by Zane Grey
Patricia found the interior of the El Tovar very pleasing to the eye, unconventional and western, with comfort the dominant note. The big stone fireplace with its smoldering red fire particularly appealed to her. As she took the pen from the clerk she found her fingers quite cold and stiff. After a moment’s hesitation she suddenly remembered that she did not intend to use her surname and she registered under her middle name, signing Miss P. Clay, New York.
A room at the end of a long corridor on the second floor was assigned her, and from it she could see far out over an undulating green forest to dim, dark mountains on the horizon. Immediately she liked this room and view. The distant horizon awakened a vague sensation in her breast—something she had never felt before. Patricia gazed across the green distance and felt as lost as if she were alone in a gray-green world. How different from the East! Never before, except on the ocean, had she felt such a sense of illimitable space. She turned to unpack one of her bags when a tap sounded on her door. Upon opening it Patricia was confronted by a young woman, rather handsome in a dark, intense way, full-bodied and red-lipped.
“I’m Miss Hilton,” she announced. “I’ve charge of the trail trips. Your train was late. If you are going down either the Bright Angel or Hermit trail you must hurry to get breakfast.”
“Thank you,” replied Patricia, aware of the woman’s sharp, curious glance roving over her. “I’ll make inquiry later if I wish to take any trips.”
As she closed the door Patricia found herself wondering why hotel people chose to employ hawk-eyed women to attend to their guests. This young woman made her conscious of her appearance, or more than that—of herself. Another glance into the mirror acquainted Patricia with the fact that her face was pale and sad. Dark shadows lay under her eyes. “Once I was proud of my good looks,” she mused as a wave of self-pity flooded over her. “Now I wish I were homely and old…. Ah! I suppose I’ll be that soon enough.”
She went in to breakfast. The dining room was half-octagonal in shape, bright and cheerful, with polished floor and white tables. The waitresses were clad in white. Patricia was given a seat beside a window through which the rich late morning sunlight poured. Evidently most of the hotel guests already had had breakfast, for there were only a scattered few at the tables. Patricia heard one woman exclaiming about the Canyon, and a man, manifestly an Englishman, responded languidly, “Jolly fine hole in the ground!”
Patricia’s appetite was like her thoughts, listless. She did not care whether she ate or not, and her mind seemed dully at tension.
After breakfast, Patricia went into the lobby and stood before the fire. Groups of people, some in riding costumes, others in blue jeans, were hurrying about, talking excitedly of prospective trips. Patricia believed she would not want to stay long at the El Tovar. Could she find any place where she would want to stay? She had asked herself a thousand questions since leaving New York. None had been answered; no decisions had been made. She was adrift. She realized only one thing—that she wished to be alone, where she would see no one and where no one would see her, for a long, long time. Yet even while she longed for solitude and escape, she realized that they were unattainable. One could not escape from people any more than from oneself. Wherever she went women would be curious about her, men would approach her, and she must inevitably be influenced by her surroundings. This unique hotel where she had come to be away from all the people she knew had been built on this once inaccessible spot because from it one could look down a mile deep to where a river ran. It did not rouse even a languid enthusiasm in Patricia; nevertheless she went out to look at it.
From the hotel porch she saw a stone parapet, which, she judged, marked the rim of the Canyon. Motionless figures of men and women, like statues, stood apart from one another along this stone wall. Their heads were bent and their postures indicated the awe and wonderment that had transfigured them.
Patricia walked forward, yet toward a point that would separate her from these absorbed watchers. As she approached the canyon rim, she could see beyond the parapet into the blue distance to where a black fringed line rose out of what appeared to be a belt of gold. Certainly that distant band of black and gold could not have anything to do with the Canyon!
A wind, cool as ice and strangely pungent, swooped up out of the void and tore at her hair. Patricia was temporarily blinded; and she had reached the parapet to lean her knees against it before she had a chance for one glimpse at the Canyon. She had had no preparation for the sight that was to meet her eye.
