The Precipice by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

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Marna made no answer at all, but Mrs. Barsaloux saw her settle down in
the deep chair in which she was sitting as if to huddle away from the
storm about to break over her.

"She isn't going to offer any resistance," thought the distressed patron
with dismay. "Her mind is completely made up and she's just crouching
down to wait till I'm through with my private little hurricane."

So, indeed, it proved. Mrs. Barsaloux felt she had the right to say
much, and she said it. Marna may or may not have listened. She sat
shivering and smiling in her chair, and when it was fit for her to
excuse herself, she did, and walked out bravely; but Mrs. Barsaloux
noticed that she tottered a little as she reached the door. She did not
go to her aid, however.

"It's an infatuation," she concluded. "I must treat her as if she had a
violent disease and take care of her. When people are delirious they
must be protected against themselves. It's a delirium with her, and the
best thing I can do is to run off to New York with her. She can make her
next appearance when the opera company gets there. I'll arrange it this
afternoon."

She refrained from telling Marna of her plans, but she went straight to
the city and talked over the situation with her friend the impresario.
He seemed anything but depressed. On the contrary, he was
excited--even exalted.

"Spirit her away, madam," he advised. "Of course she will miss her lover
horribly, and that will be the best thing that can happen to her. Why
did not the public rise to her the other night? Not because she could
not sing: far from it. If a nightingale sings, then Miss Cartan does.
But she left her audience a little cold. Let us face the facts. You saw
it. We all saw it. And why? Because she was too happy, madam; too
complaisant; too uninstructed in the emotions. Now it will be different.
We will take her away; we will be patient with her while she suffers;
afterward she will bless us, for she will have discovered the secret of
the artist, and then when she opens her little silver throat we shall
have SONG."

Mrs. Barsaloux, with many compunctions, and with some pangs of pure
motherly sympathy, nevertheless agreed.

"If only he had been a man above the average," she said, as she
tearfully parted from the great man, "perhaps it would not have
mattered so much."

The impresario lifted his eyebrows and his mustaches at the same time
and assumed the aspect of a benevolent Mephistopheles.

"The variety of man, madam," he said sententiously, "makes no manner of
difference. It is the tumult in Miss Marna's soul which I hope we shall
be able to utilize"--he interrupted himself with a smile and a bow as he
opened the door for his departing friend--"for the purposes of art."

Mrs. Barsaloux sat in the middle of her taxi seat all the way home, and
saw neither street, edifice, nor human being. She was looking back into
her own busy, confused, and frustrated life, and was remembering certain
things which she had believed were buried deep. Her heart misgave her
horribly. Yet to hand over this bright singing bird, so exquisite, so
rare, so fitted for purposes of exposition, to the keeping of a mere
male being of unfortunate contiguity, to permit him to carry her into
the seclusion of an ordinary home to wait on him and regulate her life
according to his whim, was really too fantastic for consideration. So
she put her memories and her tendernesses out of sight and walked up
the stairs with purpose in her tread.

* * * * *

She meant to "have it out" with the girl, who was, she believed,
reasonable enough after all.

"She's been without her mother for so long," she mused, "that it's no
wonder she's lacking in self-control. I must have the firmness that a
mother would have toward her. It would be the height of cruelty to let
her have her own way in this."

If the two could have met at that moment, it would have changed the
course of both their lives. But a trifle had intervened. Marna Cartan
had gone walking; and she never came back. Only, the next day, radiantly
beautiful, with fresh flowers in her hands, Marna Fitzgerald came
running in begging to be forgiven. She tried to carry the situation with
her impetuosity. She was laughing, crying, pleading. She got close to
her old friend as if she would enwrap her in her influence. She had the
veritable aspect of the bride. Whatever others might think regarding her
lost career, it was evident that she believed the great hour had just
struck for her. Her husband was with her.

"Haven't you any apology to make, sir?" poor Mrs. Barsaloux cried to
him. He looked matter-of-fact, she thought, and as if he ought to be
able to take a reasonable view of things. But she had misjudged. Perhaps
it was his plain, everyday, commercial garments which deceived her and
made her think him open to week-day arguments; for at that moment he
was really a knight of romance, and at Mrs. Barsaloux's question his
eyes gleamed with unsuspected fires.

"Who could be so foolish as to apologize for happiness like ours?" he
demanded.

