NOVEMBER of the year 1916. A woman travelling from New York to the South West, by one of the tourist trains. On the third day the train lost time more and more. She raged with painful impatience. No good, at every station the train sat longer. They had passed the prairie lands and entered the mountain and desert region. They ought soon to arrive, soon. This was already the desert of grey-white sage and blue mountains. She ought to be there, soon, soon she ought to be there. This journey alone should be over. But the train comfortably stretched its length in the stations, and would never arrive. There was no end. It could not arrive. She could not bear it.
The woman sat in that cubby-hole at the end of the Pullman which is called in America a Drawing-Room. She had the place to herself and her bags. Volts of distracted impatience and heart-brokenness surged out of her, so that the negro did not dare to come in and sweep her floor with his little brush and dustpan. He left the ‘Room’ unswept for the afternoon.
Frustration and a painful volcanic pressure of impatience. The train would not arrive, could not arrive. That was it.
She was a sturdy woman with a round face, like an obstinate girl of fourteen. Like an obstinate girl of fourteen she sat there devouring her unease, her heavy, muscular fore-arms inert in her lap. So still, yet at such a pressure. So child-like — yet a woman approaching forty. So naïve looking, softly full and feminine. And curiously heartbroken at being alone, travelling alone. Of course any man might have rushed to save her, and reap the reward of her soft, heavy, grateful magnetism. But wait a bit. Her thick, dark brows like curved horns over the naïve-looking face; and her bright, hazel-grey eyes, clear at the first glance as candour and unquenchable youth, at the second glance made up all of devilish grey and yellow bits, as opals are, and the bright candour of youth resolving into something dangerous as the headlights of a great machine coming full at you in the night. Mr Hercules had better think twice before he rushed to pick up this seductive serpent of loneliness that lay on the western trail. He had picked a snake up long ago, without hurting himself. But that was before Columbus discovered America.
Why did she feel that the train would never arrive, could never arrive, with her in it. Who knows? But that was how she did feel. The train would never arrive. Simple fate. Perhaps she felt that some power of her will would at last neutralize altogether the power of the engines, and there would come an end to motion, so there they would sit, forever, the train and she, at a deadlock on the Santa Fe Line. She had left New York in a sort of frenzy. Since they had passed Kansas City, Gate of the West, the thing had been getting unbearable. Since they had passed La Junta and come to the desert and the Rockies, the fatality had as good as happened. Yet she was only a few hours from her destination. And she would never get there. This train would never bring her there. Her head was one mass of thoughts and frenzied ideas almost to madness.
Then she sprang out of her Pullman. It was somewhere after Trinidad, she didn’t bother where. ‘Put my bags out,’ she said to the negro, and he, looking at those serpent-blazing eyes under those eyebrows like thorn bushes, silently obeyed. Yet with her mouth she smiled a little and was cajoling, and his tip was reckless. Man must needs be mollified. She remembered to be just sufficiently soft and feminine. But she was distracted and heart-broken.
Started her next whirl. She must have an automobile, she would have an automobile, to be driven this hundred or hundred and fifty miles that remained. Yes, she would have an automobile. But she had got out at a station where, at least that afternoon, there was no automobile. Nevertheless, she would have an automobile. So at last was produced an old worn-out Dodge with no springs left, belonging to a boy of sixteen. Yes, she would have that. The boy had never travelled that trail, didn’t know the way. No matter, she would go. She would get to Lamy in front of that hateful train which she had left. And the boy would get twenty-six dollars. Good enough!
She had never been west before, so she reckoned without her host. She had still to learn what trails round the Rockies and across the desert are like. She imagined roads, or forest tracks. She found what actually is a trail in the south west — a blind squirm up sand-banks, a blind rattle along dry river-beds, a breathless scramble in deep cañons over what look like simple landslides and precipices, the car at an angle of forty-five degrees above a green rocky river, banging itself to bits against boulders, surging through the river then back again through the river and once more swooping through the river with the devil’s own scramble up a rocky bank on the other side, and a young boy driving on, driving ahead, without knowing where, or what was happening to him, twenty-six dollars at the end. So out on the lurch and bump of the open white-sage desert once more, to follow the trail by scent rather than by sight, cart-ruts this way, tracks that way, please yourself in the god-forsaken landscape, bolting into a slope of piñon and cedar, dark-green bush-scrub, then dropping down to a wire fence and a gate, a sort of ranch, and a lost village of houses like brown mud boxes plonked down in the grey wilderness, with a bigger mud box, oblong, which the boy told her was the sort of church place where the Penitentes scourge and torture themselves, windowless so that no one shall hear their shrieks and groans.