She put back her thick hair from her eyes and looked down. For a moment she was stunned. But for the parapet against which she leaned, she would have been drawn by some irresistible force into the awful vastness below. She wanted to cry out in wonderment over this gigantic spectacle, but she had been struck mute, powerless to move, powerless to feel. Was this a chasm of dreams? Pictures were flat surfaces; descriptions were dead things—they had not prepared her for this staggering phenomenon.
Patricia stood there for endless moments, slowly coming out of her stupefaction, slowly awakening to reality. The appalling power of the human eye, the infinite possession-taking sight, had never before been revealed to her. It was as if some stupendous monster, alive, merciless with age-old knowledge, had lain in ambush for her, suddenly to strip bare the truth of her heart, the love of beauty, of life, of love, of mystery, of the physical in her and the spiritual that glorified it. This charm of red and black and purple, with its blank impendency, its unintelligible depths and terrors, resembled the gulf of her soul, into which she had now her first glimpse.
Patricia almost fell upon her knees. A woman accosted her, which made her realize that she was not a sole spectator there. Not that she cared! But habit of life reasserted itself, and while she had the strength left she wrenched her gaze from the Canyon and turned away.
As she closed the door of her room and locked it, she had a strange thought that she was another person. It was absurd but would not yield to reason. The mirror showed Patricia Edgerton, whiter, darker of eye, exalted by emotion, perhaps, yet the same woman. It was the crowding of new thoughts behind the level brow, behind the inscrutable eyes, that seemed to make her different. She paced the room; she sat in the deep chair to face the undulating green forest; and at last she flung herself on the couch to cover her eyes: “I didn’t know this was in me!” she whispered. “What is it that has happened?”
Scorn, ridicule paled before her consciousness. She could not accept as explanation that after months of ennui and disgust with her life in the East, after a wild and reckless act of sacrifice, and then days of morbid gloom, the sight of the Grand Canyon had broken her dark mood and kindled a white fire of emotion in her soul. True, this had actually happened, but it did not tell why. She was utterly amazed at herself. The transport, or whatever had happened within her, had been too exquisite, too enrapturing, too tremendous to be ephemeral.
Like so many of her class she had drifted away from the Church.
“I’m modern, materialistic, pagan,” she whispered. “Could this —this amazement, joy, pain be that, in the Canyon, I caught a glimpse of God?”
Patricia hoped this might be true, but she doubted it. Yet every intelligent effort to understand herself, to master and explain this inexplicable emotion, left the miracle she had experienced more wonderful, bigger, more stable and far-reaching.
“Oh, I was sick of it all,” she thought. “I had no real home. I seemed alone in the midst of luxury, idleness, uselessness, decadence. If I could have married…. But that rich, childless, middle-class crowd, bah!—I grew to hate it. Drinking men who wanted me to drink—so they could paw me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand it…. Then those few men—real men I did like—they thought only of money, of power. They never heard the pathetic little cry of my soul…. And the women—my friends, especially the girl-wife for whom I sacrificed my name—dancing, smoking, flirting, half-naked painted dolls…. Oh! I welcomed the chance to flee from it all. But
I thought life was over for me. I saw no future, no home, no husband, no love, no children. I saw only drifting, wandering from place to place. I saw no work, no good in myself or in anybody. I had given up. For me the times were out of joint. I abandoned my class. I despised the greedy, vile, war-worn, un-Christian world that I came in contact with. The dreams of girlhood were all dead and buried. I was twenty-four years old and sick of what I thought was life.”
So she pondered, as thoughts and memories she had tried to forget now surged through her mind, released by the miracle of the Canyon.
“It seems I’m out west,” her thoughts went on. “I’ve stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon. That is nothing. Places are nothing. Yet—what is it that has come over me? It is simple enough. There are marvelous things in nature—and in my heart—that I never dreamed of.”
