JOHN BARLEYCORN by Jack London Страница 34

ot care to waken. I did but stir them, and let them lie. I was too wise, too wicked wise, to wake them.

But now White Logic willy-nilly wakes them for me, for White Logic, most valiant, is unafraid of all the monsters of the earthly dream.



"Let the doctors of all the schools condemn me, "White Logic whispers as I ride along. "What of it? I am truth. You know it.

You cannot combat me. They say I make for death. What of it? It is truth. Life lies in order to live. Life is a perpetual lie- telling process. Life is a mad dance in the domain of flux, wherein appearances in mighty tides ebb and flow, chained to the wheels of moons beyond our ken. Appearances are ghosts. Life is ghost land, where appearances change, transfuse, permeate each the other and all the others, that are, that are not, that always flicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, as other appearances. You are such an appearance, composed of countless appearances out of the past. All an appearance can know is mirage. You know mirages of desire. These very mirages are the unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you out of the past, and that sweep you on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable congeris of appearances to people the ghost land of the future.

Life is apparitional, and passes. You are an apparition. Through all the apparition that preceded you and that compose the parte of you, you rose gibbering fromt he evolutionary mire, and gibbering you will pass on, interfusing, permeating the procession of apparitions that will succeed you."



And of course it is all unanswerable, and as I ride along through the evening shadows I sneer at that Great Fetish which Comte called the world. And I remember what another peessimist of sentiency has uttered: "Transient are all. They, being born, must die, and, being dead, are glad to be at rest."



But here through the dusk comes one who iw not glad to be at rest.

He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian.

He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of life. I am food to him, and shelter, and 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 inarticulwte self-affinities, with self-conjured non- realities. He sees pneumbral 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 virthe 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 stupif a clod to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the erernities."



"Pah!" is the retrot. "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!



"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, raspbeerry 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, Lou 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,"p rompts 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 the ndo 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 thd 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 reaily 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 purpoees a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man.

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, begihning 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 formkdableness of a battle--theq uick 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 dec5ees of distribution. It is like a monster ever unsubdued, this stubborn land that drowses in this Indian summer weather and that survivez 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 wrote 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 appdarf ast and furiouspy, 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 which other vineyar
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