Rezanov | Page 5

to vehicles and horses and the maddening lengthening
of time. From drenchings and freezing comes the fever that calls for
more speed. Krasnoiarsk is reached. The fever mounts, the traveler
must stop and rest and be cared for. His visions commingle his
objective and his memories . . . CONCHA! . . . The snowy steppes and
the inky rivers. . . . His servant en- ters the room in the inn . . . Why . . .
"Where has Jon found Castilian roses in this barren land?" . . . "and his
unconquerably sanguine spirit flared high before a vision of eternal and
unthinkable happiness" . . . Castilian roses! Concha Arguello waits
among them, immortal, sainted in her purity and fidelity, ministering to
her poor Indians, her face alight with unquenchable memory and with
surety of an eventual everlasting tryst. Those Cas- tilian roses! They
perfume forever one's mem- ories of this pair, puissant in faith, in this
novel that is a poem and a shrine of that love which lives when death
itself is dead.
WILLIAM MARION REEDY

REZANOV
I
As the little ship that had three times raced with death sailed past the
gray headlands and into the straits of San Francisco on that brilliant
April morning of 1806, Rezanov forgot the bitter hu- miliations, the
mental and physical torments, the deprivations and dangers of the past
three years; forgot those harrowing months in the harbor of Nagasaki
when the Russian bear had caged his tail in the presence of eyes aslant;
his dismay at Kam- chatka when he had been forced to send home an-
other to vindicate his failure, and to remain in the Tsar's incontiguous
and barbarous northeastern possessions as representative of his
Imperial Majesty, and plenipotentiary of the Company his own genius
had created; forgot the year of loneli- ness and hardship and peril in
whose jaws the bravest was impotent; forgot even his pitiable crew,
diseased when he left Sitka, that had filled the Juno with their groans

and laments; and the bells of youth, long still, rang in his soul once
more.
"It is the spring in California," he thought, with a sigh that curled at the
edge. "However," life had made him philosophical; "the moments of
un- reasonable happiness are the most enviable no doubt, for there is
neither gall nor satiety in the reaction. All this is as enchanting as--well,
as a woman's promise. What lies beyond? Illiterate and mer- cenary
Spaniards, vicious natives, and boundless ennui, one may safely wager.
But if all California is as beautiful as this, no man that has spent a
winter in Sitka should ask for more."
In the extent and variety of his travels Rezanov had seen Nature more
awesome of feature but never more fair. On his immediate right as he
sailed down the straits toward the narrow entrance to be known as the
Golden Gate, there was little to interest save the surf and the masses of
outlying rocks where the seals leapt and barked; the shore beyond was
sandy and low. But on his left the last of the northern mountains rose
straight from the water, the warm red of its deeply indented cliffs rich
in harmony with the green of slope and height. There was not a tree; the
mountains, the promon- tories, the hills far down on the right beyond
the sand dunes, looked like stupendous waves of lava that had cooled
into every gracious line and fold within the art of relenting Nature;
granted ages after, a light coat of verdure to clothe the terrible mystery
of birth. The great bay, as blue and tran- quil as a high mountain lake,
as silent as if the planet still slept after the agonies of labor, looked to
be broken by a number of promontories, rising from their points far out
in the water to the high back of the land; but as the Juno pursued her
slant- ing way down the channel Rezanov saw that the most imposing
of these was but the end of a large island, and that scattered near were
other islands, masses of rock like the castellated heights that rise
abruptly from the plains of Italy and Spain; far away, narrow straits,
with a glittering expanse be- yond; while bounding the whole eastern
rim of this splendid sheet of water was a chain of violet hills, with the
pale green mist of new grass here and there, and purple hollows that
might mean groves of trees crouching low against the cold winds of
summer; in the soft pale blue haze above and be- yond, the lofty

volcanic peak of a mountain range. Not a human being, not a boat, not
even a herd of cattle was to be seen, and Rezanov, for