Martin's work was in the Contra Costa Valley, and he and Cherry had a
small house in Red Creek, the only town of any size near the mine. Red
Creek was in a fruit-farming and dairy region and looked its prettiest
on the spring evening when Cherry saw it first. The locusts were in
leaf and ready to bloom, and the first fruit blossoms were scattered in
snowy whiteness up and down the valley.
Her little house was a cottage with a porch running across the front
where windows looked out from the sitting room and the front bedroom.
Back of these rooms were a dark little bathroom that connected the
front bedroom with another smaller bedroom, a little dining room and a
kitchen. Almost all the houses in Red Creek were duplicates, except in
minor particulars, of this house, but this particular specimen was
older than some of the others and showed signs of hard usage. The
kitchen floor was chipped and stained, and the bathroom basin was
plugged with putty; there were odd bottles partly full of shoe polish
and ink and vinegar, here and there; and on the shelves of the
triangular closet in the dining room were cut and folded pieces of
spotted white paper.
Martin, man-fashion, had merely camped in kitchen and bedroom while
awaiting his wife; but Cherry buttoned on her crisp little apron on the
first morning after her arrival, and attacked the accumulated dishes in
the sink, and the scattered shirts and collars bravely. It was a cold,
raw morning, and she went to and fro briskly, burning rubbish in the
airtight stove in the sitting room, and keeping a good wood fire going
in the kitchen, and feeling housewifely and efficient as she did so.
After a lunch for which she was praised and applauded in something of
the old honeymoon way, she walked to market, passing blocks of other
little houses like her own, with bare dooryards where nipped
chrysanthemums dangled on poles, and where play wagons, puddles of
water, and picking chickens alternated regularly. Other marketing women
looked at Cherry with the quickly averted look that is only given to
beauty; but the men in the shops wrote down the new name and address
with especial zeal and amiability. She remembered the old necessities,
bacon and lard and sugar and matches; she recovered the kitchen clock
from its wrapping of newspaper, and wound it, and set it on the sink
shelf; she was busy with a hundred improvements and cares, and was
almost too tired, when Martin came home to dinner, to sit up and share
it with him.
It was warm in the dining room and Cherry yawned over her dessert, and
rose stiff and aching to return to the kitchen with plates and silver,
glasses and food, to shake the tablecloth, to pile and wash and wipe
and put away the china, to brush the floor and the stove, and do the
last wiping and wringing, and to turn out the gas, and go in to her
chair beside the airtight stove.
Martin handed her half his paper and Cherry took it, realizing with
cheerful indifference that there was a streak of soot on one cuff, and
that her hands were affected by grease and hot water. She read jokes
and recipes and answers to correspondents, and small editorial fillers
as to the number of nutmegs consumed in China yearly, and the name and
circumstances of the oldest living man in England. A new novel was in
her bedroom, but she was too comfortable and too tired to go get it,
and at ten she rose yawning and stumbling, and went to bed. Breakfast
must be on the table at half-past seven, for Martin left for the mine
at eight, and she had had a hard day.
For a few weeks the novelty lasted and Cherry was enthusiastic about
everything. She looked out across her dishpan at green fields and the
beginning of the farms; she saw the lilacs burst into fragrant plumes
on the bare branches of her dooryard trees; spring flushed the whole
world with loveliness, and she was young, and healthy, and too busy to
be homesick.
Martin left the house at eight and was usually at home at five. He
would sometimes come into her kitchen while she finished dinner, and
tell her about the day, and then suggested that they go to the
"pictures" at night. But although Cherry and Alix often had coaxed
their father into this dissipation in Mill Valley, it was different
there, she found. That was a small colony of city people, the theatre
was small, and the films carefully selected. One sat with one's
neighbours and friends. But here in Red Creek the theatre was a
draughty barn, and the farm workers, big men odorous of warm, acid
perspiration, pushed in laughing and noisy; the films were of a
different character, too, and advertised by frightful coloured posters
at the doors. Martin himself did not like them; indeed, he and Cherry
found little to like in either the people or the town.
It was a typical railroad town of California. It was flat, dusty, all
its buildings of wood. There were some two thousand souls in Red Creek;
two or three stores, a bakery from which the crude odour of baking
bread burst every night; saloons, warehouses, a smithy, a butcher shop
open only two days a week, a Chinese laundry from which opium-tainted
steam issued all day and all night; cattle sheds, pepper trees, wheat
barns, and a hotel of raw pine, with a narrow bedroom represented by
every one of the forty narrow windows in its upper stories, and a lower
floor decorated with spittoons. Back of the crowded main street was
another street, beside which Main Street's muddy ugliness was
beautiful. Here was another saloon, and rooms above it, and several
disreputable cottages about which Cherry sometimes saw odd-looking
women.
