The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems.

by Frances Fuller Victor.

PREFACE.

This collection consists of sketches of Pacific Coast life, most of which have appeared, from time to time, in the _Overland Monthly_, and other Western magazines. If they have a merit, it is because they picture scenes and characters having the charm of newness and originality, such as belong to border life.

The poems embraced in the collection, have been written at all periods of my life, and therefore cannot be called peculiarly Western. But they embody feelings and emotions common to all hearts, East or West; and as such, I dedicate them to my friends on the Pacific Coast, but most especially in Oregon.

Portland, August, 1877.

THE NEW PENELOPE.

I may as well avow myself in the beginning of my story as that anomalous creature--a woman who loves her own s.e.x, and naturally inclines to the study of their individual peculiarities and histories, in order to get at their collective qualities. If I were to lay before the reader all the good and bad I know about them by actual discovery, and all the mean, and heroic, attributes this habit I have of studying people has revealed to me, I should meet with incredulity, perhaps with opprobrium.

However that may be, I have derived great enjoyment from having been made the recipient of the confidences of many women, and by learning therefrom to respect the moral greatness that is so often coupled with delicate physical structure, and almost perfect social helplessness.

Pioneer life brings to light striking characteristics in a remarkable manner; because, in the absence of conventionalities and in the presence of absolute and imminent necessities, all real qualities come to the surface as they never would have done under different circ.u.mstances. In the early life of the Greeks, Homer found his Penelope; in the pioneer days of the Pacific Coast, I discovered mine.

My wanderings, up and down among the majestic mountains and the sunny valleys of California and Oregon, had made me acquainted with many persons, some of whom were to me, from the interest they inspired me with, like the friends of my girlhood. Among this select number was Mrs.

Anna Greyfield, at whose home among the foot-hills of the Sierras in Northern California, I had spent one of the most delightful summers of my life. Intellectual and intelligent without being learned or particularly bookish; quick in her perceptions and nearly faultless in her judgment of others; broadly charitable, not through any laxity of principle on her own part, but through knowledge of the stumbling-blocks of which the world is full for the unwary, she was a constant surprise and pleasure to me. For, among the vices of women I had long counted uncharitableness; and among their disadvantages want of actual knowledge of things--the latter accounting for the former.

I had several times heard it mentioned that Mrs. Greyfield had been twice married; and as her son Benton was also called Greyfield, I presumed that he was the son of the second marriage. How I found out differently I am about to relate.

One rainy winter evening, on the occasion of my second visit to this friend, we were sitting alone before a bright wood fire in an open fireplace, when we chanced to refer to the subject of her son's personal qualities; he then being gone on a visit to San Francisco, and of course very constantly in his mother's thoughts, as only sons are sure to be.

"Benton is just like his father," she said. "He is self-possessed and full of expedients, but he says very little. I have often wished he conversed more readily, for I admire a good talker."

"And yet did not marry one:--the common lot!"

Mrs. Greyfield smiled, and gazed into the fire, whose pleasant radiance filled the room, bringing out the soft warm colors in the carpet, and making fantastic shadows of our easy-chairs and ourselves upon the wall.

"Mr. Greyfield was your second husband?" I said, in an inquiring tone, but without expecting to be contradicted.

"Mr. Greyfield was my first, last, and only husband," she replied, with a touch of asperity, yet not as if she meant it for me.

"I beg your pardon," I hastened to explain: "but I had been told--"

"Yes, I can guess what you have been told. Very few people know the truth: but I never had a second husband, though I was twice married;"

and my hostess regarded me with a smile half a.s.sumed and half embarra.s.sed.

For my own part, I was very much embarra.s.sed, because I had certainly been informed that she had lived for a number of years with a second husband who had not used her well, and from whom she was finally divorced. Doubt her word I could not; neither could I reconcile her statement with facts apparently well known. She saw my dilemma, and, after a brief silence, mentally decided to help me out of it. I could see that, in the gradual relaxing of certain muscles of her face, which had contracted at the first reference to this--as I could not doubt--painful subject. Straightening her fine form as if ease of position was not compatible with what was in her mind, she grasped the arms of her chair with either hand, and looking with a retrospective gaze into the fire, began:

"You see it was this way: the man I married the second time had another wife."

While she drew a deep breath, and made a momentary pause, I seemed to take it all in, for I had heard so many stories of deserted Eastern homes, and subsequent illegal marriages in California, that I was prepared not to be at all surprised at what I should learn from her.

Directly she went on:

"I found out about it the very day of the marriage. We were married in the morning, and in the afternoon a man came over from Vancouver who told me that Mr. Seabrook had a wife, and family of children, in a certain town in Ohio." Another pause followed, while she seemed to be recalling the very emotions of that time.

