The Precipice by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

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"Call on me when you want anything," she said to them. "I'm a woman who
has seen trouble, and I'd like to be of use to any of you if trouble
should come your way. Anyhow, trouble or no trouble, let us be friends."

In her simple dress, with her quiet, sad face and her deep eyes, she
convinced them of sincerity as few women could have done. They bade her
enter their doors and sit in their sloven homes amid the broken things
the Italians had left behind them.

"Why not start a furniture shop?" asked Honora. "We could find some men
here who could make plain furniture. I'll see Mr. Wander about it."

That was a simple enough plan, and she had no trouble in carrying it
out. She got the women to cooperate with her in other ways. Among them
they cleaned up the town, set out some gardens, and began spending their
men's money for necessaries.

"Do watch out," warned Karl; "you'll get to be a Lady Bountiful--"

"And you a benevolent magnate--"

"Damned if I will! Well, play with your hobo brides if you like, Honora,
but don't look for gratitude or rectitude or any beatitude."

"Not I," declared Honora. "I'm only amusing myself."

They kept insisting to each other that they had no higher intention.
They were hilarious over their failures and they persisted in taking
even their successes humorously. At first the "short-stake men" drifted
away, but presently they began to drift back again. They liked it at
Wander,--liked being mildly and tolerantly controlled by men of their
own sort,--men with some vested authority, however, and a reawakened
perception of responsibility. Wander was their town--the hoboes' own
city. It was one of the few places where something was expected of the
hobo. Well, a hobo was a man, wasn't he? The point was provable. A
number of Karl Wander's vagrants chose to prove that they were not
reprobates. Those who had been "down and out" by their own will, or lack
of it, as well as those whom misfortune had dogged, began to see in this
wild village, in the heart of these rich and terrific mountains, that
wonderful thing, "another chance."

"Would Miss Barrington approve of us now?" Karl would sometimes ask
Honora.

"Why should she?" Honora would retort. "We're not in earnest. We're
only fighting bankruptcy and ennui."

"That's it," declared Karl. "By the way, I must scrape up some more
capital somewhere, Honora. I've borrowed everything I could lay my hands
on in Denver. Now I've written to some Chicago capitalists about my
affairs and they show a disposition to help me out. They'll meet in
Denver next week. Perhaps I shall bring them here. I've told them
frankly what my position was. You see, if I can swing things for six
months more, the tide will turn. Do you think my interesting rabble will
stick to me?"

"Don't count on them," said Honora. "Don't count on anybody or anything.
But if you like to take your chance, do it. It's no more of a gamble
than anything else a Colorado man is likely to invest in."

"You don't think much of us Colorado men, do you, my cousin?"

"I don't think you are quite civilized," she said. Then a twinge of
memory twisted her face. "But I don't care for civilized men. I like
glorious barbarians like you, Karl."

"Men who are shot at from behind bushes, eh? If I ever have to hide in a
cave, Honora, will you go with me?"

"Yes, and load the guns."

He flashed her a curious look; one which she could not quite interpret.
Was he thinking that he would like her to keep beside him? For a
second, with a thrill of something like fear, this occurred to her. Then
by some mysterious process she read his mind, and she read it aright. He
was really thinking how stirring a thing life would seem if he could
hear words like that from the lips of Kate Barrington.

XXVII

It had been a busy day for Honora. She had been superintending the
house-cleaning and taking rather an aggressive part in it herself. She
rejoiced that her strength had come back to her, and she felt a keen
satisfaction in putting it forth in service of the man who had taken her
into community of interest with him when, as he had once put it, she was
bankrupted of all that had made her think herself rich.

Moreover, she loved the roomy, bare house, with its uncurtained windows
facing the mountains, and revealing the spectacles of the day and night.
Because of them she had learned to make the most of her sleepless hours.
The slow, majestic procession in the heavens, the hours of tumult when
the moon struggled through the troubled sky, the dawns with their swift,
wide-spreading clarity, were the finest diversions she ever had known.

She remembered how, in the old days, she and David had patronized the
unspeakably puerile musical comedies under the impression that they
"rested" them. Now, she was able to imagine nothing more fatiguing.

