The Call of the Canyon
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Zane Grey >> The Call of the Canyon
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"All right, Eleanor, we understand each other, even if we do not agree,"
said Carley. "You leave the future of women to chance, to life, to
materialism, not to their own conscious efforts. I want to leave it to free
will and idealism."
"Carley, you are getting a little beyond me," declared Eleanor, dubiously.
"What are you going to do? It all comes home to each individual woman. Her
attitude toward life."
"I'll drift along with the current, Carley, and be a good sport," replied
Eleanor, smiling.
"You don't care about the women and children of the future? You'll not deny
yourself now, and think and work, and suffer a little, in the interest of
future humanity?"
"How you put things, Carley!" exclaimed Eleanor, wearily. "Of course I
care--when you make me think of such things. But what have I to do with the
lives of people in the years to come?"
"Everything. America for Americans! While you dawdle, the life blood is
being sucked out of our great nation. It is a man's job to fight; it is a
woman's to save. . . . I think you've made your choice, though you don't
realize it. I'm praying to God that I'll rise to mine."
Carley had a visitor one morning earlier than the usual or conventional
time for calls.
"He wouldn't give no name," said the maid. "He wears soldier clothes,
ma'am, and he's pale, and walks with a cane."
"Tell him I'll be right down," replied Carley.
Her hands trembled while she hurriedly dressed. Could this caller be Virgil
Rust? She hoped so, but she doubted.
As she entered the parlor a tall young man in worn khaki rose to meet her.
At first glance she could not name him, though she recognized the pale face
and light-blue eyes, direct and steady.
"Good morning, Miss Burch," he said. "I hope you'll excuse so early a call.
You remember me, don't you? I'm George Burton, who had the bunk next to
Rust's."
"Surely I remember you, Mr. Burton, and I'm glad to see you," replied
Carley, shaking hands with him. "Please sit down. Your being here must mean
you're discharged from the hospital."
"Yes, I was discharged, all right," he said.
"Which means you're well again. That is fine. I'm very glad."
"I was put out to make room for a fellow in bad shape. I'm still shaky and
weak," he replied. "But I'm glad to go. I've pulled through pretty good,
and it'll not be long until I'm strong again. It was the 'flu' that kept me
down."
"You must be careful. May I ask where you're going and what you expect to
do?"
"Yes, that's what I came to tell you," he replied, frankly. "I want you to
help me a little. I'm from Illinois and my people aren't so badly off. But
I don't want to go back to my home town down and out, you know. Besides,
the winters are cold there. The doctor advises me to go to a little milder
climate. You see, I was gassed, and got the 'flu' afterward. But I know
I'll be all right if I'm careful. . . . Well, I've always had a leaning
toward agriculture, and I want to go to Kansas. Southern Kansas. I want to
travel around till I find a place I like, and there I'll get a job. Not too
hard a job at first--that's why I'll need a little money. I know what to do.
I want to lose myself in the wheat country and forget the--the war. I'll
not be afraid of work, presently. . . . Now, Miss Burch, you've been so
kind--I'm going to ask you to lend me a little money. I'll pay it back. I
can't promise just when. But some day. Will you?"
"Assuredly I will," she replied, heartily. "I'm happy to have the
opportunity to help you. How much will you need for immediate use? Five
hundred dollars?"
"Oh no, not so much as that," he replied. "Just railroad fare home, and
then to Kansas, and to pay board while I get well, you know, and look
around."
"We'll make it five hundred, anyway," she replied, and, rising, she went
toward the library. "Excuse me a moment." She wrote the check and,
returning, gave it to him.
"You're very good," he said, rather low.
"Not at all," replied Carley. "You have no idea how much it means to me to
be permitted to help you. Before I forget, I must ask you, can you cash
that check here in New York?"
"Not unless you identify me," he said, ruefully, "I don't know anyone I
could ask."
"Well, when you leave here go at once to my bank--it's on Thirty-fourth
Street--and I'll telephone the cashier. So you'll not have any difficulty.
Will you leave New York at once?"
"I surely will. It's an awful place. Two years ago when I came here with my
company I thought it was grand. But I guess I lost something over there.
. . . I want to be where it's quiet. Where I won't see many people."
"I think I understand," returned Carley. "Then I suppose you're in a hurry
to get home? Of course you have a girl you're just dying to see?"
"No, I'm sorry to say I haven't," he replied, simply. "I was glad I didn't
have to leave a sweetheart behind, when I went to France. But it wouldn't
be so bad to have one to go back to now."
