Thirty years ago there were a great many detached Englishmen in
California, fourth and fifth sons, remittance men, family
scapegraces who had been banished to the farthest frontier by
relatives who regarded California as beyond the reach of gossip,
and almost beyond the reach of letters. Checks, small but regular,
arrived quarterly for these gentry, who had only to drink, sleep,
play cards, and demoralize the girls of the country. Here and
there among them, to be sure, were pink-skinned boys as fresh and
sweet as the apple-blossoms under which they rode their horses,
but for the most part the emigrants were dissipated, disenchanted,
clinging loyally to the traditions of the older country that had
discarded them, and scorning the fragrant and inexhaustible
richness of the new land that had made them welcome. They were, as
a class, silent, only voluble on the subject of the despised
country of their adoption, and absolutely non-committal as to
their own histories. But far from questioning their credentials,
the women and girls everywhere accepted them eagerly, caught
something of an English accent and something of an English
arrogance.
So Clara Mumford, a rose of a girl, cream-skinned, blue-eyed, and
innocent with the terrible innocence of the village girlhood that
feels itself so wise--Clara, who knew, because her two older
sisters were married, where babies come from, and knew, because of
Alta Porter's experience, that girls--nice girls, who went with
one through the high school--can yield to temptation and be
ruined--Clara only felt, in shyly announcing her engagement to
Gerald Fairfax, that Fate had been too kind.
That this glittering stranger twice her age--why, he was even a
little bald--a man who had travelled, who knew people of title,
knew books, and manners, and languages--that he should marry an
undertaker's daughter in Los Lobos! It was unbelievable. Clara's
only misgiving during her short engagement was that he would
disappear like a dream. She agreed with everything he said; even
carrying her new allegiance to the point of laughing a little at
her own people: the layer cakes her mother made for the Sunday
noonday dinner; the red-handed, freckled swain who called on her
younger sister in the crisp, moonlighted winter evenings; and the
fact that her father shaved in the kitchen.
A few weeks slipped by, and Clara duly confided her youth and her
innocence and her roses to her English husband, a little ashamed
of the wedding presents her friends sent her, even a little
doubtful of her parents' handsome gift of a bird's-eye maple
bedroom set and a parlor set in upholstered cherry.
On her side she accepted everything unquestionably: the shabby
little ranch house that smelled of wood smoke, and tobacco smoke,
and dogs; the easy scorn of her old friends on her husband's part
that so soon alienated her from them; the drink that she quickly
learned to regard with uneasiness and distrust. It was not that
Jerry ever got really intoxicated, but he got ugly, excitable,
irritable, even though quite in control of his actions and his
senses.