The Splendid Idle Forties: Stories of Old California

The good priests of Santa Barbara sat in grave conference on the long corridor of their mission.  It was a winter’s day, and they basked in the sun.  The hoods of their brown habits peaked above faces lean and ascetic, fat and good-tempered, stern, intelligent, weak, commanding.  One face alone was young.

But for the subject under discussion they would have been at peace with themselves and with Nature.  In the great square of the mission the Indians they had Christianized worked at many trades.  The great aqueduct along the brow of one of the lower hills, the wheat and corn fields on the slopes, the trim orchards and vegetable gardens in the cañons of the great bare mountains curving about the valley, were eloquent evidence of their cleverness and industry.  From the open door of the church came the sound of lively and solemn tunes:  the choir was practising for mass.  The day was as peaceful as only those long drowsy shimmering days before the Americans came could be.  And yet there was dissent among the padres.

Several had been speaking together, when one of the older men raised his hand with cold impatience.

“There is only one argument,” he said.  “We came here, came to the wilderness out of civilization, for one object only—­to lead the heathen to God.  We have met with a fair success.  Shall we leave these miserable islanders to perish, when we have it in our power to save?”

“But no one knows exactly where this island is, Father Jiméno,” replied the young priest.  “And we know little of navigation, and may perish before we find it.  Our lives are more precious than those of savages.”

“In the sight of God one soul is of precisely the same value as another, Father Carillo.”

The young priest scowled.  “We can save.  They cannot.”

“If we refuse to save when the power is ours, then the savage in his extremest beastiality has more hope of heaven than we have.”

Father Carillo looked up at the golden sun riding high in the dark blue sky, down over the stately oaks and massive boulders of the valley where quail flocked like tame geese.  He had no wish to leave his paradise, and as the youngest and hardiest of the priests, he knew that he would be ordered to take charge of the expedition.

“It is said also,” continued the older man, “that once a ship from the Continent of Europe was wrecked among those islands—­”

“No?  No?” interrupted several of the priests.

“It is more than probable that there were survivors, and that their descendants live on this very island to-day.  Think of it, my brother!  Men and women of our own blood, perhaps, living like beasts of the field!  Worshipping idols!  Destitute of morality!  Can we sit here in hope of everlasting life while our brethren perish?”

“No!” The possibility of rescuing men of European blood had quenched dissent.  Even Carillo spoke as spontaneously as the others.

As he had anticipated, the expedition was put in his charge.  Don Guillermo Iturbi y Moncada, the magnate of the South, owned a small schooner, and placed it at the disposal of the priests.

Through the wide portals of the mission church, two weeks later, rolled the solemn music of high mass.  The church was decorated as for a festival.  The aristocrats of the town knelt near the altar, the people and Indians behind.

Father Carillo knelt and took communion, the music hushing suddenly to rise in more sonorous volume.  Then Father Jiméno, bearing a cross and chanting the rosary, descended the altar steps and walked toward the doors.  On either side of him a page swung a censer.  Four women neophytes rose from among the worshippers, and shouldering a litter on which rested a square box containing an upright figure of the Holy Virgin followed with bent heads.  The Virgin’s gown was of yellow satin, covered with costly Spanish lace; strands of Baja Californian pearls bedecked the front of her gown.  Behind this resplendent image came the other priests, two and two, wearing their white satin embroidered robes, chanting the sacred mysteries.  Father Carillo walked last and alone.  His thin clever face wore an expression of nervous exaltation.

As the procession descended the steps of the church, the bells rang out a wild inspiring peal.  The worshippers rose, and forming in line followed the priests down the valley.

When they reached the water’s edge, Father Jiméno raised the cross above his head, stepped with the other priests into a boat, and was rowed to the schooner.  He sprinkled holy water upon the little craft; then Father Carillo knelt and received the blessing of each of his brethren.  When he rose all kissed him solemnly, then returned to the shore, where the whole town knelt.  The boat brought back the six Indians who were to give greeting and confidence to their kinsmen on the island, and the schooner was ready to sail.  As she weighed anchor, the priests knelt in a row before the people, Father Jiméno alone standing and holding the cross aloft with rigid arms.

Father Carillo stood on deck and watched the white mission under the mountain narrow to a thread, the kneeling priests become dots of reflected light.  His exaltation vanished.  He was no longer the chief figure in a picturesque panorama.  He set his lips and his teeth behind them.  He was a very ambitious man.  His dreams leapt beyond California to the capital of Spain.  If he returned with his savages, he might make success serve as half the ladder.  But would he return?

