The Precipice by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

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"I'm coming for my answer a week from to-night," he said. "For God's
sake, girl, don't make a mistake. Life's so short that it ought to be
happy. At best I'll only be able to live with you a few decades, and I'd
like it to be centuries."

He had not meant to do it, she could see, but suddenly he came to her,
and leaning above her burned his kisses upon her eyes. Then he flung
himself out of the room, and by the light of her guttering candles
she read:--

"Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height.
What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang).
In height and cold, the splendor of the hills?
But cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease
To glide a sunbeam by the blasted pine,
To sit a star upon the sparkling spire;
And come, for Love is of the valley, come thou down
And find him; by the happy threshold, he
Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,
Or red with spirted purple of the vats,
Or foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walk
With Death and Morning on the Silver Horns,
Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine,
Nor find him dropped upon the firths of ice,
That huddling slant in furrow-cloven falls
To roll the torrent out of dusky doors;
But follow; let the torrent dance thee down
To find him in the valley; let the wild
Lean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leave
The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,
That like a broken purpose waste in air;
So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales
Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth
Arise to thee; the children call, and I
Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees."

She read it twice, soothed by its vague loveliness. She could hear,
however, only the sound of the suburban trains crashing by in the
distance, and the honking of the machines in the Plaisance. None of
those spirit sounds of which Ray had dreamed penetrated through her
vigorous materialism. But still, she knew that she was lonely; she knew
Ray's going left a gray vacancy.

"I can't think it out," she said at last. "I'll go to sleep. Perhaps
there--"

But neither voices nor visions came to her in sleep. She awoke the next
morning as unillumined as when she went to her bed. And as she dressed
and thought of the full day before her, she was indefinably glad that
she was under no obligations to consult any one about her programme,
either of work or play.

XXIV

Kate had dreaded the expected solitude of the next night, and it was a
relief to her when Marna Fitzgerald telephoned that she had been sent
opera-tickets by one of her old friends in the opera company, and that
she wanted Kate to go with her.

"George offers to stay home with the baby," she said. "So come over,
dear, and have dinner with us; that will give you a chance to see
George. Then you and I will go to the opera by our two independent
selves. I know you don't mind going home alone. 'Butterfly' is on, you
know--Farrar sings."

She said it without faltering, Kate noticed, as she gave her
enthusiastic acceptance, and when she had put down the telephone, she
actually clapped her hands at the fortitude of the little woman she had
once thought such a hummingbird--and a hummingbird with that one last
added glory, a voice. Marna had been able to put her dreams behind her;
why should not her example be cheerfully followed?

When Kate reached the little apartment looking on Garfield Park, she
entered an atmosphere in which, as she had long since proved, there
appeared to be no room for regret. Marna had, of course, prepared the
dinner with her own hands.

"I whipped up some mayonnaise," she said. "You remember how
Schumann-Heink used to like my mayonnaise? And she knows good cooking
when she tastes it, doesn't she? I've trifle for desert, too."

"But it must have taken you all day, dear, to get up a dinner like
that," protested Kate, kissing the flushed face of her friend.

"It took up the intervals," smiled Marna. "You see, my days are made up
of taking care of baby, _and_ of intervals. How fetching that black
velvet bodice is, Kate. I didn't know you had a low one."

"Low _and_ high," said Kate. "That's the way we fool 'em--make 'em think
we have a wardrobe. Me--I'm glad I'm going to the opera. How good of you
to think of me! So few do--at least in the way I want them to."

Marna threw her a quick glance.

"Ray?" she asked with a world of insinuation.

To Kate's disgust, her eyes flushed with hot tears.

"He's waiting to know," she answered. "But I--I don't think I'm going to
be able--"

"Oh, Kate!" cried Marna in despair. "How can you feel that way? Just
think--just think--" she didn't finish her sentence.

