The Precipice by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

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Day succeeded day. From early morning till late at night the great
convention read its papers, ate its luncheons, held its committee
meetings--talked, aspired, lobbied, schemed, prayed, sang, rejoiced!
Culture was splendidly on its way--progress was the watchword! It was
wonderful and amusing and superb.

The Feminine mind, much in action, shooting back and forth like a
shuttle, was weaving a curious and admirable fabric. There might be some
trouble in discerning the design, but it was there, and if it was not
arrestingly original, at least it was interesting. In places it was even
beautiful. Now and then it gave suggestions of the grotesque. It was
shot through with the silver of talent, the gold of genius. And with all
of its defects it was splendid because the warp thereof was purpose and
the woof enthusiasm.

* * * * *

Kate's day came. The great theater was packed--not a vacant seat
remained. For it was mid-afternoon, the sun was shining, and the day was
the last one of the convention.

The president presided with easy authority. It became her--that seat.
Her keen eyes expressed themselves as being satisfied; her handsome head
was carried proudly. Her voice, of medium pitch, had an accent of
gracious command. She presented to the eye a pleasing, nay, an artistic,
picture, and the very gown she wore was a symbol of efficiency--sign to
the initiate.

Kate's heart was fluttering, her mouth dry. She greeted her chairwoman
somewhat tremulously, and then faced her audience.

For a moment she faltered. Then a face came before her--Karl's face.
She did not so much wish to succeed for him as in despite of him. He had
said she would reach her greatest importance through her relationship to
him. At that moment she thrilled to the belief that, independently of
him, she was still important.

The great assemblage had ears for her. The idea of an extension of
motherhood, an organized, scientific supervision of children, made an
appeal such as nothing else could. For, after all, persistently--almost
irritatingly, at times--this great federation, which was supposed to
concern itself with many fine abstractions, swung back to that concrete
and essentially womanly idea of the care of children. Women who had
brought to it high messages of art and education had known what it was
to be exasperated into speechlessness by what they were pleased to
denominate the maternal obsession.

Kate swung them back to it now, by means of impersonal rather than
personal arguments. She did not idealize paternity. She was bitterly
well aware by this time that parents were no better than other folk, and
that only a small proportion of those to whom the blessing came were
qualified or willing to bear its responsibilities. She touched on
eugenics--its advantages and its limitations; she referred to the
inadequacy of present laws and protective measures. Then she went on to
describe what a Bureau of Children might be.

"The business of this bureau," she said, "will be the removal of
handicaps.

"Is the child blind, deaf, lame, tubercular, or possessed of any sorry
inheritance? The Bureau of Children will devise some method of easing
its way; some plan to save it from further degeneration. Is the child
talented, and in need of special training? Has it genius, and should it,
for the glory of the commonwealth and the enrichment of life, be given
the right of way? Then the Bureau of Children will see to it that such
provision is made. It will not be the idea merely to aid the deficient
and protect the vicious. Nor shall its highest aspiration be to serve
the average child, born of average parents. It would delight to reward
successful and devoted parents by giving especial opportunity to their
carefully trained and highly developed children. As the Bureau of
Agriculture labors to propagate the best species of trees, fruit, and
flowers, so we would labor to propagate the best examples of
humanity--the finest, most sturdily reared, best intelligenced boys
and girls.

"We would endeavor to prevent illness and loss of life among babies and
children. Our circulars would be distributed in all languages among all
of our citizens. We would employ specialists to direct the feeding,
clothing, and general rearing of the children of all conditions. We
would advocate the protection of children until they reached the age of
sixteen; and would endeavor to assist in the supervision of these
children until they were of legal age. My idea would be to have all
young people under twenty-one remain in a sense the wards of schools. If
they have had, at any early age, to leave school and take the burdens of
bread-winning upon their young shoulders and their untried hearts, then
I would advise an extension of school authority. The schools should be
provided with assistant superintendents whose business it would be to
help these young bread-winners find positions in keeping with their
tastes and abilities, thus aiding them in the most practical and
beneficent way, to hold their places in this struggling, modern world.

"It is an economic measure of the loftiest type. It will provide against
the waste of bodies and souls; it is a device for the conservation and
the scientific development of human beings. It is part and parcel of the
new, practical religion--a new prayer.

