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Precipice, The

<h2>XXIX</h2> At the end of a week Honora showed a decided change for the better. The horror had gone out of her face; she ate without persuasion; she slept briefly but often. The conclusion of a fortnight saw her still sad, but beyond immediate danger of melancholy. She began to assume some slight responsibility toward the children, and she loved to have them playing about her, although she soon wearied of them. Kate had decided not to go back to Chicago until her return from California. She was to speak to the Federation of Women's Clubs which met at Los Angeles, and she proposed taking Honora with her. Honora was not averse if Kate and Karl thought it best for her. The babies were to remain safe at home. "I wouldn't dare experiment with babies," said Kate. "At least, not with other people's." "You surely wouldn't experiment with your own, ma'am!" cried the privileged Mrs. Hays. "Oh, I might," Kate insisted. "If I had babies of my own, I'd like them to be hard, brown little savages--the sort you could put on donkey-back or camel-back and take anywhere." Mrs. Hays shook her head at the idea of camels. It hardly sounded Christian, and certainly it in no way met her notion of the need of infants. "Mrs. Browning writes about taking her baby to a mountain-top not far from the stars," Kate went on. "They rode donkey-back, I believe. Personally, however, I should prefer the camel. For one thing, you could get more babies on his back." Mrs. Hays threw a glance at her mistress as if to say: "Is it proper for a young woman to talk like this?" The young woman in question said many things which, according to the always discreet and sensible Mrs. Hays, were hardly to be commended. There was, for example, the evening she had stood in the westward end of the veranda and called:-- "Archangels! Come quick and see them!" The summons was so stirring that they all ran,-- even Honora, who was just beginning to move about the house,--but Wander reached Kate's side first. "She's right, Honora," he announced. "It is archangels--a whole party of them. Come, see!" But it had been nothing save a sunset rather brighter than usual, with wing-like radiations. "Pshaw!" said Mrs. Hays confidentially to the cook. "Shouldn't you think they'd burn up with all that flaming crimson on them?" Kate cried. "And, oh, their golden hair! Or does that belong to the Damosel? Probably she is leaning over the bar of heaven at this minute." In Mrs. Hays's estimation, the one good thing about all such talk was that Mrs. Fulham seemed to like it. Sometimes she smiled; and she hung upon the arm of her friend and looked at her as if wondering how one could be so young and strong and gay. Mr. Wander, too, seemed never tired of listening; and the way that letters trailed after this young woman showed her that a number--quite an astonishingly large number--of persons were pleased to whet their ideas on her. Clarinda Hays decided that she would like to try it herself; so one morning when she sat on the veranda watching the slumbers of the little girls in their hammocks, and Miss Barrington sat near at hand fashioning a blouse for Honora's journey, she ventured:-- "You're a suffragette, ain't you, Miss?" "Why, yes," admitted Kate. "I suppose I am. I believe in suffrage for women, at any rate." "Well, what do you make of all them carryings-on over there in England, ma'am? You don't approve of acid-throwing and window-breaking and cutting men's faces with knives, do you?" She looked at Kate with an almost poignant anxiety, her face twitching a little with her excitement. "A decent woman couldn't put her stamp on that kind o' thing." "But the puzzling part of it all is, Mrs. Hays, that it appears to be decent women who are doing it. Moreover, it's not an impulse with them but a plan. That rather sets one thinking, doesn't it? You see, it's a sort of revolution. Revolutions have got us almost everything we have that is really worth while in the way of personal liberty; but I don't suppose any of them seemed very 'decent' to the non-combatants who were looking on. Then, too, you have to realize that women are very much handicapped in conducting a fight." "What have they got to fight against, I should like to know?" demanded Mrs. Hays, dropping her sewing and grasping the arms of her chair in her indignation. "Well," said Kate, "I fancy we American women haven't much idea of all that the Englishwomen are called upon to resent. I do know, though, that an English husband of whatever station thinks that he is the commander, and that he feels at liberty to address his wife as few American husbands would think of doing. It's quite allowed them to beat their wives if they are so minded. I hope that not many of them are minded to do anything of the kind, but I feel very sure that women are 'kept in their place' over there. So, as they've been hectored themselves, they've taken up hectoring tactics in retaliation. They demand a share in the government and the lawmaking. They want to have a say about the schools and the courts of justice. If men were fighting for some new form of liberty, we should think them heroic. Why should we think women silly for doing the same thing?" "It won't get them anywhere," affirmed Clarinda Hays. "It won't do for them what the old way of behaving did for them, Miss. Now, who, I should like to know, does a young fellow, dying off in foreign parts, turn his thoughts to in his last moments? Why, to his good mother or his nice sweetheart! You don't suppose that men are going to turn their dying