Wanderer of the Wasteland

by Grey, Zane

  “O 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 color 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 marvelously 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 color 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 colors, 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 somber 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 color 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 recognize the illusion of distance and color, 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 favorite 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 s
adness 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.

  “How strange!” she murmured. “I didn’t have a thought. I forgot where I was. Your voice seemed to come from far off.”

  “I spoke to you before, but you didn’t hear,” said Adam. “You looked sort of, well—watchful, I ’d call it.”

  “Watchful? Yes, I was. I feel I was, but I don’t remember. This is indeed a strange state for Magdalene Virey. It behooves her to cultivate it. But what kind of a state was it? … Wansfell, could it have been happiness?”

  She asked that in a whisper, serious, and with pathos, yet with a smile.

  “It’s always happiness for me to watch from the heights. Surely you are finding happy moments?”

  “Yes, many thanks to you, my friend. But they are conscious happy moments, just sheer joy of movement, or sight of beauty, or a thrill of hope, or perhaps a vague dream of old, far-off, unhappy things. And it is happiness to remember them … But this was different. It was unconscious. I tell you, Wansfell, I did not have a thought in my mind! I saw— I watched. Oh, how illusive it is!”

  “Try to recall it,” he suggested, much interested.

  “I try—I try,” she said, presently, “but the spell is broken.”

  “Well, then, let me put a thought into your mind,” went on Adam. “Dismukes and I once had a long talk about the desert. Why does it fascinate all men? What is the secret? Dismukes didn’t rate himself high as a thinker. But he is a thinker. He knows the desert. To me he’s great. And he and I agreed that the commonly accepted idea of the desert’s lure is wrong. Men seek gold, solitude, forgetfulness. Some wander for the love of wandering. Others seek to hide from the world. Criminals are driven to the desert. Besides these, all travelers crossing the desert talk of its enchantments. They all have different reasons. Loneliness, peace, silence, beauty, wonder, sublimity—a thousand reasons! Indeed, they are all proofs of the strange call of the desert. But these men do not go deep enough.”

  “Have you solved the secret?” she asked, wonderingly.

  “No, not yet,” he replied, a little sadly. “It eludes me. It’s like finding the water of the mirage.”

  “It’s like the secret of a woman’s heart, Wansfell.”

  “Then if that is so—tell me.”

  “Ah! no woman ever tells that secret.”

  “Have you come to love the desert?”

  “You ask me that often,” she replied, in perplexity. “I don’t know. I—I reverence—I fear—I thrill. But love—I can’t say that I love the desert. Not yet. Love comes slowly and seldom to me. I loved my mother … Once I loved a horse.”

  “Have you loved men?” he queried.

  “No!” she flashed, in sudden passion, and her eyes burned dark on his. “Do you imagine that of me? … I was eighteen when I—when they married me to Virey. I despised him. I learned to loathe him … Wansfell, I never really loved any man. Once I was mad—driven!”

  How easily could Adam strike the chords of her emotion and rouse her to impassioned speech! His power to do this haunted him, and sometimes he could not resist it until wist-fulness or trouble in her eyes made him ashamed.

  “Someday I’ll tell you how I was driven once—ruined,” he said.

  “Ruined! You? Why, Wansfell, you are a man! Sometimes I think you’re a god of the desert! … But tell me—what ruined you, as you mean it?”

  “No, not now. I’m interested in your—what is it?—your lack of power to love.”

  “Lack! How little you know me! I am all power to love. I am a quivering mass of exquisitely delicate, sensitive nerves. I am a seething torrent of hot blood. I am an empty heart, deep and terrible as this valley, hungry for love as it is hungry for precious rain or dew. I am an illimitable emotion, heaving like the tides of the sea. I am all love.”

  “And I—only a stupid blunderer,” said Adam.

  “You use a knife, relentlessly, sometimes. Wansfell, listen … I have a child—a lovely girl. She is fourteen years old—the sweetest … Ah! Before she was born I did not love her—I did not want her. But afterward! Wansfell, a mother’s love is divine. But I had more than that. All—all my heart went out to Ruth … Love! Oh, my God! does any man know the torture of love? … Oh, I know! I had to leave her—I had to give her up and I’ll never—never see—her— again!”

