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Precipice, The

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<h2>XXXIV</h2> Kate and Honora left the train at the station of Wander, and the man for whom it was named was there to meet them. If it was summer with the world, it was summer with him, too. Some new plenitude had come to him since Kate had seen him last. His full manhood seemed to be realized. A fine seriousness invested him--a seriousness which included, the observer felt sure, all imaginable fit forms of joy. Clothed in gray, save for the inevitable sombrero, clean-shaven, bright-eyed, capable, renewed with hope, he took both women with a protecting gesture into his embrace. The three rejoiced together in that honest demonstration which seems permissible in the West, where social forms and fears have not much foothold. They talked as happily of little things as if great ones were not occupying their minds. To listen, one would have thought that only "little joys" and small vexations had come their way. It would be by looking into their faces that one could see the marks of passion--the passion of sorrow, of love, of sacrifice. As they came out of the piñon grove, Honora discovered her babies. They were in white, fresh as lilies, or, perhaps, as little angels, well beloved of heavenly mothers; and they came running from the house, their golden hair shining like aureoles about their eager faces. Their sandaled feet hardly touched the ground, and, indeed, could they have been weighed at that moment, it surely had been found that they had become almost imponderable because of the ethereal lightness of their spirits. Their arms were outstretched; their eyes burning like the eyes of seraphs. "Stop!" cried Honora to Karl in a choking voice. He drew up his restless, home-bound horses, and she leaped to the ground. As she ran toward her little ones on swift feet, the two who watched her were convinced that she had regained her old-time vigor, and had acquired an eloquence of personality which never before had been hers. She gathered her treasures in her arms and walked with them to the house. Kate had not many minutes to wait in the living-room before Wander joined her. It was a long room, with triplicate, lofty windows facing the mountains which wheeled in majestic semicircle from north to west. At this hour the purple shadows were gathering on them, and great peace and beauty lay over the world. There was but one door to this room and Wander closed it. "I may as well know my fate now," he said. "I've waited for this from the moment I saw you last. Are you going to be my wife, Kate?" He stood facing her, breathing rather heavily, his face commanded to a tense repose. "My answer is 'no,'" cried Kate, holding out her hands to him. "I love you as my life, and my answer is 'no.'" He took the hands she had extended. "Kiss me!" He gathered her into his arms, and upon her welcoming lips he laid his own in such a kiss as a man places upon but one woman's lips. "Now, what is your answer?" he breathed after a time. "Tell me your answer now, you much-loved woman--tell it, beloved." She kissed his brow and his eyes; he felt her tears upon his cheeks. "You know all that I have thought and felt," she said; "you know--for I have written--what my life may be. Do you ask me to let it go and to live here in this solitude with you?" "Yes, by heaven," he said, his eyes blazing, "I ask it." Some influence had gone out from them which seemed to create a palpitant atmosphere of delight in which they stood. It was as if the spiritual essence of them, mingling, had formed the perfect fluid of the soul, in which it was a privilege to live and breathe and dream. "I am so blessed in you," whispered Karl, "so completed by you, that I cannot let you go, even though you go on to great usefulness and great goodness. I tell you, your place is here in my home. It is safe here. I have seen you standing on a precipice, Kate, up there in the mountain. I warned you of its danger; you told me of its glory. But I repeat my warning now, for I see you venturing on to that precipice of loneliness and fame on which none but sad and lonely women stand." "Oh, I know what you say is true, Karl. I mean to do my work with all the power there is in me, and I shall be rejoicing in that and in Life--it's in me to be glad merely that I'm living. But deep within my heart I shall, as you say, be both lonely and sad. If there's any comfort in that for you--" "No, there's no comfort at all for me in that, Kate. Stay with me, stay with me! Be my wife. Why, it's your destiny." Kate crossed the room as if she would move beyond that aura which vibrated about him and in which she could not stand without a too dangerous delight. She was very pale, but she carried her head high still--almost defiantly. "I mean to be the mother to many, many children, Karl," she said in a voice which thrilled with sorrow and pride and a strange joy. "To thousands and thousands of children. But