“Oh, I hope it lasts,” she murmured after a while. “It must last. I will make it…. I must do something…. I feel on the threshold of a new life. It terrifies me with hope, with joy, with…. Oh! What can I do? …”
Presently she moved to the desk in her room. She began to write swiftly, with a sure pen:
Dearest Alice,
I did not mean to write to you, but something has happened that makes it imperative.
When I saw this glorious canyon it seemed I faced my soul. I thought it was dead. Something lifted a burden from my mind. It is impossible for me now to leave you in distress of mind—to permit you to imagine longer that I chose ostracism and exile solely on your account. I meant to let you suffer under that belief. It was ignoble and morbid of me.
Oh, I’m so glad to tell you. Your husband will never know. It is utterly impossible, so strange were the circumstances. I dare to write you this because I know he went abroad believing it was me he caught instead of you.
But though my sacrifice was made for love of you—impulsive and heedless—all the time it must have been an unconscious selfishness. I had come to hate our set—that idle, luxurious, childless, dancing, drinking crowd. I was a part of it, yes, but not of it. You know. I didn’t fit because in my heart, deeply buried, there was ever strife and antagonism. I wasn’t big enough to cut loose and find myself—a man, children, work—but nevertheless I rebelled more and more until my heart sickened in my breast.
Allie, I welcomed that chance to escape, though I did not realize it on the impulse. You know what little home life I had—my mother dead, my father a clubman. He will not care. No one will care deeply, not even you. I have money, and no ties. I shall travel under my middle name, Clay. Don’t grieve over me. It was a release. If only I could tell you …! It seems ungracious for me to repudiate my friends, to disown my people, to abandon my home. That great, teeming, changing, hideous New York l It has changed since the war. The East has changed. Oh, I am not a hopeless cynic. I know there are good women and fine men back there. But as I had neither goodness nor nobility, none of them ever sought me out.
Strange—I saw none of the West on my way out. I lay blind, sick, clamped in my seat. Strange that my first sight of the West embraced this Grand Canyon of Arizona. It struck me like lightning. I cannot tell you what I saw. Just a rent in the earth. But such a rent and such an earth!
You will not understand me, Allie, yet you must believe. What does it matter what reached my soul and burned away my bitter doubt of self? It has happened. I have not one regret. I owe you infinitely more than you owe me. Yet I impose upon you a solemn obligation, which, if you have any womanhood left, you will keep forever. Let that be your last wild fling!
Patricia.
Just as swiftly as she had written, Patricia sealed and stamped the letter and went out to the desk to mail it. Her hand shook, her eyes dimmed, her ears did not clearly record what someone said to her. The hour had been crucial, the last moment one of exceeding strain. What had she irrevocably turned her back upon? Why had that letter been the means to an end? She could not say then, yet she felt that it meant her freedom. Hurrying back to her room, she flung herself upon the bed and wept as she had never wept before in all her life.
The paroxysm gradually subsided, and at length she turned on the pillow and wiped her tear-wet face and lay there spent and tremulous, motionless for many moments. She imagined she saw the retreat of a pale, deformed, and restless soul, beaten into subjection for all time. She felt the blood beat in her veins as if renewed, vivified by some magic current, clarified of taint and fever and poison.
“I shall stay here for a while,” she mused, and the decision gave her unaccountable joy. She rose from the bed and gazed at her trunks and bags. Suddenly they seemed to contain useless burdens, endless monuments to her fashionable life, her craving for beautiful garments. Leisurely she unpacked some of them, divided between a melancholy retrospection and a sense of gladness that this unaccustomed task was to be hers from now on and that in this instance it meant she was settled here for days, weeks—as long as she liked.
In the afternoon Patricia went out to take her second look at the Canyon. She approached the rim as if it were an altar. She looked. The great gap seemed to yawn at her. Lights, shadows, distances of the morning had now vanished. The canyon was filled with a smoky haze, through which the millions of red lines and surfaces shone with softened accents.
Tourists were there on the rim, talking gaily, inventing banal witticisms about the Canyon, photographing each other in attitudes singularly out of harmony with the scene. The Grand Canyon of Arizona was but a place to them, another, and perhaps the greatest, addition to their accumulated sights.
