Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982)

by Grey, Zane

  And lastly, her unforgettable implication, "the crowning agony," of what he might bring upon her. There could be only one interpretation of that--love. The idea thrilled him, but only with wonder and pity. It took possession of Adam's imagination. Well, such love might come to pass I The desert storms bridged canyons with sand in one day. It was a place of violence. The elements waited not upon time or circumstance. The few women Adam had come in contact with on the desert had loved him. Even the one-eyed Mohave Jo, that hideous, unsexed, monstrous deformity of a woman, whom he had left grovelling in the sand at his feet, shamed at last before a crowd of idle, gaping, vile men--even she had awakened to this strange madness of love. But Adam had not wanted that of any woman, since the poignant moment of his youth on the desert, when the dusky eyed Margarita had murmured of love so fresh and sweet to him, "Ah, so long ago and far away!"

  Least of all did Adam want the love of Magdalene Virey.

  "If she were young and I were young! Or if she had never...!" Ah! even possibilities, like might-have-beens, were useless dreams. But the die was cast. Serve Magdalene Virey he would, and teach her the secret of the strength of the sand wastes and the lonely hills, and that the victory of life was not to yield. Fight for her, too, he would. In all the multiplicity of ways he had learned, he would fight the solitude and loneliness of Death Valley, the ghastliness so inimical to the creative life of a woman, the heat, the thirst, the starvation, the poison air, the furnace wind, storm and flood and avalanche. Just as naturally, if need be, if it fatefully fell out so, he would lay his slaying hands in all their ruthless might upon the man who had made her dare her doom.

  When, next morning at sunrise hour, Adam presented himself at the Virey camp, he was greeted by Mrs. Virey, seemingly a transformed woman. She wore a riding suit, the worn condition of which attested to the rough ride across the mountain. What remarkable difference it made in her appearance! It detracted from her height. And the slenderness of her, revealed rather than suggested by her gowns, showed much of grace and symmetry. She had braided her hair and let it hang. When the sun had tanned her white face and hands Magdalene Virey would really be transformed.

  Adam tried not to stare, but his effort was futile.

  "Good morning," she said, with a bright smile.

  "Why, Mrs. Virey, I--I hardly knew you!" he stammered.

  "Thanks. I feel complimented. It is the first time you've looked at me. Shorn of my dignity--no, my worldliness, do I begin well, desert man?...No more stuffy dresses clogging my feet! No more veils to protect my face! Let the sun burn! I want to work. I want to help. I want to learn. If madness must be mine, let it be a madness to learn what in this God-forsaken land ever made you the man you are. There, Sir Wansfell, I have flung down the gage."

  "Very well," replied Adam, soberly.

  "And now," she continued, "I am eager to work. If I blunder, be patient. If I am stupid, make me see. And if I faint in the sun or fall beside the trail, remember, it is my poor body that fails, and not my will."

  So, in the light al her keen interest, Adam found the humdrum mixing of dough and the baking of bread a pleasure and a lesson to him, rather than a task.

  "Ah! how important are the homely things of life!" she said. "A poet said 'we live too much in the world.'...I wonder did he mean just this. We grow away from or never learn the simple things. I remember my grandfather's farm--the ploughed fields, the green corn, the yellow wheat, the chickens in the garden, the mice in the barn, the smell of hay, the smell of burning leaves, the smell of the rich brown earth...Wansfell, not for years have I remembered them. Something about you, the way you worked over that bread, like a nice old country lady, made me remember...Oh, I wonder what I have missed!"

  "We all miss something. It can't be helped. But there are compensations, and it's never too late."

  "You are a child, with all your bigness. You have the mind of a child."

  "That's one of my few blessings...Now you try your hand at mixing the second batch of dough."

  She made a picture on her knees, with her sleeves rolled up, her beautiful hands white with flour, her face beginning to flush. Adam wanted to laugh at her absolute failure to mix dough, and at the same moment he had it in him to weep over the earnestness, the sadness, the pathetic meaning of her.

  Eventually they prepared the meal, and she carried Virey's breakfast in to him. Then she returned to eat with Adam.