"'Prayer,' says the old hymn, 'is the soul's sincere desire.'

"Many of us have lost our belief in the old forms of prayer. We are
beginning to realize that, to a great extent, the answer to prayer lies
in our own hands. Our answers come when we use the powers that have been
bestowed upon us. More and more each year, those who employ their
intellects for constructive purposes are turning their energies toward
the betterment of the world. They have a new conception of 'the world to
come.' It means to them our good brown Mother Earth, warm and fecund and
laden with fruits for the consumption of her children as it may be
under happier conditions. They wish to increase the happiness of those
children, to elevate them physically and mentally, and to give their
spirits, too often imprisoned and degraded by hard circumstance, a
chance to grow.

"When you let the sunlight in to a stunted tree, with what exultant
gratitude it lifts itself toward the sun! How its branches greet the
wind and sing in them, how its little leaves come dancing out to make a
shelter for man and the birds and the furred brothers of the forest! But
this, wonderful and beautiful as it is, is but a small thing compared
with the way in which the soul of a stunted child--stunted by evil or by
sunless environment--leaps and grows and sings when the great spiritual
elements of love and liberty are permitted to reach it.

"You have talked of the conservation of forests; and you speak of a
great need--an imperative cause. I talk of the conservation of
children--which is a greater need and a holier right.

"Mammalia are numerous in this world; real mothers are rare. Can we lift
the mammalia up into the high estate of motherhood? I believe so. Can we
grow superlative children, as we grow superlative fruits and animals?
Oh, a thousand times, yes. I beg for your support of this new idea. Let
the spirit of inspiration enter into your reflections concerning it. Let
that concentration of purpose which you have learned in your clubs and
federations be your aid here.

"Most of you whom I see before me are no longer engaged actively in the
tasks of motherhood. The children have gone out from your homes into
homes of their own. You are left denuded and hungry for the old sweet
vocation. Your hands are too idle; your abilities lie unutilized. But
here is a task at hand. I do not say that you are to use this extension
to your motherhood for children alone, or merely in connection with this
proposed Bureau. I urge you, indeed, to employ it in all conceivable
ways. Be the mothers of men and women as well as of little children--the
mothers of communities--the mothers of the state. And as a focus to
these energies and disinterested activities, let us pray Washington to
give us the Bureau of Children."

She turned from her responsive audience to the chairwoman, who handed
her a yellow envelope.

"A telegram, Miss Barrington. Should I have given it to you before? I
disliked interrupting."

Kate tore it open.

It was from the President of the United States. It ran:--

"I have the honor to inform you that the Bureau of Children will become
a feature of our government within a year. It is the desire of those
most interested, myself included, that you should accept the
superintendence of it. I hope this will reach you on the day of your
address before the Federation of Women's Clubs. Accept my
congratulations."

It was signed by the chief executive. Kate passed the message to the
chairwoman.

"May I read it?" the gratified president questioned. Kate nodded. The
gavel fell, and the vibrant, tremulous voice of the president was heard
reading the significant message. The women listened for a moment with
something like incredulity--for they were more used to delays and
frustrations than to cooeperation; then the house filled with the curious
muffled sounds of gloved hands in applause. Presently a voice shrilled
out in inarticulate acclaim. Kate could not catch its meaning, but two
thousand women, robed like flowers, swayed to their feet. Their
handkerchiefs fluttered. The lovely Californian blossoms were snatched
from their belts and their bosoms and flung upon the platform with
enthusiastic, uncertain aim.

XXXII

Afterward Kate took Honora down to the sea. They found a little house
that fairly bathed its feet in the surf, and here they passed the days
very quietly, at least to outward seeming. The Pacific thundered in upon
them; they could hear the winds, calling and calling with an immemorial
invitation; they knew of the little jewelled islands that lay out in the
seas and of the lands of eld on the far, far shore; and they dreamed
strange dreams.

Sitting in the twilight, watching the light reluctantly leave the sea,
they spoke of many things. They spoke most of all of women, and it
sometimes seemed, as they sat there,--one at the doorway of the House of
Life and one in a shaded inner chamber,--as if the rune of women came to
them from their far sisters: from those in their harems, from others in
the blare of commercial, Occidental life; from those in chambers of
pain; from those freighted with the poignant burdens which women bear in
their bodies and in their souls.

