Carley’s edifice of hopes, dreams, aspirations, and struggles fell in
ruins about her. It had been built upon false sands. It had no ideal
for foundation. It had to fall.
Something inevitable had forced her confession to Rust. Dissimulation
had been a habit of her mind; it was more a habit of her class than
sincerity. But she had reached a point in her mental strife where she
could not stand before Rust and let him believe she was noble and
faithful when she knew she was neither. Would not the next step in this
painful metamorphosis of her character be a fierce and passionate
repudiation of herself and all she represented?
She went home and locked herself in her room, deaf to telephone and
servants. There she gave up to her shame. Scorned—despised—dismissed by
that poor crippled flame-spirited Virgil Rust! He had reverenced her,
and the truth had earned his hate. Would she ever forget his
look—incredulous—shocked—bitter—and blazing with unutterable contempt?
Carley Burch was only another Nell—a jilt—a mocker of the manhood of
soldiers! Would she ever cease to shudder at memory of Rust’s slight
movement of hand? Go! Get out of my sight! Leave me to my agony as you
left Glenn Kilbourne alone to fight his! Men such as I am do not want
the smile of your face, the touch of your hand! We gave for womanhood!
Pass on to lesser men who loved the fleshpots and who would buy your
charms! So Carley interpreted that slight gesture, and writhed in her
abasement.
Rust threw a white, illuminating light upon her desertion of Glenn. She
had betrayed him. She had left him alone. Dwarfed and stunted was her
narrow soul! To a man who had given all for her she had returned
nothing. Stone for bread! Betrayal for love! Cowardice for courage!
The hours of contending passions gave birth to vague, slow-forming
revolt.
She became haunted by memory pictures and sounds and smells of Oak
Creek Canyon. As from afar she saw the great sculptured rent in the
earth, green and red and brown, with its shining, flashing ribbons of
waterfalls and streams. The mighty pines stood up magnificent and
stately. The walls loomed high, shadowed under the shelves, gleaming in
the sunlight, and they seemed dreaming, waiting, watching. For what?
For her return to their serene fastnesses—to the little gray log cabin.
The thought stormed Carley’s soul.
Vivid and intense shone the images before her shut eyes. She saw the
winding forest floor, green with grass and fern, colorful with flower
and rock. A thousand aisles, glades, nooks, and caverns called her to
come. Nature was every woman’s mother. The populated city was a
delusion. Disease and death and corruption stalked in the shadows of
the streets. But her canyon promised hard work, playful hours, dreaming
idleness, beauty, health, fragrance, loneliness, peace, wisdom, love,
children, and long life. In the hateful shut-in isolation of her room
Carley stretched forth her arms as if to embrace the vision. Pale close
walls, gleaming placid stretches of brook, churning amber and white
rapids, mossy banks and pine-matted ledges, the towers and turrets and
ramparts where the eagles wheeled—she saw them all as beloved images
lost to her save in anguished memory.
She heard the murmur of flowing water, soft, low, now loud, and again
lulling, hollow and eager, tinkling over rocks, bellowing into the deep
pools, washing with silky seep of wind-swept waves the hanging willows.
Shrill and piercing and far-aloft pealed the scream of the eagle. And
she seemed to listen to a mocking bird while he mocked her with his
melody of many birds. The bees hummed, the wind moaned, the leaves
rustled, the waterfall murmured. Then came the sharp rare note of a
canyon swift, most mysterious of birds, significant of the heights.
A breath of fragrance seemed to blow with her shifting senses. The dry,
sweet, tangy canyon smells returned to her—of fresh-cut timber, of wood
smoke, of the cabin fire with its steaming pots, of flowers and earth,
and of the wet stones, of the redolent pines and the pungent cedars.
And suddenly, clearly, amazingly, Carley beheld in her mind’s sight the
hard features, the bold eyes, the slight smile, the coarse face of Haze
Ruff. She had forgotten him. But he now returned. And with memory of
him flashed a revelation as to his meaning in her life. He had appeared
merely a clout, a ruffian, an animal with man’s shape and intelligence.
But he was the embodiment of the raw, crude violence of the West. He
was the eyes of the natural primitive man, believing what he saw. He
had seen in Carley Burch the paraded charm, the unashamed and serene
front, the woman seeking man. Haze Ruff had been neither vile nor base
nor unnatural. It had been her subjection to the decadence of feminine
dress that had been unnatural. But Ruff had found her a lie. She
invited what she did not want. And his scorn had been commensurate with
the falsehood of her. So might any man have been justified in his
insult to her, in his rejection of her. Haze Ruff had found her unfit
for his idea of dalliance. Virgil Rust had found her false to the
ideals of womanhood for which he had sacrificed all but life itself.
