by Zane Grey
“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.”
