The Vision of Elijah Berl. Frank Lewis Nason
grandly worth while. His heart beat high at the thought of it. The building of a great storage dam in the mountains, the laying out of canals that should lead the stored waters to the sun-parched deserts; this was an engineer's work, and he was an engineer. In imagination he could see, as Elijah saw, the bare brown hillsides clothed in verdure and teeming with prosperity. Why did he hesitate? Was it lack of money? That would come. Yet he hesitated. Why? Clearer than ever before came the thought of Elijah, and Winston knew that his question was answered. Elijah was his answer. Elijah himself was the obstacle in the way of his acceptance. There was no doubt of the worth of Elijah's idea, no doubt of his enthusiasm, no doubt of his patient, tireless energy. Of his integrity? There was the doubtful point.
If he accepted Elijah's offer, he could foresee the struggle that would follow. His own sense of right pitted against Elijah's fanatical zeal that recognized no right except its own desires. When the fully expanded idea of redeeming the desert hillsides should open before Elijah, before the eyes of men, when wealth and power should beckon, just a little at first, from the path of stern uncompromising honor, Elijah would not restrain himself. Would he be able to control him? Winston's lips set firmly. He knew that he would conquer in the end.
Elijah was pacing restlessly up and down the verandah, now and then casting an impatient look upon the young engineer who sat motionless, his eyes on the hillsides below them. At length he paused abruptly before Winston.
"Well?" he exclaimed explosively, "you haven't given me an answer yet."
Winston's words were measured.
"No; I haven't. If you insist upon an answer today, it will be no."
"You want time to think it over?" Elijah's voice was sarcastic.
"That's just it. I do want time. I know that if I accept your offer, you and I are going to come into collision. You have one way of looking at things, I have another. Not once, but many times, you and I are going to look at the same thing at the same time and in different ways. When these times come, one of us will have to give way." Winston waved aside Elijah's attempt to interrupt. "When these times come, I may be the one to give up, but if I am, it will be because your way appeals to my reason as being better than my own."
Winston's meaning was clear to Elijah. The "word" that he reverenced, the voice to which he listened and which he followed, meant not the weight of a feather to the man before him. Elijah moistened his nervous lips with his tongue. He had been guided to seek Winston—Winston he must have. Impatiently he put Winston's words aside.
"All this is not to the point."
"What is?" Winston asked curtly.
"This. Will you accept my offer?"
"An equal partnership with yourself?"
"Yes."
"I suppose you realize that if I accept, the management is no longer yours alone, but yours and mine?"
"Yes."
"And that it is my right to put forth every effort to compel you to my way of thinking?" Winston deliberately used the word compel, instead of persuade.
"Yes, yes!"
"Then I will think it over, Elijah, and will give you my final answer the next time you are in Ysleta."
"Suppose I come tomorrow?" Elijah's voice was assured.
"My answer will be ready."
CHAPTER TWO
"I am so happy!" This had been the unbroken song of Amy Berl for the five years of her married life. Maternity had not altered a line of her girlish figure, neither had it crowned her with the rounded, satisfying glory of womanhood. The ceaseless, parching winds had not dimmed the lustre of her clear blue eyes, nor deadened the gloss of her soft flaxen hair. Even the hot, dry air, so trying to most, only heightened the beauty of her complexion, as the peach reveals the rich glow of its color by diffusion through the meshes of its downy veil. Delicate in face and figure, there was no suggestion of frailty, neither was there a suggestion of strength. There was the glow of perfect health. In the eyes that looked fearlessly and frankly into the eyes of others, there was unmistakably a capacity for infinite happiness and infinite suffering. This was all. The eyes were frank because they had nothing to conceal; nor did they dream that other eyes differed from themselves. They were fearless because they knew no sin in themselves or in others. There was not strength of mind or of intellect to compel the fruition of her desire for love. It must come to her without her volition or not at all. As the flowers of the field unfold in beauty under sun and shower, even so she grew and blossomed and was fair to look upon. As the flowers of the field wither away in parching drought, even so would the beauty of happiness fall from her shrinking soul. She was of a religious nature, not because of a consciousness of its necessity to the human soul, but because, to her, God was love and his works beautiful to look upon. God to her was impersonal, because in her was not strength of intellect to construct an entity from its manifestations. When Elijah Berl came to her, she received him as a god. Her love was not selective; it was responsive. Henceforth her daily prayers on her bended knees were to her husband, not to the Divine Giver of every good and perfect gift. Even when her first-born lay in her arms, the light that shone in her eyes was not the giving of maternal love, but the thrill of assurance that the helpless mite was but another bond that bound her happiness to her soul and made it more her own. She gave with the unconscious selfishness of a perfect mirror that which she received, no more, no less.
Elijah Berl had not yet realized what his wife was, because he was selfish in another way. He saw himself in his wife. For the present, this sufficed. Five years of struggle in the land of golden promise had not lessened his faith in himself, had not wearied his restless energy, nor dulled his faith in his God. From New England's granite hills, he believed God's hand had led him to this distant field. Since the day of his birth, the firm, unwavering, fanatical belief that the Bible was God's direct, unchangeable revelation to man, made him, as it had made his father, impregnable to the assaults of reason. The figurative, semi-scriptural language of his father and of his father's father had been as the breath of his nostrils. It had become a part of him as it was of his father. It was neither cant nor hypocrisy. "As it was written," was an unanswerable dictum. The very things that had shaken and are shaking to its foundation the faith in the Bible as an infallible guide, only rooted Elijah the more firmly in his belief. In California as in New England, he felt that in good time God's hand would point out the work which He had planned for him to do. He was marking time with restless steps, ready to swing into action when God should give the word. Only one part of his work had he forecast in his mind. A son of the soil, in the soil was his work to be. This was his unshaken belief. From San Benito, under the shadow of abrupt mountains, over to San Quentin where ragged chaparral grew as it might on the blood-red hills, and where cottonwoods and willows throve rank on the moisture of hidden streams, he had pitched his tent for the night and had folded it in the morning. What mattered it to him that the scattered ranchers looked approvingly upon his fair-haired wife, and, moved with pity for her, cursed him as a heartless idiot; or that uncouth vaqueros shrugged their shoulders and softly named him a locoed gringo?
The few dollars which he had brought with him from the East, had long since been spent in his wanderings. The goodly sum which had come to him on the death of his father, was no longer what it had been; yet he had no thought of despair. The limit of his wanderings was narrowing in concentric circles, and at length its centre was fixed. With almost his last dollar, he had bought a wide ranch from a dreamy Mexican who had then gone his way. Already the land around his was heaving and swelling in undulating rolls that warn the mariner of a coming storm. Bearded ranchers laughed in scorn, and mild-eyed Mexicans spoke even more softly. What were a few seeping springs on the hillsides? What were the hillsides themselves beside the rolling plains at their feet, where herds of cattle fed and drank and mired themselves in green-fringed cienagas? Elijah was disturbed no more than was Noah when he closed the doors of his ark against the gibes of the unbelievers. His mission was being disclosed, point