What then had Glenn Kilbourne found her? He possessed the greatness of
noble love. He had loved her before the dark and changeful tide of war
had come between them. How had he judged her? That last sight of him
standing alone, leaning with head bowed, a solitary figure trenchant
with suggestion of tragic resignation and strength, returned to flay
Carley. He had loved, trusted, and hoped. She saw now what his hope had
been—that she would have instilled into her blood the subtle, red, and
revivifying essence of calling life in the open, the strength of the
wives of earlier years, an emanation from canyon, desert, mountain,
forest, of health, of spirit, of forward-gazing natural love, of the
mysterious saving instinct he had gotten out of the West. And she had
been too little too steeped in the indulgence of luxurious life too
slight-natured and pale-blooded! And suddenly there pierced into the
black storm of Carley’s mind a blazing, white-streaked thought—she had
left Glenn to the Western girl, Flo Hutter. Humiliated, and abased in
her own sight, Carley fell prey to a fury of jealousy.
She went back to the old life. But it was in a bitter, restless,
critical spirit, conscious of the fact that she could derive neither
forgetfulness nor pleasure from it, nor see any release from the habit
of years.
One afternoon, late in the fall, she motored out to a Long Island club
where the last of the season’s golf was being enjoyed by some of her
most intimate friends. Carley did not play. Aimlessly she walked around
the grounds, finding the autumn colors subdued and drab, like her mind.
The air held a promise of early winter. She thought that she would go
South before the cold came. Always trying to escape anything rigorous,
hard, painful, or disagreeable! Later she returned to the clubhouse to
find her party assembled on an inclosed porch, chatting and partaking
of refreshment. Morrison was there. He had not taken kindly to her late
habit of denying herself to him.
During a lull in the idle conversation Morrison addressed Carley
pointedly. “Well, Carley, how’s your Arizona hog-raiser?” he queried,
with a little gleam in his usually lusterless eyes.
“I have not heard lately,” she replied, coldly.
The assembled company suddenly quieted with a portent inimical to their
leisurely content of the moment. Carley felt them all looking at her,
and underneath the exterior she preserved with extreme difficulty,
there burned so fierce an anger that she seemed to have swelling veins
of fire.
“Queer how Kilbourne went into raising hogs,” observed Morrison. “Such
a low-down sort of work, you know.”
“He had no choice,” replied Carley. “Glenn didn’t have a father who
made tainted millions out of the war. He had to work. And I must differ
with you about its being low-down. No honest work is that. It is
idleness that is low down.”
“But so foolish of Glenn when he might have married money,” rejoined
Morrison, sarcastcally.
“The honor of soldiers is beyond your ken, Mr. Morrison.”
He flushed darkly and bit his lip.
“You women make a man sick with this rot about soldiers,” he said, the
gleam in his eye growing ugly. “A uniform goes to a woman’s head no
matter what’s inside it. I don’t see where your vaunted honor of
soldiers comes in considering how they accepted the let-down of women
during and after the war.”
“How could you see when you stayed comfortably at home?” retorted
Carley.
“All I could see was women falling into soldiers’ arms,” he said,
sullenly.
“Certainly. Could an American girl desire any greater happiness—or
opportunity to prove her gratitude?” flashed Carley, with proud uplift
of head.
“It didn’t look like gratitude to me,” returned Morrison.
“Well, it _was_ gratitude,” declared Carley, ringingly. “If women of
America did throw themselves at soldiers it was not owing to the moral
lapse of the day. It was woman’s instinct to save the race! Always, in
every war, women have sacrificed themselves to the future. Not vile,
but noble!... You insult both soldiers and women, Mr. Morrison. I
wonder—did any American girls throw themselves at _you?_”
Morrison turned a dead white, and his mouth twisted to a distorted
checking of speech, disagreeable to see.
“No, you were a slacker,” went on Carley, with scathing scorn. “You let
the other men go fight for American girls. Do you imagine one of them
will ever _marry_ you?... All your life, Mr. Morrison, you will be a
marked man—outside the pale of friendship with real American men and
the respect of real American girls.”
Morrison leaped up, almost knocking the table over, and he glared at
Carley as he gathered up his hat and cane. She turned her back upon
him. From that moment he ceased to exist for Carley. She never spoke to
him again.
Next day Carley called upon her dearest friend, whom she had not seen
for some time.
“Carley dear, you don’t look so very well,” said Eleanor, after
greetings had been exchanged.
“Oh, what does it matter how I look?” queried Carley, impatiently.
“You were so wonderful when you got home from Arizona.”
“If I was wonderful and am now commonplace you can thank your old New
York for it.”
“Carley, don’t you care for New York any more?” asked Eleanor.
“Oh, New York is all right, I suppose. It’s I who am wrong.”