"Aren't you going to forgive us, dear?" pleaded Marna.

But Mrs. Barsaloux couldn't quite stand that.

"You sound like an old English comedy, Marna," she said impatiently.
"You're of age; I'm no relation to you; you've a perfect right to be
married. Better take advantage of being here to pack your things. You'll
need them."

"You mean that I'm not expected to come here again, _tante_?"

"I shall sail for France in a week," said Mrs. Barsaloux wearily.

"For France, _tante_? When did you decide?"

"This minute," said the lady, and gave the married lovers to understand
that the interview was at an end.

Marna went weeping down the street, holding on to her George's arm.

"If she'd been Irish, she'd have cursed me," she sobbed, "and then I'd
have had something to go on, so to speak. Perhaps I could have got her
to take it off me in time. But what are you going to do with a snubbing
like that?"

"Oh, leave it for the Arctic explorers to explain. They're used to
being in below-zero temperature," George said with a troubled laugh.
"I'm sure I can't waste any time thinking about a woman who could stand
out against you, Marna, the way you are this day, and the way
you're looking."

"But, George, she thinks I'm a monster."

"Then there's something wrong with her zoology. You're an--"

"Don't call me an angel, dear, whatever you do! There are some things I
hate to be called--they're so insipid. If any one called me an angel I'd
know he didn't appreciate me. Come, let's go to Kate's. She's my court
of last appeal. If Kate can't forgive me, I'll know I've done wrong."

* * * * *

Kate was never to forget that night. She had come in from a day of
difficult and sordid work. For once, the purpose back of all her toil
among the people there in the great mill town was lost sight of in the
sheer repulsiveness of the tasks she had had to perform. The pathos of
their temptations, the terrific disadvantages under which they labored,
their gray tragedies, had some way lost their import. She was merely a
dreadfully fagged woman, disgusted with evil, with dirt and poverty. She
was at outs with her world and impatient with the suffering involved in
the mere living of life.

Moreover, when she had come into the house, she had found it dark as
usual. The furnace was down, and her own room was cold. But she had set
her teeth together, determined not to give way to depression, and had
made her rather severe toilet for dinner when word was brought to her by
the children's nurse that Dr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald desired to see her.
For a moment she could not comprehend what that might mean; then the
truth assailed her, took her by the hand, and ran her down the stairs
into Mama's arms.

"But it's outrageous," she cried, hugging Marna to her. "How could you
be so willful?"

"It's glorious," retorted Marna. "And if I ever was going to be willful,
now's the time."

"Right you are," broke in George. "What does Stevenson say about that?
'Youth is the time to be up and doing.' You're not going to be severe
with us, Miss Barrington? We've been counting on you."

"Have you?" inquired Kate, putting Marna aside and taking her husband by
the hand. "Well, you are your own justification, you two. But haven't
you been ungrateful?"

Marna startled her by a bit of Dionysian philosophy.

"Is it ungrateful to be happy?" she demanded. "Would anybody have been
in the right who asked us to be unhappy? Why don't you call us brave? Do
you imagine it isn't difficult to have people we love disapproving of
us? But you know yourself, Kate, if we'd waited forty-eight hours, I'd
have been dragged off to live with my career."

She laughed brightly, sinking back in her chair and throwing wide her
coat. Kate looked at her appraisingly, and warmed in the doing of it.

"You don't look as if you were devoted to a career, she admitted.

"Oh," sighed Fitzgerald, "I only just barely got her in time!"

"And now what do you propose doing?"

"Why, to-morrow we shall look for a place to live--for a home."

"Do you mean a flat?" asked Kate with a flick of satire.

"A flat, or anything. It doesn't matter much what."

"Or where?"

"It will be on the West Side," said the matter-of-fact Fitzgerald.

"And who'll keep house for you? Must you find servants?"

"Why, Kate, we're dreadfully poor," cried Marna excitedly, as if poverty
were a mere adventure. "Didn't you know that? I shall do my own work."

"Oh, we've both got to work," added Fitzgerald.

He didn't say he was sorry Marna had to slave with her little white
hands, or that he realized that he was doing a bold--perhaps an
impious--thing in snatching a woman from her service to art to go into
service for him. Evidently he didn't think that way. Neither minded any
sacrifice apparently. The whole of it was, they were together. Suddenly,
they seemed to forget Kate. They stood gazing at each other as if their
sense of possession overwhelmed them. Kate felt something like angry
resentment stir in her. How dared they, when she was so alone, so weary,
so homeless?

