In Happy Valley Part 10

"You mustn't bother," interposed the doctor firmly, and the Pope's mouth set and the old dominant gleam came into his eyes.

"Bring in every telegram," he repeated. Outside, in the hallway, the judge waylaid the doctor.

"Ain't he goin' to pull through?"

"One chance in a thousand," was the curt answer.

About three o'clock the judge got a telegram that made him swear fearfully, and thereafter they came fast. The Pope would use no money. The judge wired the Pope's manager warily offering a thousand of his own. The answer came--"Too late." At five o'clock they were running neck and neck. Ten minutes before the polls closed old Bill Maddox rounded up twenty more votes and victory was his.

And all the while the judge was making reports to the Pope:

"Runnin' easy."

"It's a cinch."

"Ole Bill fighting tooth and toe-nail but you got him, Jim."

"Countin' the votes now."

"Air ye sh.o.r.e, Jim, you want to leave all that money fer ole Bill's brats?--he's a hound."

"Ole Bill comin' up a little, Jim."

And then came that last telegram, reporting defeat, and with it crushed in his hand the judge made his last report:

"All over. You've got 'em, Jim. Hooray! Can't you hear 'em yell?"

The Pope's white mouth smiled and his eyelids flickered, but his eyes stayed closed.

"Jim, I wouldn't give _all_ that money to old Bill's brats--just some fer Sally Ann."

"All of it for old Bill's--for Sally Ann's children, the mountain folks, an' the old home town." The Pope opened his eyes and he spoke:

"All of you--nurses an' docs--git out o' here, please." And knowing that the end was nigh they quietly withdrew.

"Judge, you ain't no actor--you're a ham!"

"Whut you mean, Jim?" asked the judge, for in truth he did not understand--not just then. The roar of the city rose from below, but the sunset came through the window as through all windows of the world. The Pope's hand reached for the judge's hand. His lips moved and the judge bent low.

"Beat!" whispered the Pope; "beat, by G.o.d!

Beat--for--councilman--in--my--own home town." And because he knew his fellow man, the good and the bad, the Pope pa.s.sed with a smile.

THE G.o.dDESS OF HAPPY VALLEY

I

The professor stood at the window of his study waiting for Her to come home. The wind outside was high and whipped her skirts close to her magnificent body as, breasting it unconcernedly, she came with a long, slow stride around a corner down the street. Now, as always whenever he saw her move, he thought of the line in Virgil, for even in her walk she showed the G.o.ddess. And Juno was her name.

He met her at the door and he did not have to stoop to kiss her. "What is it, dear?" he said quickly, for deep in her eyes, which looked level with his, he saw trouble.

She handed him a letter and walked to the window--looking out at the gathering storm. The letter was from her home away down in the Kentucky hills--from the Mission teacher in Happy Valley.

There was an epidemic of typhoid down there. It was spreading through the school and through the hills. They were without nurses or doctors, and they needed help.

"Too bad, too bad," he murmured, and he turned anxiously.

"I must go," she said, with a catch in her breath. "One cabin is built above another all the way up the creeks down there. The springs are by the stream. High water floods all of them, and the infection goes with the tide. And the poor things don't know--they don't know. Oh, I must go!"

For a moment he was silent, and then he got up and put his arms about her.

He was smiling.

"Then, I'll go with you." She wheeled quickly.

"No, no, no! You can't leave your work, and--remember!"

He did remember how useless it had been to argue with her, and he knew it was useless now. Moreover, if she was going at all, it was like her to go at once--like her to go up-stairs at once to her packing and leave him in the darkened study alone.

They had been married two years. He had seen her first entering his own cla.s.sroom, and straightway that Latin line took permanent quarters in his brain, so that he was almost startled when he learned her Olympic name.

It was not long before he found himself irresistibly drawn to her big, serious eyes that never wandered in a moment's inattention, found himself expounding directly to her--a fact already discovered by every girl in the cla.s.sroom except Juno herself; and she never did discover, for no one was intimate enough to tell her seriously, and there was that about her that forbade the telling in badinage. With all secrecy, and shyly almost, he set about to learn what he could about her, and that was little indeed.

She came from the mountains of Kentucky, she had won a scholarship in the bluegra.s.s region of the same State, had come North, and was living with painful economy working her way through college, he heard, as a waitress in the dining-hall. He was rather shocked to hear of one incident. The girl who was the head of all athletics in college had once addressed rather sharp words to Juno, who had been persuaded to try for the basket-ball team. The mountain girl did not respond in kind.

Instead, her big eyes narrowed to volcanic slits, she caught the champion shot-putter by the shoulders, shook her until her hair came down, and then, with fists doubled, had stood waiting for more trouble.

When the term closed the professor stayed on to finish some experiments he had on hand, and at dinner in his boarding-house the next night he nearly overturned his soup-plate, for it was the G.o.ddess who had placed it before him. She was there for the summer--not having money to go home--as a general helper in the household and living under the same roof. She too was going on with her studies, and he offered to help her.

He found her a source of puzzling surprises. While she was from the South, she was not Southern in speech, sentiments, ideas, or ideals.

Her voice was not Southern and, while she elided final consonants, her intonation was not of the South. Indeed she would startle him every now and then by dropping some archaic word or old form of expression that made him think of Chaucer. Her feeling toward the negro was precisely what his was, and once when he halted in some stricture on the Confederacy and started to apologize she laughed.

"All my folks," she said, "fit fer the Union--as we say down there,"

she added with a smile.

So that gradually he began to realize that the Appalachian Range, while being parts of the Southern States, was not of them at all, but was a region _sui generis_, and that its inhabitants were the only Americans who had never swerved in fealty to the flag.

By midsummer it was all over with him, and he shocked his own reticent soul by blurting out one day: "I want you to marry me." The words had been shot from him by some inner dynamic force, and at the moment he would have given anything he had could he have taken them back. He waited in terror and very frankly and proudly she lifted her heavy lashes, looked straight into his eyes, and firmly said:

"No!"

He went away then, but his relief was not what he thought it would be. He could not forget that her mouth quivered slightly, and that there seemed to be a faint weakening in the depths of her eyes when he told her good-by.

He could climb no mountain that he did not see her striding as from Olympus down it. He walked by no seash.o.r.e that he did not see her rising from the waves, and again he went to her, and again he asked. And this time, just as frankly and proudly, she looked him in the eyes and said:

"Yes--on one condition."

"Name it."

"That you don't go to my home and my people for five years." He laughed.

"Why, you big, beautiful, silly young person, I know mountains and mountaineers."