“My dear, you puzzle me these days. You’ve changed. I’m sorry. I’m
afraid you’re unhappy.”
“Me? Oh, impossible! I’m in a seventh heaven,” replied Carley, with a
hard little laugh. “What ’re you doing this afternoon? Let’s go
out—riding—or somewhere.”
“I’m expecting the dressmaker.”
“Where are you going to-night?”
“Dinner and theater. It’s a party, or I’d ask you.”
“What did you do yesterday and the day before, and the days before
that?”
Eleanor laughed indulgently, and acquainted Carley with a record of her
social wanderings during the last few days.
“The same old things—over and over again! Eleanor don’t you get sick of
it?” queried Carley.
“Oh yes, to tell the truth,” returned Eleanor, thoughtfully. “But
there’s nothing else to do.”
“Eleanor, I’m no better than you,” said Carley, with disdain. “I’m as
useless and idle. But I’m beginning to see myself—and you—and all this
rotten crowd of ours. We’re no good. But you’re married, Eleanor.
You’re settled in life. You ought to _do something_. I’m single and at
loose ends. Oh, I’m in revolt!... Think, Eleanor, just think. Your
husband works hard to keep you in this expensive apartment. You have a
car. He dresses you in silks and satins. You wear diamonds. You eat
your breakfast in bed. You loll around in a pink dressing gown all
morning. You dress for lunch or tea. You ride or golf or worse than
waste your time on some lounge lizard, dancing till time to come home
to dress for dinner. You let other men make love to you. Oh, don’t get
sore. You do.... And so goes the round of your life. What good on earth
are you, anyhow? You’re just a—a gratification to the senses of your
husband. And at that you don’t see much of _him_.”
“Carley, how you rave!” exclaimed her friend. “What has gotten into you
lately? Why, everybody tells me you’re—you’re queer! The way you
insulted Morrison—how unlike you, Carley!”
“I’m glad I found the nerve to do it. What do you think, Eleanor?”
“Oh, I despise him. But you can’t say the things you feel.”
“You’d be bigger and truer if you did. Some day I’ll break out and flay
you and your friends alive.”
“But, Carley, you’re my friend and you’re just exactly like we are. Or
you were, quite recently.”
“Of course, I’m your friend. I’ve always loved you, Eleanor,” went on
Carley, earnestly. “I’m as deep in this—this damned stagnant muck as
you, or anyone. But I’m no longer _blind_. There’s something terribly
wrong with us women, and it’s not what Morrison hinted.”
“Carley, the only thing wrong with you is that you jilted poor
Glenn—and are breaking your heart over him still.”
“Don’t—don’t!” cried Carley, shrinking. “God knows that is true. But
there’s more wrong with me than a blighted love affair.”
“Yes, you mean the modern feminine unrest?”
“Eleanor, I positively hate that phrase ‘modern feminine unrest!’ It
smacks of ultra—ultra—Oh! I don’t know what. That phrase ought to be
translated by a Western acquaintance of mine—one Haze Ruff. I’d not
like to hurt your sensitive feelings with what he’d say. But this
unrest means speed-mad, excitement-mad, fad-mad, dress-mad, or I should
say _un_dress-mad, culture-mad, and Heaven only knows what else. The
women of our set are idle, luxurious, selfish, pleasure-craving, lazy,
useless, work-and-children shirking, absolutely no good.”
“Well, if we are, who’s to blame?” rejoined Eleanor, spiritedly. “Now,
Carley Burch, you listen to me. I think the twentieth-century girl in
America is the most wonderful female creation of all the ages of the
universe. I admit it. That is why we are a prey to the evils attending
greatness. Listen. Here is a crying sin—an infernal paradox. Take this
twentieth-century girl, this American girl who is the finest creation
of the ages. A young and healthy girl, the most perfect type of culture
possible to the freest and greatest city on earth—New York! She holds
absolutely an unreal, untrue position in the scheme of existence.
Surrounded by parents, relatives, friends, suitors, and instructive
schools of every kind, colleges, institutions, is she really happy, is
she really living?”
“Eleanor,” interrupted Carley, earnestly, “she is _not_.... And I’ve
been trying to tell you why.”
“My dear, let me get a word in, will you,” complained Eleanor. “You
don’t know it all. There are as many different points of view as there
are people.... Well, if this girl happened to have a new frock, and a
new beau to show it to, she’d say, ‘I’m the happiest girl in the
world.’ But she is nothing of the kind. Only she doesn’t know that. She
approaches marriage, or, for that matter, a more matured life, having
had too much, having been too well taken care of, _knowing too much_.
