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The Wrecker

by Robert Louis Stevenson · English · Gutenberg #1024 · 784,585 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Wrecker

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
        Lloyd Osbourne


        
Release date: February 11, 2006 [eBook #1024]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1024

Credits: Produced by Tony Adam and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WRECKER ***

THE WRECKER

by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne




PROLOGUE.




IN THE MARQUESAS.

It was about three o'clock of a winter's afternoon in Tai-o-hae, the
French capital and port of entry of the Marquesas Islands. The trades
blew strong and squally; the surf roared loud on the shingle beach; and
the fifty-ton schooner of war, that carries the flag and influence of
France about the islands of the cannibal group, rolled at her moorings
under Prison Hill. The clouds hung low and black on the surrounding
amphitheatre of mountains; rain had fallen earlier in the day, real
tropic rain, a waterspout for violence; and the green and gloomy brow of
the mountain was still seamed with many silver threads of torrent.

In these hot and healthy islands winter is but a name. The rain had not
refreshed, nor could the wind invigorate, the dwellers of Tai-o-hae:
away at one end, indeed, the commandant was directing some changes in
the residency garden beyond Prison Hill; and the gardeners, being
all convicts, had no choice but to continue to obey. All other folks
slumbered and took their rest: Vaekehu, the native queen, in her
trim house under the rustling palms; the Tahitian commissary, in his
beflagged official residence; the merchants, in their deserted stores;
and even the club-servant in the club, his head fallen forward on
the bottle-counter, under the map of the world and the cards of navy
officers. In the whole length of the single shoreside street, with its
scattered board houses looking to the sea, its grateful shade of palms
and green jungle of puraos, no moving figure could be seen. Only, at
the end of the rickety pier, that once (in the prosperous days of the
American rebellion) was used to groan under the cotton of John Hart,
there might have been spied upon a pile of lumber the famous tattooed
white man, the living curiosity of Tai-o-hae.


His eyes were open, staring down the bay. He saw the mountains droop,
as they approached the entrance, and break down in cliffs; the surf boil
white round the two sentinel islets; and between, on the narrow bight
of blue horizon, Ua-pu upraise the ghost of her pinnacled mountain tops.
But his mind would take no account of these familiar features; as he
dodged in and out along the frontier line of sleep and waking, memory
would serve him with broken fragments of the past: brown faces and
white, of skipper and shipmate, king and chief, would arise before his
mind and vanish; he would recall old voyages, old landfalls in the hour
of dawn; he would hear again the drums beat for a man-eating festival;
perhaps he would summon up the form of that island princess for the love
of whom he had submitted his body to the cruel hands of the tattooer,
and now sat on the lumber, at the pier-end of Tai-o-hae, so strange
a figure of a European. Or perhaps from yet further back, sounds and
scents of England and his childhood might assail him: the merry clamour
of cathedral bells, the broom upon the foreland, the song of the river
on the weir.

It is bold water at the mouth of the bay; you can steer a ship about
either sentinel, close enough to toss a biscuit on the rocks. Thus
it chanced that, as the tattooed man sat dozing and dreaming, he was
startled into wakefulness and animation by the appearance of a flying
jib beyond the western islet. Two more headsails followed; and before
the tattooed man had scrambled to his feet, a topsail schooner, of some
hundred tons, had luffed about the sentinel and was standing up the bay,
close-hauled.

The sleeping city awakened by enchantment. Natives appeared upon all
sides, hailing each other with the magic cry “Ehippy”--ship; the Queen
stepped forth on her verandah, shading her eyes under a hand that was
a miracle of the fine art of tattooing; the commandant broke from his
domestic convicts and ran into the residency for his glass; the harbour
master, who was also the gaoler, came speeding down the Prison Hill; the
seventeen brown Kanakas and the French boatswain's mate, that make up
the complement of the war-schooner, crowded on the forward deck; and the
various English, Americans, Germans, Poles, Corsicans, and Scots--the
merchants and the clerks of Tai-o-hae--deserted their places of
business, and gathered, according to invariable custom, on the road
before the club.

So quickly did these dozen whites collect, so short are the distances
in Tai-o-hae, that they were already exchanging guesses as to the
nationality and business of the strange vessel, before she had gone
about upon her second board towards the anchorage. A moment after,
English colours were broken out at the main truck.

“I told you she was a Johnny Bull--knew it by her headsails,” said an
evergreen old salt, still qualified (if he could anywhere have found
an owner unacquainted with his story) to adorn another quarter-deck and
lose another ship.

“She has American lines, anyway,” said the astute Scots engineer of the
gin-mill; “it's my belief she's a yacht.”

“That's it,” said the old salt, “a yacht! look at her davits, and the
boat over the stern.”

“A yacht in your eye!” said a Glasgow voice. “Look at her red ensign! A
yacht! not much she isn't!”

“You can close the store, anyway, Tom,” observed a gentlemanly German.
“Bon jour, mon Prince!” he added, as a dark, intelligent native cantered
by on a neat chestnut. “Vous allez boire un verre de biere?”

But Prince Stanilas Moanatini, the only reasonably busy human creature
on the island, was riding hot-spur to view this morning's landslip on
the mountain road: the sun already visibly declined; night was imminent;
and if he would avoid the perils of darkness and precipice, and the
fear of the dead, the haunters of the jungle, he must for once decline
a hospitable invitation. Even had he been minded to alight, it presently
appeared there would be difficulty as to the refreshment offered.

“Beer!” cried the Glasgow voice. “No such a thing; I tell you there's
only eight bottles in the club! Here's the first time I've seen British
colours in this port! and the man that sails under them has got to drink
that beer.”

The proposal struck the public mind as fair, though far from cheering;
for some time back, indeed, the very name of beer had been a sound of
sorrow in the club, and the evenings had passed in dolorous computation.

“Here is Havens,” said one, as if welcoming a fresh topic. “What do you
think of her, Havens?”

“I don't think,” replied Havens, a tall, bland, cool-looking, leisurely
Englishman, attired in spotless duck, and deliberately dealing with a
cigarette. “I may say I know. She's consigned to me from Auckland by
Donald & Edenborough. I am on my way aboard.”

“What ship is she?” asked the ancient mariner.

“Haven't an idea,” returned Havens. “Some tramp they have chartered.”

With that he placidly resumed his walk, and was soon seated in the
stern-sheets of a whaleboat manned by uproarious Kanakas, himself
daintily perched out of the way of the least maculation, giving his
commands in an unobtrusive, dinner-table tone of voice, and sweeping
neatly enough alongside the schooner.

A weather-beaten captain received him at the gangway.

“You are consigned to us, I think,” said he. “I am Mr. Havens.”

“That is right, sir,” replied the captain, shaking hands. “You will find
the owner, Mr. Dodd, below. Mind the fresh paint on the house.”

Havens stepped along the alley-way, and descended the ladder into the
main cabin.

“Mr. Dodd, I believe,” said he, addressing a smallish, bearded
gentleman, who sat writing at the table. “Why,” he cried, “it isn't
Loudon Dodd?”

“Myself, my dear fellow,” replied Mr. Dodd, springing to his feet with
companionable alacrity. “I had a half-hope it might be you, when I found
your name on the papers. Well, there's no change in you; still the same
placid, fresh-looking Britisher.”

“I can't return the compliment; for you seem to have become a Britisher
yourself,” said Havens.

“I promise you, I am quite unchanged,” returned Dodd. “The red
tablecloth at the top of the stick is not my flag; it's my partner's.
He is not dead, but sleepeth. There he is,” he added, pointing to a bust
which formed one of the numerous unexpected ornaments of that unusual
cabin.

Havens politely studied it. “A fine bust,” said he; “and a very
nice-looking fellow.”

“Yes; he's a good fellow,” said Dodd. “He runs me now. It's all his
money.”

“He doesn't seem to be particularly short of it,” added the other,
peering with growing wonder round the cabin.

“His money, my taste,” said Dodd. “The black-walnut bookshelves are Old
English; the books all mine,--mostly Renaissance French. You should see
how the beach-combers wilt away when they go round them looking for a
change of Seaside Library novels. The mirrors are genuine Venice; that's
a good piece in the corner. The daubs are mine--and his; the mudding
mine.”

“Mudding? What is that?” asked Havens.

“These bronzes,” replied Dodd. “I began life as a sculptor.”

“Yes; I remember something about that,” said the other. “I think, too,
you said you were interested in Californian real estate.”

“Surely, I never went so far as that,” said Dodd. “Interested? I guess
not. Involved, perhaps. I was born an artist; I never took an interest
in anything but art. If I were to pile up this old schooner to-morrow,”
 he added, “I declare I believe I would try the thing again!”

“Insured?” inquired Havens.

“Yes,” responded Dodd. “There's some fool in 'Frisco who insures us, and
comes down like a wolf on the fold on the profits; but we'll get even
with him some day.”

“Well, I suppose it's all right about the cargo,” said Havens.

“O, I suppose so!” replied Dodd. “Shall we go into the papers?”

“We'll have all to-morrow, you know,” said Havens; “and they'll be
rather expecting you at the club. C'est l'heure de l'absinthe. Of
course, Loudon, you'll dine with me later on?”

Mr. Dodd signified his acquiescence; drew on his white coat, not without
a trifling difficulty, for he was a man of middle age, and well-to-do;
arranged his beard and moustaches at one of the Venetian mirrors; and,
taking a broad felt hat, led the way through the trade-room into the
ship's waist.

The stern boat was waiting alongside,--a boat of an elegant model, with
cushions and polished hard-wood fittings.

“You steer,” observed Loudon. “You know the best place to land.”

“I never like to steer another man's boat,” replied Havens.

“Call it my partner's, and cry quits,” returned Loudon, getting
nonchalantly down the side.

Havens followed and took the yoke lines without further protest. “I am
sure I don't know how you make this pay,” he said. “To begin with,
she is too big for the trade, to my taste; and then you carry so much
style.”

“I don't know that she does pay,” returned Loudon. “I never pretend to
be a business man. My partner appears happy; and the money is all his,
as I told you--I only bring the want of business habits.”

“You rather like the berth, I suppose?” suggested Havens.

“Yes,” said Loudon; “it seems odd, but I rather do.”

While they were yet on board, the sun had dipped; the sunset gun (a
rifle) cracked from the war-schooner, and the colours had been
handed down. Dusk was deepening as they came ashore; and the Cercle
Internationale (as the club is officially and significantly named) began
to shine, from under its low verandas, with the light of many lamps. The
good hours of the twenty-four drew on; the hateful, poisonous day-fly
of Nukahiva, was beginning to desist from its activity; the land-breeze
came in refreshing draughts; and the club men gathered together for the
hour of absinthe. To the commandant himself, to the man whom he was then
contending with at billiards--a trader from the next island, honorary
member of the club, and once carpenter's mate on board a Yankee
war-ship--to the doctor of the port, to the Brigadier of Gendarmerie, to
the opium farmer, and to all the white men whom the tide of commerce,
or the chances of shipwreck and desertion, had stranded on the beach of
Tai-o-hae, Mr. Loudon Dodd was formally presented; by all (since he was
a man of pleasing exterior, smooth ways, and an unexceptionable flow of
talk, whether in French or English) he was excellently well received;
and presently, with one of the last eight bottles of beer on a table
at his elbow, found himself the rather silent centre-piece of a voluble
group on the verandah.

Talk in the South Seas is all upon one pattern; it is a wide ocean,
indeed, but a narrow world: you shall never talk long and not hear the
name of Bully Hayes, a naval hero whose exploits and deserved extinction
left Europe cold; commerce will be touched on, copra, shell, perhaps
cotton or fungus; but in a far-away, dilettante fashion, as by men
not deeply interested; through all, the names of schooners and their
captains, will keep coming and going, thick as may-flies; and news
of the last shipwreck will be placidly exchanged and debated. To a
stranger, this conversation will at first seem scarcely brilliant; but
he will soon catch the tone; and by the time he shall have moved a
year or so in the island world, and come across a good number of the
schooners so that every captain's name calls up a figure in pyjamas or
white duck, and becomes used to a certain laxity of moral tone which
prevails (as in memory of Mr. Hayes) on smuggling, ship-scuttling,
barratry, piracy, the labour trade, and other kindred fields of human
activity, he will find Polynesia no less amusing and no less instructive
than Pall Mall or Paris.

Mr. Loudon Dodd, though he was new to the group of the Marquesas, was
already an old, salted trader; he knew the ships and the captains; he
had assisted, in other islands, at the first steps of some career of
which he now heard the culmination, or (vice versa) he had brought
with him from further south the end of some story which had begun in
Tai-o-hae. Among other matter of interest, like other arrivals in
the South Seas, he had a wreck to announce. The John T. Richards, it
appeared, had met the fate of other island schooners.

“Dickinson piled her up on Palmerston Island,” Dodd announced.

“Who were the owners?” inquired one of the club men.

“O, the usual parties!” returned Loudon,--“Capsicum & Co.”

A smile and a glance of intelligence went round the group; and perhaps
Loudon gave voice to the general sentiment by remarking, “Talk of good
business! I know nothing better than a schooner, a competent captain,
and a sound, reliable reef.”

“Good business! There's no such a thing!” said the Glasgow man. “Nobody
makes anything but the missionaries--dash it!”

“I don't know,” said another. “There's a good deal in opium.”

“It's a good job to strike a tabooed pearl-island, say, about the fourth
year,” remarked a third; “skim the whole lagoon on the sly, and up stick
and away before the French get wind of you.”

“A pig nokket of cold is good,” observed a German.

“There's something in wrecks, too,” said Havens. “Look at that man in
Honolulu, and the ship that went ashore on Waikiki Reef; it was blowing
a kona, hard; and she began to break up as soon as she touched. Lloyd's
agent had her sold inside an hour; and before dark, when she went to
pieces in earnest, the man that bought her had feathered his nest. Three
more hours of daylight, and he might have retired from business. As it
was, he built a house on Beretania Street, and called it for the ship.”

“Yes, there's something in wrecks sometimes,” said the Glasgow voice;
“but not often.”

“As a general rule, there's deuced little in anything,” said Havens.

“Well, I believe that's a Christian fact,” cried the other. “What I want
is a secret; get hold of a rich man by the right place, and make him
squeal.”

“I suppose you know it's not thought to be the ticket,” returned Havens.

“I don't care for that; it's good enough for me,” cried the man from
Glasgow, stoutly. “The only devil of it is, a fellow can never find a
secret in a place like the South Seas: only in London and Paris.”

“M'Gibbon's been reading some dime-novel, I suppose,” said one club man.

“He's been reading _Aurora Floyd_,” remarked another.

“And what if I have?” cried M'Gibbon. “It's all true. Look at
the newspapers! It's just your confounded ignorance that sets you
snickering. I tell you, it's as much a trade as underwriting, and a
dashed sight more honest.”

The sudden acrimony of these remarks called Loudon (who was a man of
peace) from his reserve. “It's rather singular,” said he, “but I seem to
have practised about all these means of livelihood.”

“Tit you effer vind a nokket?” inquired the inarticulate German,
eagerly.

“No. I have been most kinds of fool in my time,” returned Loudon, “but
not the gold-digging variety. Every man has a sane spot somewhere.”

“Well, then,” suggested some one, “did you ever smuggle opium?”

“Yes, I did,” said Loudon.

“Was there money in that?”

“All the way,” responded Loudon.

“And perhaps you bought a wreck?” asked another.

“Yes, sir,” said Loudon.

“How did that pan out?” pursued the questioner.

“Well, mine was a peculiar kind of wreck,” replied Loudon. “I don't
know, on the whole, that I can recommend that branch of industry.”

“Did she break up?” asked some one.

“I guess it was rather I that broke down,” says Loudon. “Head not big
enough.”

“Ever try the blackmail?” inquired Havens.

“Simple as you see me sitting here!” responded Dodd.

“Good business?”

“Well, I'm not a lucky man, you see,” returned the stranger. “It ought
to have been good.”

“You had a secret?” asked the Glasgow man.

“As big as the State of Texas.”

“And the other man was rich?”

“He wasn't exactly Jay Gould, but I guess he could buy these islands if
he wanted.”

“Why, what was wrong, then? Couldn't you get hands on him?”

“It took time, but I had him cornered at last; and then----”

“What then?”

“The speculation turned bottom up. I became the man's bosom friend.”

“The deuce you did!”

“He couldn't have been particular, you mean?” asked Dodd pleasantly.
“Well, no; he's a man of rather large sympathies.”

“If you're done talking nonsense, Loudon,” said Havens, “let's be
getting to my place for dinner.”

Outside, the night was full of the roaring of the surf. Scattered lights
glowed in the green thicket. Native women came by twos and threes out of
the darkness, smiled and ogled the two whites, perhaps wooed them with
a strain of laughter, and went by again, bequeathing to the air a
heady perfume of palm-oil and frangipani blossom. From the club to Mr.
Havens's residence was but a step or two, and to any dweller in Europe
they must have seemed steps in fairyland. If such an one could but have
followed our two friends into the wide-verandahed house, sat down
with them in the cool trellised room, where the wine shone on the
lamp-lighted tablecloth; tasted of their exotic food--the raw fish, the
breadfruit, the cooked bananas, the roast pig served with the inimitable
miti, and that king of delicacies, palm-tree salad; seen and heard by
fits and starts, now peering round the corner of the door, now railing
within against invisible assistants, a certain comely young native lady
in a sacque, who seemed too modest to be a member of the family, and too
imperious to be less; and then if such an one were whisked again through
space to Upper Tooting, or wherever else he honored the domestic gods,
“I have had a dream,” I think he would say, as he sat up, rubbing his
eyes, in the familiar chimney-corner chair, “I have had a dream of a
place, and I declare I believe it must be heaven.” But to Dodd and his
entertainer, all this amenity of the tropic night and all these dainties
of the island table, were grown things of custom; and they fell to meat
like men who were hungry, and drifted into idle talk like men who were a
trifle bored.

The scene in the club was referred to.

“I never heard you talk so much nonsense, Loudon,” said the host.

“Well, it seemed to me there was sulphur in the air, so I talked for
talking,” returned the other. “But it was none of it nonsense.”

“Do you mean to say it was true?” cried Havens,--“that about the opium
and the wreck, and the blackmailing and the man who became your friend?”

“Every last word of it,” said Loudon.

“You seem to have been seeing life,” returned the other.

“Yes, it's a queer yarn,” said his friend; “if you think you would like,
I'll tell it you.”

Here follows the yarn of Loudon Dodd, not as he told it to his friend,
but as he subsequently wrote it.




THE YARN.




CHAPTER I. A SOUND COMMERCIAL EDUCATION.


The beginning of this yarn is my poor father's character. There
never was a better man, nor a handsomer, nor (in my view) a more
unhappy--unhappy in his business, in his pleasures, in his place of
residence, and (I am sorry to say it) in his son. He had begun life as a
land-surveyor, soon became interested in real estate, branched off into
many other speculations, and had the name of one of the smartest men in
the State of Muskegon. “Dodd has a big head,” people used to say; but I
was never so sure of his capacity. His luck, at least, was beyond doubt
for long; his assiduity, always. He fought in that daily battle of
money-grubbing, with a kind of sad-eyed loyalty like a martyr's; rose
early, ate fast, came home dispirited and over-weary, even from success;
grudged himself all pleasure, if his nature was capable of taking any,
which I sometimes wondered; and laid out, upon some deal in wheat or
corner in aluminium, the essence of which was little better than highway
robbery, treasures of conscientiousness and self-denial.

Unluckily, I never cared a cent for anything but art, and never shall.
My idea of man's chief end was to enrich the world with things of
beauty, and have a fairly good time myself while doing so. I do not
think I mentioned that second part, which is the only one I have managed
to carry out; but my father must have suspected the suppression, for he
branded the whole affair as self-indulgence.

“Well,” I remember crying once, “and what is your life? You are only
trying to get money, and to get it from other people at that.”

He sighed bitterly (which was very much his habit), and shook his poor
head at me. “Ah, Loudon, Loudon!” said he, “you boys think yourselves
very smart. But, struggle as you please, a man has to work in this
world. He must be an honest man or a thief, Loudon.”