Wind and weather favoured him.  Three days after leaving Santa Barbara he sighted a long narrow mountainous island.  He had passed another of different proportions in the morning, and before night sighted still another, small and oval.  But the lofty irregular mass, some ten miles long and four miles wide, which he approached at sundown, was the one he sought.  The night world was alight under the white blaze of the moon; the captain rode into a small harbour at the extreme end of the island and cast anchor, avoiding reefs and shoals as facilely as by midday.  Father Carillo gave his Indians orders to be ready to march at dawn.

The next morning the priest arrayed himself in his white satin garments, embroidered about the skirt with gold and on the chest with a purple cross pointed with gold.  The brown woollen habit of his voyage was left behind.  None knew better than he the value of theatric effect upon the benighted mind.  His Indians wore gayly striped blankets of their own manufacture, and carried baskets containing presents and civilized food.

Bearing a large gilt cross, Father Carillo stepped on shore, waved farewell to the captain, and directed his Indians to keep faithfully in the line of march:  they might come upon the savages at any moment.  They toiled painfully through a long stretch of white sand, then passed into a grove of banana trees, dark, cold, noiseless, but for the rumble of the ocean.  When they reached the edge of the grove, Father Carillo raised his cross and commanded the men to kneel.  Rumour had told him what to expect, and he feared the effect on his simple and superstitious companions.  He recited a chaplet, then, before giving them permission to rise, made a short address.

“My children, be not afraid at what meets your eyes.  The ways of all men are not our ways.  These people have seen fit to leave their dead unburied on the surface of the earth.  But these poor bones can do you no more harm than do those you have placed beneath the ground in Santa Barbara.  Now rise and follow me, nor turn back as you fear the wrath of God.”

He turned and strode forward, with the air of one to whom fear had no meaning; but even he closed his eyes for a moment in horror.  The poor creatures behind mumbled and crossed themselves and clung to each other.  The plain was a vast charnel-house.  The sun, looking over the brow of an eastern hill, threw its pale rays upon thousands of crumbling skeletons, bleached by unnumbered suns, picked bare by dead and gone generations of carrion, white, rigid, sinister.  Detached skulls lay in heaps, grinning derisively.  Stark digits pointed threateningly, as if the old warriors still guarded their domain.  Other frames lay face downward, as though the broken teeth had bitten the dust in battle.  Slender forms lay prone, their arms encircling cooking utensils, beautiful in form and colour.  Great bowls and urns, toy canoes, mortars and pestles, of serpentine, sandstone, and steatite, wrought with a lost art,—­if, indeed, the art had ever been known beyond this island,—­and baked to richest dyes, were placed at the head and feet of skeletons more lofty in stature than their fellows.

Father Carillo sprinkled holy water right and left, bidding his Indians chant a rosary for the souls which once had inhabited these appalling tenements.  The Indians obeyed with clattering teeth, keeping their eyes fixed stonily upon the ground lest they stumble and fall amid yawning ribs.

The ghastly tramp lasted two hours.  The sun spurned the hill-top and cast a flood of light upon the ugly scene.  The white bones grew whiter, dazzling the eyes of the living.  They reached the foot of a mountain and began a toilsome ascent through a dark forest.  Here new terrors awaited them.  Skeletons sat propped against trees, grinning out of the dusk, gleaming in horrid relief against the mass of shadow.  Father Carillo, with one eye over his shoulder, managed by dint of command, threats, and soothing words to get his little band to the top of the hill.  Once, when revolt seemed imminent, he asked them scathingly if they wished to retrace their steps over the plain unprotected by the cross, and they clung to his skirts thereafter.  When they reached the summit, they lay down to rest and eat their luncheon, Father Carillo reclining carefully on a large mat:  his fine raiment was a source of no little anxiety.  No skeletons kept them company here.  They had left the last many yards below.

“Anacleto,” commanded the priest, at the end of an hour, “crawl forward on thy hands and knees and peer over the brow of the mountain.  Then come back and tell me if men like thyself are below.”

Anacleto obeyed, and returned in a few moments with bulging eyes and a broad smile of satisfaction.  People were in the valley—­a small band.  They wore feathers like birds, and came and went from the base of the hill.  There were no wigwams, no huts.

