"Dave W--!" he exclaimed with fresh astonishment. "That is the roughest
place in the San Joaquin Valley. Several men have been killed and robbed
there during the last two or three years."
I hope Pete got back safe to his wife and children in Iowa; and I hope I
may never be corralled again.
The Reblooming.
It is now more than twenty years since the morning a slender youth of
handsome face and modest mien came into my office on the corner of
Montgomery and Clay streets, San Francisco. He was the son of a preacher
well known in Missouri and California, a man of rare good sense, caustic
wit, and many eccentricities. The young man became an attache of my
newspaper-office and an inmate of my home. He was as fair as a girl, and
refined in his taste and manners. A genial taciturnity, if the
expression may be allowed, marked his bearing in the social circle.
Everybody had a kind feeling and a good word for the quiet, brightfaced
youth. In the discharge of his duties in the office he was punctual and
trustworthy, showing not only industry but unusual aptitude for business
It was with special pleasure that I learned that he was turning his
thoughts to the subject of religion. During the services in the little
Pine-street church he would sit with thoughtful face, and not seldom
with moistened eyes. He read the Bible and prayed in secret. I was not
surprised when he came to me one day and opened his heart. The great
crisis in his life had come. God was speaking to his soul, and he was
listening to his voice. The uplifted cross drew him, and he yielded to
the gentle attraction. We prayed together, and henceforth there was a
new and sacred bond that bound us to each other. I felt that I was a
witness to the most solemn transaction that can take place on earth--the
wedding of a soul to a heavenly faith. Soon thereafter he went to
Virginia, to attend college. There he united with the Church. His
letters to me were full of gratitude and joy. It was the blossoming of
his spiritual life, and the air was full of its fragrance, and the earth
was flooded with glory. A pedestrian tour among the Virginia hills
brought him into communion with Nature at a time when it was rapture to
drink in its beauty and its grandeur. The light kindled within his soul
by the touch of the Holy Spirit transfigured the scenery upon which he
gazed, and the glory of God shone round about the young student in the
flush and blessedness of his first love. O blessed days! O days of
brightness, and sweetness, and rapture! The soul is then in its
blossoming-time, and all high enthusiasms, all bright dreams, all
thrilling joys, are realities which inwork themselves into the
consciousness, to be forgotten never; to remain with us as prophecies of
the eternal springtime that awaits the true-hearted on the hills of God
beyond the grave, or as accusing voices charging us with the murder of
our dead ideals! Amid the dust and din of the battle in after-years we
turn to this radiant spot in our journey with smiles or tears; according
as we have been true or false to the impulses, aspirations, and purposes
inspired within us by that first, and brightest, and nearest
manifestation of God. Such a season is a natural to every life as the
April buds and June roses are to forest and garden. The springtime of
some lives is deferred by unpropitious circumstance to the time when it
should be glowing with autumnal glory, and rich in the fruitage of the
closing year. The life that does not blossom into religion in youth may
have light at noon, and peace at sunset, but misses the morning glory on
the hills, and the dew that sparkles on grass and flower. The call of
God to the young to seek him early is the expression of a true
psychology no less than of a love infinite in its depth and tenderness.
His college-course finished, my young friend returned to California, and
in one of its beautiful valley-towns he entered a law-office, with a
view to prepare himself for the legal profession. Here he was thrown
into daily association with a little knot of skeptical lawyers. As is
often the case, their moral obliquities ran parallel with their errors
in opinion. They swore, gambled genteelly, and drank. It is not strange
that in this icy atmosphere the growth of any young friend in the
Christian life was stunted. Such influences are like the dreaded north
wind that at times sweeps over the valleys of California in the spring
and early summer, blighting and withering the vegetation it does not
kill. The brightness of his hope was dimmed, and his soul knew the
torture of doubt--a torture that is always keenest to him who allows
himself to sink in the region of fogs after he has once stood upon the
sunlit summit of faith. Just at this crisis, a thing little in itself
deepened the shadow that was falling upon his life. A personal
misunderstanding with the pastor kept him from attending church. Thus he
lost the most effectual defense against the assaults that were being
made upon his faith and hope, in being separated from the fellowship and
cut off from the activities of the Church of God. Have you not noted
these malign coincidences in life? There are times when it seems that
the tide of events sets against us when, like the princely sufferer of
the land of Uz, every messenger that crosses the threshold brings fresh
tidings of ill, and our whole destiny seems to be rushing to a predoomed
perdition. The worldly call it bad luck; the superstitious call it fate;
the believer in God calls it by another name. Always of a delicate
constitution, my friend now exhibited symptoms of serious pulmonary
disease. It was at that time the fashion in California to prescribe
whisky as a specific for that class of ailments. It is possible that
there is virtue in the prescription, but I am sure of one thing, namely,
that if consumption diminished, drunkenness increased; if fewer died of
phthisis, more died of delirium tremens. The physicians of California
have sent a host of victims raving and gibbering in drunken frenzy or
idiocy down to death and hell! I have reason to believe that my friend
inherited a constitutional weakness at this point. As flame to tinder,
was the medicinal whisky to him. It grew upon him rapidly, and soon this
cloud overshadowed all his life. He struggled hard to break the
serpent-folds that were tightening around him; but the fire that had
been kindled seemed to be quenchless. An uncontrolled evil passion is
hellfire. He writhed in its burnings in an agony that could be
understood only by such as knew how almost morbidly sensitive was his
nature, and how vital was his conscience. I became a pastor in the town
where he lived, and renewed my association with him as far as I could.
