L'or (7 page)

A man comes out of the house, an old man.

Anna Sutter tries to sit up. She cries out:

'Johann!'

Immediately afterwards, there is a rattle in her throat.

Confused notions fill the poor brain of this pathetic woman. Everything is spinning round. Brightness and shadow. A great roar, as of rushing water, fills her poor head. She hears cries, and her memory receives a jolt. She remembers so many things now, and, suddenly, she distinctly hears the gentle voice of Jean Marchais, the blacksmith, giving her messages for his master. Then, humbly, she repeats his words, and John Augustus Sutter, who is bending over the head of his wife's litter, hears her murmur:

'Master . . .'

Father Gabriel, the protector of the Indians, has just spent several days at the Hermitage. This morning, he is leaving before dawn, for his mission calls him back to his savages. He is a stern man and his utterances are famous amongst the tribes; he lives with the Sioux, the Osages, the Comanches, the Blackfeet and the Snakes, who listen to him as to an oracle. He travels everywhere on foot. John Augustus Sutter accompanies him along the track into the Sierra, as far as Round-Stone.

At the moment of parting, Father Gabriel grasps his hand and says to Sutter: 'Captain, a portion of the world's history has fallen on your shoulders, but you're still standing upright amidst the ruins of your former power. Lift up your head, look about you. There are thousands of people disembarking daily and coming here to work, hoping to find fortune and happiness. A whole new life is springing up in this country. You must set an example. Courage, old pioneer, this land is your true fatherland. Begin again!'

If Sutter has once more set his shoulder to the wheel, it is not for his own sake, but for his children's. He builds the farm of Burgdorf for his son Victor and that 
of Grenzach for his son Arthur. Mina, his daughter, will have the Hermitage. As for his eldest son, Emile, he has sent him East to study law.

Father Gabriel supplies the necessary labour force for this renewed burst of activity; with his revered eloquence, he has managed to tear crews of Indians and Kanakas away from the distilleries and the gold-mines.

The Hermitage is now a Temperance Centre for the savages and the islanders.

The yellow races are also being taken on in ever-increasing numbers.

And prosperity is reborn. But it is not destined to last long.

John Augustus Sutter cannot forget the blow that has struck him down. He is a prey to morbid terror. More and more, he holds himself aloof from the work on the farm and this new enterprise no longer absorbs all his faculties, as it once did. The whole business scarcely interests him any more and his children are probably quite capable of succeeding on their own, as long as they heed his advice. He himself plunges into a study of the Book of Revelation. He asks himself a multitude of questions which he cannot answer. He believes that, all his life, he has been an instrument in the hands of the Almighty. He is seeking to discover the purpose, and the reason for this. And he is afraid.

He, the man of action
par excellence
,
he who has never hesitated, hesitates now. He becomes withdrawn, distrustful, sly, avaricious. He is full of scruples. The 
discovery of the gold-mines has turned his hair and beard white; today, his tall figure, his bearing as a leader of men, are bowed and curved beneath the weight of a secret anxiety that gnaws at his soul. He dresses in a long woollen robe and wears a little rabbit-skin cap. His speech has become halting, his eyes shifty. At night, he does not sleep.

Gold.

Gold has ruined him.

He does not understand.

Gold, all the gold that has been extracted during the last four years and all the gold that will be extracted in future, belongs to him. They have robbed him. He tries to make a mental estimate of its value, to arrive at a figure. A hundred million dollars, a thousand million? Oh, God! His head spins at the thought that he will never see one cent of it. It is an injustice. Lord, Lord, to whom can I turn for help? And all these men who have come here to ruin my life . . . why? They have burned down my mills, pillaged and devastated my plantations, stolen and slaughtered my flocks and my herds, laid waste all the fruits of my Herculean labours ... is this just? And now, after murdering one another, they are founding families, building villages and towns and settling themselves on my lands, under the protection of the Law. O Lord, if this is right, if this is in the order of things, why cannot I, too, profit from it, and what have I done to deserve such total ruin? All these towns and villages belong to me, after all, as well as the people and their families, their work, their livestock, their fortunes. My God, what can I do? Everything has crumbled to dust between my fingers - possessions, fortune, honour, New Helvetia and Anna, my poor wife. Is it possible, and why?