As the darkness deepened, they grew unashamed and then reticences fell
from them. The eternally flowing sea, the ever-recurrent night gave them
courage, though they were women, to speak the truth.

"When I found how deeply I loved David," said Honora, "and that I could
serve him, too, by marrying him, I would no more have put the idea of
marriage with him out of my mind than I would have cast away a hope of
heaven if I had seen that shining before me. I would no more have turned
from it than I would have turned from food, if I had been starving; or
water after I had been thirsting in the desert. Why, Kate, to marry him
was inevitable! The bird doesn't think when it sings or the bud when it
flowers. It does what it was created to do. I married David the
same way."

"I understand," said Kate.

They sat on their little low, sand-swept balcony, facing the sea. The
rising tide filled the world with its soft and indescribable cadence.
The stars came out into the sky according to their rank--the greatest
first, and after them the less, and the less no more lacking in beauty
than the great. All was as it should be--all was ordered--all was fit
and wonderful.

"So," went on Honora, after a silence which the sea filled in with its
low harmonies, "if you loved Karl--"

"Wait!" said Kate. So Honora waited. Another silence fell. Then Kate
spoke brokenly.

"If to feel when I am with him that I have reached my home; if to suffer
a strangeness even with myself, and to feel less familiar with myself
than with him, is to love, then I love him, Honora. If to want to work
with him, and to feel there could be no exultation like overcoming
difficulties with him, is love, then truly I love him. If just to see
him, at a distance, enriches the world and makes the stream of time turn
from lead to gold is anything in the nature of love, then I am his
lover. If to long to house with him, to go by the same name that he
does, to wear him, so to speak, carved on my brow, is to love, then
I do."

"Then I foresee that you will be one of the happiest women in the
world."

"No! No; you mustn't say that. Aren't there other things than love,
Honora,--better things than selfish delight?"

"My dear, you have no call to distress yourself about the occult
meanings of that word 'selfish.' Unselfish people--or those who mean to
be so--contrive, when they refuse to follow the instincts of their
hearts, to cause more suffering even than the out-and-out selfish ones."

"But I have an opportunity to serve thousands--maybe hundreds of
thousands of human beings. I can set in motion a movement which may have
a more lasting effect upon my country than any victory ever gained by it
on a field of battle; and perhaps in time the example set by this land
will be followed by others. Dare I face that mystic, inner ME and say:
'I choose my man, I give him all my life, and I resign my birthright of
labor. For this personal joy I refuse to be the Sister of the World; I
let the dream perish; I hinder a great work'? Oh, Honora, I want him, I
want him! But am I for that reason to be false to my destiny?"

"You want celebrity!" said Honora with sudden bitterness. "You want to
go to Washington, to have your name numbered among the leading ones of
the nation; you are not willing to spend your days in the solitude of
Williston Ranch as wife to its master."

"I will not say that you are speaking falsely, but I think you know you
are setting out only a little part of the truth. Admit it, Honora."

Honora sighed heavily.

"Oh, yes," she said at length, "I do admit it. You must forgive me,
Kate. It seems so easy for you two to be happy that I can't help feeling
it blasphemous for you to be anything else. If it were an ordinary
marriage or an ordinary separation, I shouldn't feel so agonized over
it. But you and Karl--such mates--the only free spirits I know! How you
would love! It would be epic. And I should rejoice that you were living
in that savage world instead of in a city. You two would need room--like
great beautiful buildings. Who would wish to see you in the jumble of a
city? With you to aid him, Karl may become a distinguished man. Your
lives would go on together, widening, widening--"

"Oh!" interrupted Kate with a sharp ejaculation; "we'll not talk of it
any more, Honora. You must not think because I cannot marry him that he
will always be unhappy. In time he will find another woman--"

"Kate! Will you find another man?"

"You know I shall not! After Wander? Any man would be an anticlimax to
me after him."

"Can you suspect him of a passion or a fealty less than your own? If you
refuse to marry him, I believe you will frustrate a great purpose of
Nature. Why, Kate, it will be a crime against Love. The thought as I
feel it means more--oh, infinitely more--than I can make the words
convey to you; but you must think them over, Kate,--I beg you to think
them over!"

In the darkness, Kate heard Honora stealing away to her room.

