country would be at his disposal. He was sound in health again, as resistant against hardships as when he had sailed from Kronstadt. And God knew, he thought with a sigh, his will and purpose had never been stronger.
XXVI
Rezanov disembarked from the Juno at Okhotsk during the first days of October. Had it not been for a touch of fever that had returned in the filth and warm dampness of Sitka, he would have felt almost as buoyant in mind and body as in those days when California had gone to his head. The Juno had touched at Kadiak, Oonalaska, and others of the more important settlements, and he had found his schools and libraries in good condition, seals and otters rapidly increasing, in their immunity from indiscriminate slaughter, new and stronger forts threatening the nefarious Bostonian and Bri- ton. At Okhotsk he learned that the embassy of Count Golofkin to China had failed as signally as his own, and this alone would have put him in the best of tempers even had he not found his arma- ment and caravan awaiting him, facilitating his im- mediate departure. He wrote a gay letter to Con- cha, giving her the painful story of the naturalist attached to the Golofkin embassy, Dr. Redovsky, who had remained in the East animated by the same scientific enthusiasm as that of his colleague, the good Langsdorff; parted some time since from his too exacting master. Rezanov had written Concha many letters during his detention in Sitka, and left them with Baranhov to send at the first opportun- ity. The Chief-Manager, deeply interested in the romance of the mighty Chamberlain with whom he alone dared to take a liberty, vowed to guard all that came to his care and sooner or later to send them to California. Rezanov had also written com- prehensively to the Tsar and the directors of the Russian-American Company, adroitly placing his marriage in the light of a diplomatic maneuver, and painting California in colors the more vivid and en- ticing for the sullen clouds and roaring winds, the dripping forests and eternal snows of that derelict corner of Earth where he had been stranded so long. He had also, when Langsdorff announced his intention to start upon a difficult journey in the in- terest of science, provided him not only with letters of recommendation, but with all the comforts pro- curable in a land where the word comfort was the stock in trade of the local satirist. But Langsdorff, although punctiliously acknowledging the favors, never quite forgave the indifference of a mere am- bassador and chamberlain, rejoicing in the dignity of an honorary membership in the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, to the supreme division of natural history.
The first stage of the journey–from Okhotsk to Yakutsk–was about six hundred and fifty English miles, not as the crow flew, but over the Stanovoi mountains in a southwesterly direction to the Maya, by this river’s wavering course to the Youdoma, then northwest to the Aldan, and south beside the Lena. The beaten track lay entirely alongside the rivers at this season, upon their surface in winter; and in addition to these great streams there were many too unimportant for the map, but as erratic in course and as irresistible in energy after the first rains of autumn.
Captain D’Wolf had proved himself capable and faithful, and a caravan of forty horses had been in Okhotsk a week; twenty for immediate use, twenty for relief, or substitutes in almost certain emer- gency. As there were but one or two stations of any importance between Okhotsk and Yakutsk, and as a week might pass without the shelter of so much as a hut, it was necessary to take tents and bearskin beds for the Chamberlain, his Cossack guard, valet- de-chambre, cook and other servants, one set of fine blankets and linen, cooking utensils, axes, arms, tinder-boxes, provisions for the entire trip, besides a great quantity of personal luggage.
Rezanov lost no time. He had changed his origi- nal plan and dispatched Davidov on the Avos from Oonalaska. Guns and provisions awaited the Juno at Okhotsk, and in less than a week after his ar- rival Rezanov was able to start on his long journey with a mind at rest. Although the almost extrava- gant delight that his body had taken in the com- forts of his manager’s home, after ten weeks on the Juno, warned him that he might be in a better con- dition to begin a journey of ten thousand versts, he hearkened neither to the hint nor to the insistence of his host. His impatient energy and stern will, combined with the passionate wish to accomplish the double object of his journey, returning in the least possible time to California with his treaty and the consent of the Pope and King to his marriage, would have carried him out of Okhotsk in forty- eight hours had disease declared itself. Nor were there any inducements aside from a comfortable bed and refined fare, in the flat, unhealthy town with its everlasting rattle of chains, and the hideous physiognomies of criminals always at work to the rumbling accompaniment of Cossack oaths.
For the first week the exercise he loved best and the long days in the crisp open air renewed his vigor, and he even looked forward to the four months of what was then the severest traveling in the world, in a boyish spirit of adventure. He re- flected that he might as well give his brain a relief from the constant revolving of schemes and plans for the advancement of his country, his company, and himself, and let his thoughts have their car- nival of anticipation with the unparalleled happiness and success that awaited him in the future. There was no possible doubt of the acquiescence and assist- ance of the Tsar, and no man ever looked down a fairer perspective than he, as he galloped over the ugly country, often far ahead of his caravan, splash- ing through bogs and streams, fording rivers with- out ferries, camping at night in forests so dense the cold never escaped their embrace, muffled to the eyes in furs as he made his way past valleys whose eter- nal ice fields chilled the country for miles about; sometimes able to procure a little fresh milk and butter, oftener not; occasionally passing a caravan returning for furs, generally seeing nothing but a stray reindeer for hours together, once meeting the post and finding much for himself that in nowise dampened his spirit.
