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Page 92
It took Carley a full hour of slow body-bending labor to climb to the
summit of that hill. High, steep, and rugged, it resisted ascension. But at
last she surmounted it and sat alone on the heights, with naked eyes, and
an unconscious prayer on her lips.
What was it that had happened? Could there be here a different answer from
that which always mocked her?
She had been a girl, not accountable for loss of mother, for choice of home
and education. She had belonged to a class. She had grown to womanhood in
it. She had loved, and in loving had escaped the evil of her day, if not
its taint. She had lived only for herself. Conscience had awakened--but,
alas! too late. She had overthrown the sordid, self-seeking habit of life;
she had awakened to real womanhood; she had fought the insidious spell of
modernity and she had defeated it; she had learned the thrill of taking
root in new soil, the pain and joy of labor, the bliss of solitude, the
promise of home and love and motherhood. But she had gathered all these
marvelous things to her soul too late for happiness.
"Now it is answered," she declared aloud. "That is what has happened? . . .
And all that is past. . . . Is there anything left? If so what?"
She flung her query out to the winds of the desert. But the desert seemed
too gray, too vast, too remote, too aloof, too measureless. It was not
concerned with her little life. Then she turned to the mountain kingdom.
It seemed overpoweringly near at hand. It loomed above her to pierce the
fleecy clouds. It was only a stupendous upheaval of earth-crust, grown over
at the base by leagues and leagues of pine forest, belted along the middle
by vast slanting zigzag slopes of aspen, rent and riven toward the heights
into canyon and gorge, bared above to cliffs and corners of craggy rock,
whitened at the sky-piercing peaks by snow. Its beauty and sublimity were
lost upon Carley now; she was concerned with its travail, its age, its
endurance, its strength. And she studied it with magnified sight.
What incomprehensible subterranean force had swelled those immense slopes
and lifted the huge bulk aloft to the clouds? Cataclysm of nature--the
expanding or shrinking of the earth--vast volcanic action under the surface!
Whatever it had been, it had left its expression of the travail of the
universe. This mountain mass had been hot gas when flung from the parent
sun, and now it was solid granite. What had it endured in the making? What
indeed had been its dimensions before the millions of years of its
struggle?
Eruption, earthquake, avalanche, the attrition of glacier, the erosion of
water, the cracking of frost, the weathering of rain and wind and snow--
these it had eternally fought and resisted in vain, yet still it stood
magnificent, frowning, battle-scarred and undefeated. Its sky-piercing
peaks were as cries for mercy to the Infinite. This old mountain realized
its doom. It had to go, perhaps to make room for a newer and better
kingdom. But it endured because of the spirit of nature. The great notched
circular line of rock below and between the peaks, in the body of the
mountains, showed where in ages past the heart of living granite had blown
out, to let loose on all the near surrounding desert the streams of black
lava and the hills of black cinders. Despite its fringe of green it was
hoary with age. Every looming gray-faced wall, massive and sublime, seemed
a monument of its mastery over time. Every deep-cut canyon, showing the
skeleton ribs, the caverns and caves, its avalanche-carved slides, its
long, fan-shaped, spreading taluses, carried conviction to the spectator
that it was but a frail bit of rock, that its life was little and brief,
that upon it had been laid the merciless curse of nature. Change! Change
must unknit the very knots of the center of the earth. So its strength lay
in the sublimity of its defiance. It meant to endure to the last rolling
grain of sand. It was a dead mountain of rock, without spirit, yet it
taught a grand lesson to the seeing eye.
Life was only a part, perhaps an infinitely small part of nature's plan.
Death and decay were just as important to her inscrutable design. The
universe had not been created for life, ease, pleasure, and happiness of a
man creature developed from lower organisms. If nature's secret was the
developing of a spirit through all time, Carley divined that she had it
within her. So the present meant little.
"I have no right to be unhappy," concluded Carley. "I had no right to Glenn
Kilbourne. I failed him. In that I failed myself. Neither life nor nature
failed me--nor love. It is no longer a mystery. Unhappiness is only a
change. Happiness itself is only change. So what does it matter? The great
thing is to see life--to understand--to feel--to work--to fight--to endure.
It is not my fault I am here. But it is my fault if I leave this strange
old earth the poorer for my failure. . . . I will no longer be little. I
will find strength. I will endure. . . . I still have eyes, ears, nose,
taste. I can feel the sun, the wind, the nip of frost. Must I slink like a
craven because I've lost the love of one man? Must I hate Flo Hutter
because she will make Glenn happy? Never! ... All of this seems better so,
because through it I am changed. I might have lived on, a selfish clod!"
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