A FEW pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a
variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the others
are but pleasant infidelities. Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity
except upon the map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of
piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among
ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great
continent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be
something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a
foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail
from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection
joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one
Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it
not among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English,
or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other’s
errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us,
something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people.
Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most
inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with
its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its
unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking
corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a
Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do
not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far
land, a kindred voice sing out, “Oh, why left I my hame?” and it seems at
once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise
and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though I
think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to
be buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me
with every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps.
When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!
The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You must pay for it
in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You have to learn
the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink;
your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against
society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been born,
for instance, in England. But somehow life is warmer and closer; the
hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy
street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round
our hearts. An Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon
Chimborazo, and neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower
told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic.
“From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides.”
And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch.
Only a few days after I had seen M’Eckron, a message reached me in my
cottage. It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from the hills
to market. He had heard there was a countryman in Calistoga, and came
round to the hotel to see him. We said a few words to each other; we had
not much to say—should never have seen each other had we stayed at home,
separated alike in space and in society; and then we shook hands, and he
went his way again to his ranche among the hills, and that was all.
Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the more love of the
common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the
valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son: more,
perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract
countryman is perfect—like a whiff of peats.
And there was yet another. Upon him I came suddenly, as he was calmly
entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on plunder: a man of
about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a chimney-pot hat and a tail
coat, and a pursing of his mouth that might have been envied by an elder
of the kirk. He had just such a face as I have seen a dozen times behind
the plate.
“Hullo, sir!” I cried. “Where are you going?”
He turned round without a quiver.
“You’re a Scotchman, sir?” he said gravely. “So am I; I come from
Aberdeen. This is my card,” presenting me with a piece of pasteboard
which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of the rains. “I was
just examining this palm,” he continued, indicating the misbegotten plant
before our door, “which is the largest sp_a_cimen I have yet observed in
Califoarnia.”
There were four or five larger within sight. But where was the use of
argument? He produced a tape-line, made me help him to measure the tree
at the level of the ground, and entered the figures in a large and filthy
pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon. He then thanked me
profusely, remarking that such little services were due between
countrymen; shook hands with me, “for add lang syne,” as he said; and
took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and humbug as he went.
A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to
Sacramento—perhaps from Aberdeen. Anyway, there never was any one more
Scotch in this wide world. He could sing and dance, and drink, I
presume; and he played the pipes with vigour and success. All the Scotch
in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent their spare time and
money, driving him about in an open cab, between drinks, while he blew
himself scarlet at the pipes. This is a very sad story. After he had
borrowed money from every one, he and his pipes suddenly disappeared from
Sacramento, and when I last heard, the police were looking for him.
I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so thoroughly
ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way.
It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which wander
widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish in the world. But
perhaps these two are cause and effect: “For ye were strangers in the
land of Egypt.”
PART II—WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL
CHAPTER I.—TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR
ONE thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger, and
that is the number of antiquities. Already there have been many cycles
of population succeeding each other, and passing away and leaving behind
them relics. These, standing on into changed times, strike the
imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal tower. The towns, like
the vineyards, are experimentally founded: they grow great and prosper by
passing occasions; and when the lode comes to an end, and the miners move
elsewhere, the town remains behind them, like Palmyra in the desert. I
suppose there are, in no country in the world, so many deserted towns as
here in California.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and sylvan,
was once alive with mining camps and villages. Here there would be two
thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or fifteen hundred
ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable houses. But the luck
had failed, the mines petered out; and the army of miners had departed,
and left this quarter of the world to the rattlesnakes and deer and
grizzlies, and to the slower but steadier advance of husbandry.
It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on the
Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga. There is something
singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into a ready-made
house. And to the British merchant, sitting at home at ease, it may
appear that, with such a roof over your head and a spring of clear water
hard by, the whole problem of the squatter’s existence would be solved.
Food, however, has yet to be considered, I will go as far as most people
on tinned meats; some of the brightest moments of my life were passed
over tinned mulli-gatawney in the cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner,
storm-stayed in Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce
authoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone. Fresh meat must be
had on an occasion. It is true that the great Foss, driving by along the
Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with legend, might have been
induced to bring us meat, but the great Foss could hardly bring us milk.
To take a cow would have involved taking a field of grass and a milkmaid;
after which it would have been hardly worth while to pause, and we might
have added to our colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher.
It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in this
life. “Mihi est propositum,” as you may see by the motto, “id quod
regibus;” and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a neighbour
rolling in cattle.
Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call Kelmar.
That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set eyes on him, I
knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure it will be his name among
the angels. Kelmar was the store-keeper, a Russian Jew, good-natured, in
a very thriving way of business, and, on equal terms, one of the most
serviceable of men. He also had something of the expression of a Scotch
country elder, who, by some peculiarity, should chance to be a Hebrew.
He had a projecting under lip, with which he continually smiled, or
rather smirked. Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly kind woman; and the oldest
son had quite a dark and romantic bearing, and might be heard on summer
evenings playing sentimental airs on the violin.
