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Mary Mapes Dodge - "Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates"

Alexandre Dumas - "The Count of Monte Cristo"

Dinah Maria Mulock (Mrs. Craik) - "John Halifax, Gentleman"

Lucy Maud Montgomery - "Chronicles of Avonlea"

The Octopus, by Frank Norris

F >> Frank Norris >> The Octopus, by Frank Norris




All the colours of the scene were sombre--the brown of the earth,
the faded yellow of the dead stubble, the grey of the myriad of
undulating backs. Only on the far side of the herd, erect,
motionless--a single note of black, a speck, a dot--the shepherd
stood, leaning upon an empty water-trough, solitary, grave,
impressive.

For a few moments, Presley stood, watching. Then, as he started
to move on, a curious thing occurred. At first, he thought he
had heard some one call his name. He paused, listening; there
was no sound but the vague noise of the moving sheep. Then, as
this first impression passed, it seemed to him that he had been
beckoned to. Yet nothing stirred; except for the lonely figure
beyond the herd there was no one in sight. He started on again,
and in half a dozen steps found himself looking over his
shoulder. Without knowing why, he looked toward the shepherd;
then halted and looked a second time and a third. Had the
shepherd called to him? Presley knew that he had heard no
voice. Brusquely, all his attention seemed riveted upon this
distant figure. He put one forearm over his eyes, to keep off
the sun, gazing across the intervening herd. Surely, the
shepherd had called him. But at the next instant he started,
uttering an exclamation under his breath. The far-away speck of
black became animated. Presley remarked a sweeping gesture.
Though the man had not beckoned to him before, there was no doubt
that he was beckoning now. Without any hesitation, and
singularly interested in the incident, Presley turned sharply
aside and hurried on toward the shepherd, skirting the herd,
wondering all the time that he should answer the call with so
little question, so little hesitation.

But the shepherd came forward to meet Presley, followed by one of
his dogs. As the two men approached each other, Presley, closely
studying the other, began to wonder where he had seen him before.
It must have been a very long time ago, upon one of his previous
visits to the ranch. Certainly, however, there was something
familiar in the shepherd's face and figure. When they came
closer to each other, and Presley could see him more distinctly,
this sense of a previous acquaintance was increased and
sharpened.

The shepherd was a man of about thirty-five. He was very lean
and spare. His brown canvas overalls were thrust into laced
boots. A cartridge belt without any cartridges encircled his
waist. A grey flannel shirt, open at the throat, showed his
breast, tanned and ruddy. He wore no hat. His hair was very
black and rather long. A pointed beard covered his chin, growing
straight and fine from the hollow cheeks. The absence of any
covering for his head was, no doubt, habitual with him, for his
face was as brown as an Indian's--a ruddy brown quite different
from Presley's dark olive. To Presley's morbidly keen
observation, the general impression of the shepherd's face was
intensely interesting. It was uncommon to an astonishing degree.
Presley's vivid imagination chose to see in it the face of an
ascetic, of a recluse, almost that of a young seer. So must have
appeared the half-inspired shepherds of the Hebraic legends, the
younger prophets of Israel, dwellers in the wilderness, beholders
of visions, having their existence in a continual dream, talkers
with God, gifted with strange powers.

Suddenly, at some twenty paces distant from the approaching
shepherd, Presley stopped short, his eyes riveted upon the other.

"Vanamee!" he exclaimed.

The shepherd smiled and came forward, holding out his hands,
saying, "I thought it was you. When I saw you come over the
hill, I called you."

"But not with your voice," returned Presley. "I knew that some
one wanted me. I felt it. I should have remembered that you
could do that kind of thing."

"I have never known it to fail. It helps with the sheep."

"With the sheep?"

"In a way. I can't tell exactly how. We don't understand these
things yet. There are times when, if I close my eyes and dig my
fists into my temples, I can hold the entire herd for perhaps a
minute. Perhaps, though, it's imagination, who knows? But it's
good to see you again. How long has it been since the last time?
Two, three, nearly five years."

