Chapter 21

"Oh, I was thinking of the excellent Clarinda Hays. I listened to your conversation this morning and it seemed to me that she was giving you about all the truth you could find bins for. I couldn't help but take it in, it was so complacently offered. But Clarinda was getting her 'sacred feelings' mixed up with the truth. However, I suppose there is an essential truth about sacred feelings even when they're founded on an error. I surmised that you were holding back vastly more than you were saying. Now that we 're pretty well toward a mountain-top, with nobody listening, you might tell me what you _were_ thinking."

Kate smiled slowly. She looked at the man beside her as if appraising him.

"I'm terribly afraid," she said at length, "that you are soul-kin to Clarinda. You'll walk in a mist of sacred feelings, too, and truth will play hide and seek with you all over the place."

"Nonsense!" he cried. "Why can't I hear what you have to say? You stand on platforms and tell it to hundreds. Why should you grudge it to me?"

She swept her hand toward the landscape around them.

"It has to do with change," she said. "And with evolution. Look at this scarred mountain-side, how confused and senseless the upheavals seem which have given it its grandeur! Nor is it static yet. It is continually wearing down. Erosion is diminishing it, that river is denuding it. Eternal change is the only law."

"I understand," said Wander, his eyes glowing.

"In the world of thought it is the same."

"Verily."

"But I speak for women--and I am afraid that you'll not understand."

"I should like to be given a chance to try," he answered.

"Clarinda," she said, after a moment's pause, "like the larger part of the world, is looking at a mirage. She sees these shining pictures on the hot sand of the world and she says: 'These are the real things. I will fix my gaze on them. What does the hot sand and the trackless waste matter so long as I have these beautiful mirages to look at?' When you say that mirages are insubstantial, evanishing, mere tricks of air and eye, the Clarindas retort, 'But if you take away our mirages, where are we to turn? What will you give us in the place of them?' She thinks, for example, if a dying soldier calls on his mother or his sweetheart that they must be good women. This is not the case. He calls on them because confronts the great loneliness of death. He is quite as likely to call on a wicked woman if she is the one whose name comes to his flickering sense. But even supposing that one had to be sacrificial, subservient, and to possess all the other Clarinda virtues in order to have a dying man call on one, still, would that burst of delirious wistfulness compensate one for years of servitude?"

She let the statement hang in the air for a moment, while Wander's color deepened yet more. He was being wounded in the place of his dreams and the pang was sharp.

"If some one, dying, called you 'Faithful slave,'" resumed Kate, "would that make you proud? Would it not rather be a humiliation? Now, 'good wife' might be synonymous with 'faithful slave.' That's what I'd have to ascertain before I could be complimented as Clarinda was complimented by those words. I'd have to have my own approval. No one else could comfort me with a 'well done' unless my own conscience echoed the words. 'Good wife,' indeed!"

"What would reconcile you to such commendations?" asked Wander with a reproach that was almost personal.

"The possession of those privileges and mediums by which liberty is sustained."

"For example?"

"My own independent powers of thought; my own religion, politics, taste, and direction of self-development--above all, my own money. By that I mean money for which I did not have to ask and which never was given to me as an indulgence. Then I should want definite work commensurate with my powers; and the right to a voice in all matters affecting my life or the life of my family."

"That is what you would take. But what would you give?"

"I would not 'take' these things any more than my husband would 'take' them. Nor could he bestow them upon me, for they are mine by inherent right."

"Could he give you nothing, then?"

"Love. Yet it may not be correct to say that he could give that. He would not love me because he chose to do so, but because he could not help doing so. At least, that is my idea of love. He would love me as I was, with all my faults and follies, and I should love him the same way. I should be as proud of his personality as I would be defensive of my own. I should not ask him to be like me; I should only ask him to be truly himself and to let me be truly myself. If our personalities diverged, perhaps they would go around the circle and meet on the other side."