"Vancouver?" I said: "that is on the Columbia River."

"Yes; I was living in Portland at that time."

In reply to my glance of surprise, she changed the scene of her story to an earlier date.

"Mr. Greyfield had always wanted to come to California, after the gold discoveries; but when he married me he agreed not to think of it any more. I was very young and timid, and very much attached to my childhood's home, and my parents; and I could not bear the thought of going so long a distance away from them. It was not then, as it is now, an easy journey of one week; but a long six months' pilgrimage through a wilderness country infested by Indians. To reach what? another wilderness infested by white barbarians!"

"But I have always heard," I said, "that women were idealized and idolized in those days."

"That is a very pretty fiction. If you had seen what I have seen on this coast, you would not think we had been much idealized. Women have a certain value among men, when they can be useful to them. In the old States, where every man has a home, women have a fixed position and value in society, because they are necessary to make homes. But on this coast, in early times, and more or less even now, men found they could dispense with homes; they had been converted into nomads, to whom earth and sky, a blanket and a frying-pan, were sufficient for their needs.

Unless we came to them armed with endurance to battle with primeval nature, we became burdensome. Strong and coa.r.s.e women who could wash shirts in any kind of a tub out of doors under a tree, and iron them kneeling on the ground, to support themselves and half a dozen little, hungry young ones, were welcome enough--before the Chinamen displaced them. We had some value as cooks, before men, with large means, turned their attention to supplying their brothers with prepared food for a consideration below what we could do with our limited means. And then the ladies, the educated, refined women, who followed their husbands to this country, or who came here hoping to share, perchance, in the golden spoils of the mines! Where are they to-day, and what is their condition?

Look for them in the sunless back rooms of San Francis...o...b..arding-houses, and you will find them doing a little fine sewing for the shops; or working on their own garments, which they must make out of school hours, because the n.i.g.g.ardly pay of teachers in the lower grades will not allow of their getting them done. Idealized indeed! Men talk about our getting out of our places where we clamor for paying work of some kind, for something to do that will enable us to live in half comfort by working more hours than they do to earn lordly livings."

How much soever I might have liked to talk this labor question over with my intelligent hostess at any other time, my curiosity concerning her own history having been so strongly aroused, the topic seemed less interesting than usual, and I seized the opportunity given by an emphasized pause to bring her back to the original subject.

"Did you come first to California?" I asked.

"No. I had been married little over a year when Benton was born. 'Now,'

I thought, 'my husband will be contented to stay at home.' He had been fretting about having promised not to take me to California; but I hoped the baby would divert his thoughts. We were doing well, and had a pleasant house, with everything in and about it that a young couple ought to desire. I deceived myself in expecting Mr. Greyfield to give up anything he had strongly desired; and seeing how much he brooded over it, I finally told him to be comforted; that I would go with him to California if he would wait until the baby was a year old before starting; and to this he agreed."

"How old were you at that time?"

"Only about nineteen. I was twenty the spring we started; and celebrated my anniversary by making a general gathering of all my relatives and friends at our house, before we broke up and sold off our house-keeping goods--all but such as could be carried in our wagons across the plains."

"You were not starting by yourselves?"

"O no. There was a large company gathering together on the Missouri river, to make the start in May; and we, with some of our neighbors, made ready to join them. I shall never forget my feelings as I stood in my own house for the last time, taking a life-long leave of every familiar object! But you do not want to hear about that."

"I want to hear what you choose to tell me; but most of all about your second marriage, and what led to it."

"It is not easy to go back so many years and take up one thread in the skein of life, and follow that alone. I will disentangle it as rapidly as I can; but first let us have a fresh fire."

Suiting the action to the word, my hostess touched a bell and ordered a good supply of wood, which I took as an intimation that we were to have one of our late sittings. In confirmation of this suspicion a second order was given to have certain refreshments, including hot lemonade, made ready to await our pleasure. When we were once more alone I begged her to go on with her story.

"We left the rendezvous in May, and traveled without any unusual incidents all through the summer."

"I beg pardon for interrupting you; but I do want to know how you endured that sort of life. Was it not terrible?"

"It was monotonous, it was disagreeable, but it was not _terrible_ while everybody was well. There were compensations in it, as in almost any kind of life. My husband was strong and cheerful, now that he was having his own way; the baby throve on fresh air and good milk--for we had milch cows with us--and the summer months on the gra.s.sy plains are delightful, except for rather frequent thunder storms. The gra.s.s was good, and our cattle in fine order. Everything went well until the cholera broke out among us."

"And then?"

"And then my husband died."

"Ah, what have not pioneer women endured!"