THE CHOICE THAT COMES TO ALL MEN
"Did you notice anything?" demanded Brydges, as the old stranger went
down the Ridge trail. "She knows English as well as you do; and she is
a French breed. Why did she put on to be Mexican? What did she sneak
for? Whole thing cussed queer. What do you make of it? Matthews?
Matthews? I recall that name. Fellow by that name wrote our paper to
know if any Canadian settlers had come here! Say, Wayland, the old man
pricked up his ears at MacDonald's name--spoke of Rebellion Days."
"Oh, shut it off, Bat! What in the world has a travelling half-cracked
ranting old evangelist to do with the MacDonald family? He'll land on
the Mission for a week or two free like the rest of 'em! He'll likely
preach Hell-fire to Indians, who'll not know a word of what he says
till Mr. Williams gives him a call to move on--"
"All the same," retorted Bat, disappearing inside the cabin.
Wayland passed a bad night, the worst he had known on the Holy Cross,
contending with what comes to all lives, and to many lives many times.
The Ranger had absorbed the average amount of Sunday school pabulum
that floats round in the mental atmosphere of all youth, that, if you
keep on doing right and doing it hard, things will turn out all right
in the end. Well, he told himself bluntly, he _had_ been doing right
and doing it hard, just as hundreds of the Land Office field men and
Land Office attorneys had been doing right in their vain endeavour to
stop public loot;--and things had turned out all wrong. What did his
four years' fight stand for, anyway? Marking time, that was all.
Nothing accomplished except the wasting of four years of his own life;
and, while that may be small enough in the sum total of things, where a
thousand seeds go to waste for one that bears fruit, it is
overwhelmingly big to the individual man. If he had been the one and
only failure of the Civil Service workers, he could have accused
himself and taken the Senator's advice to "chuck" the fool-theory of
men in public service fighting for right; but he was only one of a
multitude of men, paid public money to prevent the looting of public
property; whose work was blocked, non-suited, pigeon-holed, bluffed,
hampered, or, worst of all, carried up to investigating committees
whose sole purpose was to conceal and wear the public out with
interminable wrangles over technicalities that were irrelevant.
Better men than he had fought doggedly only to be downed. There was
the Land Office man in Oregon dismissed for the slip of a wrong entry
in his field book because he had quite unintentionally unearthed the
frauds of a member of the land-loot ring who happened to be a
congressman. There was the Federal attorney hounded from his home city
because he prosecuted bribe-givers and objected to being shot while on
duty in the court room. There was that other Federal Law man, shot at
the shaft of a coal mine stolen from public lands. There was the Army
Engineer demoted from his life work because he fought for a free harbor
for a great city and offended the railroad fighting to keep that harbor
closed. There were the two Forest Service men dismissed for giving
facts to the public. Then, there was the Alaska Case--Wayland laughed;
and the laugh was a little bitter. Surely the crowning farce of all:
that had gone up easily to investigation with a blare of trumpets and a
flare of news headlines. That was the easiest of all.
It made good politics, yet--it was so involved in technicalities, while
it offered a bit of by-play to the gallery, that there had never from
the first, even for the fraction of an instant, been the faintest hope
of anything but confusion emerging from the investigation; but it
played into the game without hurting anybody. If they had really
wanted to investigate, why didn't they take a case in which there were
no technicalities of law, the looted red-lands of California, for
instance; or the half-million of timber openly stolen each year for a
certain smelting ring; or the two thousand acres of coal where Smelter
City itself was built; or the shooting of the Federal Law Officer down
at that other coal mine? These cases involved no "twilight zone" of
dispute as to law, in which the "system" and the "ring" could hide.
Every Government man knew the evidence was plain and complete in these
cases: yet they were pigeon-holed, let lapse for the Statute of
Limitations to bar action. Why?
Wayland sat down on the slab seat, and the personal reasons came
trooping against his resolutions like the scouts of an oncoming host.
To begin with, he could make more money outside the Service. The
Government men were paid less than foreign ditch-diggers; but then,
which of the men remained in the Service for money? He ran his mind
over half a dozen fellows in the Agricultural Department who had
increased the nation's wealth by hundreds of millions a year. They
were working at salaries less than a Wall Street Junior clerk or office
girl. The question of salary didn't come in as an argument. That
could be dismissed. But there was the bitter fact, he was
accomplishing absolutely nothing by continuing the struggle, nothing
more than a woman yoked to a Silenus hoping to reform him when he daily
grew worse under her eyes. The Government had blocked him. The party
had blocked him. What was the pith of it all, anyway? _Should those
who had the power be given the legal right to take what they cared to
seize_? It was the same old question that had split every country up
into revolution. And closest of all, keenest of all arguments, the new
influence that had come into his life, possessing it, obsessing it. He
might put her out of his thoughts as a possibility. That would not
dull the edge of his own hunger. By staying on he barred all
possibility of ultimate happiness, perhaps her happiness: yet, if he
abandoned the fight for right, he would be unworthy of her. Sooner or
later she would know, and, though she might remain mute, was she the
one to make semblance of what she did not feel? If the light died from
her eye, it would die from his life. He was not a Silenus to guzzle
hog-like over husks when the life had gone. Besides--Wayland laughed
aloud--the idea of her nature permitting a Silenus near enough to
breathe the same atmosphere that she breathed was inconceivable. There
was one chance--one chance only--Get the issue before the People,
squarely, fairly, openly before the People; awaken the People; mass the
law of the snow flake to the mighty rush of the avalanche; let the
People know, force the People to pronounce the verdict. Wayland
thought of Bat inside the cabin--, and laughed bitterly. He rose and
began pacing the edge of the Ridge. There he was, back in the old
hopeless circle.