You can see for yourself how vain it was to argue with my father.
The despair that seized upon me after such an interview was, besides,
embittered by remorse; for I was at times petulant, but he invariably
gentle; and I was fighting, after all, for my own liberty and pleasure,
he singly for what he thought to be my good. And all the time he never
despaired. “There is good stuff in you, Loudon,” he would say; “there
is the right stuff in you. Blood will tell, and you will come right in
time. I am not afraid my boy will ever disgrace me; I am only vexed he
should sometimes talk nonsense.” And then he would pat my shoulder or
my hand with a kind of motherly way he had, very affecting in a man so
strong and beautiful.

As soon as I had graduated from the high school, he packed me off to the
Muskegon Commercial Academy. You are a foreigner, and you will have a
difficulty in accepting the reality of this seat of education. I assure
you before I begin that I am wholly serious. The place really existed,
possibly exists to-day: we were proud of it in the State, as something
exceptionally nineteenth century and civilized; and my father, when he
saw me to the cars, no doubt considered he was putting me in a straight
line for the Presidency and the New Jerusalem.

“Loudon,” said he, “I am now giving you a chance that Julius Caesar
could not have given to his son--a chance to see life as it is, before
your own turn comes to start in earnest. Avoid rash speculation, try
to behave like a gentleman; and if you will take my advice, confine
yourself to a safe, conservative business in railroads. Breadstuffs are
tempting, but very dangerous; I would not try breadstuffs at your time
of life; but you may feel your way a little in other commodities. Take
a pride to keep your books posted, and never throw good money after bad.
There, my dear boy, kiss me good-by; and never forget that you are an
only chick, and that your dad watches your career with fond suspense.”

The commercial college was a fine, roomy establishment, pleasantly
situate among woods. The air was healthy, the food excellent, the
premium high. Electric wires connected it (to use the words of the
prospectus) with “the various world centres.” The reading-room was well
supplied with “commercial organs.” The talk was that of Wall Street; and
the pupils (from fifty to a hundred lads) were principally engaged
in rooking or trying to rook one another for nominal sums in what was
called “college paper.” We had class hours, indeed, in the morning, when
we studied German, French, book-keeping, and the like goodly matters;
but the bulk of our day and the gist of the education centred in the
exchange, where we were taught to gamble in produce and securities.
Since not one of the participants possessed a bushel of wheat or a
dollar's worth of stock, legitimate business was of course impossible
from the beginning. It was cold-drawn gambling, without colour or
disguise. Just that which is the impediment and destruction of all
genuine commercial enterprise, just that we were taught with every
luxury of stage effect. Our simulacrum of a market was ruled by the real
markets outside, so that we might experience the course and vicissitude
of prices. We must keep books, and our ledgers were overhauled at
the month's end by the principal or his assistants. To add a spice
of verisimilitude, “college paper” (like poker chips) had an actual
marketable value. It was bought for each pupil by anxious parents and
guardians at the rate of one cent for the dollar. The same pupil, when
his education was complete, resold, at the same figure, so much as was
left him to the college; and even in the midst of his curriculum, a
successful operator would sometimes realize a proportion of his holding,
and stand a supper on the sly in the neighbouring hamlet. In short,
if there was ever a worse education, it must have been in that academy
where Oliver met Charlie Bates.

When I was first guided into the exchange to have my desk pointed out
by one of the assistant teachers, I was overwhelmed by the clamour and
confusion. Certain blackboards at the other end of the building were
covered with figures continually replaced. As each new set appeared, the
pupils swayed to and fro, and roared out aloud with a formidable and
to me quite meaningless vociferation; leaping at the same time upon
the desks and benches, signalling with arms and heads, and scribbling
briskly in note-books. I thought I had never beheld a scene more
disagreeable; and when I considered that the whole traffic was illusory,
and all the money then upon the market would scarce have sufficed to
buy a pair of skates, I was at first astonished, although not for long.
Indeed, I had no sooner called to mind how grown-up men and women of
considerable estate will lose their temper about half-penny points, than
(making an immediate allowance for my fellow-students) I transferred
the whole of my astonishment to the assistant teacher, who--poor
gentleman--had quite forgot to show me to my desk, and stood in the
midst of this hurly-burly, absorbed and seemingly transported.

“Look, look,” he shouted in my ear; “a falling market! The bears have
had it all their own way since yesterday.”

“It can't matter,” I replied, making him hear with difficulty, for I was
unused to speak in such a babel, “since it is all fun.”

“True,” said he; “and you must always bear in mind that the real profit
is in the book-keeping. I trust, Dodd, to be able to congratulate
you upon your books. You are to start in with ten thousand dollars of
college paper, a very liberal figure, which should see you through the
whole curriculum, if you keep to a safe, conservative business.... Why,
what's that?” he broke off, once more attracted by the changing figures
on the board. “Seven, four, three! Dodd, you are in luck: this is the
most spirited rally we have had this term. And to think that the same
scene is now transpiring in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and rival
business centres! For two cents, I would try a flutter with the
boys myself,” he cried, rubbing his hands; “only it's against the
regulations.”

“What would you do, sir?” I asked.

“Do?” he cried, with glittering eyes. “Buy for all I was worth!”

“Would that be a safe, conservative business?” I inquired, as innocent
as a lamb.

He looked daggers at me. “See that sandy-haired man in glasses?” he
asked, as if to change the subject. “That's Billson, our most prominent
undergraduate. We build confidently on Billson's future. You could not
do better, Dodd, than follow Billson.”

Presently after, in the midst of a still growing tumult, the figures
coming and going more busily than ever on the board, and the hall
resounding like Pandemonium with the howls of operators, the assistant
teacher left me to my own resources at my desk. The next boy was posting
up his ledger, figuring his morning's loss, as I discovered later on;
and from this ungenial task he was readily diverted by the sight of a
new face.

“Say, Freshman,” he said, “what's your name? What? Son of Big Head Dodd?
What's your figure? Ten thousand? O, you're away up! What a soft-headed
clam you must be to touch your books!”

I asked him what else I could do, since the books were to be examined
once a month.

“Why, you galoot, you get a clerk!” cries he. “One of our dead
beats--that's all they're here for. If you're a successful operator, you
need never do a stroke of work in this old college.”

The noise had now become deafening; and my new friend, telling me that
some one had certainly “gone down,” that he must know the news, and
that he would bring me a clerk when he returned, buttoned his coat and
plunged into the tossing throng. It proved that he was right: some one
had gone down; a prince had fallen in Israel; the corner in lard had
proved fatal to the mighty; and the clerk who was brought back to keep
my books, spare me all work, and get all my share of the education, at
a thousand dollars a month, college paper (ten dollars, United States
currency) was no other than the prominent Billson whom I could do no
better than follow. The poor lad was very unhappy. It's the only good
thing I have to say for Muskegon Commercial College, that we were all,
even the small fry, deeply mortified to be posted as defaulters; and the
collapse of a merchant prince like Billson, who had ridden pretty high
in his days of prosperity, was, of course, particularly hard to bear.
But the spirit of make-believe conquered even the bitterness of recent
shame; and my clerk took his orders, and fell to his new duties, with
decorum and civility.

Such were my first impressions in this absurd place of education; and,
to be frank, they were far from disagreeable. As long as I was rich, my
evenings and afternoons would be my own; the clerk must keep my books,
the clerk could do the jostling and bawling in the exchange; and I could
turn my mind to landscape-painting and Balzac's novels, which were then
my two preoccupations. To remain rich, then, became my problem; or, in
other words, to do a safe, conservative line of business. I am looking
for that line still; and I believe the nearest thing to it in this
imperfect world is the sort of speculation sometimes insidiously
proposed to childhood, in the formula, “Heads, I win; tails, you lose.”
 Mindful of my father's parting words, I turned my attention timidly to
railroads; and for a month or so maintained a position of inglorious
security, dealing for small amounts in the most inert stocks, and
bearing (as best I could) the scorn of my hired clerk. One day I
had ventured a little further by way of experiment; and, in the sure
expectation they would continue to go down, sold several thousand
dollars of Pan-Handle Preference (I think it was). I had no sooner
made this venture than some fools in New York began to bull the market;
Pan-Handles rose like a balloon; and in the inside of half an hour I saw
my position compromised. Blood will tell, as my father said; and I stuck
to it gallantly: all afternoon I continued selling that infernal
stock, all afternoon it continued skying. I suppose I had come (a frail
cockle-shell) athwart the hawse of Jay Gould; and, indeed, I think I
remember that this vagary in the market proved subsequently to be the
first move in a considerable deal. That evening, at least, the name of
H. Loudon Dodd held the first rank in our collegiate gazette, and I and
Billson (once more thrown upon the world) were competing for the same
clerkship. The present object takes the present eye. My disaster,
for the moment, was the more conspicuous; and it was I that got the
situation. So you see, even in Muskegon Commercial College, there were
lessons to be learned.

For my own part, I cared very little whether I lost or won at a game so
random, so complex, and so dull; but it was sorry news to write to my
poor father, and I employed all the resources of my eloquence. I told
him (what was the truth) that the successful boys had none of the
education; so that if he wished me to learn, he should rejoice at my
misfortune. I went on (not very consistently) to beg him to set me up
again, when I would solemnly promise to do a safe business in reliable
railroads. Lastly (becoming somewhat carried away), I assured him I was
totally unfit for business, and implored him to take me away from this
abominable place, and let me go to Paris to study art. He answered
briefly, gently, and sadly, telling me the vacation was near at hand,
when we could talk things over.

When the time came, he met me at the depot, and I was shocked to see
him looking older. He seemed to have no thought but to console me
and restore (what he supposed I had lost) my courage. I must not be
down-hearted; many of the best men had made a failure in the beginning.
I told him I had no head for business, and his kind face darkened. “You
must not say that, Loudon,” he replied; “I will never believe my son to
be a coward.”

“But I don't like it,” I pleaded. “It hasn't got any interest for me,
and art has. I know I could do more in art,” and I reminded him that
a successful painter gains large sums; that a picture of Meissonier's
would sell for many thousand dollars.

“And do you think, Loudon,” he replied, “that a man who can paint a
thousand dollar picture has not grit enough to keep his end up in
the stock market? No, sir; this Mason (of whom you speak) or our
own American Bierstadt--if you were to put them down in a wheat pit
to-morrow, they would show their mettle. Come, Loudon, my dear; heaven
knows I have no thought but your own good, and I will offer you a
bargain. I start you again next term with ten thousand dollars; show
yourself a man, and double it, and then (if you still wish to go to
Paris, which I know you won't) I'll let you go. But to let you run away
as if you were whipped, is what I am too proud to do.”

My heart leaped at this proposal, and then sank again. It seemed easier
to paint a Meissonier on the spot than to win ten thousand dollars
on that mimic stock exchange. Nor could I help reflecting on the
singularity of such a test for a man's capacity to be a painter. I
ventured even to comment on this.

He sighed deeply. “You forget, my dear,” said he, “I am a judge of
the one, and not of the other. You might have the genius of Bierstadt
himself, and I would be none the wiser.”

“And then,” I continued, “it's scarcely fair. The other boys are helped
by their people, who telegraph and give them pointers. There's Jim
Costello, who never budges without a word from his father in New York.
And then, don't you see, if anybody is to win, somebody must lose?”

“I'll keep you posted,” cried my father, with unusual animation; “I did
not know it was allowed. I'll wire you in the office cipher, and we'll
make it a kind of partnership business, Loudon:--Dodd & Son, eh?” and
he patted my shoulder and repeated, “Dodd & Son, Dodd & Son,” with the
kindliest amusement.

If my father was to give me pointers, and the commercial college was to
be a stepping-stone to Paris, I could look my future in the face. The
old boy, too, was so pleased at the idea of our association in this
foolery that he immediately plucked up spirit. Thus it befell that those
who had met at the depot like a pair of mutes, sat down to table with
holiday faces.

And now I have to introduce a new character that never said a word nor
wagged a finger, and yet shaped my whole subsequent career. You have
crossed the States, so that in all likelihood you have seen the head
of it, parcel-gilt and curiously fluted, rising among trees from a wide
plain; for this new character was no other than the State capitol of
Muskegon, then first projected. My father had embraced the idea with a
mixture of patriotism and commercial greed both perfectly genuine. He
was of all the committees, he had subscribed a great deal of money, and
he was making arrangements to have a finger in most of the contracts.
Competitive plans had been sent in; at the time of my return from
college my father was deep in their consideration; and as the idea
entirely occupied his mind, the first evening did not pass away before
he had called me into council. Here was a subject at last into which I
could throw myself with pleasurable zeal. Architecture was new to me,
indeed; but it was at least an art; and for all the arts I had a taste
naturally classical and that capacity to take delighted pains which some
famous idiot has supposed to be synonymous with genius. I threw myself
headlong into my father's work, acquainted myself with all the plans,
their merits and defects, read besides in special books, made myself
a master of the theory of strains, studied the current prices
of materials, and (in one word) “devilled” the whole business so
thoroughly, that when the plans came up for consideration, Big Head Dodd
was supposed to have earned fresh laurels. His arguments carried the
day, his choice was approved by the committee, and I had the anonymous
satisfaction to know that arguments and choice were wholly mine. In the
recasting of the plan which followed, my part was even larger; for I
designed and cast with my own hand a hot-air grating for the offices,
which had the luck or merit to be accepted. The energy and aptitude
which I displayed throughout delighted and surprised my father, and I
believe, although I say it whose tongue should be tied, that they alone
prevented Muskegon capitol from being the eyesore of my native State.

Altogether, I was in a cheery frame of mind when I returned to the
commercial college; and my earlier operations were crowned with a full
measure of success. My father wrote and wired to me continually. “You
are to exercise your own judgment, Loudon,” he would say. “All that I do
is to give you the figures; but whatever operation you take up must be
upon your own responsibility, and whatever you earn will be entirely
due to your own dash and forethought.” For all that, it was always clear
what he intended me to do, and I was always careful to do it. Inside
of a month I was at the head of seventeen or eighteen thousand dollars,
college paper. And here I fell a victim to one of the vices of the
system. The paper (I have already explained) had a real value of one
per cent; and cost, and could be sold for, currency. Unsuccessful
speculators were thus always selling clothes, books, banjos, and
sleeve-links, in order to pay their differences; the successful, on the
other hand, were often tempted to realise, and enjoy some return upon
their profits. Now I wanted thirty dollars' worth of artist-truck, for
I was always sketching in the woods; my allowance was for the time
exhausted; I had begun to regard the exchange (with my father's help)
as a place where money was to be got for stooping; and in an evil hour
I realised three thousand dollars of the college paper and bought my
easel.

It was a Wednesday morning when the things arrived, and set me in
the seventh heaven of satisfaction. My father (for I can scarcely say
myself) was trying at this time a “straddle” in wheat between Chicago
and New York; the operation so called is, as you know, one of the
most tempting and least safe upon the chess-board of finance. On the
Thursday, luck began to turn against my father's calculations; and by
the Friday evening, I was posted on the boards as a defaulter for the
second time. Here was a rude blow: my father would have taken it ill
enough in any case; for however much a man may resent the incapacity of
an only son, he will feel his own more sensibly. But it chanced that, in
our bitter cup of failure, there was one ingredient that might truly be
called poisonous. He had been keeping the run of my position; he missed
the three thousand dollars, paper; and in his view, I had stolen thirty
dollars, currency. It was an extreme view perhaps; but in some senses,
it was just: and my father, although (to my judgment) quite reckless of
honesty in the essence of his operations, was the soul of honour as to
their details. I had one grieved letter from him, dignified and tender;
and during the rest of that wretched term, working as a clerk, selling
my clothes and sketches to make futile speculations, my dream of Paris
quite vanished. I was cheered by no word of kindness and helped by no
hint of counsel from my father.

All the time he was no doubt thinking of little else but his son, and
what to do with him. I believe he had been really appalled by what he
regarded as my laxity of principle, and began to think it might be
well to preserve me from temptation; the architect of the capitol had,
besides, spoken obligingly of my design; and while he was thus hanging
between two minds, Fortune suddenly stepped in, and Muskegon State
capitol reversed my destiny.

“Loudon,” said my father, as he met me at the depot, with a smiling
countenance, “if you were to go to Paris, how long would it take you to
become an experienced sculptor?”

“How do you mean, father?” I cried. “Experienced?”

“A man that could be entrusted with the highest styles,” he answered;
“the nude, for instance; and the patriotic and emblematical styles.”

“It might take three years,” I replied.

“You think Paris necessary?” he asked. “There are great advantages
in our own country; and that man Prodgers appears to be a very clever
sculptor, though I suppose he stands too high to go around giving
lessons.”

“Paris is the only place,” I assured him.

“Well, I think myself it will sound better,” he admitted. “A Young Man,
a Native of this State, Son of a Leading Citizen, Studies Prosecuted
under the Most Experienced Masters in Paris,” he added, relishingly.

“But, my dear dad, what is it all about?” I interrupted. “I never even
dreamed of being a sculptor.”

“Well, here it is,” said he. “I took up the statuary contract on our new
capitol; I took it up at first as a deal; and then it occurred to me it
would be better to keep it in the family. It meets your idea; there's
considerable money in the thing; and it's patriotic. So, if you say the
word, you shall go to Paris, and come back in three years to decorate
the capitol of your native State. It's a big chance for you, Loudon; and
I'll tell you what--every dollar you earn, I'll put another alongside of
it. But the sooner you go, and the harder you work, the better; for
if the first half-dozen statues aren't in a line with public taste in
Muskegon, there will be trouble.”




CHAPTER II. ROUSSILLON WINE.


My mother's family was Scotch, and it was judged fitting I should pay a
visit on my way Paris-ward, to my Uncle Adam Loudon, a wealthy retired
grocer of Edinburgh. He was very stiff and very ironical; he fed me
well, lodged me sumptuously, and seemed to take it out of me all the
time, cent per cent, in secret entertainment which caused his spectacles
to glitter and his mouth to twitch. The ground of this ill-suppressed
mirth (as well as I could make out) was simply the fact that I was an
American. “Well,” he would say, drawing out the word to infinity, “and
I suppose now in your country, things will be so and so.” And the whole
group of my cousins would titter joyously. Repeated receptions of
this sort must be at the root, I suppose, of what they call the Great
American Jest; and I know I was myself goaded into saying that my
friends went naked in the summer months, and that the Second Methodist
Episcopal Church in Muskegon was decorated with scalps. I cannot say
that these flights had any great success; they seemed to awaken little
more surprise than the fact that my father was a Republican or that I
had been taught in school to spell COLOUR without the U. If I had
told them (what was after all the truth) that my father had paid a
considerable annual sum to have me brought up in a gambling hell, the
tittering and grinning of this dreadful family might perhaps have been
excused.

I cannot deny but I was sometimes tempted to knock my Uncle Adam down;
and indeed I believe it must have come to a rupture at last, if they had
not given a dinner party at which I was the lion. On this occasion, I
learned (to my surprise and relief) that the incivility to which I had
been subjected was a matter for the family circle and might be regarded
almost in the light of an endearment. To strangers I was presented with
consideration; and the account given of “my American brother-in-law,
poor Janie's man, James K. Dodd, the well-known millionnaire of
Muskegon,” was calculated to enlarge the heart of a proud son.

An aged assistant of my grandfather's, a pleasant, humble creature with
a taste for whiskey, was at first deputed to be my guide about the city.
With this harmless but hardly aristocratic companion, I went to Arthur's
Seat and the Calton Hill, heard the band play in the Princes Street
Gardens, inspected the regalia and the blood of Rizzio, and fell in love
with the great castle on its cliff, the innumerable spires of churches,
the stately buildings, the broad prospects, and those narrow and crowded
lanes of the old town where my ancestors had lived and died in the days
before Columbus.

But there was another curiosity that interested me more deeply--my
grandfather, Alexander Loudon. In his time, the old gentleman had been a
working mason, and had risen from the ranks more, I think, by shrewdness
than by merit. In his appearance, speech, and manners, he bore broad
marks of his origin, which were gall and wormwood to my Uncle Adam.
His nails, in spite of anxious supervision, were often in conspicuous
mourning; his clothes hung about him in bags and wrinkles like a
ploughman's Sunday coat; his accent was rude, broad, and dragging: take
him at his best, and even when he could be induced to hold his tongue,
his mere presence in a corner of the drawing-room, with his open-air
wrinkles, his scanty hair, his battered hands, and the cheerful
craftiness of his expression, advertised the whole gang of us for a
self-made family. My aunt might mince and my cousins bridle; but there
was no getting over the solid, physical fact of the stonemason in the
chimney-corner.