"Do you think, my dear woman, that you would be able to recognize each other after such a long journey?"

"There would be distinguishing marks," laughed Kate; "birthmarks of the soul. But I neglected to say that it would not satisfy me merely to be given a portion of the earnings of the family--that portion which I would require to conduct the household and which I might claim as my share of the result of labor. I should also wish, when there was a surplus, to be given half of it that I might make my own experiments."

"A full partnership!"

"That's the idea, precisely: a full partnership. There is an assumption that marriages are that now, but it is not so, as all frank persons must concede."

"_I_ concede it, at any rate."

"Now, you must understand that we women are asking these things because we are acquiring new ideas of duty. A duty is like a command; it must be obeyed. It has been laid upon us to demand rights and privileges equal to those enjoyed by men, and we wish them to be extended to us not because we are young or beautiful or winning or chaste, but because we are members of a common humanity with men and are entitled to the same inheritance. We want our status established, so that when we make a marriage alliance we can do it for love and no other reason--not for a home, or support, or children or protection. Marriage should be a privilege and a reward--not a necessity. It should be so that if we spinsters want a home, we can earn one; if we desire children, we can take to ourselves some of the motherless ones; and we should be able to entrust society with our protection. By society I mean, of course, the structure which civilized people have fashioned for themselves, the portals of which are personal rights and the law."

"But what will all the lovers do? If everything is adjusted to such a nicety, what will they be able to sacrifice for each other?"

"Lovers," smiled Kate, "will always be able to make their own paradise, and a jewelled sacrifice will be the keystone of each window in their house of love. But there are only a few lovers in the world compared with those who have come down through the realm of little morning clouds and are bearing the heat and burden of the day."

"How do you know all of these things, Wise Woman? Have you had so much experience?"

"We each have all the accumulated experience of the centuries. We don't have to keep to the limits of our own little individual lives."

"I often have dreamed of bringing you up on this trail," said Wander whimsically, "but never for the purpose of hearing you make your declaration of independence."

"Why not?" demanded Kate. "In what better place could I make it?"

Beside the clamorous waterfall was a huge boulder squared almost as if the hand of a mason had shaped it. Kate stepped on it, before Wander could prevent her, and stood laughing back at him, the wind blowing her garments about her and lifting strands of her loosened hair.

"I declare my freedom!" she cried with grandiose mockery. "Freedom to think my own thoughts, preach my own creeds, do my own work, and make the sacrifices of my own choosing. I declare that I will have no master and no mistress, no slave and no neophyte, but that I will strive to preserve my own personality and to help all of my brothers and sisters, the world over, to preserve theirs. I declare that I will let no superstition or prejudice set limits to my good will, my influence, or my ambition!"

"You are standing on a precipice," he warned.

"It's glorious!"

"But it may be fatal."

"But I have the head for it," she retorted. "I shall not fall!"

"Others may who try to emulate you."

"That's Fear--the most subtle of foes!"

"Oh, come back," he pleaded seriously, "I can't bear to see you standing there!"

"Very well," she said, giving him her hand with a gay gesture of capitulation. "But didn't you say that men liked to climb? Well, women do, too."

They were conscious of being late for dinner and they turned their faces toward home.

"How ridiculous," remarked Wander, "that we should think ourselves obliged to return for dinner!"

"On the contrary," said Kate, "I think it bears witness to both our health and our sanity. I've got over being afraid that I shall be injured by the commonplace. When I open your door and smell the roast or the turnips or whatever food has been provided, I shall like it just as well as if it were flowers."

Wander helped her down a jagged descent and laughed up in her face.

"What a materialist!" he cried. "And I thought you were interested only in the ideal."

"Things aren't ideal because they have been labeled so," declared Kate. "When people tell you they are clinging to old ideals, it's well to find out if they aren't napping in some musty old room beneath the cobwebs. I'm a materialist, very likely, but that's only incidental to my realism. I like to be allowed to realize the truth about things, and you know yourself that you men--who really are the sentimental sex--have tried as hard as you could not to let us."

