Wanderer of the Wasteland

by Grey, Zane

  Adam turned away as he replied. He did not choose then to show in his eyes the leaping thought that had been born of the memory and of Virey’s strange reaction. But he heard him draw a quick, sharp breath and step back. Then a silence ensued. Adam gazed up at the endless slope, at the millions of rocks, all apparently resting lightly in their pockets, ready to plunge down.

  “So—so that was it,” spoke up Virey, evidently with effort. “I always wondered. Wild West sort of story, you know. Strange I should meet you … Thanks for telling me. I gather it wasn’t pleasant for you.”

  “It’s sickening to recall, but I have no regrets,” replied Adam.

  “Quite so. I understand. Man of the desert—ruthless—inhuman sort of thing.”

  “Inhuman?” queried Adam, and he looked at Virey, at last stung. Behind Virey’s pale, working face and averted eyes Adam read a conscience in tumult, a spirit for the moment terrorized. “Virey, you and I ’d never agree on meaning of words … I broke McKue’s arms and ribs and legs, and while I cracked them I told him what an inhuman dastard he had been—to ruin a girl, to beat her, to abandon her and her baby—to leave them to die. I told him how I had watched them die … then I broke his neck! … McKue was the inhuman man—not I.”

  Virey turned away, swaying a little, and his white hand, like a woman’s, sought the stone wall for support, until he reached the shack, which he entered.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Virey, that story had to come up,” said Adam, confronting her with reluctance. But she surprised him again. He expected to find her sickened, shrinking from him as a bloody monster, perhaps half fainting; he found, however, that she seemed serene, controlling deep emotions that manifested themselves only in the marble whiteness of her cheek, the strained darkness of her eye.

  “The story was beautiful. I had not heard it,” she said, and the rich tremor of her voice thrilled Adam. “What woman would not revel in such a story? … Wansfell the Wanderer. It should be Sir Wansfell, Knight of the Desert! … Don’t look at me so. Have you not learned that the grandest act on earth is when a man fights for the honor or love or happiness or life of a woman? … I am a woman. Many men have loved me. Virey’s love is so strong that it is hate. But no man ever yet thought of me—no man ever yet heard the little songs that echoed through my soul—no man ever fought to save me! … My friend, I dare speak as you speak, with the nakedness of the desert. And so I tell you that just now I watched my husband—I listened to the words which told his nature, as if that was new to me. I watched you stand there— I listened to you. And so I dare to tell you—if you come to fight my battles I shall have added to my life of shocks and woes a trouble that will dwarf all the others … the awakening of a woman who has been blind! … The facing of my soul—perhaps its salvation! A crowning agony—a glory come too late!”

  Chapter

  XVI

  At sunset Adam cooked supper for the Vireys, satisfying his own needs after they had finished. Virey talked lightly, even joked about the first good meal he had sat down to on the desert. His wife, too, talked serenely, sometimes with the faintly subtle mockery, as if she had never intimated that a dividing spear threatened her heart. That was their way to hide the truth and emotion when they willed. But Adam was silent.

  Alone, out under the shadow of the towering gate to the valley, he strode to and fro, absorbed in a maze of thoughts that gradually cleared, as if by the light of the solemn stars and virtue of the speaking silence. He had chanced upon the strangest and most fatal situation in all his desert years. Yes, but was it by chance? Straight as an arrow he had come across the barrens to meet a wonderful woman who was going to love him, and a despicable man whom he was going to kill. That seemed the fatality which rang in his ears, shone in the accusing stars, hid in the heavy shadows. It was a matter of feeling. His intelligence could not grasp it. Had he been in Death Valley four days or four months? Was he walking in his sleep, victim of a nightmare? The desert, faithful always, answered him. This was nothing but the flux and reflux of human passion, contending tides between man and woman, the littleness, the curse, the terror, and yet the joy of life. Death Valley yawned at his feet, changeless and shadowy, awful in its locked solemnity of solitude, its voice-lessness, its desolation that had been desolation in past ages. He could doubt nothing there. His thought seemed almost above human error. A spirit spoke for him.

  Virey had dragged his wife to this lonely and dismal hellhole on earth to share his misery, to isolate her from men, to hide her glory of charm, to gloat over her loneliness, to revenge himself for a wrong, to feed his need of possession, his terrible love that had become hate, to watch the slow torture of her fading, wilting, drooping in this ghastly valley, to curse her living, to burn endlessly in torment because her soul would elude him forever, to drive her to death and die with her.