By nightfall she had had a lot of the nonsense bumped and bruised out of her, knocked about as if she were a penitente herself. Not that she was a penitente: not she. But at least here was a country that hit her with hard knuckles, right through to the bone. It was something of a country.
Luckily, she had telegraphed to Mark, who would be waiting for her at Lamy station. Mark was her husband — her third. One dead, one divorced, and Mark alternately torn to atoms and thrown to the four corners of the universe, then rather sketchily gathered up and put together again by a desirous, if still desperate Isis. She had torn him in two and pitched him piecemeal away into the south-western desert. Now she was after him once more, going to put humpty-dumpty together again with a slam. With a slam that might finally do for him.
Of course he is an artist, a foreigner, a Russian. Of course she is an American woman, several generations of wealth and tradition in various cities of New York state behind her, several generations of visiting Europe and staying in the Meurice and seeing Napoleon III or Gambetta or whoever was figuring on the stage of Paris. She herself had stayed in the old Meurice. She too had had her apartment in a fine old hotel, and if there was no Napoleon III left for her, there had been ex-Princesses of Saxony, d’Annunzio, Duse, Isadora Duncan or Matisse.
These American families do actually tend to cumulate and culminate in one daughter. Not that the family had as yet cumulated in Sybil Mond. She had started as Sybil Hamnett, and had been successively Sybil Thomas and Sybil Danks before she married the Jewish artist from somewhere Poland way, who was, in her family’s eyes, the anti-climax. But she herself admitted no possibility of anticlimax for herself, and kept unpleasant surprises still in store for her family. Her family being her mother and the General, Sybil’s second step-father. For she was as well-off for step-fathers as for husbands.
The family had actually culminated in Sybil: all the force of the Hamnetts, on her father’s side, and the push of the Wilcoxes, on her mother’s, focused into this one highly-explosive daughter. No question of dribbling out. Sybil at forty was heavy with energy like a small bison, and strong and young-looking as if she were thirty, often giving the impression of soft crudeness as if she were sixteen. The old colonial vigour had, we repeat, collected in her as in some final dam, like the buffalo’s force in his forehead. But the old colonial riches had not yet descended upon her. She had her own sufficient income, but the mass of the family wealth rested on her mother, who, aided by the General, exemplified it in the correct and magnificent Italian Mansion on Lake Erie.
The rackety machine in which she rode had of course no headlights, and the November night fell. The boy hadn’t thought to put the lamps on. No headlights! Frustration, always frustration. Sybil annihilated the boy in her soul, and sat still. Or rather, with her body lashed and bruised, her soul sat crying and ominous. There was nothing to be done but to scramble for the nearest station again.
On then, under the many sharp, small stars of the desert. The air was cold in her nostrils, the desert seemed weird and uncanny. But — it was terra nova. It was a new world, the desert at the foot of the mountains, the high desert above the gorges of the canons, the world of three altitudes. Strange! — doomful!
Yes, destiny had made her get out of the train and into this rackety machine. Destiny even had made the boy bring no headlights. Her ponderous storm began to evaporate. She looked round the night as they emerged from a dark cañon out onto a high flat bit of vague desert, with mountains guarding the flatness beyond, shadows beyond the shadows.
It impressed her, although she must get to her journey end, she must arrive. No, it was not like desert. Rather like wilderness, the wilderness of the temptation, for example. Shadowy scrub of pale grey sage, knee-high, waist-high, on the flat of the table land; and on the slopes of the mountains that rose still further, starting off the flat table, scrub of gnarled pine and cedar, still hardly more than bushes, but like those Japanese dwarf-trees, full of age, torture and power. Strange country — weird — frightening too. It would need a battle to gain hold over such a land. It would need a battle. She snuffed the curiously-scented air of the desert. With her tongue almost jerked out of her mouth by the jumping of the car, she sat inwardly motionless, facing destiny again. It was her destiny she should come to this land. It was her destiny she should see it for the first time thus, alone, lost, without light. That was destiny, that threw her naked like the black queen onto this unknown chess-board. She hugged her furs and her fate round her, in the cold, rare air, and was somewhat relieved. Her battle! Her hope!
And thus by eight o’clock the frozen, disappointed, but dogged boy brought her to the railway again, as she bade him. It was impossible for him to get her to Lamy without lights or anything. He must forfeit some of the twenty-six dollars. He was disappointed, but he admitted the truth of her contention.
Wagon-Mound, or some such name. She remembered a sort of dome of a hill in the night. After which nothing to be done but to go to the ‘hotel’, to wait three hours for the slow train which followed the one she had abandoned way back at Trinidad.