THE first time of my
hearing of her was at Temblor. We had come all one day between blunt whitish
bluffs rising from mirage water, with a thick pale wake of dust billowing from
the wheels, all the dead wall of the foothills sliding and shimmering with
heat, to learn that the Walking Woman had passed us somewhere in the dizzying
dimness, going down to the Tulares on her own feet. We heard of her again in
the Carrisal, and again at Adobe Station, where she had passed a week before
the shearing, and at last I had a glimpse of her at the Eighteen-Mile House as
I went hurriedly northward on the Mojave stage; and afterward sheepherders at
whose camps she slept, and cowboys at rodeos, told me as much of her way of
life as they could understand. Like enough they told her as much of mine. That
was very little. She was the Walking Woman, and no one knew her name, but
because she was a sort of whom men speak respectfully, they called her to her
face, Mrs. Walker, and she answered to it if she was so inclined. She came and
went about our western world on no discoverable errand, and whether she had
some place of refuge where she lay by in the interim, or whether between her
seldom, unaccountable appearances in our quarter she went on steadily walking,
was never learned. She came and went, oftenest in a kind of muse of travel
which the untrammeled space begets, or at rare intervals flooding wondrously
with talk, never of herself, but of things she had known and seen. She must
have seen some rare happenings too--by report. She was at Maverick the time of
the Big Snow, and at Tres Pinos when they brought home the body of Morena; and
if anybody could have told whether de Borba killed Mariana for spite or
defense, it would have been she, only she could not be found when most wanted.
She was at Tunawai at the time of the cloud-burst, and if she had cared for it
could have known most desirable things of the ways of trail-making, burrow-
habiting small things.
All of which should
have made her worth meeting, though it was not, in fact, for such things I was
wishful to meet her; and as it turned out, it was not of these things we talked
when at last we came together. For one thing, she was a woman, not old, who had
gone about alone in a country where the number of women is as one in fifteen.
She had eaten and slept at the herders' camps, and laid by for days at one-man
stations whose masters had no other touch of human kind than the passing of
chance prospectors or the halting of the tri-weekly stage. She had been set on
her way by teamsters who lifted her out of white, hot desertness and put her
down at the crossing of unnamed ways, days distant from anywhere. And through
all this she passed unarmed and unoffended. I had the best testimony to this,
the witness of the men themselves. I think they talked of it because they were
so much surprised at it. It was not, on the whole, what they expected of
themselves.
Well I understand that
nature which wastes its borders with too eager burning, beyond which rim of
desolation it flares forever quick and white, and have had some inkling of the
isolating calm of a desire too high to stoop to satisfaction. But you could not
think of these things pertaining to the Walking Woman, and if there were ever
any truth in the exemption from offense residing in a frame of behavior called
ladylike, it should have been inoperative here. What this really means is that
you get no affront so long as your behavior in the estimate of the particular
audience invites none. In the estimate of the immediate audience--conduct which
affords protection in Mayfair gets you no consideration in Maverick. And by no
canon could it be considered ladylike to go about on your own feet, with a
blanket and a black bag and almost no money in your purse, in and about the haunts
of rude and solitary men.
There were other things
that pointed the wish for a personal encounter with the Walking Woman. One of
them was the contradictious reports of her, as to whether she was comely, for
example. Report said yes, and again, plain to the point of deformity. She had a
twist to her face, some said; a hitch to one shoulder; they averred she limped
as she walked. But by the distance she covered she should have been straight
and young. As to sanity, equal incertitude. On the mere evidence of her way of
life she was cracked, not quite broken, but unserviceable. Yet in her talk
there was both wisdom and information, and the word she brought about trails
and waterholes was as reliable as an Indian's.
By her own account she
had begun by walking off an illness. There had been an invalid to be taken care
of for years, leaving her at last broken in body, and with no recourse but her
own feet to carry her out of that predicament. It seemed there had been,
besides the death of her invalid, some other worrying affairs, upon which, and
the nature of her illness, she was never quite clear, so that it might very
well have been an unsoundness of mind which drove her to the open, sobered and
healed at last by the large soundness of nature. It must have been about that
time that she lost her name. I am convinced that she never told it because she
did not know it herself. She was the Walking Woman, and the country people
called her Mrs. Walker. At the time I knew her, though she wore short hair and
a man's boots and had a fine down over all her face from exposure to the
weather, she was perfectly sweet and sane.
I had met her
occasionally at ranch houses and road stations, and had got as much
acquaintance as the place allowed; but for the things I wished to know there
wanted a time of leisure and isolation. And when the occasion came we talked
altogether of other things.