thoughts to any such screaming, kicking harridans as them suffragettes over there in England, do you?" Kate heard a chuckle beyond the door--the disrespectful chuckle, as she took it, of the master of the house. It armed her for the fray. "I don't think the militant women are doing these things to induce men to feel tenderly toward them, Mrs. Hays. I don't believe they care just now whether the men feel tenderly toward them or not. Women have been low-voiced and sweet and docile for a good many centuries, but it hasn't gained them the right to claim their own children, or to stand up beside men and share their higher responsibilities and privileges. I don't like the manner of warfare, myself. While I could die at the stake if it would do any good, I couldn't break windows and throw acid. For one thing, it doesn't seem to me quite logical, as the damage is inflicted on the property of persons who have nothing to do with the case. But, of course, I can't be sure that, after the fight is won, future generations will not honor the women who forgot their personal preferences and who made the fight in the only way they could." "You're such a grand talker, Miss, that it's hard running opposite to you, but I was brought up to think that a woman ought to be as near an angel as she could be. I never answered my husband back, no matter what he said to me, and I moved here and there to suit him. I was always waiting for him at home, and when he got there I stood ready to do for him in any way I could. We was happy together, Miss, and when he was dying he said that I had been a good wife. Them words repaid me, Miss, as having my own way never could." Clarinda Hays had grown fervid. There were tears in her patient eyes, and her face was frankly broken with emotion. Kate permitted a little silence to fall. Then she said gently:-- "I can see it is very sweet to you--that memory--very sweet and sacred. I don't wonder you treasure it." She let the subject lie there and arose presently and, in passing, laid her firm brown hand on Mrs. Hays's work-worn one. Wander was in the sitting-room and as she entered it he motioned her to get her hat and sweater. She did so silently and accepted from him the alpenstock he held out to her. "Is it right to leave Honora?" he asked when they were beyond hearing. "I had little or nothing to do down in town, and it occurred to me that we might slip away for once and go adventuring." "Oh, Honora's particularly well this morning. She's been reading a little, and after she has rested she is going to try to sew. Not that she can do much, but it means that she's taking an interest again." "Ah, that does me good! What a nightmare it's been! We seem to have had one nightmare after another, Honora and I." They turned their steps up the trail that mounted westward. "It follows this foothill for a way," said Wander, striding ahead, since they could not walk side by side. "Then it takes that level up there and strikes the mountain. It goes on over the pass." "And where does it end? Why was it made?" "I'm not quite sure where it ends. But it was made because men love to climb." She gave a throaty laugh, crying, "I might have known!" for answer, and he led on, stopping to assist her when the way was broken or unusually steep, and she, less accustomed but throbbing with the joy of it, followed. They reached an irregular "bench" of the mountain, and rested there on a great boulder. Below them lay the ranch amid its little hills, dust-of-gold in hue. "I have dreamed countless times of trailing this path with you," he said. "Then you have exhausted the best of the experience already. What equals a dream? Doesn't it exceed all possible fact?" "I think you know very well," he answered, "that this is more to me than any dream." An eagle lifted from a tree near at hand and sailed away with confidence, the master of the air. "I don't wonder men die trying to imitate him," breathed Kate, wrapt in the splendor of his flight. "They are the little brothers of Icarus." "I always hope," replied Wander, "when I hear of an aviator who has been killed, that he has had at least one perfect flight, when he soared as high as he wished and saw and felt all that a man in his circumstances could. Since he has had to pay so great a price, I want him to have had full value." "It's a fine thing to be willing to pay the price," mused Kate. "If you can face whatever-gods-there-be and say, 'I've had my adventure. What's due?' you're pretty well done with fears and flurries." "Wise one!" laughed Wander. "What do you know about paying?" "You think I don't know!" she cried. Then she flushed and drew back. "The last folly of the braggart is to boast of misfortune," she said. "But, really, I have paid, if missing some precious things that might have been mine is a payment for pride and wilfullness." "I hope you haven't missed very much, then,--not anything that you'll be regretting in the years to come." "Oh, regret is never going to be a specialty of mine," declared Kate. "To-morrow's the chance! I shall never be able to do much with yesterday, no matter how wise I become." "Right you are!" said Wander sharply. "The only thing is that you don't know quite the full bearing of your remark--and I do." She laughed sympathetically. "Truth is truth," she said. "Yes." He hung over the obvious aphorism boyishly. "Yes, truth is truth, no matter who utters it." "Thanks, kind sir." "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." <hr style="width: 35%;"> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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