Not everyone in Red Creek was poor, by any means. It was a district
bursting with prosperity; all summer long wheat and fruit and butter
and beef poured through it out into the world. Down the road a mile or
two, and back toward the far hills, were comfortable ranches where
trees planted fifty years before had grown to mammoth proportions, and
where the women of the family cultivated gardens. Every family had pigs
and cattle and fine horses, and mud-spattered motor cars were familiar
sights in Red Creek's streets.
Cherry used to wonder why anybody who could live elsewhere lived here.
When some of the ranch girls told her that they always did their
shopping in San Francisco, she marvelled that they could reconcile
themselves to come home.
The days went on and on, each bringing its round of dishes, beds,
sweeping, marketing, folding and unfolding tablecloths, going back and
forth between kitchen and dining room. Martin's breakfast was either
promptly served and well cooked, in which case Martin was silently
satisfied, or it was late and a failure, when he was very articulately
disgusted; in either case Cherry was left to clear and wash and plan
for another meal in four hours more. She soaked fruit, beat up cake,
chopped boxes into kindlings, heated a kettle of water and another
kettle of water, dragged sheets from the bed only to replace them,
filled dishes with food only to find them empty and ready to wash again.
"I get sick of it!" she told Martin.
"Well, Lord!" he exclaimed. "Don't you think everybody does? Don't I
get sick of my work? You ought to have the responsibility of it all for
a while!"
His tone was humorously reproving rather than unkind. But such a speech
would fill Cherry's eyes with tears, and cause her to go about the
house all morning with a heavy heart.
She would find herself looking thoughtfully at Martin in these days,
studying him as if he were an utter stranger. It bewildered her to feel
that he actually was no more than that, after two years of marriage.
She not only did not know him, but she had a baffled sense that the
very nearness of their union prevented her from seeing him fairly. She
knew that she did him injustice in her thoughts.
It MUST be injustice, decided Cherry. For Martin seemed to her less
clever, less just, less intelligent, and less generous than the average
man of her acquaintance. And yet he did not seem to impress other
people in the way he impressed her.
He was extraordinarily healthy, and had small sympathy for illness,
weakness, for the unfortunate, and the complaining. He was scrupulously
clean, and Cherry added that to his credit, although the necessity of
seeing that Martin's bath, Martin's shaving water, and Martin's clean
linen were ready complicated her duties somewhat. He was not interested
in the affairs of the day; politics, reforms, world movements generally
found him indifferent, but he would occasionally favour his wife with a
sudden opinion as to China or intensive farming or Lloyd's shipping.
She knew when he did this that he was quoting. He whistled over his
dressing, read the paper at breakfast, and was gone. At noon he rushed
in, always late, devoured his lunch appreciatively, and was gone again.
At night he was usually tired, inclined to quarrel about small matters,
inclined to disapprove of the new positions of the bedroom furniture,
or the way Cherry's hair was dressed.
He loved to play poker and was hospitable to a certain extent. He would
whistle and joke over the preparations for a rarebit after a game, and
would willingly walk five blocks for beer if Cherry had forgotten to
get it. On Sunday he liked to see her prettily gowned; now and then
they motored with his friends from the mine; more often walked, ate a
hearty chicken dinner, and went to a cold supper in the neighbourhood,
with "Five Hundred" to follow. At ten their hostess would flutter into
her kitchen; there would be lemonade and beer and rich layer cake. Then
the men would begin to match poker hands, and the women to discuss
babies in low tones.
Cherry never saw her husband so animated or so interested as when men
he had known before chanced to drift into town, mining men from Nevada
or from El Nido, or men he had known in college. They would discuss
personalities, would shout over recollected good times, would slap each
other on the back and laugh tirelessly.
She thought him an extremely difficult man to live with, and was
angered when her hints to this effect led him to remark that she was
the "limit." They had a serious quarrel one day, when he told her that
she was the most selfish and spoiled woman he had ever known. He called
her attention to the other women of the town, busy, contented women,
sending children off to school, settling babies down for naps in sunny
dooryards, cooking and laughing and hurrying to and fro.
"Yes, and look at them!" Cherry said with ready tears. "Shabby, thin,
tired all the time!"