Father Carillo rose at once.  Bidding his Indians keep in the background, he walked to the jutting brow of the hill, and throwing a rapid glance downward came to a sudden halt.  With one hand he held the cross well away from him and high above his head.  The sun blazed down on the burnished cross; on the white shining robes of the priest; on his calm benignant face thrown into fine relief by the white of the falling sleeve.

In a moment a low murmur arose from the valley, then a sudden silence.  Father Carillo, glancing downward, saw that the people had prostrated themselves.

He began the descent, holding the cross aloft, chanting solemnly; his Indians, to whom he had given a swift signal, following and lifting up their voices likewise.  The mountain on this side was bare, as if from fire, the incline shorter and steeper.  The priest noted all things, although he never forgot his lines.

Below was a little band of men and women.  A broad plain swept from the mountain’s foot, a forest broke its sweep, and the ocean thundered near.  The people were clad in garments made from the feathered skins of birds, and were all past middle age.  The foot of the mountain was perforated with caves.

When he stood before the trembling awe-struck savages, he spoke to them kindly and bade them rise.  They did not understand, but lifted their heads and stared appealingly.  He raised each in turn.  As they once more looked upon his full magnificence, they were about to prostrate themselves again when they caught sight of the Indians.  Those dark stolid faces, even that gay attire, they could understand.  Glancing askance at the priest, they drew near to their fellow-beings, touched their hands to the strangers’ breasts, and finally kissed them.

Father Carillo was a man of tact.

“My children,” he said to his flock, “do you explain as best you-can to these our new friends what it is we have come to do.  I will go into the forest and rest.”

He walked swiftly across the plain, and parting the clinging branches of two gigantic ferns, entered the dim wood.  He laid the heavy cross beneath a tree, and strolled idly.  It was a forest of fronds.  Lofty fern trees waved above wide-leaved palms.  Here and there a little marsh with crowding plant life held the riotous groves apart.  Down the mountain up which the forest spread tumbled a creek over coloured rocks, then wound its way through avenues, dark in the shadows, sparkling where the sunlight glinted through the tall tree-tops.  Red lilies were everywhere.  The aisles were vocal with whispering sound.

The priest threw himself down on a bed of dry leaves by the creek.  After a time his eyes closed.  He was weary, and slept.

He awoke suddenly, the power of a steadfast gaze dragging his brain from its rest.  A girl sat on a log in the middle of the creek.  Father Carillo stared incredulously, believing himself to be dreaming.  The girl’s appearance was unlike anything he had ever seen.  Like the other members of her tribe, she wore a garment of feathers, and her dark face was cast in the same careless and gentle mould; but her black eyes had a certain intelligence, unusual to the Indians of California, and the hair that fell to her knees was the colour of flame.  Apparently she was not more than eighteen years old.

Father Carillo, belonging to a period when bleached brunettes were unknown, hastily crossed himself.

“Who are you?” he asked.

His voice was deep and musical.  It had charmed many a woman’s heart, despite the fact that he had led a life of austerity and sought no woman’s smiles.  But this girl at the sound of it gave a loud cry and bounded up the mountain, leaping through the brush like a deer.

[Illustration:  “HE AWOKE SUDDENLY, THE POWER OF A STEADFAST GAZE DRAGGING HIS BRAIN FROM ITS REST.”]

The priest rose, drank of the bubbles in the stream, and retraced his steps.  He took up the burden of the cross again and returned to the village.  There he found the savage and the Christianized sitting together in brotherly love.  The islanders were decked with the rosaries presented to them, and the women in their blankets were swollen with pride.  All had eaten of bread and roast fowl, and made the strangers offerings of strange concoctions in magnificent earthen dishes.  As the priest appeared the heathen bowed low, then gathered about him.  Their awe had been dispelled, and they responded to the magnetism of his voice and smile.  He knew many varieties of the Indian language, and succeeded in making them understand that he wished them to return with him, and that he would make them comfortable and happy.  They nodded their heads vigorously as he spoke, but pointed to their venerable chief, who sat at the entrance of his cave eating of a turkey’s drumstick.  Father Carillo went over to the old man and saluted him respectfully.  The chief nodded, waved his hand at a large flat stone, and continued his repast, his strong white teeth crunching bone as well as flesh.  The priest spread his handkerchief on the stone, seated himself, and stated the purpose of his visit.  He dwelt at length upon the glories of civilization.  The chief dropped his bone after a time and listened attentively.  When the priest finished, he uttered a volley of short sentences.