Her masculine satellites—father, brothers, uncles, friends, lovers—all
utterly spoil her. Mind you, I mean, girls like us, of the middle
class—which is to say the largest and best class of Americans. We are
spoiled.... This girl marries. And life goes on smoothly, as if its aim
was to exclude friction and effort. Her husband makes it too easy for
her. She is an ornament, or a toy, to be kept in a luxurious cage. To
soil her pretty hands would be disgraceful! Even if she can’t afford a
maid, the modern devices of science make the care of her four-room
apartment a farce. Electric dish-washer, clothes-washer,
vacuum-cleaner, and the near-by delicatessen and the caterer simply rob
a young wife of her housewifely heritage. If she has a baby—which
happens occasionally, Carley, in spite of your assertion—it very soon
goes to the kindergarten. Then what does she find to do with hours and
hours? If she is not married, what on earth _can_ she find to do?”
“She can work,” replied Carley, bluntly.
“Oh yes, she can, but she doesn’t,” went on Eleanor. “_You_ don’t work.
I never did. We both hated the idea. You’re calling spades spades,
Carley, but you seem to be riding a morbid, impractical thesis. Well,
our young American girl or bride goes in for being rushed or she goes
in for fads, the ultra stuff you mentioned. New York City gets all the
great artists, lecturers, and surely the great fakirs. The New York
women support them. The men laugh, but they furnish the money. They
take the women to the theaters, but they cut out the reception to a
Polish princess, a lecture by an Indian magician and mystic, or a
benefit luncheon for a Home for Friendless Cats. The truth is most of
our young girls or brides have a wonderful enthusiasm worthy of a
better cause. What is to become of their surplus energy, the
bottled-lightning spirit so characteristic of modern girls? Where is
the outlet for intense feelings? What use can they make of education or
of gifts? They just can’t, that’s all. I’m not taking into
consideration the new-woman species, the faddist or the reformer. I
mean normal girls like you and me. Just think, Carley. A girl’s every
wish, every need, is almost instantly satisfied without the slightest
effort on her part to obtain it. No struggle, let alone work! If women
crave to achieve something outside of the arts, you know, something
universal and helpful which will make men acknowledge her worth, if not
the equality, where is the opportunity?”
“Opportunities should be _made_,” replied Carley.
“There are a million sides to this question of the modern young
woman—the _fin-de-siècle_ girl. I’m for her!”
“How about the extreme of style in dress for this
remarkably-to-be-pitied American girl you champion so eloquently?”
queried Carley, sarcastically.
“Immoral!” exclaimed Eleanor with frank disgust.
“You admit it?”
“To my shame, I do.”
“Why do women wear extreme clothes? Why do you and I wear open-work
silk stockings, skirts to our knees, gowns without sleeves or bodices?”
“We’re slaves to fashion,” replied Eleanor, “That’s the popular
excuse.”
“Bah!” exclaimed Carley.
Eleanor laughed in spite of being half nettled. “Are you going to stop
wearing what all the other women wear—and be looked at askance? Are you
going to be dowdy and frumpy and old-fashioned?”
“No. But I’ll never wear anything again that can be called immoral. I
want to be able to say _why_ I wear a dress. You haven’t answered my
question yet. Why do you wear what you frankly admit is disgusting?”
“I don’t know, Carley,” replied Eleanor, helplessly. “How you harp on
things! We must dress to make other women jealous and to attract men.
To be a sensation! Perhaps the word ‘immoral’ is not what I mean. A
woman will be shocking in her obsession to attract, but hardly more
than that, if she knows it.”
“Ah! So few women realize how they actually do look. Haze Ruff could
tell them.”
“Haze Ruff. Who in the world is he or she?” asked Eleanor.
“Haze Ruff is a he, all right,” replied Carley, grimly.
“Well, who is he?”
“A sheep-dipper in Arizona,” answered Carley, dreamily.
“Humph! And what can Mr. Ruff tell us?”
“He told _me_ I looked like one of the devil’s angels—and that I
dressed to knock the daylights out of men.”
“Well, Carley Burch, if that isn’t rich!” exclaimed Eleanor, with a
peal of laughter. “I dare say you appreciate that as an original
compliment.”
“No.... I wonder what Ruff would say about jazz—I just wonder,”
murmured Carley.
“Well, I wouldn’t care what he said, and I don’t care what _you_ say,”
returned Eleanor. “The preachers and reformers and bishops and rabbis
make me sick. They rave about jazz. Jazz—the discordant note of our
decadence! Jazz—the harmonious expression of our musicless, mindless,
soulless materialism!—The idiots! If they could be women for a while
they would realize the error of their ways. But they will never, never
abolish jazz—_never_, for it is the grandest, the most wonderful, the
most absolutely necessary thing for women in this terrible age of
smotheration.”