That is one advantage of being an American: it never occurred to me to
be ashamed of my grandfather, and the old gentleman was quick to mark
the difference. He held my mother in tender memory, perhaps because
he was in the habit of daily contrasting her with Uncle Adam, whom he
detested to the point of frenzy; and he set down to inheritance from
his favourite my own becoming treatment of himself. On our walks abroad,
which soon became daily, he would sometimes (after duly warning me
to keep the matter dark from “Aadam”) skulk into some old familiar
pot-house; and there (if he had the luck to encounter any of his veteran
cronies) he would present me to the company with manifest pride, casting
at the same time a covert slur on the rest of his descendants. “This is
my Jeannie's yin,” he would say. “He's a fine fallow, him.” The purpose
of our excursions was not to seek antiquities or to enjoy famous
prospects, but to visit one after another a series of doleful suburbs,
for which it was the old gentleman's chief claim to renown that he had
been the sole contractor, and too often the architect besides. I have
rarely seen a more shocking exhibition: the bricks seemed to be blushing
in the walls, and the slates on the roof to have turned pale with shame;
but I was careful not to communicate these impressions to the aged
artificer at my side; and when he would direct my attention to some
fresh monstrosity--perhaps with the comment, “There's an idee of mine's:
it's cheap and tasty, and had a graand run; the idee was soon stole, and
there's whole deestricts near Glesgie with the goathic adeetion and
that plunth,”--I would civilly make haste to admire and (what I found
particularly delighted him) to inquire into the cost of each adornment.
It will be conceived that Muskegon capitol was a frequent and a welcome
ground of talk; I drew him all the plans from memory; and he, with the
aid of a narrow volume full of figures and tables, which answered
(I believe) to the name of Molesworth, and was his constant pocket
companion, would draw up rough estimates and make imaginary offers on
the various contracts. Our Muskegon builders he pronounced a pack of
cormorants; and the congenial subject, together with my knowledge of
architectural terms, the theory of strains, and the prices of materials
in the States, formed a strong bond of union between what might have
been otherwise an ill-assorted pair, and led my grandfather to pronounce
me, with emphasis, “a real intalligent kind of a cheild.” Thus a second
time, as you will presently see, the capitol of my native State had
influentially affected the current of my life.

I left Edinburgh, however, with not the least idea that I had done a
stroke of excellent business for myself, and singly delighted to escape
out of a somewhat dreary house and plunge instead into the rainbow city
of Paris. Every man has his own romance; mine clustered exclusively
about the practice of the arts, the life of Latin Quarter students, and
the world of Paris as depicted by that grimy wizard, the author of the
_Comedie Humaine_. I was not disappointed--I could not have been; for
I did not see the facts, I brought them with me ready-made. Z. Marcas
lived next door to me in my ungainly, ill-smelling hotel of the Rue
Racine; I dined at my villainous restaurant with Lousteau and with
Rastignac: if a curricle nearly ran me down at a street-crossing, Maxime
de Trailles would be the driver. I dined, I say, at a poor restaurant
and lived in a poor hotel; and this was not from need, but sentiment.
My father gave me a profuse allowance, and I might have lived (had I
chosen) in the Quartier de l'Etoile and driven to my studies daily.
Had I done so, the glamour must have fled: I should still have been
but Loudon Dodd; whereas now I was a Latin Quarter student, Murger's
successor, living in flesh and blood the life of one of those romances
I had loved to read, to re-read, and to dream over, among the woods of
Muskegon.

At this time we were all a little Murger-mad in the Latin Quarter.
The play of the _Vie de Boheme_ (a dreary, snivelling piece) had been
produced at the Odeon, had run an unconscionable time--for Paris, and
revived the freshness of the legend. The same business, you may say,
or there and thereabout, was being privately enacted in consequence in
every garret of the neighbourhood, and a good third of the students
were consciously impersonating Rodolphe or Schaunard to their own
incommunicable satisfaction. Some of us went far, and some farther. I
always looked with awful envy (for instance) on a certain countryman of
my own who had a studio in the Rue Monsieur le Prince, wore boots, and
long hair in a net, and could be seen tramping off, in this guise, to
the worst eating-house of the quarter, followed by a Corsican model, his
mistress, in the conspicuous costume of her race and calling. It takes
some greatness of soul to carry even folly to such heights as these; and
for my own part, I had to content myself by pretending very arduously
to be poor, by wearing a smoking-cap on the streets, and by pursuing,
through a series of misadventures, that extinct mammal, the grisette.
The most grievous part was the eating and the drinking. I was born with
a dainty tooth and a palate for wine; and only a genuine devotion to
romance could have supported me under the cat-civets that I had to
swallow, and the red ink of Bercy I must wash them down withal. Every
now and again, after a hard day at the studio, where I was steadily and
far from unsuccessfully industrious, a wave of distaste would overbear
me; I would slink away from my haunts and companions, indemnify myself
for weeks of self-denial with fine wines and dainty dishes; seated
perhaps on a terrace, perhaps in an arbour in a garden, with a volume
of one of my favourite authors propped open in front of me, and now
consulted awhile, and now forgotten:--so remain, relishing my situation,
till night fell and the lights of the city kindled; and thence stroll
homeward by the riverside, under the moon or stars, in a heaven of
poetry and digestion.

One such indulgence led me in the course of my second year into an
adventure which I must relate: indeed, it is the very point I have been
aiming for, since that was what brought me in acquaintance with Jim
Pinkerton. I sat down alone to dinner one October day when the rusty
leaves were falling and scuttling on the boulevard, and the minds of
impressionable men inclined in about an equal degree towards sadness
and conviviality. The restaurant was no great place, but boasted a
considerable cellar and a long printed list of vintages. This I was
perusing with the double zest of a man who is fond of wine and a lover
of beautiful names, when my eye fell (near the end of the card) on that
not very famous or familiar brand, Roussillon. I remembered it was a
wine I had never tasted, ordered a bottle, found it excellent, and when
I had discussed the contents, called (according to my habit) for a final
pint. It appears they did not keep Roussillon in half-bottles. “All
right,” said I. “Another bottle.” The tables at this eating-house are
close together; and the next thing I can remember, I was in somewhat
loud conversation with my nearest neighbours. From these I must have
gradually extended my attentions; for I have a clear recollection of
gazing about a room in which every chair was half turned round and every
face turned smilingly to mine. I can even remember what I was saying at
the moment; but after twenty years, the embers of shame are still alive;
and I prefer to give your imagination the cue, by simply mentioning that
my muse was the patriotic. It had been my design to adjourn for coffee
in the company of some of these new friends; but I was no sooner on
the sidewalk than I found myself unaccountably alone. The circumstance
scarce surprised me at the time, much less now; but I was somewhat
chagrined a little after to find I had walked into a kiosque. I began to
wonder if I were any the worse for my last bottle, and decided to steady
myself with coffee and brandy. In the Cafe de la Source, where I went
for this restorative, the fountain was playing, and (what greatly
surprised me) the mill and the various mechanical figures on the rockery
appeared to have been freshly repaired and performed the most enchanting
antics. The cafe was extraordinarily hot and bright, with every detail
of a conspicuous clearness, from the faces of the guests to the type of
the newspapers on the tables, and the whole apartment swang to and fro
like a hammock, with an exhilarating motion. For some while I was so
extremely pleased with these particulars that I thought I could never
be weary of beholding them: then dropped of a sudden into a causeless
sadness; and then, with the same swiftness and spontaneity, arrived at
the conclusion that I was drunk and had better get to bed.

It was but a step or two to my hotel, where I got my lighted candle from
the porter and mounted the four flights to my own room. Although I could
not deny that I was drunk, I was at the same time lucidly rational and
practical. I had but one preoccupation--to be up in time on the morrow
for my work; and when I observed the clock on my chimney-piece to have
stopped, I decided to go down stairs again and give directions to the
porter. Leaving the candle burning and my door open, to be a guide to me
on my return, I set forth accordingly. The house was quite dark; but as
there were only the three doors on each landing, it was impossible to
wander, and I had nothing to do but descend the stairs until I saw the
glimmer of the porter's night light. I counted four flights: no porter.
It was possible, of course, that I had reckoned incorrectly; so I went
down another and another, and another, still counting as I went, until
I had reached the preposterous figure of nine flights. It was now quite
clear that I had somehow passed the porter's lodge without remarking
it; indeed, I was, at the lowest figure, five pairs of stairs below
the street, and plunged in the very bowels of the earth. That my hotel
should thus be founded upon catacombs was a discovery of considerable
interest; and if I had not been in a frame of mind entirely
businesslike, I might have continued to explore all night this
subterranean empire. But I was bound I must be up betimes on the next
morning, and for that end it was imperative that I should find the
porter. I faced about accordingly, and counting with painful care,
remounted towards the level of the street. Five, six, and seven flights
I climbed, and still there was no porter. I began to be weary of the
job, and reflecting that I was now close to my own room, decided I
should go to bed. Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen flights
I mounted; and my open door seemed to be as wholly lost to me as the
porter and his floating dip. I remembered that the house stood but
six stories at its highest point, from which it appeared (on the most
moderate computation) I was now three stories higher than the roof. My
original sense of amusement was succeeded by a not unnatural irritation.
“My room has just GOT to be here,” said I, and I stepped towards the
door with outspread arms. There was no door and no wall; in place of
either there yawned before me a dark corridor, in which I continued to
advance for some time without encountering the smallest opposition. And
this in a house whose extreme area scantily contained three small rooms,
a narrow landing, and the stair! The thing was manifestly nonsense;
and you will scarcely be surprised to learn that I now began to lose
my temper. At this juncture I perceived a filtering of light along
the floor, stretched forth my hand which encountered the knob of a
door-handle, and without further ceremony entered a room. A young lady
was within; she was going to bed, and her toilet was far advanced, or
the other way about, if you prefer.

“I hope you will pardon this intrusion,” said I; “but my room is No. 12,
and something has gone wrong with this blamed house.”

She looked at me a moment; and then, “If you will step outside for a
moment, I will take you there,” says she.

Thus, with perfect composure on both sides, the matter was arranged.
I waited a while outside her door. Presently she rejoined me, in a
dressing-gown, took my hand, led me up another flight, which made the
fourth above the level of the roof, and shut me into my own room, where
(being quite weary after these contraordinary explorations) I turned in,
and slumbered like a child.

I tell you the thing calmly, as it appeared to me to pass; but the next
day, when I awoke and put memory in the witness-box, I could not conceal
from myself that the tale presented a good many improbable features.
I had no mind for the studio, after all, and went instead to the
Luxembourg gardens, there, among the sparrows and the statues and the
falling leaves, to cool and clear my head. It is a garden I have always
loved. You sit there in a public place of history and fiction. Barras
and Fouche have looked from these windows. Lousteau and de Banville (one
as real as the other) have rhymed upon these benches. The city tramples
by without the railings to a lively measure; and within and about you,
trees rustle, children and sparrows utter their small cries, and the
statues look on forever. Here, then, in a seat opposite the gallery
entrance, I set to work on the events of the last night, to disengage
(if it were possible) truth from fiction.

The house, by daylight, had proved to be six stories high, the same as
ever. I could find, with all my architectural experience, no room in its
altitude for those interminable stairways, no width between its walls
for that long corridor, where I had tramped at night. And there was yet
a greater difficulty. I had read somewhere an aphorism that everything
may be false to itself save human nature. A house might elongate or
enlarge itself--or seem to do so to a gentleman who had been dining.
The ocean might dry up, the rocks melt in the sun, the stars fall from
heaven like autumn apples; and there was nothing in these incidents
to boggle the philosopher. But the case of the young lady stood upon a
different foundation. Girls were not good enough, or not good that way,
or else they were too good. I was ready to accept any of these views:
all pointed to the same conclusion, which I was thus already on the
point of reaching, when a fresh argument occurred, and instantly
confirmed it. I could remember the exact words we had each said; and I
had spoken, and she had replied, in English. Plainly, then, the whole
affair was an illusion: catacombs, and stairs, and charitable lady, all
were equally the stuff of dreams.

I had just come to this determination, when there blew a flaw of wind
through the autumnal gardens; the dead leaves showered down, and a
flight of sparrows, thick as a snowfall, wheeled above my head with
sudden pipings. This agreeable bustle was the affair of a moment, but it
startled me from the abstraction into which I had fallen like a summons.
I sat briskly up, and as I did so, my eyes rested on the figure of a
lady in a brown jacket and carrying a paint-box. By her side walked a
fellow some years older than myself, with an easel under his arm; and
alike by their course and cargo I might judge they were bound for the
gallery, where the lady was, doubtless, engaged upon some copying.
You can imagine my surprise when I recognized in her the heroine of my
adventure. To put the matter beyond question, our eyes met, and she,
seeing herself remembered and recalling the trim in which I had
last beheld her, looked swiftly on the ground with just a shadow of
confusion.

I could not tell you to-day if she were plain or pretty; but she had
behaved with so much good sense, and I had cut so poor a figure in
her presence, that I became instantly fired with the desire to display
myself in a more favorable light. The young man besides was possibly her
brother; brothers are apt to be hasty, theirs being a part in which
it is possible, at a comparatively early age, to assume the dignity
of manhood; and it occurred to me it might be wise to forestall all
possible complications by an apology.

On this reasoning I drew near to the gallery door, and had hardly got in
position before the young man came out. Thus it was that I came face to
face with my third destiny; for my career has been entirely shaped
by these three elements,--my father, the capitol of Muskegon, and my
friend, Jim Pinkerton. As for the young lady with whom my mind was at
the moment chiefly occupied, I was never to hear more of her from that
day forward: an excellent example of the Blind Man's Buff that we call
life.




CHAPTER III. TO INTRODUCE MR. PINKERTON.


The stranger, I have said, was some years older than myself: a man of a
good stature, a very lively face, cordial, agitated manners, and a gray
eye as active as a fowl's.

“May I have a word with you?” said I.

“My dear sir,” he replied, “I don't know what it can be about, but you
may have a hundred if you like.”

“You have just left the side of a young lady,” I continued, “towards
whom I was led (very unintentionally) into the appearance of an offence.
To speak to herself would be only to renew her embarrassment, and I
seize the occasion of making my apology, and declaring my respect, to
one of my own sex who is her friend, and perhaps,” I added, with a bow,
“her natural protector.”

“You are a countryman of mine; I know it!” he cried: “I am sure of it
by your delicacy to a lady. You do her no more than justice. I was
introduced to her the other night at tea, in the apartment of some
people, friends of mine; and meeting her again this morning, I could not
do less than carry her easel for her. My dear sir, what is your name?”

I was disappointed to find he had so little bond with my young lady;
and but that it was I who had sought the acquaintance, might have been
tempted to retreat. At the same time, something in the stranger's eye
engaged me.

“My name,” said I, “is Loudon Dodd; I am a student of sculpture here
from Muskegon.”

“Of sculpture?” he cried, as though that would have been his last
conjecture. “Mine is James Pinkerton; I am delighted to have the
pleasure of your acquaintance.”

“Pinkerton!” it was now my turn to exclaim. “Are you Broken-Stool
Pinkerton?”

He admitted his identity with a laugh of boyish delight; and indeed any
young man in the quarter might have been proud to own a sobriquet thus
gallantly acquired.

In order to explain the name, I must here digress into a chapter of
the history of manners in the nineteenth century, very well worth
commemoration for its own sake. In some of the studios at that date,
the hazing of new pupils was both barbarous and obscene. Two incidents,
following one on the heels of the other tended to produce an advance in
civilization by the means (as so commonly happens) of a passing appeal
to savage standards. The first was the arrival of a little gentleman
from Armenia. He had a fez upon his head and (what nobody counted on) a
dagger in his pocket. The hazing was set about in the customary style,
and, perhaps in virtue of the victim's head-gear, even more boisterously
than usual. He bore it at first with an inviting patience; but upon one
of the students proceeding to an unpardonable freedom, plucked out
his knife and suddenly plunged it in the belly of the jester. This
gentleman, I am pleased to say, passed months upon a bed of sickness,
before he was in a position to resume his studies. The second incident
was that which had earned Pinkerton his reputation. In a crowded studio,
while some very filthy brutalities were being practised on a trembling
debutant, a tall, pale fellow sprang from his stool and (without the
smallest preface or explanation) sang out, “All English and Americans to
clear the shop!” Our race is brutal, but not filthy; and the summons
was nobly responded to. Every Anglo-Saxon student seized his stool; in
a moment the studio was full of bloody coxcombs, the French fleeing in
disorder for the door, the victim liberated and amazed. In this feat of
arms, both English-speaking nations covered themselves with glory;
but I am proud to claim the author of the whole for an American, and
a patriotic American at that, being the same gentleman who had
subsequently to be held down in the bottom of a box during a performance
of _L'Oncle Sam_, sobbing at intervals, “My country! O my country!”
 While yet another (my new acquaintance, Pinkerton) was supposed to have
made the most conspicuous figure in the actual battle. At one blow, he
had broken his own stool, and sent the largest of his opponents back
foremost through what we used to call a “conscientious nude.” It appears
that, in the continuation of his flight, this fallen warrior issued on
the boulevard still framed in the burst canvas.

It will be understood how much talk the incident aroused in the
students' quarter, and that I was highly gratified to make the
acquaintance of my famous countryman. It chanced I was to see more of
the quixotic side of his character before the morning was done; for as
we continued to stroll together, I found myself near the studio of a
young Frenchman whose work I had promised to examine, and in the fashion
of the quarter carried up Pinkerton along with me. Some of my comrades
of this date were pretty obnoxious fellows. I could almost always admire
and respect the grown-up practitioners of art in Paris; but many of
those who were still in a state of pupilage were sorry specimens, so
much so that I used often to wonder where the painters came from, and
where the brutes of students went to. A similar mystery hangs over the
intermediate stages of the medical profession, and must have perplexed
the least observant. The ruffian, at least, whom I now carried Pinkerton
to visit, was one of the most crapulous in the quarter. He turned
out for our delectation a huge “crust” (as we used to call it) of St.
Stephen, wallowing in red upon his belly in an exhausted receiver, and
a crowd of Hebrews in blue, green, and yellow, pelting him--apparently
with buns; and while we gazed upon this contrivance, regaled us with
a piece of his own recent biography, of which his mind was still very
full, and which he seemed to fancy, represented him in a heroic posture.
I was one of those cosmopolitan Americans, who accept the world (whether
at home or abroad) as they find it, and whose favourite part is that
of the spectator; yet even I was listening with ill-suppressed disgust,
when I was aware of a violent plucking at my sleeve.

“Is he saying he kicked her down stairs?” asked Pinkerton, white as St.
Stephen.

“Yes,” said I: “his discarded mistress; and then he pelted her with
stones. I suppose that's what gave him the idea for his picture. He has
just been alleging the pathetic excuse that she was old enough to be his
mother.”

Something like a sob broke from Pinkerton. “Tell him,” he gasped--“I
can't speak this language, though I understand a little; I never had any
proper education--tell him I'm going to punch his head.”

“For God's sake, do nothing of the sort!” I cried. “They don't
understand that sort of thing here.” And I tried to bundle him out.

“Tell him first what we think of him,” he objected. “Let me tell him
what he looks in the eyes of a pure-minded American”

“Leave that to me,” said I, thrusting Pinkerton clear through the door.

“Qu'est-ce qu'il a?”[1] inquired the student.

[1] “What's the matter with him?”

“Monsieur se sent mal au coeur d'avoir trop regarde votre croute,”[2]
said I, and made my escape, scarce with dignity, at Pinkerton's heels.

[2] “The gentleman is sick at his stomach from having looked too long at
your daub.”

“What did you say to him?” he asked.

“The only thing that he could feel,” was my reply.

After this scene, the freedom with which I had ejected my new
acquaintance, and the precipitation with which I had followed him, the
least I could do was to propose luncheon. I have forgot the name of the
place to which I led him, nothing loath; it was on the far side of the
Luxembourg at least, with a garden behind, where we were speedily set
face to face at table, and began to dig into each other's history
and character, like terriers after rabbits, according to the approved
fashion of youth.

