The Precipice by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

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"Not he," declared Ray. "Don't you think it! Bless me, Kate, why you
prefer these people to any others passes my comprehension. Can't you
leave these people to work out their own salvation--which to my notion
is the only way they ever can get it--and content yourself with your own
kind and class?"

"Not variety enough," retorted Kate, feeling her tenderness evaporate
and her tantalizing mood--her usual one when she was with Ray--come
back. "Don't I know just what you, for example, are going to think and
say about any given circumstances? Don't I know your enthusiasms and
reactions as if I'd invented 'em?"

"Well, I know yours, too, but that's because I love you, not because
you're like everybody else. I wish you were rather more like other
women, Kate. I'd have an easier time."

"If we were married," said Kate, with that cheerful directness which
showed how her sentimentality had taken flight, "you'd never give up
till you'd made me precisely like Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Smith, and Mrs.
Johnson. Men fall in love with women because they're different from
other women, and then put in the first years of their married life
trying to make them like everybody else. I've noticed, however, that
when they've finished the job, they're so bored with the result that
they go and look up another 'different' woman. Oh, I know!"

He couldn't say what he wished in reply because the car filled up just
then with a party of young people bound for a dance in Russell Square.
It always made Kate's heart glow to think of things like that--of what
the city was trying to do for its people. These young people came from
small, comfortable homes, quite capacious enough for happiness and
self-respect, but not large enough for a dance. Very well; all that was
needed was a simple request for the use of the field-house and they
could have at their disposal a fine, airy hall, well-warmed and lighted,
with an excellent floor, charming decorations, and a room where they
might prepare their refreshments. All they had to pay for was the music.
Proper chaperonage was required and the hall closed at midnight. Kate
descanted on the beauties of the system till Ray yawned.

"Think how different it is at the dance-hall where we are going," she
went on, not heeding his disinclination for the subject. "They'll keep
it up till dawn and drink between every dance. There's not a party of
the kind the whole winter through that doesn't see the steps of some
young girl set toward destruction. Oh, I can't see why it isn't stopped!
If women had the management of things, it would be, I can tell you. It
would take about one day to do it."

"That's one of the reasons why the liquor men combine to kill suffrage,"
said Ray. "They know it will be a sorry day for them when the women get
in. Positively, the women seem to think that's all there is to
politics--some moral question; and the whole truth is they'd do a lot of
damage to business with their slap-dash methods, as they'd learn to
their cost. When they found their pin-money being cut down, they'd sing
another tune, for they're the most reckless spenders in the world,
American women are."

"They're the purchasing agents for the most extravagant nation in the
world, if you like," Kate replied. "Men seem to think that shopping is a
mere feminine diversion. They forget that it's what supports their
business and supplies their homes. Not to speak of any place beyond our
own town, think of the labor involved in buying food and clothing for
the two million and a half human beings here in Chicago. It's no joke, I
assure you."

"Joke!" echoed Ray. "A good deal of the shopping I've seen at my
father's store seems to me to come under the head of vice. The look I've
seen on some of those faces! It was ravaging greed, nothing less. Why,
we had a sale the other day of cheap jewelry, salesmen's samples, and
the women swarmed and snatched and glared like savages. I declare, when
I saw them like that, so indecently eager for their trumpery ornaments,
I said to myself that you'd only to scratch the civilized woman to get
at the squaw any day."

Kate kept a leash on her tongue. She supposed it was inevitable that
they should get back to the old quarrel. Deep down in Ray, she felt, was
an unconquerable contempt for women. He made an exception of her because
he loved her; because she drew him with the mysterious sex attraction.
It was that, and not any sense of spiritual or intellectual approval of
her, which made him set her apart as worthy of admiration and of his
devoted service. If ever their lives were joined, she would be his
treasure to be kept close in his personal casket,--with the key to the
golden padlock in his pocket,--and he would all but say his prayers to
her. But all that would not keep him from openly discountenancing her
judgment before people. She could imagine him putting off a suggestion
of hers with that patient married tone which husbands assume when they
discover too much independent cerebration on the part of their wives.

"I couldn't stand that," she inwardly declared, as she let him think
that he was assisting her from the car. "If any man ever used that
patient tone to me, I'd murder him!"

She couldn't keep back her sardonic chuckle.