Instead, she seized little George and began undressing him, her hands
lingering over the firm roundness of his body. He seemed to be anything
but sleepy, and when his mother passed him over to her guest, Kate let
him clutch her fingers with those tenacious little hands which looked
like rose-leaves and clung like briers. Marna went out of the room to
prepare his bedtime bottle, and Kate took advantage of being alone with
him to experiment in those joys which his mother had with difficulty
refrained from descanting upon. She kissed him in the back of the neck,
and again where his golden curls met his brow--a brow the color of a
rose crystal. A delicious, indescribable baby odor came up from him,
composed of perfumed breath, of clean flannels, and of general
adorability. Suddenly, not knowing she was going to do it, Kate snatched
him to her breast, and held him strained to her while he nestled there,
eager and completely happy, and over the woman who could not make up her
mind about life and her part in it, there swept, in wave after wave,
like the south wind blowing over the bleak hills, billows of warm
emotion. Her very finger-tips tingled; soft, wistful, delightful tears
flooded her eyes. Her bosom seemed to lift as the tide lifts to the
moon. She found herself murmuring inarticulate, melodious nothings. It
was a moment of realization. She was learning what joys could be hers
if only--

Marna came back into the room and took the baby from Kate's trembling
hands.

"Why, dear, you're not afraid of him, are you?" his mother asked
reproachfully.

Kate made no answer, but, dropping a farewell kiss in the crinkly palm
of one dimpled hand, she went out to the kitchen, found an apron, and
began drawing the water for dinner and dropping Marna's mayonnaise on
the salad. She must, however, have been sitting for several minutes in
the baby's high chair, staring unseeingly at the wall, when the buzzing
of the indicator brought her to her feet.

"It's George!" cried Marna; and tossing baby and bottle into the cradle,
she ran to the door.

Kate hit the kitchen table sharply with a clenched hand. What was there
in the return of a perfectly ordinary man to his home that should cause
such excitement in a creature of flame and dew like Marna?

"Marna with the trees' life
In her veins a-stir!
Marna of the aspen heart--"

George came into the kitchen with both hands outstretched.

"Well, it's good to see you here," he declared. "Why don't you come
oftener? You make Marna so happy."

That proved her worthy; she made Marna happy! Of what greater use could
any person be in this world? George retired to prepare for dinner, and
Marna to settle the baby for the night, and Kate went on with the
preparations for the meal, while her thoughts revolved like a
Catherine wheel.

There were the chops yet to cook, for George liked them blazing from the
broiler, and there was the black coffee to set over. This latter was to
fortify George at his post, for it was agreed that he was not to sleep
lest he should fail to awaken at the need and demand of the beloved
potentate in the cradle; and Marna now needed a little stimulant if she
was to keep comfortably awake during a long evening--she who used to
light the little lamps in the windows of her mind sometime
after midnight.

They had one of those exclamatory dinners where every one talked about
the incomparable quality of the cooking. The potatoes were after a new
recipe,--something Spanish,--and they tasted deliciously and smelled as
if assailing an Andalusian heaven. The salad was _piquante_; the trifle
vivacious; Kate's bonbons were regarded as unique, and as for the
coffee, it provoked Marna to quote the appreciative Talleyrand:--

"Noir comme le diable,
Chaud comme l'enfer,
Pur comme un ange,
Doux comme l'amour."

Other folk might think that Marna had "dropped out," but Kate could see
it written across the heavens in letters of fire that neither George nor
Marna thought so. They regarded their table as witty, as blessed in such
a guest as Kate, as abounding in desirable food, as being, indeed, all
that a dinner-table should be. They had the effect of shutting out a
world which clamored to participate in their pleasures, and looked on
themselves as being not forgotten, but too selfish in keeping to
themselves. It kept little streams of mirth purling through Kate's soul,
and at each jest or supposed brilliancy she laughed twice--once with
them and once at them. But they were unsuspicious--her friends. They
were secretly sorry for her, that was all.

After dinner there was Marna to dress.

"Naturally I haven't thought much about evening clothes since I was
married," she said to Kate. "I don't see what I'm to put on unless it's
my immemorial gold-of-ophir satin." She looked rather dubious, and Kate
couldn't help wondering why she hadn't made a decision before this.
Marna caught the expression in her eyes.

"Oh, yes, I know I ought to have seen to things, but you don't know what
it is, mavourneen, to do all your own work and care for a baby. It makes
everything you do so staccato! And, oh, Kate, I do get so tired! My feet
ache as if they'd come off, and sometimes my back aches so I just lie on
the floor and roll and groan. Of course, George doesn't know. He'd
insist on our having a servant, and we can't begin to afford that. It
isn't the wages alone; it's the waste and breakage and all."