“All right, Eleanor, we understand each other, even if we do not
agree,” said Carley. “You leave the future of women to chance, to life,
to materialism, not to their own conscious efforts. I want to leave it
to free will and idealism.”
“Carley, you are getting a little beyond me,” declared Eleanor,
dubiously.
“What are you going to _do?_ It all comes home to each individual
woman. Her attitude toward life.”
“I’ll drift along with the current, Carley, and be a good sport,”
replied Eleanor, smiling.
“You don’t care about the women and children of the future? You’ll not
deny yourself now, and think and work, and suffer a little, in the
interest of future humanity?”
“How you put things, Carley!” exclaimed Eleanor, wearily. “Of course I
care—when you make me think of such things. But what have _I_ to do
with the lives of people in the years to come?”
“Everything. America for Americans! While you dawdle, the life blood is
being sucked out of our great nation. It is a man’s job to fight; it is
a woman’s to save.... I think you’ve made your choice, though you don’t
realize it. I’m praying to God that I’ll rise to mine.”
Carley had a visitor one morning earlier than the usual or conventional
time for calls.
“He wouldn’t give no name,” said the maid. “He wears soldier clothes,
ma’am, and he’s pale, and walks with a cane.”
“Tell him I’ll be right down,” replied Carley.
Her hands trembled while she hurriedly dressed. Could this caller be
Virgil Rust? She hoped so, but she doubted.
As she entered the parlor a tall young man in worn khaki rose to meet
her. At first glance she could not name him, though she recognized the
pale face and light-blue eyes, direct and steady.
“Good morning, Miss Burch,” he said. “I hope you’ll excuse so early a
call. You remember me, don’t you? I’m George Burton, who had the bunk
next to Rust’s.”
“Surely I remember you, Mr. Burton, and I’m glad to see you,” replied
Carley, shaking hands with him. “Please sit down. Your being here must
mean you’re discharged from the hospital.”
“Yes, I was discharged, all right,” he said.
“Which means you’re well again. That is fine. I’m very glad.”
“I was put out to make room for a fellow in bad shape. I’m still shaky
and weak,” he replied. “But I’m glad to go. I’ve pulled through pretty
good, and it’ll not be long until I’m strong again. It was the ‘flu’
that kept me down.”
“You must be careful. May I ask where you’re going and what you expect
to do?”
“Yes, that’s what I came to tell you,” he replied, frankly. “I want you
to help me a little. I’m from Illinois and my people aren’t so badly
off. But I don’t want to go back to my home town down and out, you
know. Besides, the winters are cold there. The doctor advises me to go
to a little milder climate. You see, I was gassed, and got the ‘flu’
afterward. But I know I’ll be all right if I’m careful.... Well, I’ve
always had a leaning toward agriculture, and I want to go to Kansas.
Southern Kansas. I want to travel around till I find a place I like,
and there I’ll get a job. Not too hard a job at first—that’s why I’ll
need a little money. I know what to do. I want to lose myself in the
wheat country and forget the—the war. I’ll not be afraid of work,
presently.... Now, Miss Burch, you’ve been so kind—I’m going to ask you
to lend me a little money. I’ll pay it back. I can’t promise just when.
But some day. Will you?”
“Assuredly I will,” she replied, heartily. “I’m happy to have the
opportunity to help you. How much will you need for immediate use? Five
hundred dollars?”
“Oh no, not so much as that,” he replied. “Just railroad fare home, and
then to Kansas, and to pay board while I get well, you know, and look
around.”
“We’ll make it five hundred, anyway,” she replied, and, rising, she
went toward the library. “Excuse me a moment.” She wrote the check and,
returning, gave it to him.
“You’re very good,” he said, rather low.
“Not at all,” replied Carley. “You have no idea how much it means to me
to be permitted to help you. Before I forget, I must ask you, can you
cash that check here in New York?”
“Not unless you identify me,” he said, ruefully, “I don’t know anyone I
could ask.”
“Well, when you leave here go at once to my bank—it’s on Thirty-fourth
Street—and I’ll telephone the cashier. So you’ll not have any
difficulty. Will you leave New York at once?”
“I surely will. It’s an awful place. Two years ago when I came here
with my company I thought it was grand. But I guess I lost something
over there. ... I want to be where it’s quiet. Where I won’t see many
people.”
“I think I understand,” returned Carley. “Then I suppose you’re in a
hurry to get home? Of course you have a girl you’re just dying to see?”
“No, I’m sorry to say I haven’t,” he replied, simply. “I was glad I
didn’t have to leave a sweetheart behind, when I went to France. But it
wouldn’t be so bad to have one to go back to now.”
“Don’t you worry!” exclaimed Carley. “You can take your choice
presently. You have the open sesame to every real American girl’s
heart.”
