The snow rarely falls in Krasnoiarsk. It is a little oasis in the
great winter desert of Siberia. Rezanov, his face turned to the
window, could see the red banks on the opposite side of the river. The
sun transformed the gilded cupolas and crosses into dazzling points of
light, and the sky above the spires and towers, the stately square and
narrow dirty streets of the bustling little capital, was as blue and
unflecked as that which arched so high above a land where Castilian
roses grew, and one woman among a gay and thoughtless people dreamed,
with all the passion of her splendid youth, of the man to whom she had
pledged an eternal troth. Rezanov's mind was clear in those last
moments, but something of the serenity and the selfishness of death had
already descended upon him. He heard with indifference the sobs of
Jon, crouched at the foot of his bed. Tears and regrets were a part of
the general futility of life, insignificant enough at the grand
threshold of death.
No doubt that his great schemes would die with him, and were he
remembered at all it would be as a dreamer; or as a failure because he
had died before accomplishing what his brain and energy and enthusiasm
alone could force to fruition. None realized better than he the
paucity of initiative and executive among the characteristics of the
Slav. What mattered it? He had had glimpses more than once of the
apparently illogical sequence of life, the vanity of human effort, the
wanton cruelty of Nature. He had known men struck down before in the
maturity of their usefulness, cities destroyed by earthquake or
hurricane in the fairest and most promising of their days: public men,
priests, parents, children, wantons, criminals, blotted out with equal
impartiality by a brutal force that would seem to have but a casual use
for the life she flung broadcast on her planets. Man was the helpless
victim of Nature, a calf in a tiger's paws. If she overlooked him, or
swept him contemptuously into the class of her favorites, well and
good; otherwise he was her sport, the plaything of her idler moments.
Those that cried "But why?" "What reason?" "What use?" were those
that had never looked over the walls of their ego at the great dramatic
moments in the career of Nature, when she made immortal fame for
herself at the expense of millions of pigmies.
And if his energies, his talents, his usefulness, were held of no
account, at least he could look back upon a past when he would have
seemed to be one of the few supreme favorites of the forces that shaped
man's life and destiny. Until he had started from Kronstadt four years
before on a voyage that had humiliated his proud spirit more than once,
and undermined as splendid a physique as ever was granted to even a
Russian, he had rolled the world under his foot. With an appearance
and a personal magnetism, gifts of mind and manner and character that
would have commanded attention amid the general flaccidity of his race
and conquered life without the great social advantages he inherited, he
had enjoyed power and pleasure to a degree that would have spoiled a
coarser nature long since. True, the time had come when he had cared
little for any of his endowments save as a means to great ends, when
all his energies had concentrated in the determination to live a life
of the highest possible usefulness--without which man's span was but
existence--his ambitions had cohered and been driven steadily toward a
permanent niche in history; then paled and dissolved for an hour in the
glorious vision of human happiness.
And wholly as he might realize man's insignificance among the blind
forces of nature, he could accept it philosophically and die with his
soul uncorroded by misanthropy, that final and uncompromising admission
of failure. The misanthrope was the supreme failure of life because he
had not the intelligence to realize, or could not reconcile himself to,
the incomplete condition of human nature. Man was made up of little
qualities, and aspirations for great ones. Many yielded in the
struggle and sank into impotent discontent among the small material
things of life, instead of uplifting themselves with the picture of the
inevitable future when development had run its course, and indulgently
pitying the children of their own period who so often made life hateful
with their greed, selfishness, snobbery--most potent obstacle to human
endeavor--and injustice. The bad judgment of the mass! How many
careers it had balked, if not ruined, with its poor ideals, its mean
heroes, its instinctive avoidance of superior qualities foreign to
itself, its contemptible desire to be identified with a fashion. It
was this low standard of the crowd that induced misanthropy in many
otherwise brave spirits who lacked the insight to discern the divine
spark underneath, the persistence, sure of reward, to fight their way
to this spark and reveal it to the gaze of astonished and flattered
humanity. Rezanov's very arrogance had led him to regard the mass of
mankind as but one degree removed from the nursery; his good nature and
philosophical spirit to treat them with an indulgence that kept
sourness out of his cynicism and inevitably recurring weariness and
disgust; his ardent imagination had consoled itself with the vision of
a future when man should live in a world made reasonable by the triumph
of ideals that now lurked half ashamed in the high spaces of the human
mind.