"Will you stay to dinner with me?" she asked with something like
asperity.

"To dinner?" they murmured in vague chorus. "No, thanks."

"But where do you intend to have dinner?"

"We--we haven't thought," confessed Marna.

"Oh, anywhere," declared Fitzgerald.

Marna rose and her husband buttoned her coat about her.

They smiled at Kate seraphically, and she saw that they wanted to be
alone, and that it made little difference to them whether they were
sitting in a warm room or walking the windy streets. She kissed them
both, with tears, and said:--

"God bless you."

That seemed to be what they wanted. They longed to be blessed.

"That's what Aunt Dennison said," smiled Fitzgerald.

Then Kate realized that now the exotic Marna would be calling the
completely domesticated Mrs. Dennison "aunt." But Marna looked as if she
liked that, too. It was their hour for liking everything. As Kate opened
the outer door for them, the blast struck through her, but the lovers,
laughing, ran down the stairs together. They were, in their way,
outcasts; they were poor; the future might hold bitter disillusion. But
now, borne by the sharp wind, their laughter drifted back like a song.

Kate wrapped her old coat about her and made her solitary way to Mrs.
Dennison's depressed Caravansary.

XII

There was no question about it. Life was supplying Kate Barrington with
a valuable amount of "data." On every hand the emergent or the
reactionary woman offered herself for observation, although to say that
Kate was able to take a detached and objective view of it would be going
altogether too far. The truth was, she threw herself into every friend's
trouble, and she counted as friends all who turned to her, or all whom
she was called upon to serve.

A fortnight after Mama's marriage, an interesting episode came Kate's
way. Mrs. Barsaloux had introduced to the Caravansary a Mrs. Leger whom
she had once met on the steamer on her way to Brindisi, and she had
invited her to join her during a stay in Chicago. Mrs. Barsaloux,
however, having gone off to France in a hot fit of indignation, Mrs.
Leger presented herself with a letter from Mrs. Barsaloux to Mrs.
Dennison. That hospitable woman consented to take in the somewhat
enigmatic stranger.

That she was enigmatic all were quick to perceive. She was beautiful,
with a delicate, high-bred grace, and she had the manner of a woman who
had been courted and flattered. As consciously beautiful as Mary
Morrison, she bore herself with more discretion. Taste governed all
that she said and did. Her gowns, her jewels, her speech were
distinguished. She seemed by all tokens an accomplished worldling; yet
it was not long before Kate discovered that it was anything but worldly
matters which were consuming her attention.

She had come to Chicago for the purpose of adjusting her fortune,--a
large one, it appeared,--and of concluding her relations with the world.
She had decided to go into a convent, and had chosen one of those
numerous sisterhoods which pass their devotional days upon the bright
hill-slopes without Naples. She refrained from designating the
particular sisterhood, and she permitted no discussion of her motives.
She only said that she had not been born a Catholic, but had turned to
Mother Church when the other details of life ceased to interest her. She
was a widow, but she seemed to regard her estate with quiet regret
merely. If tragedy had entered her life, it must have been subsequent to
widowhood. She had a son, but it appeared that he had no great need of
her. He was in the care of his paternal grandparents, who were giving
him an education. He was soon to enter Oxford, and she felt confident
that his life would be happy. She was leaving him an abundance; she had
halved her fortune and was giving her share to the convent.

If she had not been so exquisite, so skilled in the nuances of life, so
swift and elusive in conversation, so well fitted for the finest forms
of enjoyment, her renunciation of liberty would not have proved so
exasperating to Kate. A youthful enthusiasm for religion might have made
her step understandable. But enthusiasm and she seemed far apart.
Intelligent as she unquestionably was, she nevertheless seemed to have
given herself over supinely to a current of emotions which was sweeping
her along. She looked both pious and piteous, for all of her
sophisticated manner and her accomplishments and graces, and Kate felt
like throwing a rope to her. But Mrs. Leger was not in a mood to seize
the rope. She had her curiously gentle mind quite made up. Though she
was still young,--not quite eighteen years older than her son,--she
appeared to have no further concern for life. To the last, she was
indulging in her delicate vanities--wore her pearls, walked in charming
foot-gear, trailed after her the fascinating gowns of the initiate, and
viewed with delight the portfolios of etchings which Dr. von Shierbrand
chanced to be purchasing.