Sutter seeks help, advice, something to hold on to, but everything slips from his grasp. At times, he even reaches a point where he believes all his misfortunes to be imaginary. And then, by a strange inward turning upon himself, he dreams of his childhood, his religion, his mother, his father; he dreams of all that respectable, hard-working background, and above all of his grandfather, that upright man, dedicated to order and justice. And he feels ashamed.

He is the victim of a mirage.

More and more often, he returns in thought to his distant homeland; he dreams of that peaceful little corner of old Europe where all is calm, well-ordered and methodical. There, everything is in its appointed place, the bridges, the canals, the roads. The houses have been standing forever. The lives of the inhabitants are uneventful: they work, they are content with their lot. He sees Rünenberg again, as if in a painting. He thinks of the drinking-fountain he spat into on the day of his departure. He would like to go back there and die.

One day, he writes the following letter:

'My dear Herr Birmann,

'My children have written to you about the terrible misfortune that had already struck me when my poor Anna came here to die on my doorstep. It was the will of Divine Providence to have it so. But do you know the full extent of my miseries? I do not want to keep harping on the story of this catastrophe which is, in effect, the 
story of my whole life. God knows, I have puzzled over it enough in my mind during the last four years, and yet, I assure you, I cannot make head nor tail of it. I am not one to complain and yet it is a sorry sort of creature who writes to you, broken, worn out, exhausted, like an old work-horse. All the same, I must tell you that I have in no way deserved what has befallen me; whatever errors I committed in my youth, I have paid for with years of adversity. Let me explain that I lived in this country like a prince, or rather, in the words of our old proverb, I lived in this beautiful land of California "like God in France". It was the discovery of gold that ruined me. I do not understand it. The ways of Our Lord are devious and mysterious. It was my carpenter, Mr Marshall, who first brought the gold to light one day when he was working on the foundations of my sawmill at Coloma. After that fatal blow of his pickaxe, everyone deserted me - clerks, labourers, storemen, even my brave soldiers and my trusted personal assistants, in spite of the fact that I paid them all good wages. But they wanted more, and they robbed me, looted my property, then went off to search for gold. Gold is damned, and all those who come here, and all those who mine the gold are damned, for the majority of them disappear, and I ask myself how and why this happens. Life has been hell here during recent years. Men cut each other's throats, steal from one another, murder each other. Everybody has turned to banditry. Many have gone mad or committed suicide. And all this for gold, gold that is transformed into brandy, and after that into God knows what. Today, it seems as if the whole world is on my estates. Men have come from every country on earth, they have built towns, villages and farms on my lands and they have divided my plantations amongst them. They have built a city of 
the damned, San Francisco, at the very spot I had chosen for the disembarkation of my poor Kanakas, who have also run off to look for gold and barter it for liquor. Most of them would have died like dogs by now were it not for the good Father Gabriel, who went after them and saved them from the clutches of Shannon, the king of the distillers, and brought them back to me, often at the risk of his life. I gave them work, and now they are employed at the Hermitage, alongside my good Indians, and on the two farms I have given to my sons, Victor and Arthur, as they have no doubt written and told you.

'Today, California is part of the American Union and the country is in a state of complete transformation. Loyal troops have arrived from Washington, but they have much to do yet before order is restored. Every day, newcomers arrive and there are still mountains of gold. As I have already said, most of the earlier arrivals have disappeared, nobody knows how. The Beast of the Apocalypse is roaming through the countryside now and everyone is very agitated. The Mormons have already departed with their carts laden with gold, and I had no heart to follow them. It is said they have built a city on the shores of Salt Lake, where they live now in debauchery and drunkenness, for they have planted vines, which they learned to do in my vineyards, where many of them worked before the gold was found. In those days, they were good men and responsible workers, but now it seems they too are damned. Am I really to blame for all this? There are moments when, pondering on my misery, I believe that I am. Bands of strolling players are also wandering about the countryside, and many women come here, Italians, Chileans and Frenchwomen, some of them looking for husbands, but they do not all stay. The first men to stake claims to the land are all in litigation with lawyers in New York, who are issuing title-deeds to the new arrivals. Everybody is bringing lawsuits. For myself, I do not know what to do, I don't want to be just like the rest, but what should I do? This is why I am writing to you.

