The happy end

Dedication

These stories have but one purpose — to give pleasure; and they have been made into a book at the requests of those I have fortunately pleased. It is, therefore, to such friends of my writing that they are addressed and dedicated. However, this is not an effort to avoid my responsibility: but to whom? Not to critics, not middlemen, nor the Academies of which I am so reprehensible ignorant; not, certainly, to my neighbor. They brought me, in times of varying difficulty, food; and for that excellent reason I am forced to conclude that, then as now, I am responsible to my grocer.

Contents

. 93

Rosemary Rosette

. 231

II

The Braley table, spread after the Greenstream custom in the kitchen, was surrounded by Richmond and Calvin — Hosmer "had stayed late at the bank — Hannah and Susan, the eldest of the children, prematurely aged and wasted by a perpetual cough, while Lucy Braley moved carelessly between the stove and the table. At rare intervals she was assisted by Hannah, who bore the heavy dishes in a silent but perceptible air of protest.

Calvin Stammark liked this; it was a part of her superiority to the other girls of the locality. He made up his mind that she should never lose her present gentility. Whenever he could afford it Hannah must have help in the house. No greater elegance was imaginable. Senator Alderwith, at his dwelling with its broad porch, had two servants — two servants and a bathtub with hot water running right out of a tap. And he Calvin Stammark, would have the same, before Hannah and he were too old to enjoy it.

He had eleven hundred dollars now, after buying the

[IS]

land about his house. When the right time came he would invest it in more property — grazing, a few herd of cattle and maybe in timber. Calvin had innumerable schemes for their betterment and success. To all this the sheer fact of Hannah was like the haunting refrain of a song. She was never really out of his planning. He might be sitting on his rooftree squaring the shingling; bargaining with Eli Goss, the stone-cutter; renewing the rock salt for Alderwith's steers; but running through every occupation was the memory of Hannah's pale distracting face, the scarlet thread of the lips she was continually biting, her slender solid body.

He had heard that her mother was like that when she was young; but looking at Mrs. Braley's spent being, hearing her thin complaining voice, it seemed impossible. People who had known her in her youth asserted that it was so. Phebe too, they said, was the same — Phebe who had left Greenstream nine years ago, when she was seventeen, to become an actress in the great cities beyond the mountains. This might or might not be a fact. Calvin always doubted that any one else could have Hannah's charm.

However, he had never seen Phebe; he had moved from a distant part of the county to the principal Greenstream settlement after she had gone. But the legend of Phebe's beauty and talent was a part of the Braley household. Mrs. Braley told it as a distinguished trait that Phebe would never set her hand in hot dishwater. Calvin noted that Hannah was often blamed for domestic negligence, but this and far more advanced conduct in Phebe was surrounded by a halo of superiority.

After supper, in view of the fact of their courtship,

Calvin and Hannah were permitted to sit undisturbed in the formality of the parlor. The rest of the family congregated with complete normality in the kitchen. The parlor was an uncomfortable chamber with uncomfortable elaborate chairs in orange plush upholstery, a narrow sofa, an organ of highly varnished lightwood ornamented with scrolled fretwork, and a cannon stove with polished brass spires.

Calvin sat on the sofa with an arm about Hannah's waist, while she twisted round her finger the ring he had given her, a ring of warranted gold clasping a large red stone. Her throat was circled by a silver chain supporting a mounted polished Scotch pebble, his gift as well. Their position was conventional; Calvin's arm was cramped from its unusual position, he had to brace his feet to keep firm on the slippery plush, but he was dazed with delight. His heart throbs were evident in his wrists and throat, while a tenderness of pity actually wet his eyes.

At times he spoke in a hushed voice, phrases meaningless in word but charged with inarticulate emotion; Hannah replied more coherently; but for the most they were silent. She accepted the situation with evident calm as an inevitable part of life. Drawn against him she rested her head lightly on his shoulder, her gaze speculative and undisturbed.

Once he exclaimed: " I don't believe you love me! I don't believe you're interested in the things for the kitchen or the bedroom suite I saw in a catalogue at Priest's store! "

" Don't be silly! " she murmured. " Why shouldn't I be when it's my own, when it's all I'm going to have."

He cried bravely. " It's only the beginning ! Wait till you see our cattle herded over the mountain to the railroad; wait till you see a spur come up the Sugarloaf and

haul away our hardwood. Just you wait "

There was the clip-clip of a horse outside, and the creaking of wheels.

" I believe that's Hosmer." Hannah rose. " It's funny, too, because he said he'd have to stay at the hotel to-night, there was so much settling up at the bank."

It was, however, Hosmer Braley. He paused at the parlor door, a man in the vicinity of thirty, fat in body and carefully clad, with a white starched collar and figured satin tie.

