existence. He has toiled like a beast all his days, and lived
less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls. He
is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks. One shoulder is
twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled claws,
repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable
specimen. His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly.
“His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an
apparition,” the White Logic chuckles to me. “He is sense-drunk.
He is the slave of the dream of life. His brain is filled with
superrational sanctions and obsessions. He believes in a
transcendent over-world. He has listened to the vagaries of the
prophets, who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of Paradise.
He feels inarticulate self-affinities, with self-conjured non-
realities. He sees penumbral visions of himself titubating
fantastically through days and nights of space and stars. Beyond
the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made
for him, and that it is his destiny to live for ever in the
immaterial and supersensuous realms he and his kind have builded
of the stuff of semblance and deception.
“But you, who have opened the books and who share my awful
confidence–you know him for what he is, brother to you and the
dust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast that
arose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and
accident of two opposable great toes. He is brother as well to
the gorilla and the chimpanzee. He thumps his chest in anger, and
roars and quivers with cataleptic ferocity. He knows monstrous,
atavistic promptings, and he is composed of all manner of shreds
of abysmal and forgotten instincts.”
“Yet he dreams he is immortal,” I argue feebly. “It is vastly
wonderful for so stupid a clod to bestride the shoulders of time
and ride the eternities.”
“Pah!” is the retort. “Would you then shut the books and exchange
places with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire, a
marionette of the belly and the loins?”
“To be stupid is to be happy,” I contend.
“Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating in
a tideless, tepid twilight sea, eh?”
Oh, the victim cannot combat John Barleycorn!
John Barleycorn
111
“One step removed from the annihilating bliss of Buddha’s
Nirvana,” the White Logic adds. “Oh well, here’s the house.
Cheer up and take a drink. We know, we illuminated, you and I,
all the folly and the farce.”
And in my book-walled den, the mausoleum of the thoughts of men, I
take my drink, and other drinks, and roust out the sleeping dogs
from the recesses of my brain and hallo them on over the walls of
prejudice and law and through all the cunning labyrinths of
superstition and belief.
“Drink,” says the White Logic. “The Greeks believed that the gods
gave them wine so that they might forget the miserableness of
existence. And remember what Heine said.”
Well do I remember that flaming Jew’s “With the last breath all is
done: joy, love, sorrow, macaroni, the theatre, lime-trees,
raspberry drops, the power of human relations, gossip, the barking
of dogs, champagne.”
“Your clear white light is sickness,” I tell the White Logic.
“You lie.”
“By telling too strong a truth,” he quips back.
“Alas, yes, so topsy-turvy is existence,” I acknowledge sadly.
“Ah, well, Liu Ling was wiser than you,” the White Logic girds.
“You remember him?”
I nod my head–Liu Ling, a hard drinker, one of the group of
bibulous poets who called themselves the Seven Sages of the Bamboo
Grove and who lived in China many an ancient century ago.
“It was Liu Ling,” prompts the White Logic, “who declared that to
a drunken man the affairs of this world appear but as so much
duckweed on a river. Very well. Have another Scotch, and let
semblance and deception become duck-weed on a river.”
And while I pour and sip my Scotch, I remember another Chinese
philosopher, Chuang Tzu, who, four centuries before Christ,
challenged this dreamland of the world, saying: “How then do I
know but that the dead repent of having previously clung to life?
Those who dream of the banquet, wake to lamentation and sorrow.
Those who dream of lamentation and sorrow, wake to join the hunt.
While they dream, they do not know that they dream. Some will
even interpret the very dream they are dreaming; and only when
they awake do they know it was a dream…. Fools think they are
awake now, and flatter themselves they know if they are really
princes or peasants. Confucius and you are both dreams; and I who
say you are dreams–I am but a dream myself.
“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly,
fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a
butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a
butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man.
John Barleycorn
112
Suddenly, I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not
know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or
whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”
CHAPTER XXXVII
“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
John Barleycorn
113
which other vineyardists refused to haul their grapes. So Kohler
and Frohling lost the land; the earthquake of 1906 threw 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