“And what is that?” he asked, with a blush.
“Your service to your country,” she said, gravely.
“Well,” he said, with a singular bluntness, “considering I didn’t get
any medals or bonuses, I’d like to draw a nice girl.”
“You will,” replied Carley, and made haste to change the subject. “By
the way, did you meet Glenn Kilbourne in France?”
“Not that I remember,” rejoined Burton, as he got up, rising rather
stiffly by aid of his cane. “I must go, Miss Burch. Really I can’t
thank you enough. And I’ll never forget it.”
“Will you write me how you are getting along?” asked Carley, offering
her hand.
“Yes.”
Carley moved with him out into the hall and to the door. There was a
question she wanted to ask, but found it strangely difficult of
utterance. At the door Burton fixed a rather penetrating gaze upon her.
“You didn’t ask me about Rust,” he said.
“No, I—I didn’t think of him—until now, in fact,” Carley lied.
“Of course then you couldn’t have heard about him. I was wondering.”
“I have heard nothing.”
“It was Rust who told me to come to you,” said Burton. “We were talking
one day, and he—well, he thought you were true blue. He said he knew
you’d trust me and lend me money. I couldn’t have asked you but for
him.”
“True blue! He believed that. I’m glad.... Has he spoken of me to you
since I was last at the hospital?”
“Hardly,” replied Burton, with the straight, strange glance on her
again.
Carley met this glance and suddenly a coldness seemed to envelop her.
It did not seem to come from within though her heart stopped beating.
Burton had not changed—the warmth, the gratitude still lingered about
him. But the light of his eyes! Carley had seen it in Glenn’s, in
Rust’s—a strange, questioning, far-off light, infinitely aloof and
unutterably sad. Then there came a lift of her heart that released a
pang. She whispered with dread, with a tremor, with an instinct of
calamity.
“How about—Rust?”
“He’s dead.”
The winter came, with its bleak sea winds and cold rains and blizzards
of snow. Carley did not go South. She read and brooded, and gradually
avoided all save those true friends who tolerated her.
She went to the theater a good deal, showing preference for the drama
of strife, and she did not go anywhere for amusement. Distraction and
amusement seemed to be dead issues for her. But she could become
absorbed in any argument on the good or evil of the present day.
Socialism reached into her mind, to be rejected. She had never
understood it clearly, but it seemed to her a state of mind where
dissatisfied men and women wanted to share what harder working or more
gifted people possessed. There were a few who had too much of the
world’s goods and many who had too little. A readjustment of such
inequality and injustice must come, but Carley did not see the remedy
in Socialism.
She devoured books on the war with a morbid curiosity and hope that she
would find some illuminating truth as to the uselessness of sacrificing
young men in the glory and prime of their lives. To her war appeared a
matter of human nature rather than politics. Hate really was an effect
of war. In her judgment future wars could be avoided only in two
ways—by men becoming honest and just or by women refusing to have
children to be sacrificed. As there seemed no indication whatever of
the former, she wondered how soon all women of all races would meet on
a common height, with the mounting spirit that consumed her own heart.
Such time must come. She granted every argument for war and flung
against it one ringing passionate truth—agony of mangled soldiers and
agony of women and children. There was no justification for offensive
war. It was monstrous and hideous. If nature and evolution proved the
absolute need of strife, war, blood, and death in the progress of
animal and man toward perfection, then it would be better to abandon
this Christless code and let the race of man die out.
All through these weeks she longed for a letter from Glenn. But it did
not come. Had he finally roused to the sweetness and worth and love of
the western girl, Flo Hutter? Carley knew absolutely, through both
intelligence and intuition, that Glenn Kilbourne would never love Flo.
Yet such was her intensity and stress at times, especially in the
darkness of waking hours, that jealousy overcame her and insidiously
worked its havoc. Peace and a strange kind of joy came to her in dreams
of her walks and rides and climbs in Arizona, of the lonely canyon
where it always seemed afternoon, of the tremendous colored vastness of
that Painted Desert. But she resisted these dreams now because when she
awoke from them she suffered such a yearning that it became unbearable.
Then she knew the feeling of the loneliness and solitude of the hills.
Then she knew the sweetness of the murmur of falling water, the wind in
the pines, the song of birds, the white radiance of the stars, the
break of day and its gold-flushed close. But she had not yet divined
their meaning. It was not all love for Glenn Kilbourne. Had city life
palled upon her solely because of the absence of her lover? So Carley
plodded on, like one groping in the night, fighting shadows.
One day she received a card from an old schoolmate, a girl who had
married out of Carley’s set, and had been ostracized. She was living
down on Long Island, at a little country place named Wading River. Her
husband was an electrician—something of an inventor. He worked hard. A
baby boy had just come to them. Would not Carley run down on the train
to see the youngster?
That was a strong and trenchant call. Carley went. She found indeed a
country village, and on the outskirts of it a little cottage that must
have been pretty in summer, when the green was on vines and trees. Her
old schoolmate was rosy, plump, bright-eyed, and happy. She saw in
Carley no change—a fact that somehow rebounded sweetly on Carley’s
consciousness. Elsie prattled of herself and her husband and how they
had worked to earn this little home, and then the baby.
When Carley saw the adorable dark-eyed, pink-toed, curly-fisted baby
she understood Elsie’s happiness and reveled in it. When she felt the
soft, warm, living little body in her arms, against her breast, then
she absorbed some incalculable and mysterious strength. What were the
trivial, sordid, and selfish feelings that kept her in tumult compared
to this welling emotion? Had she the secret in her arms? Babies and
Carley had never become closely acquainted in those infrequent meetings
that were usually the result of chance. But Elsie’s baby nestled to her
breast and cooed to her and clung to her finger. When at length the
youngster was laid in his crib it seemed to Carley that the fragrance
and the soul of him remained with her.
“A real American boy!” she murmured.
“You can just bet he is,” replied Elsie. “Carley, you ought to see his
dad.”
“I’d like to meet him,” said Carley, thoughtfully. “Elsie, was he in
the service?”
“Yes. He was on one of the navy transports that took munitions to
France. Think of me, carrying this baby, with my husband on a boat full
of explosives and with German submarines roaming the ocean! Oh, it was
horrible!”
“But he came back, and now all’s well with you,” said Carley, with a
smile of earnestness. “I’m very glad, Elsie.”
“Yes—but I shudder when I think of a possible war in the future. I’m
going to raise boys, and girls, too, I hope—and the thought of war is
torturing.”
Carley found her return train somewhat late, and she took advantage of
the delay to walk out to the wooded headlands above the Sound.
It was a raw March day, with a steely sun going down in a pale-gray
sky. Patches of snow lingered in sheltered brushy places. This bit of
woodland had a floor of soft sand that dragged at Carley’s feet. There
were sere and brown leaves still fluttering on the scrub-oaks. At
length Carley came out on the edge of the bluff with the gray expanse
of sea beneath her, and a long wandering shore line, ragged with
wreckage or driftwood. The surge of water rolled in—a long, low, white,
creeping line that softly roared on the beach and dragged the pebbles
gratingly back. There was neither boat nor living creature in sight.
Carley felt the scene ease a clutching hand within her breast. Here was
loneliness and solitude vastly different from that of Oak Creek Canyon,
yet it held the same intangible power to soothe. The swish of the surf,
the moan of the wind in the evergreens, were voices that called to her.
How many more miles of lonely land than peopled cities! Then the
sea—how vast! And over that the illimitable and infinite sky, and
beyond, the endless realms of space. It helped her somehow to see and
hear and feel the eternal presence of nature. In communion with nature
the significance of life might be realized. She remembered Glenn
quoting: “The world is too much with us. ... Getting and spending, we
lay waste our powers.” What were our powers? What did God intend men to
do with hands and bodies and gifts and souls? She gazed back over the
bleak land and then out across the broad sea. Only a millionth part of
the surface of the unsubmerged earth knew the populous abodes of man.
And the lonely sea, inhospitable to stable homes of men, was thrice the
area of the land. Were men intended, then, to congregate in few places,
to squabble and to bicker and breed the discontents that led to
injustice, hatred, and war? What a mystery it all was! But Nature was
neither false nor little, however cruel she might be.
Once again Carley fell under the fury of her ordeal. Wavering now,
restless and sleepless, given to violent starts and slow spells of
apathy, she was wearing to defeat.
That spring day, one year from the day she had left New York for
Arizona, she wished to spend alone. But her thoughts grew unbearable.
She summed up the endless year. Could she live another like it?
Something must break within her.
She went out. The air was warm and balmy, carrying that subtle current
which caused the mild madness of spring fever. In the Park the greening
of the grass, the opening of buds, the singing of birds, the gladness
of children, the light on the water, the warm sun—all seemed to
reproach her. Carley fled from the Park to the home of Beatrice Lovell;
and there, unhappily, she encountered those of her acquaintance with
whom she had least patience. They forced her to think too keenly of
herself. They appeared carefree while she was miserable.
Over teacups there were waging gossip and argument and criticism. When
Carley entered with Beatrice there was a sudden hush and then a murmur.
“Hello, Carley! Now say it to our faces,” called out Geralda Conners, a
fair, handsome young woman of thirty, exquisitely gowned in the latest
mode, and whose brilliantly tinted complexion was not the natural one
of health.
“Say what, Geralda?” asked Carley. “I certainly would not say anything
behind your backs that I wouldn’t repeat here.”
“Eleanor has been telling us how you simply burned us up.”
“We did have an argument. And I’m not sure I said all I wanted to.”
“Say the rest here,” drawled a lazy, mellow voice. “For Heaven’s sake,
stir us up. If I could get a kick out of _anything_ I’d bless it.”
“Carley, go on the stage,” advised another. “You’ve got Elsie Ferguson
tied to the mast for looks. And lately you’re surely tragic enough.”
“I wish you’d go somewhere far off!” observed a third. “My husband is
dippy about you.”
“Girls, do you know that you actually have not one sensible idea in
your heads?” retorted Carley.
“Sensible? I should hope not. Who wants to be sensible?”
Geralda battered her teacup on a saucer. “Listen,” she called. “I
wasn’t kidding Carley. I am good and sore. She goes around knocking
everybody and saying New York backs Sodom off the boards. I want her to
come out with it right here.”
“I dare say I’ve talked too much,” returned Carley. “It’s been a rather
hard winter on me. Perhaps, indeed, I’ve tried the patience of my
friends.”
“See here, Carley,” said Geralda, deliberately, “just because you’ve
had life turn to bitter ashes in your mouth you’ve no right to poison
it for us. We all find it pretty sweet. You’re an _un_satisfied woman
and if you don’t marry somebody you’ll end by being a reformer or
fanatic.”
“I’d rather end that way than rot in a shell,” retorted Carley.
“I declare, you make me see red, Carley,” flashed Geralda, angrily. “No
wonder Morrison roasts you to everybody. He says Glenn Kilbourne threw
you down for some Western girl. If that’s true it’s pretty small of you
to vent your spleen on us.”
Carley felt the gathering of a mighty resistless force, But Geralda
Conners was nothing to her except the target for a thunderbolt.
“I have no spleen,” she replied, with a dignity of passion. “I have
only pity. I was as blind as you. If heartbreak tore the scales from my
eyes, perhaps that is well for me. For I see something terribly wrong
in myself, in you, in all of us, in the life of today.”
“You keep your pity to yourself. You need it,” answered Geralda, with
heat. “There’s nothing wrong with me or my friends or life in good old
New York.”
“Nothing wrong!” cried Carley. “Listen. Nothing wrong in you or life
today—nothing for you women to make right? You are blind as bats—as
dead to living truth as if you were buried. Nothing wrong when
thousands of crippled soldiers have no homes—no money—no friends—no
work—in many cases no food or bed?... Splendid young men who went away
in their prime to fight for _you_ and came back ruined, suffering!
Nothing wrong when sane women with the vote might rid politics of
partisanship, greed, crookedness? Nothing wrong when prohibition is
mocked by women—when the greatest boon ever granted this country is
derided and beaten down and cheated? Nothing wrong when there are half
a million defective children in this city? Nothing wrong when there are
not enough schools and teachers to educate our boys and girls, when
those teachers are shamefully underpaid? Nothing wrong when the mothers
of this great country let their youngsters go to the dark motion
picture halls and night after night in thousands of towns over all this
broad land see pictures that the juvenile court and the educators and
keepers of reform schools say make burglars, crooks, and murderers of
our boys and vampires of our girls? Nothing wrong when these young
adolescent girls ape _you_ and wear stockings rolled under their knees
below their skirts and use a lip stick and paint their faces and darken
their eyes and pluck their eyebrows and absolutely do not know what
shame is? Nothing wrong when you may find in any city women standing at
street corners distributing booklets on birth control? Nothing wrong
when great magazines print no page or picture without its sex appeal?
Nothing wrong when the automobile, so convenient for the innocent
little run out of town, presents the greatest evil that ever menaced
American girls! Nothing wrong when money is god—when luxury, pleasure,
excitement, speed are the striven for? Nothing wrong when some of your
husbands spend more of their time with other women than with you?
Nothing wrong with jazz—where the lights go out in the dance hall and
the dancers jiggle and toddle and wiggle in a frenzy? Nothing wrong in
a country where the greatest college cannot report birth of one child
to each graduate in ten years? Nothing wrong with race suicide and the
incoming horde of foreigners?... Nothing wrong with you women who
cannot or will not stand childbirth? Nothing wrong with most of you,
when if you _did_ have a child, you could not nurse it?... Oh, my God,
there’s nothing wrong with America except that she staggers under a
Titanic burden that only mothers of sons can remove!... You doll women,
you parasites, you toys of men, you silken-wrapped geisha girls, you
painted, idle, purring cats, you parody of the females of your
species—find brains enough if you can to see the doom hanging over you
and revolt before it is too late!”