So she was alone, and the hour had come for her decision.

"'Bitter, alas,'" she quoted to the rising trouble of the sea, '"the
sorrow of lonely women.'" The distillation of that strange duplex soul,
Fiona Macleod, was as a drop of poisoned truth upon her parched tongue.

"We who love are those who suffer;
We who suffer most are those who most do love."

She went down upon the sands. The tongues of the sea came up and lapped
her feet. The winds of the sea enfolded her in an embrace. For the first
time in her life, freely, without restraint, bravely, as sometime she
might face God, she confronted the idea of Love. And a secret, wonderful
knowledge came to her--the knowledge of lovely spiritual ecstasies, the
realization of rich human delights. Sorrow and cruel loss might be on
their way, but Joy was hers now. She feigned that Karl was waiting for
her a little way on in the warm darkness--on, around that
scimitar-shaped bend of the beach. She chose to believe that he was
running to meet her, his eyes aflame, his great arms outstretched; she
thrilled to the rain of his kisses; she thought those stars might hear
the voice with which he shouted, "Kate!"

Then, calmer, yet as if she had run a race, panting, palpitant, she
seated herself on the sands. She let her imagination roam through the
years. She saw the road of life they would take together; how they would
stand on peaks of lofty desire, in sunlight; how, unfaltering, they
would pace tenebrous valleys. Always they would be together. Their
laughter would chime and their tears would fall in unison. Where one
failed, the other would redeem; where one doubted, the other would hope.
They would bear their children to be the vehicle of their ideals--these
fresh new creatures, born of their love, would be trained to achieve
what they, their parents, had somehow missed.

Then her bolder thought died. She, who had forced herself so
relentlessly to face the world as a woman faces it, with the knowledge
and the courage of maturity, felt her wisdom slip from her. She was a
girl, very lonely, facing a task too large for her, needing the comfort
of her lover's word. She stretched herself upon the sand, face downward,
weeping, because she was afraid of life--because she was wishful for
the joy of woman and dared not take it.

* * * * *

"Have you decided?" asked Honora in the morning.

"I think so," answered Kate.

Honora scrutinized the face of her friend.

"Accept," she said, "my profound commiseration." Her tone seemed to
imply that she included contempt.

After this, there was a change in Honora's attitude toward her. Kate
felt herself more alone than she ever had been in her life. It was as if
she had been cast out into a desert--a sandy plain smitten with the
relentless Sun of Life, and in it was no house of refuge, no comfortable
tree, no waters of healing. No, nor any other soul. Alone she walked
there, and the only figures she saw were those of the mirage. It gave
her a sort of relief to turn her face eastward and to feel that she must
traverse the actual desert, and come at the end to literal combat.

XXXIII

Two dragons, shedding fire, had paused midway of the desert. One was the
Overland Express racing from Los Angeles to Kansas City; its fellow was
headed for the west. Both had halted for fuel and water and the
refreshment of the passengers. The dusk was gathering over the
illimitable sandy plain, and the sun, setting behind wind-blown buttes,
wore a sinister glow. By its fantastic light the men and women from the
trains paced back and forth on the wide platform, or visited the
luxurious eating-house, where palms and dripping waters, roses and
inviting food bade them forget that they were on the desert.

Kate and Honora had dined and were walking back and forth in the deep
amber light.

"Such a world to live in," cried Kate admiringly, pressing Honora's arm
to her side. "Do you know, of all the places that I might have imagined
as desirable for residence, I believe I like our old earth the best!"

She was in an inconsequential mood, and Honora indulged her with smiling
silence.

"I couldn't have thought of a finer desert than this if I had tried,"
she went on gayly. "And this wicked saffron glow is precisely the color
to throw on it. What a mistake it would have been if some supernal
electrician had dropped a green or a blue spot-light on the scene! Now,
just hear that fountain dripping and that ground-wind whispering! Who
wouldn't live in the arid lands? It's all as it should be. So are you,
too, aren't you, Honora? You've forgiven me, too, I know you have; and
you're getting stronger every day, and making ready for happiness,
aren't you?"

She leaned forward to look in her companion's face.