But there was a constraint unlike the old times. When under the
influence of liquor, he would pass me in the streets with his head down,
a deeper flush mantling his cheek as he hurried by with unsteady step.
Sometimes I met him staggering homeward through a back street, hiding
from the gaze of men. He was at first shy of me when sober, but
gradually the constraint wore off, and he seemed disposed to draw nearer
to me, as in the old days. His struggle went on, days of drunkenness
following weeks of soberness, his haggard face after each debauch
wearing a look of unspeakable weariness and wretchedness. One of the
lawyers who had led him into the mazes of doubt--a man of large and
versatile gifts, whose lips were touched with a noble and persuasive
eloquence--sunk deeper and deeper into the black depths of drunkenness,
until the tragedy ended in a horror that lessened the gains of the
saloons for at least a few days. He was found dead in his bed one
morning in a pool of blood, his throat cut by his own guilty hand.
My friend had married a lovely girl, and the cottage in which they lived
was one of the coziest, and the garden in front was a little paradise of
neatness and beauty. Ah! I must drop a veil over a part of this true
tale. All along I have written under half protest, the image of a sad,
wistful face rising at times between my eyes and the sheet on which
these words are traced. They loved each other tenderly and deeply, and
both were conscious of the presence of the devil that was turning their
heaven into hell.
"Save him, Doctor, save him! He is the noblest of men, and the
tenderest, truest husband. He loves you, and he will let you talk to
him. Save him, O save him! Help me to pray for him! My heart will
break!"
Poor child! her loving heart was indeed breaking; and her fresh young
life was crushed under a weight of grief and shame too heavy to be
borne.
What he said to me in the interviews held in his sober intervals I have
not the heart to repeat now. He still fought against his enemy; he still
buffeted the billows that were going over him, though with feebler
stroke. When their little child died, her tears fell freely, but he was
like one stunned. Stony and silent he stood and saw the little grave
filled up, and rode away tearless, the picture of hopelessness.
By a coincidence; after my return to San Francisco, he came thither, and
again became my neighbor at North Beach. I went up to see him one
evening. He was very feeble, and it was plain that the end was not far
off. At the first glance I saw that a great change had taken place in
him.
He had found his lost self. The strong drink was shut out from him, and
he was shut in with his better thoughts and with God. His religious life
rebloomed in wondrous beauty and sweetness. The blossoms of his early
joy had fallen off, the storms had torn its branches and stripped it of
its foliage, but its root had never perished, because he had never
ceased to struggle for deliverance. Aspiration and hope live or die
together in the human soul. The link that bound my friend to God was
never wholly sundered. His better nature clung to the better way with a
grasp that never let go altogether.
"O Doctor, I am a wonder to myself! It does seem to me that God has
given back to me every good thing I possessed in the bright and blessed
past. It has all come back to me. I see the light and feel the joy as I
did when I first entered the new life. O it is wonderful! Doctor, God
never gave me up, and I never ceased to yearn for his mercy and love,
even in the darkest season of my unhappy life?"
His very face had recovered its old look, and his voice its old tone.
There could be no doubt of this soul had rebloomed in the life of God.
The last night came--they sent for me with the message,
"Come quickly! he is dying."
I found him with that look which I have seen on the faces of others who
were nearing death--a radiance and a rapture that awed the beholder. O
solemn, awful mystery of death! I have stood in its presence in every
form of terror and of sweetness, and in every case the thought has been
impressed upon me that it was a passage into the Great Realities.
