The Call of the Canyon, Zane Grey [ereader for textbooks txt] 📗

This straightforward question struck Carley as singularly as if it was one she might never have encountered. It forced her to think of things she had buried.

“I don’t believe I ever will,” she answered, thoughtfully.

“That is nonsense, Carley,” he went on. “You’ll have to marry. What else can you do? With all due respect to your feelings—that affair with Kilbourne is ended—and you’re not the wishy-washy heartbreak kind of a girl.”

“You can never tell what a woman will do,” she said, somewhat coldly.

“Certainly not. That’s why I refuse to take no. Carley, be reasonable. You like me—respect me, do you not?”

“Why, of course I do!”

“I’m only thirty-five, and I could give you all any sensible woman wants,” he said. “Let’s make a real American home. Have you thought at all about that, Carley? Something is wrong today. Men are not marrying. Wives are not having children. Of all the friends I have, not one has a real American home. Why, it is a terrible fact! But, Carley, you are not a sentimentalist, or a melancholiac. Nor are you a waster. You have fine qualities. You need something to do some one to care for.”

“Pray do not think me ungrateful, Elbert,” she replied, “nor insensible to the truth of what you say. But my answer is no!”

When Harrington had gone Carley went to her room, and precisely as upon her return from Arizona she faced her m rror skeptically and relentlessly. “I am such a liar that I’ll do well to look at myself,” she meditated. “Here I am again. Now! The world expects me to marry. But what do I expect?”

There was a raw unheated wound in Carley’s heart. Seldom had she permitted herself to think about it, let alone to probe it with hard materialistic queries. But custom to her was as inexorable as life. If she chose to live in the world she must conform to its customs. For a woman marriage was the aim and the end and the all of existence. Nevertheless, for Carley it could not be without love. Before she had gone West she might have had many of the conventional modern ideas about women and marriage. But because out there in the wilds her love and perception had broadened, now her arraignment of herself and her sex was bigger, sterner, more exacting. The months she had been home seemed fuller than all the months of her life. She had tried to forget and enjoy; she had not succeeded; but she had looked with far-seeing eyes at her world. Glenn Kilbourne’s tragic fate had opened her eyes.

Either the world was all wrong or the people in it were. But if that were an extravagant and erroneous supposition, there certainly was proof positive that her own small individual world was wrong. The women did not do any real work; they did not bear children; they lived on excitement and luxury. They had no ideals. How greatly were men to blame? Carley doubted her judgment here. But as men could not live without the smiles and comradeship and love of women, it was only natural that they should give the women what they wanted. Indeed, they had no choice. It was give or go without. How much of real love entered into the marriages among her acquaintances? Before marriage Carley wanted a girl to be sweet, proud, aloof, with a heart of golden fire. Not attainable except through love! It would be better that no children be born at all unless born of such beautiful love. Perhaps that was why so few children were born. Nature’s balance and revenge! In Arizona Carley had learned something of the ruthlessness and inevitableness of nature. She was finding out she had learned this with many other staggering facts.

“I love Glenn still,” she whispered, passionately, with trembling lips, as she faced the tragic-eyed image of herself in the mirror. “I love him more- -more. Oh, my God! If I were honest I’d cry out the truth! It is terrible… I will always love him. How then could I marry any other man? I would be a lie, a cheat. If I could only forget him—only kill that love. Then I might love another man—and if I did love him—no matter what I had felt or done before, I would be worthy. I could feel worthy. I could give him just as much. But without such love I’d give only a husk—a body without soul.”

Love, then, was the sacred and holy flame of life that sanctioned the begetting of children. Marriage might be a necessity of modern time, but it was not the vital issue. Carley’s anguish revealed strange and hidden truths. In some inexplicable way Nature struck a terrible balance—revenged herself upon a people who had no children, or who brought into the world children not created by the divinity of love, unyearned for, and therefore somehow doomed to carry on the blunders and burdens of life.

Carley realized how right and true it might be for her to throw herself away upon an inferior man, even a fool or a knave, if she loved him with that great and natural love of woman; likewise it dawned upon her how false and wrong and sinful it would be to marry the greatest or the richest or the noblest man unless she had that supreme love to give him, and knew it was reciprocated.

“What am I going to do with my life?” she asked, bitterly and aghast. “I have been—I am a waster. I’ve lived for nothing but pleasurable sensation. I’m utterly useless. I do absolutely no good on earth.”

Thus she saw how Harrington’s words rang true—how they had precipitated a crisis for which her unconscious brooding had long made preparation.

“Why not give up ideals and be like the rest of my kind?” she soliloquized.