"You speak as if we had deliberately fooled you."

"You haven't fooled us any more than we have fooled ourselves." They had reached the lower level now, and could walk side by side. "You've kept us supplemental, and we've thought we were noble when we played the supplemental part. But it doesn't look so to us any longer. We want to be ourselves and to justify ourselves. There's a good deal of complaint about women not having enough to do--about the factories and shops taking their work away from them and leaving them idle and inexpressive. Well, in a way, that's true, and I'm a strong advocate of new vocations, so that women can have their own purses and all that. But I know in my heart all this is incidental. What we really need is a definite set of principles; if we can acquire an inner stability, we shall do very well whether our hands are perpetually occupied or not. But just at present we poor women are sitting in the ruins of our collapsed faiths, and we haven't decided what sort of architecture to use in erecting the new one."

"There doesn't seem to be much peace left in the world," mused Wander. "Do you women think you will have peace when you get this new faith?"

"Oh, dear me," retorted Kate, "what would you have us do with peace? You can get that in any garlanded sepulcher. Peace is like perfection, it isn't desirable. We should perish of it. As long as there is life there is struggle and change. But when we have our inner faith, when we can see what the thing is for which we are to strive, then we shall cease to be so spasmodic in our efforts. We'll not be doing such grotesque things. We'll come into new dignity."

"What you're trying to say," said Wander, "is that it is ourselves who are to be our best achievement. It's what we make of ourselves that matters."

"Oh, that's it! That's it!" cried Kate, beating her gloved hands together like a child. "You're getting it! You're getting it! It's what we make of ourselves that matters, and we must all have the right to find ourselves--to keep exploring till we find our highest selves. There mustn't be such a waste of ability and power and hope as there has been. We must all have our share in the essentials--our own relation to reality."

"I see," he said, pausing at the door, and looking into her face as if he would spell out her incommunicable self. "That's what you mean by universal liberty."

"That's what I mean."

"And the man you marry must let you pick your own way, make your own blunders, grow by your own experience."

"Yes."

Honora opened the door and looked at them. She was weak and she leaned against the casing for her support, but her face was tender and calm, and she was regnant over her own mind.

"What is the matter with you two?" she asked. "Aren't you coming in to dinner? Haven't you any appetites?"

Kate threw her arms about her.

"Oh, Honora," she cried. "How lovely you look! Appetites? We're famished."

XXX

Another week went by, and though it went swiftly, still at the end of the time it seemed long, as very happy and significant times do. Honora was still weak, but as every comfort had been provided for her journey, it seemed more than probable that she would be benefited in the long run by the change, however exhausting it might be temporarily.

"It's the morning of the last day," said Wander at breakfast. "Honora is to treat herself as if she were the finest and most highly decorated bohemian glass, and save herself up for her journey. All preparations, I am told, are completed. Very well, then. Do you and I ride to-day, Miss Barrington?"

"'Here we ride,'" quoted Kate. Then she flushed, remembering the reference.

Did Karl recognize it--or know it? She could not tell. He could, at will, show a superb inscrutability.

Whether he knew Browning's poem or not, Kate found to her irritation that she did. Lines she thought she had forgotten, trooped--galloped--back into her brain. The thud of them fell like rhythmic hoofs upon the road.

"Then we began to ride. My soul Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll Freshening and fluttering in the wind. Past hopes already lay behind. What need to strive with a life awry? Had I said that, had I done this, So might I gain, so might I miss."

She wove her braids about her head to the measure; buckled her boots and buttoned her habit; and then, veiled and gauntleted she went down the stairs, still keeping time to the inaudible tune:--

"So might I gain, so might I miss."

