University of Virginia Library

4. CHAPTER IV.
JOHN BRENT.

A man who does not love luxury is merely an
incomplete man, or, if he prefers, an ignoramus.
A man who cannot dispense with luxury, and
who does not love hard fare, hard bed, hard
travel, and all manner of robust, vigorous, tense
work, is a weakling and a soft. Sybaris is a
pretty town, rose-leaves are a delicate mattrass,
Lydian measures are dulcet to soul and body:
also, the wilderness is “no mean city”; hemlock
or heather for couch, brocken for curtain, are not
cruelty; prairie gales are a brave lullaby for
adults.

Simple furniture and simple fare a campaigner
needs for the plains, — for chamber furniture, a
pair of blankets; for kitchen furniture, a frying-pan
and a coffee-pot; for table furniture, a tin
mug and his bowie-knife: Sybaris adds a tin
plate, a spoon, and even a fork. The list of provisions
is as short, — pork, flour, and coffee; that
is all, unless Sybaris should indulge in a modicum
of tea, a dose or two of sugar, and a vial
of vinegar for holidays.

I had several days for preparation, until my
companions, the mail-riders, should arrive. One
morning I was busy making up my packs of such
luxuries as I have mentioned for the journey,
when I heard the clatter of horses' feet, and observed
a stranger approach and ride up to the
door of my shanty. He was mounted upon a
powerful iron-gray horse, and drove a pack mule
and an Indian pony.

My name was on an elaborately painted shingle
over the door. It was my own handiwork, and
quite a lion in that region. I felt, whenever I
inspected that bit of high art, that, fail or win at
the mine, I had a resource. Indeed, my Pike
neighbors seemed to consider that I was unjustifiably
burying my artistic talents. Many a not
unseemly octagonal slug, with Moffatt & Co.'s
imprimatur of value, had been offered me if I
would paint up some miner's hell, as “The
True Paradise,” or “The Shades and Caffy de
Paris.”

The new-comer read my autograph on the
shingle, looked about, caught sight of me at
work in the hot shade, dismounted, fastened his
horses, and came toward me. It was not the
fashion in California, at that time, to volunteer
civility or acquaintance. Men had to announce
themselves, and prove their claims. I sat where
I was, and surveyed the stranger.

“The Adonis of the copper-skins!” I said to
myself. “This is the `Young Eagle,' or the
`Sucking Dove,' or the `Maiden's Bane,' or
some other great chief of the cleanest Indian
tribe on the continent. A beautiful youth! O
Fenimore, why are you dead! There are a
dozen romances in one look of that young brave.
One chapter might be written on his fringed
buckskin shirt; one on his equally fringed leggings,
with their stripe of porcupine-quills; and
one short chapter on his moccasons, with their
scarlet cloth instep-piece, and his cap of otter fur
decked with an eagle's feather. What a poem
the fellow is! I wish I was an Indian myself for
such a companion; or, better, a squaw, to be
made love to by him.”

As he approached, I perceived that he was
not copper, but bronze. A pale-face certainly!
That is, a pale-face tinged by the brazen sun of
a California summer. Not less handsome, however,
as a Saxon, than an Indian brave. As
soon as I identified him as one of my own race,
I began to fancy I had seen him before.

“If he were but shaved and clipped, black-coated,
booted, gloved, hatted with a shiny cylinder,
disarmed of his dangerous looking arsenal,
and armed with a plaything of a cane, — in short,
if he were metamorphosed from a knight-errant
into a carpet-knight, changed from a smooth

rough into a smooth smooth, — seems to me I
should know him, or know that I had known
him once.”

He came up, laid his hand familiarly on my
arm, and said, “What, Wade? Don't you remember
me? John Brent.”

“I hear your voice. I begin to see you now.
Hurrah!”

“How was it I did not recognize you,” said I,
after a fraternal greeting.

“Ten years have presented me with this for a
disguise,” said he, giving his moustache a twirl.
“Ten years of experience have taken all the girl
out of me.”

“What have you been doing these ten years,
since College, O many-sided man?”

“Grinding my sides against the Adamant,
every one.”

“Has your diamond begun to see light, and
shine?”

“The polishing-dust dims it still.”

“How have you found life, kind or cruel?”

“Certainly not kind, hardly cruel, unless indifference
is cruelty.”

“But indifference, want of sympathy, must
have been a positive relief after the aggressive
cruelty of your younger days.”

“And what have you been doing, Richard?”

“Everything that Yankees do, — digging last.”

“That has been my business, too, as well as
polishing.”

“The old work, I suppose, to root out lies
and plant in truth.”

“That same slow task. Tunnelling too, to
find my way out of the prison of doubt into the
freedom of faith.”

“You are out, then, at last. Happy and at
peace, I hope.”

“At peace, hardly happy. How can such a
lonely fellow be happy?”

