John Brent. Theodore Winthrop

      Chapter IV • John Brent

      John Brent

       Table of Contents

      A man who does not love luxury is merely an incomplete man, or, if he prefers, an ignoramus. A man who cannot dispense with luxury, and who does not love hard fare, hard bed, hard travel, and all manner of robust, vigorous, tense work, is a weakling and a soft. Sybaris is a pretty town, rose-leaves are a delicate mattress, Lydian measures are dulcet to soul and body: also, the wilderness is “no mean city”; hemlock or heather for couch, brocken for curtain, are not cruelty; prairie gales are a brave lullaby for adults.

      Simple furniture and simple fare a campaigner needs for the plains—for chamber furniture, a pair of blankets; for kitchen furniture, a frying-pan and a coffee-pot; for table furniture, a tin mug and his bowie-knife: Sybaris adds a tin plate, a spoon, and even a fork. The list of provisions is as short—pork, flour, and coffee; that is all, unless Sybaris should indulge in a modicum of tea, a dose or two of sugar, and a vial of vinegar for holidays.

      I had several days for preparation, until my companions, the mail-riders, should arrive. One morning I was busy making up my packs of such luxuries as I have mentioned for the journey, when I heard the clatter of horses’ feet, and observed a stranger approach and ride up to the door of my shanty. He was mounted upon a powerful iron-gray horse, and drove a pack mule and an Indian pony.

      My name was on an elaborately painted shingle over the door. It was my own handiwork, and quite a lion in that region. I felt, whenever I inspected that bit of high art, that, fail or win at the mine, I had a resource. Indeed, my Pike neighbors seemed to consider that I was unjustifiably burying my artistic talents. Many a not unseemly octagonal slug, with Moffatt & Co.’s imprimatur of value, had been offered me if I would paint up some miner’s hell, as “The True Paradise,” or “The Shades and Caffy de Paris.”

      The new-comer read my autograph on the shingle, looked about, caught sight of me at work in the hot shade, dismounted, fastened his horses, and came toward me. It was not the fashion in California, at that time, to volunteer civility or acquaintance. Men had to announce themselves, and prove their claims. I sat where I was, and surveyed the stranger.

      “The Adonis of the copper-skins!” I said to myself. “This is the ‘Young Eagle,’ or the ‘Sucking Dove,’ or the ‘Maiden’s Bane,’ or some other great chief of the cleanest Indian tribe on the continent. A beautiful youth! O Fenimore, why are you dead! There are a dozen romances in one look of that young brave. One chapter might be written on his fringed buckskin shirt; one on his equally fringed leggings, with their stripe of porcupine-quills; and one short chapter on his moccasons, with their scarlet cloth instep-piece, and his cap of otter fur decked with an eagle’s feather. What a poem the fellow is! I wish I was an Indian myself for such a companion; or, better, a squaw, to be made love to by him.”

      As he approached, I perceived that he was not copper, but bronze. A pale-face certainly! That is, a pale-face tinged by the brazen sun of a California summer. Not less handsome, however, as a Saxon, than an Indian brave. As soon as I identified him as one of my own race I began to fancy I had seen him before.

      “If he were but shaved and clipped, black-coated, booted, gloved, hatted with a shiny cylinder, disarmed of his dangerous looking arsenal and armed with a plaything of a cane—in short if he were metamorphosed from a knight-errant into a carpet-knight, changed from a smooth rough into a smooth smooth—seems to me I should know him, or know that I had known him once.”

      He came up, laid his hand familiarly on my arm, and said, “What, “Wade? Don’t you remember me? John Brent.”

      “I hear your voice. I begin to see you now. Hurrah!”

      “How was it I did not recognize you,” said I, after a fraternal greeting.

      “Ten years have presented me with this for a disguise,” said he, giving his moustache a twirl. “Ten years of experience have taken all the girl out of me.”

      “What have you been doing these ten years, since College, many-sided man?”

      “Grinding my sides against the Adamant, every one.”

      “Has your diamond begun to see light, and shine?”

      “The polishing-dust dims it still,”

      “How have you found life, kind or cruel?”

      “Certainly not kind, hardly cruel, unless indifference is cruelty.”

      “But indifference, want of sympathy, must have been a positive relief after the aggressive cruelty of your younger days.”

      “And what have you been doing, Richard?”

      “Everything that Yankees do—digging last.”

      “That has been my business, too, as well as polishing.”

      “The old work, I suppose, to root out lies and plant in truth.”

      “That same slow task. Tunnelling too, to find my way out of the prison of doubt into the freedom of faith.”

      “You are out, then, at last. Happy and at peace, I hope.”

      “At peace, hardly happy. How can such a lonely fellow be happy?”

      “We are peers in bereavement now. My family are all gone, except two little children of my sister.”

      “Not quite peers. You remember your relatives tenderly. I have no such comfort.”

      Odd talk this may seem, to hold with an old friend. Ten years apart! We ought to have met in merrier mood. We might, if we had parted with happy memories. But it was not so. Youth had been a harsh season to Brent. If Fate destines a man to teach, she compels him to learn—bitter lessons, too, whether he will or no. Brent was a man of genius. All experience, therefore, piled itself upon him. He must learn the immortal consolations by probing all suffering himself.

      Brent’s story is a short one or a long one. It can be told in a page, or in a score of volumes. We had met fourteen years before in the same pew of Berkeley College Chapel, grammars by our side and tutors before us, two well-crammed candidates for the Freshman Class. Brent was a delicate, beautiful, dreamy boy. My counterpart. I was plain prose, and needed the poetic element. We became friends. I was steady; he was erratic. I was calm; he was passionate. I was reasonably happy; he was totally miserable. For good cause.

      The cause was this; and it has broken weaker hearts than Brent’s. His heart was made of stuff that does not know how to break.

      Dr. Swerger was the cause of Brent’s misery. The Reverend Dr. Swerger was a brutal man. One who believes that God is vengeance naturally imitates his God, and does not better his model.

      Swerger was Brent’s step-father. Mrs. Brent was pretty, silly, rich, and a widow. Swerger wanted his wife pretty, and not too wise; and that she was rich balanced, perhaps a little more than balanced, the slight objection of widowhood.

      Swerger naturally hated his step-son. One intuition of Brent’s was worth all the thoughts of Swerger’ s life-time. A clergyman who starts with believing in hells, devils, original sin, and such crudities, can never be anything in the nineteenth century but a tyrant or a nuisance, if he has any logic, as fortunately few of such misbelievers have. Swerger had logic. So had the boy Brent—the logic of a true, pure, loving heart. He could not stand Swerger’s coming into his dead father’s house and deluding his mother with a black fanaticism.

      So Swerger gave him to understand that he was a child of hell. He won his wife to shrink from her son. Between them they lacerated the boy. He was a brilliant fellow, quite the king of us all. But he worked under a cloud. He could not get at any better religion than