The Call of the Canyon

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"Carley, I've come to ask you to reconsider," he said, with a smile in his
gray eyes. He was not a tall or handsome man, but he had what women called
a nice strong face.

"Elbert, you embarrass me," she replied, trying to laugh it out. "Indeed I
feel honored, and I thank you. But I can't marry you."

"Why not?" he asked, quietly.

"Because I don't love you," she replied.

"I did not expect you to," he said. "I hoped in time you might come to
care. I've known you a good many years, Carley. Forgive me if I tell you I
see you are breaking--wearing yourself down. Maybe it is not a husband you
need so much now, but you do need a home and children. You are wasting your
life."

"All you say may be true, my friend," replied Carley, with a helpless
little upflinging of hands. "Yet it does not alter my feelings."

"But you will marry sooner or later?" he queried, persistently.

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 mirror 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, and the sycamores are yellow green. Up on the
desert the other day I rode across a patch of asters, lilac and lavender,
almost purple. I had to get off and pluck a handful. And then what do you
think? I dug up the whole bunch, roots and all, and planted them on the
sunny side of my cabin. I rather guess your love of flowers engendered this
remarkable susceptibility in me.

I'm home early most every afternoon now, and I like the couple of hours
loafing around. Guess it's bad for me, though. You know I seldom hunt, and
the trout in the pool here are so tame now they'll almost eat out of my
hand. I haven't the heart to fish for them. The squirrels, too, have grown
tame and friendly. There's a red squirrel that climbs up on my table. And
there's a chipmunk who lives in my cabin and runs over my bed. I've a new
pet--the little pig you christened Pinky. After he had the wonderful good
fortune to be caressed and named by you I couldn't think of letting him
grow up in an ordinary piglike manner. So I fetched him home. My dog, Moze,
was jealous at first and did not like this intrusion, but now they are good
friends and sleep together. Flo has a kitten she's going to give me, and
then, as Hutter says, I'll be "Jake."

My occupation during these leisure hours perhaps would strike my old
friends East as idle, silly, mawkish. But I believe you will understand me.

I have the pleasure of doing nothing, and of catching now and then a
glimpse of supreme joy in the strange state of thinking nothing. Tennyson
came close to this in his "Lotus Eaters." Only to see--only to feel is
enough!

Sprawled on the warm sweet pine needles, I breathe through them the breath
of the earth and am somehow no longer lonely. I cannot, of course, see the
sunset, but I watch for its coming on the eastern wall of the canyon. I see
the shadow slowly creep up, driving the gold before it, until at last the
canyon rim and pines are turned to golden fire. I watch the sailing eagles
as they streak across the gold, and swoop up into the blue, and pass out of
sight. I watch the golden flush fade to gray, and then, the canyon slowly
fills with purple shadows. This hour of twilight is the silent and
melancholy one. Seldom is there any sound save the soft rush of the water
over the stones, and that seems to die away. For a moment, perhaps, I am
Hiawatha alone in his forest home, or a more primitive savage, feeling the
great, silent pulse of nature, happy in unconsciousness, like a beast of
the wild. But only for an instant do I ever catch this fleeting state. Next
I am Glenn Kilbourne of West Fork, doomed and haunted by memories of the
past. The great looming walls then become no longer blank. They are vast
pages of the history of my life, with its past and present, and, alas! its
future. Everything time does is written on the stones. And my stream seems
to murmur the sad and ceaseless flow of human life, with its music and its
misery.

Then, descending from the sublime to the humdrum and necessary, I heave a
sigh, and pull myself together, and go in to make biscuits and fry ham. But
I should not forget to tell you that before I do go in, very often my
looming, wonderful walls and crags weave in strange shadowy characters the
beautiful and unforgettable face of Carley Burch!

I append what little news Oak Creek affords.

That blamed old bald eagle stole another of my pigs.

I am doing so well with my hog-raising that Hutter wants to come in with
me, giving me an interest in his sheep.

It is rumored some one has bought the Deep Lake section I wanted for a
ranch. I don't know who. Hutter was rather noncommittal.

Charley, the herder, had one of his queer spells the other day, and swore
to me he had a letter from you. He told the blamed lie with a sincere and
placid eye, and even a smile of pride. Queer guy, that Charley!