"The trouble with you is," Martin said, departing, "you've been told
that you're pretty and sweet all your life--and you're SPOILED! You are
pretty, yes--" he added, more mildly. "But, by George, you sulk so
much, and you crab so much, that I'm darned if I see it any more! All I
see is trouble!"
With this he left her. Left her to a burst of angry tears, at first,
when she dropped her lovely little head on the blue gingham of her
apron sleeve and cried bitterly.
The kettle began to sing on the stove, a bee came in and wandered about
the hot kitchen; the grocer knocked, and Cherry let the big lout of a
boy stare at her red eyes uncaring.
Then she went swiftly into the bedroom and began to pack and change.
She'd SHOW Martin Lloyd--she'd SHOW Martin Lloyd! She was going
straight to Dad--she'd take the--take the--
She frowned. She had missed the nine o'clock train; she must wait for
the train at half-past two. Wait where? Well, she could only wait here.
Very well, she would wait here. She would not get Martin any lunch, and
when he raged she would explain.
She finished her packing and put the house in order. Then, in
unaccustomed mid-morning leisure, she sank into a deep rocker, and
began to read. Quiet and shade and order reigned in the little house.
Outside in the shaded street the children went shouting home again; a
fishman's horn sounded.
Steps came bounding up to Cherry's door; her heart began to beat; a
knock sounded. She got to her feet, puzzled; Martin did not knock.
It was Joe Robinson, his closest friend at the mine. His handsome,
big-featured face was full of concern.
"Say, listen, Mrs. Lloyd; Mart can't get home to dinner," said Joe. "He
don't feel extra well--he was in the engine room and he kinder--he
kinder--"
"Fainted?" Cherry asked, sharply, turning a little pale.
"Well, kinder. Lawson made him lay down," Joe said. "And he's coming
home when the wagon comes down, at three o'clock. He says to tell you
he's fine!"
"Oh, thank you, Joe!" Cherry said. She shut the door, feeling weak and
frightened. She flew to unpack her bag, hung up her hat and coat,
darkened the bedroom and turned down the bed; waited anxiously for
Mart's return. Mrs. Turner came in with the baby, a gentle, tired
woman, with a face always radiant with joy. Mrs. Turner had seven
children, and had once told Cherry that she had never slept a night
through since the first year of her marriage. She never changed a
baby's gown or rolled a batch of cookies without a deep and genuine
love for the task; she could not unbutton the twisted collar from a
son's small neck without drawing his freckled cheek to her hungry lips
for a kiss, or ask one of her black-headed, bright-eyed daughters to
hang up a dish towel without adding: "You're a darling help to your
mother!"
The Turners lived next door to the Lloyds, in a shabby two-story house,
and though Cherry and her neighbour spoke a different language, they
had grown fond of each other. Cherry had sometimes timidly touched upon
the matter that was always troubling her, with the older woman. But
Mrs. Turner had little to say regarding her feeling for the lean,
silent, somewhat unsuccessful man who was the head of her crowded
household. She seemed to take it for granted that he would sometimes be
unreasonable.
"Papa gets so mad if anything gets burned!" she would say, with her
gentle laugh. And once she added the information that her husband's
mother had been a wonderful manager. "Men are that way!" was her
comment upon the difficulties of other wives. But once, when there was
a wedding near by, Cherry, with others in the church, saw the tears in
Mrs. Turner's eyes as she watched the bride. "Poor little innocent
thing!" she had whispered with a tremulous smile.
She was deeply concerned over the news from Martin, and when Cherry had
met his limp form at the front door, and had whisked him into a cool
bed, and put chopped ice on the aching forehead, and gotten him,
grateful and penitent, off to sleep, her neighbour came over again to
whisper in the kitchen.
"He's all right," Cherry smiled. "He was so glad to get to bed, and so
appreciative!" she added in a motherly tone.
"You look as if you hadn't a thing in the world to do!" the older
housekeeper commented, glancing about the neat, quiet kitchen.
"I believe I like sick nursing!" Cherry smiled back.
For a day or two Martin stayed in bed and Cherry spoiled and petted
him, and was praised and thanked for every step she took. After that
they took a little trip into the mountains near by, and Cherry sent
Alix postcards that made her sister feel almost a pang of envy.
But then the routine began again, and the fearful heat of midsummer
came, too. Red Creek baked in a smother of dusty heat, the trees in the
dry orchards, beside the dry roads, dropped circles of hot shadow on
the clodded, rough earth. Farms dozed under shimmering lines of
dazzling air, and in the village, from ten o'clock until the afternoon
began to wane, there was no stir. Flies buzzed and settled on screen
doors, the creek shrunk away between crumbling rocky banks, the butcher
closed his shop, and milk soured in the bottles.
