JOHN BRENT.
A man who does not love luxury is merely an incomplete man, or, if
he prefers, an ignoramus. A man who cannot dispense with luxury, and
who does not love hard fare, hard bed, hard travel, and all manner of
robust, vigorous, tense work, is a weakling and a soft. Sybaris is
a pretty town, rose-leaves are a delicate mattrass, Lydian measures
are dulcet to soul and body: also, the wilderness is “no mean city”;
hemlock or heather for couch, brocken for curtain, are not cruelty;
prairie gales are a brave lullaby for adults.
Simple furniture and simple fare a campaigner needs for the
plains,--for chamber furniture, a pair of blankets; for kitchen
furniture, a frying-pan and a coffee-pot; for table furniture, a tin
mug and his bowie-knife: Sybaris adds a tin plate, a spoon, and even
a fork. The list of provisions is as short,--pork, flour, and coffee;
that is all, unless Sybaris should indulge in a modicum of tea, a dose
or two of sugar, and a vial of vinegar for holidays.
I had several days for preparation, until my companions, the
mail-riders, should arrive. One morning I was busy making up my packs
of such luxuries as I have mentioned for the journey, when I heard the
clatter of horses’ feet, and observed a stranger approach and ride up
to the door of my shanty. He was mounted upon a powerful iron-gray
horse, and drove a pack mule and an Indian pony.
My name was on an elaborately painted shingle over the door. It was
my own handiwork, and quite a lion in that region. I felt, whenever
I inspected that bit of high art, that, fail or win at the mine, I
had a resource. Indeed, my Pike neighbors seemed to consider that I
was unjustifiably burying my artistic talents. Many a not unseemly
octagonal slug, with Moffatt & Co.’s imprimatur of value, had been
offered me if I would paint up some miner’s hell, as “The True
Paradise,” or “The Shades and Caffy de Paris.”
The new-comer read my autograph on the shingle, looked about, caught
sight of me at work in the hot shade, dismounted, fastened his horses,
and came toward me. It was not the fashion in California, at that time,
to volunteer civility or acquaintance. Men had to announce themselves,
and prove their claims. I sat where I was, and surveyed the stranger.
“The Adonis of the copper-skins!” I said to myself. “This is the ‘Young
Eagle,’ or the ‘Sucking Dove,’ or the ‘Maiden’s Bane,’ or some other
great chief of the cleanest Indian tribe on the continent. A beautiful
youth! O Fenimore, why are you dead! There are a dozen romances in one
look of that young brave. One chapter might be written on his fringed
buckskin shirt; one on his equally fringed leggings, with their stripe
of porcupine-quills; and one short chapter on his moccasons, with their
scarlet cloth instep-piece, and his cap of otter fur decked with an
eagle’s feather. What a poem the fellow is! I wish I was an Indian
myself for such a companion; or, better, a squaw, to be made love to by
him.”
As he approached, I perceived that he was not copper, but bronze. A
pale-face certainly! That is, a pale-face tinged by the brazen sun of
a California summer. Not less handsome, however, as a Saxon, than an
Indian brave. As soon as I identified him as one of my own race, I
began to fancy I had seen him before.
“If he were but shaved and clipped, black-coated, booted, gloved,
hatted with a shiny cylinder, disarmed of his dangerous looking
arsenal, and armed with a plaything of a cane,--in short, if he were
metamorphosed from a knight-errant into a carpet-knight, changed from a
smooth rough into a smooth smooth,--seems to me I should know him, or
know that I had known him once.”
He came up, laid his hand familiarly on my arm, and said, “What, Wade?
Don’t you remember me? John Brent.”
“I hear your voice. I begin to see you now. Hurrah!”
“How was it I did not recognize you,” said I, after a fraternal
greeting.
“Ten years have presented me with this for a disguise,” said he, giving
his moustache a twirl. “Ten years of experience have taken all the girl
out of me.”
“What have you been doing these ten years, since College, O many-sided
man?”
“Grinding my sides against the Adamant, every one.”
“Has your diamond begun to see light, and shine?”
“The polishing-dust dims it still.”
“How have you found life, kind or cruel?”
“Certainly not kind, hardly cruel, unless indifference is cruelty.”
“But indifference, want of sympathy, must have been a positive relief
after the aggressive cruelty of your younger days.”
“And what have you been doing, Richard?”
“Everything that Yankees do,--digging last.”
“That has been my business, too, as well as polishing.”
“The old work, I suppose, to root out lies and plant in truth.”
“That same slow task. Tunnelling too, to find my way out of the prison
of doubt into the freedom of faith.”
“You are out, then, at last. Happy and at peace, I hope.”
“At peace, hardly happy. How can such a lonely fellow be happy?”
“We are peers in bereavement now. My family are all gone, except two
little children of my sister.”