It was more than that. It was six years since Presley and
Vanamee had met, and then it had been for a short time only,
during one of the shepherd's periodical brief returns to that
part of the country. During a week he and Presley had been much
together, for the two were devoted friends. Then, as abruptly,
as mysteriously as he had come, Vanamee disappeared. Presley
awoke one morning to find him gone. Thus, it had been with
Vanamee for a period of sixteen years. He lived his life in the
unknown, one could not tell where--in the desert, in the
mountains, throughout all the vast and vague South-west,
solitary, strange. Three, four, five years passed. The shepherd
would be almost forgotten. Never the most trivial scrap of
information as to his whereabouts reached Los Muertos. He had
melted off into the surface-shimmer of the desert, into the
mirage; he sank below the horizons; he was swallowed up in the
waste of sand and sage. Then, without warning, he would
reappear, coming in from the wilderness, emerging from the
unknown. No one knew him well. In all that countryside he had
but three friends, Presley, Magnus Derrick, and the priest at the
Mission of San Juan de Guadalajara, Father Sarria. He remained
always a mystery, living a life half-real, half-legendary. In
all those years he did not seem to have grown older by a single
day. At this time, Presley knew him to be thirty-six years of
age. But since the first day the two had met, the shepherd's
face and bearing had, to his eyes, remained the same. At this
moment, Presley was looking into the same face he had first seen
many, many years ago. It was a face stamped with an unspeakable
sadness, a deathless grief, the permanent imprint of a tragedy
long past, but yet a living issue. Presley told himself that it
was impossible to look long into Vanamee's eyes without knowing
that here was a man whose whole being had been at one time
shattered and riven to its lowest depths, whose life had suddenly
stopped at a certain moment of its development.

The two friends sat down upon the ledge of the watering-trough,
their eyes wandering incessantly toward the slow moving herd,
grazing on the wheat stubble, moving southward as they grazed.

"Where have you come from this time?" Presley had asked. "Where
have you kept yourself?"

The other swept the horizon to the south and east with a vague
gesture.

"Off there, down to the south, very far off. So many places that
I can't remember. I went the Long Trail this time; a long, long
ways. Arizona, The Mexicos, and, then, afterwards, Utah and
Nevada, following the horizon, travelling at hazard. Into
Arizona first, going in by Monument Pass, and then on to the
south, through the country of the Navajos, down by the Aga Thia
Needle--a great blade of red rock jutting from out the desert,
like a knife thrust. Then on and on through The Mexicos, all
through the Southwest, then back again in a great circle by
Chihuahua and Aldama to Laredo, to Torreon, and Albuquerque.
From there across the Uncompahgre plateau into the Uintah
country; then at last due west through Nevada to California and
to the valley of the San Joaquin."
His voice lapsed to a monotone, his eyes becoming fixed; he
continued to speak as though half awake, his thoughts elsewhere,
seeing again in the eye of his mind the reach of desert and red
hill, the purple mountain, the level stretch of alkali, leper
white, all the savage, gorgeous desolation of the Long Trail.

He ignored Presley for the moment, but, on the other hand,
Presley himself gave him but half his attention. The return of
Vanamee had stimulated the poet's memory. He recalled the
incidents of Vanamee's life, reviewing again that terrible drama
which had uprooted his soul, which had driven him forth a
wanderer, a shunner of men, a sojourner in waste places. He was,
strangely enough, a college graduate and a man of wide reading
and great intelligence, but he had chosen to lead his own life,
which was that of a recluse.

Of a temperament similar in many ways to Presley's, there were
capabilities in Vanamee that were not ordinarily to be found in
the rank and file of men. Living close to nature, a poet by
instinct, where Presley was but a poet by training, there
developed in him a great sensitiveness to beauty and an almost
abnormal capacity for great happiness and great sorrow; he felt
things intensely, deeply. He never forgot. It was when he was
eighteen or nineteen, at the formative and most impressionable
period of his life, that he had met Angele Varian. Presley
barely remembered her as a girl of sixteen, beautiful almost
beyond expression, who lived with an aged aunt on the Seed ranch
back of the Mission. At this moment he was trying to recall how
she looked, with her hair of gold hanging in two straight plaits
on either side of her face, making three-cornered her round,
white forehead; her wonderful eyes, violet blue, heavy lidded,
with their astonishing upward slant toward the temples, the slant
that gave a strange, oriental cast to her face, perplexing,
enchanting. He remembered the Egyptian fulness of the lips, the
strange balancing movement of her head upon her slender neck, the
same movement that one sees in a snake at poise. Never had he
seen a girl more radiantly beautiful, never a beauty so strange,
so troublous, so out of all accepted standards. It was small
wonder that Vanamee had loved her, and less wonder, still, that
his love had been so intense, so passionate, so part of himself.
Angele had loved him with a love no less than his own. It was
one of those legendary passions that sometimes occur, idyllic,
untouched by civilisation, spontaneous as the growth of trees,
natural as dew-fall, strong as the firm-seated mountains.

