Chapter 3

He again examined his countenance in the mirror, but now he was surprised that it was not haggard with age. It seemed that twenty more years had been added to him since supper. He wondered whether there had ever been another man who had lost his love twice and saw that he had been a blind fool for not speaking in the June dusk when Lucy had come back from school.

Lucy, it developed, had spoken to Ettie, and there was a general discussion of her affair at breakfast.

Calvin carried away from it a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction, but for this he could find no tangible reason. Of course, he silently argued, the girl could not be expected to show her love for Wilmer publicly; it was enough that he had been assured of its strength; the fact of her agreement to marry him was final.

He went about his daily activities with a heavy absent-mindedness, with a dragging spirit. A man was coming from Washington to see him in the interest of a new practically permanent fencing, and he met him at the post-office, listened to a loud cheerful greeting with marked inattention.

The salesman was named Martin Eckles, and he was fashionably dressed in a suit of shepherd's check bound with braid, and had a flashing ring--a broad gold band set with a mystic symbol in rubies and diamonds. After his supper at the hotel he walked, following Calvin's direction, the short distance to the latter's house, where Calvin and Ettie Stammark and Lucy were seated on the porch.

Martin Eckles, it developed, was a fluent and persuasive talker, a man of the broadest worldly experiences and wit. He was younger than Calvin, but older than Wilmer Deakon, and a little fat. He had a small mustache cut above his lip, and closely shaved ruddy cheeks with a tinge of purple about his ears. Drawing out his monologue entertainingly he gazed repeatedly at Lucy. Calvin lost the sense of most that the other said; he was immersed in the past that had been made the present and then denied to him--it was all before him in the presence of Lucy, of Hannah come back with the unforgetable and magic danger of her appeal.

IX

In the extension of his commercial activity Martin Eckles kept his room at the Greenstream hotel and employed a horse and buggy for his excursions throughout the county. It had become his habit to sit through the evenings with the Stammarks where his flood of conversation never lessened. Lucy scarcely added a phrase to the sum of talk. She rocked in her chair with a slight endless motion, her dreaming gaze fixed on the dim valley.

Wilmer Deakon, on the occasion of his first encounter with Eckles at the Stammarks', acknowledged the other's phrase and stood waiting for Lucy to proceed with him to the parlor. But Lucy was apparently unaware of this; she sat calm and remote in her crisp white skirts, while Wilmer fidgeted at the door.

Soon, however, she said: “For goodness' sake, Wilmer, whatever's the matter with you? Can't you find a chair that suits you? You make a person nervous.”

At the same time she rose ungraciously and followed him into the house.

Wilmer came out, Calvin thought, in an astonishingly short time. Courting was nothing like it had been in his day. The young man muttered an unintelligible sentence that, from its connection, might be interpreted as a good night, and strode back to the barn and his horse.

Martin Eckles smiled: “The love birds must have been a little ruffled.”

And Calvin, with a strong impression of having heard such a thing before, was vaguely uneasy. Eckles sat for a long space; Lucy didn't appear, and at last the visitor rose reluctantly. But Lucy had not gone to bed; she came out on the porch and dropped with a flounce into a chair beside Calvin.

“Wilmer's pestering me to get married right away,” she told him; “before ever the house is built. He seems to think I ought to be just crazy to take him and go to that lonely Sugarloaf place.”

“It's what you promised for,” Calvin reminded her; “nothing's turned up you didn't know about.”

“If I did!” she exclaimed irritably. “What else is a girl to do, I'd like to ask? It's just going from one stove to another, here. Only it'll be worse in my case--you and Aunt Ettie have been lovely to me. I hate to cook!” she cried. “And it makes me sick to put my hands in greasy dishwater! I suppose that's wicked but I can't help it. When I told Wilmer that to-night he acted like I'd denied communion. I can't help it if the whippoorwills make me shiver, can I? Or if I want to see a person go by once in a while. I--I don't want to be bad--or to hurt you or Wilmer. Oh, I'll settle down, there's nothing else to do; I'll marry him and get old before my time, like the others.”

