Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982)

by Grey, Zane

  "Ah, Sir Wansfell, so you have philosophy as well as chivalry," she replied, with the faint accent that seemed to be mockery of herself. "Change my soul if you can, wanderer of the desert I I am a woman, and a woman is symbolical of change. Teach me to cook, to work, to grow strong, to endure, to fight, to look up at those dark hills whence cometh your strength...I am here in Death Valley. I will never leave it in body. My bones will mingle with the sands and moulder to dust...But my soul--ah! that black gulf of doubt, of agony, of terror, of hate--change that if you can!"

  These tragic, eloquent words chained Adam to Death Valley as if they had been links of steel; and thus began his long sojourn there.

  Work or action was always necessary to Adam. They had become second nature. He planned a brush shelter from the sun, a sort of outside room adjoining the shack, a stone fireplace and table and seats, a low stone wall to keep out blowing sand, and a thick, heavy stone fence between shack and the slope of sliding rocks. When these tasks were finished there would be others, and always there would be the slopes to climb, the valley to explore. Idleness in Death Valley was a forerunner of madness. There must be a reserve fund of long work and exercise, so that when the blazing, leaden-hazed middays of August came, with idleness imperative, there would be both physical force and unclouded mind to endure them. The men who succumbed to madness in this valley were those who had not understood how to combat it.

  That day passed swiftly, and the twilight hour seemed to have less of gloom and forbidding intimations. That might well have been due to his eternal hope. Mrs. Virey showed less gravity and melancholy, and not once did she speak with bitterness or passion. She informed Adam that Virey had improved.

  Two more days slipped by, and on the third Virey got up and came forth into the sunlight. Adam happened to be at work near by. He saw Virey gaze around at the improvements that had been made and say something about them to his wife. He looked a man who should have been in the prime of life. Approaching with slow gait and haggard face, he addressed Adam.

  "You expect pay for this puttering around?"

  "No," replied Adam, shortly.

  "How's that?"

  "Well, when men are used to the desert, as I am, they lend a hand where it is needed. That's not often."

  "But I didn't want any such work done round my camp."

  "I know, and I excuse you because you're ignorant of desert ways and needs."

  "The question of excuse for me is offensive."

  Adam, rising abreast of the stone wall he was building, fixed his piercing eyes upon this man. Mrs. Virey stood a little to one side, but not out of range of Adam's gaze. Did a mocking light show in her shadowy eyes? The doubt, the curiosity in her expression must have related to Adam. That slight, subtle something about her revealed to Adam the inevitableness of disappointment in store for him if he still entertained any hopes of amenable relations with Virey.

  "We all have to be excused sometimes," said Adam, deliberately. "Now I had to excuse you on the score of ignorance of the desert. You chose this place as a camp. It happens to be the most dangerous spot I ever saw. Any moment a stone may roll down that slope to kill you. Any moment the whole avalanche may start. That slope is an avalanche."

  "It's my business where I camp," rejoined Virey.

  "Were you aware of the danger here?"

  "I am indifferent to danger."

  "But you are not alone. You have a woman with you."

  Manifestly, Virey had been speaking without weighing words and looking at Adam without really seeing him. The brooding shade passed out of his eyes, and in its place grew a light of interest that leaped to the crystal-cold clearness of a lens.

  "You're a prospector," he asserted.

  "No. I pan a little gold dust once in a while for fun because I happen across it."

  "You're no miner then--nor hunter, nor teamster."

  "I've been a little of all you name, but I can't be called any one of them."

  "You might be one of the robbers that infest these hills."

  "I might be, only I'm not," declared Adam, dryly. The fire in his depths stirred restlessly, but he kept a cool, smothering control over it. He felt disposed to be lenient and kind toward this unfortunate man. If only the woman had not stood there with that half-veiled mocking shadow of doubt in her eyes!

  "You're an educated man!" ejaculated Virey, incredulously.

  "I might claim to be specially educated in the ways of the desert."

  "And the ways of women, are they mysteries to you?" queried Virey, with scorn. His interrogation seemed like a bitter doubt flung out of an immeasurable depth of passion.

