The Precipice by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

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Miss Morrison threw her a bright glance.

"I'll warrant you have," she said. "I should think you'd contrive a very
original sort of a place. Thank you so much for looking after me. I
brought along a gown for dinner. Naturally, I didn't want to make a
dull impression at the outset. Haven't I heard that you dine out at some
sort of a place where geniuses congregate?"

* * * * *

Years afterward, Kate used to think about the moment when Honora and her
cousin met. Honora had come home, breathless from the laboratory. It had
been a stirring afternoon for her. She had heard words of significant
appreciation spoken to David by the men whom, out of all the world, she
would have chosen to have praise him. She looked at Miss Morrison, who
had come trailing down in a cerise evening gown as if she were a bright
creature of another species, somewhat, Kate could not help whimsically
thinking, as a philosophic beaver might have looked at a bird of
paradise. Then Honora had kissed her cousin.

"Dear blue-eyed Mary!" she had cried. "Welcome to a dull and busy home."

"How good of you to take me in," sighed Miss Morrison. "I hated to
bother you, Honora, but I thought you might keep me out of mischief."

"Have you been getting into mischief?" Honora asked, still laughing.

"Not quite," answered her cousin, blushing bewitchingly. "But I'm always
on the verge of it. It's the Californian climate, I think."

"So exuberant!" cried Honora.

"That's it!" agreed "Blue-eyed Mary." "I thought you'd understand.
Here, I'm sure, you're all busy and good."

"Some of us are," agreed Honora. "There's my Kate, for example. She's
one of the most useful persons in town, and she's just as interesting as
she is useful."

Miss Morrison turned her smiling regard on Kate. "But, Honora, she's
been quite abrupt with me. She doesn't approve of me. I suppose she
discovered at once that I _wasn't_ useful."

"I didn't," protested Kate. "I think decorative things are of the utmost
use."

"There!" cried Miss Morrison; "you can see for yourself that she doesn't
like me!"

"Nonsense," said Kate, really irritated. "I shall like you if Honora
does. Let me help you dress, Honora dear. Are you tired or happy that
your cheeks are so flushed?"

"I'm both tired and happy, Kate. Excuse me, Mary, won't you? If David
comes in you'll know him by instinct. Believe me, you are very welcome."

Up in Honora's bedroom, Kate asked, as she helped her friend into the
tidy neutral silk she wore to dinner: "Is the blue-eyed one going to be
a drain on you, girl? You oughtn't to carry any more burdens. Are you
disturbed? Is she more of a proposition than you counted on?"

Honora turned her kind but troubled eyes on Kate.

"I can't explain," she said in _so_ low a voice that Kate could hardly
catch the words. "She's like me, isn't she? I seemed to see--"

"What?"

"Ghosts--bright ghosts. Never mind."

"You're not thinking that you are old, are you?" cried Kate. "Because
that's absurd. You're wonderful--wonderful."

Laughter arose to them--the mingled voices of David Fulham and his
newfound cousin by marriage.

"Good!" cried Honora with evident relief. "They seem to be taking to
each other. I didn't know how David would like her."

He liked her very well, it transpired, and when the introductions had
been made at the Caravansary, it appeared that every one was delighted
with her. If their reception of her differed from that they had given to
Kate, it was nevertheless kindly--almost gay. They leaped to the
conclusion that Miss Morrison was designed to enliven them. And so it
proved. She threw even the blithe Marna Cartan temporarily into the
shade; and Dr. von Shierbrand, who was accustomed to talking with Kate
upon such matters as the national trait of incompetence, or the
reprehensible modern tendency of coddling the unfit, turned his
attention to Miss Morrison and to lighter subjects.

* * * * *

Two days later a piano stood in Honora's drawing-room, and Miss Morrison
sat before it in what may be termed occult draperies, making lovely
music. Technically, perhaps, the music left something to be desired.
Mrs. Barsaloux and Marna Cartan thought so, at any rate. But the
habitues of Mrs. Dennison's near-home soon fell into the way of trailing
over to the Fulhams' in Mary Morrison's wake, and as they grouped
themselves about on the ugly Mission furniture, in a soft light produced
by many candles, and an atmosphere drugged with highly scented flowers,
they fell under the spell of many woven melodies.