They had an early supper, for Karl was leaving for a day or two in
Denver and had to be driven ten miles to the station. He was unusually
silent, and Honora was well pleased that he should be so, for, though
she had kept herself so busily occupied all the day, she had not been
able to rid herself of the feeling that a storm of memories was waiting
to burst upon her. The feeling had grown as the hours of the day went
on, and she at once dreaded and longed for the solitude she should have
when Karl was gone. She was relieved to find that the little girls were
weary and quite ready for their beds. She watched Karl drive away,
standing at the door for a few moments till she heard his clear voice
calling a last good-bye as the station wagon swept around the pinon
grove; then she locked the house and went to her own room. A fire had
been laid for her, and she touched a match to the kindling, lighted her
lamp, and took up some sewing. But she found herself too weary to sew,
and, moreover, this assailant of recollection was upon her again.

She had once seen the Northern lights when the many-hued glory seemed to
be poured from vast, invisible pitchers, till it spread over the floor
of heaven and spilled earthward. Her memories had come upon her
like that.

Then she faced the fact she had been trying all day not to recognize.

It was David's birthday!

She admitted it now, and even had the courage to go back over the ways
they had celebrated the day in former years; at first she held to the
old idea that these recollections made her suffer, but presently she
perceived that it was not so. Had her help come from the hills, as Karl
had told her it would?

She sat so still that she could hear the ashes falling in the
fireplace--so still that the ticking of her watch on the dressing-table
teased her ears. She seemed to be listening for something--for something
beautiful and solemn. And by and by the thing she had been waiting
for came.

It swept into the house as if all the doors and windows had been thrown
wide to receive it. It was as invisible as the wind, as scentless as a
star, as complete as birth or death. It was peace--or forgiveness--or,
in a white way, perhaps it was love.

Suddenly she sprang to her feet.

"David!" she cried. "David! Oh, I _believe I understand!_"

She went to her desk, and, as if she were compelled, began to write.
Afterward she found she had written this:--

"DEAR DAVID:--

"It is your birthday, and I, who am so used to sending you a
present, cannot be deterred now. Oh, David, my husband, you
who fathered my children, you, who, in spite of all, belong
to me, let me tell you how I have at last come, out of the
storm of angers and torments of the past year, into a
sheltered room where you seem to sit waiting to hear me say,
'I forgive you.'

"That is my present to you--my forgiveness. Take it from me
with lifted hands as if it were a sacrament; feed on it, for
it is holy bread. Now we shall both be at peace, shall we
not? You will forgive me, too, _for all I did not do_.

"We are willful children, all of us, and night over-takes us
before we have half learned our lessons.

"Oh, David--"

She broke off suddenly. Something cold seemed to envelop her--cold as a
crevasse and black as death. She gave a strangled cry, wrenched the
collar from her throat, fighting in vain against the mounting waves that
overwhelmed her.

Long afterward, she shuddered up out of her unconsciousness. The fire
had burned itself out; the lamp was sputtering for lack of oil.
Somewhere in the distance a coyote called. She was dripping with cold
sweat, and had hardly strength to find the thing that would warm her and
to get off her clothes and creep into bed.

At first she was afraid to put out the light. It seemed as if, should
she do so, the very form and substance of Terror would come and grip
her. But after a time, slowly, wave upon wave, the sea of Peace rolled
over her--submerging her. She reached out then and extinguished the
light and let herself sink down, down, through the obliterating waters
of sleep--waters as deep, as cold, as protecting as the sea.

"Into the Eternal Arms," she breathed, not knowing why.

But when she awakened the next morning in response to the punctual gong,
she remembered that she had said that.

"Into the Eternal Arms."

She came down to breakfast with the face of one who has eaten of the
sacred bread of the spirit.

* * * * *

The next two days passed vaguely. A gray veil appeared to hang between
her and the realities, and she had the effect of merely going through
the motions of life. The children caused her no trouble. They were,
indeed, the most normal of children, and Mrs. Hays, their old-time
nurse, had reduced their days to an agreeable system. Honora derived
that peculiar delight from them which a mother may have when she is not
obliged to be the bodily servitor and constant attendant of her
children. She was able to feel the poetry of their childhood, seeing
them as she did at fortunate and picturesque moments; and though their
lives were literally braided into her own,--were the golden threads in
her otherwise dun fabric of existence,--she was thankful that she did
not have the task of caring for them. It would have been torture to have
been tied to their small needs all day and every day. She liked far
better the heavier work she did about the house, her long walks, her
rides to town, and, when Karl was away, her supervision of the ranch.
Above all, there was her work at the village. She could return from
that to the children for refreshment and for spiritual illumination. In
the purity of their eyes, in the liquid sweetness of their voices, in
their adorable grace and caprice, there was a healing force beyond her
power to compute.

