The Precipice by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

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"It's been so sweet to be with you, dear," she murmured in the ears
which were growing dull to earthly sounds. "Say that I've made up to you
a little for my willfulness. I've always loved you--always."

"I know," he whispered. "I understand--everything--now!"

In fact, his glance answered hers with full comprehension.

"The beat is getting very low now, Doctor," he murmured, the fingers of
his right hand on his left wrist; "very infrequent--fifteen
minutes more--"

Dr. Hudson tried to restrain him from his grim task of noting his own
sinking vitality, but the old physician waved him off.

"It's very interesting," he said. It seemed so, indeed. Suddenly he said
quite clearly and in a louder voice than he had used that day: "It has
stopped. It is the end!"

Kate sprang to her feet incredulously. There was a moment of waiting so
tense that the very trees seemed to cease their moaning to listen. In
all the room there was no sound. The struggling breath had ceased. The
old physician had been correct--he had achieved the thing he had set
himself to do. He had announced his own demise.

XXII

Kate had him buried beside the wife for whom he had so inconsistently
longed. She sold the old house, selected a few keepsakes from it,
disposed of all else, and came, late in November, back to the city.
Marna's baby had been born--a little bright boy, named for his father.
Mrs. Barsaloux, relenting, had sent a layette of French workmanship, and
Marna was radiantly happy.

"If only _tante_ will come over for Christmas," Marna lilted to Kate, "I
shall be almost too happy to live. How good she was to me, and how
ungrateful I seemed to her! Write her to come, Kate, mavourneen. Tell
her the baby won't seem quite complete till she's kissed it."

So Kate wrote Mrs. Barsaloux, adding her solicitation to Marna's. Human
love and sympathy were coming to seem to her of more value than anything
else in the world. To be loved--to be companioned--to have the vast
loneliness of life mitigated by fealty and laughter and tenderness--what
was there to take the place of it?

Her heart swelled with a desire to lessen the pain of the world. All her
egotism, her self-assertion, her formless ambitions had got up, or down,
to that,--to comfort the comfortless, to keep evil away from little
children, to let those who were in any sort of a prison go free. Yet
she knew very well that all of this would lack its perfect meaning
unless there was some one to say to her--to her and to none other: "I
understand."

* * * * *

Mrs. Barsaloux did not come to America at Christmas time. Karl Wander
did not--as he had thought he might--visit Chicago. The holiday season
seemed to bring little to Kate except a press of duties. She aspired to
go to bed Christmas night with the conviction that not a child in her
large territory had spent a neglected Christmas. This meant a skilled
cooeperation with other societies, with the benevolently inclined
newspapers, and with generous patrons. The correspondence involved was
necessarily large, and the amount of detail to be attended to more than
she should have undertaken, unaided, but she was spurred on by an almost
consuming passion of pity and sisterliness. That sensible detachment
which had marked her work at the outset had gradually and perhaps
regrettably disappeared. So far from having outgrown emotional struggle,
she seemed now, because of something that was taking place in her inner
life, to be increasingly susceptible to it.

Her father's death had taken from her the last vestige of a home. She
had now no place which she could call her own, or to which she would
instinctively turn at Christmas time. To be sure, there were many who
bade her to their firesides, and some of these invitations she accepted
with gratitude and joy. But she could, of course, only pause at the
hearthstones of others. Her thoughts winged on to other things--to the
little poor homes where her wistful children dwelt, to the great scheme
for their care and oversight which daily came nearer to realization.

A number of benevolent women--rich in purse and in a passion for public
service--desired her to lecture. She was to explain the meaning of the
Bureau of Children at the state federations of women's clubs, in lyceum
courses, and wherever receptive audiences could be found. They advised,
among other things, her attendance at the biennial meeting of the
General Federation of Women's Clubs which was meeting that coming spring
in Southern California.

The time had been not so far distant when she would have had difficulty
in seeing herself in the role of a public lecturer, but now that she had
something imperative to say, she did not see herself in any "role" at
all. She ceased to think about herself save as the carrier of a message.

Her Christmas letter from Wander was at once a disappointment and a
shock.