I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an important
person Kelmar was. But the Jew store-keepers of California, profiting at
once by the needs and habits of the people, have made themselves in too
many cases the tyrants of the rural population. Credit is offered, is
pressed on the new customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the
tune changes, and he is from thenceforth a white slave. I believe, even
from the little I saw, that Kelmar, if he choose to put on the screw,
could send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven or eight miles
round Calistoga. These are continually paying him, but are never
suffered to get out of debt. He palms dull goods upon them, for they
dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines with them when he is on an
outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed; he is their family friend, the
director of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere unknown in modern
days, their king.
For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of Pine
Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole scheme and
was proportionately sad. One fine morning, however, he met me, wreathed
in smiles. He had found the very place for me—Silverado, another old
mining town, right up the mountain. Rufe Hanson, the hunter, could take
care of us—fine people the Hansons; we should be close to the Toll House,
where the Lakeport stage called daily; it was the best place for my
health, besides. Rufe had been consumptive, and was now quite a strong
man, ain’t it? In short, the place and all its accompaniments seemed
made for us on purpose.
He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of Calistoga,
Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air. There, in the
nick, just where the eastern foothills joined the mountain, and she
herself began to rise above the zone of forest—there was Silverado. The
name had already pleased me; the high station pleased me still more. I
began to inquire with some eagerness. It was but a little while ago that
Silverado was a great place. The mine—a silver mine, of course—had
promised great things. There was quite a lively population, with several
hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself had opened a branch store,
and done extremely well—“Ain’t it?” he said, appealing to his wife. And
she said, “Yes; extremely well.” Now there was no one living in the town
but Rufe the hunter; and once more I heard Rufe’s praises by the yard,
and this time sung in chorus.
I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something
underneath; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled had
inspired the Kelmars with this flow of words. But I was impatient to be
gone, to be about my kingly project; and when we were offered seats in
Kelmar’s waggon, I accepted on the spot. The plan of their next Sunday’s
outing took them, by good fortune, over the border into Lake County.
They would carry us so far, drop us at the Toll House, present us to the
Hansons, and call for us again on Monday morning early.
CHAPTER II—FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO
WE were to leave by six precisely; that was solemnly pledged on both
sides; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to remind us
of the hour. But it was eight before we got clear of Calistoga: Kelmar,
Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named Abramina, her little
daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away behind us, a cluster of
ship’s coffee-kettles. These last were highly ornamental in the sheen of
their bright tin, but I could invent no reason for their presence. Our
carriageful reckoned up, as near as we could get at it, some three
hundred years to the six of us. Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews.
But I never, in all my life, was conscious of so strong an atmosphere of
holiday. No word was spoken but of pleasure; and even when we drove in
silence, nods and smiles went round the party like refreshments.
The sun shone out of a cloudless sky. Close at the zenith rode the
belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even bright.
The wind blew a gale from the north; the trees roared; the corn and the
deep grass in the valley fled in whitening surges; the dust towered into
the air along the road and dispersed like the smoke of battle. It was
clear in our teeth from the first, and for all the windings of the road
it managed to keep clear in our teeth until the end.
For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the eastern
foothills; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-land, and
presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered the Toll road, or, to be
more local, entered on “the grade.” The road mounts the near shoulder of
Mount Saint Helena, bound northward into Lake County. In one place it
skirts along the edge of a narrow and deep canyon, filled with trees, and
I was glad, indeed, not to be driven at this point by the dashing Foss.
Kelmar, with his unvarying smile, jogging to the motion of the trap,
drove for all the world like a good, plain, country clergyman at home;
and I profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity.
Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave place
more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona, dotted with
enormous pines. It was these pines, as they shot above the lower wood,
that produced that pencilling of single trees I had so often remarked
from the valley. Thence, looking up and from however far, each fir
stands separate against the sky no bigger than an eyelash; and all
together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to the hills. The oak is no baby;
even the madrona, upon these spurs of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a fine
bulk and ranks with forest trees—but the pines look down upon the rest
for underwood. As Mount Saint Helena among her foothills, so these dark
giants out-top their fellow-vegetables. Alas! if they had left the
redwoods, the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed. But the redwoods,
fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bedsteads, or yet
more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.
A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain purity. It
came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful. The woods sang
aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath. Gladness seemed to
inhabit these upper zones, and we had left indifference behind us in the
valley. “I to the hills lift mine eyes!” There are days in a life when
thus to climb out of the lowlands, seems like scaling heaven.
As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing
strength. It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull us up
that steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of the wind, or
how their great eyes were able to endure the dust. Ten minutes after we
went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and even before us leaves were
thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen, large enough to make the passage
difficult. But now we were hard by the summit. The road crosses the
ridge, just in the nick that Kelmar showed me from below, and then,
without pause, plunges down a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther
side. At the highest point a trail strikes up the main hill to the
leftward; and that leads to Silverado. A hundred yards beyond, and in a
kind of elbow of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel. We came up the
one side, were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as
it poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in
shelter, but all buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door.
A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with gable
ends and a verandah, are jammed hard against the hillside, just where a
stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon, filled with pines. The pines
go right up overhead; a little more and the stream might have played,
like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof. In front the ground drops as
sharply as it rises behind. There is just room for the road and a sort
of promontory of croquet ground, and then you can lean over the edge and
look deep below you through the wood. I said croquet _ground_, not
_green_; for the surface was of brown, beaten earth. The toll-bar itself
was the only other note of originality: a long beam, turning on a post,
and kept slightly horizontal by a counterweight of stones. Regularly
about sundown this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the
road and made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.
