by Grey, Zane
“Ah! you might not respect me,” she interrupted. “Alas! … But, Wansfell, if I had met you when I was eighteen I would never have been courted and loved and ruined by men … You don’t grasp that, either.”
Adam had long ceased to curse his density. The simplicity of him antagonized her complexity. His had been the blessed victory over her bitterness, her mockery, her consciousness of despair. His had been the gladness of seeing her grow brown and strong and well, until these early June days had begun to weaken her. That fact had augmented his earnestness to get her to leave the valley. But she was adamant. And all his importunities and arguments and threats she parried with some subtle femininity of action or look or speech that left him bewildered.
The time came when only early in the mornings or late in the afternoons could they walk to their accustomed seat near the gateway of the valley and climb to the promontories. Nature moved on remorselessly with her seasons, and the sun had begun to assume its fiery authority during most of the daylight hours.
One morning before sunrise they climbed, much against Adam’s advice, to a high point where Mrs. Virey loved to face east at that hour. It was a hard climb, too hard for her to attempt in the heat and oppression that had come of late. Nevertheless, she prevailed upon Adam to take her, and she had just about strength enough to get there.
They saw the east luminous and rosy, ethereal and beautiful, momentarily brightening with a rayed effulgence that spread from a golden center behind the dark bold domes of the Funeral Mountains. They saw the sun rise and change the luminous dawn to lurid day. One moment, and the beauty the glory, the promise were as if they had never been. The light over Death Valley at that height was too fierce for the gaze of man.
On the way down, at a narrow ledge, where loose stones made precarious footing, Adam cautioned his companion and offered to help her. Waving him on, she followed him with her lithe free step. Then she slipped off the more solid trail to a little declivity of loose rocks that began to slide with her toward a slope, where, if she went over it, she must meet serious injury. She did not scream. Adam plunged after her and, reaching her with a long arm just as she was about to fall, he swung her up as if she had only the weight of a child. Then, holding her in his arms, he essayed to wade out of the little stream of sliding rocks. It was difficult only be- cause he feared he might slip and fall with her. Presently he reached the solid ledge and was about to set her upon her feet.
“Time—stand still here!” she exclaimed, her voice full of the old mockery of herself, with an added regret for what might have been, but could never be, with pathos, with the eternal charm of woman who could never separate her personality, her consciousness of her sex, from their old relation to man.
Adam halted his action as if suddenly chained, and he gazed down upon her, where she rested with her head on the bend of his left elbow. There was a smile on the brown face that had once been so pale. Her large eyes, wide open, exposed to the sky, seemed to reflect its dark blue color and something of its mystery of light. Adam saw wonder there, and reverence that must have been for him, but seemed incredible, and the shading of unutterable thoughts.
“Put me down,” she said.
“Why did you say, ‘Time—stand still here’?” he asked as he placed her upon her feet.
“Do you remember the time when I told you how words and lines and verses of the poets I used to love come to mind so vividly out here? Sometimes I speak them, that is all.”
“I understand. All I ever read has come back to me here on the desert, as clear as the print on the page seen so many years ago. I used to hate Sunday School when I was a boy. But now, often, words of the Bible come before my mind … But are you telling me the whole truth? Why did you say, ‘Time—stand still here,’ when I held you in my arms?”
“What a boy you are!” she murmured, and her eyes held a gladness for the sight of him. “Confess, now, wouldn’t that moment have been a beautiful one for time to stop—for life to stand still—for the world to be naught—for thought and memory to cease?”
“Yes, it would,” he replied, “but no more beautiful than this moment while you stand there so. When you look like that you make me hope.”
“For what?” she queried, softly.
“For you.”