That was one of the things which seemed wrong with modern life. She thrust the thought from her with passionate scorn. If poor, broken, ruined Glenn Kilbourne could cling to an ideal and fight for it, could not she, who had all the world esteemed worth while, be woman enough to do the same? The direction of her thought seemed to have changed. She had been ready for rebellion. Three months of the old life had shown her that for her it was empty, vain, farcical, without one redeeming feature. The naked truth was brutal, but it cut clean to wholesome consciousness. Such so-called social life as she had plunged into deliberately to forget her unhappiness had failed her utterly. If she had been shallow and frivolous it might have done otherwise. Stripped of all guise, her actions must have been construed by a penetrating and impartial judge as a mere parading of her decorated person before a number of males with the purpose of ultimate selection.

“I’ve got to find some work,” she muttered, soberly.

At the moment she heard the postman’s whistle outside; and a little later the servant brought up her mail. The first letter, large, soiled, thick, bore the postmark Flagstaff, and her address in Glenn Kilbourne’s writing.

Carley stared at it. Her heart gave a great leap. Her hand shook. She sat down suddenly as if the strength of her legs was inadequate to uphold her.

“Glenn has—written me!” she whispered, in slow, halting realization. “For what? Oh, why?”

The other letters fell off her lap, to lie unnoticed. This big thick envelope fascinated her. It was one of the stamped envelopes she had seen in his cabin. It contained a letter that had been written on his rude table, before the open fire, in the light of the doorway, in that little log-cabin under the spreading pines of West Ford Canyon. Dared she read it? The shock to her heart passed; and with mounting swell, seemingly too full for her breast, it began to beat and throb a wild gladness through all her being. She tore the envelope apart and read:

DEAR CARLEY:

I’m surely glad for a good excuse to write you.

Once in a blue moon I get a letter, and today Hutter brought me one from a soldier pard of mine who was with me in the Argonne. His name is Virgil Rust—queer name, don’t you think?—and he’s from Wisconsin. Just a rough-diamond sort of chap, but fairly well educated. He and I were in some pretty hot places, and it was he who pulled me out of a shell crater. I’d “gone west” sure then if it hadn’t been for Rust.

Well, he did all sorts of big things during the war. Was down several times with wounds. He liked to fight and he was a holy terror. We all thought he’d get medals and promotion. But he didn’t get either. These much-desired things did not always go where they were best deserved.

Rust is now lying in a hospital in Bedford Park. His letter is pretty blue, All he says about why he’s there is that he’s knocked out. But he wrote a heap about his girl. It seems he was in love with a girl in his home town— a pretty, big-eyed lass whose picture I’ve seen—and while he was overseas she married one of the chaps who got out of fighting. Evidently Rust is deeply hurt. He wrote: “I’d not care so … if she’d thrown me down to marry an old man or a boy who couldn’t have gone to war.” You see, Carley, service men feel queer about that sort of thing. It’s something we got over there, and none of us will ever outlive it. Now, the point of this is that I am asking you to go see Rust, and cheer him up, and do what you can for the poor devil. It’s a good deal to ask of you, I know, especially as Rust saw your picture many a time and knows you were my girl. But you needn’t tell him that you—we couldn’t make a go of it.

And, as I am writing this to you, I see no reason why I shouldn’t go on in behalf of myself.

The fact is, Carley, I miss writing to you more than I miss anything of my old life. I’ll bet you have a trunkful of letters from me—unless you’ve destroyed them. I’m not going to say how I miss your letters. But I will say you wrote the most charming and fascinating letters of anyone I ever knew, quite aside from any sentiment. You knew, of course, that I had no other girl correspondent. Well, I got along fairly well before you came West, but I’d be an awful liar if I denied I didn’t get lonely for you and your letters. It’s different now that you’ve been to Oak Creek. I’m alone most of the time and I dream a lot, and I’m afraid I see you here in my cabin, and along the brook, and under the pines, and riding Calico—which you came to do well—and on my hogpen fence—and, oh, everywhere! I don’t want you to think I’m down in the mouth, for I’m not. I’ll take my medicine. But, Carley, you spoiled me, and I miss hearing from you, and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be all right for you to send me a friendly letter occasionally.

It is autumn now. I wish you could see Arizona canyons in their gorgeous colors. We have had frost right along and the mornings are great. There’s a broad zigzag belt of gold halfway up the San Francisco peaks, and that is the aspen thickets taking on their fall coat. Here in the canyon you’d think there was blazing fire everywhere. The vines and the maples are red, scarlet, carmine, cerise, magenta, all the hues of flame. The oak leaves are turning russet gold,