“Not quite peers. You remember your relatives tenderly. I have no such
comfort.”
Odd talk this may seem, to hold with an old friend. Ten years apart!
We ought to have met in merrier mood. We might, if we had parted
with happy memories. But it was not so. Youth had been a harsh
season to Brent. If Fate destines a man to teach, she compels him to
learn,--bitter lessons, too, whether he will or no. Brent was a man of
genius. All experience, therefore, piled itself upon him. He must learn
the immortal consolations by probing all suffering himself.
Brent’s story is a short one or a long one. It can be told in a page,
or in a score of volumes. We had met fourteen years before in the same
pew of Berkeley College Chapel, grammars by our side and tutors before
us, two well-crammed candidates for the Freshman Class. Brent was a
delicate, beautiful, dreamy boy. My counterpart. I was plain prose,
and needed the poetic element. We became friends. I was steady; he was
erratic. I was calm; he was passionate. I was reasonably happy; he was
totally miserable. For good cause.
The cause was this; and it has broken weaker hearts than Brent’s. His
heart was made of stuff that does not know how to break.
Dr. Swerger was the cause of Brent’s misery. The Reverend Dr. Swerger
was a brutal man. One who believes that God is vengeance naturally
imitates his God, and does not better his model.
Swerger was Brent’s step-father. Mrs. Brent was pretty, silly, rich,
and a widow. Swerger wanted his wife pretty, and not too wise; and that
she was rich balanced, perhaps a little more than balanced, the slight
objection of widowhood.
Swerger naturally hated his step-son. One intuition of Brent’s was
worth all the thoughts of Swerger’s life-time. A clergyman who starts
with believing in hells, devils, original sin, and such crudities,
can never be anything in the nineteenth century but a tyrant or a
nuisance, if he has any logic, as fortunately few of such misbelievers
have. Swerger had logic. So had the boy Brent,--the logic of a true,
pure, loving heart. He could not stand Swerger’s coming into his dead
father’s house and deluding his mother with a black fanaticism.
So Swerger gave him to understand that he was a child of hell. He won
his wife to shrink from her son. Between them they lacerated the boy.
He was a brilliant fellow, quite the king of us all. But he worked
under a cloud. He could not get at any better religion than Swerger’s;
and perhaps there was none better--or much better--to be had at that
time.
One day matters came to a quarrel. Swerger cursed his step-son; of
course not in the same terms the sailors used on Long Wharf, but with
no better spirit. The mother, cowed by her husband, backed him, and
abandoned the boy. They drove him out of the house, to go where he
would. He came to me. I gave him half my quarters, and tried to cheer
him. No use. This bitter wrong to his love to God and to man almost
crushed him. He brooded and despaired. He began to fancy himself the
lost soul Swerger had called him. I saw that he would die or go mad;
or, if he had strength enough to react, it would be toward a hapless
rebellion against conventional laws, and so make his blight ruin. I
hurried him off to Europe, for change of scene. That was ten years
ago, and I had not seen him since. I knew, however, that his mother
was visited by compunctions; that she wished to be reconciled to her
son; that Swerger refused, and renewed his anathemas; that he bullied
the poor little woman to death; that Brent had to wring the property
out of him by a long lawsuit, which the Swergerites considered an
unconstitutional and devilish proceeding, another proof of total
depravity. Miserable business! It went near to crush all the innocence,
faith, hope, and religion out of my friend’s life.
Of course this experience had a tendency to drive Brent out of the
common paths, to make him a seer instead of a doer. The vulgar cannot
comprehend that, when a man is selected by character and circumstance,
acting together under the name of destiny, to be a seer, he must see to
the end before he begins to say what he sees, to be a guide, a monitor,
and a helper. The vulgar, therefore, called Brent a wasted life, a man
of genius _manqué_, a pointless investigator, a purposeless dreamer.
The vulgar loves to make up its mind prematurely. The vulgar cannot
abide a man who lives a blameless life so far as personal conduct goes,
and yet declines to accept worldly tests of success, worldly principles
of action. If a man rebels against laws, and takes the side of vice,
_that_ the vulgar can comprehend; but rebellion on the side of virtue
is revolutionary, destroys all the old landmarks, must be crucified.
Brent, therefore, boy and man, had had tough experience. I knew of his
career, though we had not met. He had wished and attempted, perhaps
prematurely, to make his fine genius of definite use. He wanted to
make the nation’s prayers; but the Swergerites pronounced his prayers
Paganism. He wanted to put the nation’s holiest thoughts into poetry;
they called his poetry impious. He wanted to stir up the young men of
his day to a franker stand on the side of genuine liberty, and a keener
hatred of all slavery, and so to uphold chivalry and heroism; the
cynical people scoffed, they said he would get over his boyish folly,
that he ought to have lived before Bayard, or half-way through the
millennium, but that the kind of stuff he preached and wrote with such
unnecessary fervor did not suit the nineteenth century, a practical
country and a practical age.
