Part 14 (1/2)
”To the lover of history it is like food without salt: imagination has painted an historical city with the panorama of a great time; it has been to us a stage for great events. We find it a stage with familiar paraphernalia, and actors as commonplace as ourselves.”
”It is more satisfactory to stay at home and read about it?”
”Infinitely, though less expanding.”
”Then is anything worth while except reading?
”Several things; the pursuit of glory, for one thing, and the active occupied life necessary for its achievement.”
She leaned forward a little; she felt that she had stumbled nearer to him. ”Are you ambitious?” she asked.
”For what it compels life to yield; abstractly, not. Ambition is the looting of h.e.l.l in chase of biting flames swirling above a desert of ashes. As for posthumous fame, it must be about as satisfactory as a draught of ice-water poured down the throat of a man who has died on Sahara. And yet, even if in the end it all means nothing, if 'from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot and rot,' still for a quarter-century or so the nettle of ambition flagellating our brain may serve to make life less uninteresting and more satisfactory. The abstraction and absorption of the fight, the stinging fear of rivals, the murmur of acknowledgment, the shout of compelled applause,--they fill the blanks.”
”Tell me,” she said, imperiously, ”what do you want?”
”Shall I tell you? I never have spoken of it to a living soul but Alvarado. Shall I tell it to a woman,--and an Iturbi y Moncada? Could the folly of man further go?”
”If I am a woman I am an Iturbi y Moncada, and if I am an Iturbi y Moncada I have the honor of its generations in my veins.”
”Very good. I believe you would not betray me, even in the interest of your house. Would you?”
”No.”
”And I love to talk to you, to tell you what I would tell no other.
Listen, then. An envoy goes to Mexico next week with letters from Alvarado, desiring that I be the next governor of the Californias, and containing the a.s.surance that the Departmental Junta will endorse me. I shall follow next month to see Santa Ana personally; I know him well, and he was a friend of my father's. I wish to be invested with peculiar powers; that is to say, I wish California to be practically overlooked while I am governor and I wish it understood that I shall be governor as long as I please. Alvarado will hold no office under the Americans, and is as ready to retire now as a few years later. Of course my predilection for the Americans must be carefully concealed both from the Mexican government and the ma.s.s of the people here: Santa Ana and Alvarado know what is bound to come; the Mexicans, generally, retain enough interest in the Californias to wish to keep them. I shall be the last governor of the Department, and I shall employ that period to amalgamate the native population so closely that they will make a strong contingent in the new order of things and be completely under my domination. I shall establish a college with American professors, so that our youth will be taught to think, and to think in English. Alvarado has done something for education, but not enough; he has not enforced it, and the methods are very primitive.
I intend to be virtually dictator. With as little delay as possible I shall establish a newspaper,--a powerful weapon in the hands of a ruler, as well as a factor of development. Then I shall organize a superior court for the punishment of capital crimes. Not that I do not recognize the right of a man to kill if his reasons satisfy himself, but there can be no subservience to authority in a country where murder is practically licensed. American immigration will be more than encouraged, and it shall be distinctly understood by the Americans that I encourage it. Everything, of course, will be done to promote good-will between the Californians and the new-comers. Then, when the United States make up their mind to take possession of us, I shall waste no blood, but hand over a country worthy of capture. In the meantime it will have been carefully drilled into the Californian mind that American occupation will be for their ultimate good, and that I shall go to Was.h.i.+ngton to protect their interests. There will then be no foolish insurrections. Do you care to hear more?”
Her face was flushed, her chest was rising rapidly.
”I hardly know what to think,--how I feel. You interest me so much as you talk that I wish you to succeed: I picture your success. And yet it maddens me to hear you talk of the Americans in that way,--also to know that your house will be greater than ours,--that we will be forgotten. But--yes, tell me all. What will you do then?”
”I shall have California, in the first place, scratched for the gold that I believe lies somewhere within her. When that great resource _is_ located and developed I shall publish in every American newspaper the extraordinary agricultural advantages of the country. In a word, my object is to make California a great State and its name synonymous with my own. As I told you before, for fame as fame I care nothing; I do not care if I am forgotten on my death-bed; but with my blood biting my veins I must have action while living. Shall I say that I have a worthier motive in wis.h.i.+ng to aid in the development of civilization? But why worthier? Merely a higher form of selfishness.
The best and the worst of motives are prompted by the same instinct.”
”I would advise you,” she said, slowly, ”never to marry. Your wife would be very unhappy.”
”But no one has greater scorn than you for the man who spends his life with his lips at the chalice of the poppy.”
”True, I had forgotten them.” She rose abruptly. ”Let us go back,” she said. ”It is better not to stay too long.”
As they walked down the canon she looked at him furtively. The men of her race were almost all tall and finely-proportioned, but they did not suggest strength as this man did. And his face,--it was so grimly determined at times that she shrank from it, then drew near, fascinated. It had no beauty at all--according to Californian standards; she could not know that it represented all that intellect, refinement and civilization, generally, would do for the human race for a century to come,--but it had a subtle power, an absolute audacity, an almost contemptuous fearlessness in its bold, fine outline, a dominating intelligence in the keen deeply-set eyes, and a hint of weakness, where and what she could not determine, that mystified and magnetized her.
”I know you a little better,” she said, ”just a little,--enough to make my curiosity ache and jump. At the same time, I know now what I did not before,--that I might climb and mine and study and watch, and you would always be beyond me. There is something subtle and evasive about you--something I seem to be close to always, yet never can see or grasp.”
”It is merely the barrier of s.e.x. A man can know a woman fairly well, because her life, consequently the interests which mould her mind and conceive her thoughts, are more or less simple. A man's life is so complex, his nature so inevitably the sum and work of it of it lies so far outside of woman's sphere, his mind spiked with a thousand magnets, each pointing to a different possibility,--that she would need divine wisdom to comprehend him in his entirety, even if he made her a diagram of every cell in his brain,--which he never would, out of consideration for both her and his own vanity. But within certain restrictions there can be a magnificent sense of comrades.h.i.+p.”
”But a woman, I think, would never be happy with that something in the man always beyond her grasp,--that something which she could be nothing to. She would be more jealous of that independence of her in man than of another woman.”
”That was pure insight,” he said. ”You could not know that.”