On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar. I was presented to
Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the engineer, who lives there
for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most pleasant little gentleman, once a
member of the Ohio legislature, again the editor of a local paper, and
now, with undiminished dignity, keeping the Toll House bar. I had a
number of drinks and cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous
opportunity of seeing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling,
steadily edging one of the ship’s kettles on the reluctant Corwin.
Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout victory
crowned his arms.
At last we set forth for Silverado on foot. Kelmar and his jolly Jew
girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed geniality
and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the hotel to lead them
here and there about the woods. For three people all so old, so bulky in
body, and belonging to a race so venerable, they could not but surprise
us by their extreme and almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit. They
were only going to stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not
twenty long miles of road before them on the other side? Stay to dinner?
Not they! Put up the horses? Never. Let us attach them to the verandah
by a wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person’s hat on
that blustering day. And with all these protestations of hurry, they
proved irresponsible like children. Kelmar himself, shrewd old Russian
Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a bargain to its
satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to that boy. Yet the boy
was patently fallacious; and for that matter a most unsympathetic urchin,
raised apparently on gingerbread. He was bent on his own pleasure,
nothing else; and Kelmar followed him to his ruin, with the same shrewd
smirk. If the boy said there was “a hole there in the hill”—a hole, pure
and simple, neither more nor less—Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow
him a hundred yards to look complacently down that hole. For two hours
we looked for houses; and for two hours they followed us, smelling trees,
picking flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary. Had we taken five,
with that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations, for five they
would have smiled and stumbled through the woods.
However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn, sparse
planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees. That
was the site of Silverado mining town. A piece of ground was levelled
up, where Kelmar’s store had been; and facing that we saw Rufe Hanson’s
house, still bearing on its front the legend _Silverado Hotel_. Not
another sign of habitation. Silverado town had all been carted from the
scene; one of the houses was now the school-house far down the road; one
was gone here, one there, but all were gone away.
It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by the
great, vague voice of the wind. Some days before our visit, a grizzly
bear had been sporting round the Hansons’ chicken-house.
Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found. Rufe had been out after a
“bar,” had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear
whither. Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar’s coming, and was now
ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of the
mountain. We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for
immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado. But this, somehow, was not
to Kelmar’s fancy. He first proposed that we should “camp someveres
around, ain’t it?” waving his hand cheerily as though to weave a spell;
and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that we must take up house
with the Hansons. Mrs. Hanson had been, from the first, flustered,
subdued, and a little pale; but from this proposition she recoiled with
haggard indignation. So did we, who would have preferred, in a manner of
speaking, death. But Kelmar was not to be put by. He edged Mrs. Hanson
into a corner, where for a long time he threatened her with his
forefinger, like a character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to
her entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were still
some houses at the tunnel.
Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into Lake
County, still cheerily accompanying us. For about a furlong we followed
a good road alone, the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that
road widened out and came abruptly to an end. A canyon, woody below,
red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of
rolling stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in
height. A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous
gargoyle, across the parapet. It was down this that they poured the
precious ore; and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, and
carry it mill-ward down the mountain.
The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude guerilla
fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder,
fixed in the hillside. These led us round the farther corner of the
dump; and when they were at an end, we still persevered over loose rubble
and wading deep in poison oak, till we struck a triangular platform,
filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold projections
of the mountain. Only in front the place was open like the proscenium of
a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon
treetops and hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied country. The
place still stood as on the day it was deserted: a line of iron rails
with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of lumber, old
wood, old iron; a blacksmith’s forge on one side, half buried in the
leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown wooden house.
Fanny and I dashed at the house. It consisted of three rooms, and was so
plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of another, that
the upper floor was more than twice as large as the lower, and that all
three apartments must be entered from a different side and level. Not a
window-sash remained.
The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in splinters.
We entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish: sand and gravel that
had been sifted in there by the mountain winds; straw, sticks, and
stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack on the wall; two home-made
bootjacks, signs of miners and their boots; and a pair of papers pinned
on the boarding, headed respectively “Funnel No. 1,” and “Funnel No. 2,”
but with the tails torn away. The window, sashless of course, was choked
with the green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay; and through a chink
in the floor, a spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely
prospering in the interior. It was my first care to cut away that poison
oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance. That was our first
improvement by which we took possession.
The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped
against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it gingerly,
clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper product of the
country. Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds, where miners
had once lain; and the other gable was pierced by a sashless window and a
doorless doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the
ground. As for the third room, which entered squarely from the ground
level, but higher up the hill and farther up the canyon, it contained
only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier of beds.
The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock. Poison
oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely but
sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine, the platform lay
overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours of the mine might
begin again to-morrow in the morning.
Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and
through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging, with a
wry windless on the top; and clambering up, we could look into an open
shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the mountain, trickling
with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams, whence I know not. In that
quiet place the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was loudly
audible. Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the superincumbent
shoulder of the hill. It lay partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet
above our head, we could see the strata propped apart by solid wooden
wedges, and a pine, half undermined, precariously nodding on the verge.