At the time of his meeting with Angele, Vanamee was living on the
Los Muertos ranch. It was there he had chosen to spend one of
his college vacations. But he preferred to pass it in out-of-
door work, sometimes herding cattle, sometimes pitching hay,
sometimes working with pick and dynamite-stick on the ditches in
the fourth division of the ranch, riding the range, mending
breaks in the wire fences, making himself generally useful.
College bred though he was, the life pleased him. He was, as he
desired, close to nature, living the full measure of life, a
worker among workers, taking enjoyment in simple pleasures,
healthy in mind and body. He believed in an existence passed in
this fashion in the country, working hard, eating full, drinking
deep, sleeping dreamlessly.

But every night, after supper, he saddled his pony and rode over
to the garden of the old Mission. The 'dobe dividing wall on
that side, which once had separated the Mission garden and the
Seed ranch, had long since crumbled away, and the boundary
between the two pieces of ground was marked only by a line of
venerable pear trees. Here, under these trees, he found Angele
awaiting him, and there the two would sit through the hot, still
evening, their arms about each other, watching the moon rise over
the foothills, listening to the trickle of the water in the moss-
encrusted fountain in the garden, and the steady croak of the
great frogs that lived in the damp north corner of the enclosure.
Through all one summer the enchantment of that new-found,
wonderful love, pure and untainted, filled the lives of each of
them with its sweetness. The summer passed, the harvest moon
came and went. The nights were very dark. In the deep shade of
the pear trees they could no longer see each other. When they
met at the rendezvous, Vanamee found her only with his groping
hands. They did not speak, mere words were useless between them.
Silently as his reaching hands touched her warm body, he took her
in his arms, searching for her lips with his. Then one night the
tragedy had suddenly leaped from out the shadow with the
abruptness of an explosion.

It was impossible afterwards to reconstruct the manner of its
occurrence. To Angele's mind--what there was left of it--the
matter always remained a hideous blur, a blot, a vague, terrible
confusion. No doubt they two had been watched; the plan
succeeded too well for any other supposition. One moonless
night, Angele, arriving under the black shadow of the pear trees
a little earlier than usual, found the apparently familiar figure
waiting for her. All unsuspecting she gave herself to the
embrace of a strange pair of arms, and Vanamee arriving but a
score of moments later, stumbled over her prostrate body, inert
and unconscious, in the shadow of the overspiring trees.

Who was the Other? Angele was carried to her home on the Seed
ranch, delirious, all but raving, and Vanamee, with knife and
revolver ready, ranged the country-side like a wolf. He was not
alone. The whole county rose, raging, horror-struck. Posse
after posse was formed, sent out, and returned, without so much
as a clue. Upon no one could even the shadow of suspicion be
thrown. The Other had withdrawn into an impenetrable mystery.
There he remained. He never was found; he never was so much as
heard of. A legend arose about him, this prowler of the night,
this strange, fearful figure, with an unseen face, swooping in
there from out the darkness, come and gone in an instant, but
leaving behind him a track of terror and death and rage and
undying grief. Within the year, in giving birth to the child,
Angele had died.

The little babe was taken by Angele's parents, and Angele was
buried in the Mission garden near to the aged, grey sun dial.
Vanamee stood by during the ceremony, but half conscious of what
was going forward. At the last moment he had stepped forward,
looked long into the dead face framed in its plaits of gold hair,
the hair that made three-cornered the round, white forehead;
looked again at the closed eyes, with their perplexing upward
slant toward the temples, oriental, bizarre; at the lips with
their Egyptian fulness; at the sweet, slender neck; the long,
slim hands; then abruptly turned about. The last clods were
filling the grave at a time when he was already far away, his
horse's head turned toward the desert.

For two years no syllable was heard of him. It was believed that
he had killed himself. But Vanamee had no thought of that. For
two years he wandered through Arizona, living in the desert, in
the wilderness, a recluse, a nomad, an ascetic. But, doubtless,
all his heart was in the little coffin in the Mission garden.
Once in so often he must come back thither. One day he was seen
again in the San Joaquin. The priest, Father Sarria, returning
from a visit to the sick at Bonneville, met him on the Upper
Road.
Eighteen years had passed since Angele had died, but the thread
of Vanamee's life had been snapped. Nothing remained now but the
tangled ends. He had never forgotten. The long, dull ache, the
poignant grief had now become a part of him. Presley knew this
to be so.