“Wansfell, you are the only man I’ve ever known who could have held me in his arms and have been blind and dead to the nature of a woman … Listen. You’ve done me the honor to say I have splendid thoughts and noble emotions. I hope I have. I know you have inspired many. I know this valley of death has changed my soul. But, Wansfell, I am a woman, and a woman is more than her high and lofty thoughts—her wandering inspirations. A woman is a creature of feeling, somehow doomed … When I said, ‘Time— stand still here,’ I was false to the woman in me that you idealize. A thousand thoughts, emotions, memories, desires, sorrows, vanities prompted the words of which you have made me ashamed. But to spare myself a little, let me say that it would indeed be beautiful for me to have you take me up into your arms—and then for time to stand still forever.”
“Do you mean that—so—you’d feel safe, protected, at rest?” he asked, with emotion.
“Yes, and infinitely more. Wansfell, it is a woman’s fate that the only safe and happy and desired place for her side of the grave is in the arms of the man she loves. A real man— with strength and gentleness—for her and her alone! … It is a terrible thing in women, the need to be loved. As a baby I had that need—as a girl—and as a woman it became a passion. Looking back now, through the revelation that has come to me here in this valley of silence—when thought is clairvoyant and all-pervading—I can see how the need of love, the passion to be loved, is the strongest instinct in any woman. It is an instinct. She can no more change it than she can change the shape of her hand. Poor fated women! Education, freedom, career may blind them to their real nature. But it is a man, the right man, that means life to a woman. Otherwise the best in her dies … That instinct in me—for which I confess shame—has been unsatisfied despite all the men who have loved me. When you have saved me—perhaps from injury—and took me into your arms, the instinct over which I have no control flashed up. While it lasted, until you looked at me, I wanted that moment to last forever. I wanted to be held that way—in your great, strong arms—until the last trumpet sounded. I wanted you to see only me, feel only me, hold only me, live for only me, love me beyond all else on earth and in heaven!”
As she paused, her slender brown hands at her heaving breast, her eyes strained as if peering through obscurity at a distant light. Adam could only stare at her in helpless fascination. In such moods as this she taught him as much of the mystery of life as he had taught her of the nature of the desert.
“Now the instinct is gone,” she continued. “Chilled by your aloofness! I am looking at it with intelligence. And, Wansfell, I’m filled with pity for women. I pity myself, despite the fact that my mind is free. I can control my acts, if not my instincts and emotions. I am bound. I am a woman. I am a she-creature. I am little different from the fierce she-cats, the she-lions—any of the she-animals that you’ve told me fight to survive down on your wild Colorado Desert … That seems to me the sex, the fate, the doom of women. Ah! no wonder they fight for men—spit and hiss and squall and scratch and rend! It’s a sad thing, seen from a woman’s mind. That great mass of women who cannot reason about their instincts, or understand the springs of their emotions—they are the happier. Too much knowledge is bad for my sex. Perhaps we are wrongly educated. I am the happier for what you have taught me. I can see myself now with pity instead of loathing. I am not to blame for what life has made me. There are no wicked women. They must be loved or they are lost … My friend, the divinity in human life is seen best in some lost woman like me.”
“Magdalene Virey,” protested Adam, “I can’t follow you … But to say you are a lost woman—that I won’t listen to.”
“I was a lost woman,” interrupted Mrs. Virey, her voice risi
ng out of the strong, sweet melody. “I had my pride, and I defied the husband whose heart I broke and whose life I ruined. I scorned the punishment, the exile he meted out to me. That was because I was thoroughbred. But all the same I was lost. Lost to happiness, to hope, to effort, to repentance, to spiritual uplift. Death Valley will be my tomb, but there will be resurrection for me … It is you, Wansfell, you have been my salvation … You have the power. It has come from your strife and agony on the desert. It is beyond riches, beyond honor. It is the divine in you that seeks and finds the divine in unfortunates who cross your wandering trail.”
Adam, rendered mute, could only offer his hand; and in silence he led her down the slope.
That afternoon, near the close of the hot hours, Adam lay in the shade of the brush shelter he had erected near the Virey shack. He was absorbed in watching a tribe of red ants, and his posture was so unusual that it gave pause to Virey, who had come down from the slope. The man approached and curiously gazed at Adam, to see what he was doing.
“Looking for grains of gold?” inquired Virey, with sarcasm. “I’ll lend you my magnifying glass.”