The mare Wander held for her was one which she had ridden several times before and with which she was already on terms of good feeling. That subtle, quick understanding which goes from horse to rider, when all is well in their relations, and when both are eager to face the wind, passed now from Lady Bel to Kate. She let the creature nose her for a moment, then accepted Wander's hand and mounted. The fine animal quivered delicately, shook herself, pawed the dust with a motion as graceful as any lady could have made, threw a pleasant, sociable look over her shoulder, and at Kate's vivacious lift of the rein was off. Wander was mounted magnificently on Nell, a mare of heavier build, a black animal, which made a good contrast to Lady Bel's shining roan coat.

The animals were too fresh and impatient to permit much conversation between their riders. They were answering to the call of the road as much as were the humans who rode them. Kate tried to think of the scenes which were flashing by, or of the village,--Wander's "rowdy" village, teeming with its human stories; but, after all, it was Browning's lines which had their way with her. They trumpeted themselves in her ear, changing a word here and there, impishly, to suit her case.

"We rode; it seemed my spirit flew, Saw other regions, cities new, As the world rushed by on either side. I thought, All labor, yet no less Bear up beneath their unsuccess. Look at the end of work, contrast The petty Done, the Undone vast, This present of theirs with the hopeful past! I hoped he would love me. Here we ride."

They were to the north of the village, heading for a cañon. The road was good, the day not too warm, and the passionate mountain springtime was bursting into flower and leaf. Presently walls of rock began to rise about them. They were of innumerable, indefinable rock colors--grayish-yellows, dull olives, old rose, elusive purples, and browns as rich as prairie soil. Coiling like a cobra, the Little Williston raced singing through the midst of the chasm, sun-mottled and bright as the trout that hid in its cold shallows. Was all the world singing? Were the invisible stars of heaven rhyming with one another? Had a lost rhythm been recaptured, and did she hear the pulsations of a deep Earth-harmony--or was it, after all, only the insistent beat of the poet's line?

"What if we still ride on, we two, With life forever old, yet new, Changed not in kind but in degree, The instant made eternity,-- And Heaven just prove that I and he Ride, ride together, forever ride?"

What Wander said, when he spoke, was, "Walk," and the remark was made to his horse. Lady Bel slackened, too. They were in the midst of great beauty--complex, almost chaotic, beauty, such as the Rocky Mountains often display.

Wander drew his horse nearer to Kate's, and as a turning of the road shut them in a solitary paradise where alders and willows fringed the way with fresh-born green, he laid his hand on her saddle.

"Kate," he said, "can you make up your mind to stay here with me?"

Kate drew in her breath sharply. Then she laughed.

"Am I to understand that you are introducing or continuing a topic?" she asked.

He laughed, too. They were as willing to play with the subject as children are to play with flowers.

"I am continuing it," he affirmed.

"Really?"

"And you know it."

"Do I?"

"From the first moment that I laid eyes on you, all the time that I was writing to Honora and really was trying to snare your interest, and after she came here,--even when I absurdly commanded you not to write to me,--and now, every moment since you set foot in my wild country, what have I done but say: 'Kate, will you stay with me?'"

"And will I?" mused Kate. "What do you offer?"

She once had asked the same question of McCrea.

"A faulty man's unchanging love."

"What makes you think it will not change--especially since you are a faulty man?"

"I think it will not change because I am so faulty that I must have something perfect to which to cling."

"Nonsense! A Clarinda dream! There's nothing perfect about me! The whole truth is that you don't know whether you'll change or not!"

"Well, say that I change! Say that I pass from shimmering moonlight to common sunlight love! Say that we walk a heavy road and carry burdens and that our throats are so parched we forget to turn our eyes toward each other. Still we shall be side by side, and in the end the dust of us shall mingle in one earth. As for our spirits--if they have triumphed together, where is the logic in supposing that they will know separation?"

"You will give me love," said Kate, "changing, faulty, human love! I ask no better--in the way of love. I can match you in faultiness and in changefulness and in hope. But now what else can you give me--what work--what chance to justify myself, what exercise for my powers? You have your work laid out for you. Where is mine?"