"Oh, yes, Kate," said Honora. "It really is as it should be with me. I'm
looking forward, now, to what is to come. To begin with, there are the
children shining like little stars at the end of my journey; and there's
the necessity of working for them. I'm glad of that--I'm glad I have to
work for them. Perhaps I shall be offered a place at the University of
Wisconsin. I think I should be if I gave any indication that I had such
a desire. The president and I are old friends. Oh, yes, indeed, I'm very
thankful that I'm able to look forward again with something like
expectancy--"

The words died on her lips. She was arrested as if an angry god had
halted her. Kate, startled, looked up. Before them, marble-faced and
hideously abashed,--yet beautiful with an insistent beauty,--stood Mary
Morrison, like Honora, static with pain.

It seemed as if it must be a part of that fantastic, dream-like scene.
So many visions were born of the desert that this, not unreasonably,
might be one. But, no, these two women who had played their parts in an
appalling drama, were moving, involuntarily, as it seemed, nearer to
each other. For a second Kate thought of dragging Honora away, till it
came to her by some swift message of the spirit that Honora did not wish
to avoid this encounter. Perhaps it seemed to her like a
fulfillment--the last strain of a wild and dissonant symphony. It was
the part of greater kindness to drop her arm and stand apart.

"Shall we speak, Mary," said Honora at length. "Or shall we pass on in
silence?"

"It isn't for me to say," wavered the other. "Any way, it's too late for
words to matter."

"Yes," agreed Honora. "Quite too late."

They continued to stare at each other--so like, yet so unlike. It was
Honora's face which was ravaged, though Mary had sinned the sin. True,
pallor and pain were visible in Mary's face, even in the disguising
light of that strange hour and place, but back of it Kate perceived her
indestructible frivolity. She surmised how rapidly the scenes of Mary's
drama would succeed each other; how remorse would yield to regret,
regret to diminishing grief, grief to hope, hope to fresh adventures
with life. Here in all verity was "the eternal feminine," fugitive,
provocative, unspiritualized, and shrinking the one quality, fecundity,
which could have justified it.

But Honora was speaking, and her low tones, charged with a mortal grief,
were audible above the tramping of many feet, the throbbing of the
engines, and the talking and the laughter.

"If you had stayed to die with him," she was saying, "I could have
forgiven you everything, because I should have known then that you loved
him as he hungered to be loved."

"He wouldn't let me," Mary wailed. "Honestly, Honora--"

"Wouldn't let you!" The scorn whipped Mary's face scarlet.

"Nobody wants to die, Honora!" pleaded the other. "You wouldn't
yourself, when it came to it."

A child might have spoken so. The puerility of the words caused Honora
to check her speech. She looked with a merciless scrutiny at that face
in which the dimples would come and go even at such a moment as this.
The long lashes curled on the cheeks with unconscious coquetry; the
eyes, that had looked on horrors, held an intrinsic brilliance. The
Earth itself, with its perpetual renewals, was not more essentially
expectant than this woman.

Honora's amazement at her cousin's hedonism gave way to contempt for it.

"Oh," she groaned, "to have had the power to destroy a great man and to
have no knowledge of what you've done! To have lived through all that
you have, and to have got no soul, after all!"

She had stepped back as if to measure the luscious opulence of Mary's
form with an eye of passionate depreciation.

"Stop her, Miss Barrington," cried Mary, seizing Kate's arm. "There's
no use in all this, and people will overhear. Can't you take her away?"

She might have gazed at the Medusa's head as she gazed at Honora's.

"Come," said Kate to Honora. "As Miss Morrison says, there's no use in
all this."

"If David and I did wrong, it was quite as much Honora's fault as mine,
really it was," urged "Blue-eyed Mary," her childish voice choking.

Kate shook her hand off and looked at her from a height.

"Don't dare to discuss that," she warned. "Don't dare!"

She threw her arm around Honora.

"Do come," she pleaded. "All this will make you worse again."

"I don't wish you ill," continued Honora, seeming not to hear and still
addressing herself to Mary. "I know you will live on in luxury somehow
or other, and that good men will fetch and carry for you. You exude an
essence which they can no more resist than a bee can honey. I don't
blame you. That's what you were born for. But don't think that makes a
woman of you. You never can be a woman! Women have souls; they suffer;
they love and work and forget themselves; they know how to go down to
the gates of death. You don't know how to do any of those things,
now, do you?"

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