HERE was nothing pleasing in the scene. It was in that part of the vast West where a gray sky looked down upon the grayer soil beneath; where neither brilliant birds nor bright blossoms, nor glittering rivulets made lovely the place in which human beings went up and down the earth daily performing those labors that made the sum of what they called life. Neither tree nor shrub, nor spear of grass showed green with the healthy color of plant-life. As far as the eye could reach was the monotonous gray of sagebrush, and greasewood, and sand. The muddy river, with its myriad curves, ran between abrupt banks of soft alkali ground, where now and then as it ate into the confining walls, portions would fall with a loud splash into the water. A hurrying, treacherous river—with its many silent eddies—it turned and twisted and doubled on itself a thousand times as it wound its way down the valley. Here, where it circled in a great curve called “Scott’s Bend,” the waters were always being churned by the ponderous wheel of a little quartz-mill, painted by storm and sunshine in the leaden tones of its sad-colored surroundings.
On the bluff above, near the ore platform, were grouped a dozen houses. Fenceless, they faced the mill, which day after day pounded away at the ore with a maddening monotony. All day, all night, the stamps kept up their ceaseless monotone. The weather-worn mill and drab adobe houses had stood there, year after year, through the heat of summer days, when the sun blistered and burned the whole valley, and in winter, when the winds of the desert moaned and wailed at the windows.
Today the air is quiet, save for the tiny whirlwinds that, running over the tailings below the mill, have caught up the fine powder and carried bits of it away with them, a white cloud, as they went. The sun, too, is shining painfully bright and burning. By the well a woman stands, her eyes intently following a chance wayfarer who has turned into the Sherman road—in all the waste, the only moving thing.
How surely human beings take on themselves the reflection of their surroundings! Living in the dull solitude of this valley that woman’s life has become but a gray reflection of its never-ending sameness. As we look, we fall a-wondering. Has she never known what it is to live in the way we understand it? Has nothing ever set her pulses tingling with the exultation of Life? Does she know only an existence which is but the compulsory working of a piece of human machinery? Has she never known what it is to feel hope, or joy, or love, in the way we feel it—never experienced one single stirring emotion in the whole round of her pitifully barren life? Is it possible that she has never realized the poverty of her existence?
Yet, she was a creature meant for Life. What a beautiful woman she is, too, with all that brilliance of coloring—that copper-hued hair, and those great, velvety eyes, lovely in spite of their apathetic stare. What a model for some painter’s brush! Such beauty and such apathy combined; such expressionless perfection of feature; “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null—dead perfection.”
Martha Scott is one of those women whose commanding figure and magnificent coloring are always sufficient to attract the admiration of even the most indifferent. No doubt now in her maturity she is far more beautiful than when, nearly twenty years ago, she became Old Scott’s wife. A tall, unformed girl then, she gave no promise of her later beauty, except in the velvety softness of the great eyes that never seemed to take heed of anything in the world about her, and the great mass of shining hair that had the red-gold of a Western sunset in it.
There had been a courtship so brief that they were still strangers when he took her to the small, untidy house where he had come to realize that the presence of a woman was needed. He wanted a wife to cook for him; to wash—to sew. And so they were married.
The sheep which numbered thousands, the little mill—always grinding in its jaws the ores brought down the mountain by the snail-paced teams to fill its hungry maw, these added daily to the hoard Old Scott clutched with gripping, penurious fingers. Early and late, unceasingly, he worked, and chose that Martha should labor as he labored, live as he lived. But, as she mechanically took up her burden of life, there came to the sweet, uncomplaining mouth a droop at the corners that grew with the years, telling to those who had the eyes to see, that while accepting with mute lips the unhappy conditions of her lot, she longed with all her starved soul for something different from her yearly round of never-ending toil.
Once—only once—in a whirlwind of revolt, she felt that she could endure it no longer—that she must break away from the dull routine which made the measure of her days; felt that she must go out among happy human beings—to be in the rush and whirl of life under Pleasure’s sunshine—to bask in its warmth as others did. She longed to enjoy life as Youth enjoys; herself to be young once more. Yes, even to dance as she had danced when a girl! In the upheaval of her passionate revolt, flushed and trembling, she begged her husband to take her to one of the country balls of the neighborhood.
“Take me wunst!” she pleaded, her eyes glistening with unshed tears; “only this wunst; I won’t never ask you no more. But I do want to have one right good time. You never take me nowheres. Please take me, Fred, won’t you?”
