Chapter 16

The weather was now intensely cold, the river winding, the delays many, but there were adequate stations for the benefit and accommodation of travelers every hundred versts or less. Rezanov felt so invigorated by the long hours in the open after the barbarous closeness of his sick room, that at the end of a fortnight he was again possessed with all his old ardor of desire to reach the end of his journey. He vowed he was well again, abandoned his comfortable sledge, and pushed on in the common manner. In the wretched post sledges he was often exposed to the full violence of a Siberian winter, and although the horseback exercise stirred his blood and refreshed him for the moment, he suffered in reaction and was several times forced to remain two nights instead of one at a station. But he was muffled in sables to his very eyes, and the road was diverting, often beautiful, with its Gothic mountains, its white plains set with villages and farms, the high thin crosses above the open or swelling domes of the little churches. Sometimes the Lena narrowed until its frozen surface looked like a mass of ice that had ground its way between perpendicular walls or overhanging masses of rock that awaited the next convulsion of nature to close the pass altogether. Then the dogs trotted past caves and grottos, left the abrupt and craggy banks, crossed level plains once more; where herds of cattle grazed in the summertime, now a vast uncheckered expanse of white. The Government and Company agents fawned upon him, the best of horses and beds, food and wine, were eagerly placed at the disposal of the favorite of the Tsar. Rezanov's spirit, always of the finest temper, suffered no eclipse for many days. He reveled in the belief that his sorely tried body was regenerating its old vigors.

From Wercholensk to Katschuk the journey was so winding by river that it consumed more than twice the time of the land route, which although only thirty versts in extent was one of the most difficult in Siberia. Rezanov chose the latter without hesitation, and would listen to no discussion from the Commissary of the little town or from his distracted Jon: the journey from Yakutsk had now lasted five weeks and the servant's watchful eye noted signs of exhaustion.

The hills were very high and very steep, the roads but a name in summer. Had not the snow been soft and thin, the horses could not have made the ascent at all; and, as it was, the riders were forced to walk the greater part of the way and drag their unwilling steeds behind them. They were twelve hours covering the thirty versts, and at Katschuk Rezanov succumbed for two days, while Jon scoured the country in search of a telega; as sometimes happened there was a long stretch of country without snow, and sledges, by far the most comfortable method of travel in Siberia, could not be used. The rest of the journey, but one hundred and ninety-six versts, must be made by land. Rezanov admitted that he was too weary to ride, and refused to travel in the post carriage. On the third day the servant managed to hire a telega from a superior farmer and they started immediately, the heavy luggage having been consigned to a merchant vessel at Yakutsk.

Rezanov stood the telega exactly half a day. Little larger than an armchair and far lighter, it was drawn by horses that galloped up and down hill and across the intervening valleys with no change of gait, and over a road so rough that the little vehicle seemed to be propelled by a succession of earthquakes. Rezanov, in a fever which he attributed to rage, dismissed the telega at a village and awaited the coming of Jon, who followed on horseback with the personal luggage.

It was a village of wooden houses built in the Russian fashion, and inhabited by a dignified tribe wearing long white garments bordered with fur. They spoke Russian, a language little heard farther north and east in Siberia, and when Rezanov declined their hospitality they dispatched a courier at once to the Governor-General of Irkutsk acquainting him with the condition of the Chamberlain and of his imminent arrival. In consequence, when Rezanov drew rein two days later and looked down upon the city of Irkutsk with its pleasant squares and great stone buildings beside the shining river, the gilded domes and crosses of its thirty churches and convents glittering in the sun, the whole picture beckoning to the delirious brain of the traveler like some mirage of the desert, his appearance was the signal for a salute from the fort; and the Governor-General, privy counselor and senator de Pestel, accompanied by the civil governor, the commandant, the archbishop, and a military escort, sallied forth and led the guest, with the formality of officials and the compassionate tenderness of men, into the capital.

For three weeks longer Rezanov lay in the palace of the Governor. Between fever and lassitude, his iron will seemed alternately to melt in the fiery furnace of his body, then, a cooling but still viscous and formless mass, sink to the utmost depths of his being. But here he had the best of nursing and attendance, rallied finally and insisted upon continuing his journey. His doctor made the less demur as the traveling was far smoother now, in the early days of March, than it would be a month hence, when the snow was thinner and the sledges were no longer possible. Nevertheless, he announced his intention to accompany him as far as Krasnoiarsk, where the Chamberlain could lodge in the house of the principal magistrate of the place, Counselor Keller, and, if necessary, be able to command fair nursing and medical attendance; and to this Rezanov indifferently assented.

The prospect of continuing his journey and the bustle of preparation raised the spirits of the invalid and gave him a fictitious energy. He had fought depression and despair in all his conscious moments, never admitted that the devastation in his body was mortal. With but a remnant of his former superb strength, and emaciated beyond recognition, he attended a banquet on the night preceding his departure, and on the following morning stood up in his sledge and acknowledged the God-speed of the population of Irkutsk assembled in the square before the palace of the Governor. All his life he had excited interest wherever he went, but never to such a degree as on that last journey when he made his desperate fight for life and happiness.

XXVII

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:

PAGE LINE ORIGINAL CHANGED TO

ii 13 unforgetable unforgettable ii 26 vizu- visu- vi 29 Krasnioarsk Krasnoiarsk 14 22 Arguella Arguello 15 28 Anna Ana 15 28 Gertrudes Gertrudis 16 6 Ignacia Ignacio 18 17 Dios de mi alma! _Dios de mi alma!_* 20 11 Madre de Dios!" _Madre de Dios!_"* 23 3 Ay yi! _Ay yi!* 23 4 Dios, Dios_,* 23 20 Propietario Proprietario 23 23 plebian plebeian 23 26 Madre de Dios! _Madre de Dios!_* 25 18 Dios mio! _Dios mio! 25 19 mio!" mio!_"* 33 17 embarassing embarrassing 33 24 Nadesha Nadeshda 40 10 commercal commercial 40 13 momentuous momentous 43 28 disintergrating disintegrating 51 5 He lover Her lover 55 4 Morga Moraga 71 22 Rafella Rafaella 72 3 straights straits 75 9 "You "Your 94 16 inexhautible inexhaustible 103 2 embarassed embarrassed 105 3 preciptate precipitate 106 28 Bueno Buena 111 8 Madre de Dios, _Madre de Dios_,* 117 30 prefer, prefer. 118 20 I "I 128 10 Arillaga Arrillaga 128 18 ride of rid of 133 8 Arillaga Arrillaga 133 22 Arillaga Arrillaga 135 10 Are "Are 137 28 Arrilaga Arrillaga 137 29 Nakasaki Nagasaki 146 21 refuse--' refuse--" 155 24 dumfounded dumbfounded 169 29 Moragas Moraga 171 7 twice--' twice--" 177 14 said said he said 178 16 phasis." phasis. 178 26 modoties modities 195 17 civilized that civilized than 200 27 gente de _gente de_* 201 1 razon _razon_* 201 21 silk silks 204 29 Duena duena 209 2 beneficient beneficent 211 13 Ay yi! _Ay yi!* 211 14 yi! yi!_* 212 22 Ay yi! _Ay yi!_* 213 3 ay yi! _ay yi!_*

I have also omitted the accents over proper names such as Rezanov, Baranhov, and Jose, and have omitted the umlaut over the u in Arguello.

* indicates that the italics were NOT used as emphasis, but merely as indicators of SOME of the non-English words, and were eventually stripped of their italicism for easier reading.

The first words of each chapter were also capitalized on paper, as least most of them. These have also been uncapitalized.