She said this solemnly, and Kate could not conceal a smile at her
"daughter of the air" using these time-worn domestic plaints.

"You ought to lie down and sleep every day, Marna. Wouldn't that help?"

"That's what George is always saying. He thinks I ought to sleep while
the baby is taking his nap. But, mercy me, I just look forward to that
time to get my work done."

She turned her eager, weary face toward Kate, and her friend marked the
delicacy in it which comes with maternity. It was pallid and rather
pinched; the lips hung a trifle too loosely; the veins at the temples
showed blue and full. Kate couldn't beat down the vision that would rise
before her eyes of the Marna she had known in the old days, who had
arisen at noon, coming forth from her chamber like Deirdre, fresh with
the freshness of pagan delight. She remembered the crowd that had
followed in her train, the manner in which people had looked after her
on the street, and the little furore she had invariably awakened when
she entered a shop or tea-room. As Marna shook out the gold-of-ophir
satin, dimmed now and definitely out of date, there surged up in her
friend a rebellion against Marna's complete acquiescence in the present
scheme of things. But Marna slipped cheerfully into her gown.

"I shall keep my cloak on while we go down the aisle," she declared.
"Nobody notices what one has on when one is safely seated.
Particularly," she added, with one of her old-time flashes, "if one's
neck is not half bad. Now I'm ready to be fastened, mavourneen. Dear me,
it _is_ rather tight, isn't it? But never mind that. Get the hooks
together somehow. I'll hold my breath. Now, see, with this scarf about
me, I shan't look such a terrible dowd, shall I? Only my gloves are
unmistakably shabby and not any too clean, either. George won't let me
use gasoline, you know, and it takes both money and thought to get them
to the cleaners. Do you remember the boxes of long white gloves I used
to have in the days when _tante_ Barsaloux was my fairy godmother?
Gloves were an immaterial incident then. 'Nevermore, nevermore,' as our
friend the raven remarked. Come, we'll go. I won't wear my old opera
cloak in the street-car; that would be too absurd, especially now that
the bullion on it has tarnished. That long black coat of mine is just
the thing--equally appropriate for market, mass, or levee. Oh, George,
dear, good-bye! Good-bye, you sweetheart. I hate to leave you, truly I
do. And I do hope and pray the baby won't wake. If he does--"

"Come along, Marna," commanded Kate. "We mustn't miss that next car."

* * * * *

They barely were in their seats when the lights went up, and before them
glittered the Auditorium, that vast and noble audience chamber
identified with innumerable hours of artistic satisfaction. The receding
arches of the ceiling glittered like incandescent nebulae; the pictured
procession upon the proscenium arch spoke of the march of ideas--of the
passionate onflow of man's dreams--of whatever he has held beautiful
and good.

Kate yielded herself over to the deep and happy sense of completion
which this vast chamber always gave her, and while she and Marna sat
there, silent, friendly, receptive, she felt her cares and frets
slipping from her, and guessed that the drag of Mama's innumerable
petty responsibilities was disappearing, too. For here was the pride of
life--the power of man expressed in architecture, and in the high
entrancement of music. The rich folds of the great curtain satisfied
her, the innumerable lights enchanted her, and the loveliness of the
women in their fairest gowns and their jewels added one more element to
that indescribable thing, compacted of so many elements,--all
artificial, all curiously and brightly related,--which the civilized
world calls opera, and in which man rejoices with an inconsistent and
more or less indefensible joy.

The lights dimmed; the curtain parted; the heights above Nagasaki were
revealed. Below lay the city in purple haze; beyond dreamed the harbor
where the battleships, the merchantmen and the little fishing-boats
rode. The impossible, absurd, exquisite music-play of "Madame Butterfly"
had begun.

Oh, the music that went whither it would, like wind or woman's hopes;
that lifted like the song of a bird and sank like the whisper of waves.
Vague as reverie, fitful as thought, yearning as frustrate love, it
fluttered about them.

"The new music," whispered Marna.

"Like flame leaping and dying," responded Kate.

They did not realize the passage of time. They passed from chamber to
chamber in that gleaming house of song.