* * * * *

"I've made a mess of things," he wrote, "and do not intend to
intrude on you until I have shown myself more worthy of
consideration. I try to tell myself that my present fiasco is
not my fault, but I've more than a suspicion that I'm
playing the coward's part when I think that. You can be
disappointed in me if you like. _I'm_ outrageously
disappointed. I thought I was made of better stuff.

"I don't know when I'll have time for writing again, for I
shall be very busy. I suppose I'll think about you more than
is good for me. But maybe not. Maybe the thoughts of you will
be crowded out. I'm rather curious to see. It would be better
for me if they would, for I've come to a bad turn in the
road, and when I get around it, maybe all of the old familiar
scenes--the window out of which your face looked, for
example--will be lost to me. I send my good wishes to you all
the same. I shall do that as long as I have a brain and
a heart.

"Faithfully,

"WANDER."

"That means trouble," reflected Kate, and had a wild desire to rush to
his aid.

* * * * *

That she did not was owing partly--only partly--to another letter which,
bearing an English postmark, indicated that Ray McCrea, who had been
abroad for a month on business, was turning his face toward home. What
he had to say was this:--

"DEAREST KATE:--

"I'm sending you a warning. In a few days I'll be tossing on
that black sea of which I have, in the last few days, caught
some discouraging glimpses. It doesn't look as if it meant to
let me see the Statue of Liberty again, but as surely as I
do, I'm going to go into council with you.

"I imagine you know mighty well what I'm going to say. For
years you've kept me at your call--or, rather, for years I
have kept myself there. You've discouraged me often, in a
tolerant fashion, as if you thought me too young to be
dangerous, or yourself too high up to be called to account.
I've been patient, chiefly because I found your society, as a
mere recipient of my awkward attentions, too satisfactory to
be able to run the risk of foregoing it. But if I were to sit
in the outer court any longer I would be pusillanimous. I'm
coming home to force you to make up that strange mind of
yours, which seems to be forever occupying itself with the
thing far-off and to-be-hoped-for, rather than with what is
near at hand.

"You'll have time to think it over. You can't say I've been
precipitate.

"Yours--always,

"RAY."

At that she flashed a letter to Colorado.

"What is your cousin's trouble?" she asked Honora. "Is it at the mines?"

"It's at the mines," Honora replied. "Karl's life has been and is in
danger. Friends have warned me of that again and again. There's no
holding these people--these several hundred Italians that poor Karl
insisted upon regarding as his wards, his 'adopted children.' They're
preparing to leave their half-paid-for homes and their steady work, and
to go threshing off across the country in the wave of a hard-drinking,
hysterical labor leader. He has them inflamed to the explosive point.
When they've done their worst, Karl may be a poor man. Not that he
worries about that; but he's likely to carry down with him friends and
business associates. Of course this is not final. He may win out, but
such a catastrophe threatens him.

"But understand, all this is not what is tormenting him and turning him
gaunt and haggard. No, as usual, the last twist of the knife is given by
a woman. In this case it is an Italian girl, Elena Cimiotti, the
daughter of one of the strikers and of the woman who does our washing
for us. She's a beautiful, wild creature, something as you might suppose
the daughter of Jorio to be. She has come for the washing and has
brought it home again for months past, and Karl, who is thoughtful of
everybody, has assisted her with her burden when she was lifting it from
her burro's back or packing it on the little beast. Sometimes he would
fetch her a glass of water, or give her a cup of tea, or put some fruit
in her saddle-bags. You know what a way he has with all women! I suppose
it would turn any foolish creature's head. And he has such an impressive
way of saying things! What would be a casual speech on the tongue of
another becomes significant, when he has given one of his original
twists to it. I think, too, that in utter disregard of Italian etiquette
he has sometimes walked on the street with this girl for a few steps. He
is like a child in some ways,--as trusting and unconventional,--and he
wants to be friends with everybody. I can't tell whether it is because
he is such an aristocrat that it doesn't occur to him that any one can
suspect him of losing caste, or because he is such a democrat that he
doesn't know it exists.

"However that may be, the girl is in love with him. These Italian girls
are modest and well-behaved ordinarily, but when once their imagination
is aroused they are like flaming meteors. They have no shame because
they can't see why any one should be ashamed of love (and, to tell the
truth, I can't either). But this girl believes Karl has encouraged her.
I suppose she honestly believed that he was sweethearting. He is
astounded and dismayed. At first both he and I thought she would get
over it, but she has twice been barely prevented from killing herself.
Of course her countrymen think her desperately ill-treated. She is the
handsomest girl in the settlement, and she has a number of ardent
admirers. To the hatred which they have come to bear Karl as members of
a strike directed against him, they now add the element of
personal jealousy.

"So you see what kind of a Christmas we are having! I have had Mrs. Hays
take the babies to Colorado Springs, and if anything happens to us
here, I'll trust to you to see to them. You, who mean to look after
little children, look after mine above all others, for their mother gave
you, long since, her loving friendship. I would rather have you mother
my babies, maiden though you are, than any woman I know, for I feel a
great force in you, Kate, and believe you are going on until you get an
answer to some of the questions which the rest of us have found
unanswerable.

"Karl wants me to leave, for there is danger that the ranch house may be
blown up almost any time. These men play with dynamite as if it were
wood, anyway, and they make fiery enemies. Every act of ours is spied
upon. Our servants have left us, and Karl and I, obstinate as mules and
as proud as sheiks, after the fashion of our family, hold the fort. He
wants me to go, but I tell him I am more interested in life than I ever
dared hope I would be again. I have been bayoneted into a fighting mood,
and I find it magnificent to really feel alive again, after crawling in
the dust so long, with the taste of it in my mouth. So don't pity me. As
for Karl--he looks wild and strange, like the Flying Dutchman with his
spectral hand on the helm. But I don't know that I want you to pity him
either. He is a curious man, with a passionate soul, and if he flares
out like a torch in the wind, it will be fitting enough. No, don't pity
us. Congratulate us rather."

"Now what," said Kate aloud, "may that mean?"

"Congratulate us!"

The letter had a note of reckless gayety. Had Honora and Karl, though
cousins, been finding a shining compensation there in the midst of many
troubles? It sounded so, indeed. Elena Cimiotti might swing down the
mountain roads wearing mountain flowers in her hair if she pleased, and
Kate would not have thought her dangerous to the peace of Karl Wander.
If the wind were wild and the leaves driving, he might have kissed her
in some mad mood. So much might be granted--and none, not even Elena, be
the worse for it. But to live side by side with Honora Fulham, to face
danger with her, to have the exhilaration of conflict, they two
together, the mountains above them, the treacherous foe below, a fortune
lost or gained in a day, all the elements of Colorado's gambling chances
of life and fortune at hand, might mean--anything.

Well, she would congratulate them! If Honora could forget a shattered
heart so soon, if Wander could take it on such easy terms, they were
entitled to congratulations of a sort. And if they were killed some
frantic night,--were blown to pieces with their ruined home, and so
reached together whatever lies beyond this life,--why, then, they were
to be congratulated, indeed! Or if they evaded their enemies and swung
their endangered craft into the smooth stream of life, still
congratulations were to be theirs.

She confessed to herself that she would rather be in that lonely
beleaguered house facing death with Karl Wander than be the recipient of
the greatest honor or the participant in the utmost gayety that life
could offer.

That the fact was fantastic made it none the less a fact.

* * * * *

Should she write to Honora: "I congratulate you?"

Or should she wire Karl?

She got out his letters, and his words were as a fresh wind blowing over
her spirit. She realized afresh how this man, seen but once, known only
through the medium of infrequent letters, had invigorated her. What had
he not taught her of compassion, of "the glory of the commonplace," of
duty eagerly fulfilled, of the abounding joy of life--even in life
shadowed by care or sickness or poverty?

No, she would write them nothing. They were her friends in fullness of
sympathy. They, like herself, were of those to whom each day and night
is a privilege, to whom sorrow is an enrichment, delight an unfoldment,
opposition a spur. They were of the company of those who dared to speak
the truth, who breathed deep, who partook of the banquet of life
without fear.

She had seen Honora in the worst hour of tribulation that can come to a
good woman, and she knew she had arisen from her overthrow, stronger for
the trial; now Karl was battling, and he had cried out to her in his
pain--his shame of defeat. But it would not be his extinction. She was
sure of that. They might, among them, slay his body, but she could not
read his letters, so full of valiant contrasts, and doubt that his
spirit must withstand all adversaries.