Old Scott straightened himself from the task over which he was bending and looked at her in incredulous wonder. For more than a minute he stared at her; then, breaking into a loud laugh, he mocked:
“You’d look pretty, now, wouldn’t you, a-goin’ and a-toein’ it like you was a young gal!”
She shrank from him as though he had raised a lash over her, and the light died out of her face. Without a word she turned and went back to her work.
Martha Scott never again alluded to the meagre pleasures of her life. She went back to her work of cooking the coarse food which was their only fare; of mending the heavy, uncouth clothing which week-day and Sunday alike, was her husband’s only apparel; of washing and ironing the cheap calicoes, and coarse, unbleached muslins of her own poor, and scanty wardrobe, fulfilling her part as a bread-winner. The man never saw that he failed in performing the part of a good and loving husband; and if anyone had pointed out to him that her existence was impoverished by his indifference and neglect, he still would have been unable to see wherein he had erred. He would have argued that she had enough to eat, enough to wear; that they owned their home—their neighbors having no better, nor any larger; he was laying aside money all the time; he did not drink; he never struck her. What more could any woman ask?
That the home which suited him, and the life to which he was used, could be other than all she desired, had never once occurred to him. As a boy, “back East” in the old days, he had never cared for the sports and pleasures enjoyed by other young people. How much less, now that the natural pleasure-time of life was past, could he tolerate pleasure-seeking in others!
“Folks show better sense to work an’ save their money,” he would say, “than to go gaddin’ about havin’ a good time an’ comin’ home broke.”
Together they lived in the house which through all their married life they had called “home;” together they worked side by side through all their years of youth and middle age. But not farther are we from the farthest star than were these two apart in their real lives. Yet she was his wife; this woman for whom he had no dearer name than “Marth’,” and to whom—for years—he had given no caress. She looked the incarnation of indifference and apathy. Ah! but was she?
A few years ago there came a mining expert from San Francisco to examine the Yellow Bird mine; and with him came a younger man, who appeared to have no particular business but to look around at the country, and to fish and hunt. There is the finest kind of sport for the hunter over in the Smoky Range; and this fellow, Baird—Alfred Baird was his name—spent much of his time there shooting antelope and deer.
He was courteous and gentle mannered; he was finely educated—polished in address; he spoke three or four languages, and was good to look at. He stayed with the Scotts for a time—and a long time it proved to be; a self-invited guest, whether or no. Yet all the while he did not fail to reiterate his intentions to “handsomely remunerate them for their generous hospitality in a country where there were so few or no hotels.” He assured them he was “daily expecting a remittance from home. The delay was inexcusable—unless the mail had miscarried. Very annoying! So embarrassing!” And so on. It was the old stereotyped story which that sort of a fellow always carries on the tip of his tongue. And the wonder of it all was that Scott—surly and gruff to all others—was so completely under the scamp’s will, and ready to humor his slightest wish. Baird used without question his saddle and best horse; and it was Scott who fitted him out whenever he went hunting deer over in the Smokies.
By and by there came a time when Scott himself had to go away on a trip into the Smoky Range, and which would keep him from home a week. He left his wife behind, as was his custom. He also left Alfred Baird there—for Baird was still “boarding” at Scott’s.
When old Fred Scott came back, it was to find the house in as perfect order as ever, with every little detail of house work faithfully performed up to the last moment of her staying, but the wife was gone. Neither wife, nor the money—hidden away in an old powder-can behind the corner cupboard—were there.
Both were gone—the woman and the gold pieces; and it was characteristic of Old Scott that his first feelings of grief and rage were not for the loss of his wife, but for the coins she had taken from the powder-can. He was like a maniac—breaking everything he had ever seen his wife use; tearing to pieces with his strong, sinewy hands every article of her clothing his eyes fell upon. He raved like a madman, and cursed like a fiend. Then he found her letter.
“Dear Fred:—
Now I’m a going away, and I’m a going to stay a year. The money will last us two just about that long. I asked Mr. Baird to go with me, so you needn’t blame him. I ain’t got nothing against you, only you wouldn’t never take me nowheres; and I just couldn’t stand it no longer. I’ve been a good wife, and worked hard, and earned money for you; but I ain’t never had none of it myself to spend. So I’m a going to have it now; for some of it is mine anyway. It has been work—work all the time, and you wouldn’t take me nowheres. So I’m a going now myself. I don’t like Mr. Baird better than I do you—that ain’t it—and if you want me to come back to you in a year I will. And I’ll be a good wife to you again, like I was before. Only you needn’t expect for me to say that I’ll be sorry because I done it, for I won’t be. I won’t never be sorry I done it; never, never! So, good-by.
Your loving wife,
Martha J. Scott.”
