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THE VISION OF ELIJAH BERL

Boston Little, Brown, and Company 1905

Published April, 1905.

PRELUDE

The Vision of Elijah Berl

"But I know what I need. I need you."

There was a dogged tone in Elijah Berl's voice that was almost sullenly insistent.

"I have given you all that I have to give, Elijah. You don't need me. What you need is money, and that's what I haven't got."

"And I say again that I have thought of this for five years. Ever since I left New England. I have not been alone, I have been guided. Step by step I have gone over my ground up to this point. I have studied men as carefully as I have my work. You are the man I have selected, and you are the man I want."

Ralph Winston looked thoughtfully into the glowing eyes bent full upon him. The impulse was strong within him to do as the man before him wished--almost compelled--him to do; but because of this subtle power which moved him so strongly, he hesitated. To what further lengths might it not impel him when the first step had been taken? Clear-eyed, clear-headed, never so cautious as when his desires called most loudly to him, he hesitated to take the first step in the path which Elijah Berl had so insistently opened before him. Therefore he spoke deliberately, almost coldly.

"Don't misunderstand me, Elijah. I have faith in you and I have more faith in your idea. For this very reason I hesitate to accept your offer. You and I are so different. I--"

Elijah interrupted impatiently.

"I have thought of all that. I have prayed over it. 'Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers,' and as the voice from heaven came to Paul, even so it came to me--'What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.'"

A smile flickered for a moment on the lips of the young engineer as he turned to a pretty little woman who, with her light sewing in her hands, was rocking gently on the wide verandah.

"What do you think about it, Amy?"

Amy Berl drew her needle the full length of the thread and held it poised for a moment as she made reply.

"Elijah knows what is best, Ralph." Then, with a swift glance at her husband, she again bent over her work.

"Of course he knows some things--"

"He knows every thing." Amy did not raise her eyes from her work this time.

With a sigh of impatience, Elijah threw himself into a chair near his wife. The needle dropped from the hand which she timidly rested upon his, while her eyes sought his face. Absorbed in himself, not a quiver responded to the touch of Amy's hand, not a glance answered the caress of her eyes.

It was a pretty picture in a grandly beautiful setting. A wide verandah, covered with climbing roses in full bloom, opened upon a scene almost tropical in its beauty. Down the redwood steps the eyes wandered across a luxuriant flower garden, still lower they rested upon a great square of dark, shining green; below this, in sharp contrast, and surrounding the shining green, tawny sand pricked in with tufts and clumps of dusty, green sage, rolling hills in descending cadence, till, in the far distance, a grayer, wimpling gray, the great Pacific marked the limits of the desert.

To the left, the eyes leaped the rock-strewn bed of the Rio Sangre de Cristo, climbed rock-ribbed, wooded slopes, up and up to the dizzy snow-clad peaks of the San Bernardinos that rested purple and white against the constant azure of a California sky. Within the limits of the cottage, the flower garden, and the irrigated orange grove, the sun seemed to hold its fierceness in awesome leash only to let loose its fervid power upon the glowing sands and their tortured growths.

The characters were in harmony with their setting. The blue-eyed little woman, delicate, with tawny hair, a sweet-scented mountain gentian ready to shrink and fold upon itself at a shadow that could not harm, but could only feebly threaten; the young engineer, with close-cropped hair, a face chiselled with strong, undoubting strokes, a mouth half hidden by a mustache that gave a glimpse of lips too thick to be merciless, too thin to be sensuous. There was an air of alertness about the man, a suggested tireless energy that renewed its strength on the food of humor gathered even from the most monotonous commonplaces. Ralph Winston was not a rare type of man, but he was a saving one. With him was an air of inflexibility of purpose, softened with mercy; a rugged honesty that made no compromise with evil-doers, an honesty that, with laughing eyes, left the uncovered sinner ashamed and repentant, instead of defiant and revengeful in his defeat.