"What are you laughing at?" he asked irritatedly.

"At the mad world, master," she answered.

"Where is this dance-hall?" he demanded, as if he suspected her of
concealing it.

The tone was precisely the "married" one she had been imagining, and she
burst out with a laugh that made him stop and visibly wrap his dignity
about him. Nothing was more evident than that he thought her silly. But
as she paused, too, standing beneath the street-lamp, and he saw her
with her nonchalant tilt of her head,--that handsome head poised on her
strong, erect body,--her force and value were so impressed upon him that
he had to retract. But she was provoking, no getting around that.

At that moment another sound than laughter cut the air--a terrible
sound--the shriek of a tortured child. It rang out three times in quick
succession, and Kate's blood curdled.

"Oh, oh," she gasped; "she's being beaten! Come, Ray."

"Mix up in some family mess and get slugged for my pains? Not I! But
I'll call a policeman if you say."

"Oh, it might be too late! I'm a policeman, you know. Get the patrol
wagon if you like. But I can't stand that--"

Once more that agonized scream! Kate flashed from him into the mesh of
mean homes, standing three deep in each yard, flanking each other with
only a narrow passage between, and was lost to him. He couldn't see
where she had gone, but he knew that he must follow. He fell down a
short flight of steps that led from the street to the lower level of the
yard, and groped forward. He could hear people running, and when a large
woman, draping her wrapper about her, floundered out of a basement door
near him, he followed her. She seemed to know where to go. The squalid
drama with the same actors evidently had been played before.

Mid-length of the building the woman turned up some stairs and came to a
long hall which divided the front and rear stairs. At the end of it a
light was burning, and Kate's voice was ringing out like that of an
officer excoriating his delinquent troops.

"I'm glad you can't speak English," he heard her say, "for if you could
I'd say things I'd be sorry for. I'd shrivel you up, you great brute. If
you've got the devil in you, can't you take it out on some one else
beside a little child? You're her father, are you? She has no mother, I
suppose. Well, you 're under arrest, do you understand? Tell him, some
of you who can talk English. He's to sit in that chair and never move
from it till the patrol wagon comes. I shall care for the child myself,
and she'll be placed where he can't treat her like that again. Poor
little thing! Thank you, that's a good woman. Just hold her awhile and
comfort her. I can see you've children of your own."

Ray found the courage at length to peer above the heads of the others in
that miserable, crowded room. The dark faces of weary men and women,
heavy with Old-World, inherited woe, showed in the gloom. The short,
shaking man on the chair, dully contrite for his spasm of rage, was
cringing before Kate, who stood there, amazingly tall among these
low-statured beings. Never had she looked to Ray so like an eagle, so
keen, so fierce, so fit for braving either sun or tenebrous cavern. She
dominated them all; had them, who only partly understood what she said,
at her command. She had thrown back her cloak, and the star of the
Juvenile Court officer which she wore carried meaning to them. Though
perhaps it had not needed that. Ray tried to think her theatrical, to
be angry at her, but the chagrin of knowing that she had forgotten him,
and was not caring about his opinion, scourged his criticisms back. She
had lifted from the floor the stick with its leathern thong with which
the man had castigated the tender body of his motherless child. She held
it in her hand, looking at it with the angry aversion that she might
have turned upon a venomous serpent. Then slowly, with unspeakable
rebuke, she swung her gaze upon the wretch in the chair. For a moment
she silently accused him. Then he dropped his head in his hands and
sobbed. He seemed in his voiceless way to say that he, too, had been
castigated by a million invisible thongs held in dead men's hands, and
that his soul, like his child's body, was hideous with welts.

Kate turned to Ray.

"Is the patrol wagon on its way?" she inquired.

"I--I--didn't call it," he stammered.

"Please do," she said simply.

He went out of the room, silently raging, and was grateful that one of
the men followed to show him the patrol box. He waited outside for the
wagon to come, and when the officers brought out the shaking prisoner,
he saw Kate with them carrying the child in her arms.

"I must go to the station," she said to Ray, in a matter-of-fact tone
that put him far away from her. "So I'll say good-night. It wouldn't be
pleasant for you to ride in the wagon, you know. I'll be quite all
right. One of the officers will see me safe home. Anyway, I shall have
to go to the dance-hall before the evening's over."

