The Happy End | Page 7

informed him. "Take
it round here, there's nothing to do but get married, and all the change is
from one kitchen to another. You don't even have a way to match up
fellows. Soon as you're out of short skirts one of them visits with you
and the rest stay away like you had the smallpox. Our courting lasted a
week and you were here four times."
"We haven't much time, Hannah," he reminded her. "It was right hard
for me to see you that often. There was a smart of things you were
doing, too."
"The more fool!" she exclaimed.
Again his resentment promised to leap beyond control. He clenched his
hands and stared with contracted eyes at the floor.
"Well," he articulated finally, "we're promised anyhow; that can't be
denied. 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