Pinkerton's parents were from the old country; there too, I incidentally
gathered, he had himself been born, though it was a circumstance he
seemed prone to forget. Whether he had run away, or his father had
turned him out, I never fathomed; but about the age of twelve, he was
thrown upon his own resources. A travelling tin-type photographer picked
him up, like a haw out of a hedgerow, on a wayside in New Jersey; took
a fancy to the urchin; carried him on with him in his wandering life;
taught him all he knew himself--to take tin-types (as well as I can make
out) and doubt the Scriptures; and died at last in Ohio at the corner
of a road. “He was a grand specimen,” cried Pinkerton; “I wish you could
have seen him, Mr. Dodd. He had an appearance of magnanimity that used
to remind me of the patriarchs.” On the death of this random protector,
the boy inherited the plant and continued the business. “It was a life
I could have chosen, Mr. Dodd!” he cried. “I have been in all the finest
scenes of that magnificent continent that we were born to be the heirs
of. I wish you could see my collection of tin-types; I wish I had them
here. They were taken for my own pleasure and to be a memento; and they
show Nature in her grandest as well as her gentlest moments.” As he
tramped the Western States and Territories, taking tin-types, the boy
was continually getting hold of books, good, bad, and indifferent,
popular and abstruse, from the novels of Sylvanus Cobb to Euclid's
Elements, both of which I found (to my almost equal wonder) he had
managed to peruse: he was taking stock by the way, of the people, the
products, and the country, with an eye unusually observant and a
memory unusually retentive; and he was collecting for himself a body of
magnanimous and semi-intellectual nonsense, which he supposed to be the
natural thoughts and to contain the whole duty of the born American.
To be pure-minded, to be patriotic, to get culture and money with both
hands and with the same irrational fervour--these appeared to be the
chief articles of his creed. In later days (not of course upon this
first occasion) I would sometimes ask him why; and he had his answer
pat. “To build up the type!” he would cry. “We're all committed to that;
we're all under bond to fulfil the American Type! Loudon, the hope of
the world is there. If we fail, like these old feudal monarchies, what
is left?”

The trade of a tin-typer proved too narrow for the lad's ambition; it
was insusceptible of expansion, he explained, it was not truly modern;
and by a sudden conversion of front, he became a railroad-scalper. The
principles of this trade I never clearly understood; but its essence
appears to be to cheat the railroads out of their due fare. “I threw my
whole soul into it; I grudged myself food and sleep while I was at it;
the most practised hands admitted I had caught on to the idea in a month
and revolutionised the practice inside of a year,” he said. “And there's
interest in it, too. It's amusing to pick out some one going by, make up
your mind about his character and tastes, dash out of the office and hit
him flying with an offer of the very place he wants to go to. I don't
think there was a scalper on the continent made fewer blunders. But I
took it only as a stage. I was saving every dollar; I was looking
ahead. I knew what I wanted--wealth, education, a refined home, and a
conscientious, cultured lady for a wife; for, Mr. Dodd”--this with
a formidable outcry--“every man is bound to marry above him: if the
woman's not the man's superior, I brand it as mere sensuality. There was
my idea, at least. That was what I was saving for; and enough, too! But
it isn't every man, I know that--it's far from every man--could do what
I did: close up the livest agency in Saint Jo, where he was coining
dollars by the pot, set out alone, without a friend or a word of French,
and settle down here to spend his capital learning art.”

“Was it an old taste?” I asked him, “or a sudden fancy?”

“Neither, Mr. Dodd,” he admitted. “Of course I had learned in my
tin-typing excursions to glory and exult in the works of God. But it
wasn't that. I just said to myself, What is most wanted in my age and
country? More culture and more art, I said; and I chose the best place,
saved my money, and came here to get them.”

The whole attitude of this young man warmed and shamed me. He had more
fire in his little toe than I had in my whole carcase; he was stuffed to
bursting with the manly virtues; thrift and courage glowed in him; and
even if his artistic vocation seemed (to one of my exclusive tenets) not
quite clear, who could predict what might be accomplished by a creature
so full-blooded and so inspired with animal and intellectual energy? So,
when he proposed that I should come and see his work (one of the regular
stages of a Latin Quarter friendship), I followed him with interest and
hope.

He lodged parsimoniously at the top of a tall house near the
Observatory, in a bare room, principally furnished with his own trunks
and papered with his own despicable studies. No man has less taste for
disagreeable duties than myself; perhaps there is only one subject on
which I cannot flatter a man without a blush; but upon that, upon all
that touches art, my sincerity is Roman. Once and twice I made the
circuit of his walls in silence, spying in every corner for some spark
of merit; he, meanwhile, following close at my heels, reading the
verdict in my face with furtive glances, presenting some fresh study for
my inspection with undisguised anxiety, and (after it had been silently
weighed in the balances and found wanting) whisking it away with an open
gesture of despair. By the time the second round was completed, we were
both extremely depressed.

“O!” he groaned, breaking the long silence, “it's quite unnecessary you
should speak!”

“Do you want me to be frank with you? I think you are wasting time,”
 said I.

“You don't see any promise?” he inquired, beguiled by some return of
hope, and turning upon me the embarrassing brightness of his eye. “Not
in this still-life here, of the melon? One fellow thought it good.”

It was the least I could do to give the melon a more particular
examination; which, when I had done, I could but shake my head. “I am
truly sorry, Pinkerton,” said I, “but I can't advise you to persevere.”

He seemed to recover his fortitude at the moment, rebounding from
disappointment like a man of india-rubber. “Well,” said he stoutly, “I
don't know that I'm surprised. But I'll go on with the course; and throw
my whole soul into it, too. You mustn't think the time is lost. It's all
culture; it will help me to extend my relations when I get back home;
it may fit me for a position on one of the illustrateds; and then I can
always turn dealer,” he said, uttering the monstrous proposition,
which was enough to shake the Latin Quarter to the dust, with entire
simplicity. “It's all experience, besides;” he continued, “and it seems
to me there's a tendency to underrate experience, both as net profit and
investment. Never mind. That's done with. But it took courage for you
to say what you did, and I'll never forget it. Here's my hand, Mr. Dodd.
I'm not your equal in culture or talent--”

“You know nothing about that,” I interrupted. “I have seen your work,
but you haven't seen mine.

“No more I have,” he cried; “and let's go see it at once! But I know you
are away up. I can feel it here.”

To say truth, I was almost ashamed to introduce him to my studio--my
work, whether absolutely good or bad, being so vastly superior to his.
But his spirits were now quite restored; and he amazed me, on the way,
with his light-hearted talk and new projects. So that I began at last
to understand how matters lay: that this was not an artist who had been
deprived of the practice of his single art; but only a business man
of very extended interests, informed (perhaps something of the most
suddenly) that one investment out of twenty had gone wrong.

As a matter of fact besides (although I never suspected it) he was
already seeking consolation with another of the muses, and pleasing
himself with the notion that he would repay me for my sincerity, cement
our friendship, and (at one and the same blow) restore my estimation of
his talents. Several times already, when I had been speaking of myself,
he had pulled out a writing-pad and scribbled a brief note; and now,
when we entered the studio, I saw it in his hand again, and the
pencil go to his mouth, as he cast a comprehensive glance round the
uncomfortable building.

“Are you going to make a sketch of it?” I could not help asking, as I
unveiled the Genius of Muskegon.

“Ah, that's my secret,” said he. “Never you mind. A mouse can help a
lion.”

He walked round my statue and had the design explained to him. I had
represented Muskegon as a young, almost a stripling, mother, with
something of an Indian type; the babe upon her knees was winged, to
indicate our soaring future; and her seat was a medley of sculptured
fragments, Greek, Roman, and Gothic, to remind us of the older worlds
from which we trace our generation.

“Now, does this satisfy you, Mr. Dodd?” he inquired, as soon as I had
explained to him the main features of the design.

“Well,” I said, “the fellows seem to think it's not a bad bonne femme
for a beginner. I don't think it's entirely bad myself. Here is the best
point; it builds up best from here. No, it seems to me it has a kind of
merit,” I admitted; “but I mean to do better.”

“Ah, that's the word!” cried Pinkerton. “There's the word I love!” and
he scribbled in his pad.

“What in creation ails you?” I inquired. “It's the most commonplace
expression in the English language.”

“Better and better!” chuckled Pinkerton. “The unconsciousness of genius.
Lord, but this is coming in beautiful!” and he scribbled again.

“If you're going to be fulsome,” said I, “I'll close the place of
entertainment.” And I threatened to replace the veil upon the Genius.

“No, no,” said he. “Don't be in a hurry. Give me a point or two. Show me
what's particularly good.”

“I would rather you found that out for yourself,” said I.

“The trouble is,” said he, “that I've never turned my attention to
sculpture, beyond, of course, admiring it, as everybody must who has a
soul. So do just be a good fellow, and explain to me what you like in
it, and what you tried for, and where the merit comes in. It'll be all
education for me.”

“Well, in sculpture, you see, the first thing you have to consider
is the masses. It's, after all, a kind of architecture,” I began, and
delivered a lecture on that branch of art, with illustrations from
my own masterpiece there present, all of which, if you don't mind,
or whether you mind or not, I mean to conscientiously omit. Pinkerton
listened with a fiery interest, questioned me with a certain
uncultivated shrewdness, and continued to scratch down notes, and tear
fresh sheets from his pad. I found it inspiring to have my words thus
taken down like a professor's lecture; and having had no previous
experience of the press, I was unaware that they were all being taken
down wrong. For the same reason (incredible as it must appear in
an American) I never entertained the least suspicion that they were
destined to be dished up with a sauce of penny-a-lining gossip; and
myself, my person, and my works of art butchered to make a holiday
for the readers of a Sunday paper. Night had fallen over the Genius of
Muskegon before the issue of my theoretic eloquence was stayed, nor did
I separate from my new friend without an appointment for the morrow.

I was indeed greatly taken with this first view of my countryman,
and continued, on further acquaintance, to be interested, amused, and
attracted by him in about equal proportions. I must not say he had a
fault, not only because my mouth is sealed by gratitude, but because
those he had sprang merely from his education, and you could see he had
cultivated and improved them like virtues. For all that, I can never
deny he was a troublous friend to me, and the trouble began early.

It may have been a fortnight later that I divined the secret of the
writing-pad. My wretch (it leaked out) wrote letters for a paper in the
West, and had filled a part of one of them with descriptions of myself.
I pointed out to him that he had no right to do so without asking my
permission.

“Why, this is just what I hoped!” he exclaimed. “I thought you didn't
seem to catch on; only it seemed too good to be true.”

“But, my good fellow, you were bound to warn me,” I objected.

“I know it's generally considered etiquette,” he admitted; “but between
friends, and when it was only with a view of serving you, I thought it
wouldn't matter. I wanted it (if possible) to come on you as a surprise;
I wanted you just to waken, like Lord Byron, and find the papers full of
you. You must admit it was a natural thought. And no man likes to boast
of a favour beforehand.”

“But, heavens and earth! how do you know I think it a favour?” I cried.

He became immediately plunged in despair. “You think it a liberty,” said
he; “I see that. I would rather have cut off my hand. I would stop it
now, only it's too late; it's published by now. And I wrote it with so
much pride and pleasure!”

I could think of nothing but how to console him. “O, I daresay it's all
right,” said I. “I know you meant it kindly, and you would be sure to do
it in good taste.”

“That you may swear to,” he cried. “It's a pure, bright, A number 1
paper; the St. Jo _Sunday Herald_. The idea of the series was quite my
own; I interviewed the editor, put it to him straight; the freshness of
the idea took him, and I walked out of that office with the contract in
my pocket, and did my first Paris letter that evening in Saint Jo. The
editor did no more than glance his eye down the headlines. 'You're the
man for us,' said he.”

I was certainly far from reassured by this sketch of the class of
literature in which I was to make my first appearance; but I said no
more, and possessed my soul in patience, until the day came when I
received a copy of a newspaper marked in the corner, “Compliments of
J.P.” I opened it with sensible shrinkings; and there, wedged between an
account of a prize-fight and a skittish article upon chiropody--think of
chiropody treated with a leer!--I came upon a column and a half in which
myself and my poor statue were embalmed. Like the editor with the first
of the series, I did but glance my eye down the head-lines and was more
than satisfied.

     ANOTHER OF PINKERTON'S SPICY CHATS.

     ART PRACTITIONERS IN PARIS.

     MUSKEGON'S COLUMNED CAPITOL.

     SON OF MILLIONAIRE DODD,

     PATRIOT AND ARTIST.

     “HE MEANS TO DO BETTER.”

In the body of the text, besides, my eye caught, as it passed, some
deadly expressions: “Figure somewhat fleshy,” “bright, intellectual
smile,” “the unconsciousness of genius,” “'Now, Mr. Dodd,' resumed the
reporter, 'what would be your idea of a distinctively American quality
in sculpture?'” It was true the question had been asked; it was true,
alas! that I had answered; and now here was my reply, or some strange
hash of it, gibbeted in the cold publicity of type. I thanked God that
my French fellow-students were ignorant of English; but when I thought
of the British--of Myner (for instance) or the Stennises--I think I
could have fallen on Pinkerton and beat him.

To divert my thoughts (if it were possible) from this calamity, I turned
to a letter from my father which had arrived by the same post. The
envelope contained a strip of newspaper-cutting; and my eye caught
again, “Son of Millionaire Dodd--Figure somewhat fleshy,” and the rest
of the degrading nonsense. What would my father think of it? I wondered,
and opened his manuscript. “My dearest boy,” it began, “I send you a
cutting which has pleased me very much, from a St. Joseph paper of
high standing. At last you seem to be coming fairly to the front; and
I cannot but reflect with delight and gratitude how very few youths of
your age occupy nearly two columns of press-matter all to themselves.
I only wish your dear mother had been here to read it over my shoulder;
but we will hope she shares my grateful emotion in a better place. Of
course I have sent a copy to your grandfather and uncle in Edinburgh;
so you can keep the one I enclose. This Jim Pinkerton seems a valuable
acquaintance; he has certainly great talent; and it is a good general
rule to keep in with pressmen.”

I hope it will be set down to the right side of my account, but I had
no sooner read these words, so touchingly silly, than my anger against
Pinkerton was swallowed up in gratitude. Of all the circumstances of my
career, my birth, perhaps, excepted, not one had given my poor father so
profound a pleasure as this article in the _Sunday Herald_. What a fool,
then, was I, to be lamenting! when I had at last, and for once, and
at the cost of only a few blushes, paid back a fraction of my debt
of gratitude. So that, when I next met Pinkerton, I took things very
lightly; my father was pleased, and thought the letter very clever, I
told him; for my own part, I had no taste for publicity: thought the
public had no concern with the artist, only with his art; and though I
owned he had handled it with great consideration, I should take it as a
favour if he never did it again.

“There it is,” he said despondingly. “I've hurt you. You can't deceive
me, Loudon. It's the want of tact, and it's incurable.” He sat down, and
leaned his head upon his hand. “I had no advantages when I was young,
you see,” he added.

“Not in the least, my dear fellow,” said I. “Only the next time you wish
to do me a service, just speak about my work; leave my wretched person
out, and my still more wretched conversation; and above all,” I added,
with an irrepressible shudder, “don't tell them how I said it! There's
that phrase, now: 'With a proud, glad smile.' Who cares whether I smiled
or not?”

“Oh, there now, Loudon, you're entirely wrong,” he broke in. “That's
what the public likes; that's the merit of the thing, the literary
value. It's to call up the scene before them; it's to enable the
humblest citizen to enjoy that afternoon the same as I did. Think what
it would have been to me when I was tramping around with my tin-types to
find a column and a half of real, cultured conversation--an artist, in
his studio abroad, talking of his art--and to know how he looked as he
did it, and what the room was like, and what he had for breakfast; and
to tell myself, eating tinned beans beside a creek, that if all went
well, the same sort of thing would, sooner or later, happen to myself:
why, Loudon, it would have been like a peephole into heaven!”

“Well, if it gives so much pleasure,” I admitted, “the sufferers
shouldn't complain. Only give the other fellows a turn.”

The end of the matter was to bring myself and the journalist in a more
close relation. If I know anything at all of human nature--and the IF
is no mere figure of speech, but stands for honest doubt--no series
of benefits conferred, or even dangers shared, would have so rapidly
confirmed our friendship as this quarrel avoided, this fundamental
difference of taste and training accepted and condoned.




CHAPTER IV. IN WHICH I EXPERIENCE EXTREMES OF FORTUNE.


Whether it came from my training and repeated bankruptcy at the
commercial college, or by direct inheritance from old Loudon, the
Edinburgh mason, there can be no doubt about the fact that I was
thrifty. Looking myself impartially over, I believe that is my only
manly virtue. During my first two years in Paris I not only made it a
point to keep well inside of my allowance, but accumulated considerable
savings in the bank. You will say, with my masquerade of living as a
penniless student, it must have been easy to do so: I should have had no
difficulty, however, in doing the reverse. Indeed, it is wonderful I did
not; and early in the third year, or soon after I had known Pinkerton, a
singular incident proved it to have been equally wise. Quarter-day came,
and brought no allowance. A letter of remonstrance was despatched, and
for the first time in my experience, remained unanswered. A cablegram
was more effectual; for it brought me at least a promise of attention.
“Will write at once,” my father telegraphed; but I waited long for his
letter. I was puzzled, angry, and alarmed; but thanks to my previous
thrift, I cannot say that I was ever practically embarrassed. The
embarrassment, the distress, the agony, were all for my unhappy father
at home in Muskegon, struggling for life and fortune against untoward
chances, returning at night from a day of ill-starred shifts and
ventures, to read and perhaps to weep over that last harsh letter from
his only child, to which he lacked the courage to reply.

Nearly three months after time, and when my economies were beginning
to run low, I received at last a letter with the customary bills of
exchange.

“My dearest boy,” it ran, “I believe, in the press of anxious business,
your letters and even your allowance have been somewhile neglected. You
must try to forgive your poor old dad, for he has had a trying time; and
now when it is over, the doctor wants me to take my shotgun and go
to the Adirondacks for a change. You must not fancy I am sick, only
over-driven and under the weather. Many of our foremost operators have
gone down: John T. M'Brady skipped to Canada with a trunkful of boodle;
Billy Sandwith, Charlie Downs, Joe Kaiser, and many others of our
leading men in this city bit the dust. But Big-Head Dodd has again
weathered the blizzard, and I think I have fixed things so that we may
be richer than ever before autumn.

“Now I will tell you, my dear, what I propose. You say you are well
advanced with your first statue; start in manfully and finish it, and if
your teacher--I can never remember how to spell his name--will send me
a certificate that it is up to market standard, you shall have ten
thousand dollars to do what you like with, either at home or in Paris.
I suggest, since you say the facilities for work are so much greater
in that city, you would do well to buy or build a little home; and
the first thing you know, your dad will be dropping in for a luncheon.
Indeed, I would come now, for I am beginning to grow old, and I long to
see my dear boy; but there are still some operations that want watching
and nursing. Tell your friend, Mr. Pinkerton, that I read his letters
every week; and though I have looked in vain lately for my Loudon's
name, still I learn something of the life he is leading in that strange,
old world, depicted by an able pen.”

Here was a letter that no young man could possibly digest in solitude.
It marked one of those junctures when the confidant is necessary; and
the confidant selected was none other than Jim Pinkerton. My father's
message may have had an influence in this decision; but I scarce suppose
so, for the intimacy was already far advanced. I had a genuine and
lively taste for my compatriot; I laughed at, I scolded, and I loved
him. He, upon his side, paid me a kind of doglike service of admiration,
gazing at me from afar off as at one who had liberally enjoyed those
“advantages” which he envied for himself. He followed at heel; his laugh
was ready chorus; our friends gave him the nickname of “The Henchman.”
 It was in this insidious form that servitude approached me.

Pinkerton and I read and re-read the famous news: he, I can swear, with
an enjoyment as unalloyed and far more vocal than my own. The statue was
nearly done: a few days' work sufficed to prepare it for exhibition; the
master was approached; he gave his consent; and one cloudless morning
of May beheld us gathered in my studio for the hour of trial. The
master wore his many-hued rosette; he came attended by two of my French
fellow-pupils--friends of mine and both considerable sculptors in Paris
at this hour. “Corporal John” (as we used to call him) breaking for once
those habits of study and reserve which have since carried him so
high in the opinion of the world, had left his easel of a morning to
countenance a fellow-countryman in some suspense. My dear old Romney
was there by particular request; for who that knew him would think
a pleasure quite complete unless he shared it, or not support a
mortification more easily if he were present to console? The party
was completed by John Myner, the Englishman; by the brothers
Stennis,--Stennis-aine and Stennis-frere, as they used to figure on
their accounts at Barbizon--a pair of hare-brained Scots; and by the
inevitable Jim, as white as a sheet and bedewed with the sweat of
anxiety.