"Don't you worry!" exclaimed Carley. "You can take your choice presently.
You have the open sesame to every real American girl's heart."
"And what is that?" he asked, with a blush.
"Your service to your country," she said, gravely.
"Well," he said, with a singular bluntness, "considering I didn't get any
medals or bonuses, I'd like to draw a nice girl."
"You will," replied Carley, and made haste to change the subject. "By the
way, did you meet Glenn Kilbourne in France?"
"Not that I remember," rejoined Burton, as he got up, rising rather stiffly
by aid of his cane. "I must go, Miss Burch. Really I can't thank you
enough. And I'll never forget it."
"Will you write me how you are getting along?" asked Carley, offering her
hand.
"Yes."
Carley moved with him out into the hall and to the door. There was a
question she wanted to ask, but found it strangely difficult of utterance.
At the door Burton fixed a rather penetrating gaze upon her.
"You didn't ask me about Rust," he said.
"No, I--I didn't think of him--until now, in fact," Carley lied.
"Of course then you couldn't have heard about him. I was wondering."
"I have heard nothing."
"It was Rust who told me to come to you," said Burton. "We were talking one
day, and he--well, he thought you were true blue. He said he knew you'd
trust me and lend me money. I couldn't have asked you but for him."
"True blue! He believed that. I'm glad. . . . Has he spoken of me to you
since I was last at the hospital?"
"Hardly," replied Burton, with the straight, strange glance on her again.
Carley met this glance and suddenly a coldness seemed to envelop her. It
did not seem to come from within though her heart stopped beating. Burton
had not changed--the warmth, the gratitude still lingered about him. But
the light of his eyes! Carley had seen it in Glenn's, in Rust's--a strange,
questioning, far-off light, infinitely aloof and unutterably sad. Then
there came a lift of her heart that released a pang. She whispered with
dread, with a tremor, with an instinct of calamity.
"How about--Rust?"
"He's dead."
The winter came, with its bleak sea winds and cold rains and blizzards of
snow. Carley did not go South. She read and brooded, and gradually avoided
all save those true friends who tolerated her.
She went to the theater a good deal, showing preference for the drama of
strife, and she did not go anywhere for amusement. Distraction and
amusement seemed to be dead issues for her. But she could become absorbed
in any argument on the good or evil of the present day. Socialism reached
into her mind, to be rejected. She had never understood it clearly, but it
seemed to her a state of mind where dissatisfied men and women wanted to
share what harder working or more gifted people possessed. There were a few
who had too much of the world's goods and many who had too little. A
readjustment of such inequality and injustice must come, but Carley did not
see the remedy in Socialism.
She devoured books on the war with a morbid curiosity and hope that she
would find some illuminating truth as to the uselessness of sacrificing
young men in the glory and prime of their lives. To her war appeared a
matter of human nature rather than politics. Hate really was an effect of
war. In her judgment future wars could be avoided only in two ways--by men
becoming honest and just or by women refusing to have children to be
sacrificed. As there seemed no indication whatever of the former, she
wondered how soon all women of all races would meet on a common height,
with the mounting spirit that consumed her own heart. Such time must come.
She granted every argument for war and flung against it one ringing
passionate truth--agony of mangled soldiers and agony of women and children.
There was no justification for offensive war. It was monstrous and hideous.
If nature and evolution proved the absolute need of strife, war, blood, and
death in the progress of animal and man toward perfection, then it would be
better to abandon this Christless code and let the race of man die out.
All through these weeks she longed for a letter from Glenn. But it did not
come. Had he finally roused to the sweetness and worth and love of the
western girl, Flo Hutter? Carley knew absolutely, through both intelligence
and intuition, that Glenn Kilbourne would never love Flo. Yet such was her
intensity and stress at times, especially in the darkness of waking hours,
that jealousy overcame her and insidiously worked its havoc. Peace and a
strange kind of joy came to her in dreams of her walks and rides and climbs
in Arizona, of the lonely canyon where it always seemed afternoon, of the
tremendous colored vastness of that Painted Desert. But she resisted these
dreams now because when she awoke from them she suffered such a yearning
that it became unbearable. Then she knew the feeling of the loneliness and
solitude of the hills. Then she knew the sweetness of the murmur of falling
water, the wind in the pines, the song of birds, the white radiance of the
stars, the break of day and its gold-flushed close. But she had not yet
divined their meaning. It was not all love for Glenn Kilbourne. Had city
life palled upon her solely because of the absence of her lover? So Carley
plodded on, like one groping in the night, fighting shadows.