  "I shall wash the dishes," she announced.

  "No," he protested.

  Then came a clash. It ended with a compromise. And from that clash Adam realised he might dominate her in little things, but in a great conflict of wills she would be the stronger. It was a step in his own slow education. There was a constitutional difference between men and women.

  Upon Adam's resumption of the work around the shack Mrs. Virey helped him as much as he would permit, which by midday was somewhat beyond her strength. Her face sunburned rosily and her hands showed the contact with dirt and her boots were dusty.

  "You mustn't overdo it," he advised. "Rest and sleep during the noon hours."

  She retired within the shack and did not reappear till the middle of the afternoon. Meanwhile, Adam had worked at his tasks, trying at the same time to keep an eye on Virey who wandered around aimlessly over the rock-strewn field, idling here and plodding there. Adam saw how Virey watched the shack; and when Magdalene came out again he saw her and grew as motionless as the stone where he leaned. Every thought of Virey's must have been dominated by this woman's presence, the meaning of her, the possibilities of her, the tragedy of her.

  "Oh, how I slept!" she exclaimed. "Is it work that makes you sleep?

  "Indeed yes.

  "Ah! I see my noble husband standing like Mephistopheles, smiling at grief...What's he doing over there?"

  "I don't know, unless it's watching for you. He's been around like that for hours."

  "Poor man!" she said, with both compassion and mockery. "Watching me? What loss of precious time--and so futile! It is a habit he contracted some years ago...Wansfell, take me down to the opening in the mountain there, so that I can look into Death Valley."

  "Shall I ask Virey?" queried Adam, in slight uncertainty.

  "No. Let him watch or follow or do as he likes. I am here in Death Valley. It was his cherished plan to bury me here. I shall not leave until he takes me--which will be never. For the rest, he is nothing to me. We are as far apart as the poles."

  On the way down the gentle slope Adam halted amid sun-blasted shrubs, scarcely recognisable as greasewood. Here he knelt in the gravel to pluck some flowers so tiny that only a trained eye could ever have espied them. One was a little pink flower with sage colour and sage odour; another a white daisy, very frail, and without any visible leaves; and a third was a purple-red flower, half the size of the tiniest buttercup, and this had small dark-green leaves.

  "Flowers in Death Valley!" exclaimed Mrs. Virey, in utter amaze.

  "Yes. Flowers of a day! They sprang up yesterday; to-day they bloom, to-morrow they will die. I don't know their names. To me their blossoming is one of the wonders of the desert. I think sometimes that it is a promise. A whole year the tiny seeds lie in the hot sands. Then comes a mysterious call and the green plant shoots its inch-long stalk to the sun. Another day beauty unfolds and there is fragrance on the desert air. Another day sees them wither and die."

  "Beauty and fragrance indeed they have," mused the woman. "Such tiny flowers to look and smell so sweet! I never saw their like. Flowers of a day!...They indeed give rise to thoughts too deep for tears!"

  Adam led his companion to the base of the mountain wall, and around the corner of the opening, so that they came suddenly and unexpectedly into full view of Death Valley. He did not look at her. He wanted to wait a little before doing that. The soft gasp which escaped her lips and the quick grasping of his hand were significant of the shock she sustained.

  Their position faced mostly down the valley. It seemed a vast level, gentl
y sloping up to the borders where specks of mesquites dotted the sand. Dull grey and flat, these league-wide wastes of speckled sand bordered a dazzling-white sunlit belt, the winding bottom of the long bowl, the salty dead stream of Death Valley. Miles and miles below, two mountain ranges blended in a purple blaze, and endless slanting lines of slopes ran down to merge in the valley floor. The ranges sent down offshoots of mountains that slanted and lengthened into the valley. One bright-green oasis, that, lost in the vastness, was comparable to one of the tiny flowers Adam had plucked out of the sand, shone wonderfully and illusively out of the glare of grey and white. A dim, mystic scene!

  "0 God!...It is my grave!" cried Magdalene Virey.

  "We are all destined for graves," replied Adam, solemnly. "Could any grave elsewhere be so grand--so lonely--so peaceful?...Now let us walk out a little way, to the edge of that ridge, and sit there while the sun sets."

