第11章

It was more than that.It was six years since Presley and Vanamee had met, and then it had been for a short time only, during one of the shepherd's periodical brief returns to that part of the country.During a week he and Presley had been much together, for the two were devoted friends.Then, as abruptly, as mysteriously as he had come, Vanamee disappeared.Presley awoke one morning to find him gone.Thus, it had been with Vanamee for a period of sixteen years.He lived his life in the unknown, one could not tell where--in the desert, in the mountains, throughout all the vast and vague South-west, solitary, strange.Three, four, five years passed.The shepherd would be almost forgotten.Never the most trivial scrap of information as to his whereabouts reached Los Muertos.He had melted off into the surface-shimmer of the desert, into the mirage; he sank below the horizons; he was swallowed up in the waste of sand and sage.Then, without warning, he would reappear, coming in from the wilderness, emerging from the unknown.No one knew him well.In all that countryside he had but three friends, Presley, Magnus Derrick, and the priest at the Mission of San Juan de Guadalajara, Father Sarria.He remained always a mystery, living a life half-real, half-legendary.In all those years he did not seem to have grown older by a single day.At this time, Presley knew him to be thirty-six years of age.But since the first day the two had met, the shepherd's face and bearing had, to his eyes, remained the same.At this moment, Presley was looking into the same face he had first seen many, many years ago.It was a face stamped with an unspeakable sadness, a deathless grief, the permanent imprint of a tragedy long past, but yet a living issue.Presley told himself that it was impossible to look long into Vanamee's eyes without knowing that here was a man whose whole being had been at one time shattered and riven to its lowest depths, whose life had suddenly stopped at a certain moment of its development.

The two friends sat down upon the ledge of the watering-trough, their eyes wandering incessantly toward the slow moving herd, grazing on the wheat stubble, moving southward as they grazed.

"Where have you come from this time?" Presley had asked."Where have you kept yourself?"The other swept the horizon to the south and east with a vague gesture.

"Off there, down to the south, very far off.So many places that I can't remember.I went the Long Trail this time; a long, long ways.Arizona, The Mexicos, and, then, afterwards, Utah and Nevada, following the horizon, travelling at hazard.Into Arizona first, going in by Monument Pass, and then on to the south, through the country of the Navajos, down by the Aga Thia Needle--a great blade of red rock jutting from out the desert, like a knife thrust.Then on and on through The Mexicos, all through the Southwest, then back again in a great circle by Chihuahua and Aldama to Laredo, to Torreon, and Albuquerque.

From there across the Uncompahgre plateau into the Uintah country; then at last due west through Nevada to California and to the valley of the San Joaquin."His voice lapsed to a monotone, his eyes becoming fixed; he continued to speak as though half awake, his thoughts elsewhere, seeing again in the eye of his mind the reach of desert and red hill, the purple mountain, the level stretch of alkali, leper white, all the savage, gorgeous desolation of the Long Trail.

He ignored Presley for the moment, but, on the other hand, Presley himself gave him but half his attention.The return of Vanamee had stimulated the poet's memory.He recalled the incidents of Vanamee's life, reviewing again that terrible drama which had uprooted his soul, which had driven him forth a wanderer, a shunner of men, a sojourner in waste places.He was, strangely enough, a college graduate and a man of wide reading and great intelligence, but he had chosen to lead his own life, which was that of a recluse.

Of a temperament similar in many ways to Presley's, there were capabilities in Vanamee that were not ordinarily to be found in the rank and file of men.Living close to nature, a poet by instinct, where Presley was but a poet by training, there developed in him a great sensitiveness to beauty and an almost abnormal capacity for great happiness and great sorrow; he felt things intensely, deeply.He never forgot.It was when he was eighteen or nineteen, at the formative and most impressionable period of his life, that he had met Angele Varian.Presley barely remembered her as a girl of sixteen, beautiful almost beyond expression, who lived with an aged aunt on the Seed ranch back of the Mission.At this moment he was trying to recall how she looked, with her hair of gold hanging in two straight plaits on either side of her face, making three-cornered her round, white forehead; her wonderful eyes, violet blue, heavy lidded, with their astonishing upward slant toward the temples, the slant that gave a strange, oriental cast to her face, perplexing, enchanting.He remembered the Egyptian fulness of the lips, the strange balancing movement of her head upon her slender neck, the same movement that one sees in a snake at poise.Never had he seen a girl more radiantly beautiful, never a beauty so strange, so troublous, so out of all accepted standards.It was small wonder that Vanamee had loved her, and less wonder, still, that his love had been so intense, so passionate, so part of himself.

Angele had loved him with a love no less than his own.It was one of those legendary passions that sometimes occur, idyllic, untouched by civilisation, spontaneous as the growth of trees, natural as dew-fall, strong as the firm-seated mountains.