While Presley had been reflecting upon all this, Vanamee had
continued to speak. Presley, however, had not been wholly
inattentive. While his memory was busy reconstructing the
details of the drama of the shepherd's life, another part of his
brain had been swiftly registering picture after picture that
Vanamee's monotonous flow of words struck off, as it were, upon a
steadily moving scroll. The music of the unfamiliar names that
occurred in his recital was a stimulant to the poet's
imagination. Presley had the poet's passion for expressive,
sonorous names. As these came and went in Vanamee's monotonous
undertones, like little notes of harmony in a musical
progression, he listened, delighted with their resonance. -
Navajo, Quijotoa, Uintah, Sonora, Laredo, Uncompahgre--to him
they were so many symbols. It was his West that passed,
unrolling there before the eye of his mind: the open, heat-
scourged round of desert; the mesa, like a vast altar, shimmering
purple in the royal sunset; the still, gigantic mountains,
heaving into the sky from out the canyons; the strenuous, fierce
life of isolated towns, lost and forgotten, down there, far off,
below the horizon. Abruptly his great poem, his Song of the
West, leaped up again in his imagination. For the moment, he all
but held it. It was there, close at hand. In another instant he
would grasp it.

"Yes, yes," he exclaimed, "I can see it all. The desert, the
mountains, all wild, primordial, untamed. How I should have
loved to have been with you. Then, perhaps, I should have got
hold of my idea."

"Your idea?"

"The great poem of the West. It's that which I want to write.
Oh, to put it all into hexameters; strike the great iron note;
sing the vast, terrible song; the song of the People; the
forerunners of empire!"

Vanamee understood him perfectly. He nodded gravely.

"Yes, it is there. It is Life, the primitive, simple, direct
Life, passionate, tumultuous. Yes, there is an epic there."

Presley caught at the word. It had never before occurred to him.

"Epic, yes, that's it. It is the epic I'm searching for. And
HOW I search for it. You don't know. It is sometimes almost an
agony. Often and often I can feel it right there, there, at my
finger-tips, but I never quite catch it. It always eludes me. I
was born too late. Ah, to get back to that first clear-eyed view
of things, to see as Homer saw, as Beowulf saw, as the Nibelungen
poets saw. The life is here, the same as then; the Poem is here;
my West is here; the primeval, epic life is here, here under our
hands, in the desert, in the mountain, on the ranch, all over
here, from Winnipeg to Guadalupe. It is the man who is lacking,
the poet; we have been educated away from it all. We are out of
touch. We are out of tune."

Vanamee heard him to the end, his grave, sad face thoughtful and
attentive. Then he rose.

"I am going over to the Mission," he said, "to see Father Sarria.
I have not seen him yet."

"How about the sheep?"

"The dogs will keep them in hand, and I shall not be gone long.
Besides that, I have a boy here to help. He is over yonder on
the other side of the herd. We can't see him from here."

Presley wondered at the heedlessness of leaving the sheep so
slightly guarded, but made no comment, and the two started off
across the field in the direction of the Mission church.

"Well, yes, it is there--your epic," observed Vanamee, as they
went along. "But why write? Why not LIVE in it? Steep oneself
in the heat of the desert, the glory of the sunset, the blue haze
of the mesa and the canyon."

"As you have done, for instance?"

Vanamee nodded.

"No, I could not do that," declared Presley; "I want to go back,
but not so far as you. I feel that I must compromise. I must
find expression. I could not lose myself like that in your
desert. When its vastness overwhelmed me, or its beauty dazzled
me, or its loneliness weighed down upon me, I should have to
record my impressions. Otherwise, I should suffocate."

"Each to his own life," observed Vanamee.

The Mission of San Juan, built of brown 'dobe blocks, covered
with yellow plaster, that at many points had dropped away from
the walls, stood on the crest of a low rise of the ground, facing
to the south. A covered colonnade, paved with round, worn
bricks, from whence opened the doors of the abandoned cells, once
used by the monks, adjoined it on the left. The roof was of
tiled half-cylinders, split longitudinally, and laid in alternate
rows, now concave, now convex. The main body of the church
itself was at right angles to the colonnade, and at the point of
intersection rose the belfry tower, an ancient campanile, where
swung the three cracked bells, the gift of the King of Spain.
Beyond the church was the Mission garden and the graveyard that
overlooked the Seed ranch in a little hollow beyond.