I suppose I was little better myself when I unveiled the Genius of
Muskegon. The master walked about it seriously; then he smiled.

“It is already not so bad,” said he, in that funny English of which he
was so proud. “No, already not so bad.”

We all drew a deep breath of relief; and Corporal John (as the most
considerable junior present) explained to him it was intended for a
public building, a kind of prefecture--

“He! Quoi?” cried he, relapsing into French. “Qu'est-ce que vous me
chantez la? O, in America,” he added, on further information being
hastily furnished. “That is anozer sing. O, very good, very good.”

The idea of the required certificate had to be introduced to his mind
in the light of a pleasantry--the fancy of a nabob little more advanced
than the red Indians of “Fennimore Cooperr”; and it took all our talents
combined to conceive a form of words that would be acceptable on
both sides. One was found, however: Corporal John engrossed it in his
undecipherable hand, the master lent it the sanction of his name and
flourish, I slipped it into an envelope along with one of the two
letters I had ready prepared in my pocket, and as the rest of us moved
off along the boulevard to breakfast, Pinkerton was detached in a cab
and duly committed it to the post.

The breakfast was ordered at Lavenue's, where no one need be ashamed
to entertain even the master; the table was laid in the garden; I had
chosen the bill of fare myself; on the wine question we held a council
of war with the most fortunate results; and the talk, as soon as the
master laid aside his painful English, became fast and furious. There
were a few interruptions, indeed, in the way of toasts. The master's
health had to be drunk, and he responded in a little well-turned speech,
full of neat allusions to my future and to the United States; my health
followed; and then my father's must not only be proposed and drunk,
but a full report must be despatched to him at once by cablegram--an
extravagance which was almost the means of the master's dissolution.
Choosing Corporal John to be his confidant (on the ground, I presume,
that he was already too good an artist to be any longer an American
except in name) he summed up his amazement in one oft-repeated
formula--“C'est barbare!” Apart from these genial formalities, we
talked, talked of art, and talked of it as only artists can. Here in the
South Seas we talk schooners most of the time; in the Quarter we talked
art with the like unflagging interest, and perhaps as much result.

Before very long, the master went away; Corporal John (who was already a
sort of young master) followed on his heels; and the rank and file were
naturally relieved by their departure. We were now among equals; the
bottle passed, the conversation sped. I think I can still hear the
Stennis brothers pour forth their copious tirades; Dijon, my portly
French fellow-student, drop witticisms well-conditioned like himself;
and another (who was weak in foreign languages) dash hotly into the
current of talk with some “Je trove que pore oon sontimong de delicacy,
Corot ...,” or some “Pour moi Corot est le plou ...,” and then, his
little raft of French foundering at once, scramble silently to shore
again. He at least could understand; but to Pinkerton, I think the
noise, the wine, the sun, the shadows of the leaves, and the esoteric
glory of being seated at a foreign festival, made up the whole available
means of entertainment.

We sat down about half past eleven; I suppose it was two when,
some point arising and some particular picture being instanced, an
adjournment to the Louvre was proposed. I paid the score, and in a
moment we were trooping down the Rue de Renne. It was smoking hot; Paris
glittered with that superficial brilliancy which is so agreeable to the
man in high spirits, and in moods of dejection so depressing; the wine
sang in my ears, it danced and brightened in my eyes. The pictures that
we saw that afternoon, as we sped briskly and loquaciously through the
immortal galleries, appear to me, upon a retrospect, the loveliest
of all; the comments we exchanged to have touched the highest mark of
criticism, grave or gay.

It was only when we issued again from the museum that a difference of
race broke up the party. Dijon proposed an adjournment to a cafe, there
to finish the afternoon on beer; the elder Stennis, revolted at the
thought, moved for the country, a forest if possible, and a long walk.
At once the English speakers rallied to the name of any exercise: even
to me, who have been often twitted with my sedentary habits, the thought
of country air and stillness proved invincibly attractive. It appeared,
upon investigation, we had just time to hail a cab and catch one of the
fast trains for Fontainebleau. Beyond the clothes we stood in, all were
destitute of what is called (with dainty vagueness) personal effects;
and it was earnestly mooted, on the other side, whether we had not time
to call upon the way and pack a satchel? But the Stennis boys exclaimed
upon our effeminacy. They had come from London, it appeared, a week
before with nothing but greatcoats and tooth-brushes. No baggage--there
was the secret of existence. It was expensive, to be sure; for every
time you had to comb your hair, a barber must be paid, and every time
you changed your linen, one shirt must be bought and another thrown
away; but anything was better (argued these young gentlemen) than to
be the slaves of haversacks. “A fellow has to get rid gradually of all
material attachments; that was manhood” (said they); “and as long as you
were bound down to anything,--house, umbrella, or portmanteau,--you were
still tethered by the umbilical cord.” Something engaging in this
theory carried the most of us away. The two Frenchmen, indeed, retired,
scoffing, to their bock; and Romney, being too poor to join the
excursion on his own resources and too proud to borrow, melted
unobtrusively away. Meanwhile the remainder of the company crowded
the benches of a cab; the horse was urged (as horses have to be) by an
appeal to the pocket of the driver; the train caught by the inside of
a minute; and in less than an hour and a half we were breathing deep
of the sweet air of the forest and stretching our legs up the hill from
Fontainebleau octroi, bound for Barbizon. That the leading members of
our party covered the distance in fifty-one minutes and a half is (I
believe) one of the historic landmarks of the colony; but you will
scarce be surprised to learn that I was somewhat in the rear. Myner,
a comparatively philosophic Briton, kept me company in my deliberate
advance; the glory of the sun's going down, the fall of the long
shadows, the inimitable scent and the inspiration of the woods, attuned
me more and more to walk in a silence which progressively infected my
companion; and I remember that, when at last he spoke, I was startled
from a deep abstraction.

“Your father seems to be a pretty good kind of a father,” said he. “Why
don't he come to see you?” I was ready with some dozen of reasons, and
had more in stock; but Myner, with that shrewdness which made him feared
and admired, suddenly fixed me with his eye-glass and asked, “Ever press
him?”

The blood came in my face. No; I had never pressed him; I had never even
encouraged him to come. I was proud of him; proud of his handsome looks,
of his kind, gentle ways, of that bright face he could show when others
were happy; proud, too (meanly proud, if you like) of his great wealth
and startling liberalities. And yet he would have been in the way of my
Paris life, of much of which he would have disapproved. I had feared to
expose to criticism his innocent remarks on art; I had told myself, I
had even partly believed, he did not want to come; I had been (and still
am) convinced that he was sure to be unhappy out of Muskegon; in short,
I had a thousand reasons, good and bad, not all of which could alter one
iota of the fact that I knew he only waited for my invitation.

“Thank you, Myner,” said I; “you're a much better fellow than ever I
supposed. I'll write to-night.”

“O, you're a pretty decent sort yourself,” returned Myner, with more
than his usual flippancy of manner, but (as I was gratefully aware) not
a trace of his occasional irony of meaning.

Well, these were brave days, on which I could dwell forever. Brave,
too, were those that followed, when Pinkerton and I walked Paris and the
suburbs, viewing and pricing houses for my new establishment, or covered
ourselves with dust and returned laden with Chinese gods and brass
warming-pans from the dealers in antiquities. I found Pinkerton well
up in the situation of these establishments as well as in the current
prices, and with quite a smattering of critical judgment; it turned out
he was investing capital in pictures and curiosities for the States, and
the superficial thoroughness of the creature appeared in the fact, that
although he would never be a connoisseur, he was already something of
an expert. The things themselves left him as near as may be cold; but he
had a joy of his own in understanding how to buy and sell them.

In such engagements the time passed until I might very well expect
an answer from my father. Two mails followed each other, and brought
nothing. By the third I received a long and almost incoherent letter
of remorse, encouragement, consolation, and despair. From this pitiful
document, which (with a movement of piety) I burned as soon as I had
read it, I gathered that the bubble of my father's wealth was burst,
that he was now both penniless and sick; and that I, so far from
expecting ten thousand dollars to throw away in juvenile extravagance,
must look no longer for the quarterly remittances on which I lived. My
case was hard enough; but I had sense enough to perceive, and decency
enough to do my duty. I sold my curiosities, or rather I sent Pinkerton
to sell them; and he had previously bought and now disposed of them so
wisely that the loss was trifling. This, with what remained of my last
allowance, left me at the head of no less than five thousand francs.
Five hundred I reserved for my own immediate necessities; the rest I
mailed inside of the week to my father at Muskegon, where they came in
time to pay his funeral expenses.

The news of his death was scarcely a surprise and scarce a grief to me.
I could not conceive my father a poor man. He had led too long a life
of thoughtless and generous profusion to endure the change; and though I
grieved for myself, I was able to rejoice that my father had been taken
from the battle. I grieved, I say, for myself; and it is probable there
were at the same date many thousands of persons grieving with less
cause. I had lost my father; I had lost the allowance; my whole fortune
(including what had been returned from Muskegon) scarce amounted to
a thousand francs; and to crown my sorrows, the statuary contract
had changed hands. The new contractor had a son of his own, or else a
nephew; and it was signified to me, with business-like plainness, that I
must find another market for my pigs. In the meanwhile I had given up my
room, and slept on a truckle-bed in the corner of the studio, where as I
read myself to sleep at night, and when I awoke in the morning, that now
useless bulk, the Genius of Muskegon, was ever present to my eyes. Poor
stone lady! born to be enthroned under the gilded, echoing dome of the
new capitol, whither was she now to drift? for what base purposes be
ultimately broken up, like an unseaworthy ship? and what should befall
her ill-starred artificer, standing, with his thousand francs, on the
threshold of a life so hard as that of the unbefriended sculptor?

It was a subject often and earnestly debated by myself and Pinkerton.
In his opinion, I should instantly discard my profession. “Just drop it,
here and now,” he would say. “Come back home with me, and let's throw
our whole soul into business. I have the capital; you bring the culture.
Dodd & Pinkerton--I never saw a better name for an advertisement; and
you can't think, Loudon, how much depends upon a name.” On my side, I
would admit that a sculptor should possess one of three things--capital,
influence, or an energy only to be qualified as hellish. The first two
I had now lost; to the third I never had the smallest claim; and yet I
wanted the cowardice (or perhaps it was the courage) to turn my back
on my career without a fight. I told him, besides, that however poor
my chances were in sculpture, I was convinced they were yet worse in
business, for which I equally lacked taste and aptitude. But upon this
head, he was my father over again; assured me that I spoke in ignorance;
that any intelligent and cultured person was Bound to succeed; that I
must, besides, have inherited some of my father's fitness; and, at
any rate, that I had been regularly trained for that career in the
commercial college.


“Pinkerton,” I said, “can't you understand that, as long as I was there,
I never took the smallest interest in any stricken thing? The whole
affair was poison to me.”

“It's not possible,” he would cry; “it can't be; you couldn't live in
the midst of it and not feel the charm; with all your poetry of soul,
you couldn't help! Loudon,” he would go on, “you drive me crazy. You
expect a man to be all broken up about the sunset, and not to care a
dime for a place where fortunes are fought for and made and lost all
day; or for a career that consists in studying up life till you have it
at your finger-ends, spying out every cranny where you can get your
hand in and a dollar out, and standing there in the midst--one foot on
bankruptcy, the other on a borrowed dollar, and the whole thing spinning
round you like a mill--raking in the stamps, in spite of fate and
fortune.”

To this romance of dickering I would reply with the romance (which is
also the virtue) of art: reminding him of those examples of constancy
through many tribulations, with which the role of Apollo is illustrated;
from the case of Millet, to those of many of our friends and comrades,
who had chosen this agreeable mountain path through life, and were now
bravely clambering among rocks and brambles, penniless and hopeful.

“You will never understand it, Pinkerton,” I would say. “You look to the
result, you want to see some profit of your endeavours: that is why you
could never learn to paint, if you lived to be Methusalem. The result
is always a fizzle: the eyes of the artist are turned in; he lives for
a frame of mind. Look at Romney, now. There is the nature of the artist.
He hasn't a cent; and if you offered him to-morrow the command of an
army, or the presidentship of the United States, he wouldn't take it,
and you know he wouldn't.”

“I suppose not,” Pinkerton would cry, scouring his hair with both his
hands; “and I can't see why; I can't see what in fits he would be after,
not to; I don't seem to rise to these views. Of course, it's the
fault of not having had advantages in early life; but, Loudon, I'm so
miserably low that it seems to me silly. The fact is,” he might add with
a smile, “I don't seem to have the least use for a frame of mind without
square meals; and you can't get it out of my head that it's a man's duty
to die rich, if he can.”

“What for?” I asked him once.

“O, I don't know,” he replied. “Why in snakes should anybody want to be
a sculptor, if you come to that? I would love to sculp myself. But what
I can't see is why you should want to do nothing else. It seems to argue
a poverty of nature.”

Whether or not he ever came to understand me--and I have been so tossed
about since then that I am not very sure I understand myself--he soon
perceived that I was perfectly in earnest; and after about ten days
of argument, suddenly dropped the subject, and announced that he was
wasting capital, and must go home at once. No doubt he should have gone
long before, and had already lingered over his intended time for the
sake of our companionship and my misfortune; but man is so unjustly
minded that the very fact, which ought to have disarmed, only embittered
my vexation. I resented his departure in the light of a desertion; I
would not say, but doubtless I betrayed it; and something hang-dog in
the man's face and bearing led me to believe he was himself remorseful.
It is certain at least that, during the time of his preparations, we
drew sensibly apart--a circumstance that I recall with shame. On the
last day, he had me to dinner at a restaurant which he knew I had
formerly frequented, and had only forsworn of late from considerations
of economy. He seemed ill at ease; I was myself both sorry and sulky;
and the meal passed with little conversation.

“Now, Loudon,” said he, with a visible effort, after the coffee was
come and our pipes lighted, “you can never understand the gratitude and
loyalty I bear you. You don't know what a boon it is to be taken up by
a man that stands on the pinnacle of civilization; you can't think how
it's refined and purified me, how it's appealed to my spiritual nature;
and I want to tell you that I would die at your door like a dog.”

I don't know what answer I tried to make, but he cut me short.

“Let me say it out!” he cried. “I revere you for your whole-souled
devotion to art; I can't rise to it, but there's a strain of poetry in
my nature, Loudon, that responds to it. I want you to carry it out, and
I mean to help you.”

“Pinkerton, what nonsense is this?” I interrupted.

“Now don't get mad, Loudon; this is a plain piece of business,” said he;
“it's done every day; it's even typical. How are all those fellows over
here in Paris, Henderson, Sumner, Long?--it's all the same story: a
young man just plum full of artistic genius on the one side, a man of
business on the other who doesn't know what to do with his dollars--”

“But, you fool, you're as poor as a rat,” I cried.

“You wait till I get my irons in the fire!” returned Pinkerton. “I'm
bound to be rich; and I tell you I mean to have some of the fun as I go
along. Here's your first allowance; take it at the hand of a friend; I'm
one that holds friendship sacred as you do yourself. It's only a hundred
francs; you'll get the same every month, and as soon as my business
begins to expand we'll increase it to something fitting. And so far from
it's being a favour, just let me handle your statuary for the American
market, and I'll call it one of the smartest strokes of business in my
life.”

It took me a long time, and it had cost us both much grateful and
painful emotion, before I had finally managed to refuse his offer and
compounded for a bottle of particular wine. He dropped the subject at
last suddenly with a “Never mind; that's all done with,” nor did he
again refer to the subject, though we passed together the rest of the
afternoon, and I accompanied him, on his departure; to the doors of the
waiting-room at St. Lazare. I felt myself strangely alone; a voice told
me that I had rejected both the counsels of wisdom and the helping
hand of friendship; and as I passed through the great bright city on
my homeward way, I measured it for the first time with the eye of an
adversary.




CHAPTER V. IN WHICH I AM DOWN ON MY LUCK IN PARIS.


In no part of the world is starvation an agreeable business; but I
believe it is admitted there is no worse place to starve in than this
city of Paris. The appearances of life are there so especially gay,
it is so much a magnified beer-garden, the houses are so ornate, the
theatres so numerous, the very pace of the vehicles is so brisk, that a
man in any deep concern of mind or pain of body is constantly driven in
upon himself. In his own eyes, he seems the one serious creature moving
in a world of horrible unreality; voluble people issuing from a
cafe, the queue at theatre doors, Sunday cabfuls of second-rate
pleasure-seekers, the bedizened ladies of the pavement, the show in the
jewellers' windows--all the familiar sights contributing to flout his
own unhappiness, want, and isolation. At the same time, if he be at all
after my pattern, he is perhaps supported by a childish satisfaction:
this is life at last, he may tell himself, this is the real thing;
the bladders on which I was set swimming are now empty, my own weight
depends upon the ocean; by my own exertions I must perish or succeed;
and I am now enduring in the vivid fact, what I so much delighted to
read of in the case of Lonsteau or Lucien, Rodolphe or Schaunard.

Of the steps of my misery, I cannot tell at length. In ordinary times
what were politically called “loans” (although they were never meant to
be repaid) were matters of constant course among the students, and many
a man has partly lived on them for years. But my misfortune befell me
at an awkward juncture. Many of my friends were gone; others were
themselves in a precarious situation. Romney (for instance) was reduced
to tramping Paris in a pair of country sabots, his only suit of clothes
so imperfect (in spite of cunningly adjusted pins) that the authorities
at the Luxembourg suggested his withdrawal from the gallery. Dijon, too,
was on a leeshore, designing clocks and gas-brackets for a dealer; and
the most he could do was to offer me a corner of his studio where I
might work. My own studio (it will be gathered) I had by that time lost;
and in the course of my expulsion the Genius of Muskegon was finally
separated from her author. To continue to possess a full-sized statue,
a man must have a studio, a gallery, or at least the freedom of a back
garden. He cannot carry it about with him, like a satchel, in the
bottom of a cab, nor can he cohabit in a garret, ten by fifteen, with
so momentous a companion. It was my first idea to leave her behind at
my departure. There, in her birthplace, she might lend an inspiration,
methought, to my successor. But the proprietor, with whom I had
unhappily quarrelled, seized the occasion to be disagreeable, and called
upon me to remove my property. For a man in such straits as I now found
myself, the hire of a lorry was a consideration; and yet even that I
could have faced, if I had had anywhere to drive to after it was hired.
Hysterical laughter seized upon me as I beheld (in imagination) myself,
the waggoner, and the Genius of Muskegon, standing in the public view of
Paris, without the shadow of a destination; perhaps driving at last
to the nearest rubbish heap, and dumping there, among the ordures of a
city, the beloved child of my invention. From these extremities I was
relieved by a seasonable offer, and I parted from the Genius of Muskegon
for thirty francs. Where she now stands, under what name she is admired
or criticised, history does not inform us; but I like to think she
may adorn the shrubbery of some suburban tea-garden, where holiday
shop-girls hang their hats upon the mother, and their swains (by way
of an approach of gallantry) identify the winged infant with the god of
love.

In a certain cabman's eating-house on the outer boulevard I got credit
for my midday meal. Supper I was supposed not to require, sitting
down nightly to the delicate table of some rich acquaintances. This
arrangement was extremely ill-considered. My fable, credible enough at
first, and so long as my clothes were in good order, must have seemed
worse than doubtful after my coat became frayed about the edges, and
my boots began to squelch and pipe along the restaurant floors. The
allowance of one meal a day besides, though suitable enough to the state
of my finances, agreed poorly with my stomach. The restaurant was a
place I had often visited experimentally, to taste the life of students
then more unfortunate than myself; and I had never in those days entered
it without disgust, or left it without nausea. It was strange to find
myself sitting down with avidity, rising up with satisfaction, and
counting the hours that divided me from my return to such a table. But
hunger is a great magician; and so soon as I had spent my ready cash,
and could no longer fill up on bowls of chocolate or hunks of bread,
I must depend entirely on that cabman's eating-house, and upon certain
rare, long-expected, long-remembered windfalls. Dijon (for instance)
might get paid for some of his pot-boiling work, or else an old friend
would pass through Paris; and then I would be entertained to a meal
after my own soul, and contract a Latin Quarter loan, which would keep
me in tobacco and my morning coffee for a fortnight. It might be thought
the latter would appear the more important. It might be supposed that a
life, led so near the confines of actual famine, should have dulled the
nicety of my palate. On the contrary, the poorer a man's diet, the more
sharply is he set on dainties. The last of my ready cash, about thirty
francs, was deliberately squandered on a single dinner; and a great part
of my time when I was alone was passed upon the details of imaginary
feasts.