"Kate!" he protested.

"Oh, I know," she said to him apart softly while the others concerned
themselves with assisting the blubbering Huniack into the wagon, "you
think it isn't nice of me to be going around like this, saving babies
from beatings and young girls from much worse. You think it isn't
ladylike. But it's what the coming lady is either going to do or see
done. It's a new idea, you understand, Ray. Quite different from the
squaw idea, isn't it? Good-night!"

An officer stood at the door of the wagon waiting for her. He touched
his hat and smiled at her in a comradely fashion, and she responded with
as courteous a bow as she ever had made to Ray.

The wagon drove off.

"I've been given my answer," said Ray aloud. He wondered if he were more
relieved or disappointed at the outcome. But really he could neither
feel nor think reasonably. He went home in a tumult, dismayed at his own
sufferings, and in no condition to realize that the old ideas and the
new were at death grips in his consciousness.

XXVI

Karl Wander rode wearily up the hill on his black mare. Honora saw him
coming and waved to him from the window. There was no one to put up his
horse, and he drove her into the stables and fed her and spread her bed
while Honora watched what he and she had laughingly termed "the
outposts." For she believed she had need to be on guard, and she thanked
heaven that all of the approaches to the house were in the open and that
there was nothing nearer than the rather remote grove of pinon trees
which could shelter any creeping enemy.

Wander came on at last to the house, making his way deliberately and
scorning, it would seem, all chance of attack. But Honora's ears fairly
reverberated with the pistol shot which did not come; the explosion
which was now so long delayed. She ran to open the door for him and to
drag him into the friendly kitchen, where, in the absence of any
domestic help, she had spread their evening meal.

There was a look in his face which she had not seen there before--a look
of quietude, of finality.

"Well?" she asked.

He flung his hat on a settle and sat down to loosen his leggings.

"They've gone," he said, "bag and baggage."

"The miners?"

"Yes, left this afternoon--confiscated some trains and made the crews
haul them out of town. They shook their fists at the mines and the works
as if they had been the haunt of the devil. I couldn't bring myself to
skulk. I rode Nell right down to the station and sat there till the last
carload pulled out with the men and women standing together on the
platform to curse me."

"Karl! How could you? It's a marvel you weren't shot."

"Too easy a mark, I reckon."

"And Elena?"

"Lifted on board by two rival suitors. She didn't even look at me." He
drew a long breath. "I was guiltless in that, Honora. You've stood by
through everything, and you've made a cult of believing in me, and I
want you to know that, so far as Elena was concerned, you were right to
do it. I may have been a fool--but not consciously--not consciously."

"I know it. I believe you."

A silence fell between them while Honora set the hot supper on the table
and put the tea to draw.

"It's very still," he said finally. "But the stillness here is nothing
to what it is down where my village stood. I've made a frightful mess of
things, Honora."

"No," she said, "you built up; another has torn down. You must get more
workmen. There may be a year or two of depression, but you're going to
win out, Karl."

"I've fought a good many fights first and last, Honora,--fights you know
nothing about. Some of them have been with men, some with ideas, some of
the worst ones with myself. It would be a long story and a strange one
if I were to tell it all."

"I dare say it would."

"I suppose I must seem very strange to a civilized woman like you,
or--or your friend, Kate Barrington."

"You seem very like a brave man, Karl, and an interesting one."

"But I'm tired, Honora,--extraordinarily tired. I don't feel like
fighting. Quiet and rest are what I'm longing for, and I'm to begin all
over again, it appears. I've got to struggle up again almost from
the bottom."

"Come to supper, Karl. Never mind all that. We have food and we have
shelter. No doubt we shall sleep. Things like that deserve our
gratitude. Accept these blessings. There are many who lack them."

Suddenly he threw up his arms with a despairing gesture.

"Oh, it isn't myself, Honora, that I'm grieving for! It's those
hot-headed, misguided, wayward fellows of mine! They've left the homes I
tried to help them win, they've followed a self-seeking, half-mad,
wholly vicious agitator, and their lives, that I meant to have flow on
so smoothly, will be troubled and wasted. I know so well what will
happen! And then, their hate! It hangs over me like a cloud! I'm not
supposed to be sensitive. I'm looked on as a swaggering, reckless,
devil-may-care fellow with a pretty good heart and a mighty sure aim;
but I tell you, cousin, among them, they've taken the life out of me."