During these days, however, her pleasure in them was dim, though sweet.
She had been through a mystic experience which left a profound influence
upon her, and she was too much under the spell of it even to make an
effort to shake it off. She slept lightly and woke often, to peer into
the velvet blackness of the night and to listen to the deep silence. She
was as one who stands apart, the viewer of some tremendous but
uncomprehended event.

The third day she sent the horses for Karl, and as twilight neared, he
came driving home. She heard his approach and threw open the door for
him. He saw her with a halo of light about her, curiously enlarged and
glorified, and came slowly and heavily toward her, holding out both
hands. At first she thought he was ill, but as his hands grasped hers,
she saw that he was not bringing a personal sorrow to her but a
brotherly compassion. And then she knew that something had happened to
David. She read his mind so far, almost as if it had been a printed
page, and she might have read further, perhaps, if she had waited, but
she cried out:--

"What is it? You've news of David?"

"Yes," he said. "Come in."

"You've seen the papers?" he asked when they were within the house. She
shook her head.

"I haven't sent over for the mail since you left, Karl. I seemed to like
the silence."

"There's silence enough in all patience!" he cried. "Sixteen hundred
voices have ceased."

"I don't understand."

"The Cyclops has gone down--a new ship, the largest on the sea."

"Why, that seems impossible."

"Not when there are icebergs floating off the banks and when the bergs
carry submerged knives of ice. One of them gored the ship. It
was fatal."

"How terrible!" For a second's space she had forgotten the possible
application to her. Then the knowledge came rushing back upon her.

She put her hands over her heart with the gesture of one wounded.

"David?" she gasped.

Karl nodded.

"He was on it--with Mary. They were coming back to America. He had been
given the Norden prize, as you know,--the prize you earned for him. I
think he was to take a position in some Eastern university. He and Mary
had gone to their room, the paper says, when the shock came. They ran
out together, half-dressed, and Mary asked a steward if there was
anything the matter. 'Yes, madam,' he said quietly, just like that, 'I
believe we are sinking.' You'll read all about it there in those papers.
Mary was interviewed. Well, they lowered the boats. There were enough
for about a third of the passengers. They had made every provision for
luxury, but not nearly enough for safety. The men helped the women into
the boats and sent them away. Then they sat down together, folded their
arms, and died like gentlemen, with the good musicians heartening them
with their music to the last. The captain went down with his ship, of
course. All of the officers did that. Almost all of the men did it, too.
It was very gallant in its terrible way, and David was among the most
gallant. The papers mention him particularly. He worked till the last
helping the others off, and then he sat down and waited for the end."

Honora turned on her cousin a face in which all the candles of her soul
were lit.

"Oh, Karl, how wonderful! How beautiful!"

He said nothing for amazement.

"In that half-hour," she went on, speaking with such swiftness that he
could hardly follow her, "all his thoughts streamed off across the miles
of sea and land to me! I felt the warmth of them all about me. It was
myself he was thinking of. He came back to me, his wife! I was alone,
waiting for something, I couldn't tell what. Then I remembered it was
his birthday, and that I should be sending him a gift. So I sent him my
forgiveness. I wrote a letter, but for some reason I have not sent it.
It is here, the letter!" She drew it from her bosom. "See, the date and
hour is upon it. Read it."

Karl arose and held the letter in a shaking hand. He made a
calculation.

"The moments correspond," he said. "You are right; his spirit sought
yours."

"And then the--the drowning, Karl. I felt it all, but I could not
understand. I died and was dead for a long time, but I came up again, to
live. Only since then life has been very curious. I have felt like a
ghost that missed its grave. I've been walking around, pretending to
live, but really half hearing and half seeing, and waiting for you to
come back and explain."

"I have explained," said Karl with infinite gentleness. "Mary is saved.
She was taken up with others by the Urbania, and friends are caring for
her in New York. She gave a very lucid interview; a feeling one, too.
She lives, but the man she ruined went down, for her sake."

