A STARRY DRIVE
In our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum. The
queen and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I was
sick to begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no
longer tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage
on the green. By that time we had begun to realize the
difficulties of our position. We had found what an amount of
labour it cost to support life in our red canyon; and it was the
dearest desire of our hearts to get a China-boy to go along with us
when we returned. We could have given him a whole house to
himself, self-contained, as they say in the advertisements; and on
the money question we were prepared to go far. Kong Sam Kee, the
Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and from day to
day it languished on, with protestations on our part and
mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.
At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the
waggon ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman,
with a somewhat sneering air, produced the boy. He was a handsome,
gentlemanly lad, attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy
white; but, alas! he had heard rumours of Silverado. He know it
for a lone place on the mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house
near by, where he might smoke a pipe of opium o' nights with other
China-boys, and lose his little earnings at the game of tan; and he
first backed out for more money; and then, when that demand was
satisfied, refused to come point-blank. He was wedded to his wash-
houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we must go to our
mountain servantless. It must have been near half an hour before
we reached that conclusion, standing in the midst of Calistoga high
street under the stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing
their pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the most
musical inflections.
We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought with us Joe
Strong, the painter, a most good-natured comrade and a capital hand
at an omelette. I do not know in which capacity he was most
valued--as a cook or a companion; and he did excellently well in
both.
The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must have
been half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully
ere we struck the bottom of the grade. I have never seen such a
night. It seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters
that ever dabbled in starlight. The sky itself was of a ruddy,
powerful, nameless, changing colour, dark and glossy like a
serpent's back. The stars, by innumerable millions, stuck boldly
forth like lamps. The milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud;
half heaven seemed milky way. The greater luminaries shone each
more clearly than a winter's moon. Their light was dyed in every
sort of colour--red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the
tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own
lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled
arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was
one chaos of contesting luminaries--a hurry-burly of stars.
Against this the hills and rugged treetops stood out redly dark.
As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first
grew pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven
dwindled in number by successive millions; those that still shone
had tempered their exceeding brightness and fallen back into their
customary wistful distance; and the sky declined from its first
bewildering splendour into the appearance of a common night.
Slowly this change proceeded, and still there was no sign of any
cause. Then a whiteness like mist was thrown over the spurs of the
mountain. Yet a while, and, as we turned a corner, a great leap of
silver light and net of forest shadows fell across the road and
upon our wondering waggonful; and, swimming low among the trees, we
beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half-tilted on her back.
"Where are ye when the moon appears?" so the old poet sang, half-
taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose.
"As the sunlight round the dim earth's midnight tower of shadow
pours,
Streaming past the dim, wide portals,
Viewless to the eyes of mortals,
Till it floods the moon's pale islet or the morning's golden
shores."
So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration. And so had the
sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lit face put
out, one after another, that galaxy of stars. The wonder of the
drive was over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the
air and fit shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen
for a little while that brave display of the midnight heavens. It
was gone, but it had been; nor shall I ever again behold the stars
with the same mind. He who has seen the sea commoved with a great
hurricane, thinks of it very differently from him who has seen it
only in a calm. And the difference between a calm and a hurricane
is not greatly more striking than that between the ordinary face of
night and the splendour that shone upon us in that drive. Two in
our waggon knew night as she shines upon the tropics, but even that
bore no comparison. The nameless colour of the sky, the hues of
the star-fire, and the incredible projection of the stars
themselves, starting from their orbits, so that the eye seemed to
distinguish their positions in the hollow of space--these were
things that we had never seen before and shall never see again.
Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way among the
scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of the grade,
wound up by Hanson's, and came at last to a stand under the flying
gargoyle of the chute. Sam, who had been lying back, fast asleep,
with the moon on his face, got down, with the remark that it was
pleasant "to be home." The waggon turned and drove away, the noise
gently dying in the woods, and we clambered up the rough path,
Caliban's great feat of engineering, and came home to Silverado.
The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows, and over the
lumber on the platform. The one tall pine beside. the ledge was
steeped in silver. Away up the canyon, a wild cat welcomed us with
three discordant squalls. But once we had lit a candle, and began
to review our improvements, homely in either sense, and count our
stores, it was wonderful what a feeling of possession and
permanence grow up in the hearts of the lords of Silverado. A bed
had still to be made up for Strong, and the morning's water to be
fetched, with clinking pail; and as we set about these household
duties, and showed off our wealth and conveniences before the
stranger, and had a glass of wine, I think, in honour of our
return, and trooped at length one after another up the flying
bridge of plank, and lay down to sleep in our shattered, moon-
pierced barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns in the
world, and certainly ruled over the most contented people. Yet, in
our absence, the palace had been sacked. Wild cats, so the Hansons
said, had broken in and carried off a side of bacon, a hatchet, and
two knives.