No, sardonic with these two she could never be. Like that poor Elena,
she might have mistaken Wander's meanings. He was a man of too elaborate
gestures; something grandiose, inherently his, made him enact the drama
of life with too much fervor. It was easy, Honora had insinuated, for a
woman to mistake him!

Kate gripped her two strong hands together and clasped them about her
head in the first attitude of despair in which she ever had indulged in
her life. She was ashamed! Honora had said there was nothing to be
ashamed of in love. But Kate would not call this meeting of her spirit
with Karl's by that name. She had no idea whether it was love or not. On
the whole, she preferred to think that it was not. But when they faced
each other, their glances had met. When they had parted, their thoughts
had bridged the space. When she dreamed, she fancied that she was
mounting great solitary peaks with him to look at sunsets that blazed
like the end of the world; or that he and she were strong-winged birds
seeking the crags of the Andes. What girl's folly! The time had come to
put such vagrant dreams from her and to become a woman, indeed.

Ray telephoned that he was home.

"Come up this evening, then," commanded Kate.

Then, not being as courageous as her word, she wept brokenly for her
mother--the mother who could, at best, have given her but such
indeterminate advice.

XXIII

As she heard Ray coming up the stairs, she tossed some more wood on the
fire and lighted the candles in her Russian candlesticks.

"It's what any silly girl would do!" she admitted to herself
disgustedly.

Well, there was his rap on the foolish imitation Warwick knocker. Kate
flung wide the door. He stood in the dim light of the hall, hesitating,
it would seem, to enter upon the evening's drama. Tall, graceful as
always, with a magnetic force behind his languor, he impressed Kate as a
man whom few women would be able to resist; whom, indeed, it was a sort
of folly, perhaps even an impiety, to cast out of one's life.

"Kate!" he said, "Kate!" The whole challenge of love was in the accent.

But she held him off with the first method of opposition she could
devise.

"My name!" she admitted gayly. "I used to think I didn't like it, but I
do."

He came in and swung to the door behind him, flinging his coat and hat
upon a chair.

"Do you mean you like to hear me say it?" he demanded. He stood by the
fire which had begun to leap and crackle, drawing off his gloves with a
decisive gesture.

She saw that she was not going to be able to put him off. The hour had
struck. So she faced him bravely.

"Sit down, Ray," she said.

He looked at her a moment as if measuring the value of this courtesy.

"Thank you," he said, almost resentfully, as he sank into the chair she
placed for him.

So they sat together before the fire gravely, like old married people,
as Kate could not help noticing. Yet they were combatants; not as a
married couple might have been, furtively and miserably, but with a
frank, almost an exhilarating, sense of equally matched strength, and of
their chance to conduct their struggle in the open.

"It's come to this, Kate," he said at length. "Either I must have your
promise or I stay away entirely."

"I don't believe you need to do either," she retorted with the
exasperating manner of an elder sister. "It's an obsession with you,
that's all."

"What man thinks he needs, he does need," Ray responded sententiously.
"It appears to me that without you I shall be a lost man. I mean
precisely what I say. You wouldn't like me to give out that fact in an
hysterical manner, and I don't see that I need to. I make the statement
as I would make any other, and I expect to be believed, because I'm a
truth-telling person. The fairest scene in the world or the most
interesting circumstance becomes meaningless to me if you are not
included in it. It isn't alone that you are my sweetheart--the lady of
my dreams. It's much more than that. Sometimes when I'm with you I feel
like a boy with his mother, safe from all the dreadful things that might
happen to a child. Sometimes you seem like a sister, so really kind and
so outwardly provoking. Often you are my comrade, and we are completely
congenial, neuter entities. The thing is we have a satisfaction when we
are together that we never could apart. There it is, Kate, the fact we
can't get around. We're happier together than we are apart!"

He seemed to hold the theory up in the air as if it were a shining
jewel, and to expect her to look at it till it dazzled her. But her
voice was dull as she said: "I know, Ray. I know--now--but shall we
stay so?"

"Why shouldn't we, woman? There's every reason to suppose that we'd grow
happier. We want each other. More than that, we need each other. With
me, it's such a deep need that it reaches to the very roots of my being.
It's my groundwork, my foundation stone. I don't know how to put it to
make you realize--"

He caught a quizzical smile on her face, and after a moment of
bewilderment he leaped from his chair and came toward her.