" I didn't want to drive out," he said, at once bland and aggrieved; " but it couldn't be helped. Here's a piece of news for all of you — Phebe is coming home to visit. She wrote me to say so, and I only got the letter this evening. Whatever do you suppose took her? "

Hannah at once flushed with excitement — like, Calvin Stammark thought, the parlor lamp with the pink shade, turned up suddenly. An instant vague depression settled over him; Hannah, only the minute before in his arms, seemed to draw away from him, remote and unconcerned by anything but Phebe's extraordinary return. Hosmer made it clear that the event promised nothing but annoyance for him.

" She's coming by to-morrow's stage," he went on, untouched by the sensation his information had wrought in the kitchen; "and it's certain I can't meet her. The bank's sending me into West Virginia about some securities."

Richmond Braley, it developed further, was bound to a day's work on the public roads. They turned to Calvin.

"Take my buggy," Hosmer offered; " I'll have to go from Durban by rail."

There was no reason why he shouldn't meet Phebe Braley, Calvin realized. He lingered, gazing with silent longing at Hannah, but it was evident that she had no intention of returning to the parlor.

Ill

Waiting in Hosmer's buggy for the arrival of the Greenstream stage and Phebe Braley, Calvin was conscious of the persistence of the depression that had invaded him at the announcement of her visit. He resented, too, the new element thrust into the Braley household, disrupting the familiar course of his love. Hannah had been unreasonably distracted by the actuality of Phebe's return — the Phebe who had gone away from the mountains and become an actress.

The buggy was drawn to one side of the principal Greenstream road, at the post-office. Before him the way crossed the valley and lifted abruptly to the slope of the eastern range. At his back the village — the brick Methodist church and the white painted Presbyterian church, the courthouse with its dignified columns, the stores at the corners of the single crossroads, and varied dwellings— was settling into the elusive May twilight. The highest peaks in the east were capped with dissolving rose by the lowering sun, and the sky was a dusty blue.

Calvin Stammark heard the approaching stage before he saw it; then the long rigid surrey with its spare horses rapidly rolled up over the open road to the post-office. He got down and moved diffidently forward, seeing and recognizing Phebe immediately. This was made possible by her resemblance to Hannah; and yet, Calvin added, no two women could be more utterly different.

Phebe Braley had a full figure — she was almost stout — a body of the frankest emphasized curves in a long purple coat with a collar of soiled white fur. A straw hat with the brim caught by a short purple-dyed ostrich feather was pinned to a dead-looking crinkled mass of greenish-gold hair, and her face — the memorable features of Hannah — was loaded with pink powder.

Calvin said: " You must be Phebe Braley. Well, I'm Calvin Stammark. Your father or Hosmer couldn't meet the stage and so they had to let me get you. Where's your bag? "

She adopted at once an air of comfortable familiarity. " I don't remember your name," she said, settling beside him in the buggy.

He told her that he had come to this vicinity after she had gone and that he was about to marry her sister.

" The hell you say ! " she replied with cheerful surprise. " Who'd thought Hannah was old enough to have a fellow! "

They were out of the village now and she produced a paper pack of cigarettes from a leather hand bag with a florid gilt top. Flooding her being with smoke she gazed with a shudder at the mountain wall on either hand, the unbroken greenery sweeping to the sky.

" It's worse than I remembered," she confided, resting against him. " A person with any life to them would go dippy here. Say, it's fierce! And yet, inside of me, I'm kind of glad to see it. I used to dream about the mountains, and this is like riding in the dream. I'm glad you came for me and let me down easy into things. I suppose they live in the kitchen home and pa'd lose a currycomb in his beard. Does Hosmer still beller if he gets the chicken neck?

" Do you sit in the holy parlor for your courting, and ain't that plush sofa a God-forsaken perch for two little love birds? It's funny how I remember this and that. I reckon ma's temper don't improve with age. They kid me something dreadful about saying ' reckon,' in the talent. But it's all good and a dam' sight better than ' I guess.' That's all they get off me."

Calvin Stammark's vague uneasiness changed to an acute dislike, even a fear of Phebe. Her freedom of discourse and person, the powdered hard face close to his, the reek of scent — all rasped the delicacy of his love for Hannah. The sisters were utterly different, and yet he would have realized instantly their relationship. Phebe, too, had the disturbing quality that made Hannah so appealing. In the former it was coarsened, almost lost; almost but not quite.

" I'll bet," she continued, " that I'm the only female prodigal on the bills. Not that I've been feeding on husks. Not me. Milwaukee lager and raw beef sandwiches. I have a passion for them after the show. We do two a day and I want solid refreshment. I wonder if you ever saw me. Of course you didn't, but you might have. Ned Higmann's Parisian Dainties. Rose Rayner's what I go by. That's French, but spelled different, and means brightness. And I'm bright, Casper.