Presley and Vanamee went down the long colonnade to the last door
next the belfry tower, and Vanamee pulled the leather thong that
hung from a hole in the door, setting a little bell jangling
somewhere in the interior. The place, but for this noise, was
shrouded in a Sunday stillness, an absolute repose. Only at
intervals, one heard the trickle of the unseen fountain, and the
liquid cooing of doves in the garden.

Father Sarria opened the door. He was a small man, somewhat
stout, with a smooth and shiny face. He wore a frock coat that
was rather dirty, slippers, and an old yachting cap of blue
cloth, with a broken leather vizor. He was smoking a cheap
cigar, very fat and black.

But instantly he recognised Vanamee. His face went all alight
with pleasure and astonishment. It seemed as if he would never
have finished shaking both his hands; and, as it was, he released
but one of them, patting him affectionately on the shoulder with
the other. He was voluble in his welcome, talking partly in
Spanish, partly in English.
So he had come back again, this great fellow, tanned as an
Indian, lean as an Indian, with an Indian's long, black hair.
But he had not changed, not in the very least. His beard had not
grown an inch. Aha! The rascal, never to give warning, to drop
down, as it were, from out the sky. Such a hermit! To live in
the desert! A veritable Saint Jerome. Did a lion feed him down
there in Arizona, or was it a raven, like Elijah? The good God
had not fattened him, at any rate, and, apropos, he was just
about to dine himself. He had made a salad from his own lettuce.
The two would dine with him, eh? For this, my son, that was lost
is found again.

But Presley excused himself. Instinctively, he felt that Sarria
and Vanamee wanted to talk of things concerning which he was an
outsider. It was not at all unlikely that Vanamee would spend
half the night before the high altar in the church.

He took himself away, his mind still busy with Vanamee's
extraordinary life and character. But, as he descended the hill,
he was startled by a prolonged and raucous cry, discordant, very
harsh, thrice repeated at exact intervals, and, looking up, he
saw one of Father Sarria's peacocks balancing himself upon the
topmost wire of the fence, his long tail trailing, his neck
outstretched, filling the air with his stupid outcry, for no
reason than the desire to make a noise.

About an hour later, toward four in the afternoon, Presley
reached the spring at the head of the little canyon in the
northeast corner of the Quien Sabe ranch, the point toward which
he had been travelling since early in the forenoon. The place
was not without its charm. Innumerable live-oaks overhung the
canyon, and Broderson Creek--there a mere rivulet, running down
from the spring--gave a certain coolness to the air. It was one
of the few spots thereabouts that had survived the dry season of
the last year. Nearly all the other springs had dried
completely, while Mission Creek on Derrick's ranch was nothing
better than a dusty cutting in the ground, filled with brittle,
concave flakes of dried and sun-cracked mud.

Presley climbed to the summit of one of the hills--the highest--
that rose out of the canyon, from the crest of which he could see
for thirty, fifty, sixty miles down the valley, and, filling his
pipe, smoked lazily for upwards of an hour, his head empty of
thought, allowing himself to succumb to a pleasant, gentle
inanition, a little drowsy comfortable in his place, prone upon
the ground, warmed just enough by such sunlight as filtered
through the live-oaks, soothed by the good tobacco and the
prolonged murmur of the spring and creek. By degrees, the sense
of his own personality became blunted, the little wheels and cogs
of thought moved slower and slower; consciousness dwindled to a
point, the animal in him stretched itself, purring. A delightful
numbness invaded his mind and his body. He was not asleep, he
was not awake, stupefied merely, lapsing back to the state of the
faun, the satyr.

After a while, rousing himself a little, he shifted his position
and, drawing from the pocket of his shooting coat his little
tree-calf edition of the Odyssey, read far into the twenty-first
book, where, after the failure of all the suitors to bend
Ulysses's bow, it is finally put, with mockery, into his own
hands. Abruptly the drama of the story roused him from all his
languor. In an instant he was the poet again, his nerves
tingling, alive to every sensation, responsive to every
impression. The desire of creation, of composition, grew big
within him. Hexameters of his own clamoured, tumultuous, in his
brain. Not for a long time had he "felt his poem," as he called
this sensation, so poignantly. For an instant he told himself
that he actually held it.

It was, no doubt, Vanamee's talk that had stimulated him to this
point. The story of the Long Trail, with its desert and
mountain, its cliff-dwellers, its Aztec ruins, its colour,
movement, and romance, filled his mind with picture after
picture. The epic defiled before his vision like a pageant.
Once more, he shot a glance about him, as if in search of the
inspiration, and this time he all but found it. He rose to his
feet, looking out and off below him.

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