THE REVOLT OF MARTHA SCOTT
THERE 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.