"No," said Honora, "he went down for my sake. He went down for the sake
of his ideals, and his ideals were mine. Oh, how beautiful that I have
forgiven him--and how wonderful that he knew it, and that I--" She spoke
as one to whom a great happiness had come. Then she wavered, reached out
groping hands, and fell forward in Karl's arms.

* * * * *

For days she lay in her bed. She had no desire to arise. She seemed to
dread interruption to her passionate drama of emotion, in which sorrow
and joy were combined in indeterminate parts. From her window she could
see the snow-capped peaks of the Williston range, rising with immortal
and changeful beauty into the purple heavens. As she watched them with
incurious eyes, marking them in the first light of the day, when their
iridescence made them seem as impalpable as a dream of heaven; eyeing
them in the noon-height, when their sides were the hue of ruddy granite;
watching them at sunset when they faded from swimming gold to rose, from
rose to purple, they seemed less like mountains than like those fair and
fatal bergs of the Northern Atlantic. She had read of them, though she
had not seen them. She knew how they sloughed from the inexhaustible
ice-cap of Greenland's bleak continent and marched, stately as an army,
down the mighty plain of the ocean. Fair beyond word were they, with
jeweled crevasses and mother-of-pearl changefulness, indomitable,
treacherous, menacing. Honora, closing weary eyes, still saw them
sailing, sailing, white as angels, radiant as dawn, changing, changing,
lovely and cold as death.

Mind and gaze were fixed upon their enchantment. She would not think of
certain other things--of that incredible catastrophe, that rent ship,
crashing to its doom, of that vast company tossed upon the sea, of those
cries in the dark. No, she shut her eyes and her ears to those things!
They seemed to be the servitors at the doors of madness, and she let
them crook their fingers at her in vain. Now and then, when she was not
on guard, they swarmed upon her, whispering stories of black struggle,
of heart-breaking separation of mother and child, of husband and wife.
Sometimes they told her how Mary--so luxurious, so smiling, so avid of
warmth and food and kisses--had shivered in that bleak wind, as she sat
coatless, torn from David's sheltering embrace. They had given her
elfish reminders of how soft, how pink, how perfumed was that woman's
tender flesh. Then as she looked the blue eyes glazed with agony, the
supple body grew rigid with cold, and down, down, through miles of
water, sank the man they both had loved.

No, no, it was better to watch the bergs, those glistering, fair, white
ships of death! Yes, there from the window she seemed to see them! How
the sun glorified them! Was the sun setting, then? Had there been
another day?

"To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow--"

Darkness was falling. But even in the darkness she saw the ice-ships
slipping down from that great frozen waste, along the glacial rivers,
past the bleak _lisiere_, into the bitter sea, and on down, down to meet
that other ship--that ship bearing its mighty burden of living men--and
to break it in unequal combat.

Oh, could she never sleep! Would those white ships never reach port!

Did she hear Karl say he had telegraphed for Kate Barrington? But what
did it matter? Neither Kate nor Karl, strong and kind as they were,
could stem the tide that bore those ships along the never-quiet seas.

XXVIII

So Kate was coming!

He had cravenly rebuffed her, and she had borne the rebuff in silence.
Yet now that he needed her, she was coming. Ah, that was what women
meant to men. They were created for the comforting of them. He always
had known it, but he had impiously doubted them--doubted Her. Because
fortune had turned from him, he had turned from Her--from Kate
Barrington. He had imagined that she wanted more than he could give;
whereas, evidently, all she ever had wanted was to be needed. He had
called. She had answered. It had been as swift as telegraphy could make
it. And now he was driving to the station to meet her.

Life, it appeared, was just as simple as that. A man, lost in the
darkness, could cry for a star to guide him, and it would come. It would
shine miraculously out of the heavens, and his path would be made plain.
It seemed absurd that the horses should be jogging along at their usual
pace over the familiar road. Why had they not grown shining wings? Why
was the old station wagon not transformed, by the mere glory of its
errand, into a crystal coach? But, no, the horses went no faster because
they were going on this world-changing errand. The resuscitated village,
with the American litter heaped on the Italian dirt, looked none the
less slovenly because She was coming into it in a few minutes. The clock
kept its round; the sun showed its usual inclination toward the west.
But notwithstanding this torpidity, She was coming, and that day stood
apart from all other days.

That it was Honora's desperate need which she was answering, in no way
lessened the value of her response to him. His need and Honora's were
indissoluble now; it was he who had called, and it was not to Honora
alone that she was coming with healing in her hands.