"God!" he half breathed, "why do I waste time talking?"

He had done what her look challenged him to do,--had substituted action
for words,--yet now, as he stretched out his arms to her, she held him
off, fearful that she would find herself weeping on his breast. It would
be sweet to do it--like getting home after a long voyage. But dizzily,
with a stark clinging to a rock of integrity in herself, she fought him
off, more with her militant spirit than with her outspread,
protesting hands.

"No, no," she cried. "Don't hypnotize me, Ray! Leave me my judgment,
leave me my reason. If it's a partnership we're to enter into, I ought
to know the terms."

"The terms, Kate? Why, I'll love you as long as I live; I'll treasure
you as the most precious thing in all the world."

"And the winds of heaven shall not be allowed to visit my cheek too
roughly," she managed to say tantalizingly.

He paused, perplexed.

"I know I bewilder you, dear man," she said. "But this is the point: I
don't want to be protected. I mean I don't want to be made dependent; I
don't want my interpretations of life at second-hand. I object to having
life filter through anybody else to me; I want it, you see, on my
own account."

"Why, Kate!" It wasn't precisely a protest. He seemed rather to reproach
her for hindering the onward sweep of their happiness--for opposing him
with her ideas when they might together have attained a beautiful
emotional climax.

"I couldn't stand it," she went on, lifting her eyes to his, "to be
given permission to do this, that, or the other thing; or to be put on
an allowance; or made to ask a favor--"

He sank down in his chair and folded across his breast the arms whose
embrace she had not claimed.

"You seem to mean," he said, "that you don't want to be a wife. You
prefer your independence to love."

"I want both," Kate declared, rising and standing before him. "I want
the most glorious and abounding love woman ever had. I want so much of
it that it never could be computed or measured--so much it will lift me
up above anything that I now am or that I know, and make me stronger and
freer and braver."

"Well, that's what your love would do for me," broke in McCrea. "That's
what the love of a good woman is expected to do for a man."

"Of course," cried Kate; "but is that what the love of a good man is
expected to do for a woman? Or is it expected to reconcile her to
obscurity, to the dimming of her personality, and to the endless petty
sacrifices that ought to shame her--and don't--those immoral sacrifices
about which she has contrived to throw so many deceiving, iridescent
mists of religion? Oh, yes, we are hypnotized into our foolish state of
dependence easily enough! I know that. The mating instinct drugs us. I
suppose the unborn generations reach out their shadowy multitudinous
hands and drag us to our destiny!"

"What a woman you are! How you put things!" He tried but failed to keep
the offended look from his face, and Kate knew perfectly well how hard
he was striving not to think her indelicate. But she went on
regardlessly.

"You think that's the very thing I ought to want to be my destiny? Well,
perhaps I do. I want children--of course, I want them."

She stopped for a moment because she saw him flushing with
embarrassment. Yet she couldn't apologize, and, anyway, an apology would
avail nothing. If he thought her unwomanly because she talked about her
woman's life,--the very life to which he was inviting her,--nothing she
could say would change his mind. It wasn't a case for argument. She
walked over to the fire and warmed her nervous hands at it.

"I'm sorry, Ray," she said finally.

"Sorry?"

"Sorry that I'm not the tender, trusting, maiden-creature who could fall
trembling in your arms and love you forever, no matter what you did, and
lie to you and for you the way good wives do. But I'm not--and, oh, I
wish I were--or else--"

"Yes, Kate--what?"

"Or else that you were the kind of a man I need, the mate I'm looking
for!"

"But, Kate, I protest that I am. I love you. Isn't that enough? I'm not
worthy of you, maybe. Yet if trying to earn you by being loyal makes me
worthy, then I am. Don't say no to me, Kate. It will shatter me--like an
earthquake. And I believe you'll regret it, too. We can make each other
happy. I feel it! I'd stake my life on it. Wait--"

He arose and paced the floor back and forth.

"Do you remember the lines from Tennyson's 'Princess' where the Prince
pleads with Ida? I thought I could repeat them, but I'm afraid I'll mar
them. I don't want to do that; they're too applicable to my case."

He knew where she kept her Tennyson, and he found the volume and the
page, and when he had handed the book to her, he snatched his coat
and hat.

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