Part 18 (1/2)
The glory of it lighted with magic that day and the days to come. They laughed over the pretty gipsy hat, over Len's coat, over the need of borrowing Mabel's brush and comb. With Joe and Sally, they all dined together, and wandered about the village streets in the summer moonlight; then Martie went to bed, too happy and excited to sleep, in Bernadette's room, wearing a much-trimmed nightgown of Mabel's. It had been decided that the marriage should take place in San Francisco, Wallace sensibly suggesting that there would be less embarra.s.sing questioning there, and also that Martie's money might be spent to better advantage in the city.
Martie's trunk came to Sally's house the next morning, unaccompanied by message or note, and three days later Martie wrote her mother a long letter from a theatrical boarding-house in Geary Street, sending a copy of the marriage certificate of Martha Salisbury Monroe to Edward Vincent Tenney in Saint Patrick's Church, San Francisco, and observing with a touch of pride that ”my husband” was now rehearsing for an engagement of seven weeks at sixty dollars a week. There was no answer.
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
For days it was her one triumphant thought. She was married! She was splendidly and unexpectedly a wife. And her life partner was no mere Monroe youth, and her home was not merely one of the old, familiar Monroe cottages. She was the wife of a rising actor, and she lived in the biggest city of the State!
Martie exulted innocently and in secret. She reviewed the simple fact again and again. The two Monroe girls were married. A dimple would deepen in her cheek, a slow smile tug at her lips, when she thought of it. She told Wallace, in her simple childish way, that she had never really expected to be married; she thought that she would like to go back to Monroe for a visit, and let her old friends see the plain gold ring on her big, white hand.
Everything in Martie's life, up to this point, had helped her to believe that marriage was the final step in any woman's experience. A girl was admired, was desired, and was married, if she was, humanly speaking, a success. If she was not admired, if no one asked her in marriage, she was a failure. This was the only test.
Martie's thoughts never went on to the years that followed marriage, the experiences and lessons; these were all lost in the golden glow that surrounded the step safely accomplished. That the years between thirty and fifty are as long as the years between ten and thirty, never occurred to her. With the long, dull drag of her mother's life before her eyes, she never had thought that Rose's life, that Sally's life, as married women, could ever be long and dull. They were married--doubt and surmise and hope were over. Lydia and Miss f.a.n.n.y were not married.
Therefore, Rose and Sally and Martie had an obvious advantage over Lydia and f.a.n.n.y.
It was a surprise to her to find life placidly proceeding here in this strange apartment in Geary Street, as if all the world had not stopped moving and commenced again. The persons she met called her ”Mrs.
Bannister” with no visible thrill. n.o.body seemed surprised when she and the big actor quietly went into their room at night and shut the door.
She had fancied that the mere excitement of the new life filled all brides with a sort of proud complacency; that they felt superior to other human beings, and secretly scorned the unwed. It was astonis.h.i.+ng to find herself still concerned with the tiny questions of yesterday: the ruffle torn on the bureau, the little infection that swelled and inflamed her chin, the quarter of a dollar her Chinese laundryman swore he had never received. It was always tremendously thrilling to have Wallace give her money: delightful gold pieces such as even her mother seldom handled. She felt a naive resentment that so many of them had to be spent for what she called ”uninteresting” things: lodging and food and car fares. They seemed so more than sufficient, when she first touched them; they melted so mysteriously away. She felt that there should be great saving on so generous an allowance, but Wallace never saved, nor did any of his friends and a.s.sociates.
So that a sense of being baffled began to puzzle her. She was married now; the great question of life had been answered in the affirmative.
But--but the future was vague and unsettled still. Even married persons had their problems. Even the best of husbands sometimes left a tiny something to be desired.
Husbands, in Martie's dreams, were ideal persons who laughed indulgently at adored wives, produced money without question or stint, and for twenty or fifty years, as the span of their lives might decree, came home appreciatively to delicious dinners, escorted their wives proudly to dinner or theatre, made presents, paid compliments, and disposed of bills. That her mother had once perhaps had some such idea of her father did not occur to her.
”Lissen, dear, did I wake you up?” said Mrs. Wallace Bannister, coming quietly into the sitting room that connected her bedroom with that of Mrs. Jesse Cluett, in the early hours of an August morning.
”No--o! This feller wakes me up,” Mrs. Cluett said, yawning and pale, but cheerful. She indicated the fat, serious baby in her arms. ”Honest, it's enough to kill a girl, playing every night and Sunday, and trying to raise children!” she added, manipulating her flat breast with ringed fingers to meet the little mouth.
”I wish I could either have the baby nights, or play your parts!”
laughed Martie, reaching lazily for manicure scissors and beginning to clip her nails, as she sat in a loose, blue kimono opposite the older woman.
”Dearie, you'll have your own soon enough!” Mabel answered gratefully.
”It won't be so hard long. They get so's they can take care of themselves very quick. Look at Dette--goodness knows where she's been ever since she got up. She must of drunk her milk and eaten her san'wich, because here's the empty gla.s.s. She's playing somewhere; she's all right.”
”Oh, sure--she's all right!” Martie said, smiling lazily. And as Leroy finished his meal she put out her arms. ”Come to Aunt Martie, Baby. Oh, you--cunnin'--little--sc.r.a.p, you!”
”You'd ought to have one, Mart,” said Mabel affectionately.
The wife of a month flushed brightly. With her loosened bronze braid hanging over her shoulder, her blue eyes soft with happiness, and her full figure only slightly disguised by the thin nightgown and wrapper she wore, she looked the incarnation of potent youth and beauty.
”I'd love it,” she said, burying her hot cheeks in the little s.p.a.ce between Leroy's fluffy crown and the collar of his soggy little double gown.
”I love 'em, too,” Mabel agreed. ”But they cert'ny do tie you down.
Dette was the same way--only I sort of forgot it.”
”If this salary was going to keep up, I'd like a dozen of 'em!” Martie smiled.