“We are peers in bereavement now. My
family are all gone, except two little children
of my sister.”

“Not quite peers. You remember your relatives
tenderly. I have no such comfort.”

Odd talk this may seem, to hold with an old
friend. Ten years apart! We ought to have
met in merrier mood. We might, if we had
parted with happy memories. But it was not
so. Youth had been a harsh season to Brent.
If Fate destines a man to teach, she compels him
to learn, — bitter lessons, too, whether he will or
no. Brent was a man of genius. All experience,
therefore, piled itself upon him. He must
learn the immortal consolations by probing all
suffering himself.

Brent's story is a short one or a long one. It
can be told in a page, or in a score of volumes.

We had met fourteen years before in the same
pew of Berkeley College Chapel, grammars by
our side and tutors before us, two well-crammed
candidates for the Freshman Class. Brent was
a delicate, beautiful, dreamy boy. My counterpart.
I was plain prose, and needed the poetic
element. We became friends. I was steady;
he was erratic. I was calm; he was passionate.
I was reasonably happy; he was totally miserable.
For good cause.

The cause was this; and it has broken weaker
hearts than Brent's. His heart was made of
stuff that does not know how to break.

Dr. Swerger was the cause of Brent's misery.
The Reverend Dr. Swerger was a brutal man.
One who believes that God is vengeance naturally
imitates his God, and does not better his
model.

Swerger was Brent's step-father. Mrs. Brent
was pretty, silly, rich, and a widow. Swerger
wanted his wife pretty, and not too wise; and
that she was rich balanced, perhaps a little more
than balanced, the slight objection of widowhood.

Swerger naturally hated his step-son. One intuition
of Brent's was worth all the thoughts of
Swerger's life-time. A clergyman who starts
with believing in hells, devils, original sin, and
such crudities, can never be anything in the nineteenth

century but a tyrant or a nuisance, if he
has any logic, as fortunately few of such misbelievers
have. Swerger had logic. So had the
boy Brent, — the logic of a true, pure, loving
heart. He could not stand Swerger's coming
into his dead father's house and deluding his
mother with a black fanaticism.

So Swerger gave him to understand that he
was a child of hell. He won his wife to shrink
from her son. Between them they lacerated the
boy. He was a brilliant fellow, facile princeps
of us all. But he worked under a cloud. He
could not get at any better religion than Swerger's;
and perhaps there was none better — or
much better — to be had at that time.

One day matters came to a quarrel. Swerger
cursed his step-son; of course not in the same
terms the sailors used on Long Wharf, but with
no better spirit. The mother, cowed by her
husband, backed him, and abandoned the boy.
They drove him out of the house, to go where he
would. He came to me. I gave him half my
quarters, and tried to cheer him. No use. This
bitter wrong to his love to God and to man almost
crushed him. He brooded and despaired.
He began to fancy himself the lost soul Swerger
had called him. I saw that he would die or go
mad; or, if he had strength enough to react, it
would be toward a hapless rebellion against conventional

laws, and so make his blight ruin. I
hurried him off to Europe, for change of scene.
That was ten years ago, and I had not seen him
since. I knew, however, that his mother was
visited by compunctions; that she wished to be
reconciled to her son; that Swerger refused, and
renewed his anathemas; that he bullied the poor
little woman to death; that Brent had to wring
the property out of him by a long lawsuit, which
the Swergerites considered an unconstitutional
and devilish proceeding, another proof of total
depravity. Miserable business! It went near to
crush all the innocence, faith, hope, and religion
out of my friend's life.

Of course this experience had a tendency to
drive Brent out of the common paths, to make
him a seer instead of a doer. The vulgar cannot
comprehend that, when a man is selected by
character and circumstance, acting together under
the name of destiny, to be a seer, he must
see to the end before he begins to say what he
sees, to be a guide, a monitor, and a helper. The
vulgar, therefore, called Brent a wasted life, a
man of genius manqué, a pointless investigator, a
purposeless dreamer. The vulgar loves to make
up its mind prematurely. The vulgar cannot
abide a man who lives a blameless life so far as
personal conduct goes, and yet declines to accept
worldly tests of success, worldly principles of

action. If a man rebels against laws, and takes
the side of vice, that the vulgar can comprehend;
but rebellion on the side of virtue is revolutionary,
destroys all the old landmarks, must be
crucified.

Brent, therefore, boy and man, had had tough
experience. I knew of his career, though we
had not met. He had wished and attempted,
perhaps prematurely, to make his fine genius of
definite use. He wanted to make the nation's
prayers; but the Swergerites pronounced his
prayers Paganism. He wanted to put the nation's
holiest thoughts into poetry; they called
his poetry impious. He wanted to stir up the
young men of his day to a franker stand on the
side of genuine liberty, and a keener hatred of
all slavery, and so to uphold chivalry and heroism;
the cynical people scoffed, they said he
would get over his boyish folly, that he ought
to have lived before Bayard, or half-way through
the millennium, but that the kind of stuff he
preached and wrote with such unnecessary fervor
did not suit the nineteenth century, a practical
country and a practical age.