A tyro, looking at the smooth-shaven, boyish face of Elijah Berl, would fail to note the hardly defined lines that ran from mouth to eyes; lines broad, undulating through the whole gamut of enthusiasm, but lines that grew hard and merciless as they converged to eyes narrowed before opposition and lightened with fanatical zeal.

Winston's footing with the Berls was intimate, though upon short acquaintance. This was not strange in California. Twenty miles from the Berl ranch was a booming town that had attracted Winston. Here was a good opening for an engineer, with large and sure pay. Winston made light of the town and its promoters, and among these he had no intimates. On a hunting trip he had discovered the Berl ranch and had found it worthy of the more intimate acquaintance to which he was cordially invited. Little by little he had drawn from Elijah the story of his life in California. It had been an isolated life, full of hardship, but devoted to a single idea, that of reclaiming the vast extent of country which now lay barren and unfruitful.

The young engineer's eyes grew deep and thoughtful. This offer of an equal partnership meant even more to him than Elijah realized. Why not accept it? It was what he had hoped for, had sought for--a life work in which he could enlist his strength and his sense of honor. It was worth while, 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."

"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 by point and line by line, to his waiting eye.

Elijah deepened his springs and hoarded the water they gave. Between rows of dark-green leaves, shrubs that faded not in summer's drouth nor in winter's rains, he guided trickling streams, apportioning to each its proper share. Through the day he toiled with increasing energy. Towards each night, with Amy by his side, he rested by the door of his cottage and looked below, over reddening hills, across the rolling plains, beyond where the half-buried disc of the sun spread wide the golden mantle of its light upon the wrinkling waters of the Pacific. Behind the cottage, from the rock-strewn wash of the Rio Sangre de Cristo, the lowest foot-hills rose to wooded slopes, grew to timbered mountains, up and up till the forests gave way to the snow-capped peaks of the San Bernardinos. "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help." In mid-day's toil when Elijah paused to rest his strained back, or to wipe the perspiration from his streaming face, in the silence of the night, when the moon lay white and still upon the slumbering landscape, his eyes sought out the solemn mountains which were shaping his dreams. He listened to the roar of the torrents that came faint with distance, when the mountains wrung dry the clouds that shrouded their peaks, or when the fierce sun swept away their winter's mantle of white. He watched the surging flood that rolled breast-high in receding waves through the Sangre de Cristo, tossing boulders like feathers in their boisterous strength; watched it rush through torrid plains and finally sink from sight beneath the sands. He watched the parched lips held to the Tantalean cup, saw the few drops of stolen moisture quicken into verdant life, saw, when the flood had passed by and the mountains had ceased to give forth their murmurs, the mocking sun crackle the up-sprung life to choking dust, and once more the shimmering heat-waves rise in trembling agony from the tortured sands. Then the voice that was calling him grew more distinct, the guiding hand more clearly outlined. As the blood of Christ quickened into life the soul dead in sin, so should the stream that bore His name quicken into blooming fields the dead, dry sands of the desert. His lips moved reverently with his unuttered words, a prayer for guidance, a chant of faith, as his eyes swept from crest to crest of the blood-red hills that held the river of the blood of Christ against the mountains of its birth.

In spite of his words to the contrary, Elijah was disturbed by Winston's attitude. What was the flaw in his scheme that held Winston aloof? Elijah was in an agony of doubt. Up and down the flower-scented paths, through groves of orange, yellow with golden fruit, he paced with restless steps. With all his soul he strained to catch an opening in the clouds that held the future from his eyes. Little by little the sense of depression yielded to his efforts, little by little the vision that had kept him constant, returned to him in the full glory of perfection. He had been watching the hills as they glowed in the light of the setting sun. As the gray night, settling over all, blotted out the details of the landscape, leaving the mountains a purple blur against the faint blue of the sky, Elijah felt a strong reaction. He feared, yet longed for the coming light; feared, lest it should prove that the plan which had been revealed to him might be but the figment of a frenzied dream.

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