“I’m watching these red ants,” replied Adam, without looking up.
Virey bent over and, having seen, he slowly straightened up.
“Go to the ant, thou sluggard!” he ejaculated, and this time without sarcasm.
“Virey, I’m no sluggard,” returned Adam. “It’s you who are that. I’m a worker.”
“Wansfell, I was not meaning you,” said Virey. “There are things I hate you for, but laziness is certainly not included in them … I never worked in my life. I had money left me. It was a curse. I thought I could buy everything. I bought a wife—the big-eyed woman to whom you devote your ser-vices—and your attentions … And I bought for myself the sweetness of the deadly nightshade flower—a statue of marble, chiseled in the beautiful curves of mocking love—a woman of chain lightning and hate … If I had lived by industry, as live those red ants you’re watching, I might not now have one foot in my grave in Death Valley.”
Thus there were rare instances when Virey appeared a man with the human virtues of regret, of comprehension, of intolerance, but never a word issued from his lips that was not tinged with bitterness. Had the divinity in him been blasted forever? Or was it a submerged spark that could quicken only to a touch of the woman lost to him? Adam wondered. Sometimes a feeling of pity for Virey stole over him, but it never lasted long. Adam had more respect for these red ants than for some men, despite the alleged divinity. He abhorred the drones of life. The desert taught how useless were the idlers—how nature ruthlessly cut them off.
The red ants had a hill some few paces from the shelter where Adam lay. One train of ants, empty handed, as it were, traveled rapidly from the anthill toward the camp litter; and another train staggered under tremendous burdens in the other direction. At first Adam thought these last were carrying bits of bread, then he thought they were carrying grains of gravel, and then he discovered, by moving closer to watch, that they were carrying round black-and-white globules, several times as large as their own bodies. Presently he concluded that these round objects were ant eggs that the tribe was moving from one hill to another. It was exceedingly interesting to watch them. He recognized them as the species of desert ant that could bite almost as fiercely as a scorpion. Their labor was prodigious. The great difficulty appeared to be in keeping the eggs in their jaws. These burdens were continually falling out and rolling away. Some ants tried many times and in many ways to grasp the hard little globules. Then, when this was accomplished, came the work compared with which the labor of man seemed insignificant. After getting a start the loaded ants made fair progress over smooth, hard ground, but when they ran into a crust of earth or a pebble or a chip they began the toil of a giant. The ant never essayed to go round the obstacle. He surmounted it. He pushed and lifted and heaved, and sometimes backed over, dragging his precious burden behind him. Others would meet a little pitfall and, instead of circling it to get to the anthill, they would roll down, over and over, with their eggs, until they reached the bottom. Then it was uphill work on the other side, indefatigable, ceaseless, patient, wonderful.
Adam presently had to forgo his little sentiment about the toil of the ants over their eggs. The black-and-white globules were seeds of maize. On the night before, Adam’s burro Jinny had persisted around camp until he gave her the last of some maize left in one of his packs. Jinny had spilled generous quantities of the maize in the sand, and the ants were carrying home the seeds.
How powerful they were! How endowed with tireless endurance and a persistence beyond human understanding! The thing that struck Adam so singularly was that these ants did not recognize defeat. They could not give up. Failure was a state unknown to their instincts. And so they performed marvelous feats. What was the spirit that actuated them? The mighty life of nature was infinitely strong in them. It was the same as the tenacity of the lichen that lived on the desert rocks, or the eyesight of the condor that could see its prey from the invisible heights of the sky, or the age-long destructive movements of the mountaintops wearing down to the valleys.
When Adam got up from his pleasant task and meditation he was surprised to find Mrs. Virey standing near with eyes intent on him. Then it became incumbent upon him to show her the toils of the red ants. She watched them attentively for a while.
