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 Celvin
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.
“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.”
V
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.