He saw her as she leaped from the train,--tall, alert, green-clad,--and
he ran forward, sweeping his Stetson from his head. Their hands
met--clung.

"You!" he said under his breath.

She laughed into his eyes.

"No, _you_!" she retorted.

He took her bags and they walked side by side, looking at each other as
if their eyes required the sight.

"How is she?" asked Kate.

"Very bad."

"What is it?"

"The doorway to madness."

"You've had a specialist?"

"Yes. He wanted to take her to a sanatorium. I begged him to wait--to
let you try. How could I let her go out from my door to be cast in with
the lost?"

"I suppose it was David's death that caused it."

"Oh, yes. What else could it be?"

"Then she loved him--to the end."

"And after it, I am sure."

He led the way to the station wagon and helped her in; then brought her
luggage on his own shoulder.

"Oh," she cried in distress. "Do you have to be your own stevedore? I
don't like to have you doing that for me."

"Out here we wait on ourselves," he replied when he had tumbled the
trunk into the wagon. He seated himself beside her as if he were doing
an accustomed thing, and she, too, felt as if she had been there beside
him many times before.

As they entered the village, he said:--

"You must note my rowdy town. Never was there such a place--such
organized success built on so much individual failure. From boss to
water-boy we were failures all; so we understood each other. We haven't
sworn brotherhood, but we're pulling together. Some of us had known no
law, and most of us had a prejudice against it, but now we're making our
own laws and we rather enjoy the process. We've made the town and the
mines our own cause, so what is the use of playing the traitor? Some of
us are short-stake men habitually and constitutionally. Very well, say
we, let us look at the facts. Since there are short-stake men in the
world, why not make allowances for them? Use their limited powers of
endurance and concentration, then let 'em off to rest up. If there are
enough short-stake men around, some one will always be working. We find
it works well."

"Have you many women in your midst?"

"At first we had very few. Just some bedraggled wives and a few less
responsible ladies with magenta feathers in their hats. At least, two of
them had, and the magenta feather came to be a badge. But they've
disappeared--the feathers, not the ladies. Honora had a hand in it. I
think she pulled off one marriage. She seemed to think there were
arguments in favor of the wedding ceremony. But, mind you, she didn't
want any of the poor women to go because they were bad. We are sinners
all here. Stay and take a chance, that's our motto. It isn't often you
can get a good woman like Honora to hang up a sign like that."

"Honora couldn't have done it once," said Kate. "But think of all she's
learned."

"Learned? Yes. And I, too. I've been learning my lessons, too,--they
were long and hard and I sulked at some of them, but I'm more
tractable new."

"I had my own hard conning," Kate said softly. "You never could have
done what I did, Mr. Wander. You couldn't have been cruel to an
old father."

"Honora has made all that clear to me," said Karl with compassion.
"When we are fighting for liberty we forget the sufferings of
the enemy."

There was a little pause. Then Karl spoke.

"But I forgot to begin at the beginning in telling you about my
made-over mining town. Yet you seemed to know about it."

"Oh, I read about it in the papers. Your experiment is famous. All of
the people I am associated with, the welfare workers and sociologists,
are immensely interested in it. That's one of the problems now--how to
use the hobo, how to get him back into an understanding of regulated
communities."

"Put him in charge," laughed Karl. "The answer's easy. Treat him like a
fellow-man. Don't annoy him by an exhibition of your useless virtues."

"I never thought of that," said Kate.

They turned their backs on the straggling town and faced the peaks.
Presently they skirted the Williston River which thundered among
boulders and raged on toward the low-lying valley. From above, the roar
of the pines came to them, reverberant and melancholy.

"What sounds! What sounds!" cried Kate.

"The mountains breathing," answered Wander.

He drove well, and he knew the road. It was a dangerous road, which,
ever ascending, skirted sharp declivities and rounded buttressed rocks.
Kate, prairie-reared, could not "escape the inevitable thrill," but she
showed, and perhaps felt, no fear. She let the matter rest with
him--this man with great shoulders and firm hands, who knew the
primitive art of "waiting on himself." Their brief speech sufficed them
for a time, and now they sat silent, well content. The old, tormenting
question as to his relations with Honora did not intrude itself. It was
swept out of sight like flotsam in the plenteous stream of
present content.

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