One day she received a card from an old schoolmate, a girl who had married
out of Carley's set, and had been ostracized. She was living down on Long
Island, at a little country place named Wading River. Her husband was an
electrician--something of an inventor. He worked hard. A baby boy had just
come to them. Would not Carley run down on the train to see the youngster?
That was a strong and trenchant call. Carley went. She found indeed a
country village, and on the outskirts of it a little cottage that must have
been pretty in summer, when the green was on vines and trees. Her old
schoolmate was rosy, plump, bright-eyed, and happy. She saw in Carley no
change--a fact that somehow rebounded sweetly on Carley's consciousness.
Elsie prattled of herself and her husband and how they had worked to earn
this little home, and then the baby.
When Carley saw the adorable dark-eyed, pink-toed, curly-fisted baby she
understood Elsie's happiness and reveled in it. When she felt the soft,
warm, living little body in her arms, against her breast, then she absorbed
some incalculable and mysterious strength. What were the trivial, sordid,
and selfish feelings that kept her in tumult compared to this welling
emotion? Had she the secret in her arms? Babies and Carley had never become
closely acquainted in those infrequent meetings that were usually the
result of chance. But Elsie's baby nestled to her breast and cooed to her
and clung to her finger. When at length the youngster was laid in his crib
it seemed to Carley that the fragrance and the soul of him remained with
her.
"A real American boy!" she murmured.
"You can just bet he is," replied Elsie. "Carley, you ought to see his dad."
"I'd like to meet him," said Carley, thoughtfully. "Elsie, was he in the
service?"
"Yes. He was on one of the navy transports that took munitions to France.
Think of me, carrying this baby, with my husband on a boat full of
explosives and with German submarines roaming the ocean! Oh, it was
horrible!"
"But he came back, and now all's well with you," said Carley, with a smile
of earnestness. "I'm very glad, Elsie."
"Yes--but I shudder when I think of a possible war in the future. I'm going
to raise boys, and girls, too, I hope--and the thought of war is
torturing."
Carley found her return train somewhat late, and she took advantage of the
delay to walk out to the wooded headlands above the Sound.
It was a raw March day, with a steely sun going down in a pale-gray sky.
Patches of snow lingered in sheltered brushy places. This bit of woodland
had a floor of soft sand that dragged at Carley's feet. There were sere and
brown leaves still fluttering on the scrub-oaks. At length Carley came out
on the edge of the bluff with the gray expanse of sea beneath her, and a
long wandering shore line, ragged with wreckage or driftwood. The surge of
water rolled in--a long, low, white, creeping line that softly roared on
the beach and dragged the pebbles gratingly back. There was neither boat
nor living creature in sight.
Carley felt the scene ease a clutching hand within her breast. Here was
loneliness and solitude vastly different from that of Oak Creek Canyon, yet
it held the same intangible power to soothe. The swish of the surf, the
moan of the wind in the evergreens, were voices that called to her. How
many more miles of lonely land than peopled cities! Then the sea--how vast!
And over that the illimitable and infinite sky, and beyond, the endless
realms of space. It helped her somehow to see and hear and feel the eternal
presence of nature. In communion with nature the significance of life might
be realized. She remembered Glenn quoting: "The world is too much with us.
. . . Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." What were our powers?
What did God intend men to do with hands and bodies and gifts and souls?
She gazed back over the bleak land and then out across the broad sea. Only
a millionth part of the surface of the unsubmerged earth knew the populous
abodes of man. And the lonely sea, inhospitable to stable homes of men, was
thrice the area of the land. Were men intended, then, to congregate in few
places, to squabble and to bicker and breed the discontents that led to
injustice, hatred, and war? What a mystery it all was! But Nature was
neither false nor little, however cruel she might be.
Once again Carley fell under the fury of her ordeal. Wavering now,
restless and sleepless, given to violent starts and slow spells of apathy,
she was wearing to defeat.
That spring day, one year from the day she had left New York for Arizona,
she wished to spend alone. But her thoughts grew unbearable. She summed up
the endless year. Could she live another like it? Something must break
within her.
She went out. The air was warm and balmy, carrying that subtle current
which caused the mild madness of spring fever. In the Park the greening of
the grass, the opening of buds, the singing of birds, the gladness of
children, the light on the water, the warm sun--all seemed to reproach her.