Patricia passed them by. She could not stand there in awe, in rapture, in immeasurable gratitude, while carefree and shallow people mocked the thing she revered. A trail wound along the rim, soon leading Patricia away from the vicinity of the hotel. She followed it, now and then passing a woman on a bench or a man sitting on one of the rocky points. They, too, seemed to have sought seclusion. They did not glance at Patricia as she passed by. She wondered at them and thought she understood. Here was a shrine for the lonely soul, where one could face its agony or revel in its exaltation. Every human being must be powerfully affected in the presence of this spectacle. Perhaps the ignorant and the callous were excited to loquaciousness and self-consciousness by its majesty.
The trail zigzagged in and out of the fragrant cedar forest, sometimes on the rim, and again back out of sight of the blue abyss. The rim appeared to be notched like a saw, with little and deep cuts, and lengthy yellow points of rock running out alternating with tiny abutments and promontories. But everywhere the drop was perpendicular, a fact Patricia seemed to sense rather than see. She was aware of the void; it dominated every step, yet she did not directly look. Instead she feasted her eyes on unfamiliar green growths and the gray patches under the cedars and lavender-colored berries on thick bushy trees she could not name. She recognized her first cactus and had the proof of it by sticking her finger on a thorn. She saw flowers, too, a carmine blossom like a ragged paintbrush, and pale lilac-hued flowers, growing in close round patches, that smiled modestly out of the somber gray soil.
At length the trail ended. Patricia went on, finding the brush thick and the ground rough. She had intended to make her way to a vast promontory which extended out over the canyon, but she found that after all this walking it seemed no closer. Indeed, it was miles distant, and so she had her first lesson in the rarified, deceiving atmosphere. Moreover, to her surprise and dismay she suddenly found herself quite exhausted. She had walked briskly, as was her pleasure always, only to realize that her breathing had become difficult. Her heart labored under an oppression and she discovered that her nose was bleeding slightly.
After resting, she threaded her way through gnarled, spike-branched cedars, out to a point which jutted into the canyon. It was scarcely twenty feet wide, and the end was naked yellow rock, cracked and splintered, completely bare of foliage. Patricia put a hand on her breast. How her heart was pounding. The point she had chosen extended for some distance out from the main
rim, and the approach to it was thick with brush and cedars. She was alone in solitude and silence such as she had never known in all her life before.
A cedar tree grew back a few yards from the bare rock of the canyon rim. It was small, darkly green, with low-branched spreading foliage. The ground under it was brown, clean, odorous, very inviting. Presently she would sit there, to look and watch and feel for hours, and then she would come back. This spot would be her sanctuary.
“Am I in my right mind?” she mused. “Do I intend to throw myself over this precipice? … A few steps! It would be so easy. No one would ever know what had become of me. I am not afraid.”
She stepped bravely to the very brink. The golden sunlit depths gave place to blue, and these to purple. Appalling bottomless abyss! Patricia gazed down, down, down. She was fascinated. But she had no longing to destroy herself. If only a short time ago life had seemed to be a thing of complete indifference to her, now it seemed to her something to cherish and to make over. She found herself trembling, but not from fear. The thing that shook her nerve was that here, on the very rim of one of nature’s great miracles, she had become the master of her own destiny.
Then she sought the restful seat under the cedar and abandoned herself to her senses. It was as if she had all of life to absorb something forever beautiful, growing, illusive, and infinite.
The sky was such a blue as she had never seen, not sea-blue or azure-blue, but a blue of marvelous deep transparency, as if it were a penetrable cloud canopy through which she could see. Her eyes seemed to be able to penetrate it, but beyond there was only more blue, the endless and immeasurable heavens.
Almost as unfathomable and mysterious as the blue sky were the depths of the canyon. She could distinguish the canyon floor, pale bronze through a purple veil, yet it was as evanescent as the heavens.