The Turners, and some other families, always camped together in the
mountains during this season, and they were off when school closed, in
an enviable state of ecstasy and anticipation. Cherry had planned to
join them, but an experimental week-end was enough. The camp was in the
cool woods, truly, but it was disorderly, swarming with children, the
tents were small and hot, the whole settlement laughed and rioted and
surged to and fro in a manner utterly foreign to her. She returned, to
tell Martin that it was "horribly common," and weather the rest of the
summer in Red Creek.
"Mrs. Turner is the only woman that I can stand," said Cherry, "and she
was always cooking, in an awful cooking shed, masses and masses of
macaroni and stewed plums and biscuits--and all of them laughing and
saying, 'Girlie, I guess you've got a hollow leg!' Dearie, I couldn't
eat any more without busting!' And sitting round that plank table--"
Martin shouted with laughter at her, but he sympathized. He had never
cared particularly for the Turners; was perfectly willing to keep the
friendship within bounds.
He sympathized as little with another friendship she made, some months
later, with the wife of a young engineer who had recently come to the
mine. Pauline Runyon was a few years older than her husband, a
handsome, thin, intense woman, who did everything in an entirely
individual way. She took one of the new little bungalows that were
being erected in Red Creek "Park," and furnished it richly and
inappropriately, and established a tea table and a samovar beside the
open fireplace. Cherry began to like better than anything else in the
world the hours she spent with Pauline. She would have liked to go
every day, and every day argued and debated the propriety of doing so,
in her heart.
Not since the days of her engagement to Martin, and then only on a few
occasions, had she felt the thrill that she experienced now, when
Pauline, with her dark eyes and her frilly parasol, wandered in the
kitchen door, to sit laughing and talking for a few minutes, or when
she herself dressed and crossed the village, and went up past the
packing plant and the storage barns to the two small cement gate posts
and the length of rusty chain that marked the entrance to Red Creek
"Park." Then there would be tea, poetry, talk, and the flattery that
Pauline quite deliberately applied to Cherry, and the flattery that
Cherry all unconsciously lavished on her friend in return.
Pauline read Browning, Francis Thompson, and Pater, and introduced
Cherry to new worlds of thought. She talked to Cherry of New York,
which she loved, and of the men and women she had met there. She
sometimes sighed and pushed the bright hair back from Cherry's young
and innocent and discontented little face, and said, tenderly, "On the
stage, my dear--anywhere, everywhere, you would be a furore!"
And thinking, in the quiet evenings--for Martin's work kept him later
and later at the mine--Cherry came to see that her marriage had been a
great mistake. She had not been ready for marriage. She would sit on
the back steps, as the evenings grew cooler, and watch the exquisite
twilight fade, and the sorrow and beauty of life would wring her heart.
Darkness came, the Turner children shrieked, laughed, clattered dishes,
and were silent. Cherry would sit on, her arms wrapped in her apron,
her eyes staring into the young night. In the darkness she could only
see the great shadows that were the Adams' windmill, and the old Brown
barn, and the Cutters' house down the back road. The dry earth seemed
awake at night, stretching itself, under brown sods, for a great breath
of relief in the merciful coolness. Cherry could smell grapes, and
smell the pleasant wetness of the dust where the late watering cart had
passed by, after sunset. The roads were too hot for watering all day
long, and this sweet, wet odour only came with the night.
A dream of ease and adoration and beauty came to her. She did not
visualize any special place, any special gown or hour or person. But
she saw her beauty fittingly environed; she saw cool rooms, darkened
against this blazing midsummer glare; heard ice clinking against glass;
the footsteps of attentive maids; the sound of cultivated voices, of
music and laughter. She had had these dreams before, but they were
becoming habitual now. She was so tired--so sick--so bored with her
real life; it was becoming increasingly harder and harder for her to
live with Martin; to endure and to struggle against the pricks. She was
always in a suppressed state of wanting to break out, to shout at him
brazenly, "I don't care if your coffee is weak! I like it weak! I don't
care if you don't like my hat--I do! Stop talking about yourself!"
Various little mannerisms of his began seriously to annoy her; a rather
grave symptom, had Cherry but known it. He danced his big fingers on
the handle of the sugar spoon at breakfast, sifting the sugar over his
cereal; she had to turn her eyes resolutely away from the sight. He
blew his nose, folded his handkerchief, and then brushed his nose with
it firmly left and right; she hated the little performance that was
never altered. He had a certain mental slowness, would blink at her
politely and patiently when she flashed plans or hopes at him: "I don't
follow you, my dear!" This made her frantic.