Flo and Lee Stanton had another quarrel--the worst yet, Lee tells me. Flo
asked a girl friend out from Flag and threw her in Lee's way, so to speak,
and when Lee retaliated by making love to the girl Flo got mad. Funny
creatures, you girls! Flo rode with me from High Falls to West Fork, and
never showed the slightest sign of trouble. In fact she was delightfully
gay. She rode Calico, and beat me bad in a race.

Adios, Carley. Won't you write me?

GLENN.

No sooner had Carley read the letter through to the end than she began it
all over again, and on this second perusal she lingered over passages--only
to reread them. That suggestion of her face sculptured by shadows on the
canyon walls seemed to thrill her very soul.

She leaped up from the reading to cry out something that was unutterable.
All the intervening weeks of shame and anguish and fury and strife and
pathos, and the endless striving to forget, were as if by the magic of a
letter made nothing but vain oblations.

"He loves me still!" she whispered, and pressed her breast with clenching
hands, and laughed in wild exultance, and paced her room like a caged
lioness. It was as if she had just awakened to the assurance she was
beloved. That was the shibboleth--the cry by which she sounded the closed
depths of her love and called to the stricken life of a woman's insatiate
vanity.

Then she snatched up the letter, to scan it again, and, suddenly grasping
the import of Glenn's request, she hurried to the telephone to find the
number of the hospital in Bedford Park. A nurse informed her that visitors
were received at certain hours and that any attention to disabled soldiers
was most welcome.

Carley motored out there to find the hospital merely a long one-story frame
structure, a barracks hastily thrown up for the care of invalided men of
the service. The chauffeur informed her that it had been used for that
purpose during the training period of the army, and later when injured
soldiers began to arrive from France.

A nurse admitted Carley into a small bare anteroom. Carley made known her
errand.

"I'm glad it's Rust you want to see," replied the nurse. "Some of these
boys are going to die. And some will be worse off if they live. But Rust
may get well if he'll only behave. You are a relative--or friend?"

"I don't know him," answered Carley. "But I have a friend who was with him
in France."

The nurse led Carley into a long narrow room with a line of single beds
down each side, a stove at each end, and a few chairs. Each bed appeared to
have an occupant and those nearest Carley lay singularly quiet. At the far
end of the room were soldiers on crutches, wearing bandages on their beads,
carrying their arms in slings. Their merry voices contrasted discordantly
with their sad appearance.

Presently Carley stood beside a bed and looked down upon a gaunt, haggard
young man who lay propped up on pillows.

"Rust--a lady to see you," announced the nurse.

Carley had difficulty in introducing herself. Had Glenn ever looked like
this? What a face! It's healed scar only emphasized the pallor and furrows
of pain that assuredly came from present wounds. He had unnaturally bright
dark eyes, and a flush of fever in his hollow cheeks.

"How do!" he said, with a wan smile. "Who're you?"

"I'm Glenn Kilbourne's fiancee," she replied, holding out her hand.

"Say, I ought to've known you," he said, eagerly, and a warmth of light
changed the gray shade of his face. "You're the girl Carley! You're almost
like my--my own girl. By golly! You're some looker! It was good of you to
come. Tell me about Glenn."

Carley took the chair brought by the nurse, and pulling it close to the
bed, she smiled down upon him and said: "I'll be glad to tell you all I
know--presently. But first you tell me about yourself. Are you in pain?
What is your trouble? You must let me do everything I can for you, and
these other men."

Carley spent a poignant and depth-stirring hour at the bedside of Glenn's
comrade. At last she learned from loyal lips the nature of Glenn
Kilbourne's service to his country. How Carley clasped to her sore heart
the praise of the man she loved--the simple proofs of his noble disregard
of self! Rust said little about his own service to country or to comrade.
But Carley saw enough in his face. He had been like Glenn. By these two
Carley grasped the compelling truth of the spirit and sacrifice of the
legion of boys who had upheld American traditions. Their children and
their children's children, as the years rolled by into the future, would
hold their heads higher and prouder. Some things could never die in the
hearts and the blood of a race. These boys, and the girls who had the
supreme glory of being loved by them, must be the ones to revive the
Americanism of their forefathers. Nature and God would take care of
the slackers, the cowards who cloaked their shame with bland excuses
of home service, of disability, and of dependence.