"It's your dark hour, Karl. You're standing the worst of it right now.
To-morrow things will look better."

"I couldn't ask a woman to come out here and stand amid this ruin with
me, Honora. You know I couldn't. The only person who would be willing to
share my present life with me would be some poor, devil-driven creature
like Elena--come to think of it, even she wouldn't! She's off and away
with a lover at each elbow!"

"Here!" said Honora imperatively. She held a plate toward him laden with
steaming food.

He arose, took it, seated himself, and tried a mouthful, but he had to
wash it down with water.

"I'm too tired," he said. "Really, Honora, you'll have to forgive me."

She got up then and lighted the lamp in his bedroom.

"Thank you," he said. "Rest is what I need. It was odd they didn't
shoot, wasn't it? I thought every moment that they would."

"You surely didn't wish that they would, Karl?"

"No." He paused for a moment at the door. "No--only everything appeared
to be so futile. My bad deeds never turned on me as my good ones have
done. It makes everything seem incoherent. What--what would a woman like
Miss Barrington make of all that--of harm coming from good?"

"I don't know," said Honora, rather sharply. "She hasn't written. I told
her all the trouble we were in,--the danger and the distress,--but she
hasn't written a word."

"Why should she?" demanded Wander. "It's none of her concern. I suppose
she thinks a fool is best left with his folly. Good-night, cousin.
You're a good woman if ever there was one. What should I have done
without you?"

Honora smiled wanly. He seemed to have forgotten that it was she who
would have fared poorly without him.

She closed up the house for the night, looking out in the bright
moonlight to see that all was quiet. For many days and nights she had
been continually on the outlook for lurking figures, but now she was
inclined to believe that she had overestimated the animosity of the
strikers. After all, try as they might, they could bring no accusations
against the man who, hurt to the soul by their misunderstanding of him,
was now laying his tired head upon his pillow.

All was very still. The moonlight touched to silver the snow upon the
mountains; the sound of the leaping river was like a distant flute; the
wind was rising with long, wavelike sounds. Honora lingered in the
doorway, looking and listening. Her heart was big with pity--pity for
that disheartened man whose buoyancy and self-love had been so deeply
wounded, pity for those wandering, angry, aimless men and women who
might have rested secure in his guardianship; pity for all the hot,
misguided hearts of men and women. Pity, too, for the man with the most
impetuous heart of them all, who wandered in some foreign land with a
woman whose beauty had been his lure and his undoing. Yes, she had been
given grace in those days, when she seemed to stand face to face with
death, to pity even David and Mary!

She walked with a slow firm step up to her room, holding her head high.
She had learned trust as well as compassion. She trusted Karl and the
issue of his sorrow. She even trusted the issue of her own sorrow,
which, a short time before, had seemed so shameful. She threw wide her
great windows, and the wind and the moonlight filled her chamber.

* * * * *

Two days later Karl Wander and Honora Fulham rode together to the
village, now dismantled and desolate.

"I remember," said Karl, "what a boyish pride I took in the little town
at first, Honora, to have built it, and had it called after me and all.
Such silly fools as men are, trying to perpetuate themselves by such
childish methods."

"Perpetuation is an instinct with us," said Honora calmly, "Immortality
is our greatest hope. I'm so thankful I have my children, Karl. They
seem to carry one's personality on, you know, no matter how different
they actually may be from one's self."

"Oh, yes," said Karl, with a short sigh, "you're right there. You've a
beautiful brace of babies, Honora. I believe I'll have to ask you to
appoint me their guardian. I must have some share in them. It will give
me a fresh reason for going on."

"Are you a trifle short of reasons for going on, Karl?" Honora asked
gently, averting her look so that she might not seem to be watching him.

"Yes, I am," he admitted frankly. "Although, now that the worst of my
chagrin is over at having failed so completely in the pet scheme of my
life, I can feel my fighting blood getting up again. I'm going to make a
success of the town of Wander yet, my cousin, and those three mines that
lie there so silently are going to hum in the old way. You'll see a
string of men pouring in and out of those gates yet, take my word for
it. But as for me, I proceed henceforth on a humbler policy."

