The Vision of Elijah Berl

by Frank Lewis Nason

Unconsciously he had carried this inflexible attitude of mind into the game, when necessity had compelled him to admit partners. He resented the insistence of others, that they should be considered as having rights equal to his own. He demanded unconditional surrender, implicit obedience to his will. He reasoned with a sophistical show of right that the great idea was his, that what he gave was given in the fullness of his heart, and that it was only base ingratitude that prompted the recipients to oppose and thwart him.

Winston had opposed and thwarted him in a thousand details, and though Elijah had outwardly yielded, he had not essentially changed, though he was learning many lessons. He had learned to distinguish between what Winston would accept and what he would reject, but involuntarily and unconsciously there was growing up within him a burning hatred of Ralph Winston. There was a seeming lack of sympathy in the rugged integrity of Winston that clove through the heart of things. Winston knew only north and south. If a needle swung to these points, it was right; if it did not, it was wrong, and he had no use for it.

Elijah was growing jealous of Winston. He said nothing, but he noticed that, in the field especially, and to a certain extent in the office, details were more and more referred to Winston, even by Helen. Winston's name was on every tongue. It seemed to Elijah as if profit, and honor, and prestige were slipping from him and falling upon Winston. He was being defrauded. It never occurred to him that Winston's complete surrender of heart, and soul and mind to the successful fulfilment of his dreams, all testified far more strongly than honeyed words of praise to the worthiness of the idea which he had conceived.

He had turned to Helen Lonsdale. With no less rugged ideas of right and wrong, they had been clouded in Helen with the dangerous sympathy of a woman's heart. With sympathy, Helen had softened the blows she had dealt him. To a certain extent she had kept him right, but because the blows had not pained, they lacked a compelling power. Her intuition, stimulated by her belief in him, in his essential greatness, had been quick to detect every changing mood; in her womanly sympathy, her efforts to soothe and comfort had been unstinted.

In spite of all condemning appearances, these influences were having an unconscious effect for good upon Elijah, until the advent of Mrs. MacGregor. She nursed his sense of wrong, stimulated his belief in himself, fed his morbidly craving soul with honeyed food that fattened it for the hand of the slayer.

Yet Mrs. MacGregor had missed her mark. She had counted upon a possible sometime awakening of Elijah, but before the awakening she had intended to have him fully in her power. She had not reckoned at its full value the impatient greed of Elijah; she had not reckoned on the womanhood of Helen Lonsdale which, though struggling in a fog of sinister influences, never lost consciousness of its own identity.

When, on the morning of his declaration to Helen, Elijah left the office, it was as one stricken with a numbing wound. He was not conscious of its meaning, only of the sickening absence of pain which, coupled with the knowledge of the wound, filled him with an unknown terror. As the meaning of it all slowly dawned upon him, the stinging, biting pain played full upon every tingling nerve. He became filled with blind, ungovernable, impotent rage. He raged against himself, against Helen, against Mrs. MacGregor. He would have returned to the office at once; what darker crime he might have committed, only imagination can suggest, but return was impossible. When the thought came to him, he was far beyond Ysleta, surrounded by desert sands that dragged at his feet till physical exertion was no longer possible. Burning with thirst, weakened by hunger, he threw himself upon the hot sands and watched with unconscious eyes the fierce sun sink into the Pacific.

It was here that a wandering vaquero chanced upon him. The simple Mexican knew naught of the delirium born of a frenzied mind, but he knew the delirium of blood thirst that lack of water brings upon the desert wanderer. With this knowledge and belief, he carried Elijah to his hut and nursed him back to life. If the strange señor chose to call upon the names of men and women whom he knew not, that was the señor's privilege, and it was his duty as a host to patter softly with bare feet on the dirt floor, and to bind the hot forehead with herbs which the desert gave. It was his duty as a host to bind with thongs the raving señor to his raw-hide couch, lest he should once more go out into the desert before his strength had returned.

As consciousness began to return to Elijah, his sense of injury took another form. He had been for several days in the Mexican's hut and no one had called for him or inquired. After all he had done for others, they had left him, turned from him in heartless ingratitude, in this his hour of need. He raged against Helen especially, but his rage changed first to an intense longing, then to a determination to see her again.

Toward the evening of the fifth day, he prevailed upon the Mexican to drive him to Ysleta. At the Rio Vista, having gone to his room, he called a servant and sent him with a message to Helen. She was not to be found. At the office he learned that Helen had gone out to the works and would be absent for several days. He would have followed, but he dared not. Her last words, the last look that he remembered so clearly, these told him only too plainly that she would not be forced, that—he dared think no further. He must work on her sympathy through an appeal. He returned to his room at the hotel and found what he had overlooked before, a package of papers on his table. They had been sent over from the office. A slip of paper in Helen's writing, "Elijah Berl, Rio Vista." He tore the string from the bundle in feverish haste. His fingers trembled as he shuffled the letters one by one. Not one was in Helen's hand. Again and again he went over them, then he gave up in despair.