Carley fled from the Park to the home of Beatrice Lovell; and there,
unhappily, she encountered those of her acquaintance with whom she had
least patience. They forced her to think too keenly of herself. They
appeared carefree while she was miserable.
Over teacups there were waging gossip and argument and criticism. When
Carley entered with Beatrice there was a sudden hush and then a murmur.
"Hello, Carley! Now say it to our faces," called out Geralda Conners, a
fair, handsome young woman of thirty, exquisitely gowned in the latest
mode, and whose brilliantly tinted complexion was not the natural one of
health.
"Say what, Geralda?" asked Carley. "I certainly would not say anything
behind your backs that I wouldn't repeat here."
"Eleanor has been telling us how you simply burned us up."
"We did have an argument. And I'm not sure I said all I wanted to."
"Say the rest here," drawled a lazy, mellow voice. "For Heaven's sake, stir
us up. If I could get a kick out of anything I'd bless it."
"Carley, go on the stage," advised another. "You've got Elsie Ferguson tied
to the mast for looks. And lately you're surely tragic enough."
"I wish you'd go somewhere far off!" observed a third. "My husband is dippy
about you."
"Girls, do you know that you actually have not one sensible idea in your
heads?" retorted Carley.
"Sensible? I should hope not. Who wants to be sensible?"
Geralda battered her teacup on a saucer. "Listen," she called. "I wasn't
kidding Carley. I am good and sore. She goes around knocking everybody and
saying New York backs Sodom off the boards. I want her to come out with it
right here."
"I dare say I've talked too much," returned Carley. "It's been a rather
hard winter on me. Perhaps, indeed, I've tried the patience of my friends."
"See here, Carley," said Geralda, deliberately, "just because you've had
life turn to bitter ashes in your mouth you've no right to poison it for
us. We all find it pretty sweet. You're an unsatisfied woman and if you
don't marry somebody you'll end by being a reformer or fanatic."
"I'd rather end that way than rot in a shell," retorted Carley.
"I declare, you make me see red, Carley," flashed Geralda, angrily. "No
wonder Morrison roasts you to everybody. He says Glenn Kilbourne threw you
down for some Western girl. If that's true it's pretty small of you to vent
your spleen on us."
Carley felt the gathering of a mighty resistless force, But Geralda Conners
was nothing to her except the target for a thunderbolt.
"I have no spleen," she replied, with a dignity of passion. "I have only
pity. I was as blind as you. If heartbreak tore the scales from my eyes,
perhaps that is well for me. For I see something terribly wrong in myself,
in you, in all of us, in the life of today."
"You keep your pity to yourself. You need it," answered Geralda, with heat.
"There's nothing wrong with me or my friends or life in good old New York."
"Nothing wrong!" cried Carley. "Listen. Nothing wrong in you or life
today--nothing for you women to make right? You are blind as bats--as dead
to living truth as if you were buried. Nothing wrong when thousands of
crippled soldiers have no homes--no money--no friends--no work--in many
cases no food or bed? . . . Splendid young men who went away in their prime
to fight for you and came back ruined, suffering! Nothing wrong when sane
women with the vote might rid politics of partisanship, greed, crookedness?
Nothing wrong when prohibition is mocked by women--when the greatest boon
ever granted this country is derided and beaten down and cheated? Nothing
wrong when there are half a million defective children in this city?
Nothing wrong when there are not enough schools and teachers to educate our
boys and girls, when those teachers are shamefully underpaid? Nothing wrong
when the mothers of this great country let their youngsters go to the dark
motion picture halls and night after night in thousands of towns over all
this broad land see pictures that the juvenile court and the educators and
keepers of reform schools say make burglars, crooks, and murderers of our
boys and vampires of our girls? Nothing wrong when these young adolescent
girls ape you and wear stockings rolled under their knees below their
skirts and use a lip stick and paint their faces and darken their eyes and
pluck their eyebrows and absolutely do not know what shame is? Nothing
wrong when you may find in any city women standing at street corners
distributing booklets on birth control? Nothing wrong when great magazines
print no page or picture without its sex appeal? Nothing wrong when the
automobile, so convenient for the innocent little run out of town, presents
the greatest evil that ever menaced American girls! Nothing wrong when
money is god--when luxury, pleasure, excitement, speed are the striven for?