She was twenty, undisciplined and exacting. She had no reserves within
herself to which she could turn. Bad things were hopelessly bad with
Cherry, her despairs were the dark and tearful despairs of girlhood,
prematurely transferred to graver matters.
Martin was quite right in some of his contentions; girl-like, she was
spasmodic and unsystematic in her housekeeping; she had times of being
discontented and selfish. She hated economy and the need for careful
managing.
In October Alix chanced to write her a long and unusually gossipy
letter. Alix had a new gown of black grenadine, and she had sung at an
afternoon tea, and had evidently succeeded in her first venture. Also
they had had a mountain climb and enclosed were snapshots Peter had
taken on the trip.
Cherry picked up the little kodak prints; there were four or five of
them. She studied them with a pang at her heart. Alix in a loose rough
coat, with her hair blowing in the wind, and the peaked crest of
Tamalpais behind her--Alix busy with lunch boxes--Alix standing on the
old bridge down by the mill, A wave of homesickness swept over the
younger sister; life tasted bitter. She hated Alix, hated Peter, above
all she hated herself. She wanted to be there, in Mill Valley, free to
play and to dream again--
A day or two later she told Martin kindly and steadily that she thought
it had all "been a mistake." She told him that she thought the only
dignified thing to do was to part. She liked him, she would always wish
him well, but since the love had gone out of their relationship, surely
it was only honest to end it.
"What's the matter?" Martin demanded.
"Nothing special," Cherry assured him, her eyes suddenly watering.
"Only I'm tired of it all. I'm tired of PRETENDING. I can't argue about
it. But I know it's the wise thing to do."
"You acted this same way before," Martin suggested, after looking back
at his paper for a few seconds.
"I did not!" Cherry said, indignantly. "That is not true."
"You'd go back to your father, I suppose?" Martin said, yawning.
"Until I could get into something," Cherry replied with dignity. A
vague thought of the stage flitted through her mind.
"Oh!" Martin said, politely. "And I suppose you think your father would
agree to this delightful arrangement?" he asked.
"I know he would!" Cherry answered, eagerly.
"All right--you write and ask him!" Martin agreed, good-naturedly.
Cherry was surprised at his attitude, but grateful more than surprised.
"Not cross, Mart?" she asked.
"Not the least in the world!" he answered, lightly.
"Because I truly believe that we'd both be happier--" the woman said,
hesitatingly. Martin did not answer.
The next day she sat down to write her father. The house was still. Red
Creek was awakening in the heavenly October coolness, children
chattered on the way to school, the morning and evening were crisp and
sharp.
Cherry stared out at a field of stubble bathed in soft sunshine. The
hills to-day were only a shade deeper than the pale sky. Along the road
back of the house a lumber wagon rattled, the thin bay horses galloping
joyously in harness. Pink and white cosmos, pallid on clouds of frail,
bushy green, were banked in the shade of the woodshed.
She meditated, with a troubled brow. Her letter was unexpectedly hard
to compose. She could not take a bright and simple tone, asking her
father to rejoice in her home-coming. Somehow the matter persisted in
growing heavy, and the words twisted themselves about into ugly and
selfish sounds. Cherry was young, but even to her youth the phrases,
the "misunderstood" and the "uncongenial," the "friendly parting before
any bitterness creeps in," and the "free to decide our lives in some
happier and wiser way," rang false. Pauline had been divorced, a few
years ago, and the only thing Cherry disliked in her friend was her
cold and resentful references to her first husband.
No, she couldn't be a divorced woman. It was all spoiled, the innocent
past and the future; there was no way out! She gave up the attempt at a
letter, and began to annoy Martin with talk of a visit home again.
"You were there six months ago!" Martin reminded her.
"Eight months ago, Mart."
"What you want to go for?"
"Oh, just--just--" Cherry's irrepressible tears angered herself almost
as much as they did Martin. "I think they'd like me to!" she faltered.
"Go if you want to!" he said, but she knew she could not go on that
word.
"That's it," she said at last to herself, in one of her solitary hours.
"I'm married, and this is marriage. For the rest of my life it'll be
Mart and I--Mart and I--in everything! For richer for poorer, for
better for worse-that's marriage. He doesn't beat me, and we have
enough money, and perhaps there are a lot of other women worse off than
I am. But it's--it's funny."