"Doctor," he said, smiling, and holding my hand; "I had hoped to be with
you in your office again, as in the old days--not as a business
arrangement, but just to be with you, and revive old memories, and to
live the old life over again. But that cannot be, and I must wait till
we meet in the world of spirits, whither I go before you. It seems to be
growing dark. I cannot see your face hold my hand. I am going--going. I
am on the waves--on the waves--." The radiance was still upon his
face, but the hand I held no longer clasped mine-the wasted form was
still. It was the end. He was launched upon the Infinite Sea for the
endless voyage.
The Emperor Norton.
That was his title. He wore it with an air that was a strange mixture of
the mock-heroic and the pathetic. He was mad on this one point, and
strangely shrewd and well-informed on almost every other. Arrayed in a
faded-blue uniform, with brass buttons and epaulettes, wearing a
cocked-hat with an eagle's feather, and at times with a rusty sword at
his side, he was a conspicuous figure in the streets of San Francisco,
and a regular habitue of all its public places. In person he was stout,
full-chested, though slightly stooped, with a large head heavily coated
with bushy black hair, an aquiline nose, and dark gray eyes, whose mild
expression added to the benignity of his face. On the end of his nose
grew a tuft of long hairs, which he seemed to prize as a natural mark of
royalty, or chieftainship. Indeed, there was a popular legend afloat
that he was of true royal blood--a stray Bourbon, or something of the
sort. His speech was singularly fluent and elegant. The Emperor was one
of the celebrities that no visitor failed to see. It is said that his
mind was unhinged by a sudden loss of fortune in the early days, by the
treachery of a partner in trade. The sudden blow was deadly, and the
quiet, thrifty, affable man of business became a wreck. By nothing is
the inmost quality of a man made more manifest than by the manner in
which he meets misfortune. One, when the sky darkens, having strong
impulse and weak will, rushes into suicide; another, with a large vein
of cowardice, seeks to drown the sense of disaster in strong drink; yet
another, tortured in every fiber of a sensitive organization, flees from
the scene of his troubles and the faces of those that know him,
preferring exile to shame. The truest man, when assailed by sudden
calamity, rallies all the reserved forces of a splendid manhood to meet
the shock, and, like a good ship, lifting itself from the trough of the
swelling sea, mounts the wave and rides on. It was a curious
idiosyncrasy that led this man, when fortune and reason were swept away
at a stroke, to fall back upon this imaginary imperialism. The nature
that could thus, when the real fabric of life was wrecked, construct
such another by the exercise of a disordered imagination, must have been
originally of a gentle and magnanimous type. The broken fragments of
mind, like those of a statue, reveal the quality of the original
creation. It may be that he was happier than many who have worn real
crowns. Napoleon at Chiselhurst, or his greater uncle at St. Helena,
might have been gainer by exchanging lots with this man, who had the
inward joy of conscious greatness without its burden and its perils. To
all public places he had free access, and no pageant was complete
without his presence. From time to time he issued proclamations, signed
"Norton I.," which the lively San Francisco dailies were always ready to
print conspicuously in their columns. The style of these proclamations
was stately, the royal first person plural being used by him with all
gravity and dignity. Ever and anon, as his uniform became dilapidated or
ragged, a reminder of the condition of the imperial wardrobe would be
given in one or more of the newspapers, and then in a few days he would
appear in a new suit. He had the entree of all the restaurants, and he
lodged--nobody knew where. It was said that he was cared for by members
of the Freemason Society to which he belonged at the time of his fall. I
saw him often in my congregation in the Pine-street church, along in
1858, and into the sixties. He was a respectful and attentive listener
to preaching. On the occasion of one of his first visits he spoke to me
after the service, saying, in a kind and patronizing tone:
"I think it my duty to encourage religion and morality by showing myself
at church, and to avoid jealousy I attend them all in turn."
He loved children, and would come into the Sunday-school, and sit
delighted with their singing. When, in distributing the presents on a
Christmas-tree, a necktie was handed him as the gift of the young
ladies, he received it with much satisfaction, making a kingly bow of
gracious acknowledgment. Meeting him one day, in the springtime, holding
my little girl by the hand, he paused, looked at the child's bright
face, and taking a rose-bud from his button-hole, he presented it to her
with a manner so graceful, and a smile so benignant, as to show that
under the dingy blue uniform there beat the heart of a gentleman. He
kept a keen eye on current events, and sometimes expressed his views
with great sagacity. One day he stopped me on the street, saying:
"I have just read the report of the political sermon of Dr.--(giving
the name of a noted sensational preacher, who was in the habit, at
times, of discussing politics from his pulpit). I disapprove
political-preaching. What do you think?"