"This was the best of all to me," breathed Marna, as Farrar's voice took
up the first notes of that incomparable song of woven hopes and fears,
"Some Day He'll Come." The wild cadences of the singer's voice,
inarticulate, of universal appeal, like the cry of a lost child or the
bleating of a lamb on a windy hill,--were they mere singing? Or were
they singing at all? Yes, the new singing, where music and drama
insistently meet.

The tale, heart-breaking for beauty and for pathos, neared its close.
Oh, the little heart of flame expiring at its loveliest! Oh, the loyal
feet that waited--eager to run on love's errands--till dawn brought the
sight of faded flowers, the suddenly bleak apartment, the unpressed
couch! Then the brave, swift flight of the spirit's wings to other
altitudes, above pain and shame! And like love and sorrow, refined to a
poignant essence, still the music brooded and cried and aspired.

What visions arose in Marna's brain, Kate wondered, quivering with
vicarious anguish. Glancing down at her companion's small, close-clasped
hands, she thought of their almost ceaseless toil in those commonplace
rooms which she called home, and for the two in it--the ordinary man,
the usual baby. And she might have had all this brightness, this
celebrity, this splendid reward for high labor!

The curtain closed on the last act,--on the little dead
Cio-Cio-San,--and the people stood on their feet to call Farrar, giving
her unstintedly of their _bravas_. Kate and Marna stood with the others,
but they were silent. There were large, glistening tears on Marna's
cheeks, and Kate refrained from adding to her silent singing-bird's
distress by one word of appreciation of the evening's pleasure; but as
they moved down the thronged aisle together, she caught Marna's hand in
her own, and felt her fingers close about it tenaciously.

Outside a bitter wind was blowing, and with such purpose that it had
cleared the sky of the day's murk so that countless stars glittered with
unwonted brilliancy from a purple-black heaven. Crowded before the
entrance were the motors, pouring on in a steady stream, their lamps
half dazzling the pedestrians as they struggled against the wind that
roared between the high buildings.

Though Marna was to take the Madison Street car, they could not resist
the temptation to turn upon the boulevard where the scene was even more
exhilarating. The high standing lights that guarded the great drive
offered a long and dazzling vista, and between them, sweeping steadily
on, were the motor-cars. Laughing, talking, shivering, the people
hastened along--the men of fashion stimulated and alert, their women
splendid in furs and cloaks of velvet while they waited for their
conveyances; by them tripped the music students, who had been
incomparably happy in the highest balcony, and who now cringed before
the penetrating cold; among them marched sedately the phalanx of
middle-class people who permitted themselves an opera or two a year, and
who walked sedately, carrying their musical feast with a certain sense
of indigestion;--all moved along together, thronging the wide pavement.
The restaurants were awaiting those who had the courage for further
dissipation; the suburban trains had arranged their schedules to
convenience the crowd; and the lights burned low in the hallways of
mansions, or apartments, or neat outlying houses, awaiting the return of
these adventurers into another world--the world of music. All would talk
of Farrar. Not alone that night, nor that week, but always, as long as
they lived, at intervals, when they were happy, when their thoughts were
uplifted, they would talk of her. And it might have been Marna Cartan
instead of Geraldine Farrar of whom they spoke!

"Marna of the far quest" might have made this "flight unhazarded"; might
have been the core of all this fine excitement. But she had put herself
out of it. She had sold herself for a price--the usual price. Kate would
not go so far as to say that a birthright had been sold for a mess of
pottage, but Ray McCrea's stock was far below par at that moment. Yet
Ray, as she admitted, would not doom her to a life of monotony and heavy
toil. With him she would have the free and useful, the amusing and
excursive life of an American woman married to a man of wealth. No, her
programme would not be a petty one--and yet--

"Do take a cab, Marna," she urged. "My treat! Please."

"No, no," said Marna in a strained voice. "I'll not do that. A
five-cent ride in the car will take me almost to my door; and besides
the cars are warm, which is an advantage."

It was understood tacitly that Kate was the protector, and the one who
wouldn't mind being on the street alone. They had but a moment to wait
for Marna's car, but in that moment Kate was thinking how terrible it
would be for Marna, in her worn evening gown, to be crowded into that
common conveyance and tormented with those futile regrets which must be
her so numerous companions.

She was not surprised when Marna snatched her hand, crying:--

"Oh, Kate!"

"Yes, yes, I know," murmured Kate soothingly.