Carley saw two forces in life--the destructive and constructive. On the one
side greed, selfishness, materialism: on the other generosity, sacrifice,
and idealism. Which of them builded for the future? She saw men as wolves,
sharks, snakes, vermin, and opposed to them men as lions and eagles. She
saw women who did not inspire men to fare forth to seek, to imagine, to
dream, to hope, to work, to fight. She began to have a glimmering of what a
woman might be.

That night she wrote swiftly and feverishly, page after page, to Glenn,
only to destroy what she had written. She could not keep her heart out of
her words, nor a hint of what was becoming a sleepless and eternal regret.
She wrote until a late hour, and at last composed a letter she knew did not
ring true, so stilted and restrained was it in all passages save those
concerning news of Glenn's comrade and of her own friends. "I'll
never--never write him again," she averred with stiff lips, and next moment
could have laughed in mockery at the bitter truth. If she had ever had any
courage, Glenn's letter had destroyed it. But had it not been a kind of
selfish, false courage, roused to hide her hurt, to save her own future?
Courage should have a thought of others. Yet shamed one moment at the
consciousness she would write Glenn again and again, and exultant the next
with the clamouring love, she seemed to have climbed beyond the self that
had striven to forget. She would remember and think though she died of
longing.

Carley, like a drowning woman, caught at straws. What a relief and joy to
give up that endless nagging at her mind! For months she had kept
ceaselessly active, by associations which were of no help to her and which
did not make her happy, in her determination to forget. Suddenly then she
gave up to remembrance. She would cease trying to get over her love for
Glenn, and think of him and dream about him as much as memory dictated.
This must constitute the only happiness she could have.

The change from strife to surrender was so novel and sweet that for days
she felt renewed. It was augmented by her visits to the hospital in Bedford
Park. Through her bountiful presence Virgil Rust and his comrades had many
dull hours of pain and weariness alleviated and brightened. Interesting
herself in the condition of the seriously disabled soldiers and possibility
of their future took time and work Carley gave willingly and gladly. At
first she endeavored to get acquaintances with means and leisure to help
the boys, but these overtures met with such little success that she quit
wasting valuable time she could herself devote to their interests.

Thus several weeks swiftly passed by. Several soldiers who had been more
seriously injured than Rust improved to the extent that they were
discharged. But Rust gained little or nothing. The nurse and doctor both
informed Carley that Rust brightened for her, but when she was gone he
lapsed into somber indifference. He did not care whether he ate or not, or
whether he got well or died.

"If I do pull out, where'll I go and what'll I do?" he once asked the
nurse.

Carley knew that Rust's hurt was more than loss of a leg, and she decided
to talk earnestly to him and try to win him to hope and effort. He had come
to have a sort of reverence for her. So, biding her time, she at length
found opportunity to approach his bed while his comrades were asleep or out
of hearing. He endeavored to laugh her off, and then tried subterfuge, and
lastly he cast off his mask and let her see his naked soul.

"Carley, I don't want your money or that of your kind friends--whoever they
are--you say will help me to get into business," he said. "God knows I
thank you and it warms me inside to find some one who appreciates what I've
given. But I don't want charity. . . . And I guess I'm pretty sick of the
game. I'm sorry the Boches didn't do the job right."

"Rust, that is morbid talk," replied Carley. "You're ill and you just can't
see any hope. You must cheer up--fight yourself; and look at the brighter
side. It's a horrible pity you must be a cripple, but Rust, indeed life can
be worth living if you make it so."

"How could there be a brighter side when a man's only half a man--" he
queried, bitterly.

"You can be just as much a man as ever," persisted Carley, trying to smile
when she wanted to cry.

"Could you care for a man with only one leg?" he asked, deliberately.

"What a question! Why, of course I could!"

"Well, maybe you are different. Glenn always swore even if he was killed no
slacker or no rich guy left at home could ever get you. Maybe you haven't
any idea how much it means to us fellows to know there are true and
faithful girls. But I'll tell you, Carley, we fellows who went across got
to see things strange when we came home. The good old U. S. needs a lot of
faithful girls just now, believe me."

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