"Few there are who have not something they prize more than life," he added gloomily. The fire died from his eye. He became once again the timid old butterfly hunter, pushing blindly out into the wilderness, wondering at himself for thus exposing an old wound to a chance passer; and yet perhaps feeling in some dim fashion—so inscrutable are the instincts of these half-childish natures—that in so doing he was following for a moment the lines of greater destinies than his own.
And certainly, long after the dipper had swung below the pole star, Lafond sat staring into the ashes of the fire, just as four days since he had stared into the ashes of a brave and chivalrous life. In his history there were the two crucial hours—one after the greatest battle of the plains; the other after a dozen sentences exchanged with a half-crazy old entomologist. From the potent reflections induced by these one hundred and twenty minutes it resulted that Michaïl Lafond became civilized and a seeker for wealth in the development of the young country. In wealth he saw power; in power the ability to give or take away.
The depriving each man of that which he prizes the most!
XIII
THE DISSOLVING VIEW
While things have gone on, we have conducted our business and returned each evening to our armchairs by the fire. There we have sat at ease and reviewed the world. Events have come to pass. Diplomats have quarrelled gravely over the wording of a document. From our evening papers we have gathered a languid interest in the controversy. Six months later we pick up the paper and find that the dispute is still going on. A German and an Englishman play a game of chess over the cable. This too is reported in our journal, and we follow its progress with attention through the weeks of its duration. Somebody agitates the establishment of a new industry in our native town. It will raise the value of our real estate, so we attend meetings for some months and talk about it, after which the industry is assured. Two years later it is in operation and we congratulate ourselves. Friends of our younger days marry; and before we know it their houses are noisy with the shoutings of children. Leisurely we grow older. Our ideas become fixed, often by the most trivial of circumstances. Africa means tangled forest; India, a jungle; Siberia, broad snow plains; all South America, a dripping stillness of tropical verdure; simply because somewhere, some time, a book or paper, the woodcut of a child's lesson, has so generalized them for us. Against these preconceived notions the events we read about are cast.
In very much this way the constant facts of the West have been to us the Indian and the buffalo. Before our eyes the Master Showman has held insistently this picture. Against the background of the occidental hills or the flat reach of the grass-nodding prairies has posed in solemn gravity the naked warrior, leaning from his pony upon his feather-bedecked lance; or, in the choking dust of its own progression, has lumbered heavily the buffalo myriad. These have seemed permanent—the man and the beast.
Then, before our protesting conservatism, the scene has dissolved in a mist of strange shapes and violent deeds, only to steady a moment later into a new picture. The mounted figure has disappeared, and in his place, against the glow of sunset, the sturdy form of the husbandman grasps the shaft of his plough, gazing past the tired horses, and brooding the slow thoughts of his calling. The last rays catch the sheen of grain—a sea of it—and shimmer lightly until they lose themselves in contrast with the square of ruddy light that marks the windows of a farmhouse.
This is the new West. We rub our eyes and wonder. The diplomats still squabble; the chess game dawdles its languid way; the factory is getting ready to pay its first dividend; our friends' children are about to enter the high school. Everything has developed along the usual lines of growth, and yet this greater change has come about in a night. We turn back the files of our paper, and find that it has occupied in the world's history just fifteen years! In that little space of time the institutions of untold ages have been overthrown and new ones substituted for them.