"No, you don't," retorted Marna. "How can you? It's--it's the milk."

There was a catch in her voice.

"The milk!" echoed Kate blankly. "What milk? I thought--"

"Oh, I know," Marna cried impatiently. "You thought I was worrying about
that old opera, and that I wanted to be up there behind that screen
stabbing myself. Well, of course, knowing the score so well, and having
hoped once to do so much with it, the notes did rather try to jump out
of my throat. But, goodness, what does all that matter? It's the baby's
milk that I'm carrying on about. I don't believe I told George to warm
it." Her voice ceased in a wail.

The car swung around the corner, and Kate half lifted Marna up the huge
step, and saw her go reeling down the aisle as the cumbersome vehicle
lurched forward. Then she turned her own steps toward the stairs of the
elevated station.

"The milk!" she ejaculated with commingled tenderness and impatience.
"Then that's why she didn't say anything about going behind the scenes.
I thought it was because she couldn't endure the old surroundings and
the pity of her associates of the opera-days. The milk! I wonder--"

What she wondered she did not precisely say; but more than one person on
the crowded elevated train noticed that the handsome woman in black
velvet (it really was velveteen, purchased at a bargain) had something
on her mind.

XXV

Kate slept lightly that night. She had gone to bed with a sense of
gentle happiness, which arose from the furtive conviction that she was
going to surrender to Ray and to his point of view. He could take all
the responsibility if he liked and she would follow the old instincts of
woman and let the Causes of Righteousness with which she had allied
herself contrive to get along without her. It was nothing, she told
herself, but sheer egotism for her to suppose that she was necessary to
their prosperity.

She half awoke many times, and each time she had a vague, sweet longing
which refused to resolve itself into definite shape. But when the full
morning came she knew it was Ray she wanted. She couldn't wait out the
long week he had prescribed as a season of fasting and prayer before she
gave her answer, and she was shamelessly glad when her superior, over
there at the Settlement House, informed her that she would be required
to go to a dance-hall at South Chicago that night--a terrible place,
which might well have been called "The Girl Trap." This gave Kate a
legitimate excuse to ask for Ray's company, because he had besought her
not to go to such places at night without his escort.

"But ought I to be seeing you?" he asked over the telephone in answer
to her request. "Wouldn't it be better for my cause if I stayed away?"

In spite of the fact that he laughed, she knew he was quite in earnest,
and she wondered why he hadn't discerned her compliant mood from her
intonations.

"But I had to mind you, hadn't I?" she sent back. "You said I mustn't go
to such places without you."

From her tone she might have been the most betendriled feminine vine
that ever wrapped a self-satisfied masculine oak.

"Oh, I'll come," he answered. "Of course I'll come. You knew you had
only to give me the chance."

He was on time, impeccable, as always, in appearance. Kate was glad that
he was as tall as she. She knew, down in her inner consciousness, that
they made a fine appearance together, that they stepped off gallantly.
It came to her that perhaps they were to be envied, and that they
weren't--or at least that she wasn't--giving their good fortune its full
valuation.

She told him about her dinner with the Fitzgeralds and about the opera,
but she held back her discovery, so to speak, of the baby, and the
episode of Marna's wistful tears when she heard the music, and her
amazing _volte-face_ at remembering the baby's feeding-time. She would
have loved to spin out the story to him--she could have deepened the
colors just enough to make it all very telling. But she wasn't willing
to give away the reason for her changed mood. It was enough, after all,
that he was aware of it, and that when he drew her hand within his arm
he held it in a clasp that asserted his right to keep it.

They were happy to be in each other's company again. Kate had to admit
it. For the moment it seemed to both of them that it didn't matter much
where they went so long as they could go together. They rode out to
South Chicago on the ill-smelling South Deering cars, crowded with men
and women with foreign faces. One of the men trod on Kate's foot with
his hobnailed shoe and gave an inarticulate grunt by way of apology.

"He's crushed it, hasn't he?" asked Ray anxiously, seeing the tears
spring to her eyes. "What a brute!"

"Oh, it was an accident," Kate protested. "Any one might have done it."

"But anyone except that unspeakable Huniack would have done more than
grunt!"

"I dare say he doesn't know English," Kate insisted. "He'll probably
remember the incident longer and be sorrier about it than some who would
have been able to make graceful apologies."

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