  The woman bowed with hands to her face and all her slender body shook.

  “Forgive me!” whispered Adam, huskily, in distress. It was all he could say for a moment. She had stunned him. Never had he imagined her as a mother. “Yet—yet I’m glad I know now. You should have told me. I am your friend. I’ve tried to be a—a brother. Tell me, Magdalene. You’ll be the— the less troubled. I will help you. I think I understand—just a little. You seemed to me only a very young woman—and you’re a mother! Always I say I’ll never be surprised again. Why, the future is all surprise! And your little girl’s name is Ruth? Ruth Virey. What a pretty name!”

  Adam had rambled on, full of contrition, hating himself, trying somehow to convey sympathy. Perhaps his words, his touch on her bowed shoulder, helped her somewhat, for presently she sat up, flung back her hair, and turned a tear-stained face to him. How changed, how softened, how beautiful! Slowly her eyes were veiling an emotion, a glimpse of which uplifted him.

  “Wansfell, I’m thirty-eight years old,” she said.

  “No! I can’t believe that!” he ejaculated.

  “It’s true.”

  “Well, well! I guess I’ll go back to figuring the desert. But speaking of age—you guess mine. I’ll bet you can’t come any nearer to mine.”

  Gravely she studied him, and in the look and action once more grew composed.

  “You’re a masculine Sphinx. Those terrible lines from cheek to jaw—they speak of agony, but not of age. But you’re grey at the temples. Wansfell, you are thirty-seven— perhaps forty.”

  “Magdalene Virey!” cried Adam, aghast. “Do I look so old? Alas for vanished youth! … I am only twenty-six.”

  It was her turn to be amazed. “We had better confine ourselves to other riddles than love and age. They are treacherous … Come, let us be going.”

  Chapter

  XVII

  The hour came when Magdalene Virey stirred Adam to his depths.

  “Wansfell,” she said, with a rare and wonderful tremor in her voice, “I love the silence, the loneliness, the serenity— even the tragedy of this valley of shadows. Ah! It is one place that will never be popular with men—where few women will ever come. Nature has set it apart for wanderers of the wastelands, men like you, unquenchable souls who endure, as you said, to fight, to strive, to seek, to find … And surely for lo
st souls like me! Most men and all women must find death here, if they stay. But there is death in life. I’ve faced my soul here, in the black, lonely watches of the desert nights. And I would endure any agony to change that soul, to make it as high and clear and noble as the white cone of the mountain yonder.”

  Mysterious and inscrutable, the desert influence had worked upon Magdalene Virey. On the other hand, forces destructive to her physical being had attacked her. It was as if an invisible withering wind had blown upon a flower in the night. Adam saw this with distress. But she laughed at the truth of it—laughed without mockery. Something triumphant rang like a bell in her laugh. Always, in the subtlety of character she had brought with her and the mystery she had absorbed from the desert, she stayed beyond Adam’s understanding. It seemed that she liked to listen to his ceaseless importunities; but merciless to herself and aloof from Virey, she refused to leave Death Valley.

  “Suppose I pack the burros and tuck you under my arm and take you, anyway?” he queried, stubbornly.

  “I fancy I ’d like you to tuck me under your arm,” she replied, with the low laugh that came readily now, “but if you did—it would be as far as you’d get.”

  “How so?” he demanded, curiously.

  “Why, I ’d exercise the prerogative of the eternal feminine and command that time should stand still right there.”

  A sweetness and charm, perhaps of other days, a memory of power, haunted face and voice then.

  “Time—stand still?” echoed Adam, ponderingly. “Magdalene, you are beyond me.”

  “So it seems. I’m a little beyond myself sometimes. You will never see in me the woman who has been courted, loved, spoiled by men.”

  “Well, I grasp that, I guess. But I don’t care to see you as such a woman. I might not—”