When Mary Morrison's tapering fingers touched the keys they brought
forth a liquid and caressing sound like falling water in a fountain, and
when she leaned over them as if to solicit them to yield their kind
responses, her attitude, her subtle garments, the swift interrogative
turns of her head, brought visions to those who watched and listened.
Kate dreamed of Italian gardens--the gardens she never had seen; Von
Shierbrand thought of dark German forests; Honora, of a moonlit glade.
These three confessed so much. The others did not tell their visions,
but obviously they had them. Blue-eyed Mary was one of those women who
inspire others. She was the quintessence of femininity, and she
distilled upon the air something delicately intoxicating, like the odor
of lotus-blossoms.

It was significant that the Fulhams' was no longer a house of suburban
habits. Ten o'clock and lights out had ceased to be the rule. After
music there frequently was a little supper, and every one was pressed
into service in the preparation of it. Something a trifle fagged and
hectic began to show in the faces of Mrs. Dennison's family, and that
good woman ventured to offer some reproof.

"You all are hard workers," she said, "and you ought to be hard resters,
too. You're not acting sensibly. Any one would think you were the
idle rich."

"Well, we're entitled to all the pleasure we can get," Mary Morrison had
retorted. "There are people who think that pleasure isn't for them. But
I am just the other way--I take it for granted that pleasure is my
right. I always take everything in the way of happiness that I can get
my hands on."

"You mean, of course, my dear child," said the gentle Mrs. Goodrich,
"all that you can get which does not belong to some one else."

Blue-eyed Mary laughed throatily.

"Fortunately," she said, "there's pleasure enough to go around. It's
like air, every one can breathe it in."

VII

But though Miss Morrison had made herself so brightly, so almost
universally at home, there was one place into which she did not venture
to intrude. This was Kate's room. Mary had felt from the first a lack of
encouragement there, and although she liked to talk to Kate, and
received answers in which there appeared to be no lack of zest and
response, yet it seemed to be agreed that when Miss Barrington came
tramping home from her hard day's work, she was to enjoy the solitude of
her chamber.

Mary used to wonder what went on there. Miss Barrington could be very
still. The hours would pass and not a sound would issue from that high
upper room which looked across the Midway and included the satisfactory
sight of the Harper Memorial and the massed University buildings. Kate
would, indeed, have had difficulty in explaining that she was engaged in
the mere operation of living. Her life, though lonely, and to an extent
undirected, seemed abundant. Restless she undoubtedly was, but it was a
restlessness which she succeeded in holding in restraint. At first when
she came up to the city the daze of sorrow was upon her. But this was
passing. A keen awareness of life suffused her now and made her
observant of everything about her. She felt the tremendous incongruities
of city life, and back of these incongruities, the great, hidden,
passionate purpose which, ultimately, meant a city of immeasurable
power. She rejoiced, as the young and gallant dare to do, that she was
laboring in behalf of that city. Not one bewildered, wavering, piteous
life was adjusted through her efforts that she did not feel that her
personal sum of happiness had received an addition. That deep and
burning need for religion, or for love, or for some splendid and
irresistible impetus, was satisfied in part by her present work.

To start out each morning to answer the cry of distress, to understand
the intricate yet effective machinery of benevolent organizations, so
that she could call for aid here and there, and have instant and
intelligent cooeperation, to see broken lives mended, the friendless
befriended, the tempted lifted up, the evil-doer set on safe paths,
warmed and sustained her. That inquisitive nature of hers was now so
occupied with the answering of practical and immediate questions that it
had ceased to beat upon the hollow doors of the Unknown with unavailing
inquiries.

So far as her own life was concerned, she seemed to have found, not a
haven, but a broad sea upon which she could triumphantly sail. That
shame at being merely a woman, with no task, no utility, no
independence, had been lifted from her. So, in gratitude, everywhere, at
all times, she essayed to help other women to a similar independence.
She did not go so far as to say that it was the panacea for all ills,
but she was convinced that more than half of the incoherent pain of
women's lives could be avoided by the mere fact of financial
independence. It became a religion with her to help the women with whom
she came in contact, to find some unguessed ability or applicability
which would enable them to put money in their purses. With liberty to
leave a miserable condition, one often summoned courage to remain and
face it. She pointed that out to her wistful constituents, the poor
little wives who had found in marriage only a state of supine drudgery,
and of unexpectant, monotonous days. She was trying to give them some
game to play. That was the way she put it to them. If one had a game to
play, there was use in living. If one had only to run after the balls of
the players, there was not zest enough to carry one along.

