after so long beating and panting, stretched itself upon the downward track—when I beheld that vast extent of prosperous country rolling seaward from the woods and the blue mountains, that illimitable spread of rippling corn, the trees growing and blowing in the merry weather, the country boys thronging aboard the train with figs and peaches, and the conductors, and the very darky stewards, visibly exulting in the change—up went my soul like a balloon; Care fell from his perch upon my shoulders; and when I spied my Pinkerton among the crowd at Sacramento, I thought of nothing but to shout and wave for him, and grasp him by the hand, like what he was—my dearest friend.
“O, Loudon!” he cried; “man, how I’ve pined for you! And you haven’t come an hour too soon. You’re known here and waited for; I’ve been booming you already: you’re billed for a lecture to-morrow night: ’Student Life in Paris, Grave and Gay’: twelve hundred places booked at the last stock! Tut, man, you’re looking thin! Here, try a drop of this.” And he produced a case bottle, staringly labelled Pinkerton’s Thirteen Star Golden State Brandy, Warranted Entire.
“God bless me!” said I, gasping and winking after my first plunge into this fiery fluid; “and what does ’Warranted Entire’ mean?”
“Why, Loudon, you ought to know that!” cried Pinkerton. “It’s real, copper-bottomed English; you see it on all the old-time wayside hostelries over there.”
“But if I’m not mistaken, it means something Warranted Entirely different,” said I, “and applies to the public-house, and not the beverages sold.”