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THE WALKING WOMAN

BY: MARY AUSTIN

CATEGORY: LITERATURE – SHORT STORIES

THE WALKING WOMAN
BY MARY AUSTIN

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.

THE WALKING WOMAN
BY MARY AUSTIN