She began talking now and then at women's clubs and at meetings of
welfare workers. Her abrupt, picturesque way of saying things "carried,"
as an actor would put it. Her sweet, clear contralto held the ear; her
aquiline comeliness pleased the eye without enticing it; her capable,
fit-looking clothes were so happily secondary to her personality that
even the women could not tell how she was dressed. She was the least
seductive person imaginable; and she looked so self-sufficient that it
seldom occurred to any one to offer her help. Yet she was in no sense
bold or aggressive. No one ever thought of accusing her of being any of
those things. Many loved her--loved her wholesomely, with a love in
which trust was a large element. Children loved her, and the sick, and
the bad. They looked to her to help them out of their helplessness. She
was very young, but, after all, she was maternal. A psychologist would
have said that there was much of the man about her, and her love of the
fair chance, her appetite for freedom, her passion for using her own
capabilities might, indeed, have seemed to be of the masculine variety
of qualities; but all this was more than offset by this inherent impulse
for maternity. She was born, apparently, to care for others, but she had
to serve them freely. She had to be the dispenser of good. She was
unconsciously on the outlook against those innumerable forms of
slavishness which affection or religion gilded and made to seem like
noble service.

Among those who loved her was August von Shierbrand. He loved her
apparently in spite of himself. She did not in the least accord with his
romantic ideas of what a woman should be. He was something of a poet,
and a specialized judge of poetry, and he liked women of the sort who
inspired a man to write lyrics. He had tried unavailingly to write
lyrics about Kate, but they never would "go." He confessed his
fiascoes to her.

"Nothing short of martial measures seems to suit you," he said
laughingly.

"But why write about me at all, Dr. von Shierbrand?" she inquired. "I
don't want any one writing about me. What I want to do is to learn how
to write myself--not because I feel impelled to be an author, but
because I come across things almost every day which ought to be
explained."

"You are completely absorbed in this extraordinary life of yours!" he
complained.

"Why not!" demanded Kate. "Aren't you completely absorbed in your life?"

"Of course I am. But teaching is my chosen profession."

"Well, life is my chosen profession. I want to see, feel, know, breathe,
Life. I thought I'd never be able to get at it. I used to feel like a
person walking in a mist. But it's different now. Everything has taken
on a clear reality to me. I'm even beginning to understand that I myself
am a reality and that my thoughts as well as my acts are entities. I'm
getting so that I can define my own opinions. I don't believe there's
anybody in the city who would so violently object to dying as I would,
Dr. von Shierbrand."

The sabre cut on Von Shierbrand's face gleamed.

"You certainly seem at the antipodes of death, Miss Barrington," he said
with a certain thickness in his utterance. "And I, personally, can think
of nothing more exhilarating than in living beside you. I meant to
wait--to wait a long time before asking you. But what is the use of
waiting? I want you to marry me. I feel as if it must be--as if I
couldn't get along without you to help me enjoy things."

Kate looked at him wonderingly. It was before the afternoon concert and
they were sitting in Honora's rejuvenated drawing-room while they waited
for the others to come downstairs.

"But, Dr. von Shierbrand!" she cried, "I don't like a city without
suburbs!"

"I beg your pardon!"

"I like to see signs of my City of Happiness as I approach--outlying
villas, and gardens, and then straggling, pleasant neighborhoods, and
finally Town."

"Oh, I see. You mean I've been too unexpected. Can't you overlook that?
You're an abrupt person yourself, you know. I'm persuaded that we could
be happy together."

"But I'm not in love, Dr. von Shierbrand. I'm sorry. Frankly, I'd like
to be."

"And have you never been? Aren't you nursing a dream of--"

"No, no; I haven't had a hopeless love if that's what you mean. I'm all
lucid and clear and comfortable nowadays--partly because I've stopped
thinking about some of the things to which I couldn't find answers, and
partly because Life is answering some of my questions."

