"Come," says the White , "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, beginning with Manuel Micheltoreno, one time Mexican "Governor, Commander-in-Chief, and 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 assumes the formidableness of a battle—the quick struggling with the dust. There are deeds of trust, mortgages, certificates of release, transfers, , foreclosures, of , orders of sale, tax , petitions for letters of administration, and decrees of distribution. It is like a monster ever unsubdued, this stubborn land that drowses in this Indian summer weather and that survives them all, the men who scratched its surface and passed.
Who was this James King of William, so 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 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 , wind-jamming around the Horn, to write 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 appear fast and furiously, flashing from legal page to legal page and in a flash vanishing. But ever the soil for others to themselves across. Come the names of men of whom I have 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 vineyardists refused to haul their grapes. So Kohler and Frohling lost the land; the earthquake of 1906 threw down the winery; and I now live in its ruins.
La Motte—he broke the soil, planted vines and , instituted commercial fish culture, built a in its day, was defeated by the soil, and passed. And my name of a day appears. On the site of his orchards and vine-yards, of his proud mansion, of his very fish ponds, I have myself with half a hundred thousand trees.
Cooper and Greenlaw—on what is called the Hill they left two of their dead, "Little Lillie" and "Little David," who rest to-day inside a tiny square of hand-hewn palings. Also, Cooper and Greenlaw in their time cleared the forest from three fields of forty acres. To-day I have those three fields sown with Canada peas, and in the spring they shall be ploughed under for green .
Haska—a dim figure of a generation ago, who went back up the mountain and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valley that took his name. He broke the soil, reared stone walls and a house, and planted apple trees. And already the site of the house is undiscoverable, the location of the stone walls may be deduced from the of the landscape, and I am renewing the battle, putting in angora goats to away the brush that has overrun Haska's clearing and choked Haska's apple trees to death. So I, too, scratch the land with my brief endeavour and flash my name across a page of legal script ere I pass and the page grows musty.
"Dreamers and ghosts," the White Logic .
"But surely the striving was not altogether vain," I contend.
"It was based on illusion and is a lie."
"A vital lie," I retort.
"And pray what is a vital lie but a lie?" the White Logic challenges. "Come. Fill your glass and let us examine these vital who crowd your bookshelves. Let us in William James a bit."
"A man of health," I say. "From him we may expect no philosopher's stone, but at least we will find a few things to which to tie."
"Rationality gelded to sentiment," the White Logic grins. "At the end of all his thinking he still clung to the sentiment of . Facts in the alembic of hope into terms of faith. The ripest fruit of reason the of reason. From the topmost peak of reason James teaches to cease reasoning and to have faith that all is well and will be well—the old, oh, ancient old, acrobatic of the metaphysicians whereby they reasoned reason quite away in order to escape the consequent upon the grim and honest exercise of reason.
"Is this flesh of yours you? Or is it an something by you? Your body—what is it? A machine for converting into reactions. Stimuli and reactions are remembered. They constitute experience. Then you are in ............