Calvin Stammark leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and stared at her in shocked amazement--Hannah in every accent and feeling. The old sense of danger and helplessness flooded him. He thought of Phebe with her dyed hair and cigarette-stained lips, her stories of the stage and life; he thought of Hannah dying alone and dog poor. Now Lucy----

“Do you remember anything about your mother,” he asked, “and before you came here?”

“Only that we were dreadfully unhappy,” she replied. “There was a boarding house with actresses washing their stockings in the rooms and a landlady they were all afraid of. There was beer in the wash-stand pitcher. But that wouldn't happen to me,” she asserted; “I'd be different. I might be an actress, but in dramas where my hair would be down and everybody love me.”

“You're going to marry Wilmer Deakon and be a proper happy wife!” he declared, bringing his fist down on a hard palm. “Get this other nonsense out of your head!”

Suddenly he was trembling at the old catastrophe reopened by Lucy. His love for her, and his dread, choked him. She added nothing more, but sat rigid and pale and rebellious. Before long she went in, but Calvin stayed facing the darkness, the menace of the lonely valley. Except for the lumbermen it would be worse in the Sugarloaf cutting.

Damn the frogs!

Martin Eckles appeared in the buggy the following evening and offered to carry Lucy for a short drive to a near-by farm; with an air of indifference she accepted. Wilmer didn't call, and Calvin sat in silent perplexity with Ettie. The buggy returned later than they had allowed, and Lucy went up to bed without stopping on the porch.

The next morning Ettie, with something in her hand, came out to Calvin at the stable shed.

“I found this in Lucy's room,” she said simply.

It was Martin Eckles' gold ring, set with the insignia in rubies, suspended in a loop of ribbon.

A cold angry certitude formed in his being. What a criminal fool he had been! What a blind booby! His only remark, however, brought a puzzled expression to Ettie's troubled countenance. Calvin Stammark exclaimed, “Phebe Braley.” He was silent for a little, his frowning gaze fixed beyond any visible object, then he added: “Put that back where you found it and forget everything.”

Ettie laid a hand on his sleeve. “Now, Calvin,” she begged, her voice low and strained, “promise me----”

“Forget everything!” he repeated harshly.

His face was dark, forbidding, the lines deeply bitten about a somber mouth, his eyes were like blue ice. He walked into Greenstream, where he saw the proprietor of the small single hotel; then, back in his room, he unwrapped from oiled leather a heavy blued revolver; and soon after he saddled his horse and was clattering in a sharp trot in the opposite direction from the village.

It was dark when, having returned, he dismounted and swung the saddle from the horse to its tree. Familiar details kept him a long while, his hands were steady but slow, automatic in movement. He went in through the kitchen past Ettie to his room, and after a little he re-wrapped the revolver and laid it back in its accustomed place. Supper, in spite of Lucy's sharp comment, was set by the stove, and Ettie was solicitous of his every possible need. He ate methodically what was offered, and afterward filled and lit his pipe. It soon went out. Once, on the porch, he leaned toward Lucy and awkwardly touched her shoulder.

X

Wilmer came. He was late, and Lucy said wearily, “I've got a headache to-night. Do you mind if we stay out here in the cool?”

He didn't, and his confident familiar planning took the place of Martin Eckles' more exciting narratives.

The next day, past noon, the proprietor of the Greenstream hotel left an excited group of men to stop Calvin as he drove in from Sugarloaf Valley.

He cried: “Eckles has been shot and killed. First they found the horse and buggy by the road, and then Martin Eckles. He had fallen out. One bullet did it.”

“That's too bad,” Calvin replied evenly. “Lawlessness ought to be put down.” He had known Solon Entreken all his life. The level gaze of two men encountered and held.

Then: “I'll never say anything against that,” the other pronounced. “It's mighty strange who could have shot Eckles and got clear away. That's what he did, in spite of hell and the sheriff.”

Turning, after inevitable exclamations, toward home, Calvin found Lucy sitting moodily on the porch.

“I've got a right ugly piece of news,” he told her, masking the painful interest with which he followed her expression. “Martin Eckles was killed yesterday; shot out of the buggy.”

