The Happy End | Page 7

I have your word."
"Yes," she admitted, "but chance that I went with Phebe doesn't mean I'd never come back."
"It would mean that you'd never come back," he paraphrased her.
"Maybe I would know better," she answered quickly. "I'm sorry, Calvin. I didn't go to be so sharp. Only I don't know what's right," she went on unhappily.
"It isn't what's right," he corrected her, "but what you want. I wish Phebe had stayed away a little longer."
"There you go again at Phebe!" she protested.
He replied grimly; "Not half what I feel."
In a dangerously calm voice she inquired, "What's the rest then?"
"She's a trouble-maker," he asserted in a shaking tone over which he seemed to have no command; "she came back to Greenstream and for no reason but her own slinked into our happiness. Your whole family--even Hosmer, pretending to be so wise--are blind as bats. You can't even see that Phebe's hair is as dyed as her stories. She says she is on the stage, but it's a pretty stage! I've been to Stanwick and seen those Parisian Dainties and burlesque shows. They're nothing but a lot of half-naked women cavorting and singing fast songs. And the show only begins--with most of them--when the curtain drops. If I even try to think of you in that I get sick."
"Go on," Hannah stammered, scarcely above her breath.
"It's bad," Calvin Stammark went on. "The women are bad; and a bad woman is something awful. I know about that too. I've been to the city as well as Phebe. Oh, Hannah," he cried, "can't you see, can't you!" With a violent effort he regained the greater part of his composure. "But it won't touch you," he added; "we're going to be married right away."
"We are?" Hannah echoed him thinly, in bitter mockery. "I wouldn't have you now if you were the last man on earth with the way you talked about Phebe! I don't see how you can stand there and look at me. If I told pa or Hosmer they would shoot you. You might as well know this as well--I'm going back with her; it'll be some gayer than these lonely old valleys or your house stuck away all by itself with nothing to see but Senator Alderwith's steers."
There flashed into Calvin Stammark's mind the memory of how he had planned to possess just such cattle for Hannah and himself; he saw in the elusive lamplight the house he had built for Hannah. His feeling, that a second before had been so acute, was numb. This, he thought, was strange; a voice within echoed that he was going to lose her, to lose Hannah; but he had no faculty capable of understanding such a calamity.
"Why, Hannah," he said impotently--"Hannah--" His vision blurred so that he couldn't see her clearly; it was as if, indistinct before him, she were already fading from his life. "I never went to hurt you," he continued in a curious detachment from his suffering. "You were everything I had."
Calvin grew awkward, confused in his mind and gestures. At the same time Hannah's desirability increased immeasurably. Never in Greenstream or any place else had he seen another like her; and he was about to lose her, lose Hannah.
Automatically he repeated, "If Phebe were a man----"
He was powerless not only against exterior circumstance but to combat what lay with Hannah. Phebe would never set her hands in hot dishwater. He recalled their mother, fretful and impatient. He shook his head as if to free his mind from so many vain thoughts. She stood, hard and unrelenting.
He tried to mutter a phrase about being here if she should return, but it perished in the conviction of its uselessness. Calvin saw her with green-yellow hair, a cigarette in painted lips; he heard the blurred applause of men at the spectacle of Hannah on the stage, dressed like the women he had seen there. Then pride stiffened him into a semblance of her own remoteness.
"It's in you," he said; "and it will have to come out. I'm what I am too, and that doesn't make it any easier. Kind of a fool about you. Another girl won't do. I'll say good night."
He turned and abruptly quitted the room and all his hope.
VI
When the furniture Calvin had ordered through the catalogue at Priest's store arrived by mountain wagon he placed it in the room beside the kitchen that was to have been Hannah's and his. Hannah had gone three weeks before with Phebe. This done he sat for a long while on the portico of his house, facing the rich bottom pasturage and high verdant range beyond. It was late afternoon and the rift was filling with a golden haze from a sun veiled in watery late-spring vapors. An old apple tree by the road