CHAPTER III. THE RETURN
Next morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement,
and it was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us
up. Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to
ear, and full of tales of the hospitality they had found on the
other side. It had not gone unrewarded; for I observed with
interest that the ship's kettles, all but one, had been "placed."
Three Lake County families, at least, endowed for life with a
ship's kettle. Come, this was no misspent Sunday. The absence of
the kettles told its own story: our Jews said nothing about them;
but, on the other hand, they said many kind and comely things about
the people they had met. The two women, in particular, had been
charmed out of themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded
by her admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been triumphing
together in the girl's innocent successes, and to this natural and
unselfish joy they gave expression in language that was beautiful
by its simplicity and truth.
Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good;
they seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in
so large a measure and so free from after-thought; almost they
persuaded me to be a Jew. There was, indeed, a chink of money in
their talk. They particularly commanded people who were well to
do. "HE don't care--ain't it?" was their highest word of
commendation to an individual fate; and here I seem to grasp the
root of their philosophy--it was to be free from care, to be free
to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so eagerly pursued after
wealth; and all this carefulness was to be careless. The fine,
good humour of all three seemed to declare they had attained their
end. Yet there was the other side to it; and the recipients of
kettles perhaps cared greatly.
No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began
again. The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time--
it was not worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar,
leaving them under a tree on the other side of the road. I had to
devote myself. I stood under the shadow of that tree for, I
suppose, hard upon an hour, and had not the heart to be angry.
Once some one remembered me, and brought me out half a tumblerful
of the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I drank it, and lo!
veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of
conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for
quarter of an hour. I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will
not court them. The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much
French poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to
enjoy it hugely. And now it went -
"O ma vieille Font-georges
Ou volent les rouges-gorges:"
and again, to a more trampling measure -
"Et tout tremble, Irun, Coimbre,
Sautander, Almodovar,
Sitot qu'on entend le timbre
Des cymbales do Bivar."
The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless
land; brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright
armour, in that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and
the bear! This is still the strangest thing in all man's
travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous
memories. There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that
is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights
up the contrasts of the earth.
But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been
transacted in the bar. Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was
again crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship's kettles had
changed hands. If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar's
motives, if I had ever suspected him of a single eye to business in
his eternal dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was
disposed of, my suspicions must have been allayed. I dare not
guess how much more time was wasted; nor how often we drove off,
merely to drive back again and renew interrupted conversations
about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind. Alas!
and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a sunny
vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.
Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame,
the picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and
had an age-long conversation, which would have been highly
delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger. The
ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews
with the prettiest combination of sentiment and financial bathos.
Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word. She was as
simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that should have been
brought up to the business of a money-changer. One touch was so
resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over. When her "old
man" wrote home for her from America, her old man's family would
not intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound
herself by an oath--on her knees, I think she said--not to employ
it otherwise.
This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully
more.
Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters;
of her honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey;
how in the bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after
having taken her cheque, should deny all knowledge of it--a fear I
have myself every time I go to a bank; and how crossing the
Luneburger Heath, an old lady, witnessing her trouble and finding
whither she was bound, had given her "the blessing of a person
eighty years old, which would be sure to bring her safely to the
States. And the first thing I did," added Mrs. Guele, "was to fall
downstairs."
At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap,
when--judgment of Heaven!--here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard.
So another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our
earnest pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-
faced and silent, but the Jews still smiling. The heart fails me.
There was yet another stoppage! And we drove at last into
Calistoga past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted
at six in the morning, eight mortal hours before. We were a pallid
couple; but still the Jews were smiling.
So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it
was done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of
the part we had been playing in it, than the child unborn. That
all the people we had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in
various degrees of servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up
the mountain in the interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we
laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of
various intermediaries, should all hop ultimately into Kelmar's
till;--these were facts that we only grew to recognize in the
course of time and by the accumulation of evidence. At length all
doubt was quieted, when one of the kettle-holders confessed.
Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga,
he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show face therewith
an empty pocket. "You see, I don't mind if it was only five
dollars, Mr. Stevens," he said, "but I must give Mr. Kelmar
SOMETHING."
Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it
in my heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew
tyrant. The whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and
though perhaps that game looks uglier when played at such close
quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically
inhumane for that. The village usurer is not so sad a feature of
humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer,
fattening on the toil and loss of thousands, and yet declaiming
from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of landlords.
If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he
thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my
Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers. Kelmar, if he was
unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the
matter of his brother's mote.
