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Page 91
The day happened to be Sunday, and therefore the workmen were absent.
Carley had the place to herself. How the half-completed house mocked her!
She could not bear to look at it. What use could she make of it now? Flo
Hutter had become the working comrade of Glenn Kilbourne, the mistress of
his cabin. She was his wife and she would be the mother of his children.
That thought gave birth to the darkest hour of Carley Burch's life. She
became possessed as by a thousand devils. She became merely a female robbed
of her mate. Reason was not in her, nor charity, nor justice. All that was
abnormal in human nature seemed coalesced in her, dominant, passionate,
savage, terrible. She hated with an incredible and insane ferocity. In the
seclusion of her tent, crouched on her bed, silent, locked, motionless, she
yet was the embodiment of all terrible strife and storm in nature. Her
heart was a maelstrom and would have whirled and sucked down to hell all
the beings that were men. Her soul was a bottomless gulf, filled with the
gales and the fires of jealousy, superhuman to destroy.
That fury consumed all her remaining strength, and from the relapse she
sank to sleep.
Morning brought the inevitable reaction. However long her other struggles,
this monumental and final one would be brief. She realized that, yet was
unable to understand how it could be possible, unless shock or death or
mental aberration ended the fight. An eternity of emotion lay back between
this awakening of intelligence and the hour of her fall into the clutches
of primitive passion.
That morning she faced herself in the mirror and asked, "Now--what do I owe
you?" It was not her voice that answered. It was beyond her. But it said:
"Go on! You are cut adrift. You are alone. You owe none but yourself! . . .
Go on! Not backward--not to the depths--but up--upward!"
She shuddered at such a decree. How impossible for her! All animal, all
woman, all emotion, how could she live on the cold, pure heights? Yet she
owed something intangible and inscrutable to herself. Was it the thing that
woman lacked physically, yet contained hidden in her soul? An element of
eternal spirit to rise! Because of heartbreak and ruin and irreparable loss
must she fall? Was loss of love and husband and children only a test? The
present hour would be swallowed in the sum of life's trials. She could not
go back. She would not go down. There was wrenched from her tried and sore
heart an unalterable and unquenchable decision--to make her own soul prove
the evolution of woman. Vessel of blood and flesh she might be, doomed by
nature to the reproduction of her kind, but she had in her the supreme
spirit and power to carry on the progress of the ages--the climb of woman
out of the darkness.
Carley went out to the workmen. The house should be completed and she would
live in it. Always there was the stretching and illimitable desert to look
at, and the grand heave upward of the mountains. Hoyle was full of zest for
the practical details of the building. He saw nothing of the havoc wrought
in her. Nor did the other workmen glance more than casually at her. In this
Carley lost something of a shirking fear that her loss and grief were
patent to all eyes.
That afternoon she mounted the most spirited of the mustangs she had
purchased from the Indians. To govern him and stick on him required all her
energy. And she rode him hard and far, out across the desert, across mile
after mile of cedar forest, clear to the foothills. She rested there,
absorbed in gazing desertward, and upon turning back again, she ran him
over the level stretches. Wind and branch threshed her seemingly to
ribbons. Violence seemed good for her. A fall had no fear for her now. She
reached camp at dusk, hot as fire, breathless and strengthless. But she had
earned something. Such action required constant use of muscle and mind. If
need be she could drive both to the very furthermost limit. She could ride
and ride--until the future, like the immensity of the desert there, might
swallow her. She changed her clothes and rested a while. The call to supper
found her hungry. In this fact she discovered mockery of her grief. Love
was not the food of life. Exhausted nature's need of rest and sleep was no
respecter of a woman's emotion.
Next day Carley rode northward, wildly and fearlessly, as if this conscious
activity was the initiative of an endless number of rides that were to save
her. As before the foothills called her, and she went on until she came to
a very high one.
Carley dismounted from her panting horse, answering the familiar impulse to
attain heights by her own effort.
"Am I only a weakling?" she asked herself. "Only a creature mined by the
fever of the soul! . . . Thrown from one emotion to another? Never the
same. Yearning, suffering, sacrificing, hoping, and changing--forever the
same! What is it that drives me? A great city with all its attractions has
failed to help me realize my life. So have friends failed. So has the
world. What can solitude and grandeur do? . . . All this obsession of
mine--all this strange feeling for simple elemental earthly things likewise
will fail me. Yet I am driven. They would call me a mad woman."
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