  Death Valley seemed a harmonious setting for this tragedy and a fitting grave for its actors. The worst in nature calling to the darkest in mankind! What a pity Virey could not divine his littleness—that he had been a crawling maggot in the peopled ulcer of the world—that in the great spaces where the sun beat down was a fiery cleansing.

  But Magdalene Virey was a riddle beyond solving. Nevertheless, Adam pondered every thought that would stay before his consciousness. Any woman was a riddle. Did not the image of Margarita Arrallanes flash up before him—that dusky-eyed, mindless, soulless little animal, victim of nature born in her? Adam’s thought halted with the seeming sacrilege of associating Magdalene Virey with memory of the Mexican girl. This Virey woman had complexity—she had mind, passion nobility, soul. What had she done to earn her husband’s hate? She had never loved him—that was as fixed in Adam’s sight as the North Star. Nor had she loved another man, at least not with the passion and spirit of her wonderful womanhood. Adam divined that with the intensity of feeling that the desert loneliness and solitude had taught him. He could have felt the current of any woman’s great passion, whether it was in torrent, full charged and devastating, or at its lowering ebb. But, as inevitable as was life itself, there was the mysterious certainty that Magdalene Virey had terribly wronged her husband. How? Adam had repudiated any interest in what had driven them here; not until this moment had he permitted his doubt to insult the woman. Yet how helpless he was! His heart was full of unutterable pity. He could never have loved Magdalene Virey as a man, but as a brother he was yearning to change her, save her. What else in life was worth living for, except only the dreams on the heights, the walks along the lonely trails? By his own agony he had a strange affinity for anyone in trouble, especially a woman, and how terribly he saw the tragedy of Magdalene Virey! And it was not only her death that he saw. Death in a land where death reigned was nothing. For her he hated the certainty of physical pain, the turgid pulse, the red-hot iron band at the temples, the bearing down of weighted air, the drying up of flesh and blood. More than all he hated the thought of death of her spirit while her body lived. There would be a bloodless murder long before her blood stained Virey’s hands.

  But this thought gave Adam pause. Was he not dealing with a personality beyond his power to divine? What did he know of this strange woman? He knew naught, but felt all. She was beautiful, compelling, secretive, aloof, and proud, magnificent as a living flame. She was mocking because knowledge of the world, of the frailty of women and falsity of men, had been as an open page. She had lived in sight of the crowded mart, the showplaces where men and women passed, knowing no more of earth than that it was a place for graves. She was bitter because she had drunk bitterness to the dregs. But the sudden up-flashing warmth of her, forced out of her reserve, came from a heart of golden fire. Adam constituted himself an omniscient judge, answerable only to his conscience. By all the gods he would be true to the truth of this woman!

  Never had she been forced into this desert of desolation. That thought of Adam’s seemed far back in the past. She had dared to come. Had Death Valley and the death it was famed for any terrors for her? By the side of he
r husband she had willingly come, unutterably despising him, infinitely brave where he was cowardly, scornfully and magnificently prepared to meet any punishment that might satisfy him. Adam saw how, in this, Magdalene Virey was answering to some strange need in itself. Let the blind, weak, egoist Virey demand the tortures of the damned! She would pay. But she was paying also a debt to herself. Adam’s final conception of Magdalene Virey was that she had been hideously wronged by life, by men; that in younger days of passionate revolt she had transgressed the selfish law of husbands; that in maturer years, with the storm and defeat and disillusion of womanhood, she had risen to the heights, she had been true to herself; and with mockery of the man who could so underestimate her, who dared believe he could make her a craven, whimpering, guilty wretch, she had faced the desert with him. She had seen the great love that was not love change to terrible hate. She had divined the hidden motive. She let him revel in his hellish secret joy. She welcomed Death Valley.

  Adam marveled at this unquenchable spirit, this sublime effrontery of a woman. And he hesitated to dare to turn that spirit from its superb indifference. But this vacillation in him was weak. What a wonderful experience it would be to embody in Magdalene Virey the instinct, the strife, the nature of the desert! With her mind, if he had the power to teach, she would grasp the lesson in a single day.

  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! 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 godforsaken 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 of 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 plowed 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 realized 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 Mephistophe-les, 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 recognizable 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 color and sage odor; 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; today they bloom, tomorrow 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, gently 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!