for the Idea I represent and the work I mean to do they would be trampled in the dust of the world. Can't you see that I am called to this as men are called to honorable services for their country? This is a woman's form of patriotism. It's a higher one than the soldier's, I think. It's come my way to be the banner-carrier, and I'm glad of it. I take my chance and my honor just as you would take your chance and your honor. But I could resign the glory, Karl, for your love, and count it worth while." "Kate--" "But the thing to which I am faithful is my opportunity for great service. Come with me, Karl, my dear. Think how we could work together in Washington--think what such a brain and heart as yours would mean to a new cause. We'd lose ourselves--and find ourselves--laboring for one of the kindest, lovingest ideas the hard old world has yet devised. Will you come and help me, Karl, man?" He moved toward her, his hands outspread with a protesting gesture. "You know that all my work is here, Kate. This is my home, these mines are mine, the town is mine. It is not only my own money which is invested, but the money of other men--friends who have trusted me and whose prosperity depends upon me." "Oh, but, Karl, aren't there ways of arranging such things? You say I am dear to you--transfer your interests and come with me--Karl!" Her voice was a pleader's, yet it kept its pride. "Kate! How can I? Do you want me to be a supplement to you--a hanger-on? Don't you see that you would make me ridiculous?" "Would I?" said Kate. "Does it seem that way to you? Then you haven't learned to respect me, after all." "I worship you," he cried. Kate smiled sadly. "I know," she said, "but worship passes--" "No--" he flung out, starting toward her. But she held him back with a gesture. "You have stolen my word," she said with an accent of finality. "'No'" is the word you force me to speak. I am going on to Washington in the morning, Karl. They heard the children running down the hall and pounding on the door with their soft fists. When Kate opened to them, they clambered up her skirts. She lifted them in her arms, and Karl saw their sunny heads nestling against her dark one. As she left the room, moving unseeingly, she heard the hard-wrung groan that came from his lips. A moment later, as she mounted the stairs, she saw him striding up the trail which they, together, had ascended once when the sun of their hope was still high. She did not meet him again that day. She and Honora ate their meals in silence, Honora dark with disapproval, Kate clinging to her spar of spiritual integrity. If that "no" thundered in Karl's ears the night through while he kept the company of his ancient comforters the mountains, no less did it beat shatteringly in the ears of the woman who had spoken it. "No," to the deep and mystic human joys; "no" to the most holy privilege of women; "no" to light laughter and a dancing heart; "no" to the lowly, satisfying labor of a home. For her the steep path, alone; for her the precipice. From it she might behold the sunrise and all the glory of the world, but no exalted sense of duty or of victory could blind her to its solitude and to its danger. Yet now, if ever, women must be true to the cause of liberty. They had been, through all the ages, willing martyrs to the general good. Now it was laid upon them to assume the responsibilities of a new crusade, to undertake a fresh martyrdom, and this time it was for themselves. Leagued against them was half--quite half--of their sex. Vanity and prettiness, dalliance and dependence were their characteristics. With a shrug of half-bared shoulders they dismissed all those who, painfully, nobly, gravely, were fighting to restore woman's connection with reality--to put her back, somehow, into the procession; to make, by new methods, the "coming lady" as essential to the commonwealth as was the old-time châtelaine before commercialism filched her vocations and left her the most cultivated and useless of parasites. Oh, it was no little thing for which she was fighting! Kate tried to console herself with that. If she passionately desired to create an organization which should exercise parental powers over orphaned or poorly guarded children, still more did she wish to set an example of efficiency for women, illustrating to them with how firm a step woman might tread the higher altitudes of public life, making an achievement, not a compromise, of labor. Moreover, no other woman in the country had at present had an opportunity that equaled her own. Look at it how she would, throb as she might with a woman's immemorial nostalgia for a true man's love, she could not escape the relentless logic of the situation. It was not the hour for her to choose her own pleasure. She must march to battle leaving love behind, as the heroic had done since love and combat were known to the world. <hr style="width: 35%;"> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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