So Brent paused in his work. The boyhood's
unquestioning ardor went out of him. The interregnum
between youth and complete manhood
came. He gave up his unripe attempt to
be a doer, and turned seer again. Observation

is the proper business of a man's third decade;
the less a spokesman has to say about his results
until thirty, the better, unless he wants to eat
his words, or to sustain outgrown formulas. Brent
discovered this, and went about the world still
pointless, purposeless, manqué, as they said, —
minding his own business, getting his facts. His
fortune made him independent. He could go
where he pleased.

This was the man who rode up on the iron-gray
horse. This was the Indianesque Saxon
who greeted me. It put color and poetry into
my sulky life to see him.

“Off, old fellow?” said Brent, pointing his
whip at my traps. “I can't hear him squeak,
but I 'm sure there is pig in that gunny-bag,
and flour in that sack. I hope you 're not away
for a long trip just as I have come to squat with
you.”

“No longer than home across the plains.”

“Bravo! then we 'll ride together, instead of
squatting together. Instead of your teaching
me quartz-mining, I 'll guide you across the
Rockys.”

“You know the way, then.”

“Every foot of it. Last fall I hunted up from
Mexico and New Mexico with an English friend.
We made winter head-quarters with Captain Ruby
at Fort Laramie, knocking about all winter

in that neighborhood, and at the North among
the Wind River Mountains. Early in the spring
we went off toward Luggernel Alley and the
Luggernel Springs, and camped there for a
month.”

“Luggernel Alley! Luggernel Springs! Those
are new names to me; in fact, my Rocky Mountain
geography is naught.”

“You ought to see them. Luggernel Alley is
one of the wonders of this continent.”

So I think now that I have seen it. It was
odd too, what afterward I remembered as a coincidence,
that our first talk should have turned
to a spot where we were to do and to suffer, by
and by.

“There is something Frenchy in the name
Luggernel,” said I.

“Yes; it is a corruption of La Grenouille.
There was a famous Canadian trapper of that
name, or nickname. He discovered the springs.
The Alley, a magnificent gorge, grand as the Via
Mala, leads to them. I will describe the whole
to you at length, some time.”

“Who was your English friend?”

“Sir Biron Biddulph, — a capital fellow, pink
in the cheeks, warm in the heart, strong in the
shanks, mighty on the hunt.”

“Hunting for love of it?”

“No; for love itself, or rather the lack of love.

A lovely lady in his native Lancashire would not
smile; so he turned butcher of buffalo, bears,
and big-horn.”

“Named he the `fair but frozen maid'?”

“Never. It seems there is something hapless
or tragic about her destiny. She did not love
him; so he came away to forget her. He made
no secret of it. We arrived in Utah last July,
on our way to see California. There he got letters
from home, announcing, as he told me, some
coming misfortune to the lady. As a friend, no
longer a lover, he proposed to do what he could
to avert the danger. I left him in Salt Lake,
preparing to return, and came across country
alone.”

“Alone! through the Indian country, with
that tempting iron-gray, those tempting packs,
that tempting scalp, with its love-locks! Why,
the sight of your scalp alone would send a thrill
through every Indian heart from Bear River to
the Dalles of the Columbia! Perhaps, by the
way, you 've been scalped already, and are safe?”

“No; the mop 's my own mop. Scalp 's all
right. Wish I could say the same of the brains.
The Indians would not touch me. I am half
savage, you know. In this and my former trip,
I have become a privileged character, — something
of a medicine-man.”

“I suppose you can talk to them. You used
to have the gift of tongues.”

“Yes; I have choked down two or three of
their guttural lingos, and can sputter them up
as easily as I used to gabble iambic trimeters. I
like the fellows. They are not ideal heroes; they
have not succeeded in developing a civilization,
or in adopting ours, and therefore I suppose they
must go down, as pine-trees go down to make
room for tougher stalks and fruitier growth: but
I like the fellows, and don't believe in their utter
deviltry. I have always given the dogs a good
name, and they have been good dogs to me. I
like thorough men, too; and what an Indian
knows, he knows, so that it is a part of him. It
is a good corrective for an artificial man to find
himself less of a man, under certain difficulties,
than a child of nature. You know this, of course,
as well as I do.”

“Yes; we campaigners get close to the heart
of Mother Nature, and she teaches us, tenderly
or roughly, but thoroughly. By the way, how
did you find me out?”

“I heard some Pikes, at a camp last night,
talking of a person who had sold a quartz mine
for a wonderful horse. I asked the name. They
told me yours, and directed me here. Except for
this talk, I should have gone down to San Francisco,
and missed you.”

“Lucky horse! He brings old friends together,
— a good omen! Come and see him.”