"How to be happy without being in love, perhaps."

"Well, I am happy--temperately so. Perhaps that's the only degree of
happiness I shall ever know. Of course, when I was younger I thought I
should get to some sort of a place where I could stand in swimming glory
and rejoice forever, but I see now how stupid I was to think anything of
the sort. I hoped to escape the commonplace by reaching some beatitude,
but now I have found that nothing really is commonplace. It only seems
so when you aren't understanding enough to get at the essential truth
of things."

"Oh, that's true! That's true!" cried Von Shierbrand.

"Oh, Kate, I do love you. You seem to complete me. When I'm with you I
understand myself. Please try to love me, dear. We'll get a little home
and have a garden and a library--think how restful it will be. I can't
tell you how I want a place I can call home."

"There they come," warned Kate as she heard footsteps on the stairs.
"You must take 'no' for your answer, dear man. I feel just like a
mother to you."

Dr. von Shierbrand arose, obviously offended, and he allied himself with
Mary Morrison on the way to the concert. Kate walked with Honora and
David until they met with Professor Wickersham, who was also bound for
Mandel Hall and the somewhat tempered classicism which the Theodore
Thomas Orchestra offered to "the University crowd."

"Please walk with me, Miss Barrington," said Wickersham. "I want you to
explain the universe to me."

"I can do that nicely," retorted Kate, "because Dr. von Shierbrand has
already explained it to me."

Blue-eyed Mary was pouting. She never liked any variety of amusement,
conversational or otherwise, in which she was not the center.

* * * * *

So Kate's life sped along. It was not very significant, perhaps, or it
would not have seemed so to the casual onlooker, but life is measured by
its inward rather than its outward processes, and Kate felt herself
being enriched by her experiences.

She enjoyed being brought into contact with the people she met in her
work--not alone the beneficiaries of her ministrations, but the
policemen and the police matrons and the judges of the police court. She
joined a society of "welfare workers," and attended their suppers and
meetings, and tried to learn by their experience and to keep her own
ideas in abeyance.

She could not help noticing that she differed in some particulars from
most of these laborers in behalf of the unfortunate. They brought
practical, unimaginative, and direct minds to bear upon the problems
before them, while she never could escape her theories or deny herself
the pleasure of looking beyond the events to the causes which underlay
them. This led her to jot down her impressions in a notebook, and to
venture on comments concerning her experiences.

Moreover, not only was she deeply moved by the disarrangement and
bewilderment which she saw around her, but she began to awaken to
certain great events and developing powers in the world. She read the
sardonic commentators upon modern life--Ibsen, Strindberg, and many
others; and if she sometimes passionately repudiated them, at other
times she listened as if she were finding the answers to her own
inquiries. It moved her to discover that men, more often than women, had
been the interpreters of women's hidden meanings, and that they had been
the setters-forth of new visions of sacredness and fresh definitions
of liberty.

It was these men--these aloof and unsentimental ones--who had pointed
out that the sin of sins committed by women had been the indifference to
their own personalities. They had been echoers, conformers, imitators;
even, in their own way, cowards. They had feared the conventions, and
had been held in thrall by their own carefully nursed ideals of
themselves. They had lacked the ability to utilize their powers of
efficiency; had paid but feeble respect to their own ideals; had
altogether measured themselves by too limited a standard. Failing wifely
joy, they had too often regarded themselves as unsuccessful, and had
apologized tacitly to the world for using their abilities in any
direction save one. They had not permitted themselves that strong,
clean, robust joy of developing their own powers for mere delight in the
exercise of power.

But now, so Kate believed,--so her great instructors informed
her,--they were awakening to their privileges. An intenser awareness of
life, of the right to expression, and of satisfaction in constructive
performances was stirring in them. If they desired enfranchisement, they
wanted it chiefly for spiritual reasons. This was a fact which the
opponents of the advancing movement did not generally recognize. Kate
shrank from those fruitless arguments at the Caravansary with the
excellent men who gravely and kindly rejected suffrage for women upon
the ground that they were protecting them by doing so. They did not seem
to understand that women desired the ballot because it was a symbol as
well as because it was an instrument and an argument. If it was to
benefit the working woman in the same way in which it benefited the
working man, by making individuality a thing to be considered; if it was
to give the woman taxpayer certain rights which would put her on a par
with the man taxpayer, a thousand times more it was to benefit all women
by removing them from the class of the unconsidered, the superfluous,
and the negligible.

