A to Z Classics - Bram Stoker - The Complete Novels

She took the coffee, and, although at first she felt it a sort of sacrilege to superadd the enjoyment of its consumption to the more ethereal pleasure of the sea of beauty around her, was glad a moment later for the physical comfort which it gave her. As she looked, the eastern sky commenced to lose its pallor; and then, softy and swiftly, the whole expanse of the horizon began to glow rosy red. As the light grew, the stretch of forest below began to manifest itself in a sea of billowy green. Wave after wave of forest seemed to fall back into the distance, till far away, beyond a great reach of dimness which seemed swathed in mist, the myriad peaks of the Rocky Mountains began to glow under the coming dawn. And then a great red ray shot upward, as though some veil in the sky had been rent, and the light of the eternal sun streamed through. Esse clasped her hands in ecstasy, and a great silence fell on her. This silence she realised as strange a moment after, for with the first ray of sunlight all the rest of Nature seemed to spring into waking life. Every bird — and the forest seemed to become at once alive with them — seemed to hail the dawn with the solemn earnestness of a Mahomedan at the voice of the muezzin, and the full chorus of Nature proclaimed that the day had come. Esse stood watching and watching, and drinking in consciously and unconsciously all the rare charm and inspiration of Nature, and a thousand things impressed themselves on her mind, which she afterwards realised to the full, though at the moment they were but unconsidered items of a vast mutually-dependent whole. Like many another young girl of restless imagination, at once stimulated and cramped by imperfect health, she had dipped into eccentric forms of religious thought. Swedenborgianism had at one time seemed to her to have an instinctive lesson which was conveyed in some more subtle form than is allowed of by words. Again, that form of thought, or rather of feeling, which has been known as of the “Lake School,” had made an impression on her, and she had so far accepted Pantheism as a creed that she could not dissociate from the impressions of Nature the idea of universal sentience. What the moral philosophers call “natural religion,” and whose methods of education are of the emotions, had up to the present satisfied a soul which was as yet content to deal with abstractions. This content is the content of youth, for things concrete demand certain severities of thought and attitude which hardly harmonise with the easy-going receptivities of the young. At the present the whole universe was to Esse a wonderland, and its potentialities of expression and of deep meanings which she yearned for, and she could not realise — and did not in her ignorance think of the subject — proved to her that the Children of Adam, being finite in all their relations, can only find happiness in concrete reality. The religion of the men of Athens who set up their altars “To The Unknown God” was a type of the restless spirit of an unsatisfied longing, and not merely a satisfied worship of something beyond themselves. Not seldom in Greece of old did youth or maiden pass weary hours in abasement before a statue of Venus or Apollo, hoping for the incarnation of the god. So Esse in her unsatisfied young life watched and waited at the shrine of Nature, not knowing what she sought or hoped for, whilst all the time the deep, underlying, unconscious forces of her being were making for some tangible result which would complete her life.

Now, as she stood alone in the springing dawn, with the entire world seemingly at her feet, she began to feel that in the whole scheme of Nature was one deep underlying purpose in which each thing was merely a factor; that she herself was but a unit with her own place set, and the narrow circle of her life appointed for her, so that she might move to the destined end. It might be destiny, it might be fate, it might be simply the accomplishment of a natural purpose; but whatever it might be, she would yield herself to the Great Scheme, and let her feet lead her where instinct took them. And as she sighed in relief at not having to struggle any more — for so the emotion took her — she found herself repeating Coleridge’s lines:

And if that all of animated Nature

Be but organic harps diversely framed,

That tremble into thought as o’er them sweeps

Plastic and vast one intellectual breeze —

At once the soul of each and God of all.

It was not, she felt, all fancy that the gentle sweet wind of the dawn took the pine-needles overhead, and rustled them in some sort of divine harmony with the poet’s song.

Esse’s mood of semi-religious, semi-emotional exaltation was brought to an end by Dick, who came and stood beside her, and said, as he pointed with a wide, free sweep of his arm to the whole eastern panorama:

“Considerable of a purty view, Little Missy!”

“Oh, beautiful, beautiful! How you must love it who live here in the midst of it all. I suppose you were born on Shasta?”

Dick laughed:

“Guess not much! I was raised somewhere out on the edge of the Great Desert. Mother couldn’t abide mountings, and kept dad down in the bottoms.”

“Then how did you ever come to Shasta?”

“Wall, dad he lived by huntin’ an’ trappin’ an’ when the Union Pacific came along, he found the place got too crowded; so he made tracks for Siskiyou! But, Lordy! it didn’t seem to be no time at all till the engineers began runnin’ new lines between Portland and Sacramento. So says dad: ‘If the Great American Desert ain’t good enough to let a man alone in, an’ if he gets crowded out of the chaparral at Siskiyou, then durn my skin but I’ll try the top of the mountings,’ so we up sticks and kem up here!”

“And your mother?” asked Esse, sympathetically; “how did she bear the change?”

“Lor’ bless ye! she didn’t hev no change; why before we ever went to Siskiyou, she up an’ took a fever, an’ died. Me an’ dad scooped a hole for the old lady ‘way down by One Tree Creek. Dad said as how he didn’t see as she’d be able to lie quiet even there, with fellers bringin’ along school-houses, an’ dancin’ saloons, an’ waterworks, and sewin’ machines, an’ plantin’ them down right atop of her. Ye see, Little Missy, the old man were that fond of nobody that he didn’t take no stock whatever in fash’nable life — like you an’ me!”

A ghost of a smile flickered at the corners of Esse’s mouth; she was not herself in any way addicted to “society” life, but rather longed for the wilderness — in an abstract form, and of course free from discomforts; but between Dick and herself there was so little in common — that was Dick’s very charm — that she wondered what might be the nature of that fashion which took them both within its limits to the exclusion of others. She was, however, interested in the man, and curious as to his surroundings, so she made an interrogative remark:

“Of course you love living on the mountain; and never go into a town at all?”

“Never go into a town! I should smile! Only whenever I can, and then, oh Lordy! but that town comes out all over red spots!”

Again Esse made another searching remark:

“I suppose your wife goes with you!”

Dick laughed a loud, aggressive, resonant laugh, which seemed to dominate the whole place. The Indians, hearing it, turned to gaze at him, and as Esse looked past his strong face, jolly with masculine humour and exuberant vitality, at their saturnine faces, in which there was no place for, or possibility of a smile, and contrasted his picturesqueness, which was yet without offence to convention, with their unutterably fantastic, barbarous, childish, raggedness, she could not help thinking that the Indian want of humour was alone sufficient to put the race in a low place in the scale of human types. Dick continued to roar.