Here also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned
bowels of the rock. This secure angle in the mountain’s flank was, even
on this wild day, as still as my lady’s chamber. But in the tunnel a
cold, wet draught tempestuously blew. Nor have I ever known that place
otherwise than cold and windy.
Such was our fist prospect of Juan Silverado. I own I had looked for
something different: a clique of neighbourly houses on a village green,
we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and varnished; a trout
stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts, humming with bees and nested
in by song-birds; and the mountains standing round about, as at
Jerusalem. Here, mountain and house and the old tools of industry were
all alike rusty and downfalling. The hill was here wedged up, and there
poured forth its bowels in a spout of broken mineral; man with his picks
and powder, and nature with her own great blasting tools of sun and rain,
labouring together at the ruin of that proud mountain. The view up the
canyon was a glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding together,
here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket clinging in the
general glissade, and over all a broken outline trenching on the blue of
heaven. Downwards indeed, from our rock eyrie, we behold the greener
side of nature; and the bearing of the pines and the sweet smell of bays
and nutmegs commanded themselves gratefully to our senses. One way and
another, now the die was cast. Silverado be it!
After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of
striking forward. But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came down,
before their departure, and returned with a ship’s kettle. Happy
Hansons! Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I remember rightly,
that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the details of our
installation.
The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the verandah of the Toll
House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the trees on the
other side of the valley. Sometimes, we would have it it was like a sea,
but it was not various enough for that; and again, we thought it like the
roar of a cataract, but it was too changeful for the cataract; and then
we would decide, speaking in sleepy voices, that it could be compared
with nothing but itself. My mind was entirely preoccupied by the noise.
I hearkened to it by the hour, gapingly hearkened, and let my cigarette
go out. Sometimes the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and send a
shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on our side of the glen; and
sometimes a back-draught would strike into the elbow where we sat, and
cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces. But for the most part,
this great, streaming gale passed unweariedly by us into Napa Valley, not
two hundred yards away, visible by the tossing boughs, stunningly
audible, and yet not moving a hair upon our heads. So it blew all night
long while I was writing up my journal, and after we were in bed, under a
cloudless, starset heaven; and so it was blowing still next morning when
we rose.
It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful,
wandering Hebrews. We could not suppose they had reached a destination.
The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their way to see a
gopher-hole. Boys, we felt to be their special danger; none others were
of that exact pitch of cheerful irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway
upon their minds: but before the attractions of a boy their most settled
resolutions would be war. We thought we could follow in fancy these
three aged Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop and in thicket,
a demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o’-the-wisp conductor; and at
last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the darkness, we had a
vision of all three on their knees upon a mountain-top around a
glow-worm.
CHAPTER III. THE RETURN
NEXT morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement, and it
was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us up. Kelmar,
Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to ear, and full of tales
of the hospitality they had found on the other side. It had not gone
unrewarded; for I observed with interest that the ship’s kettles, all but
one, had been “placed.” Three Lake County families, at least, endowed
for life with a ship’s kettle. Come, this was no misspent Sunday. The
absence of the kettles told its own story: our Jews said nothing about
them; but, on the other hand, they said many kind and comely things about
the people they had met. The two women, in particular, had been charmed
out of themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded by her
admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been triumphing together in
the girl’s innocent successes, and to this natural and unselfish joy they
gave expression in language that was beautiful by its simplicity and
truth.
Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good; they
seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in so large a
measure and so free from after-thought; almost they persuaded me to be a
Jew. There was, indeed, a chink of money in their talk. They
particularly commanded people who were well to do. “_He_ don’t
care—ain’t it?” was their highest word of commendation to an individual
fate; and here I seem to grasp the root of their philosophy—it was to be
free from care, to be free to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so
eagerly pursued after wealth; and all this carefulness was to be
careless. The fine, good humour of all three seemed to declare they had
attained their end. Yet there was the other side to it; and the
recipients of kettles perhaps cared greatly.
No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began again.
The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time—it was not
worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar, leaving them under a
tree on the other side of the road. I had to devote myself. I stood
under the shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour, and had
not the heart to be angry. Once some one remembered me, and brought me
out half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I
drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus
of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for
quarter of an hour. I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not
court them. The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French
poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to enjoy it hugely.
And now it went—
“O ma vieille Font-georges
Où volent les rouges-gorges:”
and again, to a more trampling measure—
“Et tout tremble, Irun, Coïmbre,
Sautander, Almodovar,
Sitôt qu’on entend le timbre
Des cymbales do Bivar.”
The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless land;
brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright armour, in
that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and the bear! This
is still the strangest thing in all man’s travelling, that he should
carry about with him incongruous memories. There is no foreign land; it
is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of
recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.
But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been
transacted in the bar. Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again
crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship’s kettles had changed
hands. If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar’s motives, if I had
ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal dallyings,
now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must
have been allayed. I dare not guess how much more time was wasted; nor
how often we drove off, merely to drive back again and renew interrupted
conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left
behind. Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a
sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.
Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the
picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and had an
age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny
and I had not been faint with hunger. The ladies each narrated the story
of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of
sentiment and financial bathos. Abramina, specially, endeared herself
with every word. She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that
should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer. One
touch was so resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over. When her
“old man” wrote home for her from America, her old man’s family would not
intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound herself by
an oath—on her knees, I think she said—not to employ it otherwise.
This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully more.
Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters; of her
honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey; how in the
bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her
cheque, should deny all knowledge of it—a fear I have myself every time I
go to a bank; and how crossing the Luneburger Heath, an old lady,
witnessing her trouble and finding whither she was bound, had given her
“the blessing of a person eighty years old, which would be sure to bring
her safely to the States. And the first thing I did,” added Mrs. Guele,
“was to fall downstairs.”
At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap,
when—judgment of Heaven!—here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard. So
another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our earnest
pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and
silent, but the Jews still smiling. The heart fails me. There was yet
another stoppage! And we drove at last into Calistoga past two in the
afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in the morning, eight
mortal hours before. We were a pallid couple; but still the Jews were
smiling.
So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it was
done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of the part
we had been playing in it, than the child unborn. That all the people we
had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various degrees of
servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain in the
interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by
dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of various intermediaries,
should all hop ultimately into Kelmar’s till;—these were facts that we
only grew to recognize in the course of time and by the accumulation of
evidence. At length all doubt was quieted, when one of the
kettle-holders confessed. Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little
way out of Calistoga, he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show
face therewith an empty pocket. “You see, I don’t mind if it was only
five dollars, Mr. Stevens,” he said, “but I must give Mr. Kelmar
_something_.”
Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it in my
heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant. The
whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and though perhaps that
game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so small a
scale, it is none the more intrinsically inhumane for that. The village
usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the
millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands,
and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of
landlords. If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he
thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my
Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers. Kelmar, if he was unconscious
of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his
brother’s mote.
THE ACT OF SQUATTING
THERE were four of us squatters—myself and my wife, the King and Queen of
Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand Duke. Chuchu, a
setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited for a rough life. He
had been nurtured tenderly in the society of ladies; his heart was large
and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion as a bed-rook necessary of
existence. Though about the size of a sheep, he loved to sit in ladies’
laps; he never said a bad word in all his blameless days; and if he had
seen a flute, I am sure he could have played upon it by nature. It may
seem hard to say it of a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat.
The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender for
immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the crown
prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider. Bags and boxes and a
second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels by Hanson’s team.
It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure. Not a leaf
moved, not a speck appeared in heaven. Only from the summit of the
mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept detaching
itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward in some high
stream of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her interminable task, making
the weather, like a Lapland witch.
By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great brown building,
half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with tanks
and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado mine, we
held to be an outlying province of our own. Thither, then, we went,
crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there lunched out of the
basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and wondering, while we ate, at
this great bulk of useless building. Through a chink we could look far
down into the interior, and see sunbeams floating in the dust and
striking on tier after tier of silent, rusty machinery. It cost six
thousand dollars, twelve hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it
stands deserted, like the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy
millers toiling somewhere else. All the time we were there, mill and
mill town showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain-side, which
is very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but ourselves
and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud manufactory upon the
mountain summit. It was odd to compare this with the former days, when
the engine was in fall blast, the mill palpitating to its strokes, and
the carts came rattling down from Silverado, charged with ore.
By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again, and we
were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold provender, until
Hanson should arrive. Hot as it was by the sun, there was something
chill in such a home-coming, in that world of wreck and rust, splinter
and rolling gravel, where for so many years no fire had smoked.
Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon. Above, as I
have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains; but below
it was a wooded dingle. And through this, I was told, there had gone a
path between the mine and the Toll House—our natural north-west passage
to civilization. I found and followed it, clearing my way as I went
through fallen branches and dead trees. It went straight down that steep
canyon, till it brought you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel.
There was nowhere any break in the descent. It almost seemed as if, were
you to drop a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would
never rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles. Signs were not
wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado. The footpath was well
marked, and had been well trodden in the old clays by thirsty miners.
And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of Silverado, I came
on a last outpost of the mine—a mound of gravel, some wreck of wooden
aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a treasure grotto in a fairy
story. A stream of water, fed by the invisible leakage from our shaft,
and dyed red with cinnabar or iron, ran trippingly forth out of the
bowels of the cave; and, looking far under the arch, I could see
something like an iron lantern fastened on the rocky wall. It was a
promising spot for the imagination. No boy could have left it
unexplored.
The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and made,
for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves. Once, I suppose,
it ran splashing down the whole length of the canyon, but now its head
waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado, and for a great part of
its course it wandered sunless among the joints of the mountain. No
wonder that it should better its pace when it sees, far before it,
daylight whitening in the arch, or that it should come trotting forth
into the sunlight with a song.
The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House stood,
dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted. My mission
was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily promised. But when I
mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the people shook their heads.
Rufe was not a regular man any way, it seemed; and if he got playing
poker—Well, poker was too many for Rufe. I had not yet heard them
bracketted together; but it seemed a natural conjunction, and commended
itself swiftly to my fears; and as soon as I returned to Silverado and
had told my story, we practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to do
what we could find do-able in our desert-island state.