She was glad, she said, to be at the Caravansary, quite on a different
side of the city from her friends. She made no attempt to renew old
acquaintances or to say farewell to her former associates. Her
extravagant home on the Lake Shore Drive was passed over to a
self-congratulatory purchaser; the furnishings were sold at auction; and
her other properties were disposed of in such a manner as to make the
transfer of her wealth convenient for the recipients.

She asked Kate to go to the station with her.

"I've given you my one last friendship," she said. "I shall speak with
no one on the steamer. My journey must be spent in preparation for my
great change. But it seems human and warm to have you see me off."

"It seems inhuman to me, Mrs. Leger," Kate cried explosively. "Something
terrible has happened to you, I suppose, and you're hiding away from it.
You think you're going to drug yourself with prayer. But can you? It
doesn't seem at all probable to me. Dear Mrs. Leger, be brave and stay
out in the world with the other living people."

"You are talking of something which you do not understand," said Mrs.
Leger gently. "There is a secret manna for the soul of which the
chosen may eat."

"Oh!" cried Kate, almost angrily. "Are these your own words? I cannot
understand a prepossession like this on your part. It doesn't seem to
set well on you. Isn't there some hideous mistake? Aren't you under the
influence of some emotional episode? Might it not be that you were ill
without realizing it? Perhaps you are suffering from some hidden
melancholy, and it is impelling you to do something out of keeping with
the time and with your own disposition."

"I can see how it might appear that way to you, Miss Barrington. But I
am not ill, except in my soul, which I expect to be healed in the place
to which I am going. Try to understand that among the many kinds of
human beings in this world there are the mystics. They have a right to
their being and to their belief. Their joys and sorrows are different
from those of others, but they are just as existent. Please do not worry
about me."

"But you understand so well how to handle the material things in the
world," protested Kate. "You seem so appreciative and so competent. If
you have learned so much, what is the sense of shutting it all up in
a cell?"

"Did you never read of Purun Bhagat," asked Mrs. Leger smilingly, "who
was rich with the riches of a king; who was wise with the learning of
Calcutta and of Oxford; who could have held as high an office as any
that the Government of England could have given him in India, and who
took his beggar's bowl and sat upon a cavern's rim and contemplated the
secret soul of things? You know your Kipling. I have not such riches or
such wisdom, but I have the longing upon me to go into silence."

The lips from which these words fell were both tender and ardent; the
little gesticulating hands were clad in modish, mouse-colored suede;
orris root mixed with some faint, haunting odor, barely caressed the air
with perfume. Kate looked at her companion in despair.

"I must be an outer barbarian!" she cried. "I can imagine religious
ecstasy, but you are not ecstatic. I can imagine turning to a convent as
a place of hiding from shame or despair. But you are not going into it
that way. As for wishing to worship, I understand that perfectly. Prayer
is a sort of instinct with me, and all the reasoning in the world
couldn't make me cast myself out of communion with the unknown something
roundabout me that seems to answer me. But what you are doing seems, as
I said, so obsolete."

"I am looking forward to it," said Mrs. Leger, "as eagerly as a girl
looks forward to her marriage. It is a beautiful romance to me. It is
the completely beautiful thing that is going to make up to me for all
the ugliness I have encountered in life."

For the first time a look of passion disturbed the serenity of the
high-bred, conventional face.

Kate threw out her hands with a repudiating gesture.

"Well," she said, "in the midst of my freedom I shall think of you often
and wonder if you have found something that I have missed. You are
leaving the world, and books, and friends, and your son for some pale
white idea. It seems to me you are going to the embrace of a wraith."

Mrs. Leger smiled slowly, and it was as if a lamp showed for a moment in
a darkened house and then mysteriously vanished.

"Believe me," she reiterated, "you do not understand."

Kate helped her on the train, and left her surrounded by her fashionable
bags, her flowers, fruit, and literature. She took these things as a
matter of course. She had looked at her smart little boots as she
adjusted them on a hassock and had smiled at Kate almost teasingly.