" My, what are you so glum about — the dump you live in or matrimony? There was a gentleman in an orchestra in Harrisburg wanted to marry me — he played the oboe — but I declined. Too Bohemian. . . . This is where we turn," she cried instinctively, and they swung into the valley where the Braleys had their clearing.

Phebe crushed the cigarette in her fingers. Suddenly she was nervous.

" It's natural I have changed a lot," she said. " If you hear me saying anything rough pinch me."

Richmond Braley was standing beside his house in the muddy clothes in which he had labored on the roads, and Mrs. Braley and Hannah came eagerly forward. Behind them sounded Susan's racking cough. Sentimental tears rolled dustily over Phebe's cheeks as she kissed and embraced her mother and sisters.

" H'y," Richmond Braley awkwardly saluted her; and " H'y," she answered in the local manner.

" Well," he commented, " you hain't forgotten that anyway."

Calvin was asked to stay for the supper that had been, delayed for Phebe's return, but when he declined uncertainly he wasn't pressed. Putting up Hosmer's rig and saddling his own horse he rode slowly and dejectedly on.

Instead of going directly back to Greenstream he followed the way that led to his new house. The evening was silvery with a full brilliant moon, and the fresh paint and bright woodwork were striking against the dark elevated background of trees. The truck patch would be dug on the right, the clearing widen rod by rod. From Alderwith's meadows came the soft blowing of a steer's nostrils, while the persistent piping of the frogs in the hollows fluctuated in his depressed consciousness.

Calvin had drawn rein and sat on his horse in the road. He was trying to picture Hannah standing in the door waiting for him, to hear her calling him from work; but always Phebe intervened with her travesty of Hannah's clear loveliness.

IV

Again at the Braleys' he found the family — in the kitchen — listening with absorbed interest to Phebe's stories of life and the stage. Richmond Braley sat with an undisguised wonderment and frequent exclamations; there was a faint flush in Mrs. Braley 's dun cheeks; Susan tried without success to strangle her coughing. Only Hosmer was unmoved; at times he nodded in recognition of the realities of Phebe's narratives; his attitude was one of complacent understanding.

Calvin, at last succeeding in catching Hannah's attention, made a suggestive gesture toward the front of the house, but she ignored his desire. She, more than any of the others, was intent upon Phebe. And he realized that Phebe paid her a special attention.

" My," she exclaimed, " the healthy life has put you in the front row. Ned Higmann would rave about your shape and airs. It's too bad to bury them here in the mountains. I reckon you love me for that " — she turned cheerfully to Calvin — " but it's the truth. If you could do anything at all, Hannah, you'd lead a chorus and go in the olio. And you would draw at the stage door better than you would on the front. Young and fresh as a daisy spells champagne and diamond garters. I don't believe they'd let you stay in burlesque but sign you for comic opera."

The blood beat angrily in Calvin Stammark's head. Whatever did Phebe mean by talking like that to Hannah just when she was to marry him! He cursed silently at Richmond Braley's fatuous face, at Mrs. Braley's endorsement of all that her eldest daughter related, at Hosmer's assumption of worldly experience. But Hannah's manner filled him with apprehension.

" It's according to how you feel," Phebe continued; " some like to get up of a black winter morning and fight the kitchen fire. I don't. Some women are happy handing plates to their husband while he puts down a square feed. Not in mine."

" The loneliness is what I hate," Hannah added.

" It's hell," the other agreed. " Excuse me, ma."

Hannah went on: " And you get old without ever seeing things. There is all that you tell about going on — those crowds and the jewels and dresses, the parties and elegant times; but there is never a whisper of it in Greenstream; nothing but the frogs that I could fairly scream at — and maybe a church social." As she talked Hannah avoided Calvin Stammark's gaze.

" Me and you'll have a conversation," Phebe promised her recklessly.

Choking with rage Calvin rose. " I might as well move along," he asserted.

11 Don't get heated," Phebe advised him. " I wouldn't break up your happy home, only I want Hannah to have an idea of what's what. I don't doubt you'll get her for a wife."

" There's nothing but slaving for a woman round here," Mrs. Braley put in. " I'm right glad Phebe had so much spirit."

Richmond Braley evidently thought it was time for certain reservations. " You mustn't come down so hard on Calvin and me," he said practically. " We're both likely young fellows."

" I'll be here evening after to-morrow," Calvin told Hannah in a low voice.

She nodded without interest. They must be married at once, he decided, his wise horse following unerringly the rocky road, stepping through splashing dark fords. If there was a repetition of the past visit he would have something to say. Hannah was his, she was promised to him. He felt the coolness of her cheeks, her bright mouth against his. A tyranny of misery and desire flooded him at the sudden danger — it was as much as that — threatening his happiness and life.