He looked back in wonder at the moment of wild regret and protest--the
bitterer in its silence--when they had told him he must die; when in
the last rally of the vital forces he had believed his will was still
strong enough to command his ravaged body, to propel his brain, still
teeming with a vast and complicated future, his heart, still warm and
insistent with the image it cherished, on to the ultimates of ambition
and love. How brief it had been, that last cry of mortality, with its
accompaniment of furious wonder at his unseemly and senseless cutting
off. In the adjustment and readjustment of political and natural
forces the world ambled on philosophically, fulfilling its inevitable
destiny.
If he had not been beyond humor, he would have smiled at the idea that
in the face of all eternity it mattered what nation on one little
planet eventually possessed a fragment called California. To him that
fair land was empty and purposeless save for one figure, and even of
her he thought with the terrible calm of dissolution. During these
last months of illness and isolation he had been less lonely than at
any time of his life save during those few weeks in California, for he
had lived with her incessantly in spirit; and in that subtle
imaginative communion had pressed close to a profound and complex soul,
revealed before only in flashes to a vision astray in the confusion of
the senses. He had felt that her response to his passion was far more
vital and enduring than dwelt in the capacity of most women; he had
appreciated her gifts of mind, her piquant variousness that scotched
monotony, the admirable characteristics that would give a man repose
and content in his leisure, and subtly advance his career. But in
those long reveries, at the head of his forlorn caravan or in the
desolate months of convalescence, he had arrived at an absolute
understanding of what she herself had divined while half comprehending.
Theirs was one of the few immortal loves that reveal the rarely sounded
deeps of the soul while in its frail tenement on earth; and he harbored
not a doubt that their love was stronger than mortality and that their
ultimate union was decreed. Meanwhile, she would suffer, no one but he
could dream how completely, but her strong soul would conquer, and she
would live the life she had visioned in moments of despair; not of
cloistered selfishness, but of incomparable usefulness to her little
world; and far happier, in her eternal youthfulness of heart, in that
divine life of the imagination where he must always be with her as she
had known him briefly at his best, than in the blunt commonplaceness of
daily existence, the routine and disillusionment of the world.
Perhaps--who knew?--he had, after all, given her the best that man can
offer to a woman of exalted nature; instead of taking again with his
left hand what his right had bestowed; completed the great gift of life
with the priceless beacon of death.
How unlike was life to the old Greek tragedies! He recalled his
prophetic sense of impending happiness, success, triumph, as he entered
California, the rejuvenescence of his spirit in the renewal of his
wasted forces even before he loved the woman. Every event of the past
year, in spite of the obstacles that mortal must expect, had marched
with his ambitions and desires, and straight toward a future that would
have given him the most coveted of all destinies, a station in history.
There had not been a hint that his brain, so meaningly and consummately
equipped, would perish in the ruins of his body in less than a
twelvemonth from that fragrant morning when he had entered the home of
Concha Arguello tingling with a pagan joy in mere existence, a sudden
rush of desire for the keen, wild happiness of youth--
His eyes wandered from the bright cross above the little cemetery where
he was to lie, and contracted with an expression of wonder. Where had
Jon found Castilian roses in this barren land? No man had ever been
more blest in a servant, but could even he--here-- With the last
triumph of will over matter he raised his head, his keen, searching
gaze noting every detail of the room, bare and unlovely save for its
altar and ikons, its kneeling priests and nuns. His eyes expanded, his
nostrils quivered. As he sank down in the embrace of that final
delusion, his unconquerably sanguine spirit flared high before a vision
of eternal and unthinkable happiness.
So died Rezanov; and with him the hope of Russians and the hindrance of
Americans in the west; and the mortal happiness and earthly dross of
the saintliest of California's women.
Note: I have made the following changes to the text: