Katharine Newlin Burt

“ A log fell forward and Joan lifted her head. She had not come to an end of Isabella’s tragedy nor of her own memories, but something other than the falling log had startled her; a light, crunching step upon the snow.
She looked toward the window. For an instant the room was almost dark and the white night peered in at her, its gigantic snow-peaks pressing against the long, horizontal window panes, and in that instant she saw a face. The fire started up again, the white night dropped away, the face shone close a moment longer, then it too disappeared. ”

“ Joan knew that it was a man’s right to kill his woman for “dealin’s with another man.” This law was human; it evidently did not hold good with animals. There was no bitterness, though some ferocity, in the traffic of their loves.
While she pondered through the first sleepless nights in this strange shelter of hers, and while the blizzard Prosper had counted on drove bayoneted 89 battalions of snow across the plains and forced them, screaming like madmen, along the narrow cañon, Joan came slowly and fully to a realization of the motive of Pierre’s deed. ”

“ The real heat of the house, and it was almost unbearably hot, came from the stoves in kitchen and bedrooms, but this fire gave its quota of warmth and more than its quota of that beauty so necessary to Prosper Gael.
Wen Ho put his head from one side to the other and stopped rubbing his hands. He had heard the packing of snow under webs and runners. After listening a moment, he nodded to himself, like a figure in a pantomime, ran into the kitchen, did something to the stove, then lighted a lantern and pattered out along the tunnel dodging the icicle stalactites. ”

“ Two years before her breakdown, Jasper had been terribly hurt in an automobile accident, and Betty had come to him at the hospital, had waited, as white as a snow-image, for the result of the examination. They had told her emphatically that there was no hope. Jasper Morena could not live for more than a few days. She must not allow herself to hope. He might or might not regain consciousness. If he did, it would be for a few minutes before the end. Betty had listened with her white, rigid, child face, had thanked them, had gone home. ”

“ He was like a man who, having denied the existence of Apollyon, has come upon him face to face and has been burnt by his breath. Such a man is inevitably moral. All this long, intricate intrigue with the wife of a man who called him friend, seemed to him horribly unworthy. If Betty had been a great lover, if she had not lost courage at the eleventh hour and left him to face that terrible winter in Wyoming, then their passion might have justified itself: but now there was a staleness in their relationship. ”

“ She wanted, pitifully enough, to mark every difference between this Joan and the Joan whom Prosper had drawn on his sled up the cañon trail. If he expected to force her back into the position of enchanted leopardess, to see her “lie at his feet and eat out of his hand,” as Morena had once described the plight of Zona, he would see at a glance that she was no longer so easily mastered. In fact, sitting there, she looked as proud and perilous as a young Medea, black-haired with long throat and cold, malevolent lips. ”

“ It was very desolate—the blank surface of the world with its flying scud, the blank yellow-gray sky, the range, all iron and white, the blue-black scars of leafless trees, the green-black etchings of firs. The wind cut across like a scythe, sharp, but making no stir above the drift. It was all dead and dark—an underground world which, Prosper felt, never could have seen the sun, had no memory of sun nor moon nor stars. The roof of Pierre’s cabin made a dark ridge above the snow, veiled in cloudy drift. ”

“ Perhaps, in spite of his gruesome boast as to dead men, it was as much to satisfy his own spirit as to comfort Joan’s that Prosper actually did undertake a journey to the cabin that had belonged to Pierre. It was true that Prosper had never been able to stop thinking, not so much of the tall, slim youth lying so still across the floor, all his beauty and strength turned to an ashen slackness, as of a brown hand that stirred. The motion of those fingers groping for life had continually disturbed him. ”

“ Holliwell’s God of comfort and forgiveness forsook him. What did he want with a God when that one comrade of his lonely, young, human life was out there lost by his own cruelty! Perhaps she was dead. Perhaps the wound had killed her. For all these years she might have been lying dead somewhere in the snow, under the sky. Sharp periods of pain followed dull periods of stupor. Now it was night again and a recollection of Jasper’s theater ticket had dragged him to a vague purpose. He wanted to see again that woman who had so vivified his memory of Joan. ”

“ She had been sitting in her chair, listless and wan, now staring at the flames, now following Wen Ho’s activities with absent eyes. A storm was swirling outside. Near the window, Prosper, a figure of keen absorption, bent over his writing-table, his long, fine hand driving the pencil across sheet after sheet. He looked like a machine, so regular and rapid was his work. A sudden sense of isolation came upon Joan. What part had she in the life of this companion, this keeper of her own life? She felt a great need of drawing nearer to him, of finding the humanity in him. ”

“ The Jew was well used to such a manner. He treated it with light bitterness, but he did not love to receive the users of it in his own house. It was with heightened color and bent brows that he pushed apart the long, crimson hangings and came into the immense drawing-room.
It was softly lighted and pleasantly warmed. A fire burned. The tall, fair visitor rose from a seat near the blaze and turned all in one rigid piece toward his advancing host. Jasper was perfectly conscious that his own gesture and speech of greeting were too eager, too ingratiating, that they had a touch of servility. ”

“ An apartment house was a greater novelty to him even than a theater, but, after a dazed moment of discovering that he did not have to ring or knock, but just push open the great iron-scrolled door and step into the brightly lighted, steam-heated marble hall, he decided that the woman at the desk was a person in authority, and to her he addressed himself, soft hat gripped in his hand, his face set to hide excitement. ”

“ Joan pushed Pierre from her violently and turned upon Prosper Gael. Her voice broke over him in a tumult of soft scorn.
“You know nothing of loving, Prosper Gael, not the first letter of loving. Nobody has learned that about you as well as I have. Now, listen and I will teach you something. This is something that I have learned. There are worse wounds than I had from Pierre, and it is by the hands of such men as you are that they are given. The hurts you get from love, they heal. Pierre was mad, he was a beast, he branded me as though I had been a beast. ”