'This is the position:

'I am ruined.

'According to American law, one half of the gold extracted is mine by clear right, and we are talking about hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars' worth. Moreover, I have suffered an incalculable loss through the discovery of gold on my lands; my property has been overrun, devastated and despoiled, I am therefore entitled to compensation. In the third place, I am the sole proprietor of the terrain on which San Francisco has been built (apart from a narrow strip of land along the ocean-front which belongs to the Franciscan Mission) and of other sites on which towns and villages have been built. I possess all the title-deeds to these lands, which were given to me in the time of the Mexicans by Governors Alvarado and Micheltorena by way of reward for my services and in payment of my expenses at the time of the wars with the Indians on my northern frontier. Fourthly, hordes of new settlers have taken possession of my plantations and exhibit title-deeds which are flagrantly new, whereas I was the one to bring this entire region under cultivation, and I paid the Russians dearly for their small farms when they left. And lastly, the bridges, the canals, the ponds, the locks, the tracks, the roads, the harbour, the landing stages and the mills that I had constructed at my own expense, today serve the public welfare, so the State legislature must pay me for them. There remains also the question of all the gold that will be mined during the next quarter of a century, and over which I have some rights.

'What should I do?

'It makes me ill to think of the sum that all this must represent.

'The trouble is, if I begin, it will be not one but a thousand lawsuits I must bring all at once; I must attack tens of thousands of individuals, hundreds of communities, the legislature of the State of California and the government in Washington. If I begin, it will be not one, but ten, a hundred fortunes that I will have to spend, although it is true that what I am claiming would make it all worth while (even before the discovery of gold, I was on my way to becoming the richest man in the world). If I begin, it will not be one new country I shall have to conquer, as it was when I landed for the first time, all alone, on the sands of the Pacific, but the entire world. They would all be against me, and I should have to fight for years and years, and I am beginning to feel my age, I am already hard of hearing, I fear my strength might let me down, and it is for this reason that I have sent Emile, my eldest son, to the Faculty of Law, for it is on him that all this immense business of the gold will devolve and, being on the inside, so to speak, he will know better how to avoid the traps and pitfalls of the law, and those men of law whom his simpleton of a father greatly fears. Yes, I confess it.

'As a matter of honour, I cannot lose everything, let it all go, just like that, without a word. It would be a crying shame, an injustice!

'On the other hand, I often ask myself whether I have the right to intervene, or whether there are not too many human interests at stake which are beyond my understanding, and if God who reigns in Heaven has not some particular design for all these people whom He sends 
into this country? And I myself feel that I am lost in His hand.

'What should I do?

'Gold brings misfortune. If I touch it, if I pursue it, if I claim what is mine by indisputable right, shall I not be damned in my turn, like so many others whose example I have before my very eyes and of whom I have already spoken to you?

'Tell me, what should I do? I am ready for anything. To disappear. Abdicate. I could, on the other hand, set to work again and give useful support to Victor and Arthur, who are making very good progress. I could squeeze the maximum produce out of my farms, smallholdings and plantations, open up new areas of cultivation, extend the work of my Indians and Kanakas, throw myself into new speculations - in a word, make the necessary money for the lawsuits and press on till my strength is exhausted. But is all this really necessary? I am homesick. I dream of our beautiful little canton of Basle and would like to return there. God, how lucky you are, my dear Herr Martin, to be able to stay in your own home! I could sell the two farms and the Hermitage, liquidate everything, come home and settle the children in Switzerland. Should I do it, or would it be desertion, and have I the right to abandon this country to which I have given life and which, I feel, will rob me of my own? Tell me what I should do, dear Herr Martin Birmann, and I will follow your advice to the letter and obey you in everything, blindly.