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Rezanov, by Gertrude Atherton

G >> Gertrude Atherton >> Rezanov, by Gertrude Atherton




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.

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