“ John Carver had used a phrase, “When you see her eyes lookin’ and lookin’ at another man—” and this phrase had stuck in Pierre’s sensitive and jealous memory. What Joan felt for Holliwell was a sort of ignorant and respectful tenderness, the excitement of an intelligent child first moved to a knowledge of its own intelligence; the gratitude of savage loneliness toward the beautiful feet of exploration. A consciousness of her clean mind, a consciousness of her young, untamed spirit, had come slowly to life in her since her talk with Holliwell. ”

“ Why, Joan couldn’t talk like this, she couldn’t act to save her soul! She was as simple as a child, and shy, with the unself-conscious shyness of wild things. To be sure, this “actress-lady” was making-believe she was a wild thing, and she was doing it almighty well, but Joan had been the reality, and grave and still, part of his own big, grave, mountain country, not a fierce, man-devouring animal of the tropics. Pierre lived in the play with all but one fragment of his brain, and that remembered Joan. ”

“ It was the great bundle of Prosper’s mail that first brought home to Joan the awareness of an outside world. She knew that Prosper was a traveled and widely experienced man, but she had not fancied him held to this world by human attachments. Concerning the “tall child” she had not put a question and she still believed her to have been Prosper’s wife. But when, leaving her place under the tree, she came into the house and found Prosper feverishly slitting open envelope after envelope, with a pile of papers and magazines, ankle-high, beside him on the floor, she stood aghast. ”

“ She was a tall girl, her stained legs and arms bare below her ragged dress, her black hair hung wild and free about her face and neck. As the daughter of a native mother and an English father, her beauty had been made to seem both Saxon and savage. Stained and painted, darkened below the great gray eyes, Joan with her brows and her classic chin and throat, Joan with her secret, dangerous eyes and lithe, long body, made an arresting picture enough against the setting of vivid green and blue. ”

“ It was this Joan that had come to Lazy-Y Ranch and had cooked for and bullied “the outfit”—a Joan of set face and bitter tongue, whose two years’ lonely battle with life had twisted her youth out of its first comely straightness. In Joan’s brief code of moral law there was one sin—the dealings of a married woman with another man. When Pierre’s living and seeking face looked up toward her where she stood on the mountain-side above Prosper’s cabin, she felt for the first time that she had sinned, and so, for the first time, she was a sinner, and the inevitable agony of soul began. ”

“ She had become a dark spot on the snow, a lifeless part of the loneliness and silence.
Above her, where the sharp peaks touched the clouds, there came a widening rift showing a cold, turquoise clarity. The sun was just setting and, as the cloud-banks lifted, strong shadows, intensely blue, pointed across the plain of snow. A small, black, energetic figure came out from among the firs and ran forward where the longest shadow pointed. It looked absurdly tiny and anxious; futile, in its pigmy haste, across the exquisite stillness. Joan, lying so still, was acquiescent ”

“ Her love and Pierre’s—her life before Pierre came—to put herself in Isabella’s place, she felt back to the days before her love, when she had lived in a desolation of bleak poverty, up and away along Lone River in her father’s shack. This log house of Pierre’s was a castle by contrast. John Carver and his daughter had shared one room between them; Joan’s bed curtained off with gunny-sacking in a corner. She slept on hides and rolled herself up in old dingy patchwork quilts and worn blankets. ”

“ And Prosper enjoyed the training of his captive leopardess, though he sometimes all but melted over the pathos of her and had much ado to keep his hands from her unconscious young beauty.
“You’re so changed, Joan,” he said one day abruptly. “You’ve grown as thin as a reed, child; I can see every bone, and your eyes—don’t you ever shut them any more?”
Joan, prone on the skin before the fire, elbows on the fur, hands to her temples, face bent over a book, looked up impatiently. ”

“ She felt her way weakly to the second large chair and sat down facing him across the hearth. The Chinaman’s shadow, thrown strongly by the lamp, ran to and fro between and across them. It was a strange scene truly, and Prosper felt with exhilaration all its strangeness. This was no Darby and Joan fireside; a wizard with his enchanted leopardess, rather. He was half-afraid of Joan and of himself.
“It’s right beautiful,” said Joan, “an’ right strange to me. I never seen anything like it before. That”—her eyes followed Wen Ho’s departure half-fearfully—“that man and all.” ”

“ Holliwell wondered why these things, this brief, sing-song recitation, had given a light thrill to the surface of his skin, had sent a tingling to his fingertips. He was the first person to wonder at that effect of Joan’s cadenced music. “The valley of the shadow—” she had missed a familiar phrase and added value to a too often repeated line.
“Joan! Joan!” said the “sin-buster,” an exclamation drawn from him on a deep breath, “what an extraordinary girl you are! What a marvelous woman you are going to be!” ”

“ Prosper stayed there on his knee beside her, his chin in his hand. What an extraordinary being this was, what a magnificent wilderness. The thought of exploration, of discovery, of cultivation, filled him with excitement and delight. Such opportunities are rarely given to a man. 87 Even that other most beautiful adventure—yes, he could think this already!—might have been tame beside this one. He looked long at Joan, long into the fire, and she lay still, with the brooding beauty of that first-heard melody upon her face. ”

“ I don’t want friends, not many friends. These acting people, they’re not real folks. I don’t savvy their ways and they don’t savvy mine. They always end by disliking me because I’m queer and different from them. You have been my friend, and your wife—that is, she used to be.” Suddenly Jane became more her usual self and spoke with childlike wistfulness. “She doesn’t come to see me any more, Mr. Morena. And I could love her. She’s so like a little girl with those round eyes—” Jane held up two circles made by forefingers and thumbs to represent Betty’s round eyes. ”