It was a danger founded on his entire ignorance of what he must combat. He couldn't visualize it, but it never occurred to him that Hannah would actually go away — leave him and Greenstream. No, it was a quality in Hannah herself, a thing that had always lurked below the surface, beyond his knowledge until now. Yet he realized that it formed a part of her appeal, a part of her distinction over the other girls of the county.

Maybe it was because he was never in his heart absolutely certain of her — even when she was closest to him she seemed to slip away beyond his power to follow. His love, he acknowledged for the first time, had never been easy or contented or happy. It had been obscure, like the night about him now; it resembled a fire that he held in his bare hands. Hannah's particularity, too, was allied to this strange newly-awakened peril. In a manner it was that which had carried Phebe out of the mountains. Now the resemblance between them was far stronger than their difference.

There was more than a touch of all this in the girls' mother, in her bitterness and discontent. He felt that he hated the elder as much as he did Phebe. If the latter were a man

He dressed with the greatest care for his next evening with Hannah. Hosmer wore no stiffer nor whiter collar, and Calvin's necktie was a pure gay silk. He arrived just as the moon detached itself from the fringe of mountain peaks and the frogs started insistently. His heart was heavy but his manner calm, determined, as he entered the Braley kitchen. No one was there but Susan; soon however, Phebe entered in an amazing slovenly wrapper with a lace edge turned back from her ample throat; and Hannah followed.

Phebe made a mocking reference to the sofa in the parlor, and Hannah's expression was distasteful; but she slowly followed Calvin into the conventional chamber.

He made no attempt to embrace her, but said instead: " I came to fix the day for our wedding."

" Phebe wants me to go with her for a little first," she replied indirectly. " She says I can come back whenever I like."

" Your Phebe has no say in it." He spoke harshly. " We're honestly promised to each other and don't need outside advice or interference."

" Don't you go to call Phebe ' outside,' " she retorted. " She's my sister. Perhaps it's a good thing she came when she did, and saved me from being buried. Perhaps I'm not aiming to be married right off."

Hannah was standing, a hand on the table that held the pink-shaded lamp, and the light showed her petulant and antagonistic. A flare of anger threatened to shut all else from Calvin's thoughts; but suddenly he was conscious of the necessity for care — care and patience. He forced back his justified sense of wrong.

" I wasn't referring direct to Phebe," he told her. " I meant that between us nobody else matters, no one in the world is of any importance to me but you. It's all I think about. When I was building the house, our house, I hammered you into it with every nail. It is sort of made out of you," he foundered; " like — like I am."

He could see her relenting in the loss of the rigidity of her pose. Hannah's head drooped and her fingers tapped faintly on the table. He moved closer, urging his advantage.

"We're all but married, Hannah; our carpet is being wove and that suite of furniture ordered through Priest. You've been upset by this talk of theaters and such.

You'd get tired of them and that fly-by-night life in a month."

" Phebe hasn't."

" What suits one doesn't suit all," he said concisely.

" It would suit more girls than you know for," she 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 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 was flushed with pink blossoms and a mocking bird was whistling with piercing sweetness.

Soon it would be evening and the frogs would begin again, the frogs and whippoorwills. The valley, just as Hannah had said, was lonely. He stirred and later found himself some supper — in the kitchen where everything was new.

On the following morning he left the Greenstream settlement; it was Friday, and Monday he returned with Ettie, his sister. She was remarkably like him — tall and angular, with a gaunt face and steady blue eyes. Older than Calvin, she had settled into a complete acquiescence with whatever life brought; no more for her than the keeping of her brother's house. Calvin, noting the efficient manner in which she ordered their material affairs, wondered at the fact that she had not been married. Men were unaccountable, but none more than himself, with his unquenchable longing for Hannah.

This retreated to the back of his being. He never spoke of her. Indeed he tried to put her from his thoughts, and with a measure of success. But it never occurred to him to consider any other girl; that possibility was closed. Those he saw — and they were uniformly kind, even inviting — were dull after Hannah.

Instead he devoted himself to the equivalent, in his undertakings, of Ettie's quiet capability. The following year a small number of the steers grazing beyond the road were his; in two years more Senator Alderwith died, and there was a division of his estate, in which Calvin assumed large liabilities, paying them as he had contracted. The timber in Sugarloaf Valley drew speculators — he sold options and bought a place in the logging development.

It seemed to him that he grew older, in appearance anyhow, with exceptional rapidity; his face grew leaner and his beard, which he continued to shave, was soiled with gray hair.

He avoided the Braleys and their clearing; and when circumstance drew him into conversation with Richmond or Hosmer he studiously spoke of indifferent things. He heard nothing of Hannah. Yet he learned in the various channels of communication common to remote localities that Richmond Braley was doing badly. Hosmer went to bank in one of the newly prosperous towns of West Virginia and apparently left all family obligations behind; Susan died of lung fever; and then, at the post-office, Calvin was told that Richmond himself was dangerously sick.