Yes, women were wanting the ballot because it included potentiality, and
in potentiality is happiness. No field seems fair if there is no gateway
to it--no farther field toward which the steps may be turned. Kate was
getting hold of certain significant similes. She saw that it was past
the time of walls and limits. Walled cities were no longer endurable,
and walled and limited possibilities were equally obsolete. If the
departure of the "captains and the kings" was at hand, if the new forces
of democracy had routed them, if liberty for all men was now an ethic
need of civilization, so political recognition was necessary for women.
Women required the ballot because the need was upon them to perform
great labors. Their unutilized benevolence, their disregarded powers of
organization, their instinctive sense of economy, their
maternal-oversoul, all demanded exercise. Women were the possessors of
certain qualities so abundant, so ever-renewing, that the ordinary
requirements of life did not give them adequate employment. With a
divine instinct of high selfishness, of compassion, of realization, they
were seeking the opportunity to exercise these powers.

"The restlessness of women," "the unquiet sex," were terms which were
becoming glorious in Kate's ears. She saw no reason why women as well as
men should not be allowed to "dance upon the floor of chance." All about
her were women working for the advancement of their city, their country,
and their race. They gave of their fortunes, of their time, of all the
powers of their spirit. They warred with political machines, with base
politicians, with public contumely, with custom. What would have crushed
women of equally gentle birth a generation before, seemed now of little
account to these workers. They looked beyond and above the irritation
of the moment, holding to the realization that their labors were of
vital worth. Under their administration communities passed from
shameless misery to self-respect; as the result of their generosity,
courts were sustained in which little children could make their plea and
wretched wives could have justice. Servants, wantons, outcasts, the
insane, the morally ill, all were given consideration in this new
religion of compassion. It was amazing to Kate to see light come to dull
eyes--eyes which had hitherto been lit only with the fires of hate. As
she walked the gray streets in the performance of her tasks, weary and
bewildered though she often was, she was sustained by the new discovery
of that ancient truth that nothing human can be foreign to the person of
good will. Neither dirt nor hate, distrust, fear, nor deceit should be
permitted to blind her to the essential similarity of all who were
"bound together in the bundle of life."

It was not surprising that at this time she should begin writing short
articles for the women's magazines on the subjects which presented
themselves to her in her daily work. Her brief, spontaneous, friendly
articles, full of meat and free from the taint of bookishness, won favor
from the first. She soon found her evenings occupied with her somewhat
matter-of-fact literary labors. But this work was of such a different
character from that which occupied her in the daytime that so far from
fatiguing her it gave an added zest to her days.

She was not fond of idle evenings. Sitting alone meant thinking, and
thought meant an unconquerable homesickness for that lonely man back in
Silvertree from whom she had parted peremptorily, and toward whom she
dared not make any overtures. Sometimes she sent him an article clipped
from the magazines or newspapers dealing with some scientific subject,
and once she mailed him a number of little photographs which she had
taken with her own camera and which might reveal to him, if he were
inclined to follow their suggestions, something of the life in which she
was engaged. But no recognition of these wordless messages came from
him. He had been unable to forgive her, and she beat down the question
that would arise as to whether she also had been at fault. She was under
the necessity of justifying herself if she would be happy. It was only
after many months had passed that she learned how a heavy burden may
become light by the confession of a fault.

Meantime, she was up early each morning; she breakfasted with the most
alert residents of the Caravansary; then she took the street-car to
South Chicago and reported at a dismal office. Here the telephone served
to put her into communication with her superior at Settlement House. She
reported what she had done the day before (though, to be sure, a written
report was already on its way), she asked advice, she talked over ways
and means. Then she started upon her daily rounds. These might carry
her to any one of half a dozen suburbs or to the Court of Domestic
Relations, or over on the West Side of the city to the Juvenile Court.
She appeared almost daily before some police magistrate, and not long
after her position was assumed, she was called upon to give evidence
before the grand jury.

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