The Happy End Part 1

The Happy End.

by Joseph Hergesheimer.

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 reprehensibly 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.

LONELY VALLEYS

The maid, smartly capped in starched ruffled muslin and black, who admitted them to the somber luxury of the rectory, hesitated in unconcealed sulky disfavor.

"Doctor Goodlowe has hardly started dinner," she a.s.serted.

"Just ask him to come out for a little," the man repeated.

He was past middle age, awkward in harsh ill-fitting and formal clothes and with a gaunt high-boned countenance and clear blue eyes.

His companion, a wistfully pale girl under an absurd and expensive hat, laid her hand in an embroidered white silk glove on his arm and said in a low tone: "We won't bother him, Calvin. There are plenty of ministers in Was.h.i.+ngton; or we could come back later."

"There are, and we could," he agreed; "but we won't. I'm not going to wait a minute more for you, Lucy. Not now that you are willing. Why, I have been waiting half my life already."

I

A gaunt young man with clear blue eyes sat on the bank of a mountain road and gazed at the newly-built house opposite. It was the only dwelling visible. Behind, the range rose in a dark wall against the evening sky; on either hand the small green valley was lost in a blue haze of serried peaks. The house was not imposing; in reality small, but a story and a half, it had a length of three rooms with a kitchen forming an angle, invisible from where Calvin Stammark sat; an outside chimney at each end, and a narrow covered portico over the front door.

An expiring clatter of hoofs marked the departure of the neighbor who had helped Calvin set the last f.l.a.n.g.ed course. It seemed incredible that it was finished, ready--when the furniture and bright rag carpet had been placed--for Hannah. "The truck patch will go in there on the right," he told himself; "and gradually I'll get the slope cleared out, corn and buckwheat planted."

He twisted about, facing the valley. It was deep in gra.s.s, watered with streams like twisting s.h.i.+ning ribbons, and held a sleek slow-grazing herd of cattle.

The care of the latter, a part of Senator Alderwith's wide possessions, was to form Calvin's main occupation--for the present anyhow. Calvin Stammark had larger plans for his future with Hannah. Some day he would own the Alderwith pastures at his back and be grazing his own steers.

His thoughts returned to Hannah, and he rose and proceeded to where a saddled horse was tied beside the road. He ought to go back to Greenstream and fix up before seeing her; but with their home all built, his impatience to be with her was greater than his sense of propriety, and he put his horse at a sharp canter to the left.

Calvin continued down the valley until the road turned toward the range and an opening which he followed into a steeper and narrower rift beyond. Here there were no clearings in the rocky underbrush until he reached Richmond Braley's land. A long upturning sweep ended at the house, directly against the base of the mountain; and without decreasing his gait he pa.s.sed over the faintly traced way, by the triangular sheep was.h.i.+ng and shearing pen, to the stabling shed.

Hannah's mother was bending fretfully over the kitchen stove, and Richmond, her father, was drawing off sodden leather boots. He was a man tall and bowed, stiff but still powerful, with a face masked in an unkempt tangle of beard.

"H'y, Calvin," he cried; "you're just here for spoon licking! Lucy was looking for company." Mrs. Braley's comment was below her breath, but it was plainly no corroboration of her husband's a.s.surance. "You'll find Hannah in the front of the house," Richmond added. Hannah was sitting on the stone steps at the side entrance to the parlor. As usual she had a bright bow in the hair streaming over her back, and her feet were graceful in slippers with thin black stockings. She kissed him willingly and studied him with wide-opened hazel-brown eyes. There wasn't another girl in Greenstream, in Virginia, with Hannah's fetching appearance, he decided with a glow of adoration. She had a--a sort of beauty entirely her own; it was not exactly prettiness, but a quality far more disturbing, something a man could never forget.

"She's done," he told her abruptly.

"What?" Hannah gazed up at him with a dim sweetness in the gathering dusk.

"What!" he mocked her. "You ought to be ashamed to ask. Why, the house--our home. We could move in by a week if we were called to. We can get married any time."

She now looked away from him, her face still and dreaming.

"You don't seem overly anxious," Calvin declared.

"It's just the idea," she replied. "I never thought of it like this before--right on a person." She sighed. "Of course it will be nice, Calvin."

He sat below her with an arm across her slim knees. "I'm going to dig right into the truck patch; there's a parcel of poles cut for the beans.

It won't be much the first year; but wait and we'll show people how to live." He repeated his vision in connection with the present Alderwith holdings.

"I wonder will we ever be rich like the senator?"

"Certainly," he answered with calm conviction. "A man couldn't be s.h.i.+ftless with you to do for, Hannah. He'd be obliged to have everything the best."

"It'll take a long while though," she continued.

"We will have to put in some hard licks," he admitted. "But we are young; we've got a life to do it in."

"A man has, but I don't know about girls. It seems like they get old faster; and then things--silk dresses don't do them any good. How would ma look in fas.h.i.+onable clothes!"

"You won't have to wait that long," he a.s.sured her. "Your father has never hurt himself about the place, there's no money in sheep; and as for Hosmer--you know well as me that he is nothing outside of the bank and his own comfort. Store clothes is Hosmer all through."

"I wish you were a little like him there," Hannah returned.

He admitted that this evening he was more untidy than need be. "I just couldn't wait to see you," he declared; "with our place and--and all so safe and happy."

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 a.s.sisted 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 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 s.h.i.+ngling; 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 a.s.serted 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 princ.i.p.al 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 courts.h.i.+p, 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 bra.s.s 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."