"In a month," she said, "I shall be walking with bared feet, or, if the
weather demands, in sandals. I shall wear a rope about my waist over my
brown robe. My hair will be cut, my head coiffed. When you are thinking
of me, think of me as I really shall be."

"So many things are going to happen that you will not see!" cried Kate.
"Why, maybe in a little while we shall all be going up in
flying-machines! You wouldn't like to miss that, would you? Or your son
will be growing into a fine man and you'll not see him--nor the woman he
marries--nor his children." She stopped, breathing hard.

"It is like the sound of the surf on a distant shore," smiled Mrs.
Leger. "Good-bye, Miss Barrington. Don't grieve about me. I shall be
happier than you can know or dream."

The conductor swung Kate off the train after it was in motion.

* * * * *

So, among other things, she had that to think of. She could explain it
all merely upon the hypothesis that the sound of the awakening
trumpets--the trumpets which were arousing woman from her long
torpor--had not reached the place where this wistful woman dwelt, with
her tender remorses, her delicate aversions, her hunger for the
indefinite consolations of religion.

Moreover, she was beginning to understand that not all women were
maternal. She had, indeed, come across many incidents in her work which
emphasized this. Good mothers were quite as rare as good fathers; and it
was her growing belief that more than half of the parents in the world
were undeserving of the children born to them. Also, she realized that a
child might be born of the body and not of the spirit, and a mother
might minister well to a child's corporeal part without once ministering
to its soul. It was possible that there never had been any bond save a
physical one between Mrs. Leger and her son. Perhaps they looked at each
other with strange, uncomprehending eyes. That, she could imagine, would
be a tantalization from which a sensitive woman might well wish to
escape. It was within the realm of possibility that he was happier with
his grandmother than with his mother. There might be temperamental as
well as physical "throwbacks."

Kate remembered a scene she once had witnessed at a railway station. Two
meagre, hard-faced, work-worn women were superintending the removal of a
pine-covered coffin from one train to another, and as the grim box was
wheeled the length of a long platform, a little boy, wild-eyed,
gold-haired, and set apart from all the throng by a tragic misery, ran
after the truck calling in anguish:--

"Grandmother! Grandmother! Don't leave me! I'm so lonesome,
grandmother! I'm so afraid!"

"Stop your noise," commanded the woman who must have been his mother.
"Don't you know she can't hear you?"

"Oh, maybe she can! Maybe she can," sobbed the boy. "Oh, grandmother,
don't you hear me calling? There's nobody left for me now."

The woman caught him sharply by the arm.

"I'm left, Jimmy. What makes you say such a thing as that? Stay with
mother, that's a good boy."

They were lifting the box into the baggage-car. The boy saw it. He
straightened himself in the manner of one who tries to endure a
mortal wound.

"She's gone," he said. He looked at his mother once, as if measuring her
value to him. Then he turned away. There was no comfort for him there.

Often, since, Kate had wondered concerning the child. She had imagined
his grim home, his barren days; the plain food; the compulsory task; the
kind, yet heavy-handed, coarse-voiced mother. She was convinced that the
grandmother had been different. In the corner where she had sat, there
must have been warmth and welcome for the child. Perhaps there were
mellow old tales, sweet old songs, soft strokings of the head, smuggled
sweets--all the beautiful grandmotherly delights.

XIII

Since Kate had begun to write, a hundred--a thousand--half-forgotten
experiences had come back to her. As they returned to her memory, they
acquired significance. They related themselves with other incidents or
with opinions. They illustrated life, and however negligible in
themselves, they attained a value because of their relation to
the whole.

It was seldom that she felt lonely now. Her newly acquired power of
self-expression seemed to extend and supplement her personality. August
von Shierbrand had said that he wished to marry her because she
completed him. It had occurred to her at the time--though she suppressed
her inclination to say so--that she was born for other purposes than
completing him, or indeed anybody. She wished to think of herself as an
individual, not as an addendum. But, after all, she had sympathized with
the man. She was beginning to understand that that "solitude of the
soul," which one of her acquaintances, a sculptor, had put into
passionate marble, was caused from that sense of incompletion. It was
not alone that others failed one--it was self-failure, secret shame, all
the inevitable reticences, which contributed most to that.

She fell into the way of examining the men and women about her and of
asking:--

"Is he satisfied? Is she companioned? Has this one realized himself? Is
that one really living?"

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