It was at Warm Spring
in the Little Antelope I came upon her in the heart of a clear forenoon. The
spring lies off a mile from the main trail and has the only trees about it
known in that country. First you come upon a pool of waste full of weeds of a
poisonous dark green, every reed ringed about the water level with a muddy
white incrustation. Then the three oaks appear staggering on the slope, and the
spring sobs and blubbers below them in ashy- colored mud. All the hills of that
country have the down plunge toward the desert and back abruptly toward the
Sierra. The grass is thick and brittle and bleached straw-color toward the end
of the season. As I rode up the swale of the spring I saw the Walking Woman
sitting where the grass was deepest, with her black bag and blanket, which she
carried on a stick, beside her. It was one of those days when the genius of
talk flows as smoothly as the rivers of mirage through the blue hot desert
morning.
You are not to suppose
that in my report of a Borderer I give you the words only, but the full meaning
of the speech. Very often the words are merely the punctuation of thought,
rather the crests of the long waves of intercommunicative silences. Yet the
speech of the Walking Woman was fuller than most.
The best of our talk
that day began in some dropped word of hers from which I inferred that she had
had a child. I was surprised at that, and then wondered why I should have been
surprised, for it is the most natural of all experiences to have children. I
said something of that purport, and also that it was one of the perquisites of
living I should be least willing to do without. And that led to the Walking
Woman saying that there were three things which if you had known, you could cut
out all the rest, and they were good any way you got them, but best if, as in
her case, they were related to and grew each one out of the others. It was
while she talked that I decided that she really did have a twist to her face, a
sort of natural warp or skew into which it fell when it was worn merely as a
countenance, but which disappeared the moment it became the vehicle of thought
or feeling.
The first of the
experiences the Walking Woman had found most worth while had come to her in a
sand storm on the south slope of Tehachapi in a dateless spring. I judged it
should have been about the time she began to find herself, after the period of
worry and loss in which her wandering began. She had come, in a day pricked
full of intimations of a storm, to the camp of Filon Geraud, whose companion
shepherd had gone a three days' passear to Mojave for supplies. Geraud was of
great hardihood, red-blooded, of a full laughing eye and an indubitable spark
for women. It was the season of the year when there is a soft bloom on the
days, but the nights are cowering cold and the lambs tender, not yet flockwise.
At such times a sand storm works incalculable disaster. The lift of the wind is
so great that the whole surface of the ground appears to travel upon it
slantwise, thinning out miles high in air. In the intolerable smother the lambs
are lost from the ewes; neither dogs nor man make headway against it.
The morning flared
through a horizon of yellow smudge, and by mid-forenoon the flock broke.
"There were but
the two of us to deal with the trouble," said the Walking Woman.
"Until that time I had not known how strong I was nor how good it is to
run when running is worth while. The flock traveled down the wind, the sand bit
our faces; we called, and after a time heard the words broken and beaten small
by the wind. But after a little we had not to call. All the time of our running
in the yellow dusk of day and the black dark of night, I knew where Filon was.
A flock-length away, I knew him. Feel? What should I feel? I knew. I ran with
the flock and turned it this way and that as Filon would have.
"Such was the
force of the wind that when we came together we held by one another and talked
a little between pantings. We snatched and ate what we could as we ran. All
that day and night until the next afternoon the camp kit was not out of the
cayaques. But we held the flock. We herded them under a butte when the wind
fell off a little, and the lambs sucked; when the storm rose they broke, but we
kept upon their track and brought them together again. At night the wind
quieted and we slept by turns, at least Filon slept. I lay on the ground when
my turn was, tired and beat with the storm. I was no more tired than the earth
was. The sand filled in the creases of the blanket, and where I turned, dripped
back upon the ground. But we saved the sheep. Some ewes there were that would
not give down their milk because of the worry of the storm, and the lambs died.
But we kept the flocks together. And I was not tired."
The Walking Woman stretched
out her arms and clasped herself, rocking in them as if she would have hugged
the recollection to her breast.
"For you
see," said she, "I worked with a man, without excusing, without any
burden of me of looking or seeming. Not fiddling or fumbling as women work, and
hoping it will all turn out for the best. It was not for Filon to ask, Can you,
or Will you. He said, Do, and I did. And my work was good. We held the flock.
And that," said the Walking Woman, the twist coming in her face again,
"is one of the things that make you able to do without the others."
"Yes," I
said; and then, "What others?"
"Oh," she
said as if it pricked her, "the looking and the seeming."