The lower room had been the assayer’s office. The floor was thick with
_débris_—part human, from the former occupants; part natural, sifted in
by mountain winds. In a sea of red dust there swam or floated sticks,
boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient newspapers, above all—for
the newspaper, especially when torn, soon becomes an antiquity—and bills
of the Silverado boarding-house, some dated Silverado, some Calistoga
Mine. Here is one, verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of
charges, he has my envious admiration.
Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.
John Stanley
To S. Chapman, Cr.
To board from April 1st, to April 30 $25 75
,, ,, ,, May 1st, to 3rd . . . 2 00
27 75
Where is John Stanley mining now? Where is S. Chapman, within whose
hospitable walls we were to lodge? The date was but five years old, but
in that time the world had changed for Silverado; like Palmyra in the
desert, it had outlived its people and its purpose; we camped, like
Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke to us of prehistoric time. A
boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman’s
were the only speaking relics that we disinterred from all that vast
Silverado rubbish-heap; but what would I not have given to unearth a
letter, a pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of names, to
take me back, in a more personal manner, to the past? It pleases me,
besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their companions,
may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the name, and read some
news of their anterior home, coming, as it were, out of a subsequent
epoch of history in that quarter of the world.
As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it with our
feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past, Sam, with a
somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag. “What’s this?” said he.
It contained a granulated powder, something the colour of Gregory’s
Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several of the bags, and each more
or less broken, the powder was spread widely on the floor. Had any of us
ever seen giant powder? No, nobody had; and instantly there grew up in
my mind a shadowy belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude,
that I had somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as
the one around us. I have learnt since that it is a substance not unlike
tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world like tallow candles.
Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who had
camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine. He was a handy,
thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but all he could
lay his hands on was a can of oil. After dark he had to see to the
horses with a lantern; and not to miss an opportunity, filled up his lamp
from the oil can. Thus equipped, he set forth into the forest. A little
while after, his friends heard a loud explosion; the mountain echoes
bellowed, and then all was still. On examination, the can proved to
contain oil, with the trifling addition of nitro-glycerine; but no
research disclosed a trace of either man or lantern.
It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out the
giant powder. It seemed never to be far enough away. And, after all, it
was only some rock pounded for assay.
So much for the lower room. We scraped some of the rougher dirt off the
floor, and left it. That was our sitting-room and kitchen, though there
was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no provision for a fire except
a hole in the roof of the room above, which had once contained the
chimney of a stove.
To that upper room we now proceeded. There were the eighteen bunks in a
double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to thirty-six
miners had once snored together all night long, John Stanley, perhaps,
snoring loudest. There was the roof, with a hole in it through which the
sun now shot an arrow. There was the floor, in much the same state as
the one below, though, perhaps, there was more hay, and certainly there
was the added ingredient of broken glass, the man who stole the
window-frames having apparently made a miscarriage with this one.
Without a broom, without hay or bedding, we could but look about us with
a beginning of despair. The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and
shattered barrack, made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight
drove us at last into the open.
Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the plants were all
alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours of nature;
and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner, even although it
were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven. Not a bird, not a beast, not a
reptile. There was no noise in that part of the world, save when we
passed beside the staging, and heard the water musically falling in the
shaft.
We wandered to and fro. We searched among that drift of lumber-wood and
iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of tracks. We gazed
up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain. We sat by the margin of the
dump and saw, far below us, the green treetops standing still in the
clear air. Beautiful perfumes, breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came
to us more often and grew sweeter and sharper as the afternoon declined.
But still there was no word of Hanson.
I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the shaft,
till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and by the time I
had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the mountain shoulder,
the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a chill descended from the
sky. Night began early in our cleft. Before us, over the margin of the
dump, we could see the sun still striking aslant into the wooded nick
below, and on the battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther
side.
There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we betook
ourselves to the blacksmith’s forge across the platform. If the platform
be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the dump to represent
the line of the foot-lights, then our house would be the first wing on
the actor’s left, and this blacksmith’s forge, although no match for it
in size, the foremost on the right. It was a low, brown cottage, planted
close against the hill, and overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of
a madrona thicket. Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust,
and rubbish from the mine. But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing,
and sat close about it on impromptu seats. Chuchu, the slave of
sofa-cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us were
greatly revived and comforted by that good creature-fire, which gives us
warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up the emptiest
building with better than frescoes. For a while it was even pleasant in
the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a look over our shoulders on
the woods and mountains where the day was dying like a dolphin.
It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a waggonful of
our effects and two of his wife’s relatives to lend him a hand. The
elder showed surprising strength. He would pick up a huge packing-case,
full of books of all things, swing it on his shoulder, and away up the
two crazy ladders and the breakneck spout of rolling mineral, familiarly
termed a path, that led from the cart-track to our house. Even for a man
unburthened, the ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine sealed it
with a light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage
child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth act.
With so strong a helper, the business was speedily transacted. Soon the
assayer’s office was thronged with our belongings, piled
higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the floor. There were our
boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys in Calistoga. There was the
stove, but, alas! our carriers had forgot the chimney, and lost one of
the plates along the road. The Silverado problem was scarce solved.
Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he even,
if I remember right, expressed regret. But his crew, to my astonishment
and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud at our distress.
They thought it “real funny” about the stove-pipe they had forgotten;
“real funny” that they should have lost a plate. As for hay, the whole
party refused to bring us any till they should have supped. See how late
they were! Never had there been such a job as coming up that grade! Nor
often, I suspect, such a game of poker as that before they started. But
about nine, as a particular favour, we should have some hay.
So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we resigned
ourselves to wait for their return. The fire in the forge had been
suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to kindle another.
We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we ate after a fashion, in
the nightmare disorder of the assayer’s office, perched among boxes. A
single candle lighted us. It could scarce be called a housewarming; for
there was, of course, no fire, and with the two open doors and the open
window gaping on the night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow
rapidly chill. Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still
in quest of sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks.
It required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward hopefully,
from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of night, to the warm
shining of to-morrow’s sun.
But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of
courage, to the bedroom. We had improved the entrance, but it was still
a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see us mounting,
one after another, by candle-light, under the open stars.
The western door—that which looked up the canyon, and through which we
entered by our bridge of flying plank—was still entire, a handsome,
panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in Silverado. And
the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled with hay for that
night’s use. Through the opposite, or eastern-looking gable, with its
open door and window, a faint, disused starshine came into the room like
mist; and when we were once in bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a haunted,
incomplete obscurity. At first the silence of the night was utter. Then
a high wind began in the distance among the treetops, and for hours
continued to grow higher. It seemed to me much such a wind as we had
found on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only by
gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was the canyon, so close our
house was planted under the overhanging rock.
THE HUNTER’S FAMILY
THERE is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom we
scarcely seem to have a parallel in England. Of pure white blood, they
are unknown or unrecognizable in towns; inhabit the fringe of settlements
and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious to all labour, and
pettily thievish, like the English gipsies; rustically ignorant, but with
a touch of wood-lore and the dexterity of the savage. Whence they came
is a moot point. At the time of the war, they poured north in crowds to
escape the conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and
petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies failed,
built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically by starvation.
They are widely scattered, however, and easily recognized. Loutish, but
not ill-looking, they will sit all day, swinging their legs on a field
fence, the mind seemingly as devoid of all reflection as a Suffolk
peasant’s, careless of politics, for the most part incapable of reading,
but with a rebellious vanity and a strong sense of independence. Hunting
is their most congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little
amateur detection. In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse
along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a
footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display
activity of body and finesse of mind. By their names ye may know them,
the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men
answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on
the first. Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is the form
of degeneracy common to all back-woodsmen, they are at least known by a
generic byword, as Poor Whites or Low-downers.
I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the name
savours of offence; but I may go as far as this—they were, in many
points, not unsimilar to the people usually so-cared. Rufe himself
combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a hunter and an
amateur detective. It was he who pursued Russel and Dollar, the robbers
of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the very morning after the
exploit, while they were still sleeping in a hayfield. Russel, a drunken
Scotch carpenter, was even an acquaintance of his own, and he expressed
much grave commiseration for his fate. In all that he said and did, Rufe
was grave. I never saw him hurried. When he spoke, he took out his pipe
with ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet
tones and few words, stated his business or told his story. His gait was
to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any step, he had
turned round and walked away again, so warily and slowly, and with so
much seeming hesitation did he go about. He lay long in bed in the
morning—rarely indeed, rose before noon; he loved all games, from poker
to clerical croquet; and in the Toll House croquet ground I have seen him
toiling at the latter with the devotion of a curate. He took an interest
in education, was an active member of the local school-board, and when I
was there, he had recently lost the schoolhouse key. His waggon was
broken, but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it. Like all truly
idle people, he had an artistic eye. He chose the print stuff for his
wife’s dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patchwork quilt,
always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye, always
with bizarre and admirable taste—the taste of an Indian. With all this,
he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act. Take his clay
pipe from him, and he was fit for any society but that of fools. Quiet
as he was, there burned a deep, permanent excitement in his dark blue
eyes; and when this grave man smiled, it was like sunshine in a shady
place.
Mrs. Hanson (_née_, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace than
her lord. She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured, with
wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and with
a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion, made, I assure you, a
very agreeable figure. But she was on the surface, what there was of
her, out-spoken and loud-spoken. Her noisy laughter had none of the
charm of one of Hanson’s rare, slow-spreading smiles; there was no
reticence, no mystery, no manner about the woman: she was a first-class
dairymaid, but her husband was an unknown quantity between the savage and
the nobleman. She was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy, and
fair; he came far seldomer—only, indeed, when there was business, or now
and again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the occasion, with
his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth. These visits,
in our forest state, had quite the air of an event, and turned our red
canyon into a salon.
Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the windy
trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length of Napa
Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship’s deck. There they kept
house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel
Webster, and I think George Washington, among the number. Nor did they
want visitors. An old gentleman, of singular stolidity, and called
Breedlove—I think he had crossed the plains in the same caravan with
Rufe—housed with them for awhile during our stay; and they had besides a
permanent lodger, in the form of Mrs. Hanson’s brother, Irvine Lovelands.