If, through the long years, he had not been blind, he could have saved her from it. Not a vicious woman—not a wantonly sinning woman; only one who—weak and ignorant—was dazed and bewildered by the possibilities she saw in just one year of unrestricted freedom to enjoy all the pleasures that might come within her reach.
To be sure, it did seem preposterous that a young and handsome man, with refined tastes and education, should go away with a woman years older than himself, and one, too, who was uncouth in manner and in speech. However strange it looked to the world, the fact remained that they eloped. But both were well away before it was suspected that they had gone together. Old Scott volunteered no information to the curious; and his grim silence forbade the questions they would have asked. It was long before the truth was known, for people were slow to credit so strange a story.
The two were seen in San Francisco one day as they were buying their tickets on the eve of sailing for Honolulu. She looked very lovely, and was as tastefully and becomingly gowned as any woman one might see. Baird, no doubt, had seen to that; for he had exquisite taste, and he was too wise to challenge adverse criticism by letting her dress in the glaring colors and startling styles she would have chosen, had she been allowed to follow her own tastes. In her pretty, new clothes, with her really handsome face all aglow from sheer joy in the new life she was beginning, she looked twenty years younger, and attracted general attention because of her unusual eyes and her magnificently-colored hair.
She was radiant with happiness; and there was no apparent consciousness of wrong-doing. Baird always showed a gracious deference to all women, and to her he was devotion itself. The little attentions that will charm and captivate any woman—attentions to which she was so unused—fed her starved nature, and for the time satisfied without sating her. They sailed for the Islands, and were there a year. They kept to themselves, seeking no acquaintance with those around them—living but for one another. And those who saw them, told they seemed thoroughly fond of each other. He was too much in love with himself and the surroundings which catered to his extravagant tastes, to have a great love for any woman; and she was scarcely the person, in spite of her beauty—the beauty of some magnificent animal—to inspire lasting affection in a man like Baird. He was shrewd enough to keep people at a distance, for unless one entered into conversation with her she might easily be taken for the really cultivated woman she looked. Yet the refined and aesthetic side of Alfred Baird’s nature—and there was such—much have met with some pretty severe shocks during a twelvemonth’s close companionship. Too indolent to work to support himself, he bore (he felt, heroically) any mortification he was subjected to, and was content in his degradation. But the woman herself was intensely happy; happier than, in all her dreary life, she had ever dreamed that mortals could be. She was in love with the beautiful new world, which was like a dream of fairy-land after her sordid life in the desolate valley. That Hawaiian year must have been a revelation of hitherto unimagined things to her. Baird’s moral sense was blunted by his past dissipations, but her moral sense was simply undeveloped. In her ignorance she had no definition of morality. The man was nothing to her except as an accessory to the fascinating life which she had allowed herself “while the money lasted.”
When the twelve months were run she philosophically admitted the end of it all, and parted with him—apparently—without a pang. If, at the moment of parting, any regrets were felt by either because of the separation, it was he, not she, who would have chosen to drift longer down the stream. The year had run its course; she would again take up the old life. This could not last. Perhaps—who knows?—in time he might have palled on her. No doubt, in time, his weak nature would have wearied her; her own was too eager for strong emotions, to find in him a fitting mate.
Whether, at the last, she wrote to her husband, or if he came to her when the year came to its end, no one knows. But one day the people of the desert saw her back at the adobes on the bluff. She returned as suddenly as she had disappeared.
She seems to have settled into the old groove again. She moves in the same apathetic way as before the stirring events of her life. In her letter she said she would not be sorry. It is not probable that she ever was, or ever will be; but neither is it likely that she has ever seen the affair from the point of view a moralist would take. Her limited intelligence only allowed her to perceive the dreariness of her own poor life, and when her longings touched no responsive chord in the man whom she had married, she deliberately took one year of her existence and hung its walls with all the gorgeous tapestries and rich paintings that could be wrought by the witchery of those magic days in the Pacific.
Fires have burned as fiercely within that woman’s breast as ever burned the fires of Kilauea; and when they were ready to burst their bounds, she fled in her impulse to the coral isles of the peaceful Western sea, and there her ears heard the sound, and her heart learned the meaning of words that have left no visible sign upon her—the wondrous, sweet words of a dream, whispered to her unceasingly, while she gave herself up to an enchantment as mad and bewildering as that of the rhythmic hula-hula.
If she sinned, she does not seem to know it. Going about at her work, as before, the expressionless face is a mask; yet it may be she is moving in a dream-world, wherein she lives over once again the months that were hers—once—in the far Hawaiian Isles.