And I had not thought
until that time that one who had the courage to be the Walking Woman would have
cared! We sat and looked at the pattern of the thick crushed grass on the
slope, wavering in the fierce noon like the waterings in the coat of a tranquil
beast; the ache of a world-old bitterness sobbed and whispered in the spring. At
last,--
"It is by the
looking and the seeming," said I, "that the opportunity finds you
out."
"Filon found
out," said the Walking Woman. She smiled; and went on from that to tell me
how, when the wind went down about four o'clock and left the afternoon clear
and tender, the flock began to feed, and they had out the kit from the
cayaques, and cooked a meal. When it was over, and Filon had his pipe between
his teeth, he came over from his side of the fire, of his own notion, and
stretched himself on the ground beside her. Of his own notion. There was that
in the way she said it that made it seem as if nothing of the sort had happened
before to the Walking Woman, and for a moment I thought she was about to tell
me one of the things I wished to know; but she went on to say what Filon had
said to her of her work with the flock. Obvious, kindly things, such as any man
in sheer decency would have said, so that there must have something more gone
with the words to make them so treasured of the Walking Woman.
"We were very
comfortable," said she, "and not so tired as we expected to be. Filon
leaned upon his elbow. I had not noticed until then how broad he was in the
shoulders and how strong in the arms. And we had saved the flock together. We felt
that. There was something that said together, in the slope of his shoulders
toward me. It was around his mouth and on the cheek high up under the shine of
his eyes. And under the shine the look--the look that said, 'We are of one sort
and one mind'--his eyes that were the color of the flat water in the
toulares--do you know the look?"
"I know it."
"The wind was
stopped and all the earth smelt of dust, and Filon understood very well that
what I had done with him I could not have done so well with another. And the look--the
look in the eyes--"
"Ah-ah--!"
I have always said, I
will say again, I do not know why at this point the Walking Woman touched me.
If it were merely a response to my unconscious throb of sympathy, or the
unpremeditated way of her heart to declare that this, after all, was the best
of all indispensable experiences; or if in some flash of forward vision,
encompassing the unimpassioned years, the stir, the movement of tenderness were
for me--but no; as often as I have thought of it, I have thought of a different
reason, but no conclusive one, why the Walking Woman should have put out her
hand and laid it on my arm.
"To work together,
to love together," said the Walking Woman, withdrawing her hand again;
"there you have two of the things; the other you know."
"The mouth at the
breast," said I.
"The lips and the
hands," said the Walking Woman, "The little, pushing hands and the
small cry." There ensued a pause of fullest understanding, while the land
before us swam in the noon, and a dove in the oaks behind the spring began to
call. A little red fox came out of the hills and lapped delicately at the pool.
"I stayed with
Filon until the fall," said she. "All that summer in the Sierras,
until it was time to turn south on the trail. It was a good time, and longer
than he could be expected to have loved one like me. And besides, I was no
longer able to keep the trail. My baby was born in October."
Whatever more there was
to say to this, the Walking Woman's hand said it, straying with remembering gesture
to her breast. There are so many ways of loving and working, but only one way
of the first-born. She added after an interval, that she did not know if she
would have given up her walking to keep at home and tend him, or whether the
thought of her son's small feet running beside her in the trails would have
driven her to the open again. The baby had not stayed long enough for that.
"And whenever the wind blows in the night," said the Walking Woman,
"I wake and wonder if he is well covered."
She took up her black
bag and her blanket; there was the ranch house of Dos Palos to be made before
night, and she went as outliers do, without a hope expressed of another meeting
and no word of good-by. She was the Walking Woman. That was it. She had walked
off all sense of society-made values, and, knowing the best when the best came
to her, was able to take it. Work,--as I believed; love,--as the Walking Woman
had proved it; a child,--as you subscribe to it. But look you: it was the naked
thing the Walking Woman grasped, not dressed and tricked out, for instance, by
prejudices in favor of certain occupations; and love, man love, taken as it
came, not picked over and rejected if it carried no obligation of permanency;
and a child; any way you get it, a child is good to have, say nature and the
Walking Woman; to have it and not to wait upon a proper concurrence of so many
decorations that the event may not come at all.
At least one of us is
wrong. To work and to love and to bear children. That sounds easy enough. But
the way we live establishes so many things of much more importance.
Far down the dim, hot
valley I could see the Walking Woman with her blanket and black bag over her
shoulder. She had a queer sidelong gait, as if in fact she had a twist all
through her.
Recollecting suddenly
that people called her lame, I ran down to the open place below the spring
where she had passed. There in the bare, hot sand the track of her two feet
bore evenly and white.