But on the eighth day the rains began: a fine steady mist, then in torrents as endless. Wrapped in bearskins at night within the shelter of a tent or of some wayside hut, and closely covered by day, Rezanov at first merely cursed the inconvenience of the rain; but while crossing the river Allach Juni, his guides without consulting him having taken him miles out of his way in order to avoid the hamlet of the same name where the small-pox was raging, but where there was a government ferry, his horse lost his footing in the rapid, swollen current and fell. Rezanov managed to retain his seat, and pulled the frightened, plunging beast to its feet while his Cos- sacks were still shouting their consternation. But he was soaked to the skin, his personal luggage was in the same condition, and they did not reach a hut where a fire could be made until nine hours later. It was then that the seeds of malaria, accumulated during the last three years in unsanitary ports and sown deep by exceptional hardships, but which he believed had taken themselves off during his six weeks in California, stirred more vigorously than in Sitka or Okhotsk. He rode on the next day in a burning fever. Jon, minding Langsdorff’s instruc- tions, doctored him–not without difficulty–from the medicine chest, and for a day or two the fever seemed broken. But Jon, sick with apprehension, implored him to turn back. He might as well have implored the sky to turn blue.
“How do you think men accomplish things in this world?” asked Rezanov angrily. “By turning back and going to bed every time they have a mi- graine?”
“No, Excellency,” said the man humbly. “But health is necessary to the accomplishment of every- thing, and if the body is eaten up with fever–“
“What are drugs for? Give me the whole damned pharmacopeia if you choose, but don’t talk to me about turning back.”
“Very well, Excellency,” said Jon, with a sigh.
The next day he and one of the Cossack guard caught him as he fell from his horse unconscious. A Yakhut hut, miserable as it was, offered in the persistent downpour a better shelter than the tent. They carried him into it, and his bedding at least was almost as luxurious as had he been in St. Petersburg. Jon, at his wits’ end, remembered the’ practice of Langsdorff in similar cases, and used the lancet, a heroic treatment he would never have accomplished had his master been conscious. The fever ebbed, and in a few days Rezanov was able to continue the journey by shorter stages, although heavy with an intolerable lassitude. But his will sustained him until he reached Yakutsk, not at the end of twenty-two days, but of thirty-three. Here he succumbed immediately, and although his sick- bed was in the comfortable home of the agent of the Company, and he had medical attendance of a sort, his fever and convalescence lasted for eight weeks. Then, in spite of the supplications of his friends, chief among whom was his faithful Jon, and the prohibition of the doctor, he began the sec- ond stage of his journey.
The road from Yakutsk to Irkutsk, some two thousand six hundred versts, or fifteen hundred and fifty English miles, lay for the most part alternately on and along the river Lena in a southeasterly di- rection; there being no attempt to cross Siberia at any point in a straight line. By this time the river was frozen, and the only concession Rezanov would make to his enfeebled frame was an arrangement to cover the entire journey by private sledge instead of employing the swifter course of post sledge on the long stretches and horseback on the shorter cuts.
The weather was now intensely cold, the river winding, the delays many, but there were adequate stations for the benefit and accommodation of trav- elers 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 jour- ney. 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 muf- fled in sables to his very eyes, and the road was diverting, often beautiful, with its Gothic moun- tains, 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 perpendicu- lar walls or overhanging masses of rock that awaited the next convulsion of nature to close the pass alto- gether. Then the dogs trotted past caves and grot- tos, 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 with- out 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 hap- pened 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 admit- ted 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 lug- gage 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 at- tributed 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 de- clined their hospitality they dispatched a courier at once to the Governor-General of Irkutsk acquaint- ing 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 pic- ture 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 Gov- ernor-General, privy counselor and senator de Pestel, accompanied by the civil governor, the com- mandant, the archbishop, and a military escort, sal- lied 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 pal- ace 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 continu- ing 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 Kel- ler, and, if necessary, be able to command fair nurs- ing 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 in- valid 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 for- mer superb strength, and emaciated beyond recog- nition, he attended a banquet on the night preced- ing 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. Reza- nov, 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 be- fore 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 Na- ture. 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, par- ents, 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 mo- ments. Those that cried “But why?” “What rea- son?” “What use?” were those that had never looked over the walls of their ego at the great dra- matic 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 charac- ter 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 exist- ence–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 insignifi- cance among the blind forces of nature, he could accept it philosophically and die with his soul uncor- roded by misanthropy, that final and uncompromis- ing admission of failure. The misanthrope was the supreme failure of life because he had not the in- telligence 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 develop- ment 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 in- justice. The bad judgment of the mass! How many careers it had balked, if not ruined, with its poor ideals, its mean heroes, its instinctive avoid- ance of superior qualities foreign to itself, its con- temptible 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 un- derneath, 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 man- kind 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 ulti- mates 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 monot- ony, 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 abso- lute 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. Mean- while, 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 mo- ments 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 hap- piness, 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 am- bitions 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 morn- ing when he had entered the home of Concha Ar- guello 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 con- tracted 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, search- ing 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 unthink- able happiness.
So died Rezanov; and with him the hope of Rus- sians 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.