"Come,"says the White Logic,"and forget these Asian dreamers of old time.Fill your glass and let us look at the parchments of the dreamers of yesterday who dreamed their dreams on your own warm hills."I pore over the abstract of title of the vineyard called Tokay on the rancho called Petaluma.It is a sad long list of the names of men,beginning with Manuel Micheltoreno,one time Mexican "Governor,Commander-in-Chief,and Inspector of the Department of the Californias,"who deeded ten square leagues of stolen Indian land to Colonel Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo for services rendered his country and for moneys paid by him for ten years to his soldiers.
Immediately this musty record of man's land lust assumes the formidableness of a battle--the quick struggling with the dust.
There are deeds of trust,mortgages,certificates of release,transfers,judgments,foreclosures,writs of attachment,orders of sale,tax liens,petitions for letters of administration,and decrees of distribution.It is like a monster ever unsubdued,this stubborn land that drowses in this Indian summer weather and that survives them all,the men who scratched its surface and passed.
Who was this James King of William,so curiously named?The oldest surviving settler in the Valley of the Moon knows him not.Yet only sixty years ago he loaned Mariano G.Vallejo eighteen thousand dollars on security of certain lands including the vineyard yet to be and to be called Tokay.Whence came Peter O'Connor,and whither vanished,after writing his little name of a day on the woodland that was to become a vineyard?Appears Louis Csomortanyi,a name to conjure with.He lasts through several pages of this record of the enduring soil.
Comes old American stock,thirsting across the Great American Desert,mule-backing across the Isthmus,wind-jamming around the Horn,to write brief and forgotten names where ten thousand generations of wild Indians are equally forgotten--names like Halleck,Hastings,Swett,Tait,Denman,Tracy,Grimwood,Carlton,Temple.There are no names like those to-day in the Valley of the Moon.
The names begin to appear fast and furiously,flashing from legal page to legal page and in a flash vanishing.But ever the persistent soil remains for others to scrawl themselves across.
Come the names of men of whom I have vaguely heard but whom I have never known.Kohler and Frohling--who built the great stone winery on the vineyard called Tokay,but who built upon a hill up which other vineyardists refused to haul their grapes.So Kohler and Frohling lost the land;the earthquake of 1906threw down the winery;and I now live in its ruins.
La Motte--he broke the soil,planted vines and orchards,instituted commercial fish culture,built a mansion renowned in its day,was defeated by the soil,and passed.And my name of a day appears.On the site of his orchards and vine-yards,of his proud mansion,of his very fish ponds,I have scrawled myself with half a hundred thousand eucalyptus trees.
Cooper and Greenlaw--on what is called the Hill Ranch they left two of their dead,"Little Lillie"and "Little David,"who rest to-day inside a tiny square of hand-hewn palings.Also,Gooper and Greenlaw in their time cleared the virgin forest from three fields of forty acres.To-day I have those three fields sown with Canada peas,and in the spring they shall be ploughed under for green manure.
Haska--a dim legendary figure of a generation ago,who went back up the mountain and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valley that took his name.He broke the soil,reared stone walls and a house,and planted apple trees.And already the site of the house is undiscoverable,the location of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration of the landscape,and I am renewing the battle,putting in angora goats to browse away the brush that has overrun Haska's clearing and choked Haska's apple trees to death.
So I,too,scratch the land with my brief endeavour and flash my name across a page of legal script ere I pass and the page grows musty.
"Dreamers and ghosts,"the White Logic chuckles.
"But surely the striving was not altogether vain,"I contend.
"It was based on illusion and is a lie."
"A vital lie,"I retort.
"And pray what is a vital lie but a lie?"the White Logic challenges."Come.Fill your glass and let us examine these vital liars who crowd your bookshelves.Let us dabble in William James a bit.""A man of health,"I say."From him we may expect no philosopher's stone,but at least we will find a few robust tonic things to which to tie.""Rationality gelded to sentiment,"the White Logic grins."At the end of all his thinking he still clung to the sentiment of immortality.Facts transmuted in the alembic of hope into terms of faith.The ripest fruit of reason the stultification of reason.From the topmost peak of reason James teaches to cease reasoning and to have faith that all is well and will be well--the old,oh,ancient old,acrobatic flip of the metaphysicians whereby they reasoned reason quite away in order to escape the pessimism consequent upon the grim and honest exercise of reason.
"Is this flesh of yours you?Or is it an extraneous something possessed by you?Your body--what is it?A machine for converting stimuli into reactions.Stimuli and reactions are remembered.