She grew pale, her breast rose in a sudden gasp and her hands were clenched.

“Oh!” she whispered, horrified.

But there was nothing in her manner beyond the natural detestation of such brutality; nothing, he saw, hidden.

“He wanted me to go away with him,” she swept on; “and get married in Stanwick. Martin wanted me to see the world. He said I ought to, and not stay here all my life.”

The misery that settled over her, the hopelessness dulling her youth filled him with a passionate resentment at the fate that made her what she was and seemingly condemned her to eternal denial. His love for her--Lucy, Hannah, Hannah, Lucy--was intolerably keen. He went to her, bending with a riven hand on the arm of her chair.

“Do you want Wilmer?” he demanded. “Do you love him truly? Is he enough?”

“I don't know.” Slow tears wet her cheeks. “I can't say. I ought to; he's good and faithful, and with some of me that's enough. But there's another part; I can't explain it except to say it's a kind of excitement for the life Mr. Eckles told us about, all those lights and restaurants and theaters. Sometimes I think I'll die, I want it so much; then it comes over me how ungrateful I am to you and Aunt Ettie, and I hate myself for the way I treat Wilmer.”

“Do you love him?” he insisted.

“Perhaps not like you mean.”

All that had been so long obscured in his mind and heart slowly cleared to understanding--Lucy Braley, Richmond's wife; Phebe; Hannah; and again Lucy, Lucy Vibard had this common hunger for life, for brightness; they were as helpless in its grasp as he had been to hold Hannah. Phebe's return, Martin Eckles--were only incidents in a great inner need. In itself it wasn't wicked; circumstance had made it seem wrong; Phebe's greenish hair, the mark of so much spoiled, Hannah's unhappy death--were the result of aspirations; they fretted and bruised, even killed themselves, like gay young animals, innocent animals, in a dark lonely enclosure.

They were really finer than the satisfied women who faded to ugliness in the solitary homes of the Greenstream mountains; not better, for example, than Ettie--it might be that they weren't so good, not so high in heaven; but they were finer in the manner of blooded horses rebelling against the plow traces. They were more elegant, slimmer, with a greater fire. That too was the secret of their memorable power over him; he wanted a companion different from a kitchen drudge; when he returned home at evening, he wanted a wife cool and sweet in crisp white with a yellow ribbon about her waist, and store slippers. He loved Lucy's superiority--it was above ordinary things. “Like a star,” Calvin Stammark told himself.

He, with everything else that had combated their desire, depriving them of the very necessities for his adoration, had been to blame.

“Lucy,” he said, bending over her and speaking rapidly, “let's you and me go and learn all this life together. Let's run away from Greenstream and Wilmer Deakon and even Ettie, what we ought to hold by, and see every theater in the country. I've got enough money----”

The radiance of the gesture by which she interrupted his speech filled him with pounding joy.

“Oh, shall we!” she cried; and then hugged him wildly, her warm young arms about his neck.

“Of course we will,” he reassured her; “and right away, to-morrow. You and me.”

He felt her lips against his, and then more cautiously she took up the immediate planning of their purpose. It would be ridiculously easy; they would drive to Stanwick in the buggy.

“The hotels and all,” she continued with shining eyes; “and nobody will think it's queer. I'll be your daughter, like always.”

Calvin turned abruptly from her and faced the valley saturated with slumberous sunlight. Lucy hesitated for a moment and then fled lightly into the house. After a little he heard her singing on the upper floor. People wouldn't think it was queer because she would be his daughter, “like always.”

Yet he wasn't old beyond hope, past love--as strong and nearly as springy as a hickory sapling. He had waited half his life for this. Calvin slowly smiled in bitterness and self-contempt; a pretty figure for a young girl to admire, he thought, losing the sense of mere physical fitness. Anyhow Lucy was supremely happy and safe, and he had accomplished it. He was glad that he had been so industrious and successful. Lucy could have almost anything she wanted--pretty clothes and rings with real jewels, necklaces hung with better than Scotch pebbles.

Perhaps when she had seen the world--its bigness and noise and confusion--after her longing was answered, she would turn back to him. Already he was oppressed by a feeling of strangeness, of loss at leaving the high valleys of home.