"Humbler? Isn't it humble to be kind, Karl? That's what you were first
and last--kind. You were forever thinking of the good of your people."

"It was outrageously insolent of me to do it, my cousin. Who am I that I
should try to run another man's affairs? How should I know what is best
for him--isn't he the one to be the judge of that? patronage,
patronage, that's what they can't stand--that's what natural overmen
like myself with amiable dispositions try to impose on those we think
inferior to ourselves. We can't seem to comprehend that the way to make
them grow is to leave them alone."

"Don't be bitter, Karl."

"I'm not bitter, Honora. I'm rebuked. I'm literal. I'm instructed. I
have brought you down here to talk the situation over with me. I can get
men in plenty to advise me, but I want to know what you think about a
number of things. Moreover, I want you to tell me what you imagine Miss
Barrington would think about them."

"Why don't you write and ask her?" asked Honora. She herself was hurt at
not having heard from Kate.

"I gave her notice that I wasn't going to write any more," said Karl
sharply. "I couldn't have her counting on me when I wasn't sure that I
was a man to be counted on."

"Oh," cried Honora, enlightened. "That's the trouble, is it? But still,
I should think she'd write to me. I told her of all you and I were going
through together--" she broke off suddenly. Her words presented to her
for the first time some hint of the idea she might have conveyed to
Kate. She smiled upon her cousin beautifully, while he stared at her,
puzzled at her unexpected radiance.

"Kate loves him," she decided, looking at the man beside her with fresh
appreciation of his power. She was the more conscious of it that she saw
him now in his hour of defeat and perceived his hope and ingenuity, his
courage and determination gathering together slowly but steadily for a
fresh effort.

"Dear old Kate," she mused. "Karl rebuffed her in his misery, and I
misled her. If she hadn't cared she'd have written anyway. As it is--"

But Karl was talking.

"Now there's the matter of the company store," he was saying. "What
would Miss Barrington think about the ethical objections to that?"

Honora turned her attention to the matter in hand, and when, late that
afternoon, the two rode their jaded horses home, a new campaign had been
planned. Within a week Wander left for Denver. Honora heard nothing from
him for a fortnight. Then a wire came. He was returning to Wander with
five hundred men.

"They're hoboes--pick-ups," he told Honora that night as the
two sat together at supper. "Long-stake and short-stake
men--down-and-outs--vagrants--drunkards, God knows what. I advertised
for them. 'Previous character not called into question,' was what I
said. 'Must open up my mines. Come and work as long as you feel like
it.' I haven't promised them anything and they haven't promised me
anything, except that I give them wages for work. A few of them have
women with them, but not more than one in twenty. I don't know what kind
of a mess the town of Wander will be now, but at any rate, it's
sticking to its old programme of 'open shop.' Any one who wants to take
these fellows away from me is quite welcome to do it. No affection shall
exist between them and me. There are no obligations on either side. But
they seem a hearty, good-natured lot, and they said they liked my grit."

Something that was wild and reckless in all of the Wanders flashed in
Honora's usually quiet eyes.

"A band of brigands," she laughed. "Really, Karl, I think you'll make a
good chief for them. There's one thing certain, they'll never let you
patronize them."

"I shan't try," declared Karl. "They needn't look to me for benefits of
any sort. I want miners."

Honora chuckled pleasantly and looked at her cousin from the corner of
her eye. She had her own ideas about his ability to maintain such
detachment.

He amused her a little later by telling her how he had formed a town
government and he described the men he had appointed to office.

"They take it seriously, too," he declared. "We have a ragamuffin
government and regulations that would commend themselves to the most
judicious. 'Pon my soul, Honora, though it's only play, I swear some of
these fellows begin to take on little affectations of self-respect.
We're going to have a council meeting to-morrow. You ought to
come down."

That gave Honora a cue. She was wanting something more to do than to
look after the house, now that servants had again been secured. It
occurred to her that it might be a good idea to call on the women down
at Wander. She was under no error as to their character. Broken-down
followers of weak men's fortunes,--some with the wedding ring and some
without,--they nevertheless were there, flesh and blood, and possibly
heart and soul. Not the ideal but the actual commended itself to her
these days. Kate had taught her that lesson. So, quite simply, she went
among them.

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