  "I confess that they are," replied Adam. "I've lived a lonely life. Few women have crossed my trail."

  "You don't realise your good fortune--if you tell the truth."

  "I would not lie to any man," returned Adam, bluntly. "Bah! Men are all liars, and women make them so. You're hanging around my camp, making a bluff of work."

  "I deny that. Heaving these stones is work. You lift a few of them in this hot sun...And my packing you on my back for ten miles over the floor of Death Valley--was that a bluff?"

  "You saved my life!" exclaimed the man, stung to passion. There seemed to be contending tides within him--a fight of old habits of thought, fineness of feeling, against an all-absorbing and dominating malignancy. "Man, I can't thank you for that...You've done me no service."

  "I don't want or expect thanks. I was thinking of the effort it cost me."

  "As a man who was once a gentleman, I do thank you--which is a courtesy due my past. But now that you have put me in debt for a service I didn't want, why do you linger here?"

  "I wish to help your wife."

  "Ah! that's frank of you. That frankness is something for which I really thank you. But you'll pardon me if I'm inclined to doubt the idealistic nature of your motive to help her."

  Adam pondered over this speech without reply. Words always came fluently when he was ready to speak. And he seemed more concerned over Virey's caustic bitterness than over his meaning. Then, as he met the magnificent flash in Magdalene Virey's eyes, he was inspired into revelation of Virey's veiled hint and into a serenity he divined would be kindest to her pride.

  "Go ahead and help her," Virey went on. "You have my sincere felicitations. My charming wife is helpless enough. I never knew how helpless till we were thrown upon our own resources. She cannot even cook a potato. And as for baking bread in one of those miserable black ovens, stranger, if you eat some of it I will not be long annoyed by your attentions to her."

  "Well, I'll teach her," said Adam.

  His practical response irritated Virey excessively. It was as if he wished to insult and inflame, and had not considered a literal application to his words.

  "Who are you? What's your name?" he queried, yielding to a roused curiosity.

  "Wansfell," replied Adam.

  "Wansfell?" echoed Virey. The name struck a chord of memory--a discordant one. He bent forward a little, at a point between curiosity and excitement. "Wansfell? I know that name. Are you the man who in this desert country is called Wansfell the Wanderer?"

  "Yes, I'm that Wansfell."

  "I heard a prospector tell about you," went on Virey, his haggard face now quickened by thought. "It was at a camp near a gold mine over here somewhere--I forget where. But the prospector said he had seen you kill a man named Mc something--McKin--no, McKue. That's the name...Did he tell the truth?"

  "Yes, I'm sorry to say. I killed Baldy McKue--or rather, to speak as I feel, I was the means by which the desert dealt McKue the death justly due him."

  Virey now glowed with excitement, changing the man.

  "Somehow that story haunted me," he said. "I never heard one like it...This prospector told how you confronted McKue in the street of a mining camp. In front of a gambling hell, or maybe it was a hotel. You yelled like a demon at McKue. He turned white as a sheet. He jerked his gun, began to shoot. But you bore a charmed life. His bul
lets did not hit you, or, if they did, to no purpose. You leaped upon him. His gun flew one way, his hat another...Then--then you killed him with your hands!...Is that true?"

  Adam nodded gloomily. The tale, told vividly by this seemingly galvanised Virey, was not pleasant. And the woman stood there, transfixed, with white face and tragic eyes.

  "My God! You killed McKue by sheer strength--with your bare hands!...I had not looked at your hands. I see them now...So McKue was your enemy?"

  "No. I never saw him before that day," replied Adam.

  Virey slowly drew back wonderingly, yet with instinctive shrinking. Certain it was that his lips stiffened.

  "Then why did you kill him?"

  "He ill-treated a woman."

  Adam turned away as he replied. He did not choose then to show in his eyes the leaping thought that had been born of the memory and of Virey's strange reaction. But he heard him draw a quick, sharp breath and step hack. Then a silence ensued. Adam gazed up at the endless slope, at the millions of rocks, all apparently resting lightly in their pockets, ready to plunge down.

