He walked on sulking.
“Your wife. Because she is your wife. It’s the pronoun, not the sex, or the relation. She’s yours, that is, she was. Oh, we recognize the marriage ceremony, we men to-day, but we go farther, we acknowledge the unwritten sacrament, inclination. If she no longer wants to be your wife, she’s not your wife, Hardin. You don’t want her. Let her alone. You have no more right to her, or to her life, after yesterday, than though she were a dollar on another man’s desk. You’re not a savage. And she’s not a child. She knows the world. She can protect herself, oh, better than you can.”
Hardin flung out a protest to this startling twist of facts. Brandon let him get tangled in his angry rush.
“The river,” began Brandon, as though they had been discussing it. “You have done this thing, but yours is not the credit, the published honor. It’s Marshall’s and Rickard’s. Yet the thing is done as you wanted it, approximately. I heard that it was you who went after Faraday. Now the success stings you. Yours is neither the power nor the glory. The pronoun again, Mr. Hardin!”
Beside them ran the river, guileless, now, in its captivity. The flat world stretched away from them until it ran into a blur of rising shadow, of dim mountain ranges. The world was sleeping; only the stars watched. In spite of his resistance, the quiet came creeping into Hardin’s soul. His muscles were relaxing; he was slipping toward sleep.
“I’ve wondered, too,” Brandon took a slower tempo, “if we could not see men better by searching for their apex. Perhaps you’ve never looked at life that way?”
The ugly lip flared. Hardin couldn’t see what Brandon was driving at. He’d never had time to sit still and look at life! He’d just lived! Just worked along!
“What are we doing? Climbing up a mountain. Whatever we call this journey of ours, ambition, labor; life. We climb up; we creep down. We are taught to climb up, plenty of teachers for that, all the way along. No one shows us when to begin to crawl down. When we reach the apex, that’s the trial. Why? We don’t know it’s the apex. We’ve achieved all we can. Achieved or failed. We fail, anyway, there, because we find we can’t climb any more. We’re in the habit of climbing; we’ve a lust for it. No slippers and easy chair yet for us. We tell ourselves it’s slothful not to climb. We keep on, and we fall. We must learn to creep; we are leaving our apex. That’s when we need help, a voice out of a book, or a friend’s to help us and say, ‘You’ve not failed! You went as far as you could. You’ve done your part. The young men will do the rest, the ones who come after. They’ll take the place you leave. Why, man, you yourself, took another’s. Creep down cheerfully. You’ve lived. It’s the eternal plan!’”
Hardin did not speak, but his eyes had left the ground.
“Look at this desert. I reckon that there’s no man who knows better than I do just what you’ve done. You’ve gone ahead when others laughed at you. You’ve worked when others slept.”