One gleam of hope visited me--an order for a bust from a rich
Southerner. He was free-handed, jolly of speech, merry of countenance;
kept me in good humour through the sittings, and when they were over,
carried me off with him to dinner and the sights of Paris. I ate well;
I laid on flesh; by all accounts, I made a favourable likeness of the
being, and I confess I thought my future was assured. But when the bust
was done, and I had despatched it across the Atlantic, I could never
so much as learn of its arrival. The blow felled me; I should have
lain down and tried no stroke to right myself, had not the honour of
my country been involved. For Dijon improved the opportunity in the
European style; informing me (for the first time) of the manners of
America: how it was a den of banditti without the smallest rudiment of
law or order, and debts could be there only collected with a shotgun.
“The whole world knows it,” he would say; “you are alone, mon petit
Loudon, you are alone to be in ignorance of these facts. The judges of
the Supreme Court fought but the other day with stilettos on the bench
at Cincinnati. You should read the little book of one of my friends: _Le
Touriste dans le Far-West_; you will see it all there in good French.”
 At last, incensed by days of such discussion, I undertook to prove to
him the contrary, and put the affair in the hands of my late father's
lawyer. From him I had the gratification of hearing, after a due
interval, that my debtor was dead of the yellow fever in Key West, and
had left his affairs in some confusion. I suppress his name; for though
he treated me with cruel nonchalance, it is probable he meant to deal
fairly in the end.

Soon after this a shade of change in my reception at the cabman's
eating-house marked the beginning of a new phase in my distress. The
first day, I told myself it was but fancy; the next, I made quite sure
it was a fact; the third, in mere panic I stayed away, and went for
forty-eight hours fasting. This was an act of great unreason; for the
debtor who stays away is but the more remarked, and the boarder who
misses a meal is sure to be accused of infidelity. On the fourth day,
therefore, I returned, inwardly quaking. The proprietor looked askance
upon my entrance; the waitresses (who were his daughters) neglected my
wants and sniffed at the affected joviality of my salutations; last and
most plain, when I called for a suisse (such as was being served to all
the other diners) I was bluntly told there were no more. It was obvious
I was near the end of my tether; one plank divided me from want, and now
I felt it tremble. I passed a sleepless night, and the first thing in
the morning took my way to Myner's studio. It was a step I had long
meditated and long refrained from; for I was scarce intimate with the
Englishman; and though I knew him to possess plenty of money, neither
his manner nor his reputation were the least encouraging to beggars.


I found him at work on a picture, which I was able conscientiously
to praise, dressed in his usual tweeds, plain, but pretty fresh, and
standing out in disagreeable contrast to my own withered and degraded
outfit. As we talked, he continued to shift his eyes watchfully between
his handiwork and the fat model, who sat at the far end of the studio
in a state of nature, with one arm gallantly arched above her head. My
errand would have been difficult enough under the best of circumstances:
placed between Myner, immersed in his art, and the white, fat, naked
female in a ridiculous attitude, I found it quite impossible. Again and
again I attempted to approach the point, again and again fell back on
commendations of the picture; and it was not until the model had enjoyed
an interval of repose, during which she took the conversation in her
own hands and regaled us (in a soft, weak voice) with details as to her
husband's prosperity, her sister's lamented decline from the paths
of virtue, and the consequent wrath of her father, a peasant of stern
principles, in the vicinity of Chalons on the Marne;--it was not, I say,
until after this was over, and I had once more cleared my throat for
the attack, and once more dropped aside into some commonplace about the
picture, that Myner himself brought me suddenly and vigorously to the
point.

“You didn't come here to talk this rot,” said he.

“No,” I replied sullenly; “I came to borrow money.”

He painted awhile in silence.

“I don't think we were ever very intimate?” he asked.

“Thank you,” said I. “I can take my answer,” and I made as if to go,
rage boiling in my heart.

“Of course you can go if you like,” said Myner; “but I advise you to
stay and have it out.”

“What more is there to say?” I cried. “You don't want to keep me here
for a needless humiliation?”

“Look here, Dodd, you must try and command your temper,” said he. “This
interview is of your own seeking, and not mine; if you suppose it's not
disagreeable to me, you're wrong; and if you think I will give you money
without knowing thoroughly about your prospects, you take me for a fool.
Besides,” he added, “if you come to look at it, you've got over the
worst of it by now: you have done the asking, and you have every reason
to know I mean to refuse. I hold out no false hopes, but it may be worth
your while to let me judge.”

Thus--I was going to say--encouraged, I stumbled through my story; told
him I had credit at the cabman's eating-house, but began to think it was
drawing to a close; how Dijon lent me a corner of his studio, where I
tried to model ornaments, figures for clocks, Time with the scythe, Leda
and the swan, musketeers for candlesticks, and other kickshaws, which
had never (up to that day) been honoured with the least approval.

“And your room?” asked Myner.

“O, my room is all right, I think,” said I. “She is a very good old
lady, and has never even mentioned her bill.”

“Because she is a very good old lady, I don't see why she should be
fined,” observed Myner.

“What do you mean by that?” I cried.

“I mean this,” said he. “The French give a great deal of credit amongst
themselves; they find it pays on the whole, or the system would hardly
be continued; but I can't see where WE come in; I can't see that it's
honest of us Anglo-Saxons to profit by their easy ways, and then skip
over the Channel or (as you Yankees do) across the Atlantic.”

“But I'm not proposing to skip,” I objected.

“Exactly,” he replied. “And shouldn't you? There's the problem. You
seem to me to have a lack of sympathy for the proprietors of cabmen's
eating-houses. By your own account you're not getting on: the longer you
stay, it'll only be the more out of the pocket of the dear old lady at
your lodgings. Now, I'll tell you what I'll do: if you consent to go,
I'll pay your passage to New York, and your railway fare and expenses
to Muskegon (if I have the name right) where your father lived, where he
must have left friends, and where, no doubt, you'll find an opening. I
don't seek any gratitude, for of course you'll think me a beast; but I
do ask you to pay it back when you are able. At any rate, that's all
I can do. It might be different if I thought you a genius, Dodd; but I
don't, and I advise you not to.”


“I think that was uncalled for, at least,” said I.

“I daresay it was,” he returned, with the same steadiness. “It seemed to
me pertinent; and, besides, when you ask me for money upon no security,
you treat me with the liberty of a friend, and it's to be presumed that
I can do the like. But the point is, do you accept?”

“No, thank you,” said I; “I have another string to my bow.”

“All right,” says Myner. “Be sure it's honest.”

“Honest? honest?” I cried. “What do you mean by calling my honesty in
question?”

“I won't, if you don't like it,” he replied. “You seem to think
honesty as easy as Blind Man's Buff: I don't. It's some difference of
definition.”

I went straight from this irritating interview, during which Myner had
never discontinued painting, to the studio of my old master. Only one
card remained for me to play, and I was now resolved to play it: I
must drop the gentleman and the frock-coat, and approach art in the
workman's tunic.

“Tiens, this little Dodd!” cried the master; and then, as his eye fell
on my dilapidated clothing, I thought I could perceive his countenance
to darken.

I made my plea in English; for I knew, if he were vain of anything, it
was of his achievement of the island tongue. “Master,” said I, “will you
take me in your studio again? but this time as a workman.”

“I sought your fazer was immensely reech,” said he.

I explained to him that I was now an orphan and penniless.

He shook his head. “I have betterr workmen waiting at my door,” said he,
“far betterr workmen.

“You used to think something of my work, sir,” I pleaded.

“Somesing, somesing--yes!” he cried; “enough for a son of a reech
man--not enough for an orphan. Besides, I sought you might learn to be
an artist; I did not sink you might learn to be a workman.”

On a certain bench on the outer boulevard, not far from the tomb of
Napoleon, a bench shaded at that date by a shabby tree, and commanding
a view of muddy roadway and blank wall, I sat down to wrestle with my
misery. The weather was cheerless and dark; in three days I had eaten
but once; I had no tobacco; my shoes were soaked, my trousers horrid
with mire; my humour and all the circumstances of the time and place
lugubriously attuned. Here were two men who had both spoken fairly of my
work while I was rich and wanted nothing; now that I was poor and lacked
all: “no genius,” said the one; “not enough for an orphan,” the other;
and the first offered me my passage like a pauper immigrant, and the
second refused me a day's wage as a hewer of stone--plain dealing for
an empty belly. They had not been insincere in the past; they were not
insincere to-day: change of circumstance had introduced a new criterion:
that was all.

But if I acquitted my two Job's comforters of insincerity, I was yet far
from admitting them infallible. Artists had been contemned before,
and had lived to turn the laugh on their contemners. How old was Corot
before he struck the vein of his own precious metal? When had a young
man been more derided (or more justly so) than the god of my admiration,
Balzac? Or if I required a bolder inspiration, what had I to do but turn
my head to where the gold dome of the Invalides glittered against inky
squalls, and recall the tale of him sleeping there: from the day when a
young artillery-sub could be giggled at and nicknamed Puss-in-Boots by
frisky misses; on to the days of so many crowns and so many victories,
and so many hundred mouths of cannon, and so many thousand war-hoofs
trampling the roadways of astonished Europe eighty miles in front of
the grand army? To go back, to give up, to proclaim myself a failure, an
ambitious failure, first a rocket, then a stick! I, Loudon Dodd, who
had refused all other livelihoods with scorn, and been advertised in the
Saint Joseph _Sunday Herald_ as a patriot and an artist, to be returned
upon my native Muskegon like damaged goods, and go the circuit of my
father's acquaintance, cap in hand, and begging to sweep offices! No, by
Napoleon! I would die at my chosen trade; and the two who had that
day flouted me should live to envy my success, or to weep tears of
unavailing penitence behind my pauper coffin.

Meantime, if my courage was still undiminished, I was none the nearer to
a meal. At no great distance my cabman's eating-house stood, at the
tail of a muddy cab-rank, on the shores of a wide thoroughfare of mud,
offering (to fancy) a face of ambiguous invitation. I might be received,
I might once more fill my belly there; on the other hand, it was perhaps
this day the bolt was destined to fall, and I might be expelled instead,
with vulgar hubbub. It was policy to make the attempt, and I knew it was
policy; but I had already, in the course of that one morning, endured
too many affronts, and I felt I could rather starve than face another. I
had courage and to spare for the future, none left for that day; courage
for the main campaign, but not a spark of it for that preliminary
skirmish of the cabman's restaurant. I continued accordingly to sit
upon my bench, not far from the ashes of Napoleon, now drowsy, now
light-headed, now in complete mental obstruction, or only conscious
of an animal pleasure in quiescence; and now thinking, planning, and
remembering with unexampled clearness, telling myself tales of sudden
wealth, and gustfully ordering and greedily consuming imaginary meals:
in the course of which I must have dropped asleep.

It was towards dark that I was suddenly recalled to famine by a cold
souse of rain, and sprang shivering to my feet. For a moment I stood
bewildered: the whole train of my reasoning and dreaming passed afresh
through my mind; I was again tempted, drawn as if with cords, by
the image of the cabman's eating-house, and again recoiled from the
possibility of insult. “Qui dort dine,” thought I to myself; and took my
homeward way with wavering footsteps, through rainy streets in which
the lamps and the shop-windows now began to gleam; still marshalling
imaginary dinners as I went.

“Ah, Monsieur Dodd,” said the porter, “there has been a registered
letter for you. The facteur will bring it again to-morrow.”

A registered letter for me, who had been so long without one? Of what
it could possibly contain, I had no vestige of a guess; nor did I delay
myself guessing; far less from any conscious plan of dishonesty: the
lies flowed from me like a natural secretion.

“O,” said I, “my remittance at last! What a bother I should have missed
it! Can you lend me a hundred francs until to-morrow?”


I had never attempted to borrow from the porter till that moment: the
registered letter was, besides, my warranty; and he gave me what he
had--three napoleons and some francs in silver. I pocketed the money
carelessly, lingered a while chaffing, strolled leisurely to the door;
and then (fast as my trembling legs could carry me) round the corner
to the Cafe de Cluny. French waiters are deft and speedy; they were not
deft enough for me; and I had scarce decency to let the man set the wine
upon the table or put the butter alongside the bread, before my glass
and my mouth were filled. Exquisite bread of the Cafe Cluny, exquisite
first glass of old Pomard tingling to my wet feet, indescribable first
olive culled from the hors d'oeuvre--I suppose, when I come to lie
dying, and the lamp begins to grow dim, I shall still recall your
savour. Over the rest of that meal, and the rest of the evening, clouds
lie thick; clouds perhaps of Burgundy; perhaps, more properly, of famine
and repletion.

I remember clearly, at least, the shame, the despair, of the next
morning, when I reviewed what I had done, and how I had swindled the
poor honest porter; and, as if that were not enough, fairly burnt my
ships, and brought bankruptcy home to that last refuge, my garret. The
porter would expect his money; I could not pay him; here was scandal
in the house; and I knew right well the cause of scandal would have to
pack. “What do you mean by calling my honesty in question?” I had cried
the day before, turning upon Myner. Ah, that day before! the day before
Waterloo, the day before the Flood; the day before I had sold the roof
over my head, my future, and my self-respect, for a dinner at the Cafe
Cluny!

In the midst of these lamentations the famous registered letter came
to my door, with healing under its seals. It bore the postmark of
San Francisco, where Pinkerton was already struggling to the neck in
multifarious affairs: it renewed the offer of an allowance, which his
improved estate permitted him to announce at the figure of two hundred
francs a month; and in case I was in some immediate pinch, it enclosed
an introductory draft for forty dollars. There are a thousand excellent
reasons why a man, in this self-helpful epoch, should decline to be
dependent on another; but the most numerous and cogent considerations
all bow to a necessity as stern as mine; and the banks were scarce open
ere the draft was cashed.

It was early in December that I thus sold myself into slavery; and
for six months I dragged a slowly lengthening chain of gratitude and
uneasiness. At the cost of some debt I managed to excel myself and
eclipse the Genius of Muskegon, in a small but highly patriotic Standard
Bearer for the Salon; whither it was duly admitted, where it stood the
proper length of days entirely unremarked, and whence it came back to me
as patriotic as before. I threw my whole soul (as Pinkerton would have
phrased it) into clocks and candlesticks; the devil a candlestick-maker
would have anything to say to my designs. Even when Dijon, with his
infinite good humour and infinite scorn for all such journey-work,
consented to peddle them in indiscriminately with his own, the dealers
still detected and rejected mine. Home they returned to me, true as
the Standard Bearer; who now, at the head of quite a regiment of lesser
idols, began to grow an eyesore in the scanty studio of my friend. Dijon
and I have sat by the hour, and gazed upon that company of images. The
severe, the frisky, the classical, the Louis Quinze, were there--from
Joan of Arc in her soldierly cuirass to Leda with the swan; nay, and
God forgive me for a man that knew better! the humorous was represented
also. We sat and gazed, I say; we criticised, we turned them hither
and thither; even upon the closest inspection they looked quite like
statuettes; and yet nobody would have a gift of them!

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man: but
about the sixth month, when I already owed near two hundred dollars
to Pinkerton, and half as much again in debts scattered about Paris, I
awoke one morning with a horrid sentiment of oppression, and found I
was alone: my vanity had breathed her last during the night. I dared
not plunge deeper in the bog; I saw no hope in my poor statuary; I owned
myself beaten at last; and sitting down in my nightshirt beside the
window, whence I had a glimpse of the tree-tops at the corner of the
boulevard, and where the music of its early traffic fell agreeably upon
my ear, I penned my farewell to Paris, to art, to my whole past life,
and my whole former self. “I give in,” I wrote. “When the next allowance
arrives, I shall go straight out West, where you can do what you like
with me.”

It is to be understood that Pinkerton had been, in a sense, pressing
me to come from the beginning; depicting his isolation among new
acquaintances, “who have none of them your culture,” he wrote;
expressing his friendship in terms so warm that it sometimes embarrassed
me to think how poorly I could echo them; dwelling upon his need for
assistance; and the next moment turning about to commend my resolution
and press me to remain in Paris. “Only remember, Loudon,” he would
write, “if you ever DO tire of it, there's plenty of work here for
you--honest, hard, well-paid work, developing the resources of this
practically virgin State. And of course I needn't say what a pleasure
it would be to me if we were going at it SHOULDER TO SHOULDER.” I marvel
(looking back) that I could so long have resisted these appeals, and
continue to sink my friend's money in a manner that I knew him to
dislike. At least, when I did awake to any sense of my position, I awoke
to it entirely; and determined not only to follow his counsel for the
future, but even as regards the past, to rectify his losses. For in this
juncture of affairs I called to mind that I was not without a possible
resource, and resolved, at whatever cost of mortification, to beard the
Loudon family in their historic city.

In the excellent Scots' phrase, I made a moonlight flitting, a thing
never dignified, but in my case unusually easy. As I had scarce a pair
of boots worth portage, I deserted the whole of my effects without
a pang. Dijon fell heir to Joan of Arc, the Standard Bearer, and the
Musketeers. He was present when I bought and frugally stocked my new
portmanteau; and it was at the door of the trunk shop that I took my
leave of him, for my last few hours in Paris must be spent alone. It
was alone (and at a far higher figure than my finances warranted) that
I discussed my dinner; alone that I took my ticket at Saint Lazare;
all alone, though in a carriage full of people, that I watched the
moon shine on the Seine flood with its tufted islets, on Rouen with her
spires, and on the shipping in the harbour of Dieppe. When the first
light of the morning called me from troubled slumbers on the deck, I
beheld the dawn at first with pleasure; I watched with pleasure the
green shores of England rising out of rosy haze; I took the salt air
with delight into my nostrils; and then all came back to me; that I was
no longer an artist, no longer myself; that I was leaving all I cared
for, and returning to all that I detested, the slave of debt and
gratitude, a public and a branded failure.

From this picture of my own disgrace and wretchedness, it is not
wonderful if my mind turned with relief to the thought of Pinkerton,
waiting for me, as I knew, with unwearied affection, and regarding me
with a respect that I had never deserved, and might therefore fairly
hope that I should never forfeit. The inequality of our relation struck
me rudely. I must have been stupid, indeed, if I could have considered
the history of that friendship without shame--I, who had given so
little, who had accepted and profited by so much. I had the whole day
before me in London, and I determined (at least in words) to set the
balance somewhat straighter. Seated in the corner of a public place, and
calling for sheet after sheet of paper, I poured forth the expression of
my gratitude, my penitence for the past, my resolutions for the future.
Till now, I told him, my course had been mere selfishness. I had been
selfish to my father and to my friend, taking their help, and denying
them (which was all they asked) the poor gratification of my company and
countenance.

Wonderful are the consolations of literature! As soon as that letter was
written and posted, the consciousness of virtue glowed in my veins like
some rare vintage.




CHAPTER VI. IN WHICH I GO WEST.


I reached my uncle's door next morning in time to sit down with the
family to breakfast. More than three years had intervened almost without
mutation in that stationary household, since I had sat there first, a
young American freshman, bewildered among unfamiliar dainties, Finnan
haddock, kippered salmon, baps and mutton ham, and had wearied my mind
in vain to guess what should be under the tea-cosey. If there were
any change at all, it seemed that I had risen in the family esteem. My
father's death once fittingly referred to, with a ceremonial lengthening
of Scotch upper lips and wagging of the female head, the party launched
at once (God help me) into the more cheerful topic of my own successes.
They had been so pleased to hear such good accounts of me; I was quite
a great man now; where was that beautiful statue of the Genius of
Something or other? “You haven't it here? not here? Really?” asks the
sprightliest of my cousins, shaking curls at me; as though it were
likely I had brought it in a cab, or kept it concealed about my person
like a birthday surprise. In the bosom of this family, unaccustomed to
the tropical nonsense of the West, it became plain the _Sunday Herald_
and poor, blethering Pinkerton had been accepted for their face. It is
not possible to invent a circumstance that could have more depressed
me; and I am conscious that I behaved all through that breakfast like a
whipt schoolboy.