  On this vantage point they were out some distance in the valley, so that they could see even the western end of the Panamint range, where a glaring sun had begun to change its colour over the bold black peaks. A broad shadow lengthened across the valley and crept up the yellow foothills to the red Funeral Mountains. This shadow marvellously changed to purple, and as the radiance of light continued to shade, the purple deepened. Over all the valley at the western end appeared a haze the colour of which was nameless. Adam felt the lessening heat of the sinking sun. Half that blaze was gone. It had been gold and was now silver. He swept his gaze around jealously, not to miss the transformations; and his companion, silent and absorbed, instinctively turned with him. Across the valley the Funerals towered, ragged and sharp, with rosy crowns; and one, the only dome-shaped peak, showed its strata of grey and drab through the rose. Another peak, farther back, lifted a pink shaft into the blue sky. What a contrast to the lower hills and slopes, so beautifully pearl grey in tint! And now, almost the instant Adam had marked the exquisite colours, they began to fade. On that illimitable horizon line there were soon no bright tones left. Far to the south, peaks that had been dim now stood out clear and sharp against the sky. One, gold capped and radiant, shadowed as if a cloud had come between it and the sun. Adam turned again to the west, in time to see the last vestige of silver fire vanish. Sunset!

  A sombre smoky sunset it was now, as if this Death Valley was the gateway of hell and its sinister shades were upflung from fire. Adam saw a vulture sail across the clear space of sky, breasting the wind. It lent life to the desolation.

  The desert day was done and the desert shades began to descend. The moment was tranquil and sad. It had little to do with the destiny of man--nothing except that by some inscrutable design of God or an accident of evolution man happened to be imprisoned where nature never intended man to be. Death Valley was only a ragged rent of the old earth, where men wandered wild, brooding, lost, or where others sought with folly and passion to dig forth golden treasure. The mysterious lights changed. A long pale radiance appeared over the western range and lengthened along its bold horizon. The only red colour left was way to the south, and that shone dim. The air held a solemn stillness.

  "Magdalene Virey," said Adam, "what you see there resembles death--it may be death--but it is peace. Does it not rest your troubled soul? A woman must be herself here."

  She, whose words could pour out in such torrent of eloquence, was silent now. Adam looked at her then, into the shadowed eyes. What he saw there awed him. The abyss seen through those beautiful, unguarded windows of her soul was like the grey scored valley beneath, but lighting, quickening with thought, with hope, with life. Death Valley was a part of the earth dying, and it would become like a canyon on the burned-out moon; but this woman's spirit seemed everlasting. If her soul had been a whited sepulchre, it was in the way of transfiguration. Adam experienced a singular exaltation in the moment, a gladness beyond his comprehension, a sense that the present strange communion there between this woman's awakening and the terrible lessons of his life was creating for him a far-distant interest, baffling, but great in its inspiration.

  In the gathering twilight he led her back to camp, content that it seemed still impossible for her to speak. But the touch of her hand at parting was more eloquent than any words.

  Then alone, in his blankets, with gaze up at the inscrutable, promising stars, Adam gave himself over to insistent and crowding thoughts, back of which throbbed a dominating, divine hope in his power to save this woman's life and soul, and perhaps even her happiness.

  Next day Adam's natural aggressiveness asserted itself, controlled now by an imperturbable spirit that nothing could daunt. He approached Virey relentlessly, though with kindness, even good nature, and he began to talk about Death Valley, the perilous nature of the camping spot, the blasting heat of midsummer and the horror of the midnight furnace winds, the possibility of the water drying up. Virey was cold, then impatient, then intolerant, and finally furious. First he was deaf to Adam's persuasion, then he tried to get out of listening, then he repudiated all Adam had said, and finally he raved and cursed. Adam persisted in his arguments until Virey strode off.

  Mrs. Virey heard some of this clash. Apparently Adam's idea of changing her husband amused her. But when Virey returned for supper he was glad enough to eat, and when Adam again launched his argument it appeared that Mrs. Virey lost the last little trace of mockery. She listened intently while Adam told her husband why he would have to take his wife away from Death Valley before midsummer. Virey might as well have been stone deaf. It was not Virey, however, who interested the woman, but something about Adam that made her look and listen thoughtfully.