“Wonderful little creatures!” she exclaimed. “So this watching is one of the secrets of your desert knowledge, Wansfell, I can’t compare these ants to men. They are far superior. They have order, purpose. They are passionless, perfect organizations to carry on their lives. They will work and live—the descendants of this very tribe of ants—long after the race of men has disappeared off the face of the earth … But wonderful as they are, and interesting as are their labors, I ’d prefer to watch you chop wood, or, better, to climb the slope with your giant stride.”
That night, sometime late, Adam was awakened by a gale that swooped up through the gateway from the valley. It blew away the cool mountain air which had settled down from the heights. It was a warmer wind than any Adam had ever before experienced at night. It worried him. Forerunner, it must be, of the midnight furnace winds that had added to the fame of Death Valley! It brought a strange, low, hollow roar, unlike any other sound in nature. It was a voice. Adam harkened to the warning. On the morrow he would again talk to Virey. Soon it might be too late to save Magdalene Virey. She had obstructed his will. She would not leave without her husband. She had bidden Adam stay there in Death Valley to serve her, but she seemed to have placed her husband beyond Adam’s reach. The ferocity in Adam had never found itself in relation to Virey. Adam had persuaded and argued with the persistence of the toiling ant, but to work his way with Virey seemed to demand the swoop of the desert hawk.
This strange warm wind, on its first occurrence during Adam’s stay in the valley, rose to a gale and then gradually subsided until it moaned away mournfully. Its advent had robbed Adam of sleep; its going seemed to leave a deader silence, fraught with the meaning of its visit.
Adam could sleep no more. This silence belied the blinking of the stars. It disproved the solidarity of the universe. Nothing lived, except his soul, that seemingly had departed from his body in a dream, and now with his vague thoughts and vaguer feelings wandered over the wastelands, a phantom in the night. Silence of utter solitude—most intense, dead, dreaming, waiting, sepulchre-like, awful! Where was the rustle of the wings of the bats? The air moved soundlessly, and it seemed to have the substance of shadows. A dead solitude—a terrible silence! A man and the earth! The wide spaces, the wild places of the earth as it was in the beginning! Here could be the last lesson to a thinking man— the last development of a man into savage or god.
There! Was that a throb of his heart or a ring in his ear? Crack of a stone, faint, far away, high on the heights, a lonely sound making real the lonely night. It relieved Adam. The tension of him relaxed. And he listened, hope
fully, longing to hear another break in the silence that would be so insupportable.
As he listened, the desert moon, oval in shape, orange hued and weird, sailed over the black brow of the mountain and illumined the valley in a radiance that did not seem of land or sea. The darkness of midnight gave way to orange shadows, mustering and shading, stranger than the fantastic shapes of dreams.
Another ring of rock on rock, and sharp rattle, and roll on roll, assured Adam that the weathering gods of the mountain were not daunted by the silence and the loneliness of Death Valley. They were working as ever. Their task was to level the mountain down to the level of the sea. The stern, immutable purpose seemed to vibrate in the ringing cracks and in the hollow reports. These sounds in their evenness and perfect rhythm and lonely tone established once more in Adam’s disturbed consciousness the nature of the place. Death Valley! The rolling of rocks dispelled phantasms.
Then came a low, grating roar. The avalanche of endless broken rocks had slipped an inch. It left an ominous silence. Adam stirred restlessly in his blankets. There was a woman in the lee of that tremendous sliding slope, a woman of delicate frame, of magnificent spirit, of a heart of living flame. Every hour she slept or lay wide-eyed in the path of that impending cataclysm was one of exceeding peril. Adam chafed under the invisible bonds of her will. Because she chose to lie there, fearless, beyond the mind of man to comprehend, was that any reason why he should let her perish? Adam vowed that he would end this dread situation before another nightfall. Yet when he thought of Magdalene Virey his heart contracted. Only through the fierce spirit of the desert could he defy her and beat down the jailer who chained her there. But that fierce spirit of his seemed obstructed by hers, an aloof thing, greater than ferocity, beyond physical life.
And so Adam lay sleepless, listening to the lonely fall of sliding rocks, the rattle and clash, and then the hollow settling. Then he listened to the silence.