Wander stared at her a moment with a bewildered expression. Then he leaped from his horse and caught Kate's bridle.

"Where is your work, woman?" he thundered. "Are you teasing me still or are you in earnest? Your work is in your home! With all your wisdom, don't you know that yet? It is in your home, bearing and rearing your sons and your daughters, and adding to my sum of joy and your own. It is in learning secrets of happiness which only experience can teach. Listen to me: If my back ached and my face dripped sweat because I was toiling for you and your children, I would count it a privilege. It would be the crown of my life. Justify yourself? How can you justify yourself except by being of the Earth, learning of her; her obedient and happy child? Justify yourself? Kate Barrington, you'll have to justify yourself to me."

"How dare you?" asked Kate under her breath. "Who has given you a right to take me to task?"

"Our love," he said, and looked her unflinchingly in the eye. "My love for you and your love for me. I demand the truth of you,--the deepest truth of your deepest soul,--because we are mates and can never escape each other as long as we live, though half the earth divides us and all our years. Wherever we go, our thoughts will turn toward each other. When we meet, though we have striven to hate each other, yet our hands will long to clasp. We may be at war, but we will love it better than peace with others. I tell you, I march to the tune of your piping; you keep step to my drum-beats. What is the use of theorizing? I speak of a fact."

"I am going to turn my horse," she said. "Will you please stand aside?"

He dropped her bridle.

"Is that all you have to say?"

She looked at him haughtily for a moment and whirled her horse. Then she drew the mare up.

"Karl!" she called.

No answer.

"I say--Karl!"

He came to her.

"I am not angry. I know quite well what you mean. You were speaking of the fundamentals."

"I was."

"But how about me? Am I to have no importance save in my relation to you?"

"You cannot have your greatest importance save in your relation to me."

She looked at him long. Her eyes underwent a dozen changes. They taunted him, tempted him, comforted him, bade him hope, bade him fear.

"We must ride home," she said at length.

"And my question? I asked you if you were willing to stay here with me?"

"The question," she said with a dry little smile, "is laid very respectfully on the knees of the gods."

He turned from her and swung into his saddle. They pounded home in silence. The lines of "The Last Ride" were besetting her still.

"Who knows what's fit for us? Had fate Proposed bliss here should sublimate My being; had I signed the bond-- Still one must lead some life beyond,-- Have a bliss to die with, dim-descried. This foot once planted on the goal, This glory-garland round my soul, Could I descry such? Try and test?"

She gave him no chance to help her dismount, but leaping to the ground, turned the good mare's head stableward, and ran to her room. He did not see her till dinner-time. Honora was at the table, and occupied their care and thought.

Afterward there was the ten-mile ride to the station, but Kate sat beside Honora. There was a full moon--and the world ached for lovers. But if any touched lips, Karl Wander and Kate Barrington knew nothing of it. At the station they shook hands.

"Are you coming back?" asked Wander. "Will you bring Honora back home?"

In the moonlight Kate turned a sudden smile on him.

"Of course I'm coming back," she said. "I always put a period to my sentences."

"Good!" he said. "But that's a very different matter from writing a 'Finis' to your book."

"I shall conclude on an interrupted sentence," laughed Kate, "and I'll let some one else write 'Finis.'"

The great train labored in, paused for no more than a moment, and was off again. It left Wander's world well denuded. The sense of aching loneliness was like an agony. She had evaded him. She belonged to him, and he had somehow let her go! What had he said, or failed to say? What had she desired that he had not given? He tried to assure himself that he had been guiltless, but as he passed his sleeping village and glimpsed the ever-increasing dumps before his mines, he knew in his heart that he had been asking her to play his game. Of course, on the other hand--

But what was the use of running around in a squirrel cage! She was gone. He was alone.

XXXI

The Federation of Women's Clubs!

Two thousand women gathered in the name of--what?