THE EGYPTIAN CHARIOT

Lemuel Doret walked slowly home from the prayer meeting with his being vibrating to the triumphant beat of the last hymn. It was a good hymn, filled with promised joy for every one who conquered sin. The long twilight of early summer showed the surrounding fields still bright green, but the more distant hills were vague, the sky was remote and faintly blue, and shadows thickened under the heavy maples that covered the single street of Nantbrook. The small frame dwellings of the village were higher than the precarious sidewalk; flights of steps mounted to the narrow porches; and though Lemuel Doret realized that his neighbors were sitting outside he did not look up, and no voices called down arresting his deliberate progress.

An instant bitterness, tightening his thin metallic lips and narrowing a cold fixed gaze, destroyed the harmony of the assured salvation. Lemuel Doret silently cursed the pinched stupidity of the country clods. The slow helpless fools! If instead of muttering in groups one of the men would face him with the local hypocrisy he'd sink a heel in his jaw. The bitterness expanded into a hatred like the gleam on a knife blade; his hands, spare and hard, grew rigid with the desire to choke a thick throat.

Then the rage sank before a swift self-horror, an overwhelming conviction of his relapse into unutterable sin. He stopped and in a spiritual agony, forgetful of his surroundings, half lifted quivering arms to the dim sky: “O Christ, lean down from the throne and hold me steady.”

He stood for a moment while a monotonous chatter on a porch above dropped to a curious stillness. It seemed to him that his whisper was heard and immediately answered; anyhow peace slowly enveloped him once more, the melody of hope was again uppermost in his mind. He went forward, procuring a cigarette from a mended ragged pocket.

His house, reached by a short steep path and sagging steps, was dark; at first he saw no one, then the creak of a rocking-chair in the open doorway indicated Bella, his wife.

“Give me a cigarette,” she demanded, her penetrating voice dissatisfied.

“You know I don't want you to smoke anywhere you can be seen,” he answered. “Since we've come here to live we have to mind the customs. The women'll never take to you smoking cigarettes.”

“Ah, hell, what do I care! We came here, but it ain't living. It makes me sick, and you make me sick I Can't you sing and pray in the city as well as among these hicks?”

“I'm afraid of it,” he said, brief and somber. “And I don't want Flavilla brought up with any of the gang we knew. Where is she?”

“I sent her to bed. She fussed round till she got me nervous.”

“Did she feel good?”

“If she didn't a smack would have cured her.”

He passed Bella, rocking sharply, into the dank interior.

On the right was the bare room where he had his dilapidated barber's chair and shelf with a few mugs, brushes and other scant necessities. There had been no customers to-day nor yesterday; still, it was the middle of the week and what trade there was generally concentrated on Saturday. Beyond he went upstairs to Flavilla's bed. She was awake, twisting about in a fragmentary nightgown, dark against the disordered sheet.

“It's dreadful hot,” she complained shortly; “my head's hot too. The window won't go up.”

Lemuel Doret crossed the narrow bare floor and dragged the sash open; then he moved his daughter while he smoothed the bed and freshened a harsh pillow. She whimpered.

“You're too big to cry without any reason,” he informed her, leaving to fetch a glass of water from the tap in the kitchen.

Usually she responded to his intimations of her increasing age and wisdom, but to-night she was listless. She turned away from him, her arms flung above her head and wispy hair veiling her damp cheek.

“Keep still, can't you?” and he gathered her hair into a clumsy plait.

The darkness about him seeped within, into his hope and courage and resolution; all that he had determined to do seemed impossibly removed. The whole world resembled Nantbrook--a place of universal condemnation, forgiving nothing. He felt a certainty that even the few dollars he had honestly earned would now be stopped.

The air grew clearer and deeper in color, and stars brightened. Lemuel Doret wondered about God. There was no doubt of His power and glory or of the final triumph of heaven established and earth, sin, destroyed. wickedness was equally plain; it was the ways of the righteous that bewildered him--the conduct of the righteous and, in the face of his supreme recognition, the extreme difficulty of providing life for Flavilla--and Bella.

