The Octopus | Page 5

deerhound.
Presley wheeled up the driveway and met Harran by the horse- block.
Harran was Magnus Derrick's youngest son, a very well- looking young
fellow of twenty-three or twenty-five. He had the fine carriage that
marked his father, and still further resembled him in that he had the
Derrick nose--hawk-like and prominent, such as one sees in the later
portraits of the Duke of Wellington. He was blond, and incessant
exposure to the sun had, instead of tanning him brown, merely
heightened the colour of his cheeks. His yellow hair had a tendency to
curl in a forward direction, just in front of the ears.
Beside him, Presley made the sharpest of contrasts. Presley seemed to
have come of a mixed origin; appeared to have a nature more
composite, a temperament more complex. Unlike Harran Derrick, he
seemed more of a character than a type. The sun had browned his face
till it was almost swarthy. His eyes were a dark brown, and his forehead
was the forehead of the intellectual, wide and high, with a certain
unmistakable lift about it that argued education, not only of himself,
but of his people before him. The impression conveyed by his mouth
and chin was that of a delicate and highly sensitive nature, the lips thin
and loosely shut together, the chin small and rather receding. One
guessed that Presley's refinement had been gained only by a certain loss
of strength. One expected to find him nervous, introspective, to
discover that his mental life was not at all the result of impressions and
sensations that came to him from without, but rather of thoughts and
reflections germinating from within. Though morbidly sensitive to
changes in his physical surroundings, he would be slow to act upon
such sensations, would not prove impulsive, not because he was
sluggish, but because he was merely irresolute. It could be foreseen that
morally he was of that sort who avoid evil through good taste, lack of
decision, and want of opportunity. His temperament was that of the
poet; when he told himself he had been thinking, he deceived himself.
He had, on such occasions, been only brooding.
Some eighteen months before this time, he had been threatened with

consumption, and, taking advantage of a standing invitation on the part
of Magnus Derrick, had come to stay in the dry, even climate of the
San Joaquin for an indefinite length of time. He was thirty years old,
and had graduated and post-graduated with high honours from an
Eastern college, where he had devoted himself to a passionate study of
literature, and, more especially, of poetry.
It was his insatiable ambition to write verse. But up to this time, his
work had been fugitive, ephemeral, a note here and there, heard,
appreciated, and forgotten. He was in search of a subject; something
magnificent, he did not know exactly what; some vast, tremendous
theme, heroic, terrible, to be unrolled in all the thundering progression
of hexameters.
But whatever he wrote, and in whatever fashion, Presley was
determined that his poem should be of the West, that world's frontier of
Romance, where a new race, a new people--hardy, brave, and
passionate--were building an empire; where the tumultuous life ran like
fire from dawn to dark, and from dark to dawn again, primitive, brutal,
honest, and without fear. Something (to his idea not much) had been
done to catch at that life in passing, but its poet had not yet arisen. The
few sporadic attempts, thus he told himself, had only touched the
keynote. He strove for the diapason, the great song that should embrace
in itself a whole epoch, a complete era, the voice of an entire people,
wherein all people should be included--they and their legends, their
folk lore, their fightings, their loves and their lusts, their blunt, grim
humour, their stoicism under stress, their adventures, their treasures
found in a day and gambled in a night, their direct, crude speech, their
generosity and cruelty, their heroism and bestiality, their religion and
profanity, their self-sacrifice and obscenity--a true and fearless setting
forth of a passing phase of history, un- compromising, sincere; each
group in its proper environment; the valley, the plain, and the mountain;
the ranch, the range, and the mine--all this, all the traits and types of
every community from the Dakotas to the Mexicos, from Winnipeg to
Guadalupe, gathered together, swept together, welded and riven
together in one single, mighty song, the Song of the West. That was
what he dreamed, while things without names--thoughts for which no

man had yet invented words, terrible formless shapes, vague figures,
colossal, monstrous, distorted-- whirled at a gallop through his
imagination.
As Harran came up, Presley reached down into the pouches of the
sun-bleached shooting coat he wore and drew out and handed