Nothing wrong when some of your husbands spend more of their time with
other women than with you? Nothing wrong with jazz--where the lights go out
in the dance hall and the dancers jiggle and toddle and wiggle in a
frenzy? Nothing wrong in a country where the greatest college cannot report
birth of one child to each graduate in ten years? Nothing wrong with race
suicide and the incoming horde of foreigners? . . . Nothing wrong with you
women who cannot or will not stand childbirth? Nothing wrong with most of
you, when if you did have a child, you could not nurse it? . . . Oh, my
God, there's nothing wrong with America except that she staggers under a
Titanic burden that only mothers of sons can remove! . . . You doll women,
you parasites, you toys of men, you silken-wrapped geisha girls, you
painted, idle, purring cats, you parody of the females of your species--
find brains enough if you can to see the doom hanging over you and revolt
before it is too late!"
CHAPTER XI
Carley burst in upon her aunt.
"Look at me, Aunt Mary!" she cried, radiant and exultant. "I'm going back
out West to marry Glenn and live his life!"
The keen old eyes of her aunt softened and dimmed. "Dear Carley, I've known
that for a long time. You've found yourself at last."
Then Carley breathlessly babbled her hastily formed plans, every word of
which seemed to rush her onward.
"You're going to surprise Glenn again?" queried Aunt Mary.
"Oh, I must! I want to see his face when I tell him."
"Well, I hope he won't surprise you," declared the old lady. "When did you
hear from him last?"
"In January. It seems ages--but--Aunt Mary, you don't imagine Glenn--"
"I imagine nothing," interposed her aunt. "It will turn out happily and
I'll have some peace in my old age. But, Carley, what's to become of me?"
"Oh, I never thought!" replied Carley, blankly. "It will be lonely for you.
Auntie, I'll come back in the fall for a few weeks. Glenn will let me."
"Let you? Ye gods! So you've come to that? Imperious Carley Burch! . . .
Thank Heaven, you'll now be satisfied to be let do things."
"I'd--I'd crawl for him," breathed Carley.
"Well, child, as you can't be practical, I'll have to be," replied Aunt
Mary, seriously. "Fortunately for you I am a woman of quick decision.
Listen. I'll go West with you. I want to see the Grand Canyon. Then I'll go
on to California, where I have old friends I've not seen for years. When
you get your new home all fixed up I'll spend awhile with you. And if I
want to come back to New York now and then I'll go to a hotel. It is
settled. I think the change will benefit me."
"Auntie, you make me very happy. I could ask no more," said Carley.
Swiftly as endless tasks could make them the days passed. But those on the
train dragged interminably.
Carley sent her aunt through to the Canyon while she stopped off at
Flagstaff to store innumerable trunks and bags. The first news she heard of
Glenn and the Hutters was that they had gone to the Tonto Basin to buy hogs
and would be absent at least a month. This gave birth to a new plan in
Carley's mind. She would doubly surprise Glenn. Wherefore she took council
with some Flagstaff business men and engaged them to set a force of men at
work on the Deep Lake property, making the improvements she desired, and
hauling lumber, cement, bricks, machinery, supplies--all the necessaries for
building construction. Also she instructed them to throw up a tent house
for her to live in during the work, and to engage a reliable Mexican man
with his wife for servants. When she left for the Canyon she was happier
than ever before in her life.
It was near the coming of sunset when Carley first looked down into the
Grand Canyon. She had forgotten Glenn's tribute to this place. In her
rapturous excitement of preparation and travel the Canyon had been merely a
name. But now she saw it and she was stunned.
What a stupendous chasm, gorgeous in sunset color on the heights, purpling
into mystic shadows in the depths! There was a wonderful brightness of all
the millions of red and yellow and gray surfaces still exposed to the sun.
Carley did not feel a thrill, because feeling seemed inhibited. She looked
and looked, yet was reluctant to keep on looking. She possessed no image in
mind with which to compare this grand and mystic spectacle. A
transformation of color and shade appeared to be going on swiftly, as if
gods were changing the scenes of a Titanic stage. As she gazed the dark
fringed line of the north rim turned to burnished gold, and she watched
that with fascinated eyes. It turned rose, it lost its fire, it faded to
quiet cold gray. The sun had set.
Then the wind blew cool through the pinyons on the rim. There was a sweet
tang of cedar and sage on the air and that indefinable fragrance peculiar
to the canyon country of Arizona. How it brought back to Carley remembrance
of Oak Creek! In the west, across the purple notches of the abyss, a dull
gold flare showed where the sun had gone down.
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