At length, the meal and family prayers being both happily over, I
requested the favour of an interview with Uncle Adam on “the state of
my affairs.” At sound of this ominous expression, the good man's face
conspicuously lengthened; and when my grandfather, having had the
proposition repeated to him (for he was hard of hearing) announced his
intention of being present at the interview, I could not but think that
Uncle Adam's sorrow kindled into momentary irritation. Nothing, however,
but the usual grim cordiality appeared upon the surface; and we all
three passed ceremoniously to the adjoining library, a gloomy theatre
for a depressing piece of business. My grandfather charged a clay pipe,
and sat tremulously smoking in a corner of the fireless chimney; behind
him, although the morning was both chill and dark, the window was partly
open and the blind partly down: I cannot depict what an air he had of
being out of place, like a man shipwrecked there. Uncle Adam had his
station at the business table in the midst. Valuable rows of books
looked down upon the place of torture; and I could hear sparrows
chirping in the garden, and my sprightly cousin already banging the
piano and pouring forth an acid stream of song from the drawing-room
overhead.

It was in these circumstances that, with all brevity of speech and a
certain boyish sullenness of manner, looking the while upon the floor,
I informed my relatives of my financial situation: the amount I owed
Pinkerton; the hopelessness of any maintenance from sculpture; the
career offered me in the States; and how, before becoming more beholden
to a stranger, I had judged it right to lay the case before my family.

“I am only sorry you did not come to me at first,” said Uncle Adam. “I
take the liberty to say it would have been more decent.”

“I think so too, Uncle Adam,” I replied; “but you must bear in mind I
was ignorant in what light you might regard my application.”

“I hope I would never turn my back on my own flesh and blood,” he
returned with emphasis; but to my anxious ear, with more of temper than
affection. “I could never forget you were my sister's son. I regard
this as a manifest duty. I have no choice but to accept the entire
responsibility of the position you have made.”

I did not know what else to do but murmur “thank you.”


“Yes,” he pursued, “and there is something providential in the
circumstance that you come at the right time. In my old firm there is a
vacancy; they call themselves Italian Warehousemen now,” he continued,
regarding me with a twinkle of humour; “so you may think yourself
in luck: we were only grocers in my day. I shall place you there
to-morrow.”

“Stop a moment, Uncle Adam,” I broke in. “This is not at all what I
am asking. I ask you to pay Pinkerton, who is a poor man. I ask you to
clear my feet of debt, not to arrange my life or any part of it.”

“If I wished to be harsh, I might remind you that beggars cannot be
choosers,” said my uncle; “and as to managing your life, you have tried
your own way already, and you see what you have made of it. You must now
accept the guidance of those older and (whatever you may think of it)
wiser than yourself. All these schemes of your friend (of whom I
know nothing, by the by) and talk of openings in the West, I simply
disregard. I have no idea whatever of your going trekking across
a continent on a wild-goose chase. In this situation, which I
am fortunately able to place at your disposal, and which many a
well-conducted young man would be glad to jump at, you will receive, to
begin with, eighteen shillings a week.”

“Eighteen shillings a week!” I cried. “Why, my poor friend gave me more
than that for nothing!”

“And I think it is this very friend you are now trying to repay?”
 observed my uncle, with an air of one advancing a strong argument.

“Aadam!” said my grandfather.

“I'm vexed you should be present at this business,” quoth Uncle Adam,
swinging rather obsequiously towards the stonemason; “but I must remind
you it is of your own seeking.”

“Aadam!” repeated the old man.

“Well, sir, I am listening,” says my uncle.

My grandfather took a puff or two in silence; and then, “Ye're makin' an
awfu' poor appearance, Aadam,” said he.

My uncle visibly reared at the affront. “I'm sorry you should think
so,” said he, “and still more sorry you should say so before present
company.”

“A believe that; A ken that, Aadam,” returned old Loudon, dryly;
“and the curiis thing is, I'm no very carin'. See here, ma man,” he
continued, addressing himself to me. “A'm your grandfaither, amn't I
not? Never you mind what Aadam says. A'll see justice din ye. A'm rich.”

“Father,” said Uncle Adam, “I would like one word with you in private.”

I rose to go.

“Set down upon your hinderlands,” cried my grandfather, almost savagely.
“If Aadam has anything to say, let him say it. It's me that has the
money here; and by Gravy! I'm goin' to be obeyed.”

Upon this scurvy encouragement, it appeared that my uncle had no remark
to offer: twice challenged to “speak out and be done with it,” he twice
sullenly declined; and I may mention that about this period of the
engagement, I began to be sorry for him.

“See here, then, Jeannie's yin!” resumed my grandfather. “A'm goin' to
give ye a set-off. Your mither was always my fav'rite, for A never could
agree with Aadam. A like ye fine yoursel'; there's nae noansense aboot
ye; ye've a fine nayteral idee of builder's work; ye've been to France,
where they tell me they're grand at the stuccy. A splendid thing for
ceilin's, the stuccy! and it's a vailyable disguise, too; A don't
believe there's a builder in Scotland has used more stuccy than me. But
as A was sayin', if ye'll follie that trade, with the capital that A'm
goin' to give ye, ye may live yet to be as rich as mysel'. Ye see, ye
would have always had a share of it when A was gone; it appears ye're
needin' it now; well, ye'll get the less, as is only just and proper.”

Uncle Adam cleared his throat. “This is very handsome, father,” said he;
“and I am sure Loudon feels it so. Very handsome, and as you say, very
just; but will you allow me to say that it had better, perhaps, be put
in black and white?”

The enmity always smouldering between the two men at this ill-judged
interruption almost burst in flame. The stonemason turned upon his
offspring, his long upper lip pulled down, for all the world, like a
monkey's. He stared a while in virulent silence; and then “Get Gregg!”
 said he.

The effect of these words was very visible. “He will be gone to his
office,” stammered my uncle.

“Get Gregg!” repeated my grandfather.

“I tell you, he will be gone to his office,” reiterated Adam.

“And I tell ye, he's takin' his smoke,” retorted the old man.

“Very well, then,” cried my uncle, getting to his feet with some
alacrity, as upon a sudden change of thought, “I will get him myself.”

“Ye will not!” cried my grandfather. “Ye will sit there upon your
hinderland.”

“Then how the devil am I to get him?” my uncle broke forth, with not
unnatural petulance.

My grandfather (having no possible answer) grinned at his son with the
malice of a schoolboy; then he rang the bell.

“Take the garden key,” said Uncle Adam to the servant; “go over to the
garden, and if Mr. Gregg the lawyer is there (he generally sits under
the red hawthorn), give him old Mr. Loudon's compliments, and will he
step in here for a moment?”

“Mr. Gregg the lawyer!” At once I understood (what had been puzzling me)
the significance of my grandfather and the alarm of my poor uncle: the
stonemason's will, it was supposed, hung trembling in the balance.

“Look here, grandfather,” I said, “I didn't want any of this. All
I wanted was a loan of (say) two hundred pounds. I can take care
of myself; I have prospects and opportunities, good friends in the
States----”

The old man waved me down. “It's me that speaks here,” he said curtly;
and we waited the coming of the lawyer in a triple silence. He appeared
at last, the maid ushering him in--a spectacled, dry, but not ungenial
looking man.


“Here, Gregg,” cried my grandfather. “Just a question: What has Aadam
got to do with my will?”

“I'm afraid I don't quite understand,” said the lawyer, staring.

“What has he got to do with it?” repeated the old man, smiting with his
fist upon the arm of his chair. “Is my money mine's, or is it Aadam's?
Can Aadam interfere?”

“O, I see,” said Mr. Gregg. “Certainly not. On the marriage of both
of your children a certain sum was paid down and accepted in full of
legitim. You have surely not forgotten the circumstance, Mr. Loudon?”

“So that, if I like,” concluded my grandfather, hammering out his
words, “I can leave every doit I die possessed of to the Great
Magunn?”--meaning probably the Great Mogul.

“No doubt of it,” replied Gregg, with a shadow of a smile.

“Ye hear that, Aadam?” asked my grandfather.

“I may be allowed to say I had no need to hear it,” said my uncle.

“Very well,” says my grandfather. “You and Jeannie's yin can go for a
bit walk. Me and Gregg has business.”

When once I was in the hall alone with Uncle Adam, I turned to him, sick
at heart. “Uncle Adam,” I said, “you can understand, better than I can
say, how very painful all this is to me.”

“Yes, I am sorry you have seen your grandfather in so unamiable a
light,” replied this extraordinary man. “You shouldn't allow it
to affect your mind though. He has sterling qualities, quite an
extraordinary character; and I have no fear but he means to behave
handsomely to you.”

His composure was beyond my imitation: the house could not contain
me, nor could I even promise to return to it: in concession to which
weakness, it was agreed that I should call in about an hour at the
office of the lawyer, whom (as he left the library) Uncle Adam should
waylay and inform of the arrangement. I suppose there was never a more
topsy-turvy situation: you would have thought it was I who had suffered
some rebuff, and that iron-sided Adam was a generous conqueror who
scorned to take advantage.

It was plain enough that I was to be endowed: to what extent and upon
what conditions I was now left for an hour to meditate in the wide
and solitary thoroughfares of the new town, taking counsel with
street-corner statues of George IV. and William Pitt, improving my
mind with the pictures in the window of a music-shop, and renewing my
acquaintance with Edinburgh east wind. By the end of the hour I made my
way to Mr. Gregg's office, where I was placed, with a few appropriate
words, in possession of a cheque for two thousand pounds and a small
parcel of architectural works.

“Mr. Loudon bids me add,” continued the lawyer, consulting a little
sheet of notes, “that although these volumes are very valuable to the
practical builder, you must be careful not to lose originality. He tells
you also not to be 'hadden doun'--his own expression--by the theory of
strains, and that Portland cement, properly sanded, will go a long way.”

I smiled, and remarked that I supposed it would.

“I once lived in one of my excellent client's houses,” observed the
lawyer; “and I was tempted, in that case, to think it had gone far
enough.”

“Under these circumstances, sir,” said I, “you will be rather relieved
to hear that I have no intention of becoming a builder.”

At this, he fairly laughed; and, the ice being broken, I was able to
consult him as to my conduct. He insisted I must return to the house,
at least, for luncheon, and one of my walks with Mr. Loudon. “For the
evening, I will furnish you with an excuse, if you please,” said he, “by
asking you to a bachelor dinner with myself. But the luncheon and the
walk are unavoidable. He is an old man, and, I believe, really fond of
you; he would naturally feel aggrieved if there were any appearance of
avoiding him; and as for Mr. Adam, do you know, I think your delicacy
out of place.... And now, Mr. Dodd, what are you to do with this money?”

Ay, there was the question. With two thousand pounds--fifty thousand
francs--I might return to Paris and the arts, and be a prince and
millionaire in that thrifty Latin Quarter. I think I had the grace, with
one corner of my mind, to be glad that I had sent the London letter: I
know very well that with the rest and worst of me, I repented bitterly
of that precipitate act. On one point, however, my whole multiplex
estate of man was unanimous: the letter being gone, there was no help
but I must follow. The money was accordingly divided in two unequal
shares: for the first, Mr. Gregg got me a bill in the name of Dijon to
meet my liabilities in Paris; for the second, as I had already cash in
hand for the expenses of my journey, he supplied me with drafts on San
Francisco.

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 athegether. 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 millionnaires, 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 awhile 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.”

“It's very possible,” said Jim, quite unabashed. “It's effective,
anyway; and I can tell you, sir, it has boomed that spirit: it goes now
by the gross of cases. By the way, I hope you won't mind; I've got your
portrait all over San Francisco for the lecture, enlarged from that
carte de visite: H. Loudon Dodd, the Americo-Parisienne Sculptor. Here's
a proof of the small handbills; the posters are the same, only in red
and blue, and the letters fourteen by one.”

I looked at the handbill, and my head turned. What was the use of
words? why seek to explain to Pinkerton the knotted horrors of
“Americo-Parisienne”? He took an early occasion to point it out as
“rather a good phrase; gives the two sides at a glance: I wanted the
lecture written up to that.” Even after we had reached San Francisco,
and at the actual physical shock of my own effigy placarded on the
streets I had broken forth in petulant words, he never comprehended in
the least the ground of my aversion.

“If I had only known you disliked red lettering!” was as high as he
could rise. “You are perfectly right: a clear-cut black is preferable,
and shows a great deal further. The only thing that pains me is the
portrait: I own I thought that a success. I'm dreadfully and truly
sorry, my dear fellow: I see now it's not what you had a right to
expect; but I did it, Loudon, for the best; and the press is all
delighted.”

At the moment, sweeping through green tule swamps, I fell direct on the
essential. “But, Pinkerton,” I cried, “this lecture is the maddest of
your madnesses. How can I prepare a lecture in thirty hours?”

“All done, Loudon!” he exclaimed in triumph. “All ready. Trust me to
pull a piece of business through. You'll find it all type-written in my
desk at home. I put the best talent of San Francisco on the job: Harry
Miller, the brightest pressman in the city.”

And so he rattled on, beyond reach of my modest protestations, blurting
out his complicated interests, crying up his new acquaintances, and ever
and again hungering to introduce me to some “whole-souled, grand fellow,
as sharp as a needle,” from whom, and the very thought of whom, my
spirit shrank instinctively.

Well, I was in for it: in for Pinkerton, in for the portrait, in for the
type-written lecture. One promise I extorted--that I was never again to
be committed in ignorance; even for that, when I saw how its extortion
puzzled and depressed the Irrepressible, my soul repented me; and in all
else I suffered myself to be led uncomplaining at his chariot wheels.
The Irrepressible, did I say? The Irresistible were nigher truth.

But the time to have seen me was when I sat down to Harry Miller's
lecture. He was a facetious dog, this Harry Miller; he had a gallant way
of skirting the indecent which (in my case) produced physical nausea;
and he could be sentimental and even melodramatic about grisettes and
starving genius. I found he had enjoyed the benefit of my correspondence
with Pinkerton: adventures of my own were here and there horridly
misrepresented, sentiments of my own echoed and exaggerated till I
blushed to recognise them. I will do Harry Miller justice: he must have
had a kind of talent, almost of genius; all attempts to lower his
tone proving fruitless, and the Harry-Millerism ineradicable. Nay, the
monster had a certain key of style, or want of style, so that certain
milder passages, which I sought to introduce, discorded horribly, and
impoverished (if that were possible) the general effect.

By an early hour of the numbered evening I might have been observed at
the sign of the Poodle Dog, dining with my agent: so Pinkerton delighted
to describe himself. Thence, like an ox to the slaughter, he led me
to the hall, where I stood presently alone, confronting assembled San
Francisco, with no better allies than a table, a glass of water, and a
mass of manuscript and typework, representing Harry Miller and myself.
I read the lecture; for I had lacked both time and will to get the trash
by heart--read it hurriedly, humbly, and with visible shame. Now and
then I would catch in the auditorium an eye of some intelligence, now
and then, in the manuscript, would stumble on a richer vein of Harry
Miller, and my heart would fail me, and I gabbled. The audience yawned,
it stirred uneasily, it muttered, grumbled, and broke forth at last
in articulate cries of “Speak up!” and “Nobody can hear!” I took to
skipping, and being extremely ill-acquainted with the country, almost
invariably cut in again in the unintelligible midst of some new topic.
What struck me as extremely ominous, these misfortunes were allowed to
pass without a laugh. Indeed, I was beginning to fear the worst, and
even personal indignity, when all at once the humour of the thing broke
upon me strongly. I could have laughed aloud; and being again summoned
to speak up, I faced my patrons for the first time with a smile. “Very
well,” I said, “I will try, though I don't suppose anybody wants to
hear, and I can't see why anybody should.” Audience and lecturer laughed
together till the tears ran down; vociferous and repeated applause
hailed my impromptu sally. Another hit which I made but a little after,
as I turned three pages of the copy: “You see, I am leaving out as much
as I possibly can,” increased the esteem with which my patrons had begun
to regard me; and when I left the stage at last, my departing form was
cheered with laughter, stamping, shouting, and the waving of hats.

Pinkerton was in the waiting-room, feverishly jotting in his
pocket-book. As he saw me enter, he sprang up, and I declare the tears
were trickling on his cheeks.

“My dear boy,” he cried, “I can never forgive myself, and you can never
forgive me. Never mind: I did it for the best. And how nobly you clung
on! I dreaded we should have had to return the money at the doors.”

“It would have been more honest if we had,” said I.

The pressmen followed me, Harry Miller in the front ranks; and I was
amazed to find them, on the whole, a pleasant set of lads, probably
more sinned against than sinning, and even Harry Miller apparently
a gentleman. I had in oysters and champagne--for the receipts were
excellent--and being in a high state of nervous tension, kept the table
in a roar. Indeed, I was never in my life so well inspired as when I
described my vigil over Harry Miller's literature or the series of my
emotions as I faced the audience. The lads vowed I was the soul of good
company and the prince of lecturers; and--so wonderful an institution
is the popular press--if you had seen the notices next day in all the
papers, you must have supposed my evening's entertainment an unqualified
success.

I was in excellent spirits when I returned home that night, but the
miserable Pinkerton sorrowed for us both.

“O, Loudon,” he said, “I shall never forgive myself. When I saw you
didn't catch on to the idea of the lecture, I should have given it
myself!”




CHAPTER VII. IRONS IN THE FIRE.


Opes Strepitumque.

The food of the body differs not so greatly for the fool or the sage,
the elephant or the cock-sparrow; and similar chemical elements,
variously disguised, support all mortals. A brief study of Pinkerton
in his new setting convinced me of a kindred truth about that other and
mental digestion, by which we extract what is called “fun for our money”
 out of life. In the same spirit as a schoolboy, deep in Mayne Reid,
handles a dummy gun and crawls among imaginary forests, Pinkerton sped
through Kearney Street upon his daily business, representing to himself
a highly coloured part in life's performance, and happy for hours if
he should have chanced to brush against a millionnaire. Reality was his
romance; he gloried to be thus engaged; he wallowed in his business.
Suppose a man to dig up a galleon on the Coromandel coast, his rakish
schooner keeping the while an offing under easy sail, and he, by the
blaze of a great fire of wreckwood, to measure ingots by the bucketful
on the uproarious beach: such an one might realise a greater material
spoil; he should have no more profit of romance than Pinkerton when he
cast up his weekly balance-sheet in a bald office. Every dollar gained
was like something brought ashore from a mysterious deep; every venture
made was like a diver's plunge; and as he thrust his bold hand into the
plexus of the money-market, he was delightedly aware of how he shook the
pillars of existence, turned out men (as at a battle-cry) to labour
in far countries, and set the gold twitching in the drawers of
millionnaires.

I could never fathom the full extent of his speculations; but there were
five separate businesses which he avowed and carried like a banner. The
Thirteen Star Golden State Brandy, Warranted Entire (a very flagrant
distillation) filled a great part of his thoughts, and was kept before
the public in an eloquent but misleading treatise: _Why Drink French
Brandy? A Word to the Wise._ He kept an office for advertisers,
counselling, designing, acting as middleman with printers and
bill-stickers, for the inexperienced or the uninspired: the dull
haberdasher came to him for ideas, the smart theatrical agent for his
local knowledge; and one and all departed with a copy of his pamphlet:
_How, When, and Where; or, the Advertiser's Vade-Mecum._ He had a tug
chartered every Saturday afternoon and night, carried people outside the
Heads, and provided them with lines and bait for six hours' fishing,
at the rate of five dollars a person. I am told that some of
them (doubtless adroit anglers) made a profit on the transaction.
Occasionally he bought wrecks and condemned vessels; these latter (I
cannot tell you how) found their way to sea again under aliases, and
continued to stem the waves triumphantly enough under the colours of
Bolivia or Nicaragua. Lastly, there was a certain agricultural engine,
glorying in a great deal of vermilion and blue paint, and filling (it
appeared) a “long-felt want,” in which his interest was something like a
tenth.

This for the face or front of his concerns. “On the outside,” as he
phrased it, he was variously and mysteriously engaged. No dollar slept
in his possession; rather he kept all simultaneously flying like a
conjurer with oranges. My own earnings, when I began to have a share, he
would but show me for a moment, and disperse again, like those illusive
money gifts which are flashed in the eyes of childhood only to be
entombed in the missionary box. And he would come down radiant from a
weekly balance-sheet, clap me on the shoulder, declare himself a winner
by Gargantuan figures, and prove destitute of a quarter for a drink.

