"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."