“Good.  We go.  Great sickness come.  All die but us.  Many, many, many.  We are strong no more.  No children come.  We are old—­all.  One young girl not die.  The young men die.  The young women die.  The children die.  No more will come.  Yes, we go.”

“And this young girl with the hair—­” The priest looked upward.  The sun had gone.  He touched the gold of the cross, then his own hair.

“Dorthe,” grunted the old man, regarding his bare drumstick regretfully.

“Who is she?  Where did she get such a name?  Why has she that hair?”

Out of another set of expletives Father Carillo gathered that Dorthe was the granddaughter of a man who had been washed ashore after a storm, and who had dwelt on the island until he died.  He had married a woman of the tribe, and to his daughter had given the name of Dorthe—­or so the Indians had interpreted it—­and his hair, which was like the yellow fire.  This girl had inherited both.  He had been very brave and much beloved, but had died while still young.  Their ways were not his ways, Father Carillo inferred, and barbarism had killed him.

The priest did not see Dorthe again that day.  When night came, he was given a cave to himself.  He hung up his robes on a jutting point of rock, and slept the sleep of the weary.  At the first shaft of dawn he rose, intending to stroll down to the beach in search of a bay where he could bathe; but as he stepped across the prostrate Californians, asleep at the entrance of his cave, he paused abruptly, and changed his plans.

On the far edge of the ocean the rising diadem of the sun sent great bubbles of colour up through a low bank of pale green cloud to the gray night sky and the sulky stars.  And, under the shadow of the cacti and palms, in rapt mute worship, knelt the men and women the priest had come to save, their faces and clasped hands uplifted to the waking sun.

Father Carillo awoke his Indians summarily.

“Gather a dozen large stones and build an altar—­quick!” he commanded.

The sleepy Indians stumbled to their feet, obeyed orders, and in a few moments a rude altar was erected.  The priest propped the cross on the apex, and, kneeling with his Indians, slowly chanted a mass.  The savages gathered about curiously; then, impressed by the solemnity of the priest’s voice and manner, sank to their knees once more, although directing to the sun an occasional glance of anxiety.  When the priest rose, he gave them to understand that he was deeply gratified by their response to the religion of civilization, and pointed to the sun, now full-orbed, amiably swimming in a jewelled mist.  Again they prostrated themselves, first to him, then to their deity, and he knew that the conquest was begun.

After breakfast they were ready to follow him.  They had cast their feathered robes into a heap, and wore the blankets, one and all.  Still Dorthe had not appeared.  The chief sent a man in search of her, and when, after some delay, she entered his presence, commanded her to make herself ready to go with the tribe.  For a time she protested angrily.  But when she found that she must go or remain alone, she reluctantly joined the forming procession, although refusing to doff her bird garment, and keeping well in the rear that she might not again look upon that terrible presence in white and gold, that face with its strange pallor and piercing eyes.  Father Carillo, who was very much bored, would have been glad to talk to her, but recognized that he must keep his distance if he wished to include her among his trophies.

The natives knew of a shorter trail to the harbour, and one of them led the way, Father Carillo urging his footsteps, for the green cloud of dawn was now high and black and full.  A swift wind was rustling the tree-tops and tossing the ocean white.  As they skirted the plain of the dead, the priest saw a strange sight.  The wind had become a gale.  It caught up great armfuls of sand from the low dunes, and hurled them upon the skeletons, covering them from sight.  Sometimes a gust would snatch the blanket from one to bury another more deeply; and for a moment the old bones would gleam again, to be enveloped in the on-rushing pillar of whirling sand.  Through the storm leaped the wild dogs, yelping dismally.

When the party reached the stretch beyond the banana grove, they saw the schooner tossing and pulling at her anchor.  The captain shouted to them to hurry.  The boat awaiting them at the beach was obliged to make three trips.  Father Carillo went in the first boat; Dorthe remained for the last.  She was the last, also, to ascend the ladder at the ship’s side.  As she put her foot on deck, and confronted again the pale face and shining robes of the young priest, she screamed, and leapt from the vessel into the waves.  The chief and his tribe shouted their entreaties to return.  But she had disappeared, and the sky was black.  The captain refused to lower the boat again.  He had already weighed anchor, and he hurriedly represented that to remain longer in the little bay, with its reefs and rocks, its chopping waves, would mean death to all.  The priest was obliged to sacrifice the girl to the many lives in his keep.