  "So--so that was it," spoke up Virey, evidently with effort. "I always wondered. Wild West sort of story, you know. Strange I should meet you...Thanks for telling me. I gather it wasn't pleasant for you."

  "It's sickening to recall, but I have no regrets," replied Adam.

  "Quite so. I understand. Man of the desert--ruthless--inhuman sort of thing."

  "Inhuman?" queried Adam, and he looked at Virey, at last stung. Behind Virey's pale, working face and averted eyes Adam read a conscience in tumult, a spirit for the moment terrorised. "Virey, you and I'd never agree on meaning of words...I broke McKue's arms and ribs and legs, and while I cracked them I told him what an inhuman dastard he had been--to ruin a girl, to beat her, to abandon her and her baby--to leave them to die. I told him how I had watched them die...then I broke his neck!...McKue was the inhuman man--not I."

  Virey turned away, swaying a little, and his white hand, like a woman's, sought the stone wall for support, until he reached the shack, which he entered.

  "I'm sorry, Mrs. Virey, that story had to come up," said Adam, confronting her with reluctance. But she surprised him again. He expected to find her sickened, shrinking from him as a bloody monster, perhaps half fainting; he found, however, that she seemed serene, controlling deep emotions which manifested themselves only in the marble whiteness of her cheek, the strained darkness of her eye.

  "The story was beautiful. I had not heard it," she said, and the rich tremor of her voice thrilled Adam. "What woman would not revel in such a story?...Wansfell the Wanderer. It should be Sir Wansfell, Knight of the Desert!...Don't look at me so. Have you not learned that the grandest act on earth is when a man fights for the honour or love or happiness or life of a woman?...I am a woman. Many men have loved me. Virey's love is so strong that it is hate. But no man ever yet thought of me--no man ever yet heard the little songs that echoed through my soul--no man ever fought to save me!...My friend, I dare speak as you speak, with the nakedness of the desert. And so I tell you that just now I watched my husband--I listened to the words which told his nature, as if that was new to me. I watched you stand there--I listened to you. And so I dare to tell you--if you come to fight my battles I shall have added to my life of shocks and woes a trouble that will dwarf all the others...the awakening of a woman who has been blind!...The facing of my soul--perhaps its salvation! A crowning agony--a glory come too late!"

  Chapter XVI

  At sunset Adam cooked supper for the Vireys, satisfying his own needs after they had finished. Virey talked lightly, even joked about the first good meal he had sat down to on the desert. His wife, too, talked serenely, sometimes with the faintly subtle mockery, as if she had never intimated that a dividing spear threatened her heart. That was their way to hide the truth and emotion when they willed. But Adam was silent.

  Alone, out under the shadow of the towering gate to the valley, he strode to and fro, absorbed in a maze of thoughts that gradually cleared, as if by the light of the solemn stars and virtue of the speaking silence. He had chanced upon the strangest and most fatal situation in all his desert years. Yes, but was it by chance? Straight as an arrow he had come across the barrens to meet a wonderful woman who was going to love him, and a despicable man whom he was going to kill. That seemed the fatality which rang in his ears, shone in the accusing stars, hid in the heavy shadows. It was a matter of feeling. His intelligence could not grasp it. Had he been in Death Valley four days or four months? Was he walking in his sleep, victim of a nightmare? The desert, faithful always, answered him. This was nothing hut the flux and reflux of human passion, contending tides between man and woman, the littleness, the curse, the terror, and yet the joy of life. Death Valley yawned at his feet, changeless and shadowy, awful in its locked solemnity of solitude, its voicelessness, its desolation that had been desolation in past ages. He could doubt nothing there. His thought seemed almost above human error. A spirit spoke for him.

  Virey had dragged his wife to this lonely and dismal hellhole on earth to share his misery, to isolate her from men, to hide her glory of charm, to gloat over her loneliness, to revenge himself for a wrong, to feed his need of possession, his terrible love that had become hate, to watch the slow torture of her fading, wilting, drooping in this ghastly valley, to curse her living, to burn endlessly in torment because her soul would elude him for ever, to drive her to death and die with her.