“What on earth have you done with it?” I would ask.

“Into the mill again; all re-invested!” he would cry, with infinite
delight. Investment was ever his word. He could not bear what he called
gambling. “Never touch stocks, Loudon,” he would say; “nothing but
legitimate business.” And yet, Heaven knows, many an indurated gambler
might have drawn back appalled at the first hint of some of Pinkerton's
investments! One, which I succeeded in tracking home, and instance for
a specimen, was a seventh share in the charter of a certain ill-starred
schooner bound for Mexico, to smuggle weapons on the one trip, and
cigars upon the other. The latter end of this enterprise, involving (as
it did) shipwreck, confiscation, and a lawsuit with the underwriters,
was too painful to be dwelt upon at length. “It's proved a
disappointment,” was as far as my friend would go with me in words; but
I knew, from observation, that the fabric of his fortunes tottered. For
the rest, it was only by accident I got wind of the transaction; for
Pinkerton, after a time, was shy of introducing me to his arcana: the
reason you are to hear presently.

The office which was (or should have been) the point of rest for so many
evolving dollars stood in the heart of the city: a high and spacious
room, with many plate-glass windows. A glazed cabinet of polished
redwood offered to the eye a regiment of some two hundred bottles,
conspicuously labelled. These were all charged with Pinkerton's Thirteen
Star, although from across the room it would have required an expert to
distinguish them from the same number of bottles of Courvoisier. I used
to twit my friend with this resemblance, and propose a new edition of
the pamphlet, with the title thus improved: _Why Drink French Brandy,
when we give you the same labels?_ The doors of the cabinet revolved all
day upon their hinges; and if there entered any one who was a stranger
to the merits of the brand, he departed laden with a bottle. When I used
to protest at this extravagance, “My dear Loudon,” Pinkerton would cry,
“you don't seem to catch on to business principles! The prime cost of
the spirit is literally nothing. I couldn't find a cheaper advertisement
if I tried.” Against the side post of the cabinet there leaned a gaudy
umbrella, preserved there as a relic. It appears that when Pinkerton was
about to place Thirteen Star upon the market, the rainy season was
at hand. He lay dark, almost in penury, awaiting the first shower, at
which, as upon a signal, the main thoroughfares became dotted with his
agents, vendors of advertisements; and the whole world of San Francisco,
from the businessman fleeing for the ferry-boat, to the lady waiting
at the corner for her car, sheltered itself under umbrellas with this
strange device: Are you wet? Try Thirteen Star. “It was a mammoth boom,”
 said Pinkerton, with a sigh of delighted recollection. “There wasn't
another umbrella to be seen. I stood at this window, Loudon, feasting
my eyes; and I declare, I felt like Vanderbilt.” And it was to this neat
application of the local climate that he owed, not only much of the sale
of Thirteen Star, but the whole business of his advertising agency.

The large desk (to resume our survey of the office) stood about the
middle, knee-deep in stacks of handbills and posters, of _Why Drink
French Brandy?_ and _The Advertiser's Vade-Mecum._ It was flanked upon
the one hand by two female type-writers, who rested not between
the hours of nine and four, and upon the other by a model of the
agricultural machine. The walls, where they were not broken by telephone
boxes and a couple of photographs--one representing the wreck of the
James L. Moody on a bold and broken coast, the other the Saturday tug
alive with amateur fishers--almost disappeared under oil-paintings
gaudily framed. Many of these were relics of the Latin Quarter, and I
must do Pinkerton the justice to say that none of them were bad,
and some had remarkable merit. They went off slowly but for handsome
figures; and their places were progressively supplied with the work of
local artists. These last it was one of my first duties to review and
criticise. Some of them were villainous, yet all were saleable. I said
so; and the next moment saw myself, the figure of a miserable renegade,
bearing arms in the wrong camp. I was to look at pictures thenceforward,
not with the eye of the artist, but the dealer; and I saw the stream
widen that divided me from all I loved.

“Now, Loudon,” Pinkerton had said, the morning after the lecture, “now
Loudon, we can go at it shoulder to shoulder. This is what I have longed
for: I wanted two heads and four arms; and now I have 'em. You'll find
it's just the same as art--all observation and imagination; only more
movement. Just wait till you begin to feel the charm!”

I might have waited long. Perhaps I lack a sense; for our whole
existence seemed to me one dreary bustle, and the place we bustled in
fitly to be called the Place of Yawning. I slept in a little den behind
the office; Pinkerton, in the office itself, stretched on a patent sofa
which sometimes collapsed, his slumbers still further menaced by an
imminent clock with an alarm. Roused by this diabolical contrivance, we
rose early, went forth early to breakfast, and returned by nine to what
Pinkerton called work, and I distraction. Masses of letters must be
opened, read, and answered; some by me at a subsidiary desk which had
been introduced on the morning of my arrival; others by my bright-eyed
friend, pacing the room like a caged lion as he dictated to the tinkling
type-writers. Masses of wet proof had to be overhauled and scrawled upon
with a blue pencil--“rustic”--“six-inch caps”--“bold spacing here”--or
sometimes terms more fervid, as for instance this, which I remember
Pinkerton to have spirted on the margin of an advertisement of Soothing
Syrup: “Throw this all down. Have you never printed an advertisement?
I'll be round in half an hour.” The ledger and sale-book, besides,
we had always with us. Such was the backbone of our occupation, and
tolerable enough; but the far greater proportion of our time was
consumed by visitors, whole-souled, grand fellows no doubt, and as sharp
as a needle, but to me unfortunately not diverting. Some were apparently
half-witted, and must be talked over by the hour before they could reach
the humblest decision, which they only left the office to return again
(ten minutes later) and rescind. Others came with a vast show of hurry
and despatch, but I observed it to be principally show. The agricultural
model for instance, which was practicable, proved a kind of flypaper for
these busybodies. I have seen them blankly turn the crank of it for five
minutes at a time, simulating (to nobody's deception) business interest:
“Good thing this, Pinkerton? Sell much of it? Ha! Couldn't use it,
I suppose, as a medium of advertisement for my article?”--which was
perhaps toilet soap. Others (a still worse variety) carried us to
neighbouring saloons to dice for cocktails and (after the cocktails were
paid) for dollars on a corner of the counter. The attraction of dice for
all these people was indeed extraordinary: at a certain club, where I
once dined in the character of “my partner, Mr. Dodd,” the dice-box came
on the table with the wine, an artless substitute for after-dinner wit.

Of all our visitors, I believe I preferred Emperor Norton; the very
mention of whose name reminds me I am doing scanty justice to the
folks of San Francisco. In what other city would a harmless madman who
supposed himself emperor of the two Americas have been so fostered
and encouraged? Where else would even the people of the streets have
respected the poor soul's illusion? Where else would bankers and
merchants have received his visits, cashed his cheques, and submitted to
his small assessments? Where else would he have been suffered to attend
and address the exhibition days of schools and colleges? where else,
in God's green earth, have taken his pick of restaurants, ransacked
the bill of fare, and departed scathless? They tell me he was even an
exacting patron, threatening to withdraw his custom when dissatisfied;
and I can believe it, for his face wore an expression distinctly
gastronomical. Pinkerton had received from this monarch a cabinet
appointment; I have seen the brevet, wondering mainly at the good nature
of the printer who had executed the forms, and I think my friend was at
the head either of foreign affairs or education: it mattered, indeed,
nothing, the presentation being in all offices identical. It was at a
comparatively early date that I saw Jim in the exercise of his public
functions. His Majesty entered the office--a portly, rather flabby man,
with the face of a gentleman, rendered unspeakably pathetic and absurd
by the great sabre at his side and the peacock's feather in his hat.


“I have called to remind you, Mr. Pinkerton, that you are somewhat in
arrear of taxes,” he said, with old-fashioned, stately courtesy.

“Well, your Majesty, what is the amount?” asked Jim; and when the figure
was named (it was generally two or three dollars), paid upon the nail
and offered a bonus in the shape of Thirteen Star.

“I am always delighted to patronise native industries,” said Norton the
First. “San Francisco is public-spirited in what concerns its Emperor;
and indeed, sir, of all my domains, it is my favourite city.”

“Come,” said I, when he was gone, “I prefer that customer to the lot.”

“It's really rather a distinction,” Jim admitted. “I think it must have
been the umbrella racket that attracted him.”

We were distinguished under the rose by the notice of other and greater
men. There were days when Jim wore an air of unusual capacity and
resolve, spoke with more brevity like one pressed for time, and took
often on his tongue such phrases as “Longhurst told me so this morning,”
 or “I had it straight from Longhurst himself.” It was no wonder, I used
to think, that Pinkerton was called to council with such Titans; for the
creature's quickness and resource were beyond praise. In the early
days when he consulted me without reserve, pacing the room, projecting,
ciphering, extending hypothetical interests, trebling imaginary capital,
his “engine” (to renew an excellent old word) labouring full steam
ahead, I could never decide whether my sense of respect or entertainment
were the stronger. But these good hours were destined to curtailment.

“Yes, it's smart enough,” I once observed. “But, Pinkerton, do you think
it's honest?”

“You don't think it's honest!” he wailed. “O dear me, that ever I should
have heard such an expression on your lips!”

At sight of his distress, I plagiarised unblushingly from Myner. “You
seem to think honesty as simple as Blind Man's Buff,” said I. “It's a
more delicate affair than that: delicate as any art.”

“O well! at that rate!” he exclaimed, with complete relief. “That's
casuistry.”

“I am perfectly certain of one thing: that what you propose is
dishonest,” I returned.

“Well, say no more about it. That's settled,” he replied.

Thus, almost at a word, my point was carried. But the trouble was that
such differences continued to recur, until we began to regard each other
with alarm. If there were one thing Pinkerton valued himself upon, it
was his honesty; if there were one thing he clung to, it was my
good opinion; and when both were involved, as was the case in these
commercial cruces, the man was on the rack. My own position, if you
consider how much I owed him, how hateful is the trade of fault-finder,
and that yet I lived and fattened on these questionable operations,
was perhaps equally distressing. If I had been more sterling or more
combative things might have gone extremely far. But, in truth, I was
just base enough to profit by what was not forced on my attention,
rather than seek scenes: Pinkerton quite cunning enough to avail himself
of my weakness; and it was a relief to both when he began to involve his
proceedings in a decent mystery.

Our last dispute, which had a most unlooked-for consequence, turned on
the refitting of condemned ships. He had bought a miserable hulk, and
came, rubbing his hands, to inform me she was already on the slip, under
a new name, to be repaired. When first I had heard of this industry I
suppose I scarcely comprehended; but much discussion had sharpened my
faculties, and now my brow became heavy.

“I can be no party to that, Pinkerton,” said I.

He leaped like a man shot. “What next?” he cried. “What ails you,
anyway? You seem to me to dislike everything that's profitable.”

“This ship has been condemned by Lloyd's agent,” said I.

“But I tell you it's a deal. The ship's in splendid condition;
there's next to nothing wrong with her but the garboard streak and the
sternpost. I tell you Lloyd's is a ring like everybody else; only it's
an English ring, and that's what deceives you. If it was American, you
would be crying it down all day. It's Anglomania, common Anglomania,” he
cried, with growing irritation.

“I will not make money by risking men's lives,” was my ultimatum.

“Great Caesar! isn't all speculation a risk? Isn't the fairest kind of
shipowning to risk men's lives? And mining--how's that for risk? And
look at the elevator business--there's danger, if you like! Didn't I
take my risk when I bought her? She might have been too far gone; and
where would I have been? Loudon,” he cried, “I tell you the truth:
you're too full of refinement for this world!”

“I condemn you out of your own lips,” I replied. “'The fairest kind of
shipowning,' says you. If you please, let us only do the fairest kind of
business.”

The shot told; the Irrepressible was silenced; and I profited by the
chance to pour in a broadside of another sort. He was all sunk in
money-getting, I pointed out; he never dreamed of anything but dollars.
Where were all his generous, progressive sentiments? Where was his
culture? I asked. And where was the American Type?

“It's true, Loudon,” he cried, striding up and down the room, and
wildly scouring at his hair. “You're perfectly right. I'm becoming
materialised. O, what a thing to have to say, what a confession to make!
Materialised! Me! Loudon, this must go on no longer. You've been a loyal
friend to me once more; give me your hand!--you've saved me again. I
must do something to rouse the spiritual side; something desperate;
study something, something dry and tough. What shall it be? Theology?
Algebra? What's Algebra?”

“It's dry and tough enough,” said I; “a squared + 2ab + b squared.”

“It's stimulating, though?” he inquired.

I told him I believed so, and that it was considered fortifying to
Types.

“Then that's the thing for me. I'll study Algebra,” he concluded.

The next day, by application to one of his type-writing women, he got
word of a young lady, one Miss Mamie McBride, who was willing and able
to conduct him in these bloomless meadows; and, her circumstances
being lean, and terms consequently moderate, he and Mamie were soon
in agreement for two lessons in the week. He took fire with unexampled
rapidity; he seemed unable to tear himself away from the symbolic art;
an hour's lesson occupied the whole evening; and the original two was
soon increased to four, and then to five. I bade him beware of female
blandishments. “The first thing you know, you'll be falling in love with
the algebraist,” said I.

“Don't say it even in jest,” he cried. “She's a lady I revere. I could
no more lay a hand upon her than I could upon a spirit. Loudon, I don't
believe God ever made a purer-minded woman.”

Which appeared to me too fervent to be reassuring.

Meanwhile I had been long expostulating with my friend upon a different
matter. “I'm the fifth wheel,” I kept telling him. “For any use I am,
I might as well be in Senegambia. The letters you give me to attend
to might be answered by a sucking child. And I tell you what it is,
Pinkerton: either you've got to find me some employment, or I'll have to
start in and find it for myself.”

This I said with a corner of my eye in the usual quarter, toward the
arts, little dreaming what destiny was to provide.

“I've got it, Loudon,” Pinkerton at last replied. “Got the idea on the
Potrero cars. Found I hadn't a pencil, borrowed one from the conductor,
and figured on it roughly all the way in town. I saw it was the thing at
last; gives you a real show. All your talents and accomplishments come
in. Here's a sketch advertisement. Just run your eye over it. 'Sun,
Ozone, and Music! PINKERTON'S HEBDOMADARY PICNICS!' (That's a good,
catching phrase, 'hebdomadary,' though it's hard to say. I made a note
of it when I was looking in the dictionary how to spell hectagonal.
'Well, you're a boss word,' I said. 'Before you're very much older, I'll
have you in type as long as yourself.' And here it is, you see.) 'Five
dollars a head, and ladies free. MONSTER OLIO OF ATTRACTIONS.' (How does
that strike you?) 'Free luncheon under the greenwood tree. Dance on
the elastic sward. Home again in the Bright Evening Hours. Manager and
Honorary Steward, H. Loudon Dodd, Esq., the well-known connoisseur.'”


Singular how a man runs from Scylla to Charybdis! I was so intent on
securing the disappearance of a single epithet that I accepted the rest
of the advertisement and all that it involved without discussion. So it
befell that the words “well-known connoisseur” were deleted; but that
H. Loudon Dodd became manager and honorary steward of Pinkerton's
Hebdomadary Picnics, soon shortened, by popular consent, to the
Dromedary.

By eight o'clock, any Sunday morning, I was to be observed by an
admiring public on the wharf. The garb and attributes of sacrifice
consisted of a black frock coat, rosetted, its pockets bulging with
sweetmeats and inferior cigars, trousers of light blue, a silk hat
like a reflector, and a varnished wand. A goodly steamer guarded my
one flank, panting and throbbing, flags fluttering fore and aft of her,
illustrative of the Dromedary and patriotism. My other flank was covered
by the ticket-office, strongly held by a trusty character of the Scots
persuasion, rosetted like his superior and smoking a cigar to mark the
occasion festive. At half-past, having assured myself that all was well
with the free luncheons, I lit a cigar myself, and awaited the strains
of the “Pioneer Band.” I had never to wait long--they were German and
punctual--and by a few minutes after the half-hour, I would hear them
booming down street with a long military roll of drums, some score of
gratuitous asses prancing at the head in bearskin hats and buckskin
aprons, and conspicuous with resplendent axes. The band, of course,
we paid for; but so strong is the San Franciscan passion for public
masquerade, that the asses (as I say) were all gratuitous, pranced for
the love of it, and cost us nothing but their luncheon.

The musicians formed up in the bows of my steamer, and struck into
a skittish polka; the asses mounted guard upon the gangway and the
ticket-office; and presently after, in family parties of father, mother,
and children, in the form of duplicate lovers or in that of solitary
youth, the public began to descend upon us by the carful at a time; four
to six hundred perhaps, with a strong German flavour, and all merry as
children. When these had been shepherded on board, and the inevitable
belated two or three had gained the deck amidst the cheering of the
public, the hawser was cast off, and we plunged into the bay.

And now behold the honorary steward in hour of duty and glory; see me
circulate amid crowd, radiating affability and laughter, liberal with
my sweetmeats and cigars. I say unblushing things to hobbledehoy girls,
tell shy young persons this is the married people's boat, roguishly
ask the abstracted if they are thinking of their sweethearts, offer
Paterfamilias a cigar, am struck with the beauty and grow curious about
the age of mamma's youngest who (I assure her gaily) will be a man
before his mother; or perhaps it may occur to me, from the sensible
expression of her face, that she is a person of good counsel, and I
ask her earnestly if she knows any particularly pleasant place on the
Saucelito or San Rafael coast, for the scene of our picnic is always
supposed to be uncertain. The next moment I am back at my giddy badinage
with the young ladies, wakening laughter as I go, and leaving in my wake
applausive comments of “Isn't Mr. Dodd a funny gentleman?” and “O, I
think he's just too nice!”

An hour having passed in this airy manner, I start upon my rounds
afresh, with a bag full of coloured tickets, all with pins attached, and
all with legible inscriptions: “Old Germany,” “California,” “True Love,”
 “Old Fogies,” “La Belle France,” “Green Erin,” “The Land of Cakes,”
 “Washington,” “Blue Jay,” “Robin Red-Breast,”--twenty of each
denomination; for when it comes to the luncheon, we sit down by
twenties. These are distributed with anxious tact--for, indeed, this
is the most delicate part of my functions--but outwardly with reckless
unconcern, amidst the gayest flutter and confusion; and are immediately
after sported upon hats and bonnets, to the extreme diffusion of
cordiality, total strangers hailing each other by “the number of their
mess”--so we humorously name it--and the deck ringing with cries of,
“Here, all Blue Jays to the rescue!” or, “I say, am I alone in this
blame' ship? Ain't there no more Californians?”

By this time we are drawing near to the appointed spot. I mount upon the
bridge, the observed of all observers.

“Captain,” I say, in clear, emphatic tones, heard far and wide, “the
majority of the company appear to be in favour of the little cove beyond
One Tree Point.”

“All right, Mr. Dodd,” responds the captain, heartily; “all one to me.
I am not exactly sure of the place you mean; but just you stay here and
pilot me.”

I do, pointing with my wand. I do pilot him, to the inexpressible
entertainment of the picnic; for I am (why should I deny it?) the
popular man. We slow down off the mouth of a grassy valley, watered by
a brook, and set in pines and redwoods. The anchor is let go; the
boats are lowered, two of them already packed with the materials of
an impromptu bar; and the Pioneer Band, accompanied by the resplendent
asses, fill the other, and move shoreward to the inviting strains of
Buffalo Gals, won't you come out to-night? It is a part of our programme
that one of the asses shall, from sheer clumsiness, in the course of
this embarkation, drop a dummy axe into the water, whereupon the mirth
of the picnic can hardly be assuaged. Upon one occasion, the dummy axe
floated, and the laugh turned rather the wrong way.

In from ten to twenty minutes the boats are along-side again, the messes
are marshalled separately on the deck, and the picnic goes ashore,
to find the band and the impromptu bar awaiting them. Then come the
hampers, which are piled upon the beach, and surrounded by a stern
guard of stalwart asses, axe on shoulder. It is here I take my place,
note-book in hand, under a banner bearing the legend, “Come here for
hampers.” Each hamper contains a complete outfit for a separate twenty,
cold provender, plates, glasses, knives, forks, and spoons: an agonized
printed appeal from the fevered pen of Pinkerton, pasted on the inside
of the lid, beseeches that care be taken of the glass and silver. Beer,
wine, and lemonade are flowing already from the bar, and the various
clans of twenty file away i

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