  Thus began a singular time for Adam, unmatched in all his desert experience. He gave his whole heart to the task of teaching Magdalene Virey and to the wearing down of Virey's will. All the lighter tasks that his hands had learned he taught her. Then to climb to the heights, to pick the ledges for signs of gold or pan the sandy washes, to know the rocks and the few species of vegetation, to recognise the illusion of distance and colour, to watch the sunsets and the stars became daily experiences. Hard as work was for her delicate hands and muscles, he urged her to their limit. During the first days she suffered sunburn, scalds, skinned fingers, bruised knees, and extreme fatigue. When she grew tanned and stronger he led her out on walks and climbs so hard that he had to help her back to camp. She learned the meaning of physical pain, and to endure it. She learned the blessing it was to eat when she was famished, to rest when she was utterly weary, to sleep when sleep was peace.

  Through these brief, full days Adam attacked Virey at every opportunity, which time came to be, at length, only during meals. Virey would leave camp, often to go up the slope of weathered rocks, a dangerous climb that manifestly fascinated him. Reaching a large rock that became his favourite place, he would perch there for long hours, watching, gazing down like a vulture waiting for time to strike its prey. All about him seemed to suggest a brooding wait. He slept during the midday hours and through the long nights. At dusk, which was usually bedtime for all, Adam often heard him, talking to Mrs. Virey in a low, hard, passionate voice. Sometimes her melodious tones, with the mockery always present when she spoke to her husband, thrilled Adam, while at the same moment it filled him with despair. But Adam never despaired of driving Virey to leave the valley. The man was weak in all ways except that side which pertained to revenge. Notwithstanding the real and growing obstacle of this passion, Adam clung to his conviction that in the end Virey would collapse. When, however, one day the Indians came, and Virey sent them away with a large order for supplies, Adam gave vent to a grim thought, "Well, I can always kill him."

  All the disgust and loathing Adam felt for this waster of life vanished in the presence of Magdalene Virey. If that long-passed sunset hour over Death Valley had awakened the woman, what had been the transformation of the weeks? Adam had no thoughts that adequately expressed his feeling for the change in her. It gave him further reverence for desert sun and heat and thirst and violence and solitude.
It gave him strange new insight into the mystery of life. Was any healing of disease or agony impossible--any change of spirit--any renewal of life? Nothing in relation to human life was impossible. Magnificently the desert magnified and multiplied time, thought, effort, pain, health, hope--all that could be felt.

  It seemed to Adam that through the physical relation to the desert he was changing Magdalene Virey's body and heart and soul. Brown her face and hands had grown; and slowly the graceful, thin lines of her slender body had begun to round out. She was gaining. If it had not been for her shadowed eyes, and the permanent sadness and mockery in the beautiful lips, she would have been like a girl of eighteen. Her voice, too, with its contralto richness, its mellow depth, its subtle shades of tone, proclaimed the woman. Adam at first had imagined her to be about thirty years old, but as time passed by, and she grew younger with renewed strength, he changed his mind. Looking at her to guess her age was like looking at the desert illusions. Absolute certainty he had, however, of the reward and result of her inflexible will, of splendid spirit, of sincere gladness. She had endured physical toil and pain to the limit of her frail strength, until she was no longer frail. This spirit revived what had probably been early childish love of natural things; and action and knowledge developed it until her heart was wholly absorbed in all that it was possible to do there in that lonesome fastness. With the genius and intuition of a woman she had grasped at the one solace left her--the possibility of learning Adam's lesson of. the desert. What had taken him years to acquire she learned from him or divined in days. She had a wonderful mind.

  Once, while they were resting upon a promontory that overhung the valley, Adam spoke to her. She did not hear him. Her eyes reflected the wonder and immensity of the waste beneath her. Indeed, she did not appear to be brooding or thinking. And when he spoke again, breaking in upon her abstraction, she was startled. He forgot what he had intended to say, substituting a query as to her thoughts.