He consciously added his wife's name. Somehow his daughter was the sole objective measure of his determination to build up, however late, a home here and in eternity.

It was not unreasonable, in view of the past, to suppose that he had no chance of succeeding. Yet religion was explicit upon that particular; it was founded on the very hopes of sinners, on redemption. But he could do nothing without an opportunity to make the small living they required; if the men of Nantbrook, of the world, wouldn't come to him to be barbered, and if he had no money to go anywhere else to begin again, he was helpless. Everything was conspiring to thrust him back into the city, of which he had confessed his fear, back----

He rose and stood above the child's thin exposed body--suddenly frozen into a deathlike sleep--chilled with a vision, a premonition, the insidious possibility of surrender. He saw, too, that it was a solitary struggle; even his devotion to Flavilla, shut in the single space of his own heart, helped to isolate him in what resembled a surrounding blackness rent with blinding flashes of lightning.

The morning sun showed him spare, with a curious appearance of being both wasted and grimly strong; he moved with an alert, a watchful ease, catlike and silent; and his face was pallid with gray shadows. He stood in trousers and undershirt, suspenders hanging down, before the small dim mirror in the room where he had the barber chair, pasting his hair down with an odorous brilliantine. This was his intention, but he saw with sharp discomfort that bristling strands defied his every effort. The hot edge of anger cut at him, but, singing, he dissipated it:

“_Why should I feel discouraged? Why should the shadows fall? Why should my heart be lonely, And long for heaven_----”

He broke off at the thought of Flavilla, still in bed, her head, if anything, hotter than last night. Lemuel Doret wished again that he had not allowed Bella to call their child by that unsanctified name. Before the birth they had seen a vaudeville, and Bella, fascinated by a golden-and-white creature playing a white accordion that bore her name in ornamental letters, had insisted on calling her daughter, too, Flavilla. In spite of the hymn, dejection fastened on him as he remembered this and a great deal more about his wife.

If she could only be brought to see the light their marriage and life might still be crowned with triumph. But Bella, pointing out the resulting poverty of his own conviction and struggle, said freely that she had no confidence in promises; she demanded fulfillment now. She regarded him as more than a little affected in the brain. Yet there had been no deep change in him--from the very first he had felt a growing uneasiness at the spectacle of the world and the flesh. The throb of the Salvation Army drum at the end of an alley, the echo of the fervent exhortations and holy songs, had always filled him with a surging emotion like homesickness.

Two impulses, he recognized, held a relentless warfare within him; he pictured them as Christ and Satan; but the first would overthrow all else. “Glory!” he cried mechanically aloud. He put down the hairbrush and inspected the razors on their shelf. The bright morning light flashed along the rubbed fine blades; they were beautiful, flawless, without a trace of defilement. He felt the satin smoothness of the steel with an actual thrill of pleasure; his eyes narrowed until they were like the glittering points of knives; he held the razor firmly and easily, with a sinewy poised wrist.

Finally, his suspenders in position over a collarless striped shirt, he moved out to the bare sharp descent before his house and poured water onto the roots of a struggling lilac bush. Its leaves were now coated with dust; but the week before it had borne an actual cluster of scented blossom; and he was still in the wonder of the lavender fragrance on the meager starved stem.

The beat of hoofs approached, and he turned, seeing Doctor Frazee in his yellow cart.

“Oh, doctor!” he called instinctively.

The other stopped, a man with a lean face, heavy curved nose and penetrating gaze behind large spectacles. He was in reality a veterinary, but Lemuel Doret, out of a profound caution, had discovered him to be above the narrow scope of local prejudice.

“I wish you'd look at Flavilla,” Doret continued.

The doctor hesitated, and then turned shortly in at the sidewalk. “It will hurt no one if I do that.” Above Flavilla's flushed face, a tentative finger on her wrist, Frazee's expression grew serious. “I'll tell you this,” he asserted; “she's sick. You had better call Markley to-day. And until he comes don't give her any solids. You can see she's in a fever.”

“Can't you tend her? I'd put more on you than any fresh young hospital stiff.”

“Certainly not,” he responded.