  Death Valley seemed a harmonious setting for this tragedy and a fitting grave for its actors. The worst in nature calling to the darkest in mankind! What a pity Virey could not divine his littleness--that he had been a crawling maggot in the peopled ulcer of the world--that in the great spaces where the sun beat down was a fiery cleansing.

  But Magdalene Virey was a riddle beyond solving. Nevertheless, Adam pondered every thought that would stay before his consciousness. Any woman was a riddle. Did not the image of Margarita Arrallanes flash up before him--that dusky-eyed, mindless, soulless little animal, victim of nature born in her? Adam's thought halted with the seeming sacrilege of associating Magdalene Virey with memory of the Mexican girl. This Virey woman had complexity--she had mind, passion nobility, soul. What had she done to earn her husband's hate? She had never loved him--that was as fixed in Adam's sight as the North Star. Nor had she loved another man, at least not with the passion and spirit of her wonderful womanhood. Adam divined that with the intensity of feeling which the desert loneliness and solitude had taught him. He could have felt the current of any woman's great passion, whether it was in torrent, full charged and devastating, or at its lowering ebb. But, as inevitable as was life itself, there was the mysterious certainty that Magdalene Virey had terribly wronged her husband. How? Adam had repudiated any interest in what had driven them here; not until this moment had he permitted his doubt to insult the woman. Yet how helpless he was! His heart was full of unutterable pity. He could never have loved Magdalene Virey as a man, but as a brother he was yearning to change her, save her. What else in life was worth living for, except only the dreams on the heights, the walks along the lonely trails? By his own agony he had a strange affinity for anyone in trouble, especially a woman, and how terribly he saw the tragedy of Magdalene Virey! And it was not only her death that he saw. Death in a land where death reigned was nothing. For her he hated the certainty of physical pain, the turgid pulse, the red-hot iron band at the temples, the bearing down of weighted air, the drying up of flesh and blood. More than all he hated the thought of death of her spirit while her body lived. There would be a bloodless murder long before her blood stained Virey's hands.

  But this thought gave Adam pause. Was he not dealing with a personality beyond his power to divine? What did he know of this strange woman? He knew naught, but felt all. She was beautiful, compelling, secretive, aloof, and proud, magnificent as a living flame. She was mocking because knowledge of the world, of the frailty of women and falsity of men, had been as an open page.
She had lived in sight of the crowded mart, the show places where men and women passed, knowing no more of earth than that it was a place for graves. She was bitter because she had drunk bitterness to the dregs. But the sudden up-flashing warmth of her, forced out of her reserve, came from a heart of golden fire. Adam constituted himself an omniscient judge, answerable only to his conscience. By all the gods he would be true to the truth of this woman!

  Never had she been forced into this desert of desolation. That thought of Adam's seemed far back in the past. She had dared to come. Had Death Valley and the death it was famed for any terrors for her? By the side of her husband she had willingly come, unutterably despising him, infinitely brave where he was cowardly, scornfully and magnificently prepared to meet any punishment that might satisfy him. Adam saw how, in this, Magdalene Virey was answering to some strange need in itself. Let the blind, weak, egoist Virey demand the tortures of the damned! She would pay. But she was paying also a debt to herself. Adam's final conception of Magdalene Virey was that she had been hideously wronged by life, by men; that in younger days of passionate revolt she had transgressed the selfish law of husbands; that in maturer years, with the storm and defeat and disillusion of womanhood, she had risen to the heights, she had been true to herself; and with mockery of the man who could so underestimate her, who dared believe lie could make her a craven, whimpering, guilty wretch, she had faced the desert with him. She had seen the great love that was not love change to terrible hate. She had divined the hidden motive. She let him revel in his hellish secret joy. She welcomed Death Valley.

  Adam marvelled at this unquenchable spirit, this sublime effrontery of a woman. And he hesitated to dare to turn that spirit from its superb indifference. But this vacillation in him was weak. What a wonderful experience it would be to, embody in Magdalene Virey the instinct, the strife, the nature of the desert! With her mind, if he had the power to teach, she would grasp the lesson in a single day.