I spell Irvine by guess; for I could get no information on the subject,
just as I could never find out, in spite of many inquiries, whether or
not Rufe was a contraction for Rufus. They were all cheerfully at sea
about their names in that generation. And this is surely the more
notable where the names are all so strange, and even the family names
appear to have been coined. At one time, at least, the ancestors of all
these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and Breedloves, must have
taken serious council and found a certain poetry in these denominations;
that must have been, then, their form of literature. But still times
change; and their next descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel
Websters, will at least be clear upon the point. And anyway, and however
his name should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands was the most unmitigated
Caliban I ever knew.
Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business,
patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats, and getting our
rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their appearance
together, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity; he, because he
was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood at I forget how much a
day. The way that he set about cutting wood was characteristic. We were
at that moment patching up and unpacking in the kitchen. Down he sat on
one side, and down sat his sister on the other. Both were chewing
pine-tree gum, and he, to my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure
with profuse expectoration. She rattled away, talking up hill and down
dale, laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth. He looked
on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his head
back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh. He had a tangle of
shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin; although as strong
as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet adroit, only leggy, coltish,
and in the road. But it was plain he was in high spirits, thoroughly
enjoying his visit; and he laughed frankly whenever we failed to
accomplish what we were about. This was scarcely helpful: it was even,
to amateur carpenters, embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off
work and began to get dinner. Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should
have been gone an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady’s laughter
died away among the nutmegs down the path. That was Irvine’s first day’s
work in my employment—the devil take him!
The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he bestowed
his conversation upon us with great liberality. He prided himself on his
intelligence; asked us if we knew the school ma’am. _He_ didn’t think
much of her, anyway. He had tried her, he had. He had put a question to
her. If a tree a hundred feet high were to fall a foot a day, how long
would it take to fall right down? She had not been able to solve the
problem. “She don’t know nothing,” he opined. He told us how a friend
of his kept a school with a revolver, and chuckled mightily over that;
his friend could teach school, he could. All the time he kept chewing
gum and spitting. He would stand a while looking down; and then he would
toss back his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring
forward a new subject. A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him,
had poisoned his dog. “That was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn’t
it? It wasn’t like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with him: I
pisoned _his_ dog.” His clumsy utterance, his rude embarrassed manner,
set a fresh value on the stupidity of his remarks. I do not think I ever
appreciated the meaning of two words until I knew Irvine—the verb, loaf,
and the noun, oaf; between them, they complete his portrait. He could
lounge, and wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be
more in everybody’s way than any other two people that I ever set my eyes
on. Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious that he
was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at work, revolving
the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in his own cloudy manner
enjoying life, and passing judgment on his fellows. Above all things, he
was delighted with himself. You would not have thought it, from his
uneasy manners and troubled, struggling utterance; but he loved himself
to the marrow, and was happy and proud like a peacock on a rail.
His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness. He could be
got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery. As long as my wife
stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long exactly he would
stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she turned her back, or
ceased to praise him, he would stop. His physical strength was
wonderful; and to have a woman stand by and admire his achievements,
warmed his heart like sunshine. Yet he was as cowardly as he was
powerful, and felt no shame in owning to the weakness. Something was
once wanted from the crazy platform over the shaft, and he at once
refused to venture there—“did not like,” as he said, “foolen’ round them
kind o’ places,” and let my wife go instead of him, looking on with a
grin. Vanity, where it rules, is usually more heroic: but Irvine
steadily approved himself, and expected others to approve him; rather
looked down upon my wife, and decidedly expected her to look up to him,
on the strength of his superior prudence.
Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this, that Irvine
was as beautiful as a statue. His features were, in themselves, perfect;
it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse expression that disfigured
them. So much strength residing in so spare a frame was proof sufficient
of the accuracy of his shape. He must have been built somewhat after the
pattern of Jack Sheppard; but the famous housebreaker, we may be certain,
was no lout. It was by the extraordinary powers of his mind no less than
by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong prison with such
imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles to service. Irvine, in
the same case, would have sat down and spat, and grumbled curses. He had
the soul of a fat sheep, but, regarded as an artist’s model, the exterior
of a Greek God. It was a cruel thought to persons less favoured in their
birth, that this creature, endowed—to use the language of theatres—with
extraordinary “means,” should so manage to misemploy them that he looked
ugly and almost deformed. It was only by an effort of abstraction, and
after many days, that you discovered what he was.
By playing on the oaf’s conceit, and standing closely over him, we got a
path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that we could come
and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the work, for in that there
were boulders to be plucked up bodily, bushes to be uprooted, and other
occasions for athletic display: but cutting wood was a different matter.
Anybody could cut wood; and, besides, my wife was tired of supervising
him, and had other things to attend to. And, in short, days went by, and
Irvine came daily, and talked and lounged and spat; but the firewood
remained intact as sleepers on the platform or growing trees upon the
mountainside. Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but Irvine as
a friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an imposition, and
at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or fifth day of our connection,
I explained to him, as clearly as I could, the light in which I had grown
to regard his presence. I pointed out to him that I could not continue
to give him a salary for spitting on the floor; and this expression,
which came after a good many others, at last penetrated his obdurate
wits. He rose at once, and said if that was the way he was going to be
spoke to, he reckoned he would quit. And, no one interposing, he
departed.