So Brent paused in his work. The boyhood’s unquestioning ardor went
out of him. The interregnum between youth and complete manhood came.
He gave up his unripe attempt to be a doer, and turned seer again.
Observation is the proper business of a man’s third decade; the less a
spokesman has to say about his results until thirty, the better, unless
he wants to eat his words, or to sustain outgrown formulas. Brent
discovered this, and went about the world still pointless, purposeless,
_manqué_, as they said,--minding his own business, getting his facts.
His fortune made him independent. He could go where he pleased.
This was the man who rode up on the iron-gray horse. This was the
Indianesque Saxon who greeted me. It put color and poetry into my sulky
life to see him.
“Off, old fellow?” said Brent, pointing his whip at my traps. “I can’t
hear him squeak, but I’m sure there is pig in that gunny-bag, and flour
in that sack. I hope you’re not away for a long trip just as I have
come to squat with you.”
“No longer than home across the plains.”
“Bravo! then we’ll ride together, instead of squatting together.
Instead of your teaching me quartz-mining, I’ll guide you across the
Rockys.”
“You know the way, then.”
“Every foot of it. Last fall I hunted up from Mexico and New Mexico
with an English friend. We made winter head-quarters with Captain Ruby
at Fort Laramie, knocking about all winter in that neighborhood, and
at the North among the Wind River Mountains. Early in the spring we
went off toward Luggernel Alley and the Luggernel Springs, and camped
there for a month.”
“Luggernel Alley! Luggernel Springs! Those are new names to me; in
fact, my Rocky Mountain geography is naught.”
“You ought to see them. Luggernel Alley is one of the wonders of this
continent.”
So _I_ think now that I have seen it. It was odd too, what afterward I
remembered as a coincidence, that our first talk should have turned to
a spot where we were to do and to suffer, by and by.
“There is something Frenchy in the name Luggernel,” said I.
“Yes; it is a corruption of La Grenouille. There was a famous Canadian
trapper of that name, or nickname. He discovered the springs. The
Alley, a magnificent gorge, grand as the Via Mala, leads to them. I
will describe the whole to you at length, some time.”
“Who was your English friend?”
“Sir Biron Biddulph,--a capital fellow, pink in the cheeks, warm in the
heart, strong in the shanks, mighty on the hunt.”
“Hunting for love of it?”
“No; for love itself, or rather the lack of love. A lovely lady in his
native Lancashire would not smile; so he turned butcher of buffalo,
bears, and big-horn.”
“Named he the ‘fair but frozen maid’?”
“Never. It seems there is something hapless or tragic about her
destiny. She did not love him; so he came away to forget her. He made
no secret of it. We arrived in Utah last July, on our way to see
California. There he got letters from home, announcing, as he told me,
some coming misfortune to the lady. As a friend, no longer a lover, he
proposed to do what he could to avert the danger. I left him in Salt
Lake, preparing to return, and came across country alone.”
“Alone! through the Indian country, with that tempting iron-gray,
those tempting packs, that tempting scalp, with its love-locks! Why,
the sight of your scalp alone would send a thrill through every Indian
heart from Bear River to the Dalles of the Columbia! Perhaps, by the
way, you’ve been scalped already, and are safe?”
“No; the mop’s my own mop. Scalp’s all right. Wish I could say the
same of the brains. The Indians would not touch me. I am half savage,
you know. In this and my former trip, I have become a privileged
character,--something of a medicine-man.”
“I suppose you can talk to them. You used to have the gift of tongues.”
“Yes; I have choked down two or three of their guttural lingos, and
can sputter them up as easily as I used to gabble iambic trimeters. I
like the fellows. They are not ideal heroes; they have not succeeded in
developing a civilization, or in adopting ours, and therefore I suppose
they must go down, as pine-trees go down to make room for tougher
stalks and fruitier growth: but I like the fellows, and don’t believe
in their utter deviltry. I have always given the dogs a good name, and
they have been good dogs to me. I like thorough men, too; and what
an Indian knows, he knows, so that it is a part of him. It is a good
corrective for an artificial man to find himself less of a man, under
certain difficulties, than a child of nature. You know this, of course,
as well as I do.”
“Yes; we campaigners get close to the heart of Mother Nature, and she
teaches us, tenderly or roughly, but thoroughly. By the way, how did
you find me out?”
“I heard some Pikes, at a camp last night, talking of a person who had
sold a quartz mine for a wonderful horse. I asked the name. They told
me yours, and directed me here. Except for this talk, I should have
gone down to San Francisco, and missed you.”
“Lucky horse! He brings old friends together,--a good omen! Come and
see him.”