Her touch had wrapped him in a vision world; but across the clearness
of the vision now somehow obtruded the quiet cynicism, the genial scoff
of the Senator's arguments, leaving fierce physical unrest and confused
cross-currents of desire. A mist seemed to blurr all life. The
hemlocks no longer chanted riotous gladness. There was a dirge
to-night of futility, monotonous age-old eons of useless effort, the
useless fall of the forest giant to the dry rot of slug and insect. It
was as if Wayland's spirit stood back and listened to the conflicting
contentions of two other men, the one who wanted to breast the stream
and the one who wanted to go with the current; one full of blind,
red-blood courage, the other full of cold white-corpuscled argument;
one a zealous sportsman playing the game for the game's zest, the other
a quitter because he foresaw no gain.
Not a doubt of it; it was a doleful business, this being stuck half-way
up between heaven and earth cut off from everything but renunciation.
_Why_, was he doing it? What was to be gained? It would have
surprised Wayland if he had disentangled out of his own weltering
thoughts the fact that he had never weighed _gain_ as an argument
before Moyese talked. He had never known the coward's fear of loss.
What was it they had said to him? 'Blocked at every turn,'--'Has your
boasted Federal Government taken any action?'--'This is the Service you
are loyal to,'--'Who of the public gives one damn for right or wrong?'
Had it really come to that? Was that the seat of the trouble? Did the
public care? 'Go lean frying fat for posterity?' All those voices
strident, scoffing; then, part of the night's voiceless voices, that
other undertone--'Nothing accomplished without somebody fighting a
losing battle,'--'What so heroic about a fighter more or less going
down beaten?' It was nothing heroic at all unless you happened to be
the fighter. And what was the sense of accepting a challenge to a
losing battle? 'I want a man who can fight like the Devil.' Well,
that was what the whole world wanted--always had needed and wanted; and
he and hundreds of other Government fellows were applicants for just
such a fighting job. What was it that comical old sermonizing duffer
had ranted about? Oh, yes! If the Devil (of course, there wasn't a
Devil), if the Devil came tempting to-day 'twould be such a place as
this.' 'Etches, he would proffer as of old,' 'the biggest gamble of
all,' 'play for the biggest stake outside of Hell,' 'The Fate . . . of
the Land . . . with all Time looking on . . . since ever Time began,'
'all the World looking on . . . asking . . . keep sacred as the
Covenant of God . . . The stakes I'd play for . . . if I were
young . . . I'd up . . . I'd up . . . I'd up . . . stripped naked of
very hold-back . . . I'd hurl the lie in the teeth of a scoffing
world. I'd hurl y'r traitor leaders huckstering the land's good for
silver. . . . Fight . . . right . . . might . . . I'd paint the words
in letters of blood till they awakened the land. . . . I'd fight . . .
fight . . . fight till they had to kill every man of my kind before I'd
down . . .'
The old man had been like the storm wind of the mountains hurling off
the dead leaves of thought. Wayland paused in his pacing. The opal
peak emerged from pearl gray cloud wrack; a silver cross, translucent,
unreal, luminous, a thing of dreams winged with silver light beneath a
solitary star, eternal as God. And the night wind through the pines,
that had sounded so doleful but a moment before, became the jubilant
clicking of countless castanets, the castanets of the long pine
needles, sounding a triumphant chant to the touch of invisible hands.
Wayland stopped pacing. He almost stopped thinking. The
consciousness, the realizing sense of her presence, of her touch, of a
something more than her touch, of her being enveloping his in some
ethereal fire, went over the Ranger in fiercely tender flood tides;
this time, not in tumultuous confused desire, but in waves of strength,
in visions from which the mists had vanished, daring that laughed with
gladness over life. There were no longer two Waylands in conflict,
with one sneering and looking on. "A house divided against itself
shall fall." There was only one, with the blood of mothers in his
veins, whelmed by a consciousness that reached back far as the
consciousness of the race. Somehow, his simple manhood, the
inheritance in his blood of men and women, who had loved, fused the
conflict of his nature to a singleness of purpose and won peace now.
What he said was: "Come on, my friend, the enemy! I'm right here on
the job; nailed, you bet, long as she does it! Just to come alive is
worth being crucified."
"Hullo," bawled a towsled head through the cabin window. "Aren't you
going to turn in? It's exactly twelve o'clock! Darn it all! Don't
make a sleep-walking Lady Macbeth tragedy out of it! Chuck the bally
thing and come on down to the Valley! Why do you waste your life
pretending you are Providence steering the whole earth? Chuck it,
Dickie! If you were in town, I'd give you a cocktail! Got anything up
here?"
Wayland went to sleep to dream one of those dreams that envelop day
with rain-bow mist. He dreamed that the amethyst gates of the sun had
swung ajar flooding life with countless charioteers each carrying a
golden spear, and as they advanced over the clouds to earth, all the
little purple heather bells that had hung their heads during the night
to keep out the dew, all the waxy chalices of the winter-greens pale
and faint with passion, all the bells nodding to the wind, began
ringing--ringing ten thousand golden bells; and the painter's brush,
multicolored dazzling knee-deep in the Alpine meadows, flaunted
countless torches of carmine flame to welcome back the day. Then,
suddenly, it wasn't a sound of bells at all. It was her voice, her
voice with the golden note and the liquid break that came when he had
surprised Love in her eyes; and it wasn't the warmth of the Sun's
fan-shaped shafts at all; it was the warmth of her lips in the face of
the picture she had promised--the face